"Trust is your currency and reputation is everything" - Patrick McGee, Author - EP10

Thank you so much. I'm a little nervous. This is so different from the rest of my book tour, but I think it'll be exciting.

Thank you. That's amazing.

Yes, I focus on the roles. So I wrote some of this out beforehand. But let me just give the quick background. So I'm Canadian. I was raised in Calgary, Alberta. A city that I think is actually pretty cool now, but I didn't care for it so much when I was a kid. It's like, you know, considered Canada's Texas, but it's not. I don't know, it was just sort of a dull city. Nobody really lived downtown. It sort of had the makeup of everyone should have a house with a little garden outside and some grass or whatever. But the effect of that was that everyone drove just miles and miles to get to work every day. So it's sort of like trying to create the best of suburbia and a city in one. And I just sort of thought it failed in that respect. I like European cities, you know, where you can walk or bike everywhere. Calgary is sort of the antithesis of that. But that being said, a lot of the city sort of moved inside. You know, downtown's more of a happening place these days with condos and stuff. So anyway, I don't know why I'm sort of on my former city. But I didn't love it as a kid, but it's a cool place now.

And I studied religion at university, and this will probably come through in some of the quotes. Not as a theology student, but as a religion student. So writing, reading, thinking about sort of the big questions, but basically from the perspective of an atheist, perhaps inclined to a little bit of mysticism. But the origin there is that my dad was an Anglican priest when I was a young kid. My parents had met at divinity school and I'm the youngest of three brothers and we all have a degree in religion. I might be the only one who doesn't have two degrees in religion. So the discussions around the dinner table are a lot of religious textbooks. One of my brothers studied Sanskrit for years and can, you know, sort of read in some detail, at least he's not fluent or anything, something called the Vishishtadvaita, which is like a Hindu god when he is a 16-year-old despondent about the world and the lessons that he is given. So in a western context, it would be like we found a text, you know, buried in Egypt somewhere or something of John the Baptist teaching Jesus when he's 15 years old, right? Just consider how cool that is. It's the only religious text of its kind in the world, right? Where God isn't teaching everything. He's the student. The problem with that is that you don't get any job offers upon graduating with an honors degree in religion. And so I fell into journalism in a sense by accident because, you know, after university, I didn't have a whole lot to do. And so I basically moved back to this city that was just becoming kind of cool, Calgary. And I lived with my best friend and I was able to get a job at a magazine. Anyway, so that's a little bit about my life. And then the magazine sort of collapses, but I went to live in DC. The financial crisis takes place, but I was becoming an economics journalist. And then I become a bond reporter. And then the Wall Street Journal hires me to be a bond reporter. Then the Financial Times hires me. And actually, I could do a three things here, which is that Steve Jobs says you can only understand your life when you connect the dots looking backward. So before I get to my three roles, I can just mention that the three roles at the FT were three years in Hong Kong, really, you know, maybe not studying China per se, but getting a sense of what Xi Jinping's first term was like, all a prelude to Hong Kong being taken over essentially. Three or four years in Germany, which is when you and I first interacted because I was studying supply chains and understanding the importance and fragility of supply chains, what makes the automotive sector work, that sort of thing. And then four years covering Apple out of California. And my book is essentially the three beats combined: China, supply chains, Apple.

But three roles, if I'm just going to mention those. I took a gap year after high school and this was like a really maturing year for me. And I was a blueberry picker for a month where I lived in a van in Tumba Womba, Australia, a place I don't think anyone has heard of. Living in a van because we really didn't have any money and we're trying to save as much as we could. It was basically eating blueberries every day. I mean, just mountains of blueberries as your breakfast, lunch, and dinner just while you did this just to sort of earn a living. But I only mentioned it just because obviously it wasn't prestigious or like a great internship or anything like that. But having a year off where you're 18 years old and for the first time in life, your life isn't scheduled by somebody else. In other words, the education system, when you graduate grade 11, you don't think about whether you're going to grade 12. Of course you do. That's just the next thing. And I didn't want to start college thinking like, well, I have to select five courses because that's how many you have to choose or whatever. I took a whole gap year and I just had to decide what I was going to do each day. And it was a maturing year because it's sort of when I realized I didn't want to just spend every day on the beach. That was the dream. I went to Australia. And I ended up traveling around Southeast Asia. But I needed books to feed my mind. And so my mother's an English teacher and I had her send me a bunch of books and that's where I really fell in love with reading. And you know in retrospect, that's probably journalism.

After

Strawberries are amazing, but after about 3 days of strawberries, you don't want to see another strawberry.

Throughout university, I was a waiter, so multiple restaurants. I really started in the restaurant industry, if you can call it that, at age 12 because I worked at Domino's Pizza. That was actually really influenced by my best friend back then and now. He's East Indian and I think he had a sense of entrepreneurial sense in his bones that he should be paying for his own frivolous teenager ways and not have his hardworking parents who had immigrated from India to take care of that stuff. And so he still wanted to be a teenager but he wanted to buy it for himself. I don't know that he's never explicitly said this. This is just sort of what I intuited and it made me feel a little bit like a spoiled white kid and so I joined him at Domino's Pizza. And so we were working there four or five nights a week.

Excoriation of the national brand or anything but

And then the third thing, or I guess if I'm saying restaurant industry, so that built me up into being like at 16 when I wanted to be a bus boy, I actually had four years of experience, you know, again kind of in restaurants. And then being a bus boy led me to being a waiter and that was a great experience. I mean, I remember I would make $200 on a weekend, working Friday night, all day Saturday, all day Sunday, just in tips.

And the nature of working at a restaurant is like it's tough for me now as a journalist to read full books sort of on the side because I'm staring at a screen. I'm thinking, I'm writing. I'm reading all day. I'm keeping up with the news. When the day is over and I've got children, it is tough to read a full book or whatever. When you are exhausted from being a waiter, it's fine to read because it's a totally different part of your brain. And so I was really glad that I didn't have a glamorous internship or something. It was fantastic that I was just actually working with people, you know. I associate being a waiter like with being a good actor or at least an actor. Maybe not a good one, but you know, you're sort of playing a role for someone's evening. I don't know. I really enjoyed that.

Yeah, and Canada is the sort of place where they really want you to introduce yourself as the waiter. You know, you wouldn't do this in Austria or somewhere in Europe where the waiter's cold-shouldered and doesn't want to talk to you. In Canada, I was like having the time of my night or whatever, right? I'd be singing to my tables when I felt like it and stuff. It really brought out a side of me that otherwise doesn't exist because I'm sort of a hermit, you know, just likes doing work. And the third thing would just be my first journalism job. So it was at a Canadian magazine called the Western Standard. And I just remember feeling underqualified. I had no background in journalism. I'd studied religion literature at university and the guy just sort of took a liking to me and he said you're going to learn more in two weeks of being a journalist than they would teach you at a year of journalism school. Yeah.

And so it was just learning by doing and I made all kinds of mistakes, but I had a team around me and it was just like a great learning up the curve thing. My wife who has studied journalism is sometimes appalled. Have you lost me?

I was going to say my wife who has studied journalism is sometimes appalled at my, uh, what am I trying to say? My ignorance about how certain things are supposed to work or what have you. But somehow escaped any responsibility.

Just in general, you know, over the course of your career, if I was

Ah well, I'll tell you what I love about reception to the book. It's that I am not trying to convince you of an argument. I'm trying to demonstrate how the last 30 years played out for Apple. By and large, I'm not making biting remarks. I am not in the narrative. I hate non-fiction books where the first thing the author does is introduce themselves. I introduce just Apple in crisis because Xi Jinping has just been elected and he's attacking Apple. I mean, it's meant to be gripping from the first page. There's no waffle. And then it maintains that pace, I think, for the entirety of the book. And yet in the end, it is kind of damning, not of anyone who made particular decisions at Apple, but of my god, do you understand the predicament that they're in. But it's not damning because of flavorful adjectives I'm throwing at the company. It's just a fair presentation of how stuck they are and what that means not just for Apple but for the United States, maybe even for the West. So it's written in this kind of neutral tone. I mean, when John Stewart interviewed me, I was thrilled because he said it's not epic. It's not hyperbole. You just sort of demonstrate that this is the case. And yeah, I mean, there's things that people can disagree with or maybe they could say, I don't trust the sourcing on this or something. I mean, there are criticisms you could make of the book, but it is not a diatribe that you either are on board with or reject. So that's what I would love to be known for.

Oh, I've got three things. This wasn't in the show notes, Alan.

Well, I suppose the other thing, I've been burrowing in my rabbit hole of the book, so I need to. So I guess the fairness, the tone, is the first thing.

The second one would be the pacing. So I did just briefly allude to that. But, you know, if you find yourself a little bit lost because it's a paragraph about engineering or procurement or something, fine, but just get through the paragraph because it's going to shift tone really quickly. Or maybe not shift tone, it's going to shift scenes, right? So the book is not like a magazine piece that's been padded out so that it's book length. It's I've cut it down to make it as short as it is, right? There's a lot of material in there and it spans 30 years. So the pacing, how it spans continents and decades and introduces all these characters. And you know, I've described the book as a Trojan horse before because I'm trying to sell you on the sex appeal of Apple products, but actually what you'll learn is things like supply chains, procurement negotiations, things that sound maybe a little bit dull, and yet you're learning them through these fascinating characters. So I'm never having to say, okay, now we're going to learn about X. It's just that I'm introducing these characters and telling these scenes where you will be picking up these things without me expressly saying this is why I'm telling you that.

Well, I don't know the difference between old school and new school procurement. You're going to have to school me on that. I think what you're referring to is that there's a character named Tony Blevins who largely led procurement for 20 years at Apple. And yeah, I mean, he's this fascinating character where he sort of, I don't know how many books Tony Blevins reads and maybe he reads a lot, but that's not his smarts. His smarts is street smarts. And he grows up in a really poor area of North Carolina and he earns a scholarship, you know, to I think the state university and then later studies at MIT. He's at IBM for 12 years where he overlaps with Tim Cook and Tim Cook and Jeff Williams, you know, the most senior people in operations are the people who pluck him up. But when he's a teenager, he works for his father's used car lot and he and his brother have a bet who can sell the shittiest car for the most money every month. And he really kind of feels the injustice of a bad price for himself in his bones. And it makes it into a game. And so some of this old school stuff is he would gather, you know, Apple people around him, let's say 12 people in a room and would give them all the exact same amount of money and then send them off to a market to buy ties and whoever came back with the most ties with that set amount of money was the winner. And then he would try to, so he's sort of doing what I'm doing, right? In terms of teaching you something without actually saying what the lesson is. So these people are learning the value of a dollar, right? And so I know like this isn't in the book, but someone would leave the meeting and they'd get in a taxi to go to the market and Tony Blevins would just be shaking his head like what an amateur, you know, you take the bus to the market. You don't waste your precious dollars on the taxi. Like this person's fired kind of thing, you know, like do you not understand the lesson? So there's lots of old school things like that and I mean if there's a movie made of this book, I'm going to have to personally oversee who is playing that character because Blevins is a real character.

Yeah,

Well, I'm trying to think. So let me see if I can sort of snake my way back into this. So my favorite thing at the FT was writing for the big read desk. So if you have the actual physical newspaper, there is one story every day. It's like, you know, page six or something that takes up an entire page. And so I realized that that was sort of my length, right? 2,000 maybe 2,300 words. And I'm not just saying that as a boast. Like I'm also saying is like breaking news isn't really my thing. I struggle to keep up with the quick-witted Brits who when something would happen in the world, they would immediately have a sense of it. They would even have a sense of humor about it. And I'm this slow Canadian who's still trying to digest the implications. And in part because I try to see multiple angles of it and in part just because I have this slow processor where I really digest the meaning of something, the consequence of something over time. And so in some respects it's a real deficit, right? And in some respects it's an asset because I guess my understanding from talking to other journalists is they don't do that. Malcolm Gladwell actually has this great podcast, although I read it by a lawyer friend the other day and she hated it. But it's about him taking the LSATs. And what he's furious about is that when you take the LSATs, they are basically giving you more information than you could naturally comprehend in the allotted time because what they're really quizzing you on isn't your smarts, but your quickness. And he, like me, I guess, is a slow Canadian, right? He's also Canadian. And so he doesn't like it because he says, look, I'm good at certain sections of the LSATs, but they don't allow me to then move on and use the extra time I've gained into the next section where I'm bad. And then he interviews someone like a Supreme Court clerk and asks how slowly the person reads and they're like, oh, so slowly. I've got multiple colors of pens and a highlighter. And you know, it's not like reading a Harry Potter novel. And he interviews the world champion of chess, but also the world champion of slow chess. And you know, effectively these are different sports. And so he's furious that the LSATs are sort of not allowing someone like him and obviously as the listener someone like me make it in the world of law because from the get-go you're not going to do well on the LSATs and yet some of the best people that are lawyers, as he demonstrates throughout the episode, are these slow, slow processor digesting the news, digesting the impact slowly. Anyway, that was a really cathartic thing. So I'm just trying to wrap this up with what am I like understanding your skill set in whatever field is really important in your career. And I remember writing about the German auto industry and I would sometimes go to the Frankfurt auto show with our very quick-witted, very fast journalist Peter Campbell and he could just write multiple stories at a time and I was still thinking about the one story that I was going to write that week. So I guess if I have something that I want to be known for, it's like the fruits of that slow, careful, patient writing where the arguments all sort of flow together and maybe there's a bow on top because it's all been tied up so nicely.

Oh yeah. I mean, it is the proudest thing in my life and it hits all three of those notes for sure.

So I really struggled with this and I'm a voracious reader, but for starters, I don't necessarily finish a lot of books. I start a lot of books. I mean, my household is just full of books, much to my wife's chagrin sometimes, because there's just new books arriving, and she knows that I haven't finished the ones that I'm currently reading. So let's see. It was called the Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. That was my real introduction to Freud. So it's actually four or five books in one. It's got the Interpretation of Dreams in there. It's got the Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious in there and a couple others. And I got really influenced by Freud at university. And I would still to some, I'm not a psychiatrist or anything, but I would really describe myself as a Freudian, but really what I'm meaning by that is he really emphasizes just how irrational we are. And I love that. And when I'm reading behavioral economics, to me, they're just like scratching the surface of just how animalistic we are. Yeah.

You know, they're trying to do experiments that point out that under certain scenarios, we use system two instead of system one. Or maybe I'm getting that backwards. This is Daniel Kahneman. And I think Freud was sort of a hundred years ahead and more profoundly than the behavioral economist working today.

I don't know. Have you read much Freud? Is this much of a conversation?

Yeah, I mean, Freud is relevant to basically like every field short of particle physics. I think his influence is absolutely profound. And as a religion major who was studying it from an atheist perspective, he was, I don't say like I, you know, he was a hero. I certainly didn't worship him. He's not like a god substitute, but his writing, if anything, his writing is too good, you know, like in other words, that can be a problem, right? Someone like Niall Ferguson sometimes I think is too good of a speaker, right? Because he's got this great Scottish accent and his ability to sort of convey how much he's read to you, but maybe his argument actually isn't good, but like he, it's just so you can be so swayed by the writing style in the case of Freud or the presentation style in the case of Niall Ferguson.

Yeah.

Most influential book I've read in the last couple years. It's called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. He passed away 12 or 13 years ago. The book's probably 25 years old. I think it's published in 2000. In its own way, it's a book about technology transfer, which is what my book is about. And I was reading it while I was doing the writing. It was very instrumental. And actually, the epigraph to the book is from David Landes. It's not from the book, but it's from an academic paper of his. So he was an economic historian.

And the nature of the book is he's really trying to figure out why did the industrial, why did the industrial revolution happen? When it happened, where it happened, and then how are its lessons diffused around the world? Why do the lessons go to some places but not others? And so it's not quite a world history, but there are entire chapters on the Islamic world, on Japan, on China, you know, and on Europe. And of course, this is all after Britain. And it's just absolutely fascinating. And I guess I had never, I mean, I never thought about it, but he just reveals to you just how consequential the industrial revolution was for the entire world. So it's a fantastic book full of just really interesting stories. He's often quite funny, all sorts of ingenious inventions, but like he's got the cultural understanding of a good anthropologist. I mean, that's what makes it so good.

Well, this has a good Chinese connection because of the importance of guanxi, the social relations or political relations.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's interesting. I mean, the journalist equivalent is trust, right? I mean trust is your currency because you know, I will have sources ask like, you say it's off record, but how do I know? And it's a fair question, but it's, I don't know how to convey to someone other than like, I mean, if I'm using your off record comments and citing you without your, I mean, that's just the end of me as a journalist. I mean, that like my interests are aligned with yours in that respect. And you know, I will take that just so seriously, even if someone has recommended somebody else, like unless they've told that person, I won't let it be known to that person even when I can't get in touch with the original person and it would be much easier if I could. Trust just matters so much and I think it's more or less what you're saying because when I say trust, really what I mean is reputation.

That's okay. Third book. I just deleted my original one and put this in for the Histories by Herodotus. And specifically, if anyone's interested in this, you want to get the edition called The Landmark Herodotus because, you know, sorry, if people don't know, this is probably around 4th century BCE Greece. And Herodotus is basically just trying to write the history of why East and West are fighting, basically the Hellenic Empire and the Persian Empire, why they've been at war. And he kind of approaches it the way a journalist would. And so I think the more correct translation is the Inquiries because he is just going around talking to people and he really does a lot of travel. So he's a Greek speaker, but he's actually on the part of the other side of the Mediterranean. I think I'm getting this right. So he's somewhere in Turkey in terms of where he's born and whatnot, but he goes around Egypt and a whole bunch of other places to sort of like document cultural thinking and beliefs and he tells all these sort of myths and stuff. So, you know, my point is if I were to recommend to like an 18-year-old or something, you know, for a summer read like this ancient Greek book, you'd think like, you know, I don't want to get bogged down in like this ancient Greek stuff, you know, but he is fascinating from the first pages. I mean, immediately you're in the realm of myths and storytelling and, you know, empires and kings and prophecies and all kinds of stuff. But I think he's a really diligent journalist. And I say that because he often gets certain things wrong and we know that they're wrong, but he tells you why he thinks something. So, of course, he doesn't know things like the earth wraps around the sun and so that leads him to something false, but because he's telling you, he's showing you his work as a teacher would say. I think it's brilliant and I got all excited by him and then thought I would really love Thucydides and I didn't care for Thucydides at all and it turns out they hated each other and their styles are vastly different. So, anyway, if someone's read Thucydides who's more popular and thought why I don't care for ancient Greek stuff, give Herodotus a try.

I struggled with this, too. Yeah. My favorite movie is called Magnolia. Do you happen to know it?

The worst way to describe it would be to call it a Tom Cruise film, right? He is in the film but he does a phenomenal job, but it's a cast of characters that includes Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy and several others. And it's PT Anderson is the director who's famous for a number of films. And it's at least 25 years old. I mean, this has got to be late 90s. And it's a film where you have maybe the lives of eight different characters. It's probably three, maybe three and a half hours long. It's beautifully done. The cinematography is amazing, but it's really nice how like these eight characters' lives in some way, and I think this is where Magnolia comes from, the shape of the flower, some ways intersect. Maybe they only intersect thematically. Maybe you find out that someone is the daughter of the other character or what have you. But it's just beautifully written and beautifully comes together. And just talking about it makes me want to see it. I haven't seen it for more than 10 years, but I've probably seen it four times, which maybe isn't that long or that many until you realize just how long a film it is. I'll put it on the watch list.

All right. Fan favorite number two is Back to the Future. I love this film. I will watch anything to do with time travel or time loops. And I recently got a chance to see with my little daughter Back to the Future the Musical. Yes. Downtown San Francisco. There were 16 songs. None of them are good, but it was still phenomenal and they really bring a sort of cinematic feel to the stage. And it was just fantastic. But it's the sort of film where I could watch it anytime it comes on TV.

Oh yeah, that probably helps. I mean, you know, it's funny like when you have a favorite film and it's from the 80s, like you sort of think like, oh, wouldn't it be great if it got redone today, but of course you vastly worry that they would ruin it. And I can imagine someone rivaling the role that Michael J. Fox plays. I mean, he's just like the perfect cooler.

Yeah, absolutely loved it. So, yeah,

I just wanted to be current. So, Oppenheimer is, I just think, a total masterpiece, and it's one of those films — it came out just as I went on book leave, and so I immediately wanted to race home and go buy the book. And it's of course a 900-page book, you know, winner of the Pulitzer, and I didn't allow myself to buy it until the manuscript was submitted. So as soon as the manuscript was submitted I ordered it, and then, you know, I only read 200, 250 pages before edits came in, and you know, then I get new interest, and so I've never come back to it. This is all in the last year, but I would love to read that book. Um, I would have probably read another biography of Oppenheimer because Ray Monk, who wrote a favorite book of mine on Wittgenstein, the German philosopher who's going to come back in a minute when I give my favorite quotes, he wrote a biography of Oppenheimer. So, not the one that the movie is based on. Um, but yeah, Oppenheimer is a significant enough figure that I think I could read two biographies of the same length.

So, I hope I'm not cheating. I'm using two professors. Okay, to start.

Okay, so I sort of kind of sort of minored in world literature at the University of Toronto. And I was not much of a student in high school. It's not that I was trying and failing, I just wasn't really trying. I had no real passion for anything. This is why the maturing year off was really helpful, because, you know, I spent some time in Indonesia, and I just had basic questions like, you know, if Muslims and Hindus are fighting so much in India over places like Kashmir, but Bali was half Hindu, half Muslim, like why aren't they fighting here? Like, it's not like a great question, but like I didn't know the answer, and I was kind of intrigued, and it just sort of awakened me to understanding different cultures and wanting to know more about them. So although my degree is in religion, you could really say it's in anthropology, and I got to study a lot of different cultures, including, like you would say, non-literate tribes. Back in the day you'd say pre-literate tribes, but that's because there was a sort of social Darwinist flavor mixed into the literature that academia since turned against for obvious reasons, perhaps. Where was I going with this?

So I unofficially minored in literature, and I had this favorite professor named Sam Selecti. Um, he really opened my eyes to Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Also some thinkers I didn't care for, D.H. Lawrence. He loved him, but I didn't like Lawrence. Um, but he was a really tough professor in terms of the marking, but his class was always a great joy because he would just tell stories, and they weren't necessarily about the books we were reading. And so one of my favorite quotes that I'll have in a second actually just comes from him, and he attributed it to Hegel, and it turns out it's — Google doesn't know this quote, so I don't think it is Hegel. It's apocryphal Hegel, but I really liked him.

I guess I always was so impressed by his smarts that I would really spend a lot of time on my work, hoping to sort of be in his league of 'this isn't just acceptable, but he's learning from my interpretation of James Joyce' or something. And so I remember the first time I submitted a two or three-page assignment. Uh, we get our papers back at the end of the class, and he said, 'You've all disappointed me so much. I've only handed out one A in this class. Everybody else is around a C range. Everyone needs to step up their game,' you know, and goes on this diatribe for a couple minutes, and I'm thinking like, I'm out of my league. Why am I in this world literature class when I'm a religion major? Like maybe I should just drop out or whatever. And then I get my paper and I look at it and I've got an A+. And that sort of set the ground for wanting to continue to get that grade for the next two years that I did work with him. And it culminated in my thesis about James Joyce's Ulysses. And it got like an A++ in it, and it was submitted for the Dean's Prize. And did not win. We didn't even hear back. But nevertheless, that was just great.

Contrast that to my other favorite professor, an anthropologist named Jillian Gillison. Um, I saw both of these teachers a few years ago, so they're still around. Um, she was an expert in a place in Papua New Guinea, okay? Like a real anthropologist, and she spoke the Gim language. I mean, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of people there are in the Gim tribe, but not many. And she can speak their language and had written a book about it. And she was a real Freudian. She's the person who introduced me to Freud. And she was the opposite of Sam Selecti in terms of, you know, handing out really good grades if you did well. Um, her highest praise would just be to write 'good' on your paper. And I remember when I got an A grade for a sort of private seminar I took with her because I studied with her for three years. She gave me an A for the paper and an A for the course, and said, 'I hope you know nobody would ever publish this shit.' And I was sort of taken aback, and she goes, 'Look, you fulfilled the requirements of the course, the requirements of the paper, but you need to know it's a whole different thing to get something published. What you say in 10 pages, a better editor could say in five, and it would be better written.' Um, and I just loved that, because later I knew some students at Columbia because I lived on their campus. And I remember someone getting an A on a paper that I had marked just days earlier, and I thought it was kind of pathetic, and it had all sorts of problems, and words that the writer didn't actually know, and things like that. But then she got an A, and she thought, 'I'm going to submit this to the New Republic,' you know? And I just thought, you need Jillian Gillison to say, 'You fulfilled the requirements of my course, but nobody's publishing this.'