Episode 89 - The Pacific Alone with author Dave Shively

President Scott L Wyatt and Steve Meredith are joined by Dave Shively to discuss his book The Pacific Alone, the second installment in the Summer Book Club series. They discuss Ed Gillet's journey across the Pacific Ocean and Shively’s process for gathering all the details and writing this book.

Full Transcript

Steve Meredith: Hi again everyone, and welcome to Solutions for Higher Education, a podcast featuring Scott L Wyatt, the president of Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. I'm your host, Steve Meredith, and I'm joined in-studio today, as always, by President Wyatt. Scott, how are you?

Scott Wyatt: Terrific, thanks.

Meredith: It's good to see you again. And this is always an exciting time of year for us because we get to take our foot off the gas a little bit and do some lighter reading, although I wouldn't necessarily say…this particular book today is full of adventure and drama and all sorts of things. I wouldn't necessarily call it lighter, but we get to take our minds away from academic concerns and we hopefully expand them and enlighten them by listening to others' stories.

Wyatt: At least for this hour. [Laughs]

Meredith: That's right, for this hour. So, anyway, we are joined today by an author, the author of the book that we're going to discuss. Why don't you introduce him and our book?

Wyatt: So, we're thrilled to have Dave Shively with us today and he's the author of The Pacific Alone which, in fact, was the 2019 National Outdoor Book Award winner for outdoor literature. Dave, thanks for joining us.

Dave Shively: Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me, guys.

Wyatt: And you're joining us from your home in…

Shively: I am in San Clemente, California.

Wyatt: San Clemente.

Meredith: A beautiful place

Shively: Yeah, kind of the halfway point between L.A. and San Diego under the end of the L.A. sprawl, and then it backs up against the Camp Pendleton Marine Base.

Meredith: Sure.

Shively: Right on the ocean. So, it's kind of a surf haven. Lower Trestles is here, kind of the key point break of point breaks in the United States. So, there's a lot of surf culture and a lot of bike riding and it's a good place to be. I moved out here because it's home to a magazine group, the flagship of  which is SURFER Magazine and a bunch of other magazine titles that brought me out here from my home in Colorado about 12 years ago.

Wyatt: Well, you're a little closer to the ocean than we are here in Utah. [All laugh]

Meredith: A few hours.

Wyatt: Well, you've been writing for a lot of magazines that I've read for years and years, and then took on this book. I think that you're the Executive Editor for Men's Journal, and that's a fun magazine to read.

Meredith: It is.

Shively: Yeah, for years I worked as the managing editor of Canoe and Kayak and we launched an SUP Magazine and a Kayak Fishing Magazine out here in the fun world of corporate media. Titles have kind of been gobbled up in…now, they've been integrated into Men's Journal as the largest brand in our portfolio. So, working away through the pandemic in San Clemente here.

Wyatt: This book, The Pacific Alone, is published by Falcon. I got it on my Kindle, but it's available on Amazon and everywhere else, and I have to say as we begin that this is such an amazing book. So, I'm the canoer, but not really a kayaker, but mostly a backpacker and hiker, but I just loved reading this story about Ed Gillet's solo kayak journey across the Pacific from California, Monterey, to Hawaii. And as we were talking about our books for this summer, this is our second book, we thought, "What better book would there be to read during this COVID-19 summer than the ultimate social distancing book?"

Meredith: Right.

Wyatt: And I think you actually mentioned somewhere in your book that a point along the way is about the furthest you can get from land in any direction…continents.

Shively: Yeah, about the most remote place you can be on the planet.

Wyatt: And if you call for help, there's not a whole lot of people sitting there waiting to jump in and help you out. Well, let's start this out. The book is about…you wrote this about Ed Gillet.

Meredith: I think it's Gillet, right?

Wyatt: Gillet, sorry.

Shively: Gillet, yeah.

Wyatt: Yeah, Ed Gillet. Well, so you wrote this book about Ed Gillet, who did the first and only successful kayak solo trip from Monterey, California to Hawaii. One of the interesting things about this book was several references in it that he didn't want to talk about this story. Tell us about how you got to know him and his willingness to open up to you?

Shively: Yeah, so in 1987 Ed did the kind of never before, never since crossing 2500+ miles over 64 days from California to Hawaii, and he did it without the aid of GPS, no satellite phone, no navigation aside from a compass and a sextant. So, he didn't have any sort of inbound or really toward the end of the book, outbound communications systems. So, he arrived in August in 1987 in Maui to no fanfare. You know, no one knows he's going to arrive, washes up on the beach, and by the time he is able to contact his family and is greeted, it becomes sort of a thing. And the only reason he's able to fly back to the mainland is an invitation from The Tonight Show. So, he lands himself with spot-on instant fame. At the time, Johnny Carson was the one and only show that America was tuned into, so, kind of increases his cachet to instant celebrity, comes back to San Diego where he was running a kayak job with his wife at the time and all of the sudden, everybody knows who he is, is asking him questions and sort of peppering him and asking him…just, I don't know, inappropriate things about this what he saw as more of an internal solo quest. He did this journey completely out of pocket, no sponsors, no media fanfare. He really internalized the voyage as the test itself that really did test his limits. He wrote a will to his wife because he thought he was going to die when he ended up running out of food along the way. So, it was this really intrinsic, important thing to him that when he was just questioned causally about it, calloused him and he kind of turned away from it and people ended up coming to his shop and he didn't' even tell them it was him who did the trip and year after year, he didn't publish anything about it, he didn't write about it, he stopped granting interviews. So, in the kayak community, he became this sort of living legend. The feat that no one had really heard about. And then in the process of reported, fast forwarding 25 years, when I was working at Canoe and Kayak, I started covering a handful of these attempts in late 2012-2013 to replicate his trip. No one had…no one before, no one has since paddled to Hawaii. So, there was a handful of guys that were trying to replicate his trip in a standard sea kayak, and in the process of recording them, three in a row had pretty spectacular failures on day one of launching their trips. And reporting and finding out more about these guys who were trying to get a lot of media fanfare, were trying to get a lot of sponsorship dollars and they all got turned around on the first day and had State Coast Guard rescues involved, I started thinking to myself, "Are these guys really the story? Or is the story this guy Ed Gillet, who 25 years ago did this with…went way further using way less?" So, I called Ed up and we had a conversation that sort of lit the fire for what sustained me through this book project for the next five years.

Wyatt: Yeah, when you say…these others that you write about, a lot of them had special built kayaks and Ed just picked one off the shelf.

Shively: Yeah, essentially. He did some basic modifications to it, strengthening it, putting in a stronger rudder, but the boat he used was essentially a tandem seat kayak that was a stock boat. There was no sealed capsule for him to sleep in, he shimmied down inside of the kayak to sleep at night and was just exposed to the elements. So, it's just pretty mind blowing what he was able to go through every day. Just a huge amount of discomfort. Just from getting his body covered in sores and at the time, he was taking a medication that he thought would help with seasickness that really contributed to anxiety attacks as well. So, he was really against it in a lot of ways.

Wyatt: You write in your book a number of things, and one is, is that after this was all over with, he eventually became a…well, he started out as an academic, he was headed to get a doctorate in philosophy and ends up teaching AP courses at a high school. But, when students come up and ask him about it, he just tells them to go look at the YouTube clip from the Johnny Carson show.

Shively: Yeah, he just kind of points them there and doesn't necessarily use it to promote himself or build himself up in any way.

Wyatt: I know a lot of people that do amazing things that can't stop talking about it. [All laugh] They're so…they just love talking about it and relishing in the glory of having accomplished something. Maybe all of us do that a little bit, but he seems to have shunned that. And I…

Shively: Yeah, that's part of the appeal, honestly.

Wyatt: Yeah, it really is, isn't it? He wrote…this is what you wrote, "The challenge is too close, the vision quest too spiritual, these thoughts must stay a secret. To talk about this would be a betrayal." Kind of a betrayal, I guess, to his purpose. Is that…he didn't do it to make money, he did it…

Shively: Yeah, exactly, it was a test of self.

Wyatt: That's really cool, actually.

Shively: Yeah, I think 25 years later I happened to call him up and he was sitting around at a hospital, his wife was undergoing cancer treatment, and he kind of had some time to kill and enough years had passed and I think he realized that I got why he was doing it, you know, the reasons he was doing it, and as a paddler, he could kind of relate to me. He didn't need to sort of catch me up to speed on all of the underlying reasons why, so we could just sort of get more into the details. And that conversation just sparked so much interest in a lot of ways about how he conceptualized the trip. You don't have to be a paddler to understand or appreciate what he was doing. In fact, it helped to be more of a mountaineer or a rock climber to understand how he conceptualized this trip, because before Ed got into sea kayaking, sea kayaking really wasn't even a…you couldn't buy boats, it wasn't really part of the outdoor experience, whereas rock climbing, people going to Yosemite and Camp 4 were kind of…it was what was exploding at the time. And he would do trips up there and learn to do big, multi-pitch routes and he was going down to these escarpments to do these big, overnight multi-pitch climbs, and that was kind of how he thought about a trip over the Pacific was, "There's only one direction you can go, you just slowly make progress. You get tired, you get something to eat, you sleep in your [inaudible] bivouac at night and then wake up the next day and keep going that one direction up.

Wyatt: I can't remember the exact quote and it's not in front of me, but it's something like, "Paddle, eat, sleep, paddle again" or something like that. Just keep going.

Shively: Yeah.

Wyatt: His start is kind of as a mountain climber, or at least that part of him that was there, mention that this is kind of like the Everest of kayaking. But as I read that, and as a mountain climber myself, but not on the level of anybody worth talking about, this is not like Everest. This is like Everest times 10. Because hundreds of people, thousands of people have been to the top of Everest and you can have some Sherpa put you on a short rope and walk you to the top. But this is him alone., the only one who's ever done this, and the loneliness and the isolation and the worries and the stress and all of the unknowns that are out there, this seems to me to be one of those most incredible outdoor achievements ever.

Shively: Yeah, the way I kind of framed it was that in terms of humans that have used entirely human power to cross the Pacific alone, there…more people have walked on the moon. [All laugh]

Wyatt: That's true.

Shively: So, it is kind of a crazy achievement.

Wyatt: And when he lands as he's coming in, you wrote, "There's no victory, elation, no great catharsis, it's just over."

Shively: Yeah, I think he had just sort of been living so much in the moment that the destination was sort of a foregone conclusion. It wasn't as important as…at that point, he had kind of learned to, I don't know, become sort of one with this floating ecosystem of this boat that he'd completely depleted and he just arrived there, and it's like, at that point, landfall . . . being a terrestrial creature sort of foreign to him.

Wyatt: Can you talk to us about the experience...you spent a lot of time with him and read his journals and his notes, his memoirs, all of these kinds of things, probably the only person that's only read this stuff, he's kept this to himself enough…there's a million points in this story, everybody just has to read this, but at one point—and I can relate to this in a very teeny, teeny, minuscule way because I've never done anything that's even a thousandth of this—but as he's canoeing out, you remember the time that he turns back and as he's turning back, he makes a decision to break his steadfast rule and rethink the decision to turn back. Tell us about that.

Shively: Yeah. I did…we did talk about that a while because that was…he has a lot of guiding principles, especially when he returned from the trip and he basically used this kayak shop in San Diego as a way to be on the road all the time leading these really kind of out-there expeditions all along the Baja peninsula, exposed trips in the Pacific as one guide with groups of six, seven, eight people, and that was always a principle he operated by. If the situation is looking harrowing, you make your choice and you don't ever look back. And in that central choice of the trip is really so important, because that's where he has to do all of the math of you know, "Am I ever going to do this again in my life? I did bring a spare rudder, do I make this choice now?" And so, he ends up rethinking his choice, and then once he continues the trip, he doesn't look back from there. So, he does end up going back.

Wyatt: What's he thinking when he gets his wetsuit on and gets out into the water and fixes his rudder in the middle of a storm? I think I would have just hidden myself in and waited until the storm was over. [All laugh]

Shively: Well, then he'd be pushed even further in and so…that's the whole…that's the craziest part is that, in terms of all of the people who have tried to duplicate it, is that the crux of the trip is immediate. There's so much current that pushes southward and kind of locks you into the orbit of the coast that pushing west past that is what proves impossible for most people. Sailors, rowers, anyone that tries to do the crossing, because you're immediately sort of up against the worst conditions, the coldest water and just basically having to have the misery…all of the worst misery, burning the most calories, using the most food right off the bat.

Wyatt: It's as if the ocean is saying, "Don't go. I'm not going to let you go."

Shively: Mhmm.

Wyatt: It's too dangerous out there, stay home where it's safe. A lot of very difficult trauma and stress, but also some really beautiful moments, like when he's watching this blue phlosourescent… phlosourescent …now I can't say the word, Steve.

Meredith: Phosphorescent.

Wyatt: [Laughs] That and the fish that were coming up to his…his pet.

Meredith: Yeah.

Shively: Yeah, that's sort of the payoff of the high cost that you pay for entry. And those are some the…you bring up the conversations that we had, the way he sort of paints that picture is like he goes right back there, where the whole point of wanting to be interested in this journey is that so few people have been there and seen that. And that kind of hidden perspective of moving at the speed at which you can power yourself under your own power and being on the water in the middle of the ocean is just a perspective that so few people get. You know, this sense on a clear night when there's no moon and the stars above you are reflected completely…there's so much clarity in the water below you that you're sort of suspended in this weird space that is like a 360 degree globe of darkness. The way he just talks about that and putting yourself out there it's like…that's where…that's why he went. You don't get that perspective if you don't kind of push off the beach and go for it.

Wyatt: Well, and the experience was an amazing one and I think it would be amazing for any of us to sit out there. But if a ship dropped us off in those spots and said, "I'll be back in a couple of days" it's not the same experience. It's the price you have to pay to get there that really enlightens the whole thing.

Shively: Yeah.

Wyatt: It's like a friend of mine said, he was flying in an airplane at 30,000 and said to himself, "Hey, I'm at the height of Everest, that's cool." But then he realized he didn't do any work to get there, so it wasn't really that cool. [Laughs]

Shively: Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, anyone can get on a plane and be in Hawaii and be there in six, seven, eight hours.

Wyatt: What do you take of the kind of personality, and you wrote a lot about this in the end of the book, the kind of personality, and I loved your "four r's" Dave. I thought that was awesome. Why don't you tell us about the four r's?

Shively: What do you mean in terms of risk?

Wyatt: Reading, writing, arithmetic, and risk.

Shively: Yeah.

Wyatt: That we should be teaching that, because too many people today…well, let me read this. This speaks to those of us here in Southern Utah because most of us, Steve and I, ancestors of hardy stock pioneers that pushed handcarts or came in wagons or walked across the plains and mountains, but I love this little quote that you put in there. You talk about how it used to be normal to take a wagon trail across the country and how we've come more or less to expect comfort and all of our endeavors to be achieved with minimal effort. We expect comfort and all of our endeavors to be achieved with minimal effort. Yet, here is somebody who could have done the same experience, gone to Hawaii with minimal effort, but chose to take the absolute most difficult path. It feels to me like most people want to take the easiest path.

Shively: Yeah.

Wyatt: Why don't you talk to us a bit about that psychology? You've got a couple of chapters at the end of this book, and what did you learn about that?

Shively: Well, I will tell you that writing a book is not the easiest task. [All laugh] I guess what I took away from it is anything that's truly worth doing, you're going to pay a price. And you have to put the work in, you have to experience discomfort and you have to sort of plod along. Yeah, I don't know. I think my whole takeaway from the whole process of both writing the book and even when I'm out in a situation that is high risk when you're sort of pushing yourself, any destination that's really worth getting to, if that's a huge distance you're mountain biking or a huge distance you're hiking or something, it's not about the goal and thinking about getting the "why," getting to the lake at the end of this trail, whatever it is. It's just the feeling of discomfort and kind of compartmentalizing the moments. I guess the way Ed put it and as it's lasted and stuck with me is this idea of limiting your horizon. You just keep moving forward and if things get bad, take a break. Stop and eat, make camp, and then you get up the next day and you keep moving because you know that you're more capable than you thought you were. And that has just stuck with me from…I did this book as a moonlighting venture, you know, nights and weekends right after I had my daughter and maxed out at work and, "OK, I've got an hour here to work on this." It's the same thing if you're paddling to the middle of the ocean or hiking, it's like you just have to look ahead to the next foreseeable goal and just get there now. And then only in retrospect can you kind of see where you've gone. So, anyway, talking about it with Ed, I don't know if that answers your question about risk, but I think that was what he tried to instill from guiding people on these sea kayak trips that are really sort of out there exposed in the middle of the ocean and pushing people farther than they thought they could, the second act he did in his career teaching students to read about risk and understand that they can make their own goals and push themselves a little further. I don't know how that relates to your personality…

Wyatt: Yeah.

Shively: I think you just have to…I don't know, some people have that ability to get absorbed in what they're doing and not sort of freaked out looking at the bigger picture.

Wyatt: This can be manifested in arts by developing a talent, it can be manifest by writing just something that's really difficult that you don't have to do, but you find a way to push yourself to do it anyway, it can be manifest in these kind of great adventures, but when I look back at our ancestors, this quote that you…what you wrote about, "It used to be normal to take a wagon trail," back in the day, risk was a part of everyday life. My grandfather died in a farming accident that would have never happened today because he wouldn't have been in that situation. A mechanic would have come and fixed the equipment and he wouldn't have been trying to make it work. Back in the day before welfare, before credit cards, before telephones, walking across the plains and getting stranded as you're trying to find a new life…we had stories of people that would start walking when they were pregnant. today, that would be considered some kind of abuse, the thought of, "Why would you take your pregnant wife and go walk 1,000 miles?" It just seems like in order to have the kind of hardship that people used to have, we have to intentionally go out and look for opportunities. And so, the growth that comes from that hardship is something that we have to intentionally find rather than just have it come to us automatically. That's one of the things that I love about this story is somebody who had a comfortable life, could have kept a comfortable life, and chose discomfort in order to gain something that, as he's finishing his trip, says it would be a betrayal to talk about because it's all about what I'm trying to develop inside of me, not about becoming famous or making money. 

Meredith: Dave, as our readers get into this book, one of the themes that I thought was kind of interesting, and it's partly because of what I do for a living, but it was early enough on that there really wasn't GPS and some of the other things that you had suggested, we didn't even really know about El Niño, he was kind of battling that. I'm sure that armed with knowledge and technology that he may have chosen not to go had he known what we would now know today. But, I was curious, he just basically said, "I plan on all things electronic, all things technological to fail." And fail they did. His satellite thing, his shortwave failed, he even ended up losing his kitchen and having to eat raw fish from time to time…I'm curious now since there have been a number of others that have tried this in a much more recent vintage who would have all of the advantages of that. You say they went out and they basically had to turn back in one day. So, the advances in technology didn't make up for what the personal fortitude that Ed had, the strength, the conditioning, what do you…because it just seems like we are armed with so much more knowledge now that somebody should have been able to replicate that. But in fact, not only have they not replicated it, they haven't come close to it.

Shively: Yeah, it is pretty amazing and I think this kind of gets back to the thoughts from before, because actually this August, there was a guy, a Spanish adventure racer and he created this kind of super craft that…I don't know, probably spent well over $150,000 to create, and it was completely wired, has a full connectivity from start to finish, you can tell exactly where he is at any given moment and he's giving live updates to Instagram on the hour, and this Spanish adventurer did the crossing, he had this kind of peanut-shaped hole that allowed him to stand the entire time so it was considered the first standup paddling crossing of the pacific and this Spanish guy did it in 76 days in this super craft. So, in…technically, the crossing has been done again alone, unsupported under human power within the last year, but it just has a sort of…it had a different appeal and a different aesthetic. Because doing the crossing completely exposed without a cabin to crawl in, without electronics is something that just kind of won't happen again just because you can now have connectivity the entire way across the ocean. So, it took 30 years for it to be duplicated in some ways, but in other ways, I don't think there will be another person that can…just to have the amount of experience and hours on the ocean to be able to navigate and take the discomfort, that's something you can't do or buy, or do I should say without great consequence or decades of training and being on the water.

Wyatt: Well, and the space that he had was so tight that he had to pull himself out a little bit to adjust and then slide back in. [Laughs]

Shively: Yeah.

Meredith: Yeah, the description of him trying to get in and out of the boat, and as you suggested, fixing the rudder and all of those…just some astonishing details that you can't…I just can't even imagine being out literally in the most remote place on the planet and have to make those adjustments and repairs.

Wyatt: Dropped his blue bag. [All laugh]

Meredith: Yeah.

Wyatt: "Why wasn't it yellow? Why didn't I get a yellow bag??" [All laugh] Well, what is your favorite thing about the conversations you had with Ed and in writing this book? What would you say is your number one memory?

Shively: Yeah, I would say, you know, we had this initial conversation when he was at the hospital and then he invited me over to his home and I went over there with our videographer and photographer and he kind of unlocked his journal out of this safe in his house and we went out to his back patio and kind of looking westward out to the ocean, and the three of us were just sort of sitting at his feet just soaking in every word as he's retelling this story that had essentially been sort of locked up. And it just felt like it was from a different time, like something out of a Joseph Conrad novel and he's just telling us this straight tale of survival at sea and just hearing about how he thought about it and where his head was at and just sort of how edgy it was was that sort of lightning in a bottle that sustained the book project and my interest in Ed and his willingness to share the story with me.

Wyatt: What do you hope the readers take from this?

Shively: I would think that it's…you know, still that message of being more capable. You're capable of more than you know, I should say, and you might go farther than you thought you could and that sense of getting out…we were talking about our ancestors being on wagon trains and now we're in a society where everything is given to us or can be instantly acquired, dropped at your door the next day, that all…you know, the things that are worth finding out about yourself and the places you can go are worth the pain and worth the effort.

Wyatt: Is your outlook on life different after this experience?

Shively: Yeah, I would think that kind of along those same lines.

Wyatt: Same thing.

Shively: Just in terms of finishing a book and grinding away at a project and just not getting lost in the bigger picture and just moving ahead one step at a time. Something that takes years that looking back, it seems like, "Where did the time go?" But during it you can't get lost in the details. Just moving ahead to the next goal.

Wyatt: Well, it motivated me to do something more epic, but not get in a kayak. I'm not the best swimmer in the world and I get seasick.

Shively: Well that's…I think that's sort of the point, right?

Meredith: That's why you have the boat. Yeah.

Shively: Yeah.

Wyatt: But he got seasick too.

Meredith: Yeah.

Wyatt: I mean, he was throwing up and having a hard time. I can't imagine being in a kayak with the size of waves. What were the largest waves he described? What I'm remembering is at least 20 feet.

Shively: Yeah, 15, 20 foot waves right off the bat just trying to make distances west and south and having a sea anchor trying to keep you from sliding backward are you're trying to rest and consume some calories and not get soaked with every wave that pours into your cockpit.

Wyatt: There has to be a moment where you say, "I'm only six feet tall, these waves are 20 feet tall, and I've got another two months. Can I handle this?" Anyway, it's amazing.

Shively: That's where caffeine comes in.

Wyatt: Well, and his wife at home, Katie. That had to have been enormously stressful.

Shively: Yes, absolutely. That's like a pretty big part of the story, too, is that they had just got married and opened up a shop in San Diego and started a small business. And then he thought this was the only time in his life he could make it happen and suddenly, she's left alone to run the shop and has no way to communicate with her husband aside from a signal she thinks is him in the ocean. So, yeah, it was incredibly stressful. And then, not to give too much away in the book, but when they lose track of where he is, she's the one that becomes the lightning rod for all of his family that's concerned thinking that he's dead or lost at sea and, "Why is our son gone?" As if she had pushed him away. So, she dealt with a huge amount of pressure and stress. But she herself was quite an ocean paddler and athlete and ended up being a national champion rower and her father is an inordinate way…every silver star honor, every kind of decorative…what am I trying to say?

Wyatt: Yeah, a very decorated military veteran.

Shively: Yeah, so she's pretty hardy stock and kind of provides a little bit of balance that's more ideal of going and testing himself, sort of keeping their business and family together. And they're still at sea. I got an email from Ed today saying he and Ed, sorry, pardon me, he and Katie who have retired, sold their house in San Diego and are sailing around the world in retirement are making their way back to California.

Meredith: Good for them, that's great.

Wyatt: That is really great.

Meredith: Yep.

Wyatt: Well, Dave, thanks for spending time with us. Most of our listeners have read the book already. For those that haven't, we hope you do. It's the 2019 National Outdoor Book award winner for outdoor literature. The Pacific Alone by Dave Shively.

Meredith: You've been listening to Solutions for Higher Education, a podcast featuring Scott L Wyatt. We've had as our guest today author Dave Shively. Dave joined us by phone from his home in San Clemente, California. We've been discussing The Pacific Alone and we recommend that if you haven't read the book, go get it and read it. We will be having two more books this summer, please join us for those, and as always, thanks for listening to the podcast. We'll be back again soon, bye bye.