Episode 44 : Alex Wilcox (CEO , JSX) | The Playbook

Hi, I'm Radhika Zavari, host for my teaching podcast, "Podwalk", where I have candid conversations with industry leaders about brand purpose, leadership and what it really takes to grow in today's marketing landscape. After leading billion-dollar brands at companies like Nestle, I now serve as professor of practice at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where I championed diverse and real world learning. Take a walk literally or in spirit and join me on "Podwalk" as we explore how marketers are building soulful brands and driving meaningful change. These are the stories behind the strategies and the people behind the brands you love. I tell my people, you know, if you're in a situation where it's not clear what you should do to satisfy a customer, just imagine that customer and your mother and what would you do to satisfy her, right? Oh, that's beautiful. What would make her proud? In this episode of "Podwalk", we go behind the scenes of the modern aviation startup J-S-X, with its co-founder and CEO, Alex Wilcox. From his early days at the University of Vermont and Southwest Airlines to helping launch JetBlue and founding J-S-X, Alex shares what inspired him to reimagine short-haul travel. The lessons he's learned about culture and resilience and how customer experience remains at the heart of innovation. Together, we'll explore how to build a brand that balances operational precision with joyful, simple experience of getting from point A to point B. Alex, welcome to "Podwalk". I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks, Radico. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, you and I have some shared history. We have both lived in Vermont. We've lived in Mumbai for a little bit, you know, different times, of course, and now we ended up in Dallas. So I have to start off by asking you, do you still say "Wicked Good" or has that long gone? I say "Wicked Pisser" because I have the highest gold message usage, too. So, you know, "Wicked Pisser" is kind of the, it's the highest compliment or the worst insult, worst both ways. Yeah, yeah. So any favorite beer from Vermont? Yeah, I drink less than less now, but I love Magic Cat number nine. Magic Cat was a good one was my hair, brewery, whatever, there, for sure. Yeah, long trail, long trail, else pretty good. That's pretty good, too. That's so many good ones there. So many good discoveries as well. So let's get right into it. You worked at Southwest, Jed Blue, King Fischer, now GSX. That's quite a hollow fame airline resume. Berchard, right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Yes. So how did those early days shape you? In where you are today? You know, I had it easy as a kid. I always knew what industry I wanted to be in. I love to travel and I love to fly. And so it was always very obvious to me that I wanted to be in the airline industry. When I was young child, people assumed that meant I wanted to be a pilot. I'm a pilot, I'm only a private pilot, you know, but I actually wanted to be on the business side of things in the aviation industry. And because I had that focus in that passion, you know, right through high school and college, I was working at the airport, got jobs on weekends and afternoons, you know, during school and summers as well, fueling airplanes, you know, loading bags, those kinds of things. And I was just always very, you know, I read the Paul DeBible aviation, aviation, space technology, came out every week and it was my favorite day of the week. When it showed up in the library, I'd read it, covered cover, during lunch break, both in elementary and high school. And so I just was sort of very absorbed in it. And it was natural to me. So when the opportunity rose to go in turn as health with airlines back in 1992, I did that. I came to Dallas, I learned about Southwest, and I got to work with head of Perk Hiller her and made most and packedly. I learned about brisket and fried okra, things that did not exist. I love that. I love that. Yeah, of course, those are the important parts when you're in the South for sure. Yeah. Exactly. So when you were in school, you talked a little bit about school, you know, as you've gone through your journey, were there any favorite subjects that you absolutely love that sort of paved your path into aviation? Yeah, you know, I was an English and polycyme major in college. And it turns out, you know, English is very important, it's debilitated right and communicated through the written word. It turns out to be very important in life no matter what it is you want to do. So that's been very useful. But what I didn't know is how important political science was, you know, I'm in a very heavily regulated industry and also a very, very visible one. Some of our neighbors here in Dallas had actually tried to capture our regulators and get my business outlawed, which is very, you know, very unwelcome, one kind of behavior. Yeah. But we've learned how to counter that behavior both politically and through our customers. And I credit my background in polycy, you know, very much for understanding how a bill becomes a law and what you can do to defend yourself. I've also got very good staff and very good advisors, very good lawyers. But most importantly, I've got, you know, over a million customers who absolutely love what we do. And whenever we need a rescue, they really come to our assistance. Yeah, it's interesting how when we are in college and school, we think certain subjects are going to make it or break our careers like math and so on and so forth. And we're just reflecting on that the other day with someone that for me, organizational behavior is one of those subjects that, you know, now it feels like that's leading because you learn so much about people and as you progress in your career, it's really all about people and managing people and all of that stuff. And in those early days, you don't give as much credit to all those topics that you're studying in college and in school. So that's really what you can do as one individual. You need a team and if you can figure out how to develop a team and how to incentivize a team and how to lead in motivates the team, the world is your oyster, if you can't, then you've got nothing. Yeah, 100%. I think that's very powerfully said. And so I did a little research on you and I read somewhere that you've also been fired as a young child. Maybe not very young, maybe teenager. So what was that like? And what was the lesson that you learned? Tell us a little bit about that. Well, I was fired. I was a waiter in a restaurant in Vermont close to my parents house. They grew up, I grew up on an island called North Heroin like Sam Plain. And there's a resort there at Paul Soragher's. It's still there today. Very best place. I recommend it if you're looking for nice places to go in the summer. It's strongly recommend even though they fired me. And I was also taking flying lessons out of summer. I think it was 1986. And which is the year I got my father's license. We, I was waiting tables to pay for my flying habit, you know, for my flying lessons. And that was my priority. And I worked at a lunch shift one day. Several days actually. And one of our duties was to make sure that we stayed until the last customer was there. And then also to speed up the kitchen and do the other chores. And occasionally I would leave a little bit early before everything was completely done because I didn't want to be like to my flying lesson. And one day it was very embarrassing for him and for me because he was good friends with my parents. My boss, Mike came out and said, "Alex, nice to see you." And I said, "Good to see you too, Mike." And he goes, "By the way, you don't work here anymore." That's what he'd mean. I'm a 16, you know, a 16 years old at the time. And I said, "What do you mean?" Because what do you work here anymore, you figure it out. So why not? That's what you keep it even early. And you keep it not sweeping the floor. I need to have people here that are going to do the finish the job. And I was humiliated. And I was embarrassed. And I had to drive back home and tell my parents what had happened. I was still living with them, of course. And I recognized that at that moment in time, the importance of finishing the job. I have not been fired since. I think history could repeat itself, but so parts are good at JSX. But I certainly learned lesson the hard way. Yeah, it keeps us honest for the rest of our lives. All the wonderful story. Young kids, young people, and young males, in particular, sometimes we have to look at things hard ways. I think all of us. I think that is true for all of us. Yes, absolutely. Well, okay, let's talk about JSX because I know our audience is just waiting to hear more about that concept. And, you know, most of us are familiar with JSX, whether we have taken a ride on it or contemplating. I know I'm contemplating a ride on it. And I'm going to get to it very, very soon. So JSX is this hop on jet experience. And it feels very personal and fast and very human. In an industry that oftentimes, you know, one might say anything, but so how have you guys been able to carve that experience for the consumer? And was there a moment where you sort of felt like was an aha moment where you felt like, you know what, something needs to be changed with travel. Something needs to be re-imagined and reinvented there. What we do is very simple. And this is our business plan. So, please be ready to take notes. Our business plan is we have a person at point A. And we want to take a point B. And we want them happier at point B than they were at point A. That's the whole, that's the plan. Okay. So we get you from where you are to where you want to go and you're happier when you get there. And that is something that the airline industry has a very hard time doing. They can often get you to point B, maybe you're late and probably frustrated. And certainly, it feels a, many times you've been ripped off or lied to. And so we took out all the impediments from getting here from A to B. And that's, you know, the fastest thing, of course, is getting you out of your car into the airport. within 20 minutes and the door closes and off you go. There's no reason we need to spend two hours at an airport for 45 minutes in an airplane. The industry has managed to completely break the model and the incentives are all wrong. So the epiphany for me was when I was running a private jet business and I would see people pay me $10, $20,000 to fly for an hour, say from Lawrence County, California to Oakland when commercial airline would take you there for 200 bucks and more or less the same time. But it wasn't more or less the same time. It was actually you had to show up an hour ahead of time. You had to go through security, you had to take out your shoes and you had to walk through shopping mall and you had to have all kinds of things offered to you didn't necessarily want. And then it was time to board, you know, you had to wait for 160 other people to get on the airplane with you and then you, you know, taxi for a while and then when you finally take off and you got wait for a gate at the other end, having forbid you're early because you're not actually early, you're gonna just sit there and wait for the gate to open on the other side and then you pull in. I'm describing what we all experience, you know, most times that we fly. And then you have to wait for 160 people to get off and having forbid you to check the bag because that could be, you know, another hour on your trip. Yeah. And so it's just, it's a very dehumanizing, almost humiliating experience for most people. And the entire time your treat is like a child. Sit down, shut up, put on your seatbelt, don't talk to me as I talk to you. You know, you're really infantilized and you're told what to do and what not to do and when to show up and there's really no other service industry that treats you in such a manner. So-called service industry. And so we just, we basically deconstructed the whole experience and from our experience in the private industry, we knew that you could actually get a person out of a car into an airplane in a matter of minutes. We figured out how to do that at scale. So we are continuing to scale up. But our USP is basically, you know, gets you to point at a point B as fast as you can, which is part of making you happy. And you're moving all those impediments. So you're not going through a shopping mall, you're not going through a demon, you know, humanizing security experience. We have security to be sure, but it's a much more efficient process. And by the way, it's done at the time you want to done, which is right when you're boarding the airplane. - Yeah. - We want to make sure there's nothing bad on you, you know. If you go through security checkpoint, then you're walking through a shopping mall. - Yeah. - You know, whatever else you can acquire during that time. So it's small as beautiful when it comes to service, small as beautiful when it comes to security. And so we created, you know, a smaller version of an air carrier. And then the other USP of course is that half the air was we fly to, no one else flies to. And that's important because this country has an embarrassment of airports, you know, we've got 5,000 publicly-funded airports in the United States. But the entire US airline industry only flies, I'm going to hear my window goes on my airport, only flies to 480 airports. So fewer than 10% of the publicly-funded airports in this country are even available to people that don't have access to a private airplane, whether it's a accessory, whether it's a valve stream, most people don't have access to private aviation. And therefore most of us, 99% of us, have stuck with the 480 airports offered by the airlines. And so we can get you much closer to where you're going. So, you know, if you go into the Bay Area, we can get you to Oakland for sure, but we can also get to the Conqueror, we can get you to the Napa, we go to LA, meet up, we can go to many airports that are not served by other hairs and we'll be soon opening Santa Monica, California with our ACR fleet, which we just acquired, which needs even less firmly. So that's sort of how we did it. And the epiphany was when we finally sold our first flight and watched people get on and off the airplane, couldn't believe how easy it was. You know, that was the moment where we knew we had something. - And it's really the entire journey because it's curbs to wheels up in 20 minutes or something like that. So that entire friction point is, you know, put at ease that stress is taken off, but the travel time, the de-boarding, the whole line yards. And so I love the way you have described it, that it's getting from point A to point B and happier, (laughs) which is not something that one might say for the travel industry particularly. So that's awesome. And you know, a lot of times, you know, companies talk about customer first as a mantra, as a slogan on the wall, very few actually do it. So as you have navigated that and you've had to come, you know, make decisions about the cost involved with it, whether it's time, whether it's other resources, sometimes it's even ego, how have you been able to manage through that in order to make the stuff decisions? - You know, they're actually not that tough for me because obviously, imagine, you know, to the lens of what do I want or what would my mother want, what my colleague want. And when you think about things that way, it becomes much simpler, you know, I've mentioned my mother because, you know, we're in the service industry and I tell my people, you know, if you're in a situation where it's not clear, what you should do to satisfy a customer, just imagine that customer and your mother and what would you do to satisfy her, right? - Oh, that's beautiful. - Or what would make her proud. So either, you know, if it's not someone in front of you, it's a decision you're wrestling with, you know, what would make your mother proud. And if it is somebody who's facing, you know, who's in distress, they need to fly, they've, you know, whatever the situation is, imagine that's your mother and how would you explain it to your mother and how would you take care of your mother. And that's basically the approach that we take with our customers, you know. We don't treat them like children, but treat them like respected parents, which I think is, you know, kind of the polar opposite of what most airlines do. And then when it comes to product decisions, cost decisions, you know, I think we take a view that if we build something that we are going to like, then it's pretty likely that other people are going to like it as well. The best example of that was when we installed Starlink and we don't charge for Starlink and that's, you know, our ISP Wi-Fi where the person in the world to put Starlink on an airplane, every single one of our airplanes is installed with it. And there's no login, there's no credit card, you just get on, you connect to the network and all your devices work instantaneously. You can stream what you want. If you want to have a FaceTime call, you know, with your mom, perhaps you can do that from the airplane as well, catch up. You should definitely do that every time you fly JSX, call mom. And you can do anything else that you want to do and anything else that can be done online, you can do. So it's basically seamless. You don't stop, you don't miss a step. And you're not stopping your life when you're getting on board, right there. Exactly, and you're also not spending-- And it's mom approved. And you're not spending 20 minutes trying to put a credit card number, you know, into your iPhone. Only to be frustrated when the system would actually work promised. And so, you know, we thought it would be amazing to have Starlink available to all of our customers. It would be even more amazing to have it be free and just work. We did that. And obviously, it's very costly, you know, economically. But I think the return has been there because our loyalty, our NPS code, our word of mouth just skyrocketed after we installed it. And even the experience within, I mean, I love the fact that this is mom approved sounds like it. I mean, that's the fun way of putting it. But even the experience in the plane, you know, it's roomier aircraft, you're not lugging your luggage in it and not putting it to the overhead bins. And you probably don't have overhead bins, I imagine. No. Right? It's sort of that concierge style experience where everything is easier. So it's not just the time that is spent, but also the fact that to your earlier point, you're triggered more like a human. Yeah. The difference between a commercial jet and a private jet is overhead bins, you know. There's no private jet out there that has overhead bins in it. Not that I'm more of anyway. And because it's very easy to get your back stored in the back and as soon as you land, you know, your bags are delivered to the side of the wing and off you go. And that's exactly how we do it at JSX. We don't make you, you know, still your own bags. And by the way, number one source of injuries in the airline industry is people's bags dropping over people when they're going in and out of the overhead bin. So we eliminated that risk as well. But, you know, we have a good model in the private jet industry, which is figured out how to get people quickly out of the car and into the airplane. And we're trying to emulate that, you know, at scale as much as we can. Yeah. And I imagine that as you are traveling yourself internationally on commercial flights or other places on commercial flights, where JSX is not yet there, what are you looking for as far as customer experience? Are you sort of scooping it out, like trying to figure out what are they doing right? And what can I learn from that? And what have you been finding? Is someone doing it really right? Yeah, very much so. You know, two of our investors include Katareways and Jeppeloo Airways. And Jeppeloo, I think, has got the best domestic, you know, first class product that there is. You know, if you go from New York to LA, and you fly in mint, there's no better way to get across our beautiful country. And they've been inspiring to me in terms of service selection and many choices and things like that. Katareways has a reputation for incredible service as well. I think everyone applies on the key suites and Katar business class to anywhere that they're going on a planet recognizes that as one of the best, if not the best airlines in the world. But those are long-haul situations and so they've got very elaborate lounges. And it's all designed around that long-haul experience. And one of the complaints we get at JSX is actually, your lounges are terrible, they're too small, there's no food, there's no bar. And like, guys, it's not an airport. Don't think of it that way. The whole point at JSX is to not spend time at the airport. Yeah, if you're flying from here to Doha for 18 hours, it doesn't change your trip very much if you have to show up in our head of time. And it's certainly nice to spend an hour in a nice place with good food. But that's the opposite of what we're trying to achieve at JSX. So we look for the touches that are important to the customers and that touch points and maybe to this downward service. But in terms of, but we don't want to lose our weight and forget what it is our customer actually wants. And we can spend a lot of money. But our lot is very small, too, because it's expensive to get real estate in an airport. We actually don't want to encourage our people to come spend time here because if we did that, we could just come to the pub. Not an airline. So, but in terms of what we do look for, the technology, some of our partners actually followed us with Starlink, both United Airlines, who is also an investor here. United and Qatar are ways for the first customers, the first major airlines to put Starlink on their airplanes after JSX. I think there's reason for that. that because they saw what we think here and they saw what our customers responded to it. And so I think they're learning from us as well. But it's a two-way street and the service and the solicitation that you get from Qatar, Aways, Fyathanans in particular, and how they address their customers and how they go out of their way to anticipate needs is something that we learn from every time I fly. Yeah, and absolutely, and some of it is transferable and some is probably not between a long haul versus a short haul. Your philosophy is different. You want to spend as little time as possible at the mini airport, you know, at the private airport versus being in a lounge at Qatar. You might want to spend a little extra time for all the reasons that we know. So, yeah, that's brilliant. I love the way that you have simplified this very complex space. Let's talk a little bit about digital. I mean, today, the experience is not just being at the airport, getting on the plane, deboarding, but it's also the entire process of being able to book the flight and check on the flight, the whole line yards. How have you been able to transform your digital platforms to connect with the consumer, where they want to be connected and ease the travel for them? We have an app, of course. It wouldn't be very good at care if we didn't. It's okay. It does fine-booking. We haven't integrated with the input experience too well yet. You can get your menu in certain other things, but it's a bit static, not very dynamic. And so, you know, the list of things that we want to do with the app versus the list of things we are doing. The app is the first list is much longer than the second, but the other thing that we do have, which is unique to us, mostly coming back to Starlink again, we have this huge pipe that goes, you know, two directions to and from the airplanes. And so, we've got some cool tricks up our sleeve for that. We've put instrumentation on our planes to see, to monitor the noise, to monitor the temperatures throughout the cabin, to monitor the vibration levels, the humidity even. And so, you know, if we get complaints that the cabins too cold, the cabins too hot, now with real-time monitoring of the fleet, we can adjust that. We can let the crews know that, hey, you might want to check the temperature in your cabin. Because sometimes the, you know, the cars and pilots are sitting in the cockpit, they don't necessarily know. So, we've been able to use it in non-obvious ways as well to improve the quality of the flight. We could conceivably, we don't do this currently, but we could conceivably put cameras in the cabins as well to kind of monitor, you know, the atmosphere in the cabin. And if people appear to be happy or not, and, you know, how often flighted an insert are making, you know, drinking and collecting, collecting refuse, you know, throughout the cabin, making sure that they're up and about. So, these things, with AI tools can also be very, very helpful to ensure you're providing great service in every single flight. My favorite feedback tool is our NPS report. Every customer is kind of a grubber. As an opportunity for at the end of the flight to rate the flight, the check-in station, the flight attendant and their travel experience. We get real-time feedback. It summarizes every Monday into a report that all in our senior leaders don't read. And so, being able to capture the feedback and thoughts of our customers, knowing real-time, all but in near real-time is extremely useful as well. And then we want to further integrate things. I want it to be able to have, you know, sort of the JSX-everything app where one button, you know, it takes fairly entire rhythm, and the car is delivered to your house, picks you up, gets the airport exactly the right time, not too early, not too late. You know, you just seem to see just walk through the terminal, board the airplane, sit down, and then the same experience at the other end, you know, has the second walk out of the terminal, your car's there waiting for you, and never break your stride. You know, that's the vision, and the tools are definitely there, and to offer that, you know, in a seamless way, most of the time. And so, that's what we're focused on. Yeah, sort of that driveway to plain experience, sort of that Emirates-for-class experience, or the Copic-Cue-Observate-D-A. And also, hey, I'll be curious what your students think about this, but, you know, TSA is now using your face as your comorbidity, you know, opportunity to try that as well. And so, never having to pull out your wallet, you know, right now, we check your ID, when you check in, we check it again, when you board. It's kind of paying the bus when you've got your carrying on bags and things, you're talking about your- Yeah. So, how do we, how do we eliminate that, and all you have to do is present your face to a camera? This is your ID. Yeah, sort of like global entry, like when you're walking through, you know, space-face recognition. Yeah. Just like- Which has made that entire process so much easier, right? Like, you're not standing in lines, not to your point, not pulling out your passport, forgetting your- or anything, your phone right there, and it makes it much more seamless. So, no, that's fantastic. So, that's your next step. But as you start scaling, and you were talking about scaling earlier, what are some of the biggest operational hurdles that you see, especially in a highly regulated industry, like aviation? Aviation is difficult for at least five reasons, you know. We're capital intensive, so if you want to scale, you need more airplanes, and the airplanes are very expensive. And there's newer economies of scale, by the way. So, every single airplane needs two pilots to fly, needs to fly a ten, and so every time you acquire one airplane, they have to go out and hire, you know, 22 people, we get a higher 16 pilots and the flight tends to go operate the airplane. And no scaling, no economies of scale, they're whatsoever. So, it's capital intensive, and then it's commodity-intensive, right? So, we don't control the price at fuel, but we buy a heck of a lot of fuel. Our costs, our operating costs are basically one-third crew members, one-third maintenance, and one-third fuel, and they're pretty much balanced. So, we're also highly regulated, as you mentioned. We've done a good job playing defense, making sure that the rules will make change to outlaws, while these underhanded, nasty, very dishonest competitors that are based in Fort Worth, and over here in the Lovefield. You know, these companies are well owned well on it, but you got to play defense on regulatory side, but there's no cap to, there's no regulatory cap to how big we can be. Now that we haven't been outlawed, we can grow freely. We are also subject to the vagaries of weather, if there's a thunderstorm in Dallas, you know, the entire network gets screwed up for a little while, and then finally we've got, we're very labor intensive, you know, we've got a lot of, every single plane needs a pilot, and every single airport needs employees as well. So, every single way that a business can be, you know, vulnerable or difficult, or having to have control, aviation has them all, and we have them on stage. So, you know, John Owen, who is the former treacherous health officer of lines and the founding CFO of JetBlue, he told me a very good op of the lesson. This is another, this is the second note of the, of my presentation here, and that is there's no such thing as too much cash in this business. You know, you have to have a very strong balance sheet, and if people send you our week, or they have a week balance sheet, what the competitors do is they just flood capacity on top of all the routes that put the fares down to 20 bucks, they're waiting for you to die, and then they go right back to what they were doing once you're out of business. And so, if you can demonstrate that you can withstand that kind of a challenge, then they're not going to be likely to screw with you that way. Excuse my language, but, you know, you have to be, you have to have that very strong balance sheet, because if you don't, people will know it and they will take advantage of it. So, let's well said, just being cash rich is extremely important. Yeah. That's a valuable lesson. If you start thinking about the lessons that you might want to share with other founders, and, you know, you've been in that position multiple times in your career, what's the one thing that's not said to a founder that you would really love to be able to say? Don't give up, you know, this be persistent, be unreasonably persistent, most businesses fail, most are of a fail, and it's not necessarily a lack of product market fit. It might, it may not be lack of capital. It's usually looks like persistence, lack of determination. You certainly have to be convicted that you've got a better mouse trap. There's a reason that your business should, you know, should be allowed to exist. The market will reward your effort. You know, I think any any startup is hard. A navigation is particularly difficult as an industry, you know, when it's got a reputation as that deservedly. But any kind of startup is difficult to do. But if you want to be different from everybody else, you also have to be willing to take on outsized adversity and just keep flying through. Yeah, that's that's very powerful advice. It's going to be harder than you think. That's yeah. For sure. For sure. For sure. By the way, yeah, don't be surprised by that, right? Like, we're warning you now. I mean, I tell our crew members when they join here, I try to talk to all of our incoming crew members. And if I can't be there, I have a video. And basically I say, I can't promise you much, but I can promise you they're going to be bad days. You know, planes will be delayed. They'll be weather issues. People will be going to funerals. They'll be upset with you for no reason. That's one of the few things I can promise you. But don't be upset when it happens because it's totally predictable. I don't know what's going to happen, but I can absolutely guarantee it will happen. So be prepared. And this is a part of the job. And so I would say something similar to entrepreneurs like you're starting a business. It's going to suck. It's going to be some really, really hard days and going to be full of self doubt. And that's that's one's important to persevere. And has there been a daily ritual? I love the advice, by the way. I think that's a very powerful advice. Very true. It's very hard to do, right? Like it's easy to say, but it's very hard to do. So do you have a daily ritual perhaps that has helped you through those hard days to get up the next morning and say, you know what? I'm I'm going to continue doing this. And I love yesterday was a hard day, but tomorrow is going to be a different day. Look, if you're healthy and your family is healthy, and you will have got, you know, it's already a good day. And so the other thing we tell our crew members and I tell myself almost every day, you know, happiness is a choice and you got to choose to be happy. No matter what our circumstances are, now if you're living here in Dallas and and your belly is full and you've got something to do, then you're better off than most of the planet. And so you got you got to count your blessings as well. And I think choosing to be happy, it's self-reinforcing. You actually become happy and your body becomes more positive and just speaking in a smile, we'll actually change your brain and your body chemistry. And I think, you know, I tell people, you're hired here because we think you're a happy person and the kind of person that chooses to be happy. But no matter who you are, you're gonna have bad days. You know, your life will eventually sound like a country song on someday and your pet will die and, you know, your partner will leave you or get in the fight with you and you get a flat tire on the way to work. But, you know, our customers don't care about that. Our customers won't be smile that when they get there. And the choice is to do that. So sometimes it's hopefully most of us natural. Sometimes you gotta put it in your game face and go out and fake it. And overcome, you know, your personal adversities you have and show up for your customers. So I think that's probably the lesson. - That's what makes the hospitality business so difficult for all the patrons, but also for the employees who are serving and hopefully people are empathetic to the food, to the fact that even people on the other side of the counter are humans and they could have a bad day and sometimes we expect way too much from the service industry. So well said. And I love the fact that you. - Your service leader go out and talk to people and lift them up, you know, me, so. - Yeah. - So a small personal collection with the people around you. It makes a big impact. Big impact on them. - So I would love to get to know, you're sort of alluding to purpose as you talk about all of this. And I would love to hear a little bit more about your personal purpose. - JSX, I'll bring it back to the name of the company for a second because it's very linked and I think they need to be linked. And JSX stands for a joyful, simple experience, right? So I think joy kind of is the purpose of life, to joy or happiness as we've discussed, you know. If you believe in a higher power and that power is your parent in some way, what is every parent want for their child happiness? - Boy in health, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, and happiness, right? And so, and if there is no higher power and this is all meaningless and we're just sitting on a rock and then completely randomly in the middle of the universe and it all goes away in five billion years, you might as well be happy too, right? Like whether it's a point, whether there's no point, you know, the only obvious choice to me is to choose to be happy and to build something, you know, to achieve something and to be of service to other people, you know. That's what the service industry is by definition. We help people, you know, get to where they want to go and hopefully be happy when they get there. And so, you know, being of service, I think is very, very important. I want my kids to be happy. And I try to lead by example there as well. I think, you know, misery is very contagious, misery is most company. And we've got to fight that, you know, we've got to fight that with every opportunity that we get. And so, you know, let's advance ourselves and let's have a good time doing it. That really is, it is. - That's great, that's fantastic. It's so wonderful to hear that joy and health and happiness and, you know, that sort of the, the personal purpose sort of connects to that, to the higher purpose, which is the corporate purpose and you're alluded to that. And, you know, let's talk a little bit about that if we may, you know, how do you align your corporate purpose with that of your personal purpose? And what happens when it's not aligned? And what happens when it's aligned, you know, from an impact decisions or even personal satisfaction standpoint, you know, what are the good things that come out of it? - On personal level, I want to be a force for good. I want to be, you know, one of the good guys. And I want to be kind to people. And I want to, I want the days to be better because they got, because I got to interact with them. And I want to be a service to people, right? Whether it's my family, you know, or my friends or whoever, and that kind of gives me purpose. And then certainly it is our corporate purpose to be a service to people. If we're not providing a service, or we're not making your life a little bit better, then you're gonna stop giving us money. And then we all have the oxygen that we need to breathe. You know, cash flow and profits. And so, provide, so long as we're providing a good service and being compensated for it appropriately. And creating that value to use the business words for these very same concepts, it will work. And if you want to become wealthy, you know, provide a great service to a lot of people. You know, and that's basically the way it's supposed to work. And in my experience, the way it does work. And if you want to be miserable and you want to have a whole lot of failure, then focus on what doesn't work. And don't worry about providing service. Just go out there and try to get the short term to kill. And you know, make as much money as you can, as quickly as you can. I think you'll find it very unfulfilling. And I think if you're corporate purpose and your personal purpose are not aligned, then that will lead to misery and probably failure. Yeah, yeah. And has that happened with you ever in your lifetime, or your career and what have you done with? Because you know, long as I sort of seek purpose at where we work, because we spend so much time at work. And so oftentimes, a young people, and when my son asks me, "I know you keep talking about purpose." Well, how do I find purpose? I don't even know where to start. And so generally speaking, you start when you begin working or you're in a college, and that larger entity sort of drives you or finds the energy and you to lead towards your purpose and that changes. It evolves over time. So has that happened to you where it hasn't been aligned? And if it hasn't, what did you do? No, I've always been engaged in what I'm doing. I've always had, you know, as I said early on, I always know what I wanted to do. And that's been a good North Star for me. And I've never been bored at work. I've never been upset at work. Other than the one time I got fired when I was waiting tables, but I had, that was not, that was the incident. You have a 60. It doesn't matter. Thank you. Thank you. But like anybody, I've been through difficult times personally. I went through a very difficult divorce about 20 years ago. And it was definitely the need here for me. I just got back from India where I had helped start Kingfisher Airlines. Airlines, I had no job. I had no marriage and I had no money. And it was a pretty tough place to be. But I just continue to do an amazing one of it. What is I want to build? And that's ultimately what we created here today. So I think you have to have something to look forward to. Yeah. Certainly much more fun when you have someone to do it to do it with as well. So I'm going to say I'm now a half-leaf, very happy, married, 11 years, and beautiful children. Congratulations. Now that's wonderful. It sounds like you're a very forward-focused man, which allows you to keep moving forward with resilience and perseverance and good energy. At the risk of sounding like a Disney movie, the past isn't the past. And you can't let it haunt you. Today in the Mar was all that really matters. Are you kidding me? Those Disney stuff things. You can throw it yourself. The only thing you can throw yourself, that took me a long time to learn. You cannot control the damn thing other than what you're going to do what you are going to do today. Yeah. No, absolutely. That's very well said. So talking about the future, what do you think the future of aviation might look like? Is it going to be flying cars and us calling JSX like we do at Uber like JSX? Where do you see us in 20 years, 25 years? Maybe less. It's a great question. The industry is now evolved to a point of almost absurdity in the network model. So you've got 10 or 11 big hubs. I'm talking about the domestic US hubs now, but it's true in much of the world. You have this hub and spoke model. And it's very good. And it's very efficient in many ways, where you can get from any small town in the US to any big town in the world in the world. And so I think, by and large, it actually works quite well for most people. But what has been happening as the gauge or the size of the airplanes continue to increase the number of small markets that can be served, possibly decreases, actually. And so there have been dozens and dozens of airports that used to have service in the longer half service. And that's a problem for people who live in those smaller communities. The other problem is that as the hubs get to a certain size, I mean, DFW is adding like 17 gates now. And the average gauge or the size of the airplane is increasing from something like 150 seats to over 200 seats. So you're going to have 20 more gates of capacity. You're going to have another 50 seats on each airplane. So when it is a thunderstorm over DFW, it's already miserable today and that reverberates around the world. But it's going to be exacerbated. And I think it's going to hit a point where the whole system is going to melt down more frequently. And so then people will be looking for an alternative to this hub and spoke system where every single person flying from point A to point B on the coast has to go through Dallas to get to the other end. And I think that the system has started to show its cracks. As I mentioned, there's 5,000 airports in the country. Only 10% of them, fewer than 10% of them have airline service. So I actually think that the trend will be towards giving people what they want in terms of point-to-point stops. There's some airlines that are doing it now, like Breeze and Evalod, they're flying a secondary intercerial airports on a point-to-point basis and they essentially over-flying the hub. And then there's airlines or carriers like JSX that are even smaller, you know, flying 30 passenger planes and able to serve tiny, tiny markets like Talsam in Mexico, guessed, and executive in Florida, you know, conquered in the East Bay, places that don't make any sense at all for the 180 plus seat airplanes that are being built now for the airlines. And so I think you're going to actually see a trend where the bigger-line airplanes continue to get bigger and the hubs continue to get bigger and less and less reliable and even less enjoyable than they are now. And what's there'll be many, many more smaller airplanes. Flying cars, I don't think so. You know, you got a car to fly. could be a bad car and it's going to be a bad airplane. These compromises think vehicles don't really work. Hybrid electric short airplanes, short-haul airplanes, I think that could work. If you have an electrically powered nine-pass-mere airplane, you want to fly from Fort Worth to Dallas. And there's a flight every 15 minutes. I think that's in the future. Getting from SMU to downtown or SMU up to Plano in an EV-toler plane, I don't really see it. I just don't see it. I think there's all kinds of regulatory and air traffic and energy issues that are going to make that extremely challenging. I wish those guys the best, but I'm not sure that the EV-toler models are at one. But things with wings will definitely continue to exist. And my job is to make it as pleasant as possible for my customers. Yeah. Now, this has been such a joyful conversation with you and very inspiring month for folks who are thinking about starting something on their own, but also just reinventing and reimagining any business model. And it's also really sets up the point that destruction doesn't have to be something that's absolutely brand new. It's taking the experience that you already have and seeing what no one else saw and reimagined and reinvented it. So it's been absolutely fabulous. Are you ready for your headlines? This is the favorite part of our audience. I ask you a couple of questions. And if you may, answer it in a word or a sentence. I'll do my best. All right. OK. Sounds good. OK, Alex, first question. What should young people learn in this digital age? Go outside, make a friend, talk to a human, get off line. I love it. What's the most undervalued leadership trait? Being real, being authentic. You don't have to be the smartest person, but you should be the friendliest person. What do you think is the power of marketing? Well, you can't buy it if you don't know about it. So if your target consumer has no idea you exist, you basically don't exist. What do you think is the purpose of purpose? The purpose of purpose is to give your job your life meaning. It's to give you-- to give your life meaning without meaning. And what's the point? Mine is to create joy and achieve something. Love it. What happens when your individual purpose and corporate purpose aren't aligned? Misery and bankruptcy. Alex, this has been such a thoughtful look behind the scenes of JSX and your journey from Vermont to visionary and stops along the way in LA and Mumbai and other places. And also, I got a chance to talk to you about purpose as well as the future of travel, which just sounds so much warmer and more human and maybe even wicked good, as we move forward. So thank you so much for joining me on "Podwalk." Absolute pleasure and terribly listening, fly JSX. Key takeaways from our conversation today. First, reinvention comes from seeing what others overlook. JSX was built on the belief that short haul travel could feel human again. Alex reminds us that disruption doesn't always mean building something new. Sometimes it's reimagining what's been taken for granted and designing a better experience around it. Second, customer experience isn't a department. It's the heartbeat of the brand. From check-in to landing, JSX succeeds because it obsesses over the moments that matter, time comforts simplicity. And the key takeaway is that brand strength isn't built on ads, it's built on consistency, empathy, and removing friction for the customer. And lastly, purpose and passion fueled longevity. Alex's story shows us that aviation is really about the next mission, not just destinations. When a company is clear on its purpose and why it exists and who it serves, it can evolve the technology, weather market, turbulence, regulations, and still keep human and the human heart beat of joy. Thank you for listening to "Podwalk." We appreciate it if you can subscribe to us so that you can hear the next upcoming podcast and give us a positive rating and we love five stars and suggest it to a friend until next time.