Design Education Talks Ep. 93 - Paul Rogers

Paul Rogers has worked as a free lance illustrator and designer since his graduation from Art Center College of Design in 1980. His clients include the Jazz at Lincoln Center, Los Angeles County MTA, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, e National Infantry Museum, e New York Times, e New Yorker, NIKE, Pixar Pictures, Pentagram, the Playboy Jazz Festival, Salesforce, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Warner Bros. Studios.

He has designed five postage stamps for the United States Postal Service and official posters for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Super Bowl XXXVII and for e US Open Tennis Championship.

His work has won awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Association of Illustrators/London, e Society of Illustrators, e Type Directors Club, AMERICAN ILLUSTRATION, COMMUNICATION ARTS, and GRAPHIS POSTER. His drawings and paintings have been exhibited at the Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans, the Mendenhall Sobieski Gallery in Pasadena, California, and at e Cummer Museum of Art in Jacksonville, Florida. He is currently an Associate Professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Paul has collaborated on two books with Wynton Marsalis, Jazz ABZ, which was given the Norman Sugarman Award for Distinguished Biography for Children, and was selected for AIGA 50 Books 2006, and Squeak, Rumble, Whomp, Whomp, Whomp! published by Candlewick Press in 2012. He illustrated a children’s book, Forever Young by Bob Dylan published by Simon and Schuster in Fall 2008, and is the author of Name at Movie: 100 Illustrated Movie Puzzles, published by Chronicle Books in 2012, and the Name at Show: 100 Illustrated TV Show Puzzles. (2017.) Next year Bejing Zito Books will publish an illustrated version of On e Road by Jack Kerouac with over 300 drawings by Paul Rogers.

Transcript

0:10

Hello and welcome to Design Education Talk from the New Art School. Our guest today is Paul Rogers. Welcome Paul. Thank you, thank you. Nice to be here, thanks for the invitation. It's wonderful to have you here. So tell us about you and your work. Well, you know, I've been an illustrator since I graduated from Art Center College of Design in 1980, so that's like 44 years now. And... That's all I've ever done. I've worked as a freelance illustrator. I've done editorial, most of us as we get out of school, that's the first place we go is editorial and magazines. What I really wanted to do was work in records. I'm gonna do record covers, because it was that LP era was still on, right? And all those beautiful illustrations that were done in the 70s were big inspirations to me. And I realized quickly when I started taking my portfolio around to the record labels, there were about 10 or 12 record labels here in Los Angeles where I live. And everybody was very, very nice to me, but I quickly realized I had a very nice art school portfolio, but I did not have a portfolio that was gonna get me assignments because the work I was doing was kind of a sad invitation of the people I admired. Right? And my portfolio was a little bit all over the place. Yes, because I just came out of school and I had this assignment and this assignment. I wasn't really directed towards one kind of thing. And and as I said, people were nice. And in that in that era, like the illustration and design industry in Los Angeles was kind of like a small town, you know, like everybody knew each other. And once you met one person, they tell you, oh, you should go see this guy, you should go see this guy. But what I realized quickly was, I'm gonna have to make a new portfolio. I'm gonna have to make new pieces that raise the level of what I was doing in school, because now I'm out here with the guys, all my heroes. Like when I was getting out of school and looking around, the illustrators that I knew, they all drove. drove nice cars, you know, they had mortgages on a house and they were putting their kids through college. And I just wanted to be one of those people, right? I just wanted to get into that world any way I could. And I had no backup plan. My thing was like, I'm going to go out here and make, make illustrations and get somehow pay my bills every month. I was crazy, right? But it was possible. And as I said, it was a small town kind of atmosphere and people were helpful. You know, and so if you did a new piece, you could call them up and take it down and show it to them. You know, people who were encouraging, you know. And I had two instructors at Art Center, Dave Willardson and Charlie White. They were like the airbrush kings of Los Angeles. At a time when airbrush was the, every illustrator wanted to work with airbrush, right? If you worked with a brush, you were corny, you were old fashioned, you know. And they were very, very nice. And they started to give me little assignments, you know. Here, can you do a storyboard? We got this music video coming up. That was a new thing. MTV was brand new. Hey, can you do some lettering on this thing? We got this other, and so they started giving me a little bit, enough to keep me afloat, right? They were freelance jobs. I didn't work in their studio, but I hung around there a lot. And I learned so much from those two guys about how to be a professional, how to prepare a sketch for a client, how to talk to a client on a phone, right? And so it was like, I was just like this. young, naive guy who wanted to get into the industry, and people just helped me everywhere I went, right? And so eventually, you know, when you first got out of school, the hardest thing is no one knows you. And trying to build a reputation some way, doing some work that people could see, and then spreading out your sort of, the people that knew you and would think you were all right, you started to get assignments, right? I always tell my students now that the hardest time is when you first get out of school because nobody knows you. And the only jobs you're going to get are jobs that you reach out to somebody for, right? But over time, more and more people learn who you are, know the kind of work you do, and are thinking of you even though you don't know it. And you start to get assignments from places that you hadn't reached out and tried to generate the work yourself. So that's what I've been doing. And so... About 20 years ago, Anne Field, who's the chair of the illustration department at Art Center, Art Center College of Design here in Pasadena. And Anne is English. She and her husband, the great Clive Piercy, moved from London to Los Angeles and liked it and stayed, right? And so, Clive and Anne and I have been friends since they got here, essentially the 80s sometimes. And, um... Uh, uh, Anne became the chair at art center college of design about 20 years ago. And she called me up and said, do you want to teach a class? And I was like, yeah, sure. You know, I, I loved art school. You know, when I, when I got into art school, the first day sitting in that room, I liked the way the room smelled. I loved drawing from a model. I liked the people I met. And so, um, so when Anne asked me if I would teach a class, I said I would. And then it just eventually kind of grew into a. more and more involvement over the years. So I've been teaching at Art Center now, they have this thing called full-time faculty, which means you teach three classes a semester. So it's not, you still have time for your career, you still have time to be doing illustrations. And so that's what I've been doing the last 20 years. Excellent. Excellent, so you told us how you got into teaching. Yeah, yeah. And you know, it was interesting because when I got into teaching, The illustration department was changing. As a student, illustration was editorial illustration. Everybody I went to school with, we all wanted to be illustrators for magazines, and like me, record labels, but some advertising. We knew money was in advertising, but we all were aiming for the editorial market. That's where we made your reputation, and that was where you wanted your work to be seen. When I came back to start teaching at Art Center 20 years ago, it had changed to an entertainment-based department. It was maybe 50-50. Half the students in the department wanted to go to work at Pixar or Disney, and the other half were thinking of a traditional illustration career or other things like surface design or motion design. There's more options now in illustration career than there was in the 70s when I was in school. And so Anne asked, would I teach a class in the, I taught a class called illustration design, which is what I do. That kind of mix of illustration and graphic design kind of together. And, but she also said, I think you could be helpful in the entertainment department. Because I had done some freelance projects for feature animation, right? Like I did a poster for Brad Bird when he was making the Incredibles. Brad and I've been friends for a long time. He, so he'd seen my work and called me in and I've been, so every now and then he has something, he says, can you do this for me? So I had done a little bit in that world, but I wasn't really an entertainment guy, right? So in the last 20 years or so, I've been more and more involved in just looking at that world, how do people make a living? And how do, how can I help train students to, to get into that world and make a living? And the one thing I really came down to is like, The thing that they need to be able to do is make good pictures, right? Tell a story in a picture, you know, tell a story with clarity, tell a story with some finesse and some style, right? And it's not that different from illustration really, right? It's, you know, there's a different sort of machine they're going into, but the whole thing is pretty much a kind of a different world than, than what I was aiming for. But the basics were all the same, you know? So that's still the thing I do now, is I teach in the entertainment track of the department, and I teach in the other thing, with the publishing and editorial kind of things. That's excellent, that's excellent. So how has illustration teaching changed in those 20 years? And how have the students changed also? Well, you know, there's great, great dependence on technology now, right? And I mean, you know, my Photoshop skills are minimal, right? I would do all my work. You know, I used to work with an airbrush and I used to work with paint and ink. And then when, when Photoshop and Illustrator Adobe Creative Suite, when that came in, I realized I was going to have to change, right? I was going to have to adapt and figure out how to work in this new digital world, if I was going to keep my career going. And, um, and so that process wasn't that difficult for me. Cause I just tried to figure out, I figured out how can I do what I'm doing with paint with this digital program? And I, and I just felt, I felt comfortable in illustrator and I more comfortable in illustrator than I did in Photoshop. Like to me, to me, illustrator was like swimming in a pool and swimming pool. And, and, and Photoshop was like swimming in the ocean, right? It was like, it was too big. It was too, it's too much danger things, you know, and, um, and so, so I figured out illustrator with my students, they have great Photoshop skills, most of Right. But they're still struggling with that thing, trying to make a picture with clarity. So they have murky values. They have, they have, uh, indistinct foreground, middle ground background. And so, so things like that, we're just making pictures, right? But I tell them all the first day, they all have better Photoshop skills than I do, but I'm going to try to help them make better pictures and tell their stories in a more clear way. Right. So there's this great dependence on computers and computer tricks. rather than a great dependence on your ability to draw. Right? And I think especially we've had, you know, with COVID, we had students taking their first art school classes in their childhood bedroom on Zoom, you know? And the feeling of drawing in your bedroom couldn't have been the same as the feeling I had sitting in the classroom drawing from a life model with all my friends around me and everyone kind of competitive. And also kind of that fear of life and death, every drawing you think is gonna, people are gonna judge me, I gotta pay attention. And so what I learned when I was in school is if you figure out, learning to draw in paint is difficult, right? It takes time. But if you learn to draw in paint, then when software comes along, technology comes along, you can figure out the technology and take your skills into that world, right? But I see a lot of students now who are relying on technology first. And they don't always realize that their magic power is going to be their ability to draw. And no matter what happens later, if they can draw, then they're going to have a higher level of sophistication when they're looking at images that come their way through technology or how to adjust an image or this whole AI thing. And are we going to be seeing? AI images, well, in the hands of an artist, maybe an AI image can be improved, right? And, but they have to have that thing in their head, like what would I do to fix this? They have to be able to imagine the thing in their head, the same way as when you sit down with a blank piece of paper and you have to imagine, what am I going to do? You have to be able to imagine it and then get it on paper or get it on the screen so people can see it, right? So, you know, to manipulate the digital world, right? To work in the digital skills and to make images. But I'd worry about them not taking enough drawing classes, you know, and like those things will show me something they're working on. And I'm like, yeah, that guy's foot, that right foot actually looks like a left foot the way you drew it, right? And then when I say it, they see it, but they did not see it when they were looking at it, you know? And I think a lot of that is just years and years of drawing and looking at, you know, and then they have, they haven't done that yet. So at Art Center, we have costume and live model workshops, which are in addition to your classes. There's one every day or two or three a day, and you can figure out your schedule and then go in and draw from a model. And I just tell students, you gotta be doing that. You gotta just take that like a class and go every single day, because... What you're trying to do is build up your drawing skills, your chops, your ability to see and imagine, and your ability to get ideas on the paper. And some do, you know, some students do, but not enough, not enough. Yeah. So where do you see the future of employment for these students in light of course of today's AI technology? Well, the AI thing is a weird thing. No one knows right now, right? I mean, right now it's all, you know, it can't copyright an AI image. And so, you know, I get I get illustration assignments and the contract says that I will not use AI in any part of my process because they don't want to be hung up with the copyright later. If I'm selling a copyright through an image to a client, they want to know they're buying the copyright. So right now, AI is not really an issue in that world, right? And I was on a crew for a feature animation and someone brought some, it was one of those Zoom calls where everyone's checking in and showing what their progress is, what they've done up to this stage. And one guy had this AI thing. And he's, it was very, very preliminary. He had a bunch of AI ideas and he was going to work on those. And he said, so I'm going to work on this and change it to, you know, to my own thing. And the production manager cut in and said, uh, the studio policy at this time is no AI on anything, not even sketches, ideas, preliminary stuff. So that made me just be like, okay, the copyright world is still scaring off the ability for that, right? But you know, we keep seeing more and more crappy AI images every time you open your computer. Right. Yeah. And if you do a search for something, you're going to get half of those images. Could be AI images, right? And if you don't have the ability to see that and realize this may not be right, it's like just because it's on your computer doesn't mean it's true, right? We've all seen Google searches giving you the wrong information when you search something. So the AI thing, I don't really know the answer. No one knows the answer. My worry is it'll do the same thing Revolution did. Like when Illustrator and Photoshop came on the scene, we saw a lot of crappy images being used in place of illustration, right? Because they were acceptable. They were acceptable to the guy who was writing the checks, right, the company who's watching the budget or whatever. They realized, well, you know, we don't have to call an Illustrator in anymore for this tiny little spot illustration that's gonna be in the back of the newspaper. And, and, you know, for me, when I got out of school, man, that was my bread and butter. I showed up and did stuff, silhouette illustrations. We need a drawing of a car. We need a drawing of a hotel, you know? And it was, it wasn't great work, but you know, paid the bills and you showed up every day with it. You were reliable. You can make it, you could get going, right? You didn't have to get a second job. So my worry is, you know, so, you know, when I got out of school, you had to have a certain amount of finesse and expertise. just to get ink out of the bottle onto the paper the way you wanted it, right? When illustrator showed up, and an art director sitting in an office who needed a little illustration, a silhouette illustration, they couldn't do it, right? I mean, they had no chance of doing that. They couldn't get ink out of the bottle. Now the software, clip art, all these different things, boom, they got something that's crappy. It's acceptable. It's not art. It's okay. It's fine. And they use it, right? So... So the technology replaced the lower level of illustration and also lowered the bar of mediocrity to an acceptable level. So more and more we're seeing images that were not acceptable in the past, acceptable today, right? And I see it all the time. I saw an ad yesterday in the New York Times, a full page ad for some investment company, and it was just two-tone kind of, you know, stylized drawing. And it had no heart and it had no inspiration. And it was like, I was thinking, I wonder what they paid the illustrator. Did they do it in house? There's a no illustrator involved. And what did they pay for that space in the New York times? Somehow that the space in the New York times is valuable, but the illustration, the level of quality illustration was not valuable to the people involved, you know, cause they wouldn't have run that way. Right. So my worry with AI is like, we get worse work. we see even crappier stuff, the bar of mediocrity is lowered to a spot where we see even less good work as we look through the newspaper and magazines. I mean, when I was a kid, you know, looking at magazines and newspapers was inspiration to me, right? I mean, most of us, comic books and magazines, that's where we saw our inspiration. If you were just a kid who didn't, we didn't have a bunch of art books in my house or anything, you know? And, you know, I was like, you know, I was drawing Spider-Man. and sports stars when I was a kid, because I was just inspired by the pictures I was seeing. You know? And also then you start to see illustrations and you'd be like, well, how'd this guy get his drawing on the front of this magazine? Or how'd this guy, you know? I had no idea how it worked, but I just thought, I just thought that was for me, if I could do it, you know? So we see crappier and crappier work. And now the AI thing, we're probably going to see even more crappy work that, you know, that. I was telling my students the other day, finesse and nuance is the first thing to disappear when money becomes more important than art. Right? So if you grow up with no finesse and nuance in your culture, you don't even notice when it's terrible. Right? I mean, we have terrible pop music now, mostly terrible pop music compared to the music that we grew up with. Right? Kids, that's all they hear. So they like it. That's their pop music. Okay, fine. but there's a richer world that's possible and we're not even dipping into it. Absolutely. Is there any way to remedy this through education? Well, it's the only way, I think. You gotta, you know, I have these carousels, no, like I call them carousels because I'm old. Yes, of course. These PowerPoint presentations where every week I'm showing them, here's 30 artists I bet you never heard of, you know? And these guys inspired me when I was coming up and here's 10 new people I just found this week. You know, I have my students come in every week and bring a piece of illustration they saw during the week. It crossed their path somewhere, right? It could be a candy bar wrapper. It could be a menu cover. It could be an illustration, a magazine. I go, let's just talk about it. Let's look at it and let's say, how do you think this person is making a living? Could you, do you know who the artist is? Is it who was the client? Was there a client on this thing? And, um, just to talk about the world of illustration. Like if people are out there making a living, there's a machine out there buying artwork. And you got to figure out how do you fit into that world? Right? What are the skills you have that you're developing and what's possible, right? Like I was a terrible painter. Like, you know, I admired the hell out of people who could paint, but I realized, I got to figure out I'm more of a, I'm more of a drawer and a designer than a painter. So I had to figure out my world, right? So I think one of the dangers is with kids today, they just don't see illustration at a high level at enough volume for them to have inspiration about it. Like a lot of them get ready to graduate and they're excited that they got an Instagram commission. Pays like $65. Okay, God bless you, that's great. Do it, draw the hell out of it. But I want their goals to be higher. And if you don't show it to them. If you don't say what you're working on and what people you know are doing and think, you know. And I don't wanna come across with my students either as, you know, well, grandpa's about to tell us stories about before the internet again, you know. But so I try to stay current, right? I try to pay attention to what's happening and tell them stories about what I've done. You know, I bring in like projects where I've saved every email between me and an art director, you know. And I say, here's the brief, here's what I got from the art. And then here's the first round of sketches I sent, and here's what I showed them and what I said, and here's what they said, and here's what the editor said. And we go back and forth and show them step by step. And my students are like, this is so great, I've never seen this kind of thing before. And I think when I was a student, there was no way to say it, right? There was no way to know that. There was no email back and forth. Someone may come in and tell you a story, but you have to listen. So now we have it step by step, we can show it's much clearer. So I'm hopeful because The students I have are fantastic. I mean, you have some who you just wonder, you don't seem to be putting forth a lot of effort, right? There's some, but for the most part, the students I have are fantastic and they inspire me every week. I go in and I talk to them and see what they're doing and see them trying, so it's what you do, right? That's how you try to do it, try to raise the bar. Absolutely. Do you find any limitations in your teaching? of illustration through the existing structures? No, and you know, at Art Center, there's struggles to run the school, right? I mean, there's a bunch of changes at Art Center right now. We have a lot of international students and I'm sure finances are difficult. Tuition is really, really high, right? So... Not everybody that wants to learn to be an artist gets to be an artist. So I don't know the ins and outs of running a school. I don't know the details of why, you know, they make decisions they make in terms of, of the administration, in terms of money and how things get done. But one great thing about Art Center is, is that they let the instructors, you come in and teach your class your way. Right. That's wonderful. And you can adapt your class. each week according to what students are doing and what students are in your class and all that, right? So, you know, it's a great place to teach because you really, they really want you to be, you know, Art Center started in the, I think, 1940, the idea of training artists to work in industry. And it's always been a place where working artists are teaching students. So it's not just a bunch of... It's not so much an academic situation, although it is, but the tradition has always been you're learning from people that are doing the thing you want to do. Sure, sure. But is there anything that you would change if you could, anything at all, in your whole teaching structure? Yeah, I wish a couple things. First of all, I wish it wasn't so expensive. I wish it was possible. I don't even know if I could have gotten it. The cost it is now. My parents, when I was in high school, my mom went... She was a housekeeper, you know, a homekeeper, and my brothers and me were growing up, she was always home. And then when we got in high school, she went and got a job working in an office, and then she actually ended up working in admissions office over at another college. And I realized thinking back on it, man, she did that so she could pay my tuition, right? Like that was some extra income to pay tuition for me and my brothers when we were coming up. And a simple move like that is not possible now for the cost of art school, you know? And so I would have been in student. student debt, I'd probably, you know, I would have had to go into debt to do that. And so the cost is prohibited for some people, right? So I wish I could change that. And I know it's, this is another thing, I don't understand it, because the cost of high, of art schools all around the world is the same, and so it's expensive. It must be expensive to run an art school, right? So I wish I could change that. The other thing I wish I could change is I wish, we have students who come right out of high school. And they're asked, they're 17 years old, 18 years old, and they're asked, what do you wanna do the rest of your life? Because you're gonna start being trained for that thing right now. And I wish they could just come in and be an artist, just come in and draw and paint and try this and try that without that crush of money and that crush of time and that thing where you better get your portfolio together because you gotta get a job the second you graduate. I wish there was more time stretched out so there was. more it's not just so much experimentation but less stress of just like trying to be a professional when you're just a kid you know and I wish there was also more crossover between majors where you can take a photography class I took a filmmaking class when I was a student I started and you know I was love movies and now here I am with a little super 8 camera shooting my friends and then and then editing the film and put I loved it was fantastic, but I had no time you know it's like that was a great class. That was exhausting to make those films. And I'm not a film major, so I'm not gonna ever do it again. But I wish there was more of that kind of, you just get to come to school and learn and try new things, right? And that's, sadly that's, it's like these young kids are on a career path that's stressful from the minute they show up at Art Center, right? Yeah. And I'm sure it's the same at all schools, where you're worried about, you know, getting a job. How are you going to get this investment of your art school? How are you going to turn this into a business? You know? Or how are you going to turn this into a way to a career? And so I wish I could change that. You know, I'd like to see, you know, because, you know, like I said, when I was in art school, I loved every minute of it. And I would have loved to stay longer. Although, you know, I also remember getting at the end of my school years, I was just like, I don't want to do one more fake assignment. I want to go out and see if I can do this or not. You know? It's wonderful. For example, the axis, though, you said about the super 8, the axis to materials and media is much greater now. For example, I remember when I was an illustration student, all we had was a Polaroid to test out the positions if we want a complicated body position for drawing. All we had was Polaroid or the Ilford XP2 that would process really fast. series of things in black and white. You know, so now you have these, you know, broadcast quality, film quality, you know, cameras for really cheap or, you know, the access to media is far greater. Yeah. Access to all kinds of things for a lot less. So it's interesting what students now have with greater ease of access, but of course, much harder. careers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, the technology is amazing, right? But do they have an idea of what to do with it? You know, and the limitations actually help them become better storytellers or, you know, having everything at your disposal doesn't always make the best. Absolutely. I mean, look at, look at, you know, Marvel movies, right? I mean, they're horrible. and they're all special effects and they're all the same and it's like, you could do anything. And it gets so, we don't care, right? Absolutely, absolutely. How could our viewers and listeners find you? Well, I'm, you know, as all illustrators, I have a website. It's paul So you can see my work on the website. I'm also on Instagram. I think that's also under Paul Rogers Studio. So you can follow me on Instagram. And I try to stay current with that stuff, post new work when I have something I'm proud of. And Instagram's a lot of fun because Sometimes it's just like a sketchbook drawing or something that nobody would see, just stuff around your studio and you can post it. And then, you know, you get a few likes and you feel good about yourself that morning. But I like that. I like seeing, you know, I'm friends with a lot of people I've never met, other illustrators around the world who I've never met, but I feel like I know them because of their Instagram and the stuff we share back and forth there. So that's fantastic, right? Absolutely. Yeah, especially for illustrators who, you know, it's a... pretty solitary business. You spend a lot of time alone. And that's another thing about teaching that I like is like, you know, there's some great artists teaching on faculty with me as I get to see them. And then as my students graduate and move on, I get to keep track of them. And so through social media and stuff, that's possible. It used to be hard to do that. And so it's wonderful. Yeah. What advice would you like to leave us with? Advice for who? Well, for teachers, for students. I don't know, you just got to believe in yourself. That's one thing, right? You know, one thing I think like, to be an illustrator, you need a certain level of sort of ignorant optimism, you know, you have to sort of believe it's going to work out. and you need a kind of personality that is okay with uncertainty. You know, and even if you're going into the entertainment world, you know, movies end, shows end, you get fired, studios cut things, and you're out looking for work again. So there's never really a solid, no one goes to Disney and works for 30 years anymore, you know. So there's a level of uncertainty in the industry we're in. You need that personality. Like you need a personality that is okay with that, or at least is optimistic enough to send out emails to strangers with your work, you know? Because if you stop doing that, if you stop the thing you have to believe enough in to make it, you know, those first rough years when nobody knows you, I've seen a lot of great artists graduate from arts center. Their work is fantastic, but they're too shy to get out there, right? And I don't know whether you need like, I don't know what to do about that. That's a personality thing. You need help, you need someone else to do it for you to send things out, you need to find a representative. If they can get a good agent, yeah, it used to be the role of an agent, but these days it's all more complicated. It's very complicated, right? I mean, you know, I mean, I don't know, it's always been complicated, right? When I got out of school, you needed an agent in every town you wanted to work in, because we all had these physical portfolios that had to be shut down around, you know? Of course, of course. So it's complicated. whole thing is complicated. But you know, you got to hang in there and you have to believe in yourself even when it seems like there's no reason to believe in yourself. And that's hard, right? That's really, really hard. So you know, hang in there, you know, get with your friends. Everybody's the same. I'll tell you, here's a bit of advice. You always think everybody else is doing better than you. Right? You always think, man, you look at that. They had a drawing in the New Yorker that must be fantastic to be them. And it's like, they're just like you. They're worried about the next job. They're sweating it out, trying to pay their bills. They have a feeling of insecurity, but somehow they're managing, right? And they're just like you. We're all just out here trying to manage, trying to figure out how do we do this? How do we do it? Keep it going. You know, like, you know, we started this thing. I started, 44 years I've been in Ilterate, that's crazy. I don't know how I ever got started. I don't know how I ever, like how it continues. It seems crazy. But it does, right? It's like, okay, we're lucky. Well, Paul, thank you ever so much. It's been a wonderful conversation and very, very useful. I do keep in touch. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thanks very much.