The Emerging Strategy: Rethinking Business with Alejandro Salazar

Brent Peterson (00:02.636)
Welcome to this episode. Today I have Alejandro Salazar. He is the bestselling author of the Emergent Strategy and Managing Director of Strategy Firm Breakthrough. Alejandro, go ahead, do an introduction for yourselves, much better than I just did. Tell us your day -to -day role and one of your passions in life.

Alejandro Salazar (00:23.202)
Thanks, Brent. Thanks for having me in your podcast. Yeah, I mean, I guess I've been a consultant all my life. I mean, I never wanted to be like they say in the real sector. I've always been a consultant, strategy consultant, mostly Latin America. I started my career in the US. And over time, I developed philosophy, which was very successful and, you know, I guess 20, 25 years into the road.

people ask me to, why don't you write it? I did, around the time of the pandemics, right before it. You know, I never thought I was going to sell much. I did it just out of, you just to make the statement and to leave, even to facilitate the training of my consultants. And it turned out to be a huge success. It turned out to be a huge success. Let me just, it turned out to be a huge success and.

best -selling book in Colombia, you know, for Colombia's standards, you know, it just went above the charts. It's doing the right, also the same type of tracking in Latin America, and I decided to translate it into English. I'm entering the, I guess, the US market, the big market. So today I tell you that I'm still a consultant. I do a lot of podcasting with people like you. I travel a lot. Hobbies,

tend to be a boring guy. I like walking a lot. We have very good, very pristine ecosystems to walk around in Colombia and in Germany, Latin America. I do some traveling. And other than that, I just spend time with my kids. I have four. And that's about life. I I spend time in the US, in Mexico.

Dominican Republic and mostly in Colombia throughout the major cities. That's kind of my life in a nutshell.

Brent Peterson (02:23.714)
That's great. Yeah. I spent a lot of time in Mexico and I actually, find that Dominican Republic is the hardest to understand for me for Spanish. They speak very fast and they have a very Spanglish version of Spanish and now my Spanish is terrible. So, but anyways, yes, good. So before we get started on content, you have volunteered to be part of the free joke project. I'm going to tell you a joke and all you have to do is give me a rating one through five.

Alejandro Salazar (02:48.021)
Okay, yes.

Alejandro Salazar (02:52.758)
Great, go ahead.

Brent Peterson (02:53.642)
I have a topical joke that's relevant for today. So here we go. If laziness was an Olympic sport, I would come in fourth just so I wouldn't have to walk up to the podium.

Alejandro Salazar (03:08.31)
That's good. I'd say that's a four for me. I liked it. I liked it. So you wouldn't even make the bronze medal. That's good.

Brent Peterson (03:12.126)
OK, good. Thank you.

Brent Peterson (03:17.134)
Exactly, because I'm too lazy. All right. So today we're going to talk about strategy. I feel like that strategy is often one thing that most a lot of businesses overlook or don't even do. And we kind of started off with, you know, there's a bunch of frameworks that you can do to put your business together to help you in the day to day sort of things that help you

Alejandro Salazar (03:19.585)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (03:44.792)
punch card items to make sure that things have happened, that there's trailing KPIs and forward -looking ones. Strategy is one that is forward -looking that people often don't do or miss. And I think one of the things that you've said that it's dying. So tell us a little bit about the background and why you're so passionate about this.

Alejandro Salazar (04:08.438)
I think you're right in your general diagnosis. I think strategies are totally misunderstood word, misrepresented, mispracticed for sure. And I think the whole thing started with the really bad idea. And I think the really bad idea that captured the imagination and I guess the practice of so many years, so many people was strategic planning. The first bad idea.

was the idea that most people tend to confuse and to associate a strategy with a strategic plan. And I think that's the origin of the problems. Obviously, that has led to a huge industry of which a lot of people benefit, consultants, technology providers, internal offices, planning offices. But I think that's the origin of the bad idea. So for you to have any chance to solve the conundrum, the first thing you need to kill

is that idea. Strategy is not a plan and strategic planning is a little bit of an oxymoron. It's a contradiction in terms. You can't plan strategy. I guess why am I so passionate about it? Because my life was about

Coming aware of that, understanding that in my practice, even from the very beginnings, I was very lucky to be in certain points in my career with certain guys that all of them in different ways started the demolition. I think what I did was to actually, and a lot of people for the last maybe 20 years, 15 years, already knew that strategic planning was a zombie.

And people started using the word strategy instead. But unfortunately, a lot of people that say, okay, I don't do plans, I do strategy, still are capturing in a planning paradigm. So that's really the bad idea that's the origin. I think it goes back to the last 70 years. It goes back to when the Americans came back from the World War II with the military practices and they spread over the American industry.

Alejandro Salazar (06:24.044)
Then through the era of Japan, with the Japanese paranoia. know, back when I went to school, I went to grad school in the US back in those times. And so all that mixing and blending of total quality plus the heritage of the Second World War planning, know, I mean, remember we just watched the movie, you know, the Alamo and all those things, they were theoretically plans. And so the whole thing captured and became mainstream.

And so it's an ether where a lot of people are there without being aware of it. So that was kind of the story of my life. I became a parent as I practiced it. And at some point, I think that my contribution was that a lot of people knew that the thing didn't work, that the king was naked. A lot of people pointed to the philosophical criticism of it.

But nobody had really, from what I know, and that's what I decided to, you know, I wrote an ambitious book to go into every language. Okay, if strategic planning doesn't work, then how do you practice the other stuff? What is the other stuff? How do you practice it? How do you take it concrete? And that's the idea, you know? The idea is I devise a theory, not a methodology, so that you can practice.

Strategy without the need of the work plan and to do so you you have to do it, know with a I guess a philosophical compact that I would call the emergent approach And so that's that's it and and and you know, I wanted to do a theory I still remember an old quote by Gary Hamill famous management thinker who used to say that you know He used to say the problem with the strategy is that there's no theory

for what strategy is and how should it be practiced. I think that's what I did. I stayed in my principles. I set some principles, not steps or methods. And it's captured the imagination of a lot of people down here. And I'm sure it will capture the imagination of a lot of people up there, because I don't think strategy has anything to do with culture or language.

Brent Peterson (08:48.056)
Yeah, so let's unpack that you mentioned earlier that there's a paradigm in strategic planning. Tell us a little bit about how that affects strategy and how there's a paradigm in

Alejandro Salazar (09:00.66)
Yes. Yeah, there's a fundamental paradigm in the whole. know, strategic planning comes from the general idea that the old plan, do, review type of thinking, which is the essence of the control mechanism. That's the way server mechanisms work. That's the way control systems work. And they should work that way. The problem is that organizations aren't that way, don't function that way, and strategy is not for control purposes.

So the whole mixture of, that's the origin of the bad idea. Once you take that paradigm means, people, you once you say, have to do a plan before I do, remember, plan to review. What authorizes the do is a plan, which then you review. That's the origin of the bad idea, because it's actually the other way around. The way it works in biological systems, you know, in the biosphere, in the econosphere, is the other way around. You do.

You do. First you do everything. I'm sure that your life is based on doing. What got you here is what you did. What you declared, planned. So the doing goes neglected. So in strategic planning, the doing goes after the planning and even after the reviewing. And it's a cycle of unconsciousness. In strategy,

You start, and that's the first principle of my theory is, is what you do. Strategy is what you've been doing. That's the origin of strategy. If your strategy, reflection, exercise, intention, whatever, doesn't start up there, then it started in the wrong path, and it will take you nowhere. So that's the essence of the thing. Don't finish by doing, start with the doing. And interestingly, it's very powerful because the world.

You I mean, you as a person, your organization, companies, you clash with the market. All the market cares is what you did, not what you thought, declared, aspired, intent, but what you did. So the feedback you get from the market is through your doing. So the emerging approach starts there. It's the other way around. The first principle is strategy is straight ass. A little bit like Forrest Gump. Strategy is.

Alejandro Salazar (11:28.224)
strategy that start there. And that's very interesting because when you look at the exercises that everybody does from humble offshoots to huge companies, they start with the plan, do, review type of thinking. And when you enter that path, you start platonizing. You start intellectualizing. You start aspiring. Most of the time, you end up trying to do what's fashionable, trying to do what

competitor is doing or the company that is fashionable is doing and that actually explains part of the problem as to why the thing doesn't work which is that it promotes convergence and at the level of strategy the worst thing that can happen to you is convergence. In strategy the worst news you can get is that you are like your competitors.

So the philosophical process, so when people started noticing, people like Mike Porter in the 90s, who was founder of Monitor, firm where I worked, when he came with the first, I guess, demolishing critique that strategy was about being unique, not better. And he posited this beautiful theory, strategy is uniqueness and the cost of uniqueness is choice.

Therefore, strategies are choice. That would be another one of my principles. But interestingly, you can't do really that. I mean, if you do that on a platonic way, you still fail. You need to understand that the market has you alive, and you have a right to do whatever exercise you're doing, because you're unique enough. So start off there.

When you don't do that, it's very hard to even practice that. know, mired in the noise, in the pressure, in the trends. So I actually think that Porter, he coined the, he actually diagnosed the problem, he coined the concept of comparative convergence. And he said, that's the disease of strategy. Yeah, that's the disease of what strategy is, of the what is strategy. His paper was called What is Strategy? But it's originated.

Alejandro Salazar (13:49.172)
in the how -to of the strategy. If you start in a planning mode, most likely you will end up converging.

Brent Peterson (13:59.244)
Yeah, so you mentioned earlier emergence strategy. Tell us how that differs from planning strategy.

Alejandro Salazar (14:09.614)
It's fundamental. mean, emerging strategy starts, and it's actually a beautiful synthesis. Remember, I mean, it's obvious that you work in the two worlds. Over the last years, there used to be this idea that startups worked by pivoting and hacking, and the incumbent established companies still did plans. I actually think that if you need two theories to explain the same phenomenon, then both theories are wrong.

Emergence means that in a huge company or in a startup, the origin of strategy is doing. That validates the inside of the lean startup people. I think they get carried away with it and lose their path a little bit. But the origin, what you're doing, what you're doing, and what the world is telling you about what you're doing with the fundamental feedback the world has for that, which is cash.

You know, the only important feedback, the market is blind, know, neutral. When it sees value, gives you back cash. When it doesn't see value, takes away the cash. Actually, in a way to scale or inhibit growth. when you start by doing, and remember, the emerging strategy is an exercise

Mindfulness when you start to have mindfulness because a lot of people don't know what they're doing You'd be surprised that you know, sometimes you talk to CEOs and you know, they don't really know what their company is doing so when you start there you get a very a very a a Real concrete actionable feedback interestingly That feedback and that's you know, the rest of my theory will talk about it may not coincide With what you thought or wanted?

But when you start with something real, when you start with a plan, a plan hasn't clutched with the market. That's why the old insights of military, old military guys that I remember reading a quote by von Moltke, the Prussian general who used to say that a plan doesn't resist the contact with the enemy. So plans are fragile to use use Taleb's lingo.

Alejandro Salazar (16:37.196)
Plans are fragile. There are so many ways in which they won't go as you planned. It will fragilize your organization. Whereas when you reflect upon what you're doing or what the market is doing, that thing is no longer fragile. That thing happened. Happened for a reason. You may not understand it. You may not like it. And that's where the real process starts. So I guess you're basically comparing reality with

Platonic theory I think and that and that's I think the reason why I mean You must have heard it many times strategic plans have two ways of 99 % of the plans fail for two reasons many people say that The plan wasn't

A lot of people say something even more cruel, that the plan was good but it was badly implemented. At the end, it's the same thing. The idea, the idea of planning, the idea that some guys make a plan for others to execute, the idea that you plan and then you implement, all those ideas implicit are bad. The industry around it is, it's a farce. It's an industry where, you know,

if you measure those things by their actual effectiveness in all those budgets. So that was the whole idea. And what I did was, the central thesis of my theory was, for you to get to the what of a strategy, if a strategy is choice and really hard choice, know, strategy is hard choice. It's being able to do things and organizing ways no other would have done it before. And for that, have

payoffs and trade -offs, choice, real choice. If that's the what of a strategy, then how is the how of a strategy? And what I came up with and the center of my theory is the only way for you, for an organization, to get to a hard choice is through a process of starting with the doing, getting some mindfulness of what the market is telling you. You may not like it, therefore it's going to be a discovery process.

Alejandro Salazar (18:55.296)
You will have to break paradigms. Nobody likes to break paradigms. And that thing will eventually give you the courage to exercise a hard choice. That's kind of the general theory. for you to get to a hard choice, you cannot be recommended a hard choice. You cannot plan a hard choice. You cannot say, look, I think in five years I'm going to divorce. Or you face choices. You eventually make those choices. They're going to be agonizing choices, difficult choices.

You're choosing between things that appear to be good all of them. And that process, if you really want to get to the what, you need to do it through an emerging process. So the essence of my theory is that I also think that once I kill your plan, what I give you in exchange is a strategy is not a plan. Then what is it? My proposal is strategy is a trinity, meaning an indivisible set of three things.

Strategy is what you do. We've talked about it. Strategy is a box of paradigms that any organization has, which explain a lot more what you do and the things you plan. Remember, people act upon beliefs, organizations too. So a set of paradigms, I call that the theory of the business or the theory of the world. That explains. And the third one, and the bond between those two is, and this is even, it's also subtle.

Strategy is how you are organized. Strategy is not something an organization does. So it doesn't live outside the organization. Strategy is how you are organized. Biology. The biological strategy of a species is how the species is organized. So those three things are indivisible. You kind of say, OK, I like the doing and let the other one. And the three things, co -mutate, co -evolve. And the choice process exists.

at the heart of that. So what I'm saying is, look, the choice starts with a breakthrough in your theory of the business. You discover suddenly that the market you thought was so attractive wasn't. You discover that the sexiest technology you invested in was not the sexiest technology. You discover that your relevant competitor wasn't the guy you were tracking, or by the way, that you shouldn't be tracking any competitor. You discover things and remember, nobody likes to discover those things.

Alejandro Salazar (21:21.878)
That's what I call a breakthrough. A breakthrough precedes a hard choice. And then the hard choice, the closing of the loop, why is it so hard? Why are choices hard? What are the choices that are hard? There are mutations in the way you're organized. So whenever people tell you, I did this hard choice, but the hard choice didn't entail any real mutation during the session, you know that's bullshit. They're deceiving themselves.

I learned in my life that hard choices and CEOs and management teams, know, avoid hard choices and rather stay doing plans, intellectualizing aspirations, because hard choices are mutations in the organization. And, you know, I don't think anybody likes to mutate by phone or by hobby. Once you mutate the organization throughout the hard choice, my theory explains that, you know, that organization becomes more coherent to the world where you got the breakthrough. So you become more coherent. What is coherent?

Very simply, when you're more coherent with the world, you get more cash. The fundamental feedback, the only feedback that the market has, which is very beautiful because you know, actually the way market economy is, I actually used to reflect upon why is it that we in the Western world criticize centrally planned economies so much, but they have no problem in centrally planned companies?

So a strategy is a fundamental process of capitalism. It's emergent. It's unplanned, which doesn't mean that it's not understandable. It doesn't mean that it's purely empirical. You have to make an effort. And the other, I guess, big corollary is that there's no strategist in my story. The idea of a super CEO who's a genius.

and he sees things that other people don't see and get other guys to do his, know, it's more, the strategies in my story is a collective intelligence that comes from the organization because for anything to emerge has to exist on a tacit way. So my theory what says is if you have a company that is alive, don't do this with business plans. With business plans, just go and do something and learn. But if you have an organization that is alive,

Alejandro Salazar (23:48.48)
I'm totally sure that the organization knows a lot of things that it's not aware it knows that are critical for the explanation of its being alive. That's kind of the, so I always tell my consultant, look, anybody who can hire us is already very successful, and the most successful in a biological sense. So start up there. So I start with the organization, I start with the collective intelligence, I start with the doing, read, and all that I'm telling you, all those things.

are totally neglected in the world of platonic strategic planning. Fashion, trends, paranoia. Every 10 years there's a paranoia. Now we're in the AI paranoia. We used to be in the mobility paranoia. Before that in the ERP paranoia. Before that, back in, I don't know you were around those areas in the total quality management paranoia. Japan's paranoia, China's paranoia, California's paranoia.

So when you have your thinking, the paranoia in the world, kind of strategy comes from an American friend. He tells me that by the law of unintended outcomes, I ended up putting together a theory that was Western in its what's and a little bit Eastern in its house, which I think is a good approach. But I didn't mean it, by the way. So I had a plan. I didn't have a plan. That's kind of my general view, Brent.

I set eight principles, which my claim is if you practice those principles and you haven't read my book, then you're an emergent strategy and you don't have to read it. And if you have read the book five times and don't practice those eight principles, then you're playing with yourself. That's kind of

Brent Peterson (25:34.734)
Can you list the eight principles in the next three minutes?

Alejandro Salazar (25:39.424)
Yes. So a strategy is what you do. A strategy comes from a breakthrough. The origin of a strategy is a breakthrough that you can only come to through reflecting upon your doing. Once you have fundamental breakthrough, like in science, the third one is strategy is learning. have a breakthrough is a domino that changes your theory of the business. That's the third one, learning, discovery, the essence of strategy is learning.

The fourth one is that thing is what gives you strategy choice. Don't try to make hard choices with the same learning you had before out of recommendations and trends.

The fifth one is critical is strategy is about value. And value is the most misrepresented thing. mean, value is the currency of which a strategy is all about. And it's been abused. You financiers have one way of saying it, marketeers other one. There's only one. And I actually posited a very cogent definition of value. Value is that thing that is simultaneously relevant and distinct.

Strategy is, this is very American but not very Latin American, so it's a principle. It happens in all cultures. Strategy is about winning, not playing. Many times, many times you do strategic plans to catch up, to match, to tie. Winning, so it's very fundamentally, you know, and that's the whole mantra of Roy Martin, play to win. Because a lot of people, a lot of the time people play to play.

Strategy is about distinctive capabilities, building and accumulating like the turtle in the Achilles versus the turtle, accumulating a set of distinctive capabilities. And finally, strategy is organization. Those are the principles, and you will find them embedded. They're not a sequence. It's like Russian dolls.

Alejandro Salazar (27:50.562)
in all problems of the strategy. So that's really, and actually my clients, that's what they do, we teach them how to practice those principles. We never try to enter and tell them what to think, how to think and how to practice those principles. That's kind of a, I guess that's my confession.

Brent Peterson (28:11.566)
So your book right now is in Spanish, as I understand. When will it be available in English?

Alejandro Salazar (28:16.106)
Yeah, no, it's available in English. The Emerging Strategy, it's already, yeah, it's available in English. It's in Amazon, available all over the US, North America, Mexico. It's available in English and Spanish all over Latin America. My website, theemergingstrategy .com, and you can get there, know, podcast, the concepts IP.

Brent Peterson (28:18.432)
it is.

Alejandro Salazar (28:44.611)
that we share with the world. And I am crossing over. I am spending a good deal of my time bridging into the US market. I that's where I was originally from. I had the chance, the good luck in life of learning the fundamentals from the big ones. So that's it.

It's there and we have around our IP a lot of different models to engage people from podcasting to boot camps to our actual consulting. We have a consultancy, a very successful consultancy in the countries that I told you about, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, Panama. I have a small base in Miami, all Latin Americans do. But that's the story. But the book,

A client of mine told me, translating your book is continuous improvement. For me, continuous improvement is the opposite of strategy. So he knew who he was talking to. He said to me, if you translate your book, that's continuous improvement. If you rewrite it in English, that's a choice, which is what I did. I I didn't translate it. I rewrote it. Even the English book has some pieces that the Spanish book still hasn't gotten into it. I have to take them into the second edition. That's the story, Brent.

So I hope that people can get a hold of the book and, you know, what people tell me. And I wrote the book to get the chance for, you know, getting my ideas so a lot of people could practice them, knowing that, you know, we are a small boutique and even in my country I wasn't going to be serving anything larger than the 1 % of the 1%.

Brent Peterson (30:39.246)
That's great to tell us how can people get in touch with

Alejandro Salazar (30:43.042)
OK, through the website, theemergencestrategy .com, in my LinkedIn. My LinkedIn is actually the social network I use, Alejandro Salazar. My firm, The Emergence Strategy, leads to my consulting firm. Breakthrough. You can imagine that if I named my firm 25 years ago, before I named this thing The Emergence Strategy, the importance of the concept of breakthrough, of actually breaking paradigms.

But I'd say mostly through LinkedIn. I have been using that platform as the platform to connect and to engage with the people that want to share ideas and help me build it. And it's very interesting. I that old maxim that nobody reads the same book is so real. mean, the feedback that I get and the perspectives and nuances that I get from different readers is fascinating. I I'm so eager

eventually right at 2

Brent Peterson (31:46.466)
That's perfect. I'll make sure we get all these in the show notes as links to get in touch with you. Alejandro, yeah, it's been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for being here today.

Alejandro Salazar (31:51.702)
Please. Please, Brian, yeah, yeah.

Alejandro Salazar (32:02.784)
So you wanted to take a final thing or I mean, you said you would ask me

Brent Peterson (32:08.834)
Yeah, at the end of the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they want. What would you like to plug today?

Alejandro Salazar (32:16.77)
Okay, man, that's interesting. Shameless. I tend to be a very authentic guy. mean, maybe I'd like to talk about what's going on in Venezuela, our neighboring country.

Alejandro Salazar (32:31.264)
Very, I mean, in my authentic, non -politically correct view of that.

Brent Peterson (32:40.088)
Go ahead, tell us.

Alejandro Salazar (32:41.514)
Okay, no, I'm saying that I hope that our neighbors, know, mean, Colombia and Venezuela have a common origin throughout many times, throughout times, they were, you know, because of their oil riches, the richest country in Latin America, we were the poor brother, the poor neighbor, and they had these tragedies, tremendous tragedy, you know, which is this totalitarian,

socialistic cancer that got there, you know, was, I guess, a coup on steroids. And I hope that, you know, that we say in Spanish something, don't know if it's maximum exist in English, there's no evil or no bad thing can last for, you know, 100 years. So I'm glad that we're living through the last moments of that era. And we're going to...

enter an era of prosperity actually believe that in the post -globalization world, we're going to have this North American, the North American diamond, like they call it, is going to be the most prosperous region of the world. If we all understand it emergently and make the choices to take it to the next level, Americans,

And the southernmost states of that diamond are Venezuela and Colombia. It's actually going to be a very interesting. So I'm so glad that this painful 25 years, this tragedy, social and human tragedy appears to be coming to an end. I send my Venezuelan friends my best wishes that this thing ends, that they end it. I nobody can end it for them but themselves.

And I hope that we will wait for them at the other side of the river to enter this. And it has a lot of strategies, a discipline that applies to all human collectives, not only companies, your life, teams. We just saw the Copa America in the US. And so Venezuela needs to play to win. Colombia needs to play to win. The US needs to play to win. We all as a region could win.

Alejandro Salazar (35:07.49)
And that's an extraordinary challenge. And for strategy to reign, to dominate, we'll have to have a conversation, learning, breakthroughs. So that's, guess, I'm so, you know, I'm so, over the last 24 hours, focused on my Venezuelan friends and hoping that they can get rid of that shit and that, you know, stupid ideas.

Seize the day and go for it and they will be a wonderful. I'm sure a wonderful Partner and country to do business with and to prosper together. That's kind of my You know, I wanted to say that to my Venezuelan friends

Brent Peterson (35:50.386)
That's good. I think you're surrounded. Ecuador is having some issues and Bolivia is having a cash crisis right now and Eva Morales is back. So you're surrounded by turmoil sometimes in Colombia.

Alejandro Salazar (35:56.598)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Alejandro Salazar (36:04.102)
I mean, we are, we have the term, you know, let me give you the sequel to it. the country that has the challenge now is Colombia. fortunately enough, Colombia has always been a country that gets, you know, it's a little bit untimely. It is always the last in trends. We're so lucky that we, I mean, so lucky and so stupid simultaneously in being the last to join this.

stupid gank of socialist revolutions in Latin America based out of oil or whatever. Ecuador, I think, overcame it. They're now coming. Bolivia, you know you visited Bolivia. Bolivia is in, but Venezuela, and in particularly Venezuela and Colombia are the Caribbean countries. This whole thing, remember this whole problem, which has a lot to do with anti -Americanism. If you look at the speech of this guy,

started in the Caribbean, started in the Caribbean. You remember Cuba and Venezuela and Colombia are Caribbean countries. I think we're in a battle for our prosperity. What happens in Venezuela affects Colombia. What happens in Colombia affects Venezuela. I think those two countries in this theory of the diamond I told you are very important. I think when you go to the south of South America, that's a different world. When you see trade patterns, for example, the countries to the south of Colombia.

All of them, their largest trading partner is China. Colombia, and certainly Venezuela, if it were free, the largest trading partner would be the US. So that's the real reason. that's what I'm really, I I see, I'm seeing this thing emerge. And like in emerging strategy, once you see the thing emerge, it doesn't mean you see quite a smoke. It means that you catalyze that with hard choice. So I think we have a great era ahead of us.

and it's very interesting and that's I'm rooting for.

Brent Peterson (38:08.95)
Yeah, thank you, Alejandro Salazar. It's been a very interesting conversation and thank you for the ending and for your shameless plug that I'm happy that you have this passion and I'm with you. We had an exchange student from Venezuela in the 1990s and things were completely different then. So I appreciate your passion. Thank you so

Alejandro Salazar (38:28.384)
Yes, that's it.

Alejandro Salazar (38:33.11)
Thanks Brent. It's been a pleasure being in your podcast with your audience, getting to know you, knowing that you had some connections to Latin America. Next visit of yours has to be Colombia. And when you do, please call and make sure you show you around.

Brent Peterson (38:47.8)
Certainly, thank you so much.

Alejandro Salazar (38:49.612)
Bye