MARK Thank you for joining us on Mind Monkey's Welcome... Bananas Optional, our regular opportunity to pause, then name, explain and reframe the most common hesitations that get in the way of the discussions that we each deserve. I'm Mark Franklin, I'm your guide as we embark on raw, honest, irreverent and important conversations designed to acknowledge and normalise the fears that we each face at work or at play. In order to help you, our amazing listener, reframe those perspectives around the stories that you've created for yourself that have been feeding those monkeys. Now I'm very excited, we've started very punctually today because you're going to be dealing with two drummers and we like to keep a good time but let me introduce my guest. My fear-busting guest today is John Blackburn. I'm going to ring on camera shortly. John is a coach who works with people who make live entertainment happen. He gets entertainment professionals to think more clearly about their work and become deliberate about the opportunities that they build. At the heart of his work is a fantastic question, how do you create the freedom you want and the security you need? John's the host of his own podcast, Entertainment Matters, which explores how people from across the entertainment business think about their work and put that thinking into practise. Alongside his coaching, John has spent more than 20 years working in live entertainment as a professional drummer and musical director. It's a high pressure environment where preparation, adaptability, communication and clear thinking matter in real time and that experience continues to shape his work with people who are building demanding careers in uncertain conditions. Let's bring you on to screen. John, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today. JOHN Hey Mark, great to see you. Thanks so much for having me on. MARK Absolute pleasure. As I say, we've got to, as I mentioned before we start, we've got to avoid the temptation of getting the sticks out and doing the rudiments and just kind of tapping away. It's not about us, it's about our amazing audience, the people out there who want to know more about you. So before we get into the fears, the hesitations, the interruptions that perhaps get in the way of the people you serve and support, tell me a little bit more about you. So how do you go from being an active musician, musical director, a performer in the entertainment industry to becoming a coach? Tell me a bit about that journey. JOHN Right, oh thanks Mark. So, I can trace it right back to a moment with my drum teacher when I was a kid. So, I had this incredible drum teacher, his name was Geoff Hutchinson, really like foremost mentor and also coach, more of that later, sort of figure in my life. And in my first ever lesson with him, I'd had other teachers before, some of whom have been great, you know, but I'd managed to get a lesson with Geoff and in that first lesson he got me to play something for him and at one point he sort of patted me on the shoulder to get me to stop. And he, you know, I was very excited, this is my first words of wisdom from Geoff. I was really, you know, I was really, okay here we go. And he goes, well John, I've got some good news for you. Your hands and your feet, the drumming, are going to take care of themselves. You could be a really, you could be a great drummer. I was like, oh I'm very excited, that was what a wonderful thing to hear. And then he did this, he went, now this sort of motioning to his head and his chest, this might need some work. And obviously at that point in my life, I was about 17, I didn't really know what, I didn't really know what he was on about. And interestingly, in that first lesson, he got me to get a couple of drum related books, and he also got me to go out and buy a couple of personal development books, a couple of self-development books. And one of them, I mean, and even in that first session, there was a lot of what we, you and I would recognise as coaching happened as well as teaching. And one of the things he got me to do is he got me to get this one specific book that he'd suggested, but then he also told me to go and look and just see what leapt out at me, which of course is engaging intuition and starting to develop a connection with you or with me rather in that moment, isn't it? So, I can trace the beginnings of it back to my drum lessons with Jeff. He was also familiar with, even if he hadn't done necessarily the training in things like neuro-linguistic programming, bits of positive psychology, bits of coaching, lots of different models that we might use for problem solving and things like that. And, you know, they would all sort of come out of the lessons. And then, you know, fast forward, I go to music college because I've decided I'm going to be a professional musician. I go to music college. So, there I go and I do my first gigs and then I went to work on cruise ships for P&O Cruises, a British cruise company, which I loved. And it was there that I really started getting into the looking at the MD, the musical direction, the band leading side of things. It was there that I got my first opportunities to do that. And it was at that point that I really started to notice that there was a huge gap sort of around me where most people, the vast majority of people had all the required musical, technical, professional skills to do the job. And yet things were not always being done at a very high level. Communication could often be very poor between not just between musicians or MD and musicians, but between on a cruise ship, you've got these very sorts of formalised sorts of hierarchy, you know, that you wouldn't normally get in music. But quite often the communication between those layers, the way things were managed was really bad and like unnecessary. There was a lot of unnecessary sorts of stress and anguish for people, not me particularly, but other people. So it was about that point, I suddenly started sort of realising the value of a lot of that personal development stuff that Jeff had pointed to professionally, which was I had these skills and could recognise these things and had behavioural flexibility to do things differently. And these people didn't. And it was, that was really the beginning of my interest in it. And, you know, I could do that. I become an MD and then I have more to do with the running of things and work more closely with the manager type people on the ships. And then I moved to London and again, even just doing gigs, sort of professional gigs at home and in London and around. And, you know, same thing, just people not being able to maybe manage the people side of things that well, you know, getting kind of more head up and stressed about things than they really need to. And at the same time, sort of avoiding taking something seriously, which really needed to be taken seriously. And yeah. And anyway, so it was basically those sorts of signals and my own interest in the personal development stuff. You know, I'd always used, I'd always sort of informally studied that NLP, that neuro-linguistic programming stuff. Like I've read a lot of books. I've got all that, you know, when YouTube first became a thing, I was like getting all of the grainy copies of the original training videos. And anyway, eventually, just for my own development, I decided to start doing a bunch of the real training for that stuff out of my own interest. And that took up even more story, a bit shorter. It was in doing that training, the NLP licenced practitioner and then coach training, and then the NLP master practitioner, as they call it. It was when I did that NLP master practitioner training that I realised actually, I should do this for other people, not just for myself. And that is what led to me running work, like stress busting workshops for teachers initially. And it was after that, that I pointed it and I sort of asked myself, why on earth am I not doing this in the sector, the environment that I really love, which of course is entertainment. And that's probably as good an answer as I can give, Mark. MARK It's a fantastic answer. Thank you. It's so fascinating. As a fellow musician, obviously, I completely get and I understand what we do in those environments. We are, it's all communication. It's all working together. It's bouncing off each other. It's kind of, it's that flow of energy and so on and so forth. And what you've brilliantly pointed out, again, the gap that I guess you now fill is that when that communication breaks down, the performance suffers, the show suffers, the entertainment suffers. And you notice that. So just to dig a little bit deeper in terms of, yeah, let's explore some of those fits. So these other people who weren't communicating well, who were hyper focussing on things that they didn't need to focus on, that they were getting in their own way. Just tell me more about those kinds of barriers that you were noticing. JOHN Yeah, absolutely. Well, I suppose those barriers at the time that first pushed me in this direction are slightly different to the ones that I typically deal with now. But to do both quickly at the time. And this is not a problem that is limited to entertainment, as we all know. Most people that enter into entertainment do so as what I would refer to as a practitioner, which basically means they're usually a singer, a dancer, an actor, a musician. Perhaps they're from the technical side of things. So they could be a sound engineer, a lighting engineer, a stage manager. So, most people that enter into entertainment as a field come in as one of those kinds of practitioners. So, all of their training and education is in being really good at that. Now, what happens, of course, is as those people, because we don't have the same sort of career ladder that other sectors might have, and because everybody is basically self-employed to an extent. Because of that, the way for people to kind of grow professionally and earn more money, have more stability and security, etc., is usually to immediately step into doing a thing that isn't the thing they dedicated their life to. So, if you're a dancer, the first step up, the most obvious first step up as a dancer within that career is to become a dance captain, or what used to be called a head boy or head girl. And that is below a choreographer or assistant choreographer, but you've taken on some more responsibility. Now, of course, you might expect at that point that you decide to become a team captain, if you like. You would then get some training in how to do that. Nope. What happens is you basically kind of remember what your team captain was like, and you've got two choices at that point, haven't you? You either liked it, so you do it like that, or you didn't like it, so you do it somehow differently. Well, then, of course, there's the next one. So, then you might want to become a new thing. Oh, well, I'd quite like some more responsibility or some more freedom or whatever it is. So, OK, well, maybe I'll become I'm actually I am interested in choreography, so I'll become an assistant choreographer. Well, and of course, as you would expect at that point, you get loads of training, don't you? No. What happens is you, et cetera, et cetera. And that goes on and on and on and on. And I know it happens in other sectors, but I think entertainment. It strikes me that it is particularly challenging in entertainment. So, what you end up with is people running entertainment companies fulfilling the role of leader, manager, everything, who have never even sat down and read a book on how to maybe best practises on any aspect of the work that they're now doing, because all of their learning, all of their growing up and their studying and all the rest of it was how to be a singer or a drummer. And I think that just produces its own problems. So those problems it just manifest in every part of the work. So, what kinds of things are happening? Fundamentally, I think it's frustration. I think fundamentally what happens is somebody at a lower level than you will will notice something that is wrong in your enterprise and they will bring it to your attention and you don't know what to do about it. So, you get annoyed. You get frustrated. I'm sure it's in the fears somewhere. I look forward to hearing about that. There's something in there, isn't there? And I think people then learn to just to push these things away from them rather than really dealing with them. Now, what I mostly deal with now is actually individuals who are making that transition, perhaps from being what I would call a practitioner, from being told what to do and then getting paid for it, to a producer who in my description is someone who creates opportunities, basically. And of course, what they find is, first of all, having to totally take responsibility and set their own agenda is tough. And I think, to actually come back to what your question was, sorry, I think that the thing that presents itself most often as getting in the way is suddenly you have to prioritise the thing that you've said you're going to do. No one else is going to tell you what to do and you can then kind of blame them if it doesn't work. You now have to create time in your day, your week, your month to do the things that you've said that you're going to do. And often I think the problem is that you're actually okay already because you're a competent professional drummer or whatever. So, you're living in this world of okayness. There's plenty that you don't like. There are things that you do want that live on the other side of this little step from practitioner to producer. But I think the thing that gets in the way is that the familiar discomfort of where you are now is less scary than the potential discomfort of making the changes. And I think that is probably the one of the biggest, yeah, I think that's probably one of the biggest things that holds people back, yeah. MARK Thank you. It's interesting when you say it feels, it's not particularly just the entertainment industry. And I would say that actually I think that kind of accidental leadership progression, yeah, is prevalent everywhere. And as you say, when you are a musician and entertainer, when you have spent a lifetime honing a skill to be the best that you can be, and I think, and again, I'll just throw this as a question to you. Is there, or how impactful is the emotional aspect of that focus in so much as you become the very best you can be? Let's stick to the dance analogy that you use. So you become the very best dancer you can be. That in itself earns you the opportunity to become the team leader within the troupe because you stand out. And then you're encouraged to go for the assistant choreographer role, the choreographer role. Like you say, it's like any other career progression. You're being promoted to recognise the fact that you have skills that warrant that recognition. But that emotional aspect, I just want to focus on that. Because again, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but within the entertainment industry, perhaps more than other industries, there is that comparisonitis, there is that am I the best dancer in the troupe? Am I the best drummer for this gig? Every other person who dances, every other musician who plays my instrument could be going for this job. What makes me the right person for this? How does that noise perhaps impact that journey and that progression, do you think? JOHN That's very interesting. That will be absolutely correct that that problem exists. That's obviously a very real thing. I suppose it might just be the nature of the exact work that I do and the nature of the group of people that I generally get to work with. I think there's not a lot of that, to be honest. Now, if we were to move parallel to the dancer, a dancer, as you've suggested, it's certainly true that there is an enormous amount of competition, depending on how you, obviously, all these things are perspective dependent, aren't they? But it is a reasonable and commonly held perspective that there's an enormous amount of competition for that work. Fine. I'm sure that does sometimes weigh heavily on people's minds. I suppose it's also true that when you land one of those highly competitive, coveted opportunities, I think people are probably just so happy to be doing that, that that might push aside some of those other things. But what you're saying is absolutely right. How else could it express itself? That thing of having dedicated so much time to it, yes, your skills, perhaps different to working on the front desk at a bank, your identity is very tightly tied to the thing that you have chosen to do as your work. It's not just going to work, is it? Yes, I suppose that's probably when a lot of those things that you just mentioned come into play. There are challenges, there are positives, but there are also challenges with being so tied to it in terms of if you don't get a particular job, how you interpret that feedback. Does this mean that if I'm not the right drummer for that job, does this mean that I'm not as good a drummer as I thought? Does that mean that I'm not as good a person as I thought? Oh, God, am I wasting my time? So, yes, I think you're totally right. All of that stuff is in the mix, isn't it? MARK So, if we just park that for a second. So, again, let's, well, not park it, but let's kind of build on it, build on it. There is this potential, competition is a much better word, I think, than comparison. So, thank you for bringing that one out. As you say, there's the competition element. So, then there is the potential, in some instances, to catastrophise that, you know, I'm not worthy of this competition. Coming back to what you do, this idea of you have trained your whole life, this has become your identity, this particular profession within sort of entertainment. Now you're being asked to expand your set of skills, to incorporate looking after a team, being a leader, other aspects of, you know, if you're a musical director, actually ensuring every member of the band is on point, knows what's expected of them. So, there's all these other requests being made of you that in that journey you haven't previously considered or prepared for. Is that fair? That's perfect. Okay. So, you're helping people prepare and manage those other expectations. Beautiful. Yeah, that's exactly right. Thank you. Good. I think, I mean, I'm fascinated by this course, yes, just because of my own kind of musical leanings. But I think, coming back to the practitioner-producer point that you made, and I would like to expand on that, because I know it's a sort of big element of the work you do, this idea of practitioner does the do. So, the practitioner dancer dances, the practitioner musician plays the instrument, but the producer creates opportunities for more of that to happen. Tell me about those opportunities. Tell me about that shift into production. JOHN Great. Oh, thank you, Mark. Beautifully teed up. So, yeah, in my little model of how I talk to people about these things, and this is kind of my pre-coaching discussion point, just to get people to start thinking a bit differently and seeing other possibilities of what they're doing. So, I talk about, if you're a practitioner, if we take us, because it would be another whole conversation, if we take us red for a moment, as you said in the introduction, for a moment that, loosely speaking, what people are looking for is some combination of more freedom and more security. If we take that as a loose, vague direction. As a practitioner, in my little model, you've basically got five ways that you can do that, right? The first way is the one that everybody does when they first kind of enter the business. You can just try and do more work. So, when you sort of graduate from training, you're not doing any work, you haven't got any gigs, you haven't got any contracts. The first thing you've got to do is get something, and you can do that for a while. But, of course, there's only so many days in a week or a year, there's a very obvious capacity on that. So, what people will often do is, if you're a musician in an originals band, for example, plucking one completely out of the ocean, you might have what that community might refer to as a day job. Whatever it is, the band, the music might still be your big thing in your life. But, you know, you go and work in a cafe or a bookshop or whatever it happens to be. So, I would refer to that as an unrelated side hustle, all right? And I would say that's the second thing that you can do, apart from just try and get more gigs. So, we're on to that. The next thing you can do is what I would refer to as a related side hustle, which is, you're still within the entertainment industry, you're still supporting the industry somehow, but you're just not doing the practitioner job that you trained to do. For example, it's really common within musical theatre for people to teach dance classes. It's really common in musical theatre for people to work front of house at theatres in London, for example. That kind of thing. Musicians, I would class this as a related side hustle. It's very common for instrumental musicians to teach, whether it's peripatetically or privately. So, that's your third one, your related side hustle. And basically, as you sort of move through these different things, I won't go through the one in detail, but the one that I have always been most excited by, if you're a practitioner, is you can become a practitioner, right? Sorry, you can become a producer. So, you are a practitioner that you've got your pathways to more freedom and security. I think the most exciting one and the most dependable one is to become a producer. And that means, as you put it, you start creating the opportunities to get paid as a practitioner, rather than just waiting for someone else to pick you. As a producer, the way I describe it, so this is not the same thing as being a record producer or even a theatre producer, it's just producer is my word for someone who creates opportunities, there's sort of five resources for that. There's the concept, which is what is the experience an audience is going to have, so that could be set list, script, the click tracks, the musical arrangements, whatever it is. The audience, which is basically the question is who is this thing that I'm creating for. You've got platform, which is basically where is the work going to be received, is it a video thing you're going to put on YouTube, is it a show that you're going to put in theatres, is it a pub band, is it a wedding band, that kind of thing. Payment, which basically covers you've got to have some kind of contractual agreement by which people get paid. The other one, of course, is practitioners and that is who is it that you need on your team, who's actually going to deliver the work. My basic thesis, if you like, big posh word, I should have said idea, is that I think you can predict a producer's success or a show's success by looking at how close their relationship is to each of those five things. So, if you are in an original's band and that is your project, your show, that is, if you've been part of the writing, that is the closest possible relationship you could have to the content or the IP. You created it, you own it, no other company can come in and say, actually, we don't want you doing that anymore. Very close relationship. If you're doing a tribute act to an artist and you don't have a specific licencing agreement for the material; I would say that's about the most distant you can be. Because as was the case last year, several quite successful tribute acts in the UK had their Facebook pages, etc, shut down because the artist just said, well, I didn't authorise this. Gone, like overnight gone. And anyway, without going through all the detail, you can go through each of those boxes and describe what a close relationship to that resource is and what a distant relationship is. And the closer relationship you have to those resources, the more likely that show or that producer is to be successful. And do you know what? If I just said it like that at the start, that would have been the slickest I'd ever described that. Thanks, Mark. MARK No, it's absolutely fine. And again, I think I'm really hoping that sort of the listener is understanding that yes, we are talking about the entertainment industry, we are talking about the music business. But there are some things that are analogous here, because in terms of whatever sector you are in, I still think there is that practitioner, producer sort of push/pull opportunity as well. In so much as again, even as a coach, you know, I can be a practitioner. And as you say, I can work out sort of how many clients I can fit in working week, what does that look like in a month? What does that look like in a year? That's, that's my pathway to what I consider to be sort of success and happiness. Or there is the producer aspect of becoming or creating a coaching academy of some kind, you know, it does one very narrow example. But again, it's what I love about sort of the model you're creating is that it's inviting people to think about gaps, and how they can, as you said, close that gap, move closer to the core thing that's that will make that difference. JOHN Yeah. And actually, just to stick with that, because that's, that's a lovely, especially with us both being coaches, that's a lovely example where I can, I can articulate a bit more on that, which is, it will be like, the practitioner producer thing is extremely analogous to employee business owner, basically, yeah, that's, that's a really easy way to think about it, except that weirdly, within entertainment, you can basically, if you're a practitioner, you probably aren't employed, like you probably not on a salary, but you will probably behave as if you were an employee, basically. And that's, that's a big difference. So it would be like you or I perhaps, you know, occasionally on LinkedIn, there'll be those there'll be those sorts of organisations advertising for what they call coaches and us saying, Oh, well, okay, I've got coaching skills, which you could use, you could bring me to work, and then you could just pay me a salary each month. And that would be a practitioner coach if we were to use my model. And then everything you just said about yes, or you can, you can build something that is, you know, it's not, it's not completely analogous with entrepreneurship, because my understanding of that word is that if you're an entrepreneur is something that you build that could run sort of without you, it doesn't have to be that, but it could be. But yeah, absolutely. And what you say about spotting the gaps, I think is exactly right. That's what got me thinking about trying to come up with something in the first place. MARK And I guess sort of taking it back to the cruise ship days, those gaps are what you were seeing in others. Is that fair? Again, they're kind of, you know, the, the stresses, anxieties that they were creating for themselves that didn't need to exist that sort of, I'm going to use the word attitude. I mean, that clumsily, but their approach, their approach to sort of the environment, the relationships, the organisation, the expectation, from a producer's point of view, you are deliberately embracing some of those challenges in order to learn, close the gap. And it's I mean, again, really, really sort of clumsy sort of explanation that jumps into my head is, if you are an originalist band, as you said, you know, the closest, most important relationship you have is with the music you create. That's what it's all about. That's your kind of very, that's your identity, I guess, that is driving your practitioner sort of approach. From a producer point of view, as an originalist band, now you've got to think about your marketing. Now you've got to think about the messaging. You've got to think about the relationships you're building with venues and promoters. And you've got to think about how you're interacting with that following you're trying to build and what you can do to make them engage more and feel special and feel more connected. It's all the stuff that isn't actually about making the music but makes your music more appreciated. Is that another way of looking at it? JOHN That is exactly it. That is, yes, I could not have described it better myself. In fact, I might transcribe that, Mark. I'll say it's absolutely fine. It's great. No, perfect. Yeah, exactly. And I suppose it's also true. It is, as you say, it's also true then. So, when I came into my coaching work, of course, I, well, maybe not, of course, but I did come into it with a very, to borrow the term, practitioner mindset. I absolutely was entirely focused on the skills development of being a good coach. That's what got me into it in the first place. That's what I loved about it. I just wanted to do the work with people and understand it. And I loved it. And then of course, if you want to do that work with other people, especially if you want them to pay you for it, there are other skills that you just then have to develop or you find a job, you know, working for someone else, of course, but I didn't want to do that. MARK No, no. And there's a fantastic episode of your podcast, Entertainment Matters, where you're chatting with Janine Coombes. Who is incredible. And we all love Janine. Yeah, we all do love Janine. But what she does brilliant, what you invited her to do brilliantly, should I say, is that you almost, you asked her to point out some of those gaps in various sort of entertainment professionals' websites, wasn't it? So, it's kind of, they've come at it as, I'm the practitioner, this is what I do, here I am. And Janine had that wonderful marketing brain of, yeah, but if you acted more of a producer and thought about how does this website or whatever tool it was, this medium, how does that speak to the people who are going to pay you, the people who are going to come and see you, and so on and so forth, that kind of, again, completing, filling those gaps around the identity that you've attached yourself to through that practise. JOHN Yeah, that is exactly right, Mark. And as you point out, and of course, Janine, amongst her many skills, was absolutely incredible and did it with such good humour and sort of good nature, was able to come in just very quickly. And of course, it's a perspective issue, isn't it? And I'm sure that in the kinds of people that you work with, I'm sure that you also encounter versions of this. And quite often, the way I describe that practitioner-producer move, a bit like employee to business owner move, is one of the things that has to happen is a perspective shift and a values shift for the work. And yeah, Janine, of course, being an expert in all that stuff, she's already got all of that perspective and those values, and she can just come in straight away and go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, not this, not this. What is this? Come on. So yeah, amazing. MARK Yeah. Well, it's the producer mindset, I guess, that she brought to this. Which again, that's the work you now do as well. You're kind of introducing that producer mindset to the people you support. I am mindful of time, frustratingly, because we could just, we could do this forever. And I'm just, I'm so enthralled by this, again, this wonderful path that you're forging that, again, I think speaks to so many different people in so many different ways in different industries and sectors. It comes back to that whoever you are, whatever it is that you're doing, whatever it is that you absolutely put spot on, you know, what success and happiness looks like for you. There's two ways. There's doing more of that one thing that you're really good at, the practitioner, or there's that closing the gaps, filling the holes, adopting that producer mindset of what are these other wonderful things that I can bring in that almost sort of magnify success and happiness and have that ripple effect outwardly as well in terms of the people that you then support when you're a dance leader, assistant choreographer, and so on. John, where can people find out more about you and the incredible work that you do? JOHN Oh, thanks, Mark. And the best place to go is my website, which is john-blackburn.com. And everything is there. And hopefully it's laid out in a way that makes it easy for you to find what you're looking for. There's also links on there to the podcast, which is called Entertainment Matters. And so yeah, your best bet is just to go to my website. Everything is there. I'm also available. I'm also on Instagram and LinkedIn. But again, it's all on the website. MARK Fantastic. Thank you. And just from a kind of entertainment perspective, where are you performing next And can we come and see you and hear you? JOHN Oh, for sure. Yeah. So, as it happens, I mean, I think this might be a very small part of your audience. But my next gig is actually in a few days’ time on the Isle of Wight. So that's, we do, I do quite with the various shows that I'm involved in, we do quite a lot of these Warner Hotels, like holiday gigs, which are good fun. So that's, that's where the Carpenters show on Saturday. And then I think the week after that, if you if you've got anyone down towards Penzance or Tavistock, I've got two nights down there with a great blondie act called Bootleg Blondie. They're fantastic. They're really fun, lovely guys as well. And so we're down. Oh, yeah, it's Penzance and then Tavistock, the wharf arts into the night after. So that's the following the other following weekend. So, you get to channel your inner Clem Burke. JOHN 37:32) Well, and hilariously, or not hilariously, wonderfully, Clem, the Deb and Andy who run Bootleg Blondie, were actually very close with Clem, like they used to go and stay at his for Christmas and stuff. And Clem actually toured, Clem toured with Bootleg Blondie a couple of times. So, he actually did. Yeah, they what did they do? They did a couple of things, I think. And then they did some other one off gigs, I think. And it's they basically, for those gigs became Clem Burke's Bootleg Blondie. That was the that was how they were marketed and stuff. But yeah, so there's a lot, you know, those guys, you know, he sadly passed away fairly recently. So, you know that was that loss was felt quite deeply in the band. And but yeah, it's amazing. It's great music as a drummer, as of course, you know, yourself, like it's, it's great music to go and play. You know, they're great guys in the band, like, it's really fun. So yeah, always look forward to those. MARK Fabulous, fabulous, right. We're getting dangerously close to geeking off. So, let's call time. Thank you so much, John. Thoroughly appreciate this conversation today. It's just been as wonderful as I knew it would be. So very much appreciate your time. Thank you everybody for joining us live on LinkedIn. And if you're watching back afterwards, obviously on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you'd like to find your podcast, that's where we will be just search for the little blue chimps. Next episode is with the incredible Hannah Knowles from the Art of Brilliance team. That is, I forgot the date, but it will be up there soon. So, look out for it. Hannah is just one of the most incredible keynote speakers I've ever seen. So that's going to be a good one. Thank you again, John. Have a wonderful Monday, everybody. And appreciate your time. Take care. Bye bye. JOHN Thanks, Mark.