47 Brands, $127M: What Really Worked on BFCM This Year

[00:00:00] Tony Chopp: We have a data set across 147 clients for Thursday through Monday. Approximately $127 million in revenue. just a hair under $25 million in media spend at an average of 5.1 MER across the dataset. And $40.2 million in contribution margin. so we got a, we got a big chunk of data that we're in, in the process of really beginning to tangle with. And understand what, what were the trends? I, I have a couple things on my mind that we're, I'm working with the data team now to, to sort out, and they're, they're really all in relation to, this is the first Black Friday, Cyber Monday in the Post and Drama to World on the meta side.

And one thing that we've observed really all year long is the, the efficacy of. UGC style content creator video on the platform. 

[00:00:55] Richard Gaffin: Alright folks, welcome back to the DTC Hotline. This is your direct connection to Hot Takes, to Cold Truth, to really come advice from the best in the business. I'm your host Richard, The Professor, Gaffin. Now. Call or text, 866-DTC-2263. Get your burning ecomm questions answered. 866-382-2263.

You can leave a voicemail, shoot us a text, ask us whatever's on your mind. DTC-wise. Our operators are standing by speaking of which, we got 'em both here. First off, I'm gonna go with Luke, The Weatherman, Austin here coming in live from CTC studios in sunny, sunny, sunny, Southern California. Luke, what's going on, man.

[00:01:32] Luke Austin: Oh, it is good to be back home. But going through a bit of a bit of, bit of travel withdrawal Tony and I and then other. A few other folks from CTC HQ cruise out to Dubai for about a five-day trip over Black Friday, Cyber Monday and hung out with Joy Sharma and our accelerator team. And it was, it was incredible, just great time with everyone in person.

Did all the Dubai things, did all the Cyber Monday scaling and overnights necessary to accomplish that. So it's good to be back. Sad to leave.

[00:02:06] Richard Gaffin: it's awesome. And of course we also have Tony, The Chopper, Chopp. So you've been in Dubai as well, Tony,

[00:02:11] Tony Chopp: We did not take a chopper. 

[00:02:13] Richard Gaffin: No choppers are involved at all. Huh?

[00:02:15] Tony Chopp: no choppers. We flew in the largest airplane I've ever been on. It was like four stories. I'm not sure.

[00:02:21] Richard Gaffin: Wow.

[00:02:22] Tony Chopp: Luke did make an attempt to go to the penthouse area up top. 

[00:02:28] Richard Gaffin: In the plane.

[00:02:29] Tony Chopp: In the plane.

[00:02:30] Luke Austin: Yeah. May made it, made it made it there.

[00:02:32] Richard Gaffin: CTC didn't spring for the lounge, huh?

[00:02:34] Luke Austin: made it to the bar in the sky. No. CTC did not spring for first-class tickets on Emirates Airlines. Just, just for the record, it's.

[00:02:41] Richard Gaffin: Bummer. We're not there yet. Alright, cool. Well, glad to have you back stateside. Maybe at the end we can talk a little bit about Dubai takeaways. But what we wanna do first is answer a couple questions here and one mainly, which is of course, what else would it be about? Which is the following, which is, Hey guys, I'm curious what your biggest takeaways from BFCM. This year are, so in other words, what was different this year than last year? What you think what maybe trends are pointing to, and then what stories we have from over the weekend that'd be interesting to kind of unpack here. So, I know you both have a lot of them, so, why don't we start with you, Tony.

[00:03:16] Tony Chopp: Well, so, so let me just kinda set the table here. We've been a aggregating some of this data. So, we have a data set across 147 clients for Thursday through Monday. Approximately $127 million in revenue. just a hair under $25 million in media spend at an average of 5.1 MER across the dataset. And $40.2 million in contribution margin. so we got a, we got a big chunk of data that we're in, in the process of really beginning to tangle with. And understand what, what were the trends? I, I have a couple things on my mind that we're, I'm working with the data team now to, to sort out, and they're, they're really all in relation to, this is the first Black Friday, Cyber Monday in the Post and Drama to World on the meta side.

And one thing that we've observed really all year long is the, the efficacy of. UGC style content creator video on the platform. And I, I'm, I, I'm on a quest to prove or disprove a theory that this year our investment into video and specifically UGC content creator format ads is larger than it's ever been before as a function of the, the ADR to updates on meta. A couple other things that, that stand out before I kick it over to Luke. We the early data suggests that we, we, our clients in partnership with us and, and their existing creative produced orders of magnitude more creative. So some of my early data is showing three, four x more creative year over year to actually get to get to the results that we got to.

And then also an interesting pattern. The new Kid on the Block app Loving represents the third largest invested channel in our dataset. Out of meta Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok. So, a lot a sign, significant amount of resources coming into this new platform during this moment.

[00:05:18] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. And as I talked about a little bit with Taylor on our earlier ecommerce playbook our app loving results smashed our target by a lot. So on almost every metric we were within like, let's say 10% of, goal with a app loven, it really feels like it overperformed. So, I'm sure there's more to unpack there as well.

But let's, let's, let's go to Luke real quick. Let's give a, give us A-B-F-C-M takeaway.

[00:05:40] Luke Austin: Yeah, I'll, I'll do another macro takeaway that's to build on what Tony Sheridan. And then I think we'll get into some of the tactics that frame up that, frame this up. But so Tony shared across our dataset, sort of aggregate what we're seeing, takeaways and channel. Macro in terms of year over year and what we're seeing.

So this is based on our data data from No Commerce as well, that they that Jeremiah and the team there were, were sharing out overall 9.1% year over year growth based on that data set from Black Friday 2024, slightly down from 10.2% a year ago. Are, we're seeing, we saw similar out. Comes in terms of our data set on aggregate as well.

Which, which align with, with that. So, you know, somewhere in the, the neighborhood of eight to 10% year over year growth in aggregate. And then order volume was basically flat year over year in that data set. We saw a bit of growth in our data set relative to order volume, but what that indicates is a lot of that, a lot of that growth came, came from higher prices, higher average order value.

Right, rather than the order volume being higher. And then there's other things going on in the macro, in the macro landscape related to the usage of buy now pay later up about 9% overall. 41% of shoppers age 16 to 24 using buy now, pay later. So I think there's there are always, the aggregate data is helpful in sort of framing.

The, the sentiment more broadly in what we saw, and it's completely unhelpful in framing up the individual outcomes that we saw over Black Friday, Cyber Monday. 'cause those were the there, those were all over the place in terms of in, in terms of the outcome. But I think helpful for us to understand what happened in the space.

Eight to 10% year over year growth on average. And the broader economic sentiment as we think about some of the things Tony shared in terms of additional creative output, the growth of the media channels. And, and what really jumped out to me from these two data points is, is the continuation of a trend that we've been seeing, which is brands are needing to.

Find relief, margin relief in the business because of these factors related to tariffs, the macro sentiment, the economy, et cetera. And where that's going is if you start to cut media spend, that's just like, it's it that's going to come to haunt you at some point, right? Cut the media spend, your new customer revenue starts to drop.

And so, what's necessary is. Keep the media spin going, increase the creative volume to get there, but find it's necessary to find relief in other areas, increasing your prices and then, and then in your fixed costs and your and your your, yeah, your fixed costs. What, what's going into the into the people tech.

Infrastructure that's running your business so that you can put more into creative and more in media to counteract these trends. So that's, that's the, that's the continuation of the trend that we've seen. And we've been sort of framing up in conversations around how we're evolving our service offering to be able to index against.

Those levers of more money into more media spend and more creative I rather than the, the fixed cost of the people, the tech stack, et cetera which is gonna be necessary for brands moving forward to continue to see growth and hopefully buck some of this trend.

[00:08:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. Let's let's jump from the macro into the micro then. You mentioned that it was some individual sort of, circumstances or individual examples where there was sort of some tactical insight that could potentially have a little broader application. So I'll kinda like, let's ping pong back and forth between you and, and drop a tactical insight for us.

So let's go let's go Tony. What's a, what's a tactical insight that really a story over the weekend that would really strike striking.

[00:09:02] Tony Chopp: I mean, I don't know that this is new news for, for anyone listening here, but the, the necessity to monitor media pacing very granularly by, by the hour and at least, and the relationship between. The, the media spend pacing that you're seeking to be at and the revenue and efficiency pacing the business.

So, we had more than one situation where we, we were unable to at first get the media spend pacing out of meta that we were seeking. And the, the tactical solution to solve that problem in many cases is to duplicate the campaign and, and try in different. Of different bidding tactics to actually, to actually get the media spend to go.

But the, the, this moral of the story is like, it's not enough to set your campaigns and go do something else On Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it really requires like minute by minute vigilance purely because of the, the pace of the moment. Yeah. I'm not sure that that's a, a new news story, but it, it was a common theme for us in, in many accounts.

[00:10:10] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Luke.

[00:10:16] Luke Austin: There was someone I was gonna say connected to what Tony just said but I'll start with this one and then it'll come back. To me. So o offer strategy being one of the main levers that we all know is critical during this, this time period, what occurred to me, based on what we were seeing across our data set and the, for the brains that were winning, is the air bars sort of the like.

Disparate outcomes that are available when thinking about offer strategy and the impact that it can have on the business. And I think the temptation is to think that the revenue outcome is baked. Like whether you slice your offer one way or the other 30% off, or it's gonna be, you know, buy two, get one, whether it's, you know, three days only, or whether it's the whole month of November, like.

The, the temptation could be that there, you're just gonna kind of get the same outcome and you pull some revenue forward or maybe not, and it's gonna be sort of the same, like it's baked, you know? And what occurred to me, based on the results you're seeing this weekend, is that that is one of the farthest thing from things from the truth in this time period, the brands that we saw winning the most.

Were the ones that had a really, had really clear urgency and tight time constraints around their offer strategy where over the past couple years, I'll say like two to three years, there's been more of a trend in the direction of have a consistent offer that's easy to access. You can run paid media against consistently.

You don't have to change all of your creatives, run it earlier so you have more time to run. And then it's like. Okay, for Cyber week, those seven to 10 days, we're gonna run 30% off sitewide. And that's the thing we're gonna do and message 30% off sitewide. And the brands that we saw winning this year were ones that actually opted to tighten the time horizon against their offers.

Who didn't pull some of that revenue earlier in the week or earlier in the month, but maybe did a VIP launch Thursday and then their biggest day, black Friday, and then through the weekend. So tighten the, tighten the urgency around it, but then two had. Tons of mini peaks over the course of Cyber Weekend that they were building into their offer strategy in the form of, novelty in the offers, whether that's doorbusters and you're adding new styles every day that gets sold out. Whether that's tearing up your offer over the course of the weekend, it's flash sales on Saturday and then Sunday, and then your biggest offer Monday. And it gives you different ways to message the offer that you're driving and create novelty rather than consistency.

It's, it's really an art form to be able to find out like. That identify the offer that we can run and that can give paid media sort the consistency that that engine needs. And you're not switching out creative every day. And you know, like that's, but that in terms of your email messaging and in terms of your own channels, email messaging, messaging that you can create novelty and urgency around and the new website and how that's framed.

Can drive it as well. And so heading into next year, I think that's, that is the one thing I would say is like, there is a lot, there's just a wide, much larger range of outcomes that I think many brands understand for Black Friday, Cyber Monday that's directly connected to how interesting their offer strategy is over that time period and lends to the strengths of each of the channels and built in that way.

We we're actually putting together a database of like the, the, the Cyber weekend, the Cyber week offers that we saw work best of 2025. And we'll, we'll make that available at some point for folks because it's, it's always interesting seeing how many different ways you can slice and dice those seven days and how many brands do it so differently and see a wide range of outcomes as a result.

[00:13:49] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, no, that's interesting. Real quick, Corey, you can cut from here. I was just gonna say for the both of you, just go off, go on mute as soon as you're done talking 'cause you're starting to feed back into each other's mics anyway. Alright, cool. So one thing I'll just say, like to your point Luke, 'cause I think it's interesting is anecdotally, for me anyway, this is like one of the first.

Fcms where this sort of like general cultural knowledge of Black Friday, Cyber Monday sort of being too long felt like it was a little bit more in the zeitgeist than before. In other words, like my in-laws were like, ah, I don't know about Black Friday. They run the things all week, like, I don't know if you have to shop today, whatever.

My parents being like, what? That sort of thing. And I wonder if like, part of what you're alluding to is like, it's not necessarily that it's too long per se, but that the. Black Friday is not special enough or something. And that's kind of the fundamental difference between the people who wanted the people who lost.

Is that fair to say?

[00:14:40] Luke Austin: Yeah, and I, I think it's like. You kind of think about like an adoption curve and as sort of like oscillating a different direction where like, call it seven years ago it was it was less long in aggregate in terms of that time period and the perception. And it's slowly, like more and more brands have become like, oh, let's run for the month, or let's run for the week and like, let's add more consistency rather than a different Black Friday offer versus Cyber Monday offer.

And, and there was arbitrage. There's just not an arbitrage in that anymore because that's. Where I think the majority is sitting now. And the ones, the ones that aren't, are actually oscillating the other way. Seeing where the majority is and actually driving the other direction to, hey, let's, let's actually push for urgency and tight time constraints to go that direction.

And then at some point it'll oscillate in a different direction or back in the back the other way. But I think over the next couple years we're gonna see more of a trend to two, getting back to the heart of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. The, the challenge is like what you do is you introduce more revenue risk for sure.

So like, you have to be able to stomach that and you have to be able to create additional revenue peaks for yourself at other times of the year when you start to constrain the time period. Because if you, if you run the offer for two weeks, like you just have more levers to pull on and you can like.

Gives you a couple, like, okay, we saw the first week's performance, now let's change things up for the second week. Or add this in. If you're doing a thing for two days, right? Like you gotta do the thing really well, otherwise you, you're gonna have to have some backup option. So that can come either in the form of additional revenue peaks later in December or early in the year.

Or packing a parachute for Cyber Monday in your Friday off back Friday offer, which we saw for a number of brands as well, which is let's run the software, let's start playing for the weekend, but we got a parachute packed with ads. Everything we need for the landing page, everything we need for the email to switch the offer over to this higher outcome if we're not seeing what we planned.

And we can pull the parachute and we can see the, the higher outcome as a result.

[00:16:28] Tony Chopp: Which we, which we absolutely had to do in one, one specific case with, with a, with a brand that, had one of their top selling SKUs that, that had an offer. They started with one offer that, that turned out, turned out to not have the response rate that, that we were, that we were looking for. So, to Luke's parachute packing metaphor,

[00:16:45] Richard Gaffin: analogy.

[00:16:46] Tony Chopp: the parachute was unpacked in order to change the direct church trajectory.

[00:16:52] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. And that made, and I think I, I was talking maybe with Brian or Taylor about this on the pod, but, or, or on the ecommerce playbook, but that was like. A transformative moment too, right? Like the, the amount of difference that those types of like hour by hour decisions can make and those sort of like triage decisions can make is like, is massive.

And in this particular instance, if, this is the one I'm thinking of, they were able to switch the offer and that basically saved the entire day at up to a certain point. They were trending like 20% behind or whatever. They switched the offer and they were able to make up everything and actually kind of crush their target.

So it's just, yeah, a good lesson in. Being able to be flexible and then just like the value of that day, and you know, how much things can change on that specific day, I guess.

[00:17:36] Luke Austin: Yep, exactly.

[00:17:38] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Right. So like, you know, from a media perspective, like our, our role in this whole thing is to make sure the media dollars get, get invested, right? And tactically we have these things, these different levers to pull in order to compel that to happen. But. But the precursor to that is the product and the offer.

And this, the, the combination of those two things can yield like dramatically different, different outcomes.

[00:17:59] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Cool. Alright. More, more tactical observations if you have Luke, Tony, anything else pop out?

[00:18:11] Tony Chopp: Me, media investment the app, 11 piece of the story is, is really interesting for the. For one standout reason. So the media investment falls a pretty, a pretty normalized curve. So Thursday, then Friday is the largest, then drop down for Saturday, Sunday. Then Monday is, is a bump, bump up, but less than Friday.

So the maximum app 11, the peak app 11 investment actually happened on, on Monday. And it, I think it, I think it's telling me a, it's telling us a story. Of the efficacy of that media throughout the weekend as as people as our, as media teams worked to deploy those dollars. And we saw the investment increase throughout, throughout the throughout the weekend and, and actually peak on Monday.

[00:18:53] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, so that's an to, to summarize that back to you. So like, app Loving did better, just generally did better on Cyber, Cyber Monday than Black Friday.

[00:19:01] Tony Chopp: Spent more for sure. Yeah.

[00:19:03] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I'm just, I'm always curious like what, what the human dynamic of that is. It's like they're, you're back at work, so you're.

Screwing around on your phone more, like what's the,

[00:19:12] Tony Chopp: No, I don't think it's that. No, no. I think, I think we, we are just scratching the surface of what's available through that inventory pool. So I think what I think what I, the story I'm making up is that throughout the weekend people were developing more and more confidence in the channel's ability to return and affect revenue, and as a result, ended up moving more media dollars in into the channel.

In a way that, in a way that was, is different than the normal curve.

[00:19:37] Richard Gaffin: Right. Luke.

[00:19:47] Luke Austin: Are gonna be the main takeaways heading into as we think about future sale

[00:19:52] Richard Gaffin: quick. Start that sentence again. You were on mute and I just, I clicked you off, but

[00:19:55] Luke Austin: Thank you. What I, what I think are gonna be the main takeaways heading into Black Friday, Saturday, Monday next year, as well as future sale moments to brand for brands is to Tony's opening point, clarity and transparency and tracking on an hourly basis.

It's just the standard of it. If you're, if that's not happening and you don't have visibility into revenue, spend, contribution margin, and then spend and, and return by channel on an hourly basis and target. Step map with those there, you do not have enough. Yeah, you do not have enough. You do not have enough visibility and you are going to leave margin dollars on the table either to the upside or the downside.

And so only at that level of visibility, do you have the visibility? Do you have the, do you see what you need to be able to make the accurate decisions? Two is novelty and offer strategy coming. It's coming back like tighter timeframes. Really unique ways at running offers that are really strategic.

And that cut through the noise. And then three, which is, this is the sort of novel one to tie, tie it off, I think is email and SMS communication sort of matching. The uniqueness of the offer strategy and and being something that people are more comfortable leaning into a higher volume of sins because there's different ways to talk about your sale than just, Hey, it's 30% off.

Hey, reminder, 30% off. Hey, last chance, 30% off. You could talk about these things as. Hey, this hero product of ours is now included in the offer. A, this collection that you've been browsing is now included in this offer. Even though the offer's consistent, you can talk about it in a million different ways.

And there are and we even saw brands. We are in the office on Friday. We even saw brands. Over the course of the day looking at feedback they're getting from customers and things customers are saying, and then firing off emails in the middle of the day related to those specific topics. Right? And, and even playing into it, right?

Like, Hey, I know this is the seventh time you've heard from me today. Thi I just believe in it this much. Right. And if you like, if a concern is unsubscribe rates and, and that getting you flagged in terms of deliverability, like a message like that is just not going, is, that's not gonna be harmful in most cases.

Right. That's a very thoughtful, very personal, very relational, and it's the founder or whoever's owning the marketing channel. Responding in real time to the customers and to specific things in the email that then just you're talking about the offer in a unique way and more time. So that's, that's what we want to see more of in future sale periods for our brands and in next year is.

The hourly tracking visibility offer strategy, and the novelty of that narrative, and then speaking about it in as many ways as, as possible across media, as many channels as possible. Scaling app open, right? And then across email and SMS and, and, and doing that in a way that s the noise. And makes it more unique than, than it candidly has been over the past couple years, especially where there's been a lot more consistency that's sort of been prioritized over novelty.

[00:22:54] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. Let's so I just, one other thing that I wanted to talk about with you specifically, Tony, 'cause I think this would be interesting to hear your take on, and I, I talked a little bit with Taylor about how on over BFCM. Like one of our kind of consistent tropes is that creative is the most important, offer, is the most important.

That obviously is still the case, as you pointed out, Luke, over PFCM. But Black Friday is one of the few instances where we can actually say like, Hey, like media buying tactics, actually maybe make a difference here. Or like very specific, clever, like, Hey, we need to unlock more volume here. Retargeting's been smashing for one of my accounts.

Let's like try that, you know, these sort of like little ways to kind of gain the system, so to speak, to gain, to get more of an edge. And I was curious, A, what's your general thoughts on that and B, whether there's any kind of specific instances of that you saw on Black Friday that were interesting? I.

[00:23:49] Tony Chopp: Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. So I, I think like there's, there's this value in a certain amount of value and consistency in patience through, throughout the year. Especially like, consider that all the media platforms, like, you know, whether unless you're optimizing against a one day click, like for the most part you're optimizing on some sort of click window.

That's like more than a day. So if you're making, you're making, doing a lot of decision making. You know, in intraday, in sort of a BAU period, you're in some ways fighting against the algorithm. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and really throughout the weekend, like all, all bets are off as far as you know, set it and forget it.

And in some cases the, the posture really shifts because. The primary mission on, on, in this moment in time is to deploy the media budget. The, the only thing that, the number one thing you can't do is let the media budget not not get delivered. So there's all sorts of things that, that we do tactically, I think, I think probably the, the most consistent tactical approach, at least across CTC.

We, we use a lot of cost cap, a lot of minerals, a lot of efficiency based bidding through throughout the year. And it's great. It, it really helps us control for downside and is really predictable to come into a sale moment, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday without having some volume based bidding campaigns.

It packed in your parachute. To use Luke's, use Luke's metaphor here is a mistake. So. I would say that, and this, this is actually part of the, the analysis that we're gonna, we're gonna run back is how much of the media actually got delivered through through highest volume campaigns. But I'm gonna estimate that it's somewhere between 30, 40, maybe upwards of 50%.

You absolutely need this to, to be able to, to fight in this, in this auction. So, and the other thing that, that we see a lot of tactically is, we sort of joke about it a little bit, but add adding zeros to the campaign budgets, right? And sometimes more, more than one zero. So, duplicating campaigns, adding zeros, all of these are like sending signals, screaming at the platform.

Deliver my dollars,

[00:25:59] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:00] Tony Chopp: you must deliver. And there's like one other, one other thing that I think is really important here from a media buyer perspective. And, and it's paired with this idea of, you know, hourly tracking, which is the, the understanding of if you are looking at hourly tracking on Cyber Monday in the morning and your ROAS is at target, you are not spending enough, you have not delivered enough into that moment.

And so this idea of really pushing on the delivery, doing everything you possibly can to push on the delivery during those moments in time, duplicating campaigns, highest volume anything, anything that you, lifetime budgets is another, is another little media buyer hacky thing. So run, set up a campaign with a lifetime budget for just that day on highest volume and that that will compel delivery.

But yeah, the, the behavior, the behavior is unique in this moment in time, in line with how, how much different it is versus any other time of the year.

[00:27:01] Richard Gaffin: yeah. No, I mean, I was just really struck, like talking, talking to you, talking to Taylor, whatever, about like how much this really is our Super Bowl, like the one day of the year, the Super Bowl's, the one day of the year, every single person cares about football. This is like the 1, 2, 3 days of the year where every single person cares about shopping, particularly online, and that's not the environment that.

We're in most of the time. And so I think that's kind of like the, the fundamental, yeah, the fundamental context has changed so much that you have to approach it a little bit differently. But okay. Cool. Let's I think we we're gonna cut it there. So I want to end with observations. What was the most interesting thing about Dubai?

That's what I'm curious about. We'll start we'll start with you look.

[00:27:46] Luke Austin: Dubai is simultaneously the most interesting place and the most uninteresting place I've been to. You while you're there, like this is the progression of you get, you get to Dubai. The, the first day you get there, you're like, whoa, look at all the. Buildings, like it's so nice and modern. And then, and then what you start to do like the next two days is sort of like, there's a weird feeling about this place.

I'm not really sure what it is. But I feel weird. And, and then by the end, what settles in is like the, you know, like the parallel might be like in New York City you have like all this bedrock and then you like talk about someplace like Istanbul, Turkey, or so like, there's just like all this history over centuries that sort of forms the foundation of the city and what's been built.

And while we were there in Dubai, it was the 51st anniversary of the United Arab Emirates. Formation. I believe. I, I, I hope that's right. And, but it was the 51st, first anniversary of that happening. That's just so new. That's like yesterday in relation to these things and the amount of growth that's happened.

And so it's just been sort of like, it's the, the fabrication and sort of veneer that exists over the place relative to the amount of infrastructure in like every building. You're on the 77th floor of this building overlooking like a drone show that's like going over the Ferris wheel on the manmade island, you know, at the palm you like.

It's a fascinating dynamic.

[00:29:11] Richard Gaffin: Interesting. Tony, what'd you think? What's the weirdest thing about Dubai?

[00:29:17] Tony Chopp: It was remarkably difficult for me to come across some baklava. 

[00:29:21] Richard Gaffin: Oh, that's a bummer. I just, not what you want out of that, but did you get some,

[00:29:26] Tony Chopp: I, at, at the airport lounge on the way out. Yeah.

[00:29:30] Richard Gaffin: the airport lounge. You fi. Okay. She finally made it

[00:29:34] Tony Chopp: No, I,

[00:29:35] Richard Gaffin: Wow.

[00:29:35] Tony Chopp: yeah, no, I, I sort, I sort of second what Luke said. It's like, it's obviously super polished and. I looked out my hotel window. I hotel was a restaurant, I can't remember, looked out in my field of view, I counted 14 cranes like literally every two inches in my field of view was a, was a crane.

So the, the infrastructure piece of it is is, is striking. And it's, it's, it's really quite, it's quite beautiful to look at. There is something about the, there's something that it's like I don't want to say inauthentic 'cause that, that sounds bad, but I, I, I crave like, experiences that feel really real and and I think there's there's, there's other places where I've, I've had that.

Here's one other thing that, one other thing that was interesting, very few like cross intersection. So it's not, it's not a place where it's like a really walkable city and when you're driving around, there's not a lot of left turns. There's just all these loops everywhere. So several times we like missed our turn or whatever else.

We ended up on this super long loop about. So, I don't know, just an interesting infrastructure tra traffic control system out there.

[00:30:46] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah, all I know about it is the overhead shot from the Apple TV screensaver. So, all right, well that's gonna do it for us. So we lost Luke, but remember, if you, if you want your questions answered on the pod call leave us a voicemail, 866-DTC-2263. Shoot us a text there.

We'd love to answer your question on a subsequent episode. So for Tony, The Chopper, Chopp for Luke, The Weatherman, Austin in absentia. I'm Richard, the Professor Gaffen. Take care. Everybody have a good.