Lucas Krump on Men & Emotions

Lucas Krump is the Co-Founder & CEO of EVRYMAN, an organization launched in 2017 that helps men develop emotional skills and deeper connections. Prior to EVRYMAN, he worked in media and technology, launching international editions of Travel + Leisure and Maxim. The founding of EVRYMAN came after feeling disconnected despite his career success.I met Lucas in Hudson, and was excited to learn more about his story.

All right, well, Lucas, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.

Of course.

I start all of the interviews that I do with the same question, which I borrowed from a Hudson neighbor, Suzanne Snyder. She helps people tell their story. And it's a big, beautiful question, which is why I ask it. And because it's so big, I kind of over explain it the way I'm doing now. So before I ask, I want you to know that you're in absolute control. You can answer or not answer any way that you want to. With the biggest lead up ever, the question is, where do you come from?

I come from Kansas. That's where I was born and raised. And as I've gotten older, it's funny, I was just talking about this. I grew up in Kansas. I went to the University of Kansas very shortly after graduating. I left Kansas. I spent 10 years living and working overseas, Europe, Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia, then found my way back to New York City for 10 years and eventually full time in the Hudson Valley. And so I have traveled around and I've called a lot of places home. And one of the observations that I had in New York City is, there's this idea that after you live in New York City for a period of time, seven or 10 years or maybe more, you're from there, right?

And I always thought that was funny because we don't get to choose where we're from, but the place where we're born and obviously in our very early years as children, as we grow up, the influences of the place we're born make an imprint on who we are. And for me, I'm very proud of the values that were imprinted on me in a place like Kansas in the Midwest. I will say this, I'm not going to live in Kansas ever again, but I will always and forever be from Kansas.

And it's very important to me. And just a bit of a back story. My great great grandparents were homesteaders from during the potato famine. And that's where my grandmother was, and she met my grandfather in Estes Park, and they eventually settled in Kansas. And then my father's side, they were half, part of them were from Sicily, they went to Ellis Island and immigrated and eventually ended up in Kansas. And so there is some history of just my biological roots that have been there for quite some time.

Do you have a memory of, I guess my first question is, what does it mean to be from Kansas? What part of you, what part of Kansas do you carry with you? So you're not going to live there, but you're proud of the values you have. What is it, what do you carry with you that you grew up with?

I think a real sense of humility. As somebody from the Midwest, we don't, we prefer to let our actions do the talking versus us doing the talking, right? So it's a certain level of humility and a quiet sort of stature, if you will.

Do you remember as a kid, what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I remember having a moment in high school. I was very fortunate to go to an all boys Jesuit school in Kansas. And part of the curriculum there was that we would go on these annual religious retreats, but there were they were religious in nature, but they were also just opportunities for us as young men to express ourselves and connect with one another in a deeper way. Something that certainly wouldn't happen in a public school. And I always remember that that was a very comfortable space for me. And I can remember my grandfather was a family doctor for 57 years. And I can remember going in once and saying, "Hey, I think I should be a psychologist." And he said, "No, you shouldn't do that. You won't make any money." And so I went on to have a very different career. But ironically, that initial comfort in that space has sort of led me back to what I do now.

What was a psychologist for you then? Do you remember what you were wishing for? It's interesting.

I thought a psychologist was somebody that - that's an interesting question, because I think in the Midwest, but I would even say 25, 30 years ago, the realm of emotionality was generally confined to a conversation with a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

Right.

And so because I was given the space to be able to speak about my emotions, I just immediately associated that with this sort of professional field.

That's amazing. That's beautiful. So catch us up. Tell me now where you are now and the work that you're doing now.

Well, I've lived many lives and had multiple chapters. I lived and worked overseas for 10 years in this sort of media and publishing world. Then I went to business school at UCLA. After that, I moved to New York City and was in the media and technology space, was with a number of companies. And then eventually was an executive at a Fortune 100 company. Throughout that, I've always been an entrepreneur. I started my first company when I was 12 mowing lawns, which I eventually grew into a thriving enterprise before I sold it and ran for greener pastures, so to say. But when I was 36 years old, I was living and working in New York City. And the technology company that I was working for was acquired by a large technology company.

And prior to that event, I was working very hard to get towards that event because I was following the script that I thought I should be following as a man. My father, my parents divorced when I was quite young and my father passed away. So for the most part, I've sort of guided myself in my career. And so I did all the things that I thought I was supposed to do that ultimately would deliver me a certain level of fulfillment and happiness and all the other things. And when this company was acquired and I benefited from that, the sense of fulfillment that I thought I was going to have by now for the first time, having a bigger bank account than I'd ever had and sort of take that off the box, it didn't work. And so I was pretty upset.

That was when I decided that I needed to figure out what that thing was that was going to bring me a deeper level of purpose, meaning and fulfillment in my life. At the same time, I had a difficult childhood and I sort of moved overseas in order to maybe run away from my childhood. While I was overseas, my grandparents, who were both influential in my life, passed away and my father passed away as well. And all of those things impacted me very deeply, spiritually, mentally, all of those things. And I never really did anything about it. I mean, I did things about it, but I never really explored it on a deeper level.

I just got to this point in my life where I was, "OK, I've got to figure this out." And that was when I went on my own sort of exploration. I called my mom when I had that epiphany. And I said, "Mom," who now lives in Arizona, "I'm coming down to Arizona and I really think I need to go see a therapist." Prior to that, I hadn't really had that much experience with a therapist. I've done a lot of retreats and sort of personal development, self-discovery work in various ways and all those things. But she was, "OK."

And so I flew down to Arizona for a weekend and my mom said, "Oh, I talked to my friend at the gym and she knows a therapist." And so I got you an appointment with him. And so I went and told the guy my situation. And he said, "Hey, no amount of sort of achievement, no amount of money, no amount of adventure is going to give you the fulfillment that you seek. And you're going to have to figure out a way to find a deeper level of purpose and meaning. And you're going to have to grow yourself up. And because you don't have a dad, you're going to have to be your own dad. And oh, by the way, you should probably get a new group of friends that can help you on this path." And so I was, "Oh, s**t. He's right."

And we sort of got there in the first 20 minutes. And he said, "Well, you know, you can leave now because I can't really do anything for you." So I was, "OK." And that was really the start of a deeper personal journey for me. Obviously, I went back to New York City and went back to my corporate job. But shortly after that, we started EVRYMAN and that journey began.

And that sort of leads me to where I am today. That being said, I do lots of other things outside of this work. A pretty active entrepreneur in various projects and initiatives and work one on one with founders and helping them to make sense of what it's like growing an early stage company, having been through that myself. But yeah, that's where I am now.

It's amazing your story. As you were telling that story, I was reminded of, I think probably something I saw on Instagram Reels, but Matt Damon, there's some of him saying that when he and Ben won the Academy Award, he went home and he was just, "Oh, this is it." And he just feels grateful that he had gotten what he wanted. And it was totally unsatisfying and that he learned that early and that changed everything for him.

One of the things that I would say is that the adventure and I think at this stage I've been to 80 plus countries and I've sort of started various types of businesses and went to business school. And then I always wanted to get my name on the door. My last corporate job, I had my name on the door. I had somebody sat outside it and it was, "Wow, I thought that that was what I wanted." And obviously there's compensation that comes along with that.

And I always thought I wanted those things. And now that I sort of achieved those things, I would say I would do a different relationship with them. One thing I see in young men is they always say, "Oh, I want to make a lot of money." It's, "OK, well, how much money do you want to make?" OK, well, I don't know if that's going to make you any happier, but I'm probably not going to be able to tell you any different until you actually get there and realize that for yourself. And that's not to say that certainly money doesn't provide a certain level of freedom and joy. But I am fortunate to have done various things in my life that have given me a perspective.

I'm curious about EVRYMAN and where that came from, how that came to be and sort of what you've learned in that process. It's such a unique proposition in the space. And in all the conversations we have just around masculinity and about men's mental health. I mean, it just seems such a - I'm just very curious to hear your point of view. So where - when did - out of what did EVRYMAN arise and how did it come to be?

It's a great question. Well, 2016, when I was when I had that conversation with my therapist or the therapist, I don't - I didn't ever go back to him. I don't know if he knows how important he has been in my life. But so I was on a personal sort of exploration. I was actually at an event waiting in line to see Esther Perel, who's quite a well-known speaker. And I was in line with a guy. I struck up a conversation with him and he said, "Hey, I'm going to do this retreat and it's going to be in upstate New York." And we were just talking and he was, "Well, you should come to the retreat." And so I came to this retreat in December of 2016.

It was the first time him and his name's Dan Doty and Sasha Lewis. And I came as a participant and I very quickly realized that I was very deeply impacted by the experiences of other men at this retreat.

But very quickly, I realized how I was impacted by the retreat, but I was also very impacted by the impact that the retreat was having on the other participants. Considering the fact that I had already done a significant amount of individual self-exploration and self-discovery through various retreats and just things that I'd done.

And so immediately after that retreat, I said to Dan and Sasha, "I really think that more men need this. So I'd love to figure out a way to collaborate." So they said, "Sure." And we did another retreat and more guys came and we did another retreat and more guys came. Very quickly. That was in 2017.

But I guess there were two important insights that I had. One of the things that I was struggling with at 36 was the work that I was doing at the time didn't feel meaningful, right? It felt very purposeless, I guess. And one of the statements that I had coming out of that retreat the first time was purpose and hustle. I've always been a hustler. It's another word for an entrepreneur.

And I thought, "Wow, if I could use my entrepreneurial ingenuity and resiliency in a more purposeful way, I might find a deeper level of fulfillment in my life." And so that was my personal mission coming out of that first retreat. And so then I thought, well, we could do more of this.

And one of the things that I said early on was that if I think about men and the need for the work that we do, the market is enormous. And so my initial thought was, in order to solve big problems, you actually need the discipline and rigor of a for-profit company, because you have to be able to attract the talent and you have to be able to make the investments and the infrastructure and everything else to be able to make a big impact.

And so I said, "I'd love to work together, but I don't - I'd be very interested to start a social enterprise, but not a non-profit, because I think that this problem is so significant that we need to do something big." And they were on board for that. And then very quickly after that, Me Too happened, and we were kind of in the right place at the right time, because journalists and media were looking for good men that were trying to be better in some way, shape or form. And EVRYMAN was right there.

And I think within the first year we were on Joe Rogan and CNBC and the New York Times. And it just kind of continued to grow from there. And so very quickly, we'd sort of caught the tiger by the tail. And this became a full-time job for me, while also doing my other full-time job, which I eventually left to work on EVRYMAN full-time.

You mentioned there was a moment, an awareness that the problem was so big, so you should go after it in a big way. How do you think about the problem? What is the problem of being a man in America, I guess, right?

It's a great question. Well, I think there's a big problem, and then there's lots of little problems inside that big problem. But if you look at the work of Richard Reeves, who I think does an excellent job of speaking to the problem, men have been sold a box that they're allowed to exist in, which provides a very limited scope of who they really are, right?

We've followed a path of being a provider, and obviously those things have changed in this day and age. And we certainly are equal in our knowledge and expertise, but at the same time, men and women are physically different from one another. But if I think about it, it's interesting, I'm trying to think of ways to not speak to all the little problems and just speak to the big problem.

I think that it is very normal for every man to want to be better in all areas of his life, right? That's kind of what men do. We aspire to improve or be better, right? And one of the biggest areas that we aspire to be better is in our relationships and in our relationships with ourselves. And because if we're not, then we're lonely as men. And we're all mammals, we're hardwired to connect.

And so if we don't know how to develop a relationship with ourselves, if we don't know how to be in relation with others, then we're going to be very lonely and isolated. At the same time, if men are not taught to express their emotionality and their vulnerability - if you think about it, a lot of the education that we receive around our emotionality actually comes from women, right? Our mother or our teachers or other sort of figures in our life because our fathers are generally working, right?

And so the result of that is that men receive a very sort of feminine education around how to express emotionality. And at the same time, we're told not to express our emotionality, right? Well, if we don't know how to express our vulnerability and our emotionality, and if we don't have the tools to be able to do that, and if we don't know how to do that from a very masculine way, we're going to be very isolated. And that is ultimately going to end up leaving us very lonely. So maybe that's an answer.

It's a wonderful answer, and I'm connecting with all of it. I've followed Richard Reeves for a really long time, and the stronger his voice gets, the more powerful it is to see someone making that case in public. There's often this zero-sum assumption that when you talk about men's struggles, you're somehow taking attention and resources away from women's struggles and lack of access. It becomes a complicated, fraught conversation.

But I wanted to share something - my dad once told me a joke, which wasn't characteristic of him. He said, "Do you know what the definition of an a*****e is? Someone who, when you ask them how they're doing, actually tells you."

Exactly.

Isn't that amazing?

But it's so true, right? And so as men, we're sort of conditioned very early on to hide behind these throwaway answers of fine and good. And well, you can imagine that if we're not actually given license, nor we're given the nomenclature to express what's actually going on for ourselves, then how can one ever connect with us on a deeper level?

I will say one thing that one of the coming back to this problem of - that we were sort of looking at and everything is, I've had a struggle with this idea, there's so many articles and things, it's this men's mental health crisis, right? Mental health is the idea of mental health is a diagnosable mental health issue, something chronic depression, personality disorder, other types of very specific mental health disorders, which are diagnosable and treatable, right? But the experience of being a human, the ups and downs, the joys and the sorrows and the depressions and the anxiety that comes with navigating this world that we're supposed to navigate, that is not a mental health disorder.

Yeah.

What we've done is we've said, "Oh, there's a mental health crisis." And any man that feels depressed or has anxiety about what his next job will be, or is stressed at home, because he has mouths to feed, he must have a mental health issue, right? Well, the reality is that no, he is experiencing life.

That is not to say that people don't, men don't have mental health issues. And that's not to say that any man can go and see a therapist or a counselor, if he thinks that that is a necessary vehicle for his health and wellbeing. But when we take such a heavy word, and we blanket statement it around men, the problem with that is you're now telling men that they have a mental health issue.

And the treatment for that is to go see a therapist or a psychologist or a counselor, whatever it may be, which one is very inaccessible, both from a sheer number of therapists and also financially inaccessible for a vast majority of people. And by the way, three out of four therapists are actually women.

Yeah.

So you're now saying, "Hey, this problem that you have that isn't really a problem. But the only way that you can actually go and fix this problem is to go see this person that actually has a lot of stigma associated with it. And it's very expensive. And oh, by the way, they happen to be a woman." So if you don't feel comfortable talking about the issues that you're dealing with as a man, that might not be the solution for you.

And the reality is that I believe fundamentally that as human beings, we actually have the tools and resources and capacity within ourselves to care for each other. Up to a certain level, right? I'm not saying that somebody can care for somebody that has personality disorder, but it's certainly what we do at EVRYMAN, right?

We create space and we provide men with the tools and the resources that allows them to support each other. And through that, they actually feel connected, which alleviates this sense of loneliness. They actually feel purposeful because now that the time that they're investing is for another man, they're being of service. I believe that service is the true wealth in our world. You can have all the money in the world and you can give it away and it will never compare to the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that you have when you're actually of service to another human being, right. With no expectation of return.

I think that men have been told that we have this problem that is sort of questionable. The messaging that comes out around that is generally in some form of a PSA announcement, "Oh, men die by suicide." You don't need to tell a man that men die by suicide. We all, every man knows somebody directly or indirectly that has taken their own life. And quite frankly, they don't need to be reminded of it by wearing a mustache or doing something like that because we don't like that.

One of the first interviews I did was with anthropologist Grant McCracken, one of my heroes. His observation was that it's the responsibility of culture to grow us up - and a culture that does not grow us up is broken. He was talking about the phenomenon of failure to launch, which we keep seeing as a compounding issue.

I'm curious about this, and I love your observation about how the solution is also inaccessible or not fit for purpose. In Richard Reeves' work with the American Institute for Boys and Men, they shared a study of 400 therapists, most of whom described men as "ill-equipped for therapy and not psychologically minded." So there's a therapeutic industry that essentially sees men as bad customers.

Yeah, yeah. They're bad customers.

And so I guess the question is, and maybe this is, what is masculine emotionality? And what do men need to feel fulfilled?

I was interested, I was listening to some commentary around that. And they said men voted, obviously, if you were a Democrat, I guess men voted for their daughters in terms of rights and things like that. And women were voting for their boys in terms of opportunity and sort of upward mobility and the importance of men to be able to have jobs that provide purpose and meaning and allow for them to have dignity in order to provide for their families and themselves, right? And I'm not saying that we're going back to the 1930s.

But one of the things that Richard does talk about is how we've over indexed on girls and women in terms of opportunity at the expense of young men. That it has now created a situation where you have a large population of men that feel very disenfranchised and they're not able to access the thing that they need to do to feel purposeful, fulfilled, that brings them dignity, right.

And I think there's two things that I would want to say about that. One is men and women are physiologically and biologically different, right. We were - it's just true. There are things that women do that I can't do. And there are things that I can do that women can't do, right. Obviously, generally it comes to reproduction, but I think we've gotten away from that simple truth, right.

And really looked at that and "Why is that? Why are we physiologically and biologically different? What are we in this meat suit that we're in, what is it intended to do and how does its intention and what it does actually serve our overall wellbeing?" Right. Men are providers, women are caregivers. They're very good at that. One of the things I saw in the corporate world was when all of a sudden women leaders, many of which I had the good fortune to work for that were very talented, but I always thought it was very unfortunate that now women leaders were having to display very traditionally masculine characteristics. And so it's "Wow, it's another part of the patriarchy."

It's "Well, yeah, you're equal, but you're equal if you act like a man and you sort of ignore the very characteristics that are unique to you as a women that should be actually appreciated and valued." Right.

Do you have any mentors or touchstones that you keep returning to that have been sort of central to what you've learned and what you guys have built in EVRYMAN?

That's a great question. Mentors in terms of individuals or I always think of mentors or touchstones. I think I always returned to - I was just - I always returned to this very simple definition of every man, which is an ordinary or typical human being, right. And what I mean by that is the vast majority of us are ordinary and typical human beings, right?

We live our lives. We have families, hobbies, we have communities that we participate in and I think somewhere along the line, we ignored or we sort of diminished the every man, right. And so I think of Every Man, and I always come back to it as the zeitgeist, EVRYMAN, the organization that every man is, but it really is intended to be the zeitgeist of the every man, "Hey, I just want to belong. I want to be part of something. I want to have the ability to show up at a place where I don't have to be anybody who I'm not."

And I want to feel connected and supported, right. And that's what everybody wants. Right. That's part of our being, that's part of our DNA. And so I always come back to that. People oftentimes, or we actually did a retreat last weekend and CBS was there interviewing me for a piece and they wanted to talk about loneliness.

I don't think we have a loneliness problem. We have a belonging problem because if I belong to something, if I belong to a community or a group, then I don't feel lonely, right. And the reality is that we've had a lot of breakdown in community and groups and the way we gather in the last 30 years, 40 years.

What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you?

The real - we have lots and lots of men that have participated and are part of EVRYMAN. And I love all of them, right. They're all great men. But I, in particular, love just the everyday guys, the guys from Kansas or Nebraska or Louisiana or Pennsylvania. We're at a retreat this last weekend and there was a steel worker from Pennsylvania who was there and had never ever in his life experienced the opportunity for him to be exactly who he was and express who he was and be accepted for his flaws and his ambitions and his weaknesses. And that's what keeps me coming back.

Yes, we get all the guys on the coast and we can talk all day about wellness and all this spirituality and blah, blah, blah. But in some ways that industry has looked down upon everyday people. And what I always say is "Who doesn't want to feel better? Who doesn't want to feel well? Why does the wellness industry have to be so bourgeois, I guess."

I was curious. I was going to ask you about that because I've done, I have clients in sort of the wellness and self-care. I've explored these behaviors and these brands and these products with people numerous times. It's more often than not, I'm talking with women. And then I was curious if you had any insights or what your observations are on what wellness means for men or are there brands out there that you see doing it in a way that feels both contemporary and meaningful? I feel like the brand landscape around masculinity, I don't know. What's your take on how companies try to connect and try to develop for men?

Men don't like to be told or sold anything. They don't like to be told what to do and they don't like to be sold s**t. What I have seen and what I have observed is just tell it like it is, just be honest. I can remember there's these commercials for Procter and Gamble post Me Too, these sort of virtue signaling commercials about men being - it's "Really?" I appreciate the effort, but men see right through that.

Are there brands, do you feel like that sort of represent well, seem to sort of understand how to communicate with men?

That's a great question. None that I could name off the top of my head. I mean, I have the brands that I personally like, but I think at the core of the brands that do very well with men really are authentic, right. Authenticity is at the core of those brands.

What do you make of the election and what that means? I mean, I feel like Trump is nothing if not authentic, and the Dems, the critique is they never really had a vision for men. They weren't really - they don't even have men like Richard Reeves points out, on their platform they don't even really include men in their policies. And everybody's sort of - there's think piece after think piece about what happened. I know Scott Galloway has been very vocal about how the failure to sort of communicate with men is sort of partly responsible. Do you have any thoughts on it?

I think that young men as a demographic, in my opinion, were personally sort of looked down upon or disregarded. I can remember this "White guys or dudes for Kamala Harris" or something. And it's "Oh, well, what more polarizing effort could there be?" Right. "Oh, if I'm not a white guy for Kamala Harris, then I'm a bad guy for Donald Trump." Right. "F**k you."

And I think that again, I think what I've long said, and I'm an independent is Democrats, we have the very privileged opportunity to vote for our ideology, for the virtues that we believe to be the virtues and the values that we think the world and everybody else should espouse to and adopt, right. But the vast majority of people are worried about the price of groceries and gas and how they're going to put food on the table. And if they're going to have a job, that's not going to be taken by somebody else, right. They're not worried about "Is a girl going to now play on my kids, my boys, softball team" or vice versa.

Yeah.

And that's not to say that's not allowed, but young men have been very disenfranchised over the last 15 to 20 years, right. We don't necessarily live in a merit-based society. We've over-indexed on women and other groups. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't have done that, but oftentimes the pendulum will swing far too far in the wrong direction.

Yeah.

I'll never forget the Boy Scouts was allowing girls in the Boy Scouts. I think it now it's called the Scouts. Is it really necessary for us to rip apart the foundation of a hundred year old institution that has actually done incredible things for young men in terms of their ability to feel capable and strong in our world.

It's amazing. I hadn't, I guess I'm trying to, I'm just, you're reminding me of my first encounter with Richard Reeves and just how provocative his data is and how overwhelming the case is. And he makes a beautiful case, but it's such a difficult case to raise, because of the climate, because of the zero sum and it's really pretty amazing. And I'm so, I love his work. I mean, I think he's doing amazing stuff.

But I think you're very right that Richard and I applaud him because at a time when it was that it is, and still remains to be not necessarily in vogue to talk about young men and the plight of the young white man, he's sort of gone out on a limb and said, "No, this is what's happening."

Yeah. And he has the data to show it. I remember with him, he said that coming out of COVID, there was all this data about the impacts of COVID on young boys and young girls in education and the top line, all the news reports were all about the impacts on girls. But he went back into the back of the report and the data on the boys was dramatically worse, but it was not deemed as newsworthy.

Right. Right. Or it was not deemed as acceptable or relevant in our day and age. And again, I fundamentally believe that we need to find a balance, right. We need to have equality. We need to have opportunity, but we also have to recognize that biologically we are fundamentally different and we have different needs, right.

Yeah.

Whoever your creator is, the reality is that we were created different for a reason.

I think we've spent a lot of time already together. I really appreciate you accepting my invitation to talk. And this has been really a lot of fun and it's beautiful stuff. And what you've done in Every Man is really amazing. And we share, we haven't talked about Hudson, we're neighbors, right? I was just actually reminded of conversations I've had about our waterfront. There's a couple of places, the powerboat association is down there. The shacks are down there. There are all these places in a generation, they were places where men would go and hang out, probably misbehave, but they were places where men socialized. And those were also all the toxic places, right? That's where we were dumping stuff into the river and that's where men go and socialize with each other. The one guy, he's a member of the powerboat association. And he said, "You know what we've lost? We've lost," he called it "tavern culture." And he was talking about this kind of male sociability, I guess. And it always stuck with me that in a generation, this waterfront, which was a place where men went to be together was also the place where we dumped all of our industrial, it was just industrial waste. And now we've opened it up and now we want to, we want green open space and we're preserving the nature and it's beautiful and all that stuff. But where did the men go to socialize and where did the men go to that tavern culture?

Well, and Robert Putnam talks about this in his book, "Bowling Alone," about the breakdown of community, the breakdown of the third space or the social club. And it's unfortunate. I think I was - if you go through the cemetery, you can see the Association of Polar Sportsmen. And I love that people gather there, right? And one of the reasons why I love Hudson is for the simple fact that we do have a smaller community that is more analogous to where, to how communities used to be. And that those sort of spaces and institutions still exist.

I mean, it's always funny when you get somebody that comes up from the city and they spend a couple of days here and they say, "Oh, I feel great." And it's "Well, oh yeah, of course, because you're closer to nature. You're not surrounded by concrete and infiltrated every single day by all kinds of madness. It's actually how we're supposed to live our lives." I feel very fortunate to be able to be here. I hope more people get to experience that for themselves.

Nice. Well, we will have a coffee and a stroll sometime soon in town. And thank you so much, Lucas, once again.

Yeah, we shall.

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