PATRIK SCHUMACHER : only markets and discourses, in conversation with Marko Milovanovic

I am talking about postmodernism as one of the transitional styles from modernism to parametricism. I understand what it delivered, and initially it was quite resourceful. It was trying to make architecture speak again, to be expressive, which was also a way to inhabit the historic cities again because in that era of the '70s and '80s, the urban renaissance reversed the Fordist moving out into the suburbs, greenfield factories, and 9-to-5 commuting. The more dynamic economy with smaller startup companies was expressed in postmodernism as a new era of societal reproduction and innovation. When you get these small incisions, it explains the affiliation with historical motifs, but it was also just grabbing onto anything to have something more expressive. Complexity and contradiction was an early manifesto, and learning from Las Vegas about the semiological dimension to architecture. I appreciate this. I thought deconstructivism, we learned about postmodernism at the university in the early '80s and mid-'80s, and my heart wasn't interested. I wasn't understanding the purpose and rationality yet. When I came to London, I was part of this kind of before I went to Zaha, even with guys like Kevin Rowbotham, we looked at the new spirit in architecture, which was deconstructivism. I had more time for that. I thought postmodernism was a bit cute. I don't like humor in architecture, this kind of pop play with motifs. I wasn't into it myself, but I realized when you look at Charles Jencks' The Language of Postmodern Architecture, he's talking about postmodern space. A lot of the features of deconstructivism, for instance, interpenetrating of spaces, this kind of collaging, was anticipated in postmodernism and became prevalent in deconstructivism, but without the historicizing motifs, instead with more abstract geometric elements, recycling constructivism, suprematism, etc. That's what I was into. Deconstructivism, if you look at practice, it will lead. There was a kind of retro-constructivism, but also the attempt to be more original and fresh, not explicitly neo-constructivism, but it wanted to be something unique and contemporary. It tried to do the complexity game and collage game without the historical motifs, and therefore it is less constrained by traditional typologies. Postmodernism had this element that went into neo, like the Krier brothers, who went into neoclassicism and treasured the old towns and cities. There were other postmodernists like Eisenman who were more like a pop art style play collage. There were quite different sensibilities. My sensibilities were more with Eisenman and even Rem Koolhaas, who were in the postmodern era.

There was a certain retro 50s thing. You look at the Dance Theater of The Hague. He was part of the 1980 show La Strada at the Biennale, which was the idea of going back to a traditional street and having buildings with an emphasis on the facade addressing the street, each building being different. There you see a traditionalism element and a pop element because a lot of these postmodern things had very funny colors and collaging. They were mannerist in a sense, or eclectic. Mannerism was originally a transition from Renaissance to Baroque, but it has similar connotations. Eclecticism was the late 19th century, the end of historicism. These elements, this playful engagement with the motifs of traditional architecture in pop colors, without using the literal grammars of traditional architecture, was the progressive element. There were also spatial elements in what Jencks called postmodern space. His show actually was Eisenman's intersecting grids or these layers of punched-through sheets which generated space. These were quite original features, which Kahn had started a little bit. I think there was a lot in postmodernism which was progressive. The progressive elements were recuperated and radicalized in deconstructivism. The regressive elements, the traditional element, mutated into this kind of popular QC town. Graves was one of those guys who became too popular for his own good, though originally it was quite radical.

If it's just going back, there's even one element to relativize a little bit. I thought this book Urban Space by Rob Krier had things to say. This emphasis on the void space, the urban void, and the figural void, also in Krier, looking at the Nolli Plan, to criticize this vastness of indifferent free-flowing space as an amorphous in-between between object buildings. That element I accept. But you can get at this without the motifs, without the literal recuperation of everything about the traditional town. That element I do think is progressive. Progressive is something which leads forward and can be rationally appropriated and argued. Regressive is more motivated by an emotional engagement or nostalgia, and by the uncertainty to filter out the elements. Sometimes it's okay because these traditional towns are successful. People like them and they seem to generate some urbanity which new city layouts don't have. I don't know why, so I go lock, stock, and barrel trying to replicate it because I can't filter out the relevant factors from the irrelevant ones. That leads to this. I call it regressive because it's not analytical, not penetrating the issues, and is guided by a kind of holistic gobbling up of some old thing. That is regressive because it's not leading us forward. There was a reason why we moved out of cities and why they transformed and didn't stay like Siena or whatever these models of traditional historic cities were.

Yes, except the part of parametricism learning from the vernaculars in terms of this more bottom-up, accumulative build-up, trial and error, more adaptive variation and adaptive capacity because each problem was solved contingently in this location, based on models. So yes, you can say that. But still, you will not see us literally replicating lock, stock, and barrel a traditional town. Also atmospherically, I think it's wrong. I sometimes find it wrong even though they work in inverted commas. Atmospherically, I want to have something which signals the 21st century, incites me to understand that we're in a different era with new problems. If you study philosophy in Cambridge in the medieval colleges or even in a replica like Yale, it is a kind of neo-Gothic replica.

With the only exception being the architecture building, the Rudolph building, which I find kind of strong. It has a wonderful kind of open sections and atriums. It has things which point beyond the typical modernist building. I feel that is atmospherically stale. If you go to Cambridge, your mood is different. You want to study theology or Plato and Aristotle, not second-order cybernetics. But if the university looked like Beaubourg and the Pompidou, you'd want to study something else.

This is tangential and not the core of the argument. It's a hint, but not totally relevant because it collects people. I'm criticizing this kind of nostalgic and intuitive way of selecting. We can't dismiss it. We all navigate the world aesthetically, and we can't always analyze the particular structures. There's a space syntax argument for the stoic cities, and analytical arguments about the optimal detail system in the medieval town. That's what we should build on, and then we could recuperate relevant aspects. But we're not going to do a space analysis before we visit a district or locate our home office. Maybe we should, but we usually don't. We go more intuitively. On the intuitive level, we select something according to our aesthetic sensibility. We have to reckon with that. We don't only have to generate the objective conditions; we also have to signal atmospherically. Often this helps with our buildings. For example, an office building in Moscow is very cool with a lot of communication spaces. Objectively, you can perform colocation synergies there, but it attracts companies with a certain contemporaneous outlook, relatively young people. They find each other there because they're on the same page. That is something architecture does. Another group of people find each other because they love dark traditional pubs with bacon pie. These superficial markers also help sorting. We shouldn't be altogether oblivious to these aesthetic markers.

I don't like humor. I don't know when to leave in a joke. I understand it in a kindergarten or an entertainment place. But I never understood this kind of my own house full of ironies and citations like Charles Jencks. I wouldn't want to live like that. In an office building or a university, to have jokes like Claes Oldenburg's binoculars or something inflated, I think it's something which... There's nothing wrong with fun, but certain institutions and buildings have purposes. We want to articulate those and make them legible, and we use form for that. We don't use the form to crack a joke.

Yes, I find that not appropriate, quite frankly. Rem has this. He's a less serious person. He did a lot of wonderful research and great writings and slogans. Delirious New York, Bigness, some of these articles in SMLXL. I have a lot of respect for him, but he is more of an agent provocateur. He's after rubbing the discipline the wrong way. There are insights, don't get me wrong. But he is too much in love with some of these slogans he then coins and puts a little copyright. This is partly ironic. There's no coherent red thread. It's always something against the grain, something which hasn't been discovered yet. He's not a system builder, not a leader who knows the way forward. He's a journalistic mind of teasing out tendencies. I learned a lot. The way the actual dynamics of development go against the grain of a canon of academic architecture is very good. But he has these surrealist provocations he wants to put forward in a building. Sometimes that makes sense. When he wanted to put an escalator in MoMA to make it look like a shopping mall, there's a critique of the commodification of art. Sometimes it might be appropriate. But usually, I want to take life more seriously and the institutions we're designing for. I don't think it's appropriate.

I met him. I was around when he was there. I saw him a few times and some lectures he gave. I was respectful of his work, his collaboration with Gordon Pask, and I learned about him and that whole circle. I was aware of some of his projects. I was a great fan of Archigram too. I thought it was very progressive, good over the top. There was an exuberance and exaggeration, but I thought these were quite stimulating. I actually wrote a book about Archigram as a young man in my 20s. He was part of the Battle of Britain, a big influence. I don't see... Yes, he was funny and humorous. He had a cigar, a big belly, and whiskey. He was a bit of a drunk, partly like Gordon Pask tragically. Maybe there was some frustration. It was late in his career that he didn't pull through. He didn't do much. He was broke. Where are the big writings? Where are the big buildings? Where is the big influence? Maybe there was a bit of cynicism in the end. He just failed life, maybe. A bright man ends up semi-alcoholic, hanging around with kids, and didn't achieve much. Or maybe it's quite a different achievement.

There is something really big. Rem is somebody you could take much more seriously. His writing is more extensive, and he has a big body of work and created all these spin-offs. I think of ten great spin-offs of OMA. He couldn't keep them all together. Reinier is a kind of reincarnation of Rem, with this irony, never prepositional, always undercutting everything. Stefan now finally wrote... Reinier is coming out with his positive manifesto. I've been teasing him, challenging him a number of times. He's always taking the piss, undercutting, exposing irrationalities and false ideologies. I say, 'What is your ideology?' You have to come to that. I find that Rem and Reinier up to this point... I haven't seen this book. If he's really having a positive manifesto, I don't think you can generate this in a couple of years through a book. I remain skeptical. I'm much more serious than these guys. I don't say Rem is unserious. He's fantastic. Innovations like what he's done with the Bibliothèque Nationale and bigness, this kind of space of deep free space unleashing a regime of complete flexibility, is part of the complexity discourse. But ultimately, he sways. He was pushing metropolitan life and density so much, then he suddenly said, 'Okay, I'm getting bored, now I'm going to the countryside.' It makes sense to him. There's nothing to do in the countryside, then finding some fascination with big data centers. This is relevant stuff. He doesn't have a clear compass about the role of architecture in society and where society is going. He remains a very smart and resourceful agent provocateur, but he could have switched topic. From the greater China area around Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, to Atlanta, to shopping, to Lagos phenomena. Discovering phenomena which are intriguing, which the artist just can't handle. It's quite productive, but he's still surfing the waves and discovering the processes. It's not bad, but he doesn't have a position. He's aestheticizing and conceptualizing something he finds out there. It's a bit like Delirious New York and the manifesto of bigness is something he discovers and then wants to extrapolate from. I think that's a good method. Modernism emerged through this as well, looking at industrialization, factories, and big infrastructures. I'm not saying it's a bad heuristic, but I don't feel he's pulling through.

I do find some of what I'm thinking being realized in our works. Some of the urban plans we generated have been building up for 25 years. The Singapore master plan is a knowledge economy hub that works very well, an integrated city fabric. I'm proud of that. A lot of our buildings are like Maxi, but also in our recent projects, like the Dongdaemun, Hyundai Department Store, and mixed-use complexes like the Galaxy project in Beijing. I use them in lectures. I can illustrate what I'm talking about. The recent work of tectonism, I can illustrate a lot of our works as well as other firms and research groups' works. That is imprinted. But a lot of this doesn't come through fully. Even the semiological project, which is difficult to bring through, I can select and use our work to illustrate some of that, but it's better to illustrate through other works. These are unbuilt projects. There I have more time and thematic focus to develop these projects. For instance, on the semiological projects, the phenomenological projects, the responsive environments and interactive intelligent environment concepts. They don't appear in reality yet, and it's hard to bring that into the real world. Yes, I can show what I think. I'm continuously working on it. For me, this is not just reflective or contemplative. This is all operational. That's why I've done this PhD. I finished this four-grade PhD work, thinking through and demonstrating more detail and delivering tool development at the same time on agent-based simulations and recently legibility and navigability research. There is stuff which is illustrated. These theories are very conscious of this. They have to finally grip and be operationalized in reality. I'm a little disillusioned that I realize I have to do them myself. It's not just to write and think that many will follow and build on this. I'm embedded in the movement. Parametricism is a movement. Even tectonics is a movement. I'm never isolated, but I have a certain contribution which points beyond a certain take on this within the movement, and that's rarely being picked up. Only Shajay Moshavi, who is here in this company, is more closely following and helping and working through and aligning with us and building on a theoretical level into an execution level. We're now working together on an article and on a studio teaching together.

I'm still a Marxist in the sense of historical materialism and the importance of technology and economics as the active part of history and drivers through competitiveness. I'm not a socialist. But a socialist would also have gone to parametricism because it's driven by... There are certain illusions about libertarian socialism which could be compatible with illusions I had myself. The post-Fordism discussion was very important for me, and the recognition of debureaucratization, leveling of hierarchies, self-directed work, self-organization of teams and projects in clusters and networks of firms. That is emancipatory on many levels. A leftist would also endorse that, although they see more of a negative element, the precariat, and self-exploitation. I said, 'Would you prefer self-exploitation or somebody breathing down your neck and micromanaging you?' Because a social solution hasn't happened, a lot of these tendencies are seen negatively. But they should be seen positively from a left-leaning, even anarchist, perspective. The autonomist movement, out of which Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus evolves, sees similar tendencies in the left discourse and way of organizing struggles, the free flow of struggles, the rejection of Leninist cadre parties and democratic centralism. This is similar to what happens in organization theory. It connects up with cybernetics and theories of self-organization and complexity and chaos theory. It's interesting that a lot of this came through left theoreticians. I don't see a huge break intellectually for me to jump on this and then later go full on anarcho-capitalism. Still anarcho, instead of anarcho-communism. Anarcho-communism is a delusion. The collective needs to have power, but how does it have power? I don't think we need power so much. We need a free flow of initiatives and voluntary processes. That's where I ended up, but there is a left version of that which I was promoting. Even when I called it parametricism, it was the very moment I shifted into libertarianism. But that's just calling it parametricism. I was in the weeds of that movement and took a sociologically driven point of view from a left perspective.

Absolutely. It is the repertoire. It's much more expanded. The possibilities of manipulating and adapting, transforming, deforming according to information delivering deformation in the elements. The variation and iteration and transformation of the fields and systems, and the interaction between fields and systems. There's much more variety and richness, like the endless forms of nature. The inspiration is quite open-ended. It refuses and rejects some things that remain inert, uninformed, indifferent. If you work with undifferentiated grids and hermetic volumes or platonic primitives and leave them uninflected, like a cube, we carve them out and open them up. The cube form holds together a lot of internal complexity. But to just do a cube like the MoMA with a singular central dome, an inflated version of Villa Rotonda, there are taboos against that because it's not plausible that you should incarcerate an enormous amount of life process in such a preconceived form. We have infinite formal possibilities. We just exclude a few outmoded, highly simplistic forms which are not plausible, which could not be the outcome of a self-organization process.

Once it's built, it's fixed. We have to freeze it and tailor it to a situation, to a site, to an internal process or institution. If the context changes and you had been affiliating to this, it is undermined. In my view, if you build a building into a context, it adjusts itself. It opens up because there's a plaza here. It connects up here because there's something in view. The trajectory injects itself into the building. All these contextual forces you absorb and adapt to motivate this building. What happens if these things change? They shouldn't change randomly by somebody cutting a connection. If you had proper discipline, you would replace and redo, but you would continue to respect continuities. You keep the conversation going. Whoever is buying that land or deciding to build next to your building probably does so because your building being there is one of the reasons. It's one of the contextual elements you choose to be next to. The new building picks up this axis or trajectory, and wants to keep the entrance opposite your entrance because they came to have relationships with you. Could it be that they're coming for other reasons and it's a compromise? I can't exclude it. But my hope is that this game of affiliation keeps being knitted and can be continued in different ways. For instance, if you had a city field with 100 blocks all different, initially it relates to incoming streets and topography, but also a gradient ordering small, medium, large in a certain way. People and institutions sort themselves into it. Smaller firms find the small building, larger find the large ones. If you had a neutral grid with nothing to go by, it's random. If you structure something, you will select and start sorting. That could happen a second time. It will continue even with substitutions. The default of a varied but ordered varied, not chaotically jumbled, because if it's jumbled it's difficult to find yourself. There's more chance to have a kind of ordered varied, a complex aggregate order, in a default field with gradients and differentiations, not random. When you have the functions to play with, you tailor it. But even if you didn't, you let society self-sort into it, and it keeps self-sorting even as it changes. That's my argument. If the costs of that are not punitive. In the 1950s, if you made 100 blocks the same versus 100 blocks different, you had a tripling of cost, which would be prohibitive. We're not in that position. Accommodation costs for any enterprise are relatively trivial. Whatever we pay for a year, it's not making much difference compared to salaries. If it was double, it wouldn't kill us. It's similar to what you pay for software and servers. It's relatively small. It's always worth it to get in the good location and get better spaces. That's why we see in our buildings, very attractive buildings in the center of Hong Kong or in the Leman Tower here in the city. This wonderful free plates where he pulled out the core. Wonderful idea. We're copying it. They can sell it higher. If they have an advantage, for these financial firms, whatever they're paying, they don't pay astronomical because there's still competition. In the city, you don't have planning restrictions. The economics would be to look at the benefit side rather than the cost side. Entrepreneurs have to be cost competitive, but all entrepreneurs face the surcharge over making something more varied over making it repetitive. The surcharge is not relevant for the end users. I think it's definitely a viable and meaningful thing, even if it's more of a new default rather than something super tailored.

Associate with centrism. Somehow, I feel market pulls everything to a certain kind of center. It pulls Trump to a center. It pulls a socialist government to a center.

Political centrism, yes. Because I think we're still talking in this realm of conviction or political position.

Too many people living and have kids at school and universities and all that. So, it's difficult. So the government can mess around and curb our flourishing and we still locked in here. But it's true they can't go too far. And that's we should like this cool thing. Keep things in a kind of good semi-predictable moderate realm. I accept that. So for radical alternatives like your party, which looked there and actually came to something, I went to some of their events.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean they can only agree on very kind of on Gaza and what to protest against. I don't think there's much chance they could agree on much when it comes to positive policy steps or once they would take control, how far they would go and how these nationalizations would unfold and who would be in power. They would fall apart in no time. So there's not been a discourse on this anyway. But I do think that these characters, of course, once you want to have more radical politics, you're running against market functioning and that holds them back. Now my position is quite radical and very pro-market and allows the market to rip through and self-organize and go where it wants to go with societal processes and entrepreneurship being totally unleashed. That's my world, but I'm saying markets and discourses are not. My contribution to libertarianism is that they overlooked the importance of this.

No, absolutely no, no, no, no. I don't think so. There's an enormous role of government, of regulation.

Yeah, but the large amount of political power, discretionary power, and that you could have an election or the new lot taking over, that's quite unpredictable. Because you don't know who's going to win the election and you don't know what they end up doing. And they might shift over the levers. In China you can feel that. They often make very abrupt changes. They have a lot of political power. They just reset the framework and the rules. Like from one day to another suddenly there's a price cap on all residences or from one day to another there's a particular on the urban development arena. They suddenly say you can no longer buy in any of these larger cities if you're not a registered resident. That's sudden, cool off the market, but it kind of squashes the market at that point. And these are in the market process themselves when a tendency comes up, a new product, a new innovation. Yes, it could be so-called disruptive, but this is not as dramatic and rapid as when they switch the rules and suddenly hundreds of projects are unviable. So I would say the market is dynamic but it's more predictable than political action often.

No, I don't think you would have monopolies. So, what I've learned, first of all, monopolies the original monopolies were royal privileges. That was a typical mafia structure.

Feudal mafia, then absolutism, the royal prerogatives. They could control who has a right to do this or that business. With the guilds, only if your father was a blacksmith you could become a blacksmith. This was to keep it viable because there wasn't much technological transformation and change. You didn't have to have suddenly more blacksmiths, so it was just politically controlling. But anyway, it would have been relatively stable reproduction. Economic growth was 0.01% per decade or something for several hundred years under feudalism. So that was fine. But that is the characteristic situation: you had political power regulating economic activity strictly throughout history mostly. And where it wasn't through formal authority, it was informal mafia structures, monopoly structures. So, it requires force. In the 18th and 19th century, when you had some kind of rule of law framing the market, you didn't find spontaneous monopoly. There were attempts, of course, big businesses trying to monopolize. Nobody likes to be continuously exposed to competition.

Made bold home. So, absolutism was still they decided that because they were also extracting, they granted royal privilege, a monopoly to certain cities and businesses, and they were the only ones doing this kind of business and then they paid to the royal purse. And later on this was criticized as the mercantilist system as well, they had controlled trade. And the 19th century was more or less laissez-faire in France and in England. And then firms became larger and larger. There was concentration as naturally as economies of scale. But when they tried to step into a monopoly, it was never reached. When you tried to build these cartels and make agreements to regulate how much everybody is producing and keeping the price stable, they would always be undermined. They make the agreements and then they go home and start giving discounts to their friends. The official price was this but they were breaking up. It turned out that the monopoly isn't the most spontaneous formation and is very difficult to organize. They realized this after several decades of attempts. Rothbard is analyzing this. They were requiring the state to step in to help the cartelization, through licensing law, through certain interstate commerce commissions, through the railway commissions, where they controlled the price. Only the government has the monopoly of violence, they could then, if you undersell, the competitors could sue and get a lawsuit and they would be slapped off. And that's the way they monopolized. Through government. And similar with the banking systems, through central banks, the Federal Reserve, some kind of organizing the banks. They were competing with each other too much so that nobody could, they weren't inflating the money, something like this, very good for the banks, so they step collectively under 'we cannot do it together, we don't undercut each other.' So, I refute monopoly. I do believe that in the current era in particular, I admit that in the Fordist era, yeah, these big concentrated capital bureaucracies, corporate bureaucracies, assembly line, vertically integrated industries, a few firms, and you could lump them together and run them as a planned economy reasonably well. Not as good as separate, they were still useful to have a market and have some competition, but it was subdued. And you could look at this and say, well, there are now three or four steel companies, there's not much market activity, it's all vertically integrated, and we can actually nationalize them. We just substitute the owners, the shareholders, we become the government. That was reasonable to some extent. You had nationalization of industries in Britain. You had the New Deal quasi-nationalization and so on. Fascist economies, you know, the corps and the families, but they couldn't determine prices, they couldn't determine investment, they couldn't determine production quota. That was all state-regulated. So, the fascist economy is very similar to the socialist economy and to the New Deal kind of economy. They were all what we call state capitalism. And that model worked, but it was no longer working at all well since the '70s, '80s with the microelectronic revolution. That's why communism collapsed. That's why Britain had to have a kind of Thatcher revolution. The US had a Reagan revolution. And my point is that this wasn't radical enough. These revolutions were reversed and were hemmed in. The gains they made were redistributed and resocialized through the next layer like Clinton and Blair and in Germany and a lot of these countries, even Sweden and all the northern countries, they kind of re-marketized. They had to give up their socialism because it's not competitive. It was inefficient and they couldn't exploit the opportunities of this new world of microelectronic revolution. So, I just feel we should experiment somewhere with a much more radical free market world in the advanced countries, not only in Argentina, which is so down the drain that the socialist kind of...

Well, we have platform capitalism. I'm just in that.

I mean, for instance, a lot of these super incomes in the financial sector, without the government, that wouldn't exist. First of all, there are a number of factors. But, as we all know, they collect in on the upside and then socialize the losses on the downside through bailouts, one time after another. That protects the financial industry people.

Yeah, that's because of government. First of all, for instance, deposit insurance, which is government-organized and government-guaranteed, means that people don't look after their income, where it's going. It's just sit on a bank and banks compete on giving you high interest and not competing on prudence because you don't have to worry about prudence. So that has a very perverse incentive of how do you give more interest by taking more risks? And nobody is looking after your risk. Maybe some bureaucrats are supposed to be supervising, some financial authorities. And they don't do their job in the same way millions of customers would do the job of controlling and checking. Then you would have information flow and you would worry because you would have to appraise: do I put my money where I get 3% or should I put my money where it has 1% and I know that they don't touch certain types of investments, certain types of lending practices? That doesn't exist because everybody is put to sleep. This is one aspect. There are many others. But the money printing whenever there are problems in the economy, the idea to suppress interest rates to inflate assets back to where they were to not worry anybody, this is very deficiently leading to crisis and leading also to people becoming more wealthy because...

Inflating.

Yeah. So without government that wouldn't exist. So I say on the tops, but on the other hand, some of capitalism which I would defend, the billionaires, key figures these self-made characters like, let's say if you look at Tesla, you could criticize that they got government loans...

...and that they got government contracts.

If you cut this out, it's kind of cut to half.

Well. And also on the other hand, if you look at these characters, that they're rich is also a misconception in the sense that you can't take their so-called net worth as what you really...

What I mean is you should look at consumption standards. And what they're actually consuming.

I mean Warren Buffett is not the best example. He's famously modest.

Bezos, yeah. So yes, I don't know if he has a yacht and some of the Apple guys had yachts. And these are excessive things, or private jets which sit in the garage and they have crews and so on. But that's only a small fraction of their so-called net worth. So these notions that these guys have more wealth than country XYZ, that's disorienting and it's an exaggeration because you should look at the consumption what they're burning through their own consumption.