#53. Theo Watt: Drink Well
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What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. You can always reach us at thehonestdrink at gmail.com. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, go ahead, rate, comment, and subscribe.

My guest today is the founder of Thirsty Work Productions and Drink Magazine. He's a former bartender and also the creator of the Drink Awards, which is an awards event that celebrates the best of the best of China's bar industry. He's a big advocate for responsible drinking and a huge supporter of bartenders, creating experiences for them to enjoy and competitive events for them to compete to help further their passion and career in mixology and bartending.

Really, in a nutshell, he's creating a culture around the drink and bar industry here in China and trying to connect and empower people through great drinks and shared experiences. I had a wonderful time talking to him. So without further ado, please give it up for Theo Watt. Thank you.

Cheers, Leo. Cheers, dude. Cheersing water. Cheersing Perrier. Yeah, cheersing Perrier. Thanks for being on the show, man. No worries, man. We're good.

So what's this detox you're on right now? What's that all about? I thought we were going to drink today. We can drink after, maybe. No, it's just a thing that, you know, kind of like after doing this for, you know, after being in the bar and the hospital world for like 20 years, I'm 40. I turned 40 in April. And doing what we do, we're just constantly out there. And I'm not out there as much as I used to be, but kind of like...

when you when you travel or when you do get out there you you end up going to see three or four bars in a night and in every single bar that you'll go they'll be like try this cocktail try this cocktail hey have a shot you know and you end up kind of like just very very easily having had 14 drinks and five or six shots by the end of the night and then you're just like oh shit i'm not gonna drink for a few days and it kind of like just gets up to you to the point that also when you're

You know, when you've got like 10 kilos of COVID fat like I have, you know, built through traveling before COVID and then during COVID and then just going out and seeing people and drinking. Drinking just fucking puts on the pounds, man. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And then hangover the next day, you end up going like, oh, I've got a really bad hangover. I'm not going to have a salad, right? For me, I'm going to go for a Shake Shack, man. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, yeah, so kind of, it's not easy. So, um, for me kind of like, it's much easier just to turn it off. So what I'll do is I'll just turn it off for a couple of weeks. I'll try and turn it off for a couple of weeks. And then I've got a trainer and kind of like, we're now three months before, uh, the drink awards, which is happening on November the 23rd. Um, and, uh, it's like three days after my wife gives birth. Oh, damn. Awesome. Damn. Yeah. So yeah, I like a challenge.

um so what's your plan like what are you going to do uh wing it no um we've already she's she's already booked herself into doing a yuza yuza yuza that month off okay month we go to the hospital and they they kind of look after you for a month afterwards which is you know um expensive um but um yeah so she's going to do that kind of um

I think she's hoping to give birth a little bit before the 20th and then go into that. And kind of like she says she wants to get out of my hair whilst I'm going to be stressed. But I'll be stressed the whole time anyway. So what's up with these drink awards? Like what is the drink awards? Drink awards. We started drink awards, I guess it was November 2016. And it was supposed to be like...

the culmination of ev like the first one was like the culmination of basically like eight or nine years of work of of us kind of uh building the industry in china kind of like kind of pulling all of our clients and friends and bartenders and and some media into the into the same room and just just celebrating what we've done for the last uh for the last year um in the case of

The first one, it was kind of it was it was kind of like a bit of a shout out to say kind of like this is what we've done as Drink Magazine over the last eight years. It was it was slightly focused on us, I think. But, you know, that's OK. We have to you know, it was and the first year at the same time, we didn't really make any money. So it really was just a massive marketing push.

to everyone so what is it are you just getting all the bars together all the restaurants anywhere that serves alcohol and just seeing like the competition of who can make the best drink no there's no competition yeah the idea was simply just about um we'd been wanting to do something like uh um an awards kind of every year to to really just um

Find out kind of like who the most popular people in the industry are it wasn't about saying the word best You've already got like the 50 best lists and all of that kind of stuff and it's really hard to It's really hard to kind of say who really is the best you know kind of and there's a there's so many different debates that come back to the best list and all the rest of it and it's it's a great platform at the end of the day and

And I'm a judge on the 50 Best platform and anything that you can put out that's positive is great about our industry. So when we did our one, we really wanted just to pull in a whole bunch of different industry leaders and movers and shakers from the industry to become our judges. And then we just put out a nomination post and we just get anyone from the industry, anyone that's in our WeChat group.

Now we're over 50,000 on our WeChat. But kind of like anyone that sits within our audience can nominate and they can nominate for themselves or they can nominate for somebody else. But then after that, those nominations, the top 20 within those nominations will then be put forwards to all of our like 250 judges from across the country. And then they will basically select from those 20 their top four. And then obviously based on the number of,

of the different awards that the judges vote for. So let's just say bar of the year, a massive amount of people vote for one bar. It's simply just done like that. And then we get our first, our second, our third and a fourth from that. So the fourth of four nominees will come in off of those votes. And we basically go across about, this year we're going across 23 awards. And each of those awards are basically built around a sector of the bar that you can't do without.

Kind of. What does that mean? So kind of like in a great bar, you need to have a great cocktail program. You need to have a good wine program, hopefully. You need to have good design. You obviously have to have a great team. You have to have a great bartender. Obviously, you have to have a great bar. Also, I think we've knocked it out this year, the music. Music was a key point as well. But at the same time, this year...

We try to knock out a couple of awards so that we can pull in some other awards. So you guys really focus on like all the aspects of what makes a good bar, a good bar, right? Bring like more attention and more awareness to a lot of things that, you know, maybe regular customers might just take for granted. Yeah. So it's, it's also just put out there to, to make each category of bar. So let's just say hotel bar, a restaurant bar, a beer program as well. So you get a lot of kind of, um,

uh, beer bars where they, uh, brew pubs and beer bars that, that are, that take part. The point is, is that we want the whole industry to be activated. And I think that if you position a specific award there, um, and you can build up the, you can build up the noise, uh, about what our platform is, then I think in the future, bar bartenders, young bartenders will go, Oh,

shit, one day I want to get the Best Bartender Award. I'd love to get the Best Bartender Award. Oh, I'm just going to work harder to get that. There's a goal other than just to have a job. You're putting a goal out to the industry for that, yeah. But you're putting a goal out to the industry just to say, hey, we want to win Best Design this year. Or sorry, the Design Award this year. Which means that we might concentrate a little bit more on the design side.

of our bar versus if there wouldn't be something that would recognize that. Now, I might be putting it on a pedestal, but the point is, is that we want to give as many reasons as possible for people to do better. That's kind of the point of what Drink Magazine did and started with in the very beginning.

Well, I think creating an industry starts with things like what you're saying. It starts with those first few steps of putting something out there, whether or not you're putting it on a pedestal like you're saying or not. You're the first ones to be putting it out there and be like, look, there's something at stake here. There's something to work towards other than just having a job or holding down the job. If you're truly passionate about what you do as a business or as a bartender or whatever,

you have this kind of a goal. You have a prize at the end that you can work towards if you wish to do so. And the more people that get on it, the more exciting it becomes, right? Yeah, 100%. I mean, what we're trying to do is we're trying to build a culture. That's it. It's simply just building a culture. And what does a culture mean? There's all kinds of different definitions of what a culture means, but for me it kind of just means that you have purpose.

What is the culture like here now? What is like the, I guess, I mean, how would you put it in your words? Is it the bartending culture, the bar culture, the drink culture? Like, how do you phrase it? You know, so for a while when we did drink awards, a lot of, a lot of,

People thought that it was a celebration of bartenders. And what I've tried to tell people is that the idea of drink awards is not a celebration of bartenders. Yes, we do celebrate bartenders, but it's an idea of celebrating the industry. You know, one...

One year I had a client of mine come up and say, hey, Theo, this is so great. This is so great. I've managed to see so many old friends who working in different companies that I've worked with before. And this is a really good event because I get to see them. And I was like, yeah, dude, this event's for you too, man. You know, so kind of like anyone that kind of like touches the beverage industry is welcome to come to the awards or to be a part in our industry.

And the thing is that we just want people to take part. And we started the magazine in, well, we incorporated 2008, October. Yeah, Drink Magazine, right? Yeah. Yeah, you brought this. This was, you said, one of your latest last issues? That was one of the last ones. So we stopped in 2017, and that's issue 47. So we stopped in issue 49. Ironically, it should have just been 50, but we did stop in issue 49. Can I open this? It's yours, dude. Thank you.

Yeah, it looks like an amazing magazine. It looks really cool. What got you started on this in the first place, though? And why here? Why in Shanghai? When I studied hospitality, so the first real job that I had was in Australia in the W Hotel in Sydney. And I got a job as a cocktail waiter on the floor. I was 24 years old.

And I got to this W Hotel, which I didn't really know much about, but it was a cool, really cool space. It was a small boutique hotel, nothing like all the big ones that were in Sydney at the time. And I just happened to land getting a job in this bar called The Water Bar. And it was one of the best bars in Australia at the time. And I was kind of thrust automatically into this amazing culture of bartending.

what I mean is kind of like, you know, you had an amazing team of bartenders. We had a great team of cocktail waiters that really were professional. And then everyone, you know, around, around them, our managers and, and, and having a cool hotel to work in kind of like just made me say, Oh, hotels are cool, but bars are cooler. And I started thinking about the philosophy behind it and all the rest of it. And I, you know, I was thinking like from, from that perspective, um,

quite a lot, you know? Um, and I was thinking just the fact that, you know, the bars are the voice, you know, having a good bar in a hotel is the voice can be the voice of the hotel. Well, it's like the heartbeat, not the reception. Reception is very important. It's your greeting, but kind of like exactly. It's the soul, the soul of the hotel, um, can be a great bar. And I think that hotel bars have become, have taken, uh,

I'm not going to say they've taken it at the forefront, but you find a lot of the time it's sitting in that 50 best list, some of these amazing hotel bars. And that's just because they have a leg up because they have money. More resources. They have heritage. They've got more resources to spend more and to do more. So that was kind of my route in. And then I applied to do training and purchasing.

So I applied to do training in purchasing, and once or twice a week I did this purchasing training. And the guy that was the purchasing officer for the hotel, basically he was actually given a lot more than just purchasing. So he was given a lot of the bar operational training.

um, jobs. So kind of like he had to do all the margins, he had to do all the PNLs, the margins, he had to do some forecasting, had to do all this, you know, the, the staffing, um, as well as basically purchasing, organizing trainings for all the different brands. We had like 420 odd brands in our bar. So I did that and kind of like, um, I really enjoyed it. And I started, but basically the idea of being the purchaser for the hotel was you were kind of like the middleman between the brands and the bartenders.

it's kind of what i do now is there in the kind of i guess more high-end bar scene is there a sort of kind of like elitist mentality in terms of like not using the kind of like really generic brands of spirits i think it still exists i think it definitely still exists i think that um there is there is a massive amount that you're

your bottom line has to play within the building of the list. If again, if you're working for hotels and those kinds of establishments that have got, you know, a slightly bigger budget to play with, then you can have a higher, you can have a higher cost, maybe like a 25 or 26% cost maybe. But most of the time you want to be able to balance, be balancing out your costs to be coming down quite a lot. Cause you've got a lot of other costs like rent and staffing and other bits and pieces.

So I think there was a time, you know, for me when I was then so at the W, when I go into the purchasing position, we had most of our management leave, but I'd been taught through all the operational bits and pieces. So I basically after they left, I was running the operations of the bar as well as

as well as dealing with all the purchasing as well. So it was my responsibility to do that. Right. So, um, and now at that stage there was a slightly elitist view to the way we did things. So it was mostly coming from you. It was all, no, no. I think, I think we were all in that stage where it was just like, well, you know, our house poor is kettle one. This is back in the day when kettle one is, was just released.

a house pour is kettle one um uh vodka or you know or you say for example um you and people will set will almost separate out there that they might say look our our gin and tonic gin is tanqueray our martini gin is tanqueray 10 for example our like uh the our house pouring rum that we use is maybe bacardi or it's havana club or it's florida canya or something like this but then for our

higher end drinks. We might use maybe a more aged rum. And the point is, is that, you know, as you build your cocktail program, it's your responsibility. It's the same as mix and matching. It's the same as mixing, mixing, mixing, matching fashion. You know, you kind of like the best guys out there will be able to, to, to, to wear a, you know, some kind of,

Hermes belt but with a pair of Zara jeans and then a Burberry shirt with something else and something else and it's always it's always more about kind of like how you can pull out something that just looks and feels great yeah at the end of the day so I think a good cocktail program and a good a good head bartender a manager of a bar is is is a person that is able to balance all of that and

And make your drinks program look and taste awesome, but not cost too much. Yeah. Yeah. I think with anything creative, that's always a sign of a truly talented person who's really good at their craft.

is because like if you take if you take being a chef or even being like an interior designer like it's not just oh I'm only gonna buy like the best stuff only the highest end stuff and you know shit anyone can do that and make something look nice right yeah

the real trick and the real craft comes in. It's like exactly how you're saying, like, how do you mix and match in a way where it's seamless and it has the quality of something really high end, but not necessarily the cost of it. Just like I've spoken to some interior designers before, not on this show, but just...

in my own personal life. And, you know, when they do interior design, they're like, you know, we can spend a lot of money on a lot of things. And usually for the foundational stuff, we try to spend the money to buy the best quality stuff. But I'll put in things here and there that are from fucking Ikea. And you'll never even notice them. And they'll work seamlessly in that environment. And that's like the balance. The thing is, is it comes down to...

you know, it comes down to what you do with it at the end of the day and how you use it. So, you know, you go to Ginza in Tokyo, which is world famous for being, you know, one square mile of a thousand bars, um, to which has had a hundred years of honed technique, honed, um, experimentation in terms of mostly classics. Right. But you'll go there and,

And you'll order a martini and they'll use Gordon's gin or they'll use Bifida gin, which are, you know, they're fine gins depending on your taste. But they will work with that gin in order to make it taste as great as possible. And the idea of taste, yeah, you've got those five sensory points in your tongue, but taste is so much more than that.

Your taste is also psychological. So there's so many other parts that play in to that action of drinking from the glass. The whole experience. It's the frozen glass. It's the technique to which they've mixed that gin with a block of ice and the way in which they've poured it in with a steady, beautiful stream into that glass and the way that they've

Put a zest of lemon over the top with some kind of ninja release kind of action and then obviously with the lighting that tries to make you look better looking and and the sound of Ambient jazz riffs in the background all of these bits and pieces and then with obviously with the hospitality of the of the staff there the Tina it all plays

to making that drink taste better. And at the end of the day, and they'll be charging some of the most money for these fucking drinks than any other place in the world. And, but they're still using the cheapest ingredients, right? So the point is, is that, you know, uh, the, the, the craft, the packaging around the drink, it's so much more than the, the, there's so much more involved in just the juice that's inside the cup, you know? Um,

So, you know, if you can, if you can build something that enables your creativity to

as well as to work, yeah, and also to work with some of these different companies that, you know, the Pernod Ricards and the Diageos and the Bacardis and the Beam Suntouries of this world who, you know, people might say a lot about these mainstream brands that they carry, but these mainstream brands are what has paid for the building of this industry. You know, a lot of the craft brands here are great or around the world are great. They're awesome. And it's definitely...

It's definitely, it was definitely needed as the consumer's appetite changes into the future to say, you know, the consumer wants to be able to say, no, no, no, no. I like Monkey 47 gin and Fever Tree Tonic.

you know, this kind of, this kind of thing. Um, because they like, they like to be, they like to be, uh, in the know, in the know, in the know. And it's quite funny kind of like when you, when I go back to England and I go back to London and I meet my brother's friends and stuff like that, they'll always be like, they'll always kind of be like, so what's your favorite drink? It's like, Oh God, a highball. I think probably right now it's a highball.

What do you drink when you go out? Oh, you don't drink cocktails? It's like, no, no, not really. Haven't done that for a while. Mainly just because of how fat they get you, really, at the end of the day. But are they expecting some sort of really fancy drink for you to say something really fancy? Yeah. They say, oh, I like old fashions. It's like, oh, good, man. That's great. What kind of old fashions do you like? So, I mean...

But it's funny kind of like when you meet terrestrial people, like just out there, when they meet you, they're always trying to kind of play up the – how much they – Yeah, like they're too cool for school. No, it's not. It's like I like making cocktails. I like making cocktails at home. Yeah, yeah. I do like making a mojito when I get home. It's like, that's cool, man. Nice. Good for you.

And that's great. And that's what we want. In this industry here in China, we want more people to go home and make cocktails. We want as many people out there making drinks and doing that because literally because we want the volume to go up. We want the volume to go up. Personally, my...

My agenda is I want the volume to go up so that then those companies can spend more money on building the industry. Yeah. You know, because the more the consumers drink, then the more that our little fraction of what we have being spent on the industry can go up and we can do more cool shit. Well, okay, I'm going to get to my main question. But before we get to that, I want to ask you, like, is there a kind of like a industry standard in terms of...

If you walk into a bar, like any bar, what would be like the best bang for the buck cocktail to get? Is there something like that? Like, oh, this is always known as like the best bang for the buck drink.

Because like you say, like drinks, cocktails, depending on where you go can get really expensive these days. Right? Is there one, if you're going to pay for it, get this one because you're getting, forget taste. Let's say I can, I can drink anything. Depends on what bang for buck means. Does it, does bang for buck means like which cocktail is going to get me the most wankered? Which cocktail is going to get me the most drunk or which cocktail am I going to enjoy the most in terms of taste? Because a lot of people's idea on bang for buck might be like, uh,

I want to spend the money. How drunk is this going to get me? Because the idea of drinking to get drunk is still there, but it's starting to dissipate a bit. People are trying to, you see my WeChat name is Drink Better. So the idea of what we're trying to do and trying to teach the industry and then also try to teach consumers is that we're there to ensure that your drinking experience is better.

So the bang for buck for me would mean what kind of place you're going to that has relatively affordable drinks, but you've got an amazing experience within that when you're going to that place, meaning it's got good music, it's got really good staff, the drink prices aren't too expensive.

You know, and the full package. So like, what if you're like, you're on a like, when I mean bang for the buck, I mean, like, let's say you're a person going out, but you're on a budget, right? But you want to have a good time, you want to have good drinks. You know, what are what are like some like cocktails or drinks you should be ordering from bars if you're on a budget, but you still like have high standards?

Or is there one? Or does it completely just depend? Every bar uses different spirits for the same cocktail. I don't know. It really does depend. For me, I always like a highball. So a highball is whiskey and soda water? Yeah. But isn't that technically a cocktail? That's not considered a cocktail? I wouldn't consider it a cocktail. I'd consider it a mixed drink.

So some people might consider a gin and tonic a cocktail. Maybe because it's, yeah. So what's the difference between a mixed drink and a cocktail? A mixed drink for me is a spirit and a mixer. A cocktail has probably a third ingredient that's put in to flower it up a bit. But everyone's opinion is different, right? So for me, like a twisted highball, so...

Yeah, so we were having these discussions the other day. It's like, how far can you twist a highball before it comes to cocktail? How far can you push it to the edge? How far can you twist a highball? So what that means is kind of like, there's a great highball that's in Soba Company, which is called the Hoji Highball. And the Hoji Highball is basically, it's whiskey...

infused with oolong tea, I think, and then served with soda. So it's an infusion of the whiskey. So obviously the flavor of the whiskey's changed. But technically that'd still be a mixed drink, not a cocktail, right? Yeah, so that's what I call a twisted highball. A highball's still a mixed drink. But then you might chuck in a 5 ml of...

barley sugar or something on top of that, or like a little dash of lemon juice or something else. And then suddenly your cocktail becomes a little bit more, your drink comes a little bit more. Mixed drink graduates to a cocktail. Into a cocktail. So, I mean, yeah, for me, I would classify gin and tonics and I classify cocktails

But then, you know, for example, the Cuba Libre is a, I'd classify it a mixed drink, but it's got lime in it. So kind of like you've got the Cuba, you've got Coke, you've got Coca-Cola, you've got rum, and then they squeeze a lime into it. So, you know, it's a mixed drink. By those definitions, I'm definitely a mixed drink kind of guy. Then I probably only had a very like small handful of cocktails in my life then, if that's the case. Yeah, so, I mean, so going back to your question of bang for buck,

I don't know. I think that, I think, you know, again, for, it's a really hard question to answer. Um, if you want to have a drink that you can sit on for a while and old fashioned is great, depending on whether you like spirit forward drinks. Um, because depending on how much they've stirred the old fashioned, um, if it comes out super strong, you can just let the block of ice melt slowly and you can just enjoy it. And the drink changes. It's a great drink from that perspective.

I'm doing a, this isn't live, so it would have been a good plug if it was, but I'm doing my first guest shift after like nine years of being, or not of being in China, but probably about eight or nine years of not doing any kind of shifts tomorrow at The Odd Couple in Shenzhen, D. You're doing your first shift in nine years?

So you're going to be a bartender mixing drinks behind the bar? I'm going to be a bartender, which I don't classify myself as, but I'm going to be a bartender tomorrow night from 9 until 12 at the Odd Couple.

And The Odd Couple is great because it's kind of like a nostalgic kind of 80s. Have you been there? No, I haven't, but I've heard of it. Yeah, it's great. So it's one of the venues that comes from the SG group, so from Shingo Gokan and the SG group. So those are the guys that have built Speak Low. They're the guys that have built Sober Company. And they're a slightly more high-volume venue, like a more kind of chillaxed and relaxed kind of venue.

Ben Yu is the odd couple, which is kind of built around the 80s. It's got lots of great 80s, early 90s music coming out, and they've got lots of riffs on 80s cocktails. So I'm putting out three different drinks tomorrow night. So I'm doing an old-fashioned. So I'm actually doing one of the first drinks that I made on the list that I consulted on when I came to China in my first job that I came to China 13 years ago. I built a cocktail list, and one of the cocktails was called the Burnt Orange Old Fashioned.

So I've changed it to being called the grilled orange old-fashioned. But the old-fashioned is just a great drink to have in a menu, in a mix, if you want a nice spirity cocktail that's still flavorful and can appeal not just to the dude that wants a strong drink, but also to ladies as well that want a strong drink. Something like that kind of appeals also to those that want something a bit more adventurous on the spirity side.

And then I'm doing a blue Hawaiian. Ooh, blue Hawaiian. Blue Hawaiian is basically a twist on the Pina Colada, which is one of my favorite drinks. But it's blue.

It's a blue. What makes a blue? Blue Cressel. Oh, that sounds good. Yeah. So, I mean, you just put enough. So I'm putting enough blue in it to make it Tiffany blue. Wow. So. The girls are going to like that one. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So I'm going to put that in a small highball. It's not going to be in a hurricane glass. It's a small little highball with a block of ice. And I'm going to. So it's going to be like Tiffany blue. And I'm going to put a coconut cream on the top. Put a bit of toasted coconut on top of that. Boom.

Yeah, it's going to be nice. It's really tasty. I've just been balancing it all week trying to get it right. You know, and again, that comes down to, you know, it doesn't come down to the fact that you need to have the most expensive rum. It's about some of those homemade ingredients that you do. I'm going to make my own coconut cream syrup. So that's basically just taking coconut water, coconut meat, and blending it together and then...

boiling it wait for wait with water i'm sorry boiling it wait for wait with sugar and becomes a cream and then it becomes a it becomes a syrup a creamy kind of syrup because you've still got the uh still got the blended coconut meat in there so it's kind of still it's still nice and coconutty and then um fresh pressed coconut juice which is sorry a pineapple juice which is always great i always have this nostalgic lean back to malibu

I used to drink Malibu back in high school. It reminds me of when I was 12 and one of the first drinks that I ever drank when I was like 12 years old. Same here. Yeah, I was in a resort in Kenya and we had friends that kind of ran the resort, owned the resort. And we like picked straws and I was the one that had to run up to the bar. I might have been even younger than 12, maybe 10. Ran up to the bartender and I was like, hi. Hi.

Can I have a double Malibu on the rocks, please? You're doing the voice and everything. And he was like, what did he say? Don't you think you're a bit young to, like an Africanian guy, don't you think you're a bit young to have Malibu?

And I was like, oh, it's not for me. It's my dad. And I pointed at some random big German guy sitting by the pool. He's like, yeah, that's fine, mate. And then I wrote down the room that I was in. He's like, oh, okay, cool. He let me have it. And I ran away with all these kids sitting behind the hedge. And it looked like the Holy Grail, you know, gleaming Malibu on a rock on rocks.

took it back kind of like literally like it was Indiana Jones taking that head out of that tomb. The crystal skull. Yeah, the crystal skull back and then just all taking sips from it and going, mmm, tasty. So I've got this kind of nostalgic, you know, and that's the whole thing about memory creation within brands. You know, the first ever, I think the first point of memory creation that you want to do as a marketer with brands is,

is what I classify as the virginal memory creation. So that happens obviously only a few times. So it can be happening when that was the first time you drank it because that will sit in your memory. It's like, oh, no, no, no, I remember the first ever vodka that I drank. You'll always remember, I drank this. And within the bartending industry, there'll always be this nostalgic pull sometimes back to the first time that you mixed with something or you drank something.

And then on top of that, obviously creating events based on giving virginal memories to bartenders. So whether you're jumping from an airplane or jumping off a bridge or riding on a horseback or building a fire in the wilderness, the idea for us and what we do as a kind of a brand building agency is to try and give more reasons for bartenders to enjoy life and do it through bartending.

these brands that have helped them to do it and I think that you know you never know what's going to pull them back towards different brands but you like you like to walk away from that activation saying kind of like yeah I took a bartender on a plane for the first time

That's a good one to do. I've done it twice. The two different bartenders taking them on a plane for the first time. Would you like, so they're just mixing drinks on the plane? No, no, just taking them on a plane. Like just a bartender that's never been on a plane before. And you're sitting next to him and, you know, being in the airport and him going, boss, I've never been on a plane before.

And you're like, dude, thank you so much. He's like, why are you thanking me? He's like, well, you're giving me the chance to... They're just giving him a new life experience. You're giving me the chance to see how you're going to react on a plane. And you see them take off. They're like, oh, I'm weightless. And they've never flown before in their life. So trying to... The good thing about China is that there's still a very large amount of bartenders that haven't experienced stuff yet.

You know, whereas the rest of the world is spoiled. You know, the West is spoiled because there's so many bartenders have traveled the world and they've done on their, they've backpacked around here and they've bartended here and there, and they've had the chance to speak to so many different nationalities, so many different types of people. But, you know, the bartenders here haven't been that lucky and they haven't been able to, you know, visas or money or other bits and pieces. They haven't had the chance to kind of get out and about.

So our job was to try and if we can't take them there, let's bring it to them. So what was the industry like when you first got here? Well, I came in 2007, January, and I came to open three bars at a venue in Shintindi called The Collection.

Um, and that was to be a Japanese restaurant downstairs with Japanese drinks. And then upstairs was to be like, you know, it wouldn't happen so much now, but it's kind of, it was to be a slightly more female oriented bar simply because there was so many bars with so many kind of Western cowboys who are hunting after ladies. We decided to, um, well, my, my bosses decided to conceptualize a bar that was to be built for the female audience.

So I built a cocktail list based on desserts. I built a dessert cocktail list, which I'd kind of done a little bit in Australia before. So we built all kinds of sweet drinks and highly garnished drinks and a lot of them low ABV drinks back in that day. And then we had another bar on the side of that was called, so that was called Sugar. And we had another bar called Cube.

And Cube was more black and mirrored and it was more based around kind of more masculine drinks. So it was kind of like martinis and old fashions, sidecars, more classics. Yeah. So what got me into where I kind of got was that I taught all of these, my bar team, all these young bartenders that had no idea that bartending was so cool. I gave them a reason to carry on bartending.

I taught them about what the old-fashioned was, and I kind of tried to tell them the story of the old-fashioned and show them how easy it is just to take a spirit, some bitters, some sugar, and some ice, and turn it into a cool drink, and stick an orange zest and an orange peel on the top. And then they kind of looked at that drink, and they're like, whoa, shit, you did that with bitters and spirit? And it's not magic, it's just...

They just didn't know about it. Yeah. So the moment that you open that door... You spark that interest. You spark that interest. Like, you see that interest. And I was like, shit, fuck. Ten bartenders who are kind of like quite interested in what they're doing now, you know? Well, it sounds like it's the difference between... Then we decided to do the magazine.

Then we decided to do the magazine. Well, before we get to the magazine, it really sounds like you kind of shifted their perspective on bartending, whereas before they only saw it as a job. Oh, fuck. Like, I'm just here to serve drinks. Like, that's my role. I'm just a server of drinks. Because there wasn't any real cocktail bars at that time. There wasn't many at all. There was a couple. There was a handful. But most of the bars in China back then were kind of these MOT, what you call modern entree clubs, bottle clubs with a...

the fireworks are going off and, and then yeah, they'd be the generic, you know, flaming Lamborghinis or the cosmopolitans or maybe some mojitos or long Island iced teas going out, but they wouldn't have been made directly always for the guests. They generally be a ticket coming out, a bartender taking the ticket, him taking the SOP of what he's been told to build that drink, stick it on a tray. And then the waiter takes it to the table. They would have, there was no idea that,

that a bartender was it's like being a line cook you know you're just you're just there to construct the thing in in like a mat on a mass scale really like mass production and just put it out so like it went from just i'm just a server of drinks and this is just a job to opening up their eyes to be like whoa this is like an art yeah so that's the next step was kind of like saying this is what you can do with drinks if you actually spend a bit of time and love and effort in you know

researching first of all about the classics getting to understand and learn the classics once you've got an understanding of the base of what a classic is and and those those basic those basic tools um through what you know different classic families are and all the rest of that in cocktails then you can start going well what happens in an old fashion if i take out the bourbon and i put in rum it's still an old fashion you just twisted it into into a different drink so what we had we had a

burnt orange old-fashioned which was Bacardiate rum. So we did a Jameson old-fashioned as well, which is an Irish old-fashioned. We didn't, I don't think we even did a bourbon old-fashioned. So the idea of our cocktail program was to also to train the consumers coming in who know some might have known some of those classic drinks to see it done in a different way. Yeah. Well, I can tell like, I can tell just by watching you talk, especially before when you're talking about like designing a drink and

you know, coming up with a drink and how it's made. You can really tell in your eyes, like you really have a passion for it. And it really, it gets, it seems like it gets really gets your creative juices flowing. I love it. I love it. I don't, I don't do something. I don't, I don't do the same shit every day. No. Which is great. It's great to kind of go to work and do something different every day. So how do you balance that? Like, how do you balance like the passion for the craft and artistic side of it with like,

it having to be a business at the end of the day. It's fucking difficult, man. Yeah. Putting yourself down to ground. I had a business, I have a business partner, but he left a couple of years ago to go back to England for family reasons. But kind of, um, he was always the guy that I was always the kite in the sky and he was always the guy holding onto the string. But that's, I think, I think with any business venture, you kind of need that balance, right? You can't, you can't both be like dreamers and like be flying high. Right.

Yeah. I have one has to kind of control the other. It has to be kind of like a yin and a yang to it, I guess. Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And, um, I think that, you know, so the one thing that I've had to, you know, learn and realize over the last, over the last few years is, is to be more of a realist, I guess, um,

And I have people around me that have been able to kind of, you know, that I trust and have been able to help guide me sometimes to come back down to ground and to think about, you know, more of a mature way or more of a, I'm not going to say professional way, but more of a mature way to think about things and kind of like COVID's been...

been something as well that's kind of like you know over the last uh seven eight months that's kind of really really kind of pulls you back down to ground yeah well and makes you realize fuck you know shit you know when we when we depend on marketing budgets from different brands and we haven't done a live event since uh drink awards last year you start to think about how you can innovate and how you can and do stuff and and and and trying to be a bit more thrifty and and and also trying to

try and keep positive at the same time. And then at the same time, when we are, when, when, when drink is a platform, we've also been trying to put out as much content that keeps people positive and pushes people in, in, in the industry and in, in a direction that's helpful. How do you put out content now? Is it all digital online? All digital. Yeah. So we were, we were, we were, we had content coming out and we chat pretty much almost since the beginning.

And then when we stopped the magazine, we just put out more content and we just put out a different array of stuff and we can always do more, but it kind of just comes down to the amount of people you have on the team. And, and, uh, but I think that we're, we're quite happy. We've just, uh, we've just been, we were nominated in the top 10 publications in the world, digital publications in the world for the spirited spirited awards, which is entails the cocktail, which is one of the biggest, uh,

kind of award shows for the drinks industry in the world. And then, um, and then a couple of weeks ago we got, we got from the top 10 to the top four, which is fucking wicked. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's great. Congrats, man. Thanks, man. Um, yeah, it's really good. It's still, it took a while to hit. So, you know, my team, both the China team and, and, and Holly in Hong Kong who runs the international on, on all the online stories going out, she's been, um,

Her and Alicia and Elle have been very busy kind of like putting out great content that can be useful. And specifically Holly on the international side has just been, you know, finding great international stories as well as

my team here have been putting out stories from China onto the online platform. What kind of stories, what kind of stories you guys put out? Well, we would have, we would have done kind of like, um, you know, what's been happening in, in Wuhan, uh, with a couple of different bar owners in Wuhan. We did a story kind of based on that. Uh, we did a story kind of, uh, on, on the, the different things that you should be doing when disinfecting your bar, um, and keeping high, you know, all the different,

Things to think about as a hygienic venue moving forwards. We did a story about bottled cocktails and what bartenders can do, what bars can do potentially to try and create a different revenue stream on the side when there's no one coming into your bar. So bottled cocktails. So that means you can distribute like...

At retail? Like, what is bottled cocktails? Well, a lot of the time what they were doing with the bottled cocktail was, for example...

Epic did it quite well, and Union Trading Company did it. Hope and Sesame in Guangzhou did it. Scandal in Beijing did it. Quite a few different bars around the country have done it during that time. And what they did was they basically just bottled up their most popular drinks, and they put it out on their WeChats to their different customer bases, and customers would order the drinks, and sometimes they'd send it via courier. Sometimes even the bartenders would just be on shift because they had nothing better to do to...

and you'd find the bartender just going to the local area and here's his his fault that's cool so adapting to like a delivery yeah business yeah and it's quite interesting because china was the first kind of country to be hit we got a lot of you know i got a lot of questions from around the world from even some of the top bars around the world like oh have you dealt with the situation in china and we kind of like so some of these stories that we put out were put out really quite early

before the pandemic really hit some of those bigger places. So I think kind of like us, the nod that we've got to get into the top four might have been just because my team has put out some really good content that helps people to navigate, helped the industry to navigate a little bit the fucked up situation that we've been dealt. That's really cool. Like, what do you think...

What do you think are going to be like the long-term impacts and changes of COVID on the drink industry here or worldwide? Or do you think it's just going to kind of bounce back to normal? I don't think it'll ever be normal again. I think that there'll always be a certain amount of a worry that it could come back at any time, potentially. I think that this has been so serious that the whole industry has seen how something of this...

size can affect our business. So I think the one thing that it's probably done is, is it's, it's trained managers and owners to be more thrifty, I guess, to, to think about where the money is being spent and how the money is being spent. I think, uh, from an innovative perspective, bars have kind of like slightly, they've a lot of bars have turned into cafes during the day. Um,

Yeah, I think that, you know, you've seen places innovate, you know, so whether the bottled cocktail serves coming out from the bars at the same time. So I think that, yeah, I think, you know, from a saving money, from a hygiene perspective, I guess, at the same time, you know, maybe.

You mentioned in our earlier conversation before, you mentioned something about robotic bartenders or something like that. Does that have anything to do with it? You were talking about automated bartenders or something like that. That was nothing to do with COVID. For a lot of time, I think that a lot of Chinese people across the country have looked at cocktails as maybe just...

It's a Western thing. It's a Western trend. We don't need to necessarily dive in there and see it. I prefer to, if I'm going to drink a Western spirit, I might drink whiskey. But again, you've got to remember that only probably around 2% of consumption is happening through Western spirits. What is it? Most of it is Baijiu, Huangjiu? No, no, no, Western spirits. So most of the consumption, the 98% of consumption will be through Baijiu, Huangjiu.

And then wine, wine is big now, right? Well, the locals are all drinking wine. Yeah. I mean, yeah, to an extent, the wine, wine is probably, wine is massive. But in terms of spirits, 2% will be, biggest one will be cognac, which is about 2.1, 2.2 million cases. And then under that, you'll have whiskey. And then under that, you'll have your light spirits. So you'll have your

You'll have your gin, which will probably be next, or vodka, gin, rum, tequila. So cocktails is all the way at the end of the list, at the bottom of the list. So that volume, that 2% volume, most of that volume is bottles in clubs and in karaoke joints, whether it's Family KTV or the other one.

Most of that volume is going out through bottles. So cocktails sit at the other end of that spectrum in a tiny, tiny, tiny little position. Is it growing though? Yes, 100%. It's probably the fastest growing category with how everything works. It's going to be a tough road, right? Because it seems to me like cocktails, it's also...

Like we were talking about this earlier, you were talking about like, you know, the whole experience is more than just the juice that's inside the cup, right? It's the cocktails. To me, it's about the ambiance. It's about going out. It's about socializing, right? That's traditionally, that's what it is when you go out, you have a cocktail. Yeah. No one, I feel like cocktails are not something you usually drink anywhere else, but like at a lounge or a bar, right? But I think maybe that idea needs to change and it needs to be accepted just like,

All the other drinks they are, because right now in China, well, at least, you know, I don't go out too often now, but when I used to go out karaoke, it was even clubs. It was especially the Chinese clubs. It was about, you know, black label and green tea, you know, black label, green tea. And then if, if they don't drink that, then, you know, they just drink beer. Right. And really that's it. Right. And then some places by Joe, of course, depending on still to this day. Yeah. So there's like, those are the three options.

When you're hanging out with locals. Very rarely is it ever anything else. So the point I was making before about this robotic arm thing was simply, we had a few bartenders that said, the idea of a robotic arm is taking away the bartender. And it's not really. The fact is that the premise of that specific business was built around trying to put these gimmicky robotic arms into malls.

So that when people walk past, they see this robotic arm kind of mixing a drink. And it was just to be a gimmick. And it's, you know, another reason for people to go, oh, what's that? Oh, that's interesting. Oh, they're putting different spirits and flavors together to make something, you know? So, you know, even the idea of Haiti and all of these different kind of like night are kind of places, um,

who have just been blending flavors and all the rest of it. You start to see Haiti starting to put alcohol inside some of their drinks. Oh, are they? Yeah, yeah. So you start to see that happening. So there's so many different avenues to which they're modernizing businesses, whether it's the non-alcoholic becoming alcoholic or the alcoholic becoming lower ABV.

or non-alcoholic. So talking about the idea of certain bars that might be turning into cafes or lower ABV establishments. And just to clarify for listeners, when you say ABV, that's the alcohol content, right? Yeah, alcohol by volume. So yeah, so there's a trend. So the whole one-hong trend that we've got, obviously, kind of with everything. I was going to say, like social media, in your quest to kind of

like the cocktail market here and industry here, like social media is one of your biggest allies, right? Because when there's a fancy drink being mixed and it looks pretty and has flowers and all these crazy things. You want to take photos of it. Dude,

the girls are taking thousands of pictures of it. Yeah. And in many cases, that's what they're like. The whole purpose of going to the bar really is just to take pictures. They take one or two sips and they're done with it. So that's exactly, exactly what we were talking about the other day. The idea is that they'll, they'll find a good looking place. It's got good lighting that might have colorful walls or other bits and pieces where they can then take a picture with this great garnished up drink. Um,

And most of the time they don't like drinking alcohol too much. So they'll take a couple of sips and they'll put it down. They've done their job. And, you know, in terms of they've, they've taken those pictures and then they'll, then they'll leave. Now, the fact is, is that if you can just omit the alcohol or take the alcohol down, they'll finish the fucking drink.

you know so you know as i said before drinking does not have to be about getting drunk it just needs to be about enjoying the experience and if we can get more people to enjoy the experience by lowering the abv of drinks down to you know four five six seven uh percent um so they don't kind of have one and leave dizzy um you're gonna widen the market 100 widen the market the drinks i'm making tomorrow

And I'll let you know how it went. Well, hopefully you can come. So like one of them, as I said, is the grilled orange old fashioned. Another one is the blue Hawaiian. So as I said, it's kind of like a Tiffany blue drink with a white cream top with some kind of like toasted coconut on the top of that. It sounds delicious, but it also looks fucking cool. I love girly drinks. I'm going to admit that right now. I love girly drinks. And then the last drink that I've got is a twist of a classic 80s drink, which was the screaming orgasm.

So the screaming orgasm was vodka, Kahlua, sorry, vodka, well, Kahlua, another coffee liqueur, Amaretto, Bailey's or an Irish cream liqueur or something like that, cream and milk. It's a heart attack in a cup, right? But...

The point is, is that that would be shaken up and served on the rocks in a hurricane glass or something like that. And that was called the screaming orgasm. It's like drinking a cake. It's like drinking a cake, exactly. So what I've done is I've done a clarified version of that. So I've basically made a milk punch out of it.

So you'll put all of those. So you'll put the creamed elements together. So you'll put, so in this instance, I've taken oat milk because, you know, people see oat milk and, oh, it's healthy. Take cream. So that kind of contradicts that. And then I've taken, in this instance, I've taken an African cream liqueur, like a marula kind of thing in the place of Bailey's. And those three creamed elements, you heat up until a small simmer.

And then all the other elements, so the vodka, the coffee liqueur, the amaretto, and then also lemon juice. So you add lemon juice into it. So you chill those for an hour or something like that. So once it's simmered, then you pour the simmered milk into the alcoholic mix that's in the fridge. And then the mixture of the acid and the lemon juice will basically...

be the same as curdling milk, which enables you to make cheese. So when you pour the hot milk into the cold, and then also the action of the acid will basically bind all the proteins together and it will create basically a curd in a way. So then what you do is you take that mix and then you leave that. So it'll coagulate more the more you leave it in the fridge. Then you leave it in the fridge for a couple of hours. And then you pour that mixture through a cheesecloth.

through a cheesecloth. And then all the creamy opaque elements of cream will be left behind in the cheesecloth. And then a clear liquid will come through on the other side. So you're preparing, it'll look like a martini. Yeah. Yeah. I'm preparing it all tomorrow. So, um, tomorrow afternoon, I've already done a few batches. So, um, the, the, the first version is called the screaming orgasm. I'm calling this the real orgasm. And I'm, and I'm, and I'm, my garnish is a clipped, it's a clipped, uh,

um uh sex wipe a clipped sex wipe like a like a like a hand wipe yeah but use it's like an std sex wipe it's gonna be sticking out of the glass no no it's just clipped on the side of the glass like you're a lemon peel so sitting on a nick and nora glass it's a it's a great looking um slightly um uh yellowish drink um and then you drink it and it's got all this you've got the creaminess you've got the flavor of the cream liqueur but you don't have any of the cream there

So it's kind of like, yeah, it's, so it's a very, it's, it'll have all the flavors of what a screaming orgasm was. It's almost like a dairy free dairy product, right? It's a dairy, it's almost like a martini version of the screaming orgasm. Wow. So it's, then it's served straight up in a Nicanora glass.

which is a beautiful small little glass. And then just because it's the real orgasm, you basically stick a sex wipe on the side of it. Wow, that sounds awesome. Hope you liked it. Yeah, but see, like, exactly. Like, hearing you talk about these drinks and explain them, like, you can tell you really have a passion for it, you know? With, you know, and you're talking about, like, before, like, you know, especially with the girls, the ladies, they, you were talking about, like, just bringing the alcohol volume down, the ABV down. Yeah.

Perrier. You're plugging Perrier now on the show. But you're talking about like bringing like the alcohol content down and, you know, maybe they'll drink it. Do you think it's just a matter of the drinks are like are typically too stiff for a lot of the ladies here so they don't drink it? Or do you think it's more of the stigma that alcohol and drinking carries culturally here?

where, you know, a lot of girls, you know, obviously you have a lot of girls that drink a ton here, but then, you know, a lot of locals, they don't really drink because there is some sort of stigma to drinking too much. I think that will definitely play into it. But I think, as you'll know, at the same time, I've got a lot of Asian friends that get the Asian glow. You know, they generally have an allergic reaction to drinking too much. They turn like bright red immediately. Yeah.

And, um, you find that generally you'll have that stigma for sure. But I think that that stigma will vanish over time. But I think that simply it's just a physical reaction in the sense that they, you know, people just don't want to drink as much as they did in the old days. That's it finished. They just don't want to drink as much as they did. So, um,

Do you think the lifestyle is becoming more healthy here? Is this more the health conscious kind of thing? 100%. So even for what we've been doing, we've been trying to promote wellness and a healthy, balanced lifestyle as well through our platform. So we've recently released a platform called Drink Well. And the idea of Drink Well is a wellness-based group on WeChat, which is growing slowly. But it's simply about putting out

to our group of industry professionals based around four pillars of drink well. So drink well means, it means drink well, first of all. It means eat well. It means train well and rest well. So we say that the industry, with the amount that they drink and the amount that they work and how late that they work, you guys need to really have a balanced lifestyle. So we're trying to kind of promote that a bit. So drink,

What we'll be doing, and that's part of the reason why I'm also trying to take breaks and drinking, is because we have to practice what we preach, in a way. Yeah, so that's one of the reasons why you're on a detox yourself right now. I'm on a detox, but I'm also going to the gym four or five, six times a week. I'm eating, trying to eat healthily, not just for my own health, but also...

to kind of lead by example a little bit. Was it to like kind of show people like the drink industry doesn't necessarily have to contradict living a healthy lifestyle? Yeah. So like, you know, I've had questions. So for example, my, my PT who works with us with drink world, Jay, he's a great PT, but because he's not just teaching you how to, how to physically look and feel better, but also he's,

you know, you are what you eat. So he's, you know, nutritionally looking at the amount of calories you should be taking to ensure that you're in a deficit. Just making sure that it's not about fasting. It's just about eating well. So he's been working with us. He will be working with us on a bit more content. He's also going to be heading up a few free classes that we will be offering up to anyone in the industry. So we did one a couple of Mondays ago at the middle house.

So we're looking on supporting partners, maybe hotel partners that might support by giving us some space. And then sometimes brands might come in and say, look, we'd like to host one of those sessions. But we say to the brand, look, you just have to be ready to know that this is for everyone in the industry. So if you're, for example, if you're Bacardi Rum and you're hosting this, the Havana Club Rum brand ambassador can come to it.

you know, there's no such thing as competition when it comes, when it comes to being healthy and, and all the rest of it. So we're just trying to kind of lead, especially within this year that everyone's been kind of like sitting at home playing Mario Bross and stuff and, and whatever, um, at home. I don't know why I said Mario Bross, but you know, um, shows my age. Um, but I think it's really important to do that. So, and then the other day Jay was, we were in the gym and Jay was like, um,

He was like, dude, I just don't understand why you're not losing weight. And I was like, well, maybe it's the knob of butter that I put into my egg in the morning. You're eating butter? He's like, and then, but I do, I do love butter, but I'm trying to stay away from it now, but...

But he said he kind of came out and he was like all manipulative and shit. And he was just like, hey, dude, OK, so you're the one that's built this drink well platform. Right. And I'm working with you on this drink well platform. And I really think it's important for you as you're hosting this platform to be an example for others.

and, and he was saying it kind of in quite a serious, but very manipulative way. And I was like, you manipulative son of a bitch. I'm already trying to, I was like, I'm already trying to kind of post out good food and, and, and post up whenever in the gym. But it was like, I was like, good move, man. There's a good move. Okay. I'll stop eating butter. Um,

But, you know, kind of it's all, you know, life is all about having the right people around you, I think, at the end of the day. And as you said before, kind of like you just like in the context of this room and what you do, you enjoy having good conversations with people and finding people to come in to have a good conversation. You're not going out so much, but you bring the good conversations in, which I love, which I think is great. So, yeah.

Yeah, I think that what we can do to live better and live well is to choose the times that we're going out and that when we do go out, we're going to, you know, you can enjoy yourself more. You can, you know, don't drink for the whole week, but then go out. And I'm not saying go out and then suddenly have 15 shots of something and then have, you know, five pina coladas. Like binge drink. And binge drink.

But the idea is to go and just, you know, choose well and enjoy. So I think people are willing to pay a bit more to have that great drink and, you know, to have a good experience. So I don't know whether that will...

I think the good thing about it in China is that, you know, we're not at a saturated point of consumption here for this Western spirit industry. No, not at all. We're sitting at a point now that, you know, the volumes are still quite high across the board for all the categories. But there's still a hell of a lot more people to convert, to convert. So I think that if we, even if we can be, you know, telling people to drink less, but drink better, but we can pull more people into the fold and,

to enjoy the direction that we're taking this pastime and to do it with great people and to do it in great places that really care about what they do. I think the world will be a better place, at least from a drinks perspective. Well, I think what you're doing is beautiful. I think the message you have, especially with the Drink Well kind of campaign, I guess, is beautiful. And it's going to take a lot of work to kind of

educate people about what it is exactly you're trying to do. It's not just, oh, come on, drink more because we're trying to get you drunk. No, you're trying to be more mindful about the whole industry itself and what a drink can mean. If you go out and you're mindful about having a drink to kind of bring people together and socialize and live the balanced life. But at the same time,

live a very healthy lifestyle in terms of being active and eating healthy, all that, you can live a very balanced life. It's not like you have to cut something out completely out of your lifestyle, right? Whether it be drinks or other things. And I think it's incredibly important what you're doing with the drink well in terms of, it really started with trying to get people

you know, it was really geared towards people in the industry. It's not just general consumers. It's people in the industry that are working in an industry, even the F&B industry, you know, oftentimes, traditionally, they live very unhealthy lifestyles. And I know this from firsthand experience back in LA. I was a line cook for several years. And, you know,

that's when I gained my most weight. I was like literally obese, obese was those years that I was working as a line cook because it was incredibly, like the hours, number one, were just like awful, right? But that's par for the course in the industry.

But the lifestyle and even after work when you get off, like the partying they do, especially with these chefs and cooks, they're just crazy. They're literally crazy people. So the entire lifestyle and you're constantly eating the whole time because you're constantly tasting food in the restaurants. But then afterwards, you're going to other restaurants and other establishments that you know and they know you. Just testing the competition here. Yeah.

but it's incredibly, and I gained so much weight where I was almost unrecognizable. That was the heaviest I've ever been in my life. And so I know from her firsthand experience that like the, the lifestyle, you know, was very, was very, um, was very toxic and it was very, very incredibly unhealthy, but it doesn't have to be like that. Right. It doesn't have to be like that. And so I think kind of like the initiatives and like kind of message you're putting out there is very necessary. Yeah.

Yeah. Especially for people in the industry. Yeah. Because they're, they're the ones taking the brunt of it. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. It's, it's just a, you know, and it's the same across everything. I think not just that, not just even that industry, I think even kind of like being on wall street or, you know, in, in that kind of high stressed environment at the same time, you know, people want to fucking, they just want to let off steam.

And I think, you know, one of the hardest working industries is definitely the hospitality industry where, you know, I was told in the very beginning when I first started getting into hotels, I was like, well, be prepared to work the most hours and have the least pain. And just if you love it, you should go and do it. So things like, you know, we built the Chivas Masters for about six years, which was a great cocktail competition with Chivas, which was the first big competition that we were given the chance to run.

and the idea behind it was, was choosing the best invite, only the best bartenders in China. And where we're putting the idea of the Chinese bartender in the same level as the Western bartender to explain that a little bit, like in the past, you always had, um, the Western bartenders that came over and they were always the teachers and then the youngsters beneath them who are being taught, um,

They were, yeah, they were the youngsters being taught. But a lot of the time, sometimes you'd see these cocktail competitions being had between different brands and you suddenly see these Western bartenders in there and these young bartenders in there and the young bartenders don't have a fucking chance.

So half the time I'd say to the guys running these competitions, or if I'm running the competition, I'd say, look, sorry, no Westerners involved. No Westerners allowed. This is a competition not to show off these guys that have come here to show off. It's to really build these guys. Those guys are on their backpacking trip around the world and they've done all those experiences and they've had all those opportunities. Of course, they're going to win. You know? They want to encourage. We want to encourage the youngsters to get up. So there was a lot of cocktail competitions that kind of didn't involve Westerners.

Western guys into those competitions simply because we wanted to give the opportunity to the youngsters to build and work their way up. And then Chivas Masters, we basically said, look, we're choosing the best of the Chinese guys and the best of the foreign guys. And we're saying that you're on exactly the same level and you need to fight it out in this friendly kind of competition where you have to take Chivas to a different level and you have to entertain the judges.

And that competition part was great, but then it was just about how you built up to that competition. So we held a poker game

the night before the competition where we have these 10 guys or 12 guys or girls around the poker table all with chips and we give some of them a crash course and people that knew how to play would coach the others. For the first half an hour, we'd have some Chivas 18 or Chivas 25 sitting on the table and then they'd all be there and Craig, the brand ambassador, would be there as the croupier and then we'd play two hours and you'd start with the same amount of money. And these are all the bartenders that are going to compete? All the bartenders competing.

And it was kind of like they'd all sit around this poker table and they play for two hours. And the person that had the most money at the end of the game was the winner. And then they would be able to, we had a row of hooks and they would have a little token with a ring on it. And then once we've won, we'd have a bit of a ritual where you say, okay, congratulations for winning. There's 10 different positions on that board and you can choose where you want to come tomorrow, where you want to go in the competition.

So then they go up to the board and then they choose, do I want to be first? Do I want to go first? Or do I want to be last? Because a lot of the time before that, a lot of the selection process is like, here's a hat and here's 10 names, pick a hat. But the fact is, is that when you're in the memory creation business, you want to

create as many opportunities for memory as possible. So, you know, this is an example of that. The selection process could be just fucking archery, you know, firing arrows at Trump's head. You know, whoever can hit the nose, you know, goes first. But it's memorable. That's smart. That's creative. And then at the end of that is that what happened after that is that you'd have many bartenders around the country goes, fuck, I want to be in the Shivers Masters. Oh, fuck, I want to be at that poker table, man. Mm-hmm.

You know, they weren't even thinking about the competition next. They just wanted to be at that poker table. And, you know, so kind of like my point is, is that kind of the stuff that can be done by different brands is incredibly powerful as long as you're doing it in the right way. And you can go both ways. If a competition is done really badly at a high budget competition,

And lots of consumers see it and they see these, all these crappy bartenders. I'm sorry to say crappy bartenders, but people who aren't prepared necessarily making bad drinks and then they make the industry look bad. It's going to be like, there's going to be a couple of thousand people that go, Oh, I don't want to try cocktails. Yeah. Yeah. And then the bartenders at the same time, because they weren't given a great time, they'll be like, why don't I bartend?

So there's incredible responsibility behind the activational stuff that's done for the industry because those bartenders are still on the fence.

We're still trying to get them to fall in love. It's like a first impression, not only for the bartenders, but for the consumers. It's a first impression for everybody. For everyone. First impression for everyone. Wow. So that's got to be really stressful then because the stakes are really high for these events and these activations, like you're saying then. Yeah. So all the awards you guys do, is that like right now in China, is that like the gold standard right now of awards in the drink industry here? I think so. Yeah. It's probably one of the only ones, I think. Yeah.

Mean by by the amount of people that view through the chaos and the streaming The amount of media that we have coming, you know in terms of the media the size of the size of the investment made into the awards and the number of people at the awards It's probably the largest bar awards in the world. I'm sure oh wow. Yeah. Yeah, so the spirited Awards is the most respected I think 50 best is also very expected respected, but it's not going across a massive amount of categories and

But the one at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans was always like classified as the highest echelon of the industry. And obviously that's just because it's in New Orleans. It's in one of the fucking capitals of the world of cocktails. And it started as a massive American awards and then it slowly branched more out into international awards. And that's what I wanted to do for Shanghai is that we built...

And it's only ever going to be in Shanghai. We work with the Jing An Shangri-La. We do it in the ballroom there that can house all the different people. And we slowly want to put Shanghai on the map as being one of the cocktail capitals of Asia. And if not in the future, in the world. And to say that this is where the Drink Awards happen. This is the Oscar of the industry.

of the industry. And then the reason why we're then pumping it out to the consumer market is so that consumers can see bartenders in the best fucking light possible. They can see them suited and booted. They can say, oh, fucking hell, you know. So this is what it's all about. Okay. Cool, man. Yeah. Shit. I think I said to you the other day, you know, there's this common conception of a, well, not conception, maybe it's a reality of a bartender, but, you know, when I've done a couple of different

Masterclasses in the past, I'll be like, have any of you been with a girlfriend and your girlfriend has told her parents about what her boyfriend does? And the girl goes up to her dad and her dad says, so who's your boyfriend? And she says, oh, he's a bartender. And he goes...

What? Yeah, that doesn't apply here. You know, I told you, doctor, accountant, lawyer, you know, what I want it to be is you're like, so what does your boyfriend do? Oh, he's a bartender.

that's great. Oh, when are you going to bring them over? You know, kind of thing, you know, I don't think I'll ever be, Oh, that's great. But it'll be, it can be somewhere in between though. So my point, but my point is, is that I'm a, I'm quite positive, but kind of like the point is, is that at the end of the day, that what I want, I want the word bartender to be synonymous with the idea of a prosperous small business. The fact is at the end of the day, as I said before, um,

Bartending before was always like a line cook job. It was a guy that took a ticket, made a drink, sent it out to the table. And what's happened over the last 10 to 12 years is slowly but surely with a few key kind of benchmarks, examples, people like Kinsan from Constellation Group, who is one of the first shining lights that basically

showed bartenders that you can have a 27 square meter or a 35 square meter place that fits 25 people in it and you can make drinks and you can make a small business out of it. The Constellation Bars have done an incredible job. And then through partnerships, so through the partnership with Shinji So Group and it went up to number two, number three, number four, number five, all the way up to like 10 or 11, to which it is now. The fact is, is that what he showed people

um bartenders and what a few other you know bartenders since that who've kind of like taken that jump into the deep end and gone off and turned their parents watermelon shop in Jiangxi province into a six-seat bar and they've turned it into a small business um it's just the beginning of people going the same what are you seeing now with coffee the amount of coffee shops it's now it's becoming like Seoul

You know, like, like, you know, the amount of coffee that's drunk and consumed and the amount of coffee shops you see scattered across Seoul. In the olden days, like 10, 12 years ago, you would use the only coffee shops that you would see were Starbucks. Yeah. So what you're going to see happening is you're going to see a lot of these bartenders that are trained in these big cities and that will leave and they'll go back to their hometowns and they're going to open these small bars.

And they're going to be spreading the cocktail love and the whiskey love. And, you know, a lot of, you know, whiskey's really driven a lot of these small bars to the consumers. So I'm really looking forward to the time that that can happen more, more and more. How much longer, you think? Oh, yeah. Decades. Decades? Yeah.

Process, right? It's a process. It's a very big process. It's the same process in terms of, you know, decade. What I mean by decades is that, you know, in the sense of Baijiu as a national spirit, Baijiu still has a stupendous volume. It's just an amazingly massive volume. But a lot of that volume is drunk by the elderly. Yeah. You know, whether you're 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years old, they're still having lunch.

with half a highball of fucking baiji. They drink it like water. 53% are going, yeah, sitting in front of you. And they drink it like water. But what you do start to see now is you see some of these baiji companies, I'm not going to say worrying, but you see these companies going, shit, we've got this burgeoning millennial culture of people that really don't want to drink spirity spirits. And all we have is 53% baiji. And it's really expensive. Yeah.

So, you know, first of all, they won't like the taste. Secondly, they won't like the price. We have to do something different. So you see, whether it's Jiang Shou Bai, whether you see Wu Liang Ye, whether you see Lu Zhao, maybe Mao Tai a little bit internationally, but starting to make movements to create a lower ABV product.

So you start to see 38%, 40% baijiu is being created, which is what Zhang Xiaobai are doing, which is what Lu Jialaojiao are doing. And then you start to see them, you know, so then you start to see them starting to partner with other venues that can potentially turn their baijiu, like cocktail venues, that might be able to turn their baijiu into something flavorful and tasty to which a millennial person might go, hmm.

Interesting. Has anyone done that successfully yet? Because Baijiu has such a strong taste to it. What is it? Sanyo. Sanyo. So Sanyo is a bar that's been built by the Hope and Sesame team. So Hope and Sesame, which is, I think, number 34 or number 36 on the Asia Best list in Guangzhou. They're a great team of people. And they have built this bar

Baijiu forward Haiti-esque style kind of cafe bar in this kind of very cool, I can't remember the name of it, this very cool kind of old school Cantonese mall opposite the Mandarin Oriental in Guangzhou. And you go in and it kind of introduces Baijiu in a different way to consumers. And you're drinking Baijiu drinks that don't taste of Baijiu, really.

So they're managing to find specific drinks to make baijiu more applicable to the palate. And that is something I think that's incredibly valuable to the future of the baijiu business. At the same time, you see the way, you see the direction that like soju has gone in Korea. Soju. Soju has gone in Korea in the sense that you have now a heap of, you know, soju in the very beginning was also sitting at 50, 60%.

Then over the years, it's dropped in percentage down to the point that it's now like 13 or 15% alcohol. Well, I see it in cocktail bars now all the time. Yeah. Yeah, on the menu. And then now recently in the last couple of years, they started putting out the flavored soju. Yeah. So they can get out to that millennial kind of set as well. Dapting with the times. Dapting to the younger consumer. Same as with flavored gins in England as well.

Yeah, there's a bunch of flavored gins now. Heaps of flavored gins. Pink gin coming out. And all kinds of different gins coming out. It's like grapefruit gin now. Because they want to be applicable to a different set of consumers. So yeah, it's interesting. So I think that I'm really interested to see how the industry changes over the next couple of decades. How the millennials react to the way that Baijiu might change. But then also at the same time, how...

how the Western spirit sector will increase. And it will increase. And it's just a waiting game. I'm playing the waiting game the same as all the spirits companies are. So what do you think, what are the biggest hurdles in your way or the biggest challenges right now in your industry? I think from the consumer side, it's probably culture. I think it's just, you know, the way that,

The way that most people do it is absolutely fine. Why do we need this? Why do we need this extra thing? So there's a point of aspiration that needs to come in to the reason why you should be drinking these types of spirits or these types of drinks. They need to feel as though it's important to do it for a specific reason. I think in terms of what's in our way for our own industry, I think service...

I think service does need to, it's not about, it's not about improving service. Service is always improving, as I said before, but I think at the same time, I think it's the level of confidence, which, which bartenders, which you see bartenders have in the West, um, is a different level of confidence than you see here. You know, the upselling ability, the, the entertainment that's put through the different bartenders to the clientele in different countries around the place. Um,

you see as rife, right? You know, kind of, that's why the whole, the bar industry in America is driven by tips and a tipping culture. Cause you know, the, the more outgoing they are, the more, more tips they can get. No, it's not, we don't obviously have that drive here, but, um,

Well, they're almost like performers, right? It's like when you're tip based, it's like, okay, I have to put on a show. Yeah. Right. I need to perform somewhere. Yeah. They're actors, performers. And many times they are actually aspiring actors. Especially in LA. But they're performers and the more they do it, the more tips they can get. But here it's not a tipping system.

And I think what you said before, culturally also, Chinese people are not as outgoing in terms of showing off. - Showing off is actually more negative than it is positive sometimes.

But a lot of it also has to do with Hollywood, I guess. Like we grew up with like the movie Cocktail with like Tom Cruise, right? And you see it all the time in movies, Coyote Ugly, right? These girls, like, and then you get the idea like, oh, okay, these bartenders, well, they're cool, but they're also really...

They're the performers. You really got to put on a show, whether you're juggling things or dancing on a bar. I've had this dream for a long time to build a drama based around bartenders and that can be put out on the mainstream. And it's almost projecting the idea of what bartenders can be 20 years into the future to consumers to say, these guys are actors, these guys are...

ambassadors of social society. They can walk a red carpet and look fucking cool. They can hold a conversation. They can chat up a girl and then realize her husband's next door and then manage to turn it around. You're such a lucky guy. So is that the confidence you're talking about? That you really want the bartenders here to have? That's the thing. And confidence comes with being sure about yourself. And being sure about yourself comes through loving what you do.

And I think that when you love what you do, you'll defend what you can do. And when you can defend what you can do, yeah, anything is possible. You know, so kind of like... That you're non-apologetic about it and you're just going to do whatever. No, and you're almost arrogant about it. I mean, and the idea of the bartender, you've seen the film Cocktail, you know? You know, they're cocky, arrogant bartenders.

And the best, you know, the best bartenders are those that can manage the arrogance and be nice people, but also manage to walk that tightrope of being a bit cheeky. Arrogant enough where you're likable, but not too arrogant where you turn people off, right? 100%. Arrogant enough where you're actually interesting. Yeah. So for me, I used to look at the way that what Kung Fu did for, sorry, what, what,

People like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Bruce Lee did for the kung fu industry.

You know, you have these massive Kung Fu schools around China, especially in the north of China, which I think is where Jet Li went. But kind of like, you know, a lot of those kids, if you interview, I've seen documentaries, a lot of these kids, you interview them and it's like, what do you want to be when you're older? I want to be Jet Li. I want to be the movie star. I'm becoming, I'm doing Kung Fu so I can be the best. I can get into those movies. So I think that what I want to do from the other angle is I wanted to kind of build a drama so that I can put certain amazing bartenders on a pedestal.

So the young kids can go, I want to be a bartender. I'm going to practice bartending so I can be a bartender. And then I'm going to build it in that route. And, you know, I'm an entertaining kind of guy. I want to grow up as a, I want to practice my entertainment on consumers in my bar every night.

You got to find your star. That's what you're saying, right? Someone to like really represent the industry for you. Yeah. And we have a few of those. We have a few of those guys that, you know, I don't know whether they can be those actors, but they are definitely those shining lights, um, in the industry that kind of like that you, you see young bartenders, see them in a masterclass or something. And they're like, Oh, who are these? Oh, you got people like Eddie young who I'm bartending with tomorrow on Thursday night. Um,

who came from, he worked in the bar industry in England for six years and came back. He's from Shenyang. He was the brand ambassador for Drink Magazine for almost three, around three years. So he's kind of like shot into stardom within the industry. And then on top of that, obviously he's worked incredibly hard working with different brands and doing masterclasses and doing videos and all kinds of other bits and pieces across the country.

to the point that he is classified as a legend within the industry. You've got Kinsan from Constellation Group, who's obviously very, very well known. He's done a lot of teaching around the country, especially with Diageo, and doing a lot of online courses and stuff like that. You've got Ouyang from Guangzhou, built the Monin syrup brand for Diageo,

13 14 years um and is also he used to be a flair bartender and uh and and he'd done he'd won championships for flair bartending and it's kind of like he's kind of taken that realm of flair all the way through to then classic bartending and high garnishing of drinks and he's just a consummate lovely guy he doesn't have an arrogant bone in his body he's just a lovely beautiful person

You've got Cross Yu from Epic, who's won almost every competition there was because he's just a natural entertainer. As soon as he's in front of a camera, in front of a crowd, he'll dance, he'll sing. And you see that driven through the whole team that he has at Epic. And these are all local Chinese bartenders? Yeah.

Yes, all local Chinese bartenders. You've got people like Lu Yao from Union Training Company who came from Houston over here and worked first of all in Alchemist and then went on to open his own place, which is Union Training Company. And he's shown freestyle to a different degree now.

With people like, you know, freestyle bartenders like Cross Yao. What's freestyle bartending? Well, so you have kind of specifically two different types of bartending. So you've got here, so you've got your more classic, which is more Japanese-led bartending, which is very technique-driven. It's less chatty. It's more suited and booted. You've got more of this kind of, it's more based around the three-piece shaker than the two-piece tin-on-tin shaker.

Um, you've got a lot of the, you know, I'm doing a gesture of stirring in a glass in a specific way. Um, Western bartenders will still stir like that, but kind of, there's a much more kind of highbrow way to which Japanese bartending has, has, has, has come into China and incredibly important part of the journey of where bartending has come from because the way that Japanese teaching is

Or the way the Japanese technique is driven. It's given a really interesting base of training for these bartenders to understand and to know whether it's chipping an ice ball, whether it's doing a specific shake or specific stir, whether it's a specific gesture or a specific posture to which you should stand. It's quite a tunnel visioned and straight up way to which you can be trained.

which I think works very well for the Chinese bartender. They're used to, whether it's schooling or whether it's this, like, I'm going to abide by these rules. It's quite strict. Then you have the more freestyle way, which is where bartenders might have had a teacher that wasn't giving them the Japanese style of teaching. So they might have had an English teacher or an American or an Australian teacher

that is basically showing them much more freestyle route, which is much more chatty. It's much more kind of like... Just use a little bit of this and a dash of that and there's no measuring. No, no. So they'll still be measuring. That's something that really is in the modern bartender a lot of the time, unless you're an employees-only bartender where they still measure, but they'd measure by eye with a pouring spout.

But there's just two different types. And one is, as I said, one's more highbrow and one's more suited and booted. The other one is more kind of casual in the way that it's done. But the good thing is, is that the first one to come was more of the Japanese style or the classical English style approach of the way that bartending was done. And then the Western style came in and it just, it kind of like showed the whole industry that,

It's okay. You don't have to be like this. You can be like this and still be great, you know, or you can mix up the two. You can still, you can still be suited and booted and have some cool technique, but you can still be a chatty, chatty, chappy. And that's what Shingo Gokan is as a, as the founder of, is that this guy on the cover? Yeah, the guy on the cover of, of SG group has kind of done, he's kind of taken, he

He still has a beautiful technical Japanese style, but he brings a little bit more of the cool to school of the Japanese. He's a cool dude. Yeah, he is a cool dude. Quite dapper. So all the guys that sit under him within the SG group are all like very happy to have fun and to do shots with the bartender, to do shots with the guests or just, you know,

talk with them and converse with them and have a good time, but also kind of when they're working, they still have this amazing style of bartending. So you're seeing kind of, that's almost like a hybrid style and it's the future of Japanese bartending is being done through places like SG club in Tokyo and through other places. Um, whether, whether you're looking at trench tram triad, um, Bellwood, uh, other places in, in Tokyo as well, which are really pushing a slightly more relaxed way of doing something. Well, um,

Okay, I get it. I think the difference back with like the freestyle and more like, I guess, Japanese system of bartending was like, I can like, I guess...

draw an analogy to like horseback riding. I don't know if you know anything about horseback riding, but there's like the English style of horseback riding, which is like very prim and proper, right? It's a lot of form. And then there's the Western style, which you see in the Westerns, cowboys riding. Exactly. Right. I think maybe there's an analogy there. I don't know, but that's what first came to mind with me. Yeah. Let me ask you something though. Do, because this is something I always wanted to know, do bartenders in general, I know it's an individual thing, but the bartenders in general, from your experience, do,

Do they like it when the customer asks them to take a shot with them? Or is it annoying for them because they have to work?

You know, like some customers like, Hey, take a shot for me. Like they'll buy an extra shot just for the bartender to take. I think that, yeah, for sure. The bartender will do it. I think, you know, I think the idea of the great bartender is the, is the guy that is able to do that. But is it annoying for them to do it or is it, I can't tell you because I'm not a, I'm not a bartender from that perspective and I've not been put in that position before. Um,

And when I'm doing it on Thursday night, yes, for sure I'm going to be doing it with everyone because I don't do that all the time. But I think that sometimes they've got their tricks. They might have the bartender bottle. They might say, I'll have a shot. I'll have a shot, but I don't drink bourbon, but I'll drink this. Do they do that? Is there like a bottle that's just like water? Sometimes. Sometimes they might do it. Is it just watered down or is it just straight up water? You've got to remember that bartenders, generally bartenders can drink a heap of

So, you know, they can be having shots with guests and they will do that. And they won't, you know, there are tricks to which they do water down bottles or even just have water and say it's vodka or something like this. But, you know, I think that most of them will basically just do it. So if, you know, you never know how they're feeling on a specific night. But I think that at the same time, I think they're getting the confidence in order to be able to say no.

And just say, look, you know, I'm really sorry I'm not drinking tonight. I'm driving home. Or coming up with an excuse. That's the... The idea of a great bartender is also a salesman. Someone that can, you know... Navigate. Sell you a used handkerchief. You know, like... So...

is to navigate those conversations and navigate them well. You know, you can't just, you can have 50 people sitting at the front of a bar and everyone wants to talk to you because you're the man to talk to if you're the bar owner or the head bartender. So like a president, you have to work a line and give them a few lines and go, oh, so great to see you. One second. So I'll be right back in a second. And then you just got to work that line. So I think that it's just, it's the gift of the gab a lot of the time for these guys and girls. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, look, Theo, I had a great time. I don't want to take up any more of your time than I already did. But thanks for being on the show, man. No worries, man. I hope what comes out is okay. No, trust me, it's going to be fine. We can do this again next time, too. But I think your industry is really interesting because...

There's definitely, you know, anyone that's living here and has their finger on the pulse, especially here in Shanghai, or even in general in China knows that the drink industry is something that's quickly evolving. It's growing exponentially.

And it seems like the future is very bright, but it's very unknown in terms of what exactly is it going to be? How is it actually going to evolve here? We know there are some big changes coming, but no one really knows exactly what it's going to look like 10 years from now. And for you guys to be kind of like on the forefront of that and organizing and creating the culture...

is um you mean not even with just with drinks but in in any field when you can be in that kind of position is is a truly special gift yeah no it's um i'm very lucky that i came as early as i did and um i think that if anyone had come here that early then they would have had the chance to be able to to be a part of this journey so yeah no it's been great i i love what i do and um

And I love the people in our industry. And I really think that the Chinese bar industry can be honestly one of the best ever industries in the world, not because of how amazing their drinks are, but because of how close knit they are as a family. And we're seeing that even more so now than ever.

than ever before kind of like with the amount of guest bartenders that are traveling from bar to bar and the amount of sharing that's happening it's a really great place to be it's really becoming a community yeah very much so that's great and I love what you said you know minutes earlier it was just like

You have to love what you do to be confident in what you do. Right. Confidence comes from a passion for what you do. And that's beautiful. That's very well said. And that applies to almost everything. Yeah. If you love what you do, you'll have an innate confidence to do it because you'll have a desire to defend what you do. Right. Yeah. And that's really well said. Thanks. Thanks, Leo. No worries, man. All right, brother. Take care. Later, guys. Bye, guys. Bye. Bye.

Bye.