Behind Alex’s First Concert in Italy
Sep 09, 2025
Hey,
I hope you’re doing well! I’m right now sitting in the plane on our way back to Montreal! I’m about to finalize this week’s missive as we’re about to take off! I’m so exhausted! We ended this tour with such a solid concert at Maastricht’s Zero For Three Festival, it was just insane! We literally gave it all we had left deep inside!
We ended up going to bed close to 2am with a 5am lobby call, as we had a last 75-minute drive to Brussels airport before heading home! Sleeping was a luxury on that insane tour! But we made it, in grand style, like never before! It was so great to hear people we have known for more than a decade mentioning we never looked that alive!
Here’s what came to my mind in the last few days!!!
🎧 What I’m listening to
DIIV - Return of the Youth
As we were ending that crazy tour in Maastricht playing the Zero For Three festival, where amazing bands were assembled for three days, DIIV was part of this year’s edition, a band I haven’t listened to in a long while!
I really love their latest single of the same title! Great tune and it was amazing to get back into their catalog! If you didn’t know them, I recommend Is The Is Are released in 2016.
📖 Reading highlight I’m pondering
Being in Spitzingsee allowed me to catch up on a few good things I like to read! For instance, I’m a faithful reader and follower of Scott Galloway, or Professor G. He’s an incredible human being, a left-wing thinker, and a marketer who has a passion for the younger generation, especially men, and he brings countless numbers and data proving how a new generation of men is pretty far from thriving on so many levels in life.
His latest newsletter, called No Mercy No Malice, was titled Lonely Fans, in which he describes the billions made by OnlyFans using our greatest and latest pandemic called loneliness in order to cash in billions of dollars. I truly was in pain since we’ve been using every possible social media to navigate in the complete opposite direction, creating a community of people where sharing, building, and thriving are at the core and forefront.
Here’s an excerpt:
We’ve created a platform where 95.8% of men pay nothing but still consume content, while a tiny fraction of “whales” subsidize an entire economy built on loneliness. It’s digital feudalism with OnlyFans as the landlord collecting rent on human connection.
The pitch resonates with millions of men retreating from the high-risk but high-reward activity of forming real-world relationships. It also appeals to women. OnlyFans has paid more than $20 billion to creators since 2016. Women are flocking to the site, with an estimated one million-plus in the U.S. alone. The success of OnlyFans is making some people rich. However, it’s also a symptom of a loneliness epidemic with devastating second-order effects.
This isn’t just an epidemic. It’s a pandemic.
He continues:
Men are especially vulnerable. The most unstable, violent societies have one thing in common: a plethora of lonely young men. We are producing millions of them.
In Japan, 1.5 million people are hikikomori — modern-day recluses who withdraw for more than six months. In Britain, the loneliness crisis costs employers more than $3 billion annually. In Spain, the economic impact equals 1.2% of GDP. Millions of Chinese women seeking companionship are downloading AI boyfriends.
It doesn’t take much to simply drop our phones on a train, on a bus, while waiting in line, and say hi to someone around and start a conversation.
📸 My Picture Of The Week
I took that picture as we were doing our 10k steps around the beautiful lake in Spitzingsee...! This place is home to me, not because of the mountains, the lake, and the incredible and breathtaking atmosphere around this little Alp town, but because one of the greatest treasures of my own universe lives there: our dear and precious friends Eric and Ana. We spent five days there, and again, it wasn’t enough for me!
True friendship is the hardest thing to find on this earth, and once found, it’s not easy to cultivate, to nurture, and to give it the attention and passion it deserves to grow deeper. But with these two, it simply is on another level already! It’s like interconnectedness! Our friendship is so strong, it's comparable to Einstein's theory of entanglement, whereinsome sense, our destinies are inextricably linked, regardless of distance. It’s even hard to explain, as it doesn’t make any sense, which is why it’s something I trust and truly want to pursue, since no one has something to gain in the end outside of the purity of real relationships and friendship!
Ain’t that wonderful! I wish everyone had Eric and Ana in their lives!!!
🎧 Podcast I’ve Enjoyed The Most
Broken Record | Adam Duritz
As we were driving from Veruno to the Frankfurt area in one day (took us 13 hours to reach), I downloaded a few podcasts for the day. Alex gets easily sick while driving in those vans, and as I knew that we would go up and down the Alps, three hours that would be quite long and hard during those 13 hours, I wanted to bring a great vibe by listening to one of his favorite artists, Adam Duritz, sharing about his new album on the Broken Records Podcast.
When I first started to hang out with Alex, he was a huge fan of the band Counting Crows, as they had just released their album Hard Candy. I wasn’t a fan at all but learned to love, especially Adam’s lyrics and ways to share about simple things but in a grand, deep and meaningful style!
The vibe was so great, as it’s not only what Adam talks about that is very interesting but also the way he does it and how he still puts all of his heart and soul into sharing about his passion for life and music in every interview he does. I would like to have a coffee with him someday…!
💬 Shared in the Long Shadows Chat this week
I don’t know if you read Alex’s Substack entry about our trip to Italy, driving countless hours in the Alps and playing in this country for the very first time, but we were so excited and thrilled about everything. Last week’s chat was more like teenagers on a high school trip for the first time!
The entire band and crew got back together in Spitzingsee last Wednesday evening, as we had to be in Veruno, Italy, on Thursday evening for a gathering with every band playing at the festival. I love those events! So, our band chat has been a little quiet during our time in the Alps before the rest of the crew joined us! But once they did…! I’m not sure how many mountain hops we drove by during our back-and-forth trip to Veruno, but I’m pretty sure they’re all included in our chat!
It was pretty much like this: Photo of a mountain, of a higher mountain, a higher mountain, oh yeah, a mountain with snow, and then, espresso...! Repeat as much as you like!!!!
I honestly truly like this kind of vibe! We work so hard and put in everything we’ve got to touch what’s invisible every time we hit the stage. It's also great and wonderful to see 10 grown-up kids all dressed in black being excited about mountains, snow, and espresso once in a while!!!
We hit the hotel they gave us, the world-renowned Grand Emotional. I strongly suggest you read Alex’s Substack about it, as our chat became a little more explicitly funky, with a forever young-hearted touch, which made it obviously hilariously and memorably funny!!!! It’s so nice to see the complicity we all have been building over this tour, as we all like to take a good laugh at one another!
I will miss this group of incredible people! So blessed to live such a life!
Let’s be great to one another!
Your chief operator and friend,
Jeff
