Video Chat with Felix Wetzel

Audio (listen by clicking below)

Conversation with Felix Wetzel

Felix is a well-known recruitment thought leader, practitioner, and leader in the U.K. I have known Felix for a long time and respect his thoughtful and analytical thinking about recruitment, talent, work, and the future.

In this video, we roam over a lot of topics – the current state of recruitment, what we see as trends in recruitment, the state of recruitment automation, and much more.

Felix is currently Director of Career Acquisition at Cera. Cera is a technology-enabled care company that has grown rapidly to become one of the largest home care providers in the United Kingdom.

Transcript (Here is a very lightly edited transcript of the interview.)

Kevin

Hi everybody. Kevin here from the future of talent Institute. Today we’re talking with Felix from the UK. Felix, why don’t you tell us about your background and what you do?

Felix
I’m a human being, obviously. I’m always struggling when I have to explain who I am. I’m a people-list, not a populist, which means I’m trying to find solutions that actually make finding jobs interesting, easier and better and more rewarding. I started over 20 years ago with a job board in the UK called Jobsite, which we built from really small to the fourth biggest global player and sold it all. I’ve played with loads of others. I guess that gives you a good indication of my view of work. Played with a lot of HR tech companies and for the last three years. I have been with Pocket Recruiter that is an AI-based matching engine, which also uses process automation to ultimately automate everything between the hiring manager and the candidate and make it a completely seamless journey.

Kevin
That’s very interesting. Now how has that been accepted by the industry? Are people actually trying to completely or largely automate the process or what’s going on?

Felix
COVID played a big role because since COVID actually more companies have opened up toward automation and I believe that it’s because a lot of companies obviously, needed to re-jig things, especially if we’re looking at RPOs or staffing companies. They were looking at their approach and often also on their cost. Imstead of having a thousand sources, we can now run it with a hundred sources if you use technology like Pocket Recruiter. To be honest, the majority of people might talk about end-to-end recruitment, but the majority of companies aren’t trusted and don’t often have the vision of how to build an end-to-end recruitment process. There are some companies now pushing it mainly in the volume recruitment recruiting space, where we’re involved. Obviously, you hear also from other companies, Emerson is a good example, but to hear everywhere where actually people say they don’t need a recruiter involved, the candidate goes through a process and then ends up with the hiring manager, ends up with a shortlist and then does the interview, and it goes into the onboarding.

Generally, we think, well, I personally think that humans are still the biggest, harder to progress into the adoption of AI and automation tools.

Kevin
I agree with you. I’ve been talking about this for several years now and I don’t see a whole lot of adoption. I’m kind of curious as to what are the objections. Why do you think that’s the case? I mean, is it that people just are afraid of it or they don’t trust it as it was going to lose their job? I mean, what’s the motivation for not being more open to it?

Felix
I think there are several, one of them, which I call it middle-management sabotage. I think there are actually the extra recruiters who don’t fear their jobs because what we see, they embrace new technologies, and it was the same with an iOS compared to when social media came along. We needed to suddenly have social media policies whereby the top, or, the people at the top were apps. If they fine with using social media, the people on the ground, just using social media, it was just some people in the middle who needed to control. And that’s exactly the same thing. Again, there’ll be now, have we, there’s a middle management or people with middle management, so mindset, which is all about control and what happens with AI and automation tools you lose this control and you lose, especially also, if you think about recruiting teams, especially in RPOs and stuffing firms, you suddenly lose, your, kingdom of thousands of tens, twenties of recruit of people reporting into you because you don’t need that anymore.

Felix
That’s what I think is one part. The other part, there is a certain amount of, skepticism about AI. What is true? I AI there was, I think there was a lot of muddying of the water. What is AI? What can I do AI do what can’t AI do? How should it be used? there’s obviously a lot of, and rightly so, questions about bias, and how AI helps bias or doesn’t help bias. Again, with COVID that changed again where suddenly people when, especially when they needed to lay off staff or furlough staff or bring them back trusted. For example, somebody like Paul, who could have more in the scoring and in the ranking of who they should follow than actually managing managers, because they thought, well, the manager chooses their buddies. They’re not choosing the best person for the organization. The third thing is obviously it is for a lot of people, also a tricky business and industry of business to combining, integrating different systems.

Felix
If you have an NHS, you need to integrate it often as a TA team, you don’t have the technology, technologists working for you. You need to wait until your it team has capacity until your it team gives you a nod or you need to bring in the cap Geminis and the Accentures of this world. And it costs a lot of money. If you then have to four systems, how do you create the data flow? Who does actually build all of this together? That’s why I think that’s these other reasons.

Kevin

The last one really resonates with me when I say the fragmented nature of most of the solutions. And, there are very few companies that really offer a an end to end integrated suite of solutions that are, that have mentioned, right? So it’s real a juggle term. What do we buy and what do we implement and how do we implement it? Well, that’s,

Felix
And, and we can see, I mean, we see it from a poker recruiter perspective because we integrate with job boards and professional networks and then CMS VMSs ATSs and other point solutions. One of the biggest problem for talent acquisition teams and for companies like us is a, the data flow, but then tying up the different analytics or the different numbers. How many applications did I receive system? Number one says one number system. Number two says a different number system. Number three says a different number and then different. They have different category in a way you would need to have, start and saying, how do I categorize an applicant versus a candidate? And how do I measure it in a how and how do I sync it across all these systems? And that often causes a lot of confusion where people are going and saying, actually poke ruder.

Felix
Why are you telling me something completely different than the ATS? Why is that? And now we’re at kind of definition stages where we need to define it and saying, well, because the applicant tracking system counts, every application, we count one person and so on, you have all sorts of different, fun things. And, and we obviously have an integration team. We have tech teams. I completely understand that when you not in the, in that world and you’re not in the depth, you just look at it and go that doesn’t work at property. Right.

Kevin
I think there’s a lot of fear. I mean, I talked to recruiting leaders and there they go to their it team and the it team has got, we’ll get to you in a year or two from now because we’ve got so many other projects going on that we can’t help you with your integration in the short term. They, the recruiting team doesn’t have its own expertise to do that. There’s legal and bureaucratic hurdles, as you mentioned earlier, middle managers who run interference and, delay or hinder the use of the technology. So, I mean, if somebody really wanted to and had, the freedom to do that, you could integrate pretty quickly and pretty thoroughly.

Felix
Yeah. We normally believe that you can do an ATS integration with polar group within four weeks. Right. That’s, it’s, the delays are not on our side. The delays are often on the capacity, and resources, the client side, understandably. Right. Obviously what you just talked about legal, there’s obviously in Europe, a lot of questions about GDPR. So you need to talk about GDPR. There are questions about bias, how do we overcome bias? And there, and again, these are new fields where people just finding their own ways about it. And, even with GDPR, in a way we would need a law suit that kind of clarifies what it stands for, because not that I want to that on anybody, but because at the moment we have so many different, every client has a different definition.

Kevin
Yeah. It’s really, it’s really a fascinating time to be in the recruiting field. It’s, what’s amazed me is we’ve had technology for, I don’t know, we’ve had reasonably good technology for at least a decade now, and it gets better and better, but we’ve had reasonably good technology starting about 10 years ago, at the adoption curve is incredibly slow. I keep looking for that hockey stick when it will, suddenly accelerate the pandemic, help that no question about that. The, the COVID accelerated what was going on tremendously, but it still hasn’t really been an overwhelming a hockey stick.

Felix
I think it’s also, what you can see, and I think you can see it in any industry. It’s when an industry tries to innovate itself, it’s very difficult. You, in a way you need to have outsiders coming in, who will look at recruiting. I don’t know, look at it from a, well, what did Skype do? What did Sam, do you need any way these product people coming in and saying, what can we take from, home deliveries of parcels or food, and how can we put these place into place? Because, we have always, there’s always this discussion about, can, we should let candidates know where they stand in the application process and it never happens. It’s not a technical problem. The technology is there can be easy to use, but it’s like, people are not going on and wanting to put it in. Whereby if you speak with people who come from a different industry, they say, yeah, that’s just, let’s just tell people where their application is.

Felix
What’s the problem. We do that with everything else in life. I think that’s now what comes to talent acquisition that finally we will see some of those changes coming in, but it’s slower because we’re dealing with people.

Kevin
That brings a great opportunity to segue into your signature. And, I think you’re about to embark on a journey where you’re going to be doing some of this stuff.

Felix
Yes. So, so I’ve, after a lot of consideration, I have decided to actually go onto the other side and not only talk about automation and scaling up recruiting systems, but doing it. I will be joining a, a care provider. It’s a company that provides carers who go into people’s houses and my task will be to run the care acquisition and my specific remit, why they chose me and why they’ve contacted me is because they wanted to have somebody who understands technologies has spelled I was involved in job boards. It’s about building a platform and building the attraction around it to actually bring candidates. And then I’m very excited about it. I’m a bit scared about it, but I thought, it’s too good at Shawn’s to finally put into practice about what I’m talking about.

Kevin
That’s great. I think, did they have some existing, I mean, they must’ve had some recruiting already going on, is that,

Felix
Oh, yes. They’re, they’re already recruiting. I will also inherit a recruiting team of, 20 recruiters and, they will stay in place. There’s already some, an ATS in place, but, it’s all about now they know that from what they want to achieve, they can’t achieve that in the old method of just adding on more people and adding more people, you need to find different ways of doing that, especially because there are not enough registered carers around people who actually already work in care. It means you need to bring people into an industry that have never thought about care. It’s no different than people becoming Uber drivers or deliver route drivers, just becoming careless. That’s in a way who we compare us against. And, I can be lucky that within the company, for example, the product director worked for Shazam, for Skype, for gold to compare the market.

Felix
We had already conversations about how can we take these, some of the principles, some of the approaches that these companies took and take them into, this recruiting part. It will be very much a multi, there will be product people involved. They will be it, people involved there will be marketing people involved and they will be recruiters involved because it’s really important, but I’m not saying let’s get rid of recruiters. It’s really important that they’re involved.

Kevin
Are these the people that you’re recruiting primarily, contract people, gig workers or permanent?

Felix
Both. There are some of them who are permanent on, flexible contracts and there’s others who, so it’s carers, then there’s also people for the branch. I’m, this is what I’m focusing on. We have another team that focuses on head HQ, developers, legal people. My focus at the beginning, it’s just on building this platform, building this brand and in a way, branding, hopefully a category like, Uber brand as an entire category. So it will be good. It will be exciting. Obviously what I’ve noticed, your last article about making simplifying recruitments made therefore quite impression because I read it thinking about carers and I thought actually often, and I have seen these solutions I’ve been involved in also suggested the solutions where you say, okay, you have an programmatic ad buying, then you have a, I dunno, application forms or gated questions. You have like a skills matching engine.

Felix
You put in some assessment automation that it goes to a video, interviewing, and then it goes through the recruiter or the hiring manager. I thought about this and I thought like, it sounds cool, right? If you can go from pop from one technology to the next and to the next, but actually is it necessary? Is it needed? And does it help the candidate? And does it help the recruiter and I, more and more get to the, view point that actually we need to maybe add less pieces into this whole funnel and take people out so that we can, as you wrote, screen people instead of screening people out.

Kevin
Well, I think a minimalist approach is clearly the best way to go. I hope that it’s always better to simplify than to, and we’ve overcomplicated. I think that recruiting process tremendously that put in barriers for when eliminate many good people from opportunities simply for no good reason, really, just because they don’t meet some criteria that isn’t validated in my opinion, or isn’t really, going to differentiate in a performance perspective, anybody that knows who those are, the real key effects.

Felix
Okay. I think also, you, and you can see this with what I believe also COVID has kicked on is that we will have, we always talk about transferable skills, but it should be more about transferable mindsets or attitudes, or however you, it might not be the right word. The most technically correct words, but it’s this, we will see people who need to make this move from one industry or one job into something completely different that they might have never thought about. That’s the only way that we find people employment and also can actually tackle some of the major issues that we have, where we don’t have enough places. We can’t find the people, then we have to bring in the robots. At the beginning, I think, and, HR talked a long time about transferable skills and we’ve seen little about it, but now again, this, we see more and more about it, but now I would, the next stage, I think for me, it’s in certain roles that you don’t need the skills because you get trained and it’s more about, do you have the right mindset for it?

Kevin
I totally agree. I think the whole challenge has been for many companies. They lack the training capability. I think many companies have eliminated it or re almost eliminated the training and development activities, because they’d been looking for experienced people and they assume they don’t need training. There’s been a real shift because of COVID I think toward resurrecting learning and development and building more capability inside many companies than they’ve had before, which is really a good thing.

Felix
That’s what we see with poker recruits as well, where they, that the internal mobility piece is really coming to light. We S polka recruiter, poker recruiter can look in your internal employee pool. It can look into the known candidates in your ATS. It can look into your unknown candidates outside and applicants and find the best ones out of it. We could see a real shift happened from around may onwards, where people said, hold on. The first thing that we want to do is like, who’s who do we already have working for us? Who could do a role? Then we go to the next stage. I really, think that’s, it’s very fascinating. It’s positive, but tricky because it’s not just the technology, it’s a different process, and it will take a while until these programs will come into place and are being adopted if they’re adopted at all, because if the economy picks up again, they might be already forgotten.

Felix
It’s just about, let’s bring an external,

Kevin
I think that’s a real danger. I think that, we’ve had, I think for the last, since the eighties, since the 1980s, believe it or not, there’s been this, it, the lean staffing models, which are, you have very, the minimum number of people to do a job, and you have no extra capability. Somebody is not there, you really are suffering, there’s no buffer where prior to that companies had, I guess what we used to call mid-level manager mid-level employees who were basically trainees and they were learning the job so that when somebody moved on there was almost immediately a ready to go replacement or almost ready to go replacement. That disappeared, companies like IBM, general electric, Unilever, they all had vast training programs for people. They really had internal mobility was named the name of the game and it kind of disappeared, which is really interesting when you look back historically, and there was always some, but it was really at a managerial level.

Kevin
It probably was not at the technical or the, so if you were an HR person and you wanted to move into a different field, let’s say finance or manufacturing or whatever, it was a huge challenge, almost an impossibility to do that because there was no way to get training. There were no apprentice programs. There were no, accelerated training programs that again, companies like IBM and GE had those for years. You could apply, to move from wherever you were into these other fields and then train you.

Felix
Yeah, it’s quite interesting because it’s like, here in the UK, we always talk about the Tory government brought in a decade of austerity where they cut down all of the social service. It just reminded me when you just said it was like an osterity on or lean recruitment, maybe austerity pub equivalent of what we see in the economy, just cutting everything down to the bare minimum. A lot of people would just get lost. Yeah.

Kevin
And, and it was just simply a thing because, maximizing corporate profits was the name of the game. Right. And that was it. And, shareholders were, demanding every quarter that they get a good dividend or increasing stock price. So, it’s a really systemic kind of a thing that maybe COVID has changed or will change. Do you think it will change? Well, I think it’s a up for grabs. It’s a real question. I, I, it could go either way and, I have a feeling that, right now, I think your point earlier, when the economy booms again, will they want to stick with this, or is he just going to be continuing to be easier, especially with a remote workforce to just go find qualified people wherever they are, and rather than take the time and money to train them. We’ve also shifted philosophy kind of where it’s not the company’s responsibility, it’s your responsibility, so you’re responsible for your own develop, Felix, you better, here are some resources.

Kevin
You go, you go figure it out. Where in the old days it was more, patriarchal, I guess you might say, Oh, you want to do this? Okay. You will take the six week training course, or you are going to this three month program, or we’re going to send you back to uni or whatever it was. Right. They were very specific programs that don’t exist anymore. Really. So it’s a real question. I don’t know. Whose responsibility is it? Is it yours? Is it the company? Is it the governments? I don’t think we’ve answered that question either. So,

Felix
No, but I guess it’s interesting whether we, that we say I’m in a world where it’s more and more about recommending in all other spaces. Right. We get more micro-targeted we get more precise recommendation based on our own unique digital footprints. Ultimately then leaving, letting people to just say like, okay, look at your own development instead of kind of having some kind of, recommendation and say he is in a lot of my data and recommend me, what I should do. This is what I would like to do. Because, hopefully we’ll see something like that soon,

Kevin
But, that requires you to have at least enough knowledge about what you should learn so that you can go learn it. Right. I am an HR and I want to move into finance. Well, what do I need to know? I mean, I, I’m not a finance person, for example, I don’t know what I should know, but I’m interested in it. I’ve always been fascinated with numbers and whatever. So, I think people do need guidance. They do need some mentoring, whether it’s a person or whether it’s a program or a curriculum, but, you kind of need something to aim at, right?

Felix
Yes, you’re right. There’s a void, as you said, there’s companies, don’t step in governments step more and more out of it.

Kevin
You’re kind of left to your own. Let’s say you want to be a coder. I want to learn coding. Well, what do I learn to code? Which language do I use? what’s coding all about? What are the basics? ? So if you don’t know that you have to be really, incredibly, I don’t know what gifted in a way to go figure out what you need to know. You’ve got to have a friend or a colleague who’s a coder that can guide you. And not everybody has that.

Felix
Yeah. I think you’re right. I think it’s often decided by friends, your family, and then a hell of a lot of luck and coincidence, but you’re right. It’s in a way we already, then, if we want to, if we wanted to give more equal opportunity at this stage, you already close the door for many people who do not have the friend who can help them or teach them,

Kevin
Especially minority groups and disadvantaged people who don’t have colleagues or friends that have any of those skills. Right. So it’s really a challenge there. Let me share just and, ask you about RPO, and why wouldn’t this caregiver company that you’re joining just for an RPO. Why would they hire Felix to connect?

Felix
Because they believe that for the value of the company, it is too important to have a unique and, a unique platform and a unique approach of hiring. Okay. Because they believe that it’s, yes, that’s the reason why, because they think it will help because the company will grow with the more carers they have and they believe it’s actually one of the unique, they see it as a, one of the unique proposition.

Kevin
Fair enough. What’s your general opinion or thoughts about the RPO model? So I work.

Felix
With loads of RPOs, first of all. I think that RPOs are often always, especially now more, open for change. And, I’m working with, RPOs that I have a lot of respect for, because I think they are thinking really much further than most, talent in-house talent acquisition teams. Now don’t get me wrong. There’s some talent acquisition teams and talent acquisition leaders who are right on the forefront and have the ability, but otherwise, yeah, I’m a generally a big fan of RPOs because it makes a lot of sense to me. And they have great people. They’re the ones that I spoke to have great people. They have great resources, they can obviously buy on scale, but they’re also not afraid to take some risks. What I see more and more they’re redefining their own playbooks. We have, for example, one client they’ve just changed completely that playbook about who’s doing what and through technology, through programs, who they manage 30% capacity release.

Felix
That translates to in the first six weeks of this year to around 240,000 pounds gained additional highest. It’s just an insignificant and yeah, so, and then I think they also, because their business model depends on it. They then have the, steel to roll out this playbook across every single account and make therefore much bigger gains. That obviously allows them again, to be much faster in their, in adoption of new technologies. I also think that they will need a difference in their, business models or in their business approaches of actually checking and taking out some of the costs. Because I think if they just stick to the old model of throwing people at the problem, they run into significant problems them.

Kevin
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I as well work with some very progressive, I think progressive RPMs that are investing pretty heavily in technology and really, eliminating people wherever it makes sense in order to save money and be more, faster and higher quality in what they do. I think there’s, obviously different models. There’s the large scale recruiting RPO model. There’s the small company RPO model. There’s the mid-level professional RPO model. There’s different ones. I’ve been talking with a couple of companies that have completely outsourced all their recruiting to an RPL except for a university graduate recruitment and executive recruitment. They’ve kept those two pieces in house. Very interesting model.

Felix
Well, I, I spoke within, talent acquisition or HR leader, and they said that they’ve identified and said, who are the, which ones are the critical skills. These are the ones that we recruit for anything else that isn’t critical skill we outsource. I think the other interesting thing about RPO is the interesting part that ICS, we talked at the beginning about integration issues and how difficult it is to integrate. I think what RPOs or the new modern forward-thinking RPOs bring is not only technology, not only recruiters, they can do a mix hybrid model. They could do just technology that can do just people. They can do both, but they also bring technologists. They could actually go in and design bespoke, workflows for an organization. Also bring the technology, but not just act as an advisor, but actually kind of act as an implementer and saying, we implement this for you.

Felix
You don’t need to even think about implementing it. You don’t need to think about training the AI, we’ll do this for you. If you still want to do the recruiting at the end, when you get the short list of the most qualified and relevant and interested candidates, then you can do it. We pick up all of the heavy lifting at the beginning.

Kevin
I think that’s absolutely right on target. I think, as your prediction, RPOs are gonna continue to grow, or are they going to just plateau or it’s going to move back in house?

Felix
I think they will. I guess like in any industry at the moment, there will be some RPOs that will be growing really fast because they made the moves and they’re moving fast at the moment in their acquisition of technologies, they’re moving fast and changing their business models. They will be, I guess, several who will just stay around, but not really grow because they didn’t adopt fast enough and they make enough money where they say, why should we change our business model? And then there will be some who will just die and with a way because they haven’t adopted fast enough. I will, I think you will see some of the big ones really moving ahead. You will see maybe a new breed of RPO that is much more technology driven coming into the market and taking some of the traditional RPOs market share.

Kevin
I agree. I’ve only got about a little less than 10 minutes left here. I’d like to just throw you out a question you’re a bit of a futurist as am. I I’d love to hear your thoughts about the future of the profession and where it’s going and, not only your profession, but of work itself. It going to stay remote? Is it going to go, what’s it going to look like? So just kind of, what are your thoughts on the future?

Felix
I’d say I have a vision in which I would like it to be is that robots do all of the work for us. We change our taxation system, so it’s not on anymore. We all get a universal, basic income and not just a couple of hundred dollars every month, but a universal, basic income that lets us live because we can do that by just taxing financial transactions. We can do the work, the unpaid work or non salaried work that we always wanted to do. And that could be caring for people. It could being creative, could be at an old developing, a new software could be, you could still work as completely, but you would, you could choose the work that you want to take. You could follow your interests. You could maybe go back to university and say, Hey, I would like to explore if I can be a finance person, right?

Felix
Why not? Because you have security here. That’s my, that’s my dream. I w wanted to be, I think it will get there, but there will be a lot of turmoil beforehand. Where do I see, remote working? I mean, I’m a big fan of remote working. I think there will be a hybrid, right? So, and I hope, and I obviously there’s remote working and there’s remote working. There’s remote working where you allow to work from home, but you still have to log on at nine and everybody looks at your keystrokes and at five o’clock you’re allowed to go and there’s remote working where you say, do your work, but work wherever you want, whenever you want. I’m a fan of the latter. I think that we will see a hybrid between going to back into the office and the former more than anything. I would hope that we more and more guarded.

Felix
I also think, which I think will be fabulous is that you can, could live anywhere in the world. And, I don’t yet know. I knew of, I always think like, while globalization is the big leveler, right, will it level, would it level salaries to what extend, with salaries go down in the Western world to be aligned with the rest of the world, will it go up? So it will be fascinating.

Kevin
I mean, really an interesting journey I read, I think, one of the big us companies that care Salesforce or Google, I can’t remember which one it was, but they just announced that whatever salary you have, no matter where you work at the same.

Felix
And that’s how it should be, right. If you pay for somebody, it shouldn’t be about, okay, I can buy you somewhere else cheaper. If it depends on how much I value your work.

Kevin
Well, I think, I used to be in HR and I think our formula was a little more complex. It was, this is what your worst, and this is what we’re adding on because of the cost to live in this particular geography. Right? So if you’re worth a hundred pounds a year in London, because it’s so expensive compared to Birmingham, we’re going to give you an extra 20,000 pounds a year. If you were to move to Birmingham, we’re going to take that 20,000 pounds away. That was the model we operated on for many years. I think some companies still do is that cost of living, accelerator or decelerator that they put on the salary. I’m not sure how that’s gonna play out. Maybe salaries become salaries.

Felix
On top of, it’s quite interesting that we see now, for example, The Bahamas offering, one year visa to families and people who want to work there, because if you any way work remote because of COVID and Dubai I think is doing, or the Emirates is doing exactly the same. I think it’s an interesting perspective also from a nation branding perspective. How can they now brand a nation that the, I dunno, the creative classes are going to come into my country and what does it mean to me for my texts thing? So it will be fascinating to see suddenly a completely different globalized, competition for talent that is different than it’s not depending on the companies.

Kevin
That’s already happening in the U S just by people at San Francisco is a great example where it is a 20% decrease in rents and huge amount of occupancy of apartments, which, one year ago you couldn’t get an apartment that you’re on a waiting list, and it was thousands, X dollars beyond what you would expect to pay for one. Now they’re moving to small towns. It’s creating real issues for some of the smaller cities in California, where suddenly a whole bunch of people have moved and they don’t have the infrastructure. They don’t have the police force. They don’t have the schools, to deal with all the people that are moving in because they never expected that people were going to move to this particular city, right. Small towns in particular, but it’s going to, it’s really an interesting, shifting of people. Very interesting. It changes all the texts of these small towns.

Felix
I guess you could see this in Georgia, right?

Kevin
Let’s see this in Georgia. You can see it in Texas. You can see it in Arizona, Nevada, which were very conservative States and lots of less conservative techies have moved there. Suddenly they become what we call purple, which is between them and the blue right. Of the two parties. It creates really interesting issues, around that or inflates housing prices. It’s lots of the people who live in these small communities are not happy. It’s really a very interesting social phenomenon. That’s going on.

Felix
Bring up rents will arise when I do. You will see everything happening again, but it is fascinating. And, well, I’m an optimist, so I hope it will work out, even though I think we’ll go through some more shaky times.

Kevin
I mean, every major invention has created shaky times, politically, legally, every other way, this was no different. So if you look,

Felix
Yours are needed right here, you look at the economic and political systems at the moment where you think actually, are they still, well, they are not fit for purpose. How do you regulate a company like Facebook and Google at the moment with nation-States and with our rather slow development of laws? How do you, that’s one thing, how do you use taxation? Where in a way tax is only the big discussion here where, they don’t make a profit within the UK, even though they sell hundreds of millions of software or products within the UK, but it’s produced in Ireland or the profits and the tax that being paid in Ireland in the neck or in the U S but these companies are using the streets and the electricity and the infrastructure of the whole States. I think that’s why you will see a lot of change because it’s just not, I think that’s why you see Ellis is.

Felix
It’s why you see that regardless of where people stand from a political perspective or color, they’re all unhappy with their current political system.

Kevin
Yeah, pretty much so, pretty much are almost at the end of our time. So, thanks so much for spending this 45 minutes with us, really appreciate it. And, great luck in your new and new adventure.

Felix
Yeah. Thank you very much. And thanks for your time, Kevin.