Unlocking the Secret: You MUST Grow Your Business

At CTC right now, I am the best CEO I've ever been because I suffered extreme failure in 2022. Yes. In a way that I was ready to quit. But I would, if you gave me the choice, make it never happen to me. The hardest year of my marriage, I say the exact same thing about it. People have said, well, don't you learn so much and you grow so much closer?

And my answer is no, I would, if I could go back, I would not have done that. Yes. You are right. It builds resilience. It made me more conscious, more capable, have to survive. And if I could go back, I would make it not happen. Today on the Andrew Ferris podcast, I've got Taylor Holliday, my very good friend and the CEO of Common Thread Collective for a wide ranging episode recorded in my backyard.

On the show today, we're talking about how to generate negative cack in your ad so that you actually get paid to acquire customers. We discussed the question, do you have an obligation to grow your business? We talk about whether or not it's a good to suffer in business, and we hit you with each of our favorite meta ads tactics, really specifically, A small note on this, because we recorded this live in my backyard, we had some problems with the audio.

My voice is a little louder than Taylor's. We will fix that next time we do an episode like this, hang in there. It's a really good conversation. You're going to love it. Me and Taylor at my house in my backyard. Enjoy. All right. Taylor. What's up? It does feel funny to sit this close to you. Yeah. I, I feel, how do you feel most comfortable?

Do you feel most comfortable looking at the screen? I mean, looking at the computer, look at each other, like a little back and forth. Yeah. I think we'll turn into more conversationalism. I think maybe the, maybe it's the drinks happen a little bit. You've got a Manhattan that I made you. So two things about this.

First of all, this rye, I, I might've made it, it might be a faux pas for me to like, not just drink it straight. I don't know, but it was sent to me by your friend and mine, Edward Wimmer of legend road ID, dog ID. He's been in e commerce maybe for longer than anybody that I know. Yeah. And also the inspiration for my hair tonight.

Is that it's super delicious Edwards in Cincinnati, which is of course across the border from Kentucky where they have, uh, Oh, is he? Well, but the, but the company's in Cincinnati, right? Yeah. Cincinnati, Ohio, but he's on the Kentucky side of the bridge. Oh, okay. Well, anyway, the point is they're very close to each other.

And so he has access to Legit Kentucky bourbon and rye. And so he sent me this very nicely. It was very kind of him to do. He sent me a bottle of bourbon and then I just took a call at some point. We talked cause he's just great. And I think we did a coaching call. And then afterwards, part of his, he just sent it to me cause we're, I don't know, talking about a little bit.

And then he said, Oh, the rise even better. I said, that's awesome. I love rye. And then boom, the rye showed up after he'd already sent me the bourbon. Well, thank you, Mr. Wimmer. We love you and appreciate you made with Angostura bitters. And there's a reason I put this out here too. I think this is some of the all time great packaging in the history of the world.

The two big label? Yes, I think it's a work of genius because the story I've heard about this, have you ever heard about this? No, it feels very purple cow though. I don't know what purple cow is. Seth Gunn's idea that you drive along, you don't look at any of the black and white cows, but if there was a purple one, you would.

And I could just smack it on a shelf, like every label fits right. Exactly. So like if you go into a grocery store in a liquor aisle, you will immediately know what's going on. And I don't even know another bidders company. Like they just are the bidders of record. And I, what I've heard is like, it was like early in the company, somebody printed labels that were too big and they didn't have enough money until they put them on there.

And then they realized, wait a minute, this is like kind of genius. And so anyway, I was, that's a good start to what we're trying to do. Yeah. Was it good? Did you plan that? Did you just, when I was inside, I thought it would get to get the conversation going. Yeah. So the, the inspiration here is the random show you've ever listened to.

I'm a really experienced podcast. Right. I know how to do Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, good friends that kind of get together and chat over a bottle of wine. And Andrew and I have been meaning to do a podcast together recently. And it was sort of like, Hey, let's just do it in person. Let's just get together and talk and think about some things that we would want to talk about that are not Totally all e commerce related, but we live like 40 minutes away from each other.

Yeah. 7, 000 miles. Yeah. At this stage of life, especially with small kids. You drove. Thank you. We're at my house. Thank you for that. Yeah. So we sort of pre gamed a little bit. We did built an outline of, Hey, if we could talk about a bunch of stuff, what are you thinking about? What's interesting to you? And normally these are Marco Polos that Andrew and I trade.

And now we're just going to try this every so often, maybe once a quarter or so, just get together and do our own version of the random show. So we'd love to hear, we're going to cross publish this on both these podcasts. And ours, uh, the e commerce playbook podcast and the Andrew Ferris podcast. So it's like my one last claim on the e commerce playbook podcast, which, which used to be my podcast.

So the, uh, the goal will be that. What's the quarter? We cross both of these. So we'd love to hear it. What are their topics? Is this interesting to you to hear us chat beyond just the tactical e commerce stuff? We'll get there to do some of it, I'm sure, but we're going to, I think a little bit broader. Well, we hadn't talked about this.

I was thinking we kind of start tactical for like the may tabs of the world that showed up and we're like, I'm leaving. If we spend 40 minutes on family and fitness, people are going to like turn it off. But I think we can, we can start cause cause our Marco Polos are like, yeah, It's very like what's top of mind for you right now kind of stuff.

Like you see something happen in an account and you go like, dude, what about this? You know, you'd have a call with someone. You learn something interesting. Have you seen this brand? They're doing this crazy thing, you know, whatever. And so I think we can start there and then. Okay. So I think we both have a list and we could just sort of trade punches here.

Go with what we think is the most interesting. Okay. Why don't you start? Why don't you start? So if we're going to start with. Tactical then. Yeah. Or business observation. Business can be tactical. So my, the biggest thing that is driving my obsession is, so Kevin, I think I'm going to say his last name wrong, but the spirit too.

Do you know who I'm talking about? Runs the garden plant daddy on Twitter. Yeah. I, all I know is that he seems good on Twitter and strikes me as very smart. Yes. Okay. So he put out this tweet the other day and I'm going to, I'm going to read it. This is your business obsession, right? This is my current business obsession.

So he writes number three, negative CAC is the secret sauce of most of the creator businesses that you see these days, but it's a double edged sword. So CAC equals customer acquisition costs and normally commerce business. This is a positive number, AKA you pay to acquire customers via ads in a content first business.

Not only do you tend to not rely on paid acquisition at the start of the business, you actually get paid for the media you create. So that's the idea of a negative CAC. And he gave me language for something that not only have we done at CTC, and I think it's. Referential to what we're doing right here, which is to create content that you get sponsors for that you end up getting paid to create your marketing material.

Yes. And then I had a follow on conversation last week with Alan Doan. It's one of my episodes on podcasts. You know, Alan, have you met Alan? So he's one of the founders of the Missouri star Quoco. Oh, then I have, I think, or so. Yes. One of the. One of the most outrageous e commerce businesses in the world, like incredible, I believe I sent them to you.

Okay. Yeah, you did. You did. Yeah. And yes, it was exactly, right. Or somewhere maybe through here, maybe through the podcast or Twitter. I think he just DM'd me on Twitter and he sent me what his business was and I was like, you need to go to CTC because they had a very good business, but with very little paid from what I understood.

No paid. Yeah, but a nine figure e commerce business and I say that because he said it on my podcast. Yeah, I'm not unveiling. Yeah, but and boatloads of content already made. Oh, and spend one and a half percent of their revenue on marketing. One of the best businesses you'll ever see in your life and quilting stuff, quilting stuff.

And you should listen to, he's a genius thinker in the way it goes about this, but on the idea of, okay, they have a magazine subscription. So the core of their business is they generate quilting content. They have a million followers on YouTube and they produce this, you know, a ton of content for YouTube, for Instagram.

And it's all about how to quilt and his whole heart, like Alan's an amazing dude and he genuinely is trying to create value. For these women, his people, they have a city, they built Quilt Town USA. He has this whole opinion on using CapEx as a way to build marketing. It's like the whole thing is genius.

But on the idea of negative CAC, the content that they create, he downsells. So they pay a bunch of money to produce great video content and then they transcribe it into a magazine and they charge 8 a month for a magazine subscription. And so I said a nine figure business. The magazine is the number three SKU.

So far this year. So you can imagine how much money they're making off of this magazine as a downsell off the content that they produce for marketing material. And so it's like, how is he able to produce a business where you get that big at 1 percent marketing as a percentage of revenue? Well, it's tactics like that.

And there's something in this that is just Really brilliant about the idea that you could get paid to create the material that drives the growth of your business. I mean, I think if you asked me right now, what is the next thing after meta? Mm-Hmm. , I think it probably is some version of the organic customer acquisition strategy.

By leveraging content creation on something like YouTube or who knows about TikTok, right? If it gets banned, but like something like that, and then finding things like that to do, I think in the early days of hearing about people doing this, like I'll go back to beard brand. When I first heard about beard brand doing it, it felt like it was an almost impossible task for most people to do.

And I don't know what it was about that era that felt like ban holds is like, Uniquely creative. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that he could go create a bunch of content that drove growth in beard brands business via YouTube. But now it feels like people are kind of learning the tactics to make the, um, recommendation engines work for them really, really well.

And then they are doing exactly what you said, which is like the content then becomes an additional source of value, you know, cause like one word version of that, it's just like, you get paid. AdSense dollars right on YouTube. And that's great. That can get, I can get you really, really far. Isaac Darius has talked about this like a little bit as well, but yeah, that extra layer of turning that stuff into a magazine by making the content really, really good.

And then getting people to subscribe, especially in the world of like sub stack creators, where it's like, I say, You know, I subscribed to my favorite baseball writer. I pay 120 a year for Sam Miller's sub stack and I'm happy to because the content is really, really good. And so you can sort of imagine like if, if the content was good enough, there's a world where you can do this.

And I, I drive one too. Like, I mean, well, so I was, and then what they really, I bought their, you know, the most recent youth sports book. So I've had this conversation with them, drive on baseball client of mine. I can, I can, I can say that because Mike's been on the show as CEO. I mean, people who aren't baseball people don't realize that dry wine is kind of one of the most interesting companies in the world.

Like they're doing crazy stuff in sports and I helped them on this like silly little e commerce part of their business, which is part of it, but they're actually like this genius group of people, software engineering firm, half baseball coaches. And they've talked about the same thing that like basically maybe they need to move to a really content first strategy because they have a lot of good stuff to talk about.

Now they have a different layer, which is working with professional athletes in particular. Basically creates cost on the talent. You know, agents are going to get in the way of that in certain ways. So they would have to maybe do it at the college level, which is a little less compelling to the broader market.

So there's like some challenges I think for them, but they've believed me when I say like they have listened to the Isaac Medeiros episode of my show to talk, to think about this idea of content driven stuff. And I think what you're saying to take that to another level where there's actually a subscription product on the backend, that's not just the YouTube recommendation engine.

I think that's really, really interesting. What, when you say you're obsessed with it, like what else? Well, so I think are you seeing other businesses do this? Have you seen other or are you recommending it? Well, I know you're doing it. So what I've discovered in for years at CDC B to B marketing is really hard.

It's it's hard to get tight feedback loop, so you can't sort of run the standard like Facebook playbook for your own growth. Right? So we've had to constantly and you know, when, when A. O. Was with us, um, Aaron Orndorff. Aaron Oro is who by all accounts, is one of the best B2B marketers in the world. Yeah.

And creates world class content. Yep. When it was only our own written material. Right. That was pure expense. And you had to generate an ROI relative to the expense, and Aaron's not cheap and the team was big and it was like a lot of work. And what we've sort of unlocked now is that. When I make a Bridges series and can get sponsors for the content that actually creates positive revenue and those publishers actually help me with distribution because they have a bunch of audience built in too.

Now all of a sudden the thing that I've created actually is a profit center and a marketing dollar at the same time. And so, yeah, and we, we, it's just, I think that's a similar idea to what the guys at Missouri Quilt are doing or what, you know, if you're running a YouTube channel, you can generate ad dollars on it.

Yeah. I sent somebody one of your bridges episodes today that I thought you should make sure you watch this. Probably you should hire them. And, and, and so you're getting the sponsor dollars on them watching it basically. And I just know for a fact that it's, I mean, it's so compelling as an explanation for what you guys do that it was like.

If you told me like somebody could do that for me and it's like a reasonable price relative to other agency offerings in the same space. It's just night and day. So like, but see, I think what that highlights and I think the mistake that's possible here, it actually reminds me a little bit of like when you remember you, you were public about when you had this idea of creating the, um, rail Madrid Academy at CTC, where you were going to get like, you're going to train up young DTC people instead of hire her.

Yeah. Experience strategists or whatever. Well, so what you said, the reason it ended up being a bad idea was because what Real Madrid's Academy does is it already attracts the best young players in the world. And so you hadn't factored that in that the talent you were getting at, even at the Academy level, wasn't good enough.

There's a similar principle here, which is like the reason Bridges works is not because of the content strategy. It's because of the content. It's because you, when I watched that Bridges episode, I was actually talking to one of my clients about it, who had also watched that. Yeah. And I said, well, I've been with, I've worked with you for 10 years.

It's almost exactly 10 years at this point. That piece of content is 10 years of work. Well, it's funny. I saw Alex Bayness. I don't know. You know, he's awesome. Used to be work for Trek. And he's one of my favorite people in e commerce. I always see him at ECF. And he's got Bayness. No, I don't know. He's amazing.

He used to run all of globally comfort track. And now his wife runs a competitor to figs. Like, and he and his wife are just running it together. And he's just the greatest dude. And he, like, we were out that night. He like stopped me. He's like, you were on your hero's journey. Like you have found your thing.

That's right. This is your thing. And so, but, but to me, it's so different than Isaac who is uniquely gifted or even Alan, when you meet him. So it doesn't negate the need for talent or like it's the business model is not magic. But well, but what you said about Alan or Al from Missouri quilt, right? Is like the content's actually really good.

It's providing a ton of value to people. He weirdly uniquely cares about these women. Like he's a, he's a, you know, older dude like us, but he cares about these 50 year old quilting women because it's, you know, that's awesome. Like he cares about this town in Missouri. There's actual, real, genuine, authentic care for quilting.

So don't get me wrong. That's still present, but you, so you have to combine, it's sort of like BK beauty, like Paul, like, I don't know how well you know him, but do you know Paul at BK Beauty? No. Okay. So He's blowing up on TikTok shops. They sell the makeup brush. And so everybody's like, Oh, TikTok shops is valid because of Paul.

Right. And so I sat with him at ECF the other night we were talking and his story, if you listen to it is his wife was an influencer. He went to film school for five years. They seeded product into the TikTok community so that when the affiliate feature came out, they knew and were uniquely positioned to take everybody.

Yeah. In a way that like no one can replicate. Today. Yes. Yeah. And so people look at it and they go, Oh, tick tock shops is the magic thing, but false. Right. Right. And so I think that that can be where these things get conflated. But the reality is, is that margin innovation is this idea that the present construct of just paying meta.

Yeah. Yeah. As the tax on everything has to be offset somewhere to create disproportionate growth. And that's why creators with an audience are able to do it. So I think there is something to this idea that businesses are going to find ways to offset with revenue in a novel. That's the point that's right, which is that you have to, if you want to grow a really big business, you have to find a way to generate revenue.

That's not tied to ad spend. You need leverage somewhere and a really big business. You can grow a pretty good business. Yeah, but this is right. Like all these tactics come down to these other elements of the business. I think, you know, for For supplement brands, the answer to that is LTV. It's the leverages that you, the customers are drastically more valuable than they are in other agencies.

For Isaac Medeiros, it's, it's organic content creation. And part of the reason for that is he's talented. Part of the reason for that is that his product lends to visual content really, really well for the tick tock shops people. It's that for, what was I going to say? I think for, for other brands, the growth lever, this is why omni channel retail is the growth lever essentially at some point.

Simple modern is a great example. Well, simple modern for them, it's, it's actually like Amazon driven. That's the thing people need to understand about that business is that like, what really started with was like brilliant product strategy on Amazon is the thing that propelled them at first. But then you're right.

Like what eventually propelled them to the larger numbers was mass retail and some of that. And then D to leverage points. Exactly. D to C is the backend for simple modern. It was like, uh, they didn't care about it for a long time. And so, you know, Omnichannel retail, that I think is a good way to think about what's compelling about it for some brands, which I, you know, is like a question that comes up a lot, which is like, should we go more omnichannel?

And to me, it's like, yeah, if you can do meaningful value capture where it really is part value creation at large things, and Part of the thing you get there is this additional value capture on the spend. You're already spending on your DTC. It can be really, really powerful because all of these clicks and video views and stuff like that right now, if it's just DTC don't work.

So I think maybe that's the principle that I would think about there is like, what is, what is the actual pathway? In your business to generating revenue that is not tied directly to ad spend essentially to make your ad spend more valuable, but she'll capture broader. So Shereen, you, you were joking about having her come on to do the anti cost caps.

Yeah, it's always like the number one internet troll about this idea. Yeah. And also one of the best people on a podcast. So do it because I think she has this really compiling point of view. Thank you. You know, where our good friend Vince is running their ad account and I mess with them all the time because if you look at the sort of that on the surface, it's like you guys are trashing money here, but the contention, which I think is a fair one to engage in is they're the number one product on Sephora, they have, they're crushing in all these alternative channels and so their demand creation, the ad on meta has a broader impact than people who are exclusively attempting to capture all that demand on their website.

That's right. And that's a leverage. Again, that's, that's leverage. Right. Yeah. And that opportunity. Yeah. Okay. What should, what should my business strategy be? I mean, are you just going to keep beating the long form explainer horse? That's my tactic. That's a tactic, but I might beat that because people need to hear that people are so wrong about so much creative.

It's crazy. Yeah. Should I do a Taylor was right, or should I do,

I don't think I have a problem. Many when you're right. I feel like I'm, I'm willing to do that. I love arguing. I love, no, come on. I feel like I love to argue with you, but I just, the fifth major sport is arguing with Taylor in the U S let's do, you want to talk about, let's do, I'm going to say fix the next thing next.

Okay. So this is, this is something I think about a lot. So you and I have very different businesses. Yeah. Are you too? I mean, sort of, well, So we are trying to do really different things with our businesses. There's a reason though, that you and I are not competitors right now that we're going to cross publish this.

We both serve e commerce clients. We both offer meta ad spend as like sort of the ostensibly, the thing you pay for is at least part of it. You know, creative development, our services look pretty similar. I forecast businesses, you forecast businesses, you do it better than I do. That's okay. But. You have an agency with a bunch of people working for you doing this.

I am capped on my client role. And you and I were just talking about that before we started recording this. And so as I think about my business, here's something I've realized. I tell every entrepreneur that I deal with, like, At some point I asked them this question and you asked them this question. I think maybe I've gotten this question from you, which is like, what is your, what are your goals?

Cause I want to know that if like, they're going to tell me their goals that I can serve their goals in some way that I, that I actually think I can accomplish what they're trying to do. And the conversation will kind of end if they're trying to do a goal that I just think is impossible. If somebody comes to me and says, we want to do a hundred million dollars next year and we're doing 10 now, then I might just be like, great, find somebody hackier than me.

You know, like, I don't know, maybe it can be done. I don't know, but like, yeah. So. You, I think I even when I think about like the bridges episode that is referring to earlier, which goes through your forecasting method, which makes a lot of sense for a larger business where it is your forecasting daily campaign budgets and meta ads, right?

For clients. I am not doing that for my clients and I'm not doing anything close to that in my business. For AJF growth. And so what I have continued to think about is I have almost no long term goal for my brand or for AJF growth. I have, I have, I sort of put a goal out there cause I have a small team now and I thought it was probably a good idea for them to have some idea of what success was, but to be totally honest with you, I don't really care that much about it.

As long as the business works and they get paid. And I, Can pay my family and stuff like that. I don't have a number that it just, it doesn't actually motivate me very much to do that instead. And this is, this is probably the thing that I'm thinking about from a broader business perspective. I feel very comfortable with a strategy that just says, fix the next thing next.

And I'm not really trying to build a pathway. And again, like I seriously tell brands all the time in e commerce, they need to plot out their course for multiple years and everything, you know, now I actually think in e commerce, this probably doesn't really work that well because in e commerce, you actually do need to think about the value of a customer in a way that directly dictates the dollars you're going to spend on ads.

And I think that's pretty different than my business. But yeah, that's, this is the thing that I'm thinking about a lot. And I think what it reflects is the question of essentially like business goals. Like I, I just don't think that every business needs to have very clear mid to long term goals unless they want to get really big.

If they want to get really big, you probably have, if you, if you're going to get 20, 40, A hundred people involved in your business. You probably have to have some idea of where you're going because at some point you just have to plan. Like it's just, it's just a reality of the details. But for me, what I'm thinking about is even in this, even in the sort of, if I was a CEO, even of that business, I think I would probably spend, I would be pretty comfortable with the idea that my main job is to, is to just fix the next thing next.

Okay. So that's like a half baked thought. So tell me what you think about that. Do you remember we used to do at CTC, you remember the first thing song? Oh, yeah. Okay. So, you know, Richard, Richard Gaffin, Richard Gaffin wrote the first one by both podcasts to write a song. And this is the best guitar player.

I personally know. Dr. Darwin, who runs Bambi, CEO Bambi, and he used to introduce this thing at CTC that was first thing. And the idea was what's the most important thing to do this week and do that before you do anything else. And so we used to stand up at company meetings and everybody would declare the first thing.

And the idea was you're going to leave this meeting right now and you're going to go do that. Nothing else until that thing is done. And that's what this is. My question is, what's the framework for answering the question? What's next? So I think about like, well, I can tell you the answer. Well, let's take the conversation that we had.

I'm going to push back on that. I don't actually think, you know, because you don't have a framework to use against, which is what the long term objective is. Well, the funny thing is I do, but go ahead, go ahead. Well, but my experience of the conversation we were having just between people about this client, that client.

It's entirely predicated on understanding what the long term goal is. And what I think is that right now you are trying to discover what the actual maximum potential is of the present thing. Yes. And so, which is exactly what fixing the next thing next is. But what do you mean? Well, I mean, like part of the thing that keeps happening is like, I'm I have a new understanding of what the maximum potential is based off of what happens next.

And I don't think that that could have happened the same way six months ago as it happens today. But I think that you could actually get to the answer non experientially. But what a lot of people do is they have to live it to actually accept it. Is that there actually isn't an answer that you could probably accept and that you could logically get to.

But until you've actually lived it. Well. And experience the emotion of what it would cost you to live in, like that it's not actually real to you. So I think, I think part of the thing that's happening here is like, I don't really want to hold myself accountable to it. I think that's part of the idea to some goal that I create, because I don't care that much about the goal.

So then just, it just, you create a goal. So I don't, I don't do that. Right. Exactly. This is exactly the point. I go to the gym in the morning and you just like, yeah, I don't, I don't really, I don't really have serious fitness goals. What do you mean? I want to work out three to four days a week cause it's good for me.

I like doing it. It feels like playing sports. I love playing sports cause I do CrossFit. So it feels like there's like a time goal in a given workout or a weight goal or whatever it is. Right. So it's like, it's got like a, it's got like a gamified kind of element to it. And so, but I'm not, I have no. I mean, I weigh myself when I get to somebody's house that has a scale cause it's kind of fun.

I don't have any body, I don't have any muscle goal or anything like it's fun to hit a new number when I get on the bench and bench press, but I don't really care. I just know I feel good when I do it. I want to do that. What I believe is, is that if I can say consistent with CrossFit for a long period of time, I'll feel, I'll feel good.

I'll be as healthy as I can reasonably be without CrossFit. Building my whole life around fitness and health. And so the solving the next thing next is like my pushups are terrible. So when they come up, I try to work at them. But why? Because it's fun to get better things. So, so I think that it sounds to me like in many of these cases, you're optimizing for an experience, which is what I did.

I think for the first, probably seven years of my business at CDC was entirely about an experience. Yeah. And it was entirely predicated on the idea of like, the highest value is like, I love this thing. Uh huh. And as long as that remains true, then persist in that action. So I don't, but I, I think that in some ways what it is, is you're rejecting examining your behavior for the actual source of the motivation.

Yeah. I think, I mean, I think the biggest, so the biggest question for me is. The biggest, the most live question in my business is like, how hard should I push to build a big, bigger thing? And there's one thing that's external to me. And I can just tell you, this is definitely not the thing I, it does not get me out of bed in the morning, except in the sense that it feels like a game to win.

And I like winning games. I, but it feels that arbitrary to me. There's one thing that says like, you should go build the biggest business you can to make the most money you can. And that's the point of business. And that's like the thing you should go do. And I think that's true. So I think that's like, there's a, there's very few things that I find to be objective, true.

So I reject that premise, but I think that's what business is no matter what anybody pretends it is. Yeah. And I, I mean, I, I actually appreciate that perspective. I think, I think More people should be honest about that. I think actually that's what a lot of is driving a lot of people who won't say that with clarity.

You know, I always think about this when I see the mission statement of companies where I'm like, no, your mission statement is to make the most money possible. That's what the mission statement is. In fact, when I see people sort of hip, you know, Presenters at conferences or whatever talk about has been so important to have a mission that people can rally behind.

It's like, what the mission is for the equity holders to maximize their enterprise value, which is the capital society. I think it's an externality that you don't actually get to decide. And that's part of my thing is that, like, we exist inside of a system that moves in a very specific way where the employees and things are motivated in ways that you don't actually get to control.

That's right. So sort of, it would be like. Uh, joining a basketball league and starting the game and saying I'm playing for some other reason than to score more points than the other team and everybody could go like Okay. You're allowed to say whatever you want, but the entire premise of this thing is all predicated on whoever scores the most points wins.

So no matter what you say in the context of that, there's a bigger truth than you, but in business, there's not another team. You're not trying to beat a team. Well, maybe. So I don't think so. I think, but I think if you define winning as beating all the other teams, it creates, so, I mean, this is, this is, this is exactly the thing for me is like, I feel really comfortable on the one hand saying this is like a game.

Mm hmm. And this is actually the thing that motivates me. I look, I kind of look at my forecast for AGF growth and I go, how do I make the number go up? And that's because it's inherent to the activity. And at the same time, there are some things I'm not willing to sacrifice to do that. Okay. Now I agree with this.

Now I think very similarly, which is that I'm willing to lose the game, but that doesn't change what the game is. So I'm willing to accept that. I don't that some people beat me. Yeah. I've been beat by my competitors in my space. I've been beat. Yeah. And I, I'm willing to actually accept it because for me, there's a level that I'm not the consequence of which I'm not willing to accept from a familial thing from a bunch of reasons, but that doesn't change the game that it just means I lose.

Yeah. So I just, I mean, the thing is like basketball actually is a constrained thing for one thing. It is necessarily the case that one team wins and another team loses. There's no world in which both teams win. Whereas I think you and I are both winning right now. I don't think the fact that you have a bigger EBITDA than me means that you're beating me.

Even though we're ostensibly in the same case. I just think it means that we're after really different things. And I don't have a problem with that. I'm team Taylor, man. I want you to have the biggest EBITDA that you can get. That's great. I refer you clients. Like, I'm happy to do it. Right? Like, But I, uh, that's, that's where I think that that breaks down and there is a constraint here.

And so, and so, so the point is like for me, I'm always trying to play this back and forth, which is like, like, well, cause like if the point of the game is to win Taylor, why don't you work 80 hours a week? I mean, maybe you do. Cause I'm willing to lose the game because I'm playing multiple games at once.

I'm playing the marriage game. Yeah. I'm playing the father game. I'm playing a bunch of games at the same. I'm playing my personal health. Yeah. But then, then your whole thing breaks apart. Because, because what you're saying is that like, I mean, then it is just for fun for you, right? It's a game that you're willing to lose, then you're not playing to win.

I'm playing to win to a certain level. No, you're not. Because no, you said there's another team that's beating you. They are beating me. So in that case, the analogy breaks down. I can accept that there is somebody better than me. There is a real cost that somebody is willing to pay that. I'm not. Yeah. I listened to, it was a, if you listen to a, you're probably not a basketball guy, but LeBron and JJ Redick have had started the podcast.

I've just heard about it. Two episodes. Yeah. On the first episode, LeBron says that To be at his level, it comes at the personal expense of the people closest to him. And he goes, I acknowledge I am selfish for the pursuit of this thing. Yeah. That's great. He's willing to pay the price and therefore he is the greatest of all time.

Yeah. You don't get to be LeBron and not pay the price. That's right. I agree. But then you're not then it doesn't mean that there's not a game going on that somebody's LeBron. Somebody's better than yeah They're bigger than me. They have more money than me. They have Everything but I just don't industry.

I mean you're asserting this. Yeah. Yeah, you're asserting this idea That that is an objective weighting of who is winning and who's not and I think I'm suggesting and well, I mean the game of business. Yeah. So maybe there's a game of life, right? There's a separate. I think that's subsumed that business is subsumed by this game.

Right? So exactly inside of it. Okay. So society, everything will move towards this direction. Yeah. Inevitable. Yeah. And I watch people like this is a thing. I know another podcast guest of yours. Just from higher priority. I think he hates me because he has this. No, I don't mean that. Just you're awesome.

You're great. He's a great dude. Yeah. But like he has this deep entrenched motivation to say, I will not be big and I am happy the size that I am. And I just go, okay, that's a thing that won't exist. Yeah. Yeah. And well, so what I think is definitely right. And I think about it as he points out is that the reason it's really hard for businesses to stay in stasis and maybe you point this out to somebody else is that employees want to grow.

Exactly. Because that's it. You have to get the system that you're in. Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is possible does you can, you could theoretically say that's fine. We will take somebody at a lower level and replace them, and it will come at the cost of our thing, or you can try to grow with them if you want to keep them.

But at that point, the reason I'm trying to grow is not necessarily to grow my EIPTA per se. The reason I'm trying to grow is because I like the way this is set up with this person. I need to provide them more value. Right. Well, but again, and because you're inside, that's a different game entirely. No, but because you're inside of a capitalist system, you only have one choice, which is to grow.

Yeah. Unless they, unless the people who you attract feel the same way, which is like, they're actually willing to take less because they don't, because they would rather exist in a workplace. I mean, there are many people all over the place are willing to trade money for other benefits. I'd like to meet them.

They probably don't exist in our space that much. I don't know. Yeah. I don't think they do. I mean, I think the very Totally. The very, the very, yeah, I mean, people's, people's, uh, stated preferences and revealed preferences on this are quite different, but the, I mean, the classic, sure. The classic example of this is that I'm sort of on a societal level is younger mothers very often are willing to trade more flexibility in a job for pay.

And this is like an observed thing from a woman who just won the Nobel in economics, right? This is like part of the reason for gender gaps or gender pay gap. So in that respect, they value. Something differently than they value pay. Now that's in that case, it's flexibility. But I also think that that's actually consistent with Western American capitalism in terms of how gender roles proceed.

So I think probably like again, sure, that's actually probably built into the premise of the game that we're playing. Yeah. And the difference between gender. But I mean, that person is still doing the thing for whatever reason, right? They're doing the thing that you're saying that people don't do, which is like, they're not necessarily.

And so always intensely major, but I agree with you in an, in a highly entrepreneurial space like ours. It's just like, it attracts people who are like trying to grow and do more things all the time. You know? Yeah. It's just like, who's celebrated. What is it? Like, yeah. Who have you chosen to have on your podcast?

Why did you have you on the podcast? Why? Yeah. Cause you sold her company for profit. Yeah. Right. She won. And she thought she should be celebrated and ask questions. Yeah. Why are the operators so popular? Because they all run nine figure businesses. And it's like, It's just, it's like, it's so deeply ingrained into the premise.

It's like, I don't, I think resistance is futile. Even like I watch you and there's this question too, which is like, which is one of the things I put in, this is actually what Edward and I talked about, which is that, do you have some sort of underlying obligation to maximizing your potential in this game?

Um, is there like a, Are you letting down the gift that you have in some capacity? So to play a small game, I mean, it's funny, like I, I think this is actually the much more compelling question to me than an EBIT goal per se, or like a revenue goal per se, which is a stewardship goal or, or like a stewardship sense, right?

So, I mean, you know, like I'm a Christian, I'm a person of faith. I think sometimes about, I, I view the world through the lens of. There's an element where like God has made me in certain ways and, and given me certain responsibilities. I think about my family or something like that. Right. This is sort of the obvious ones.

I have kids and part of my role is to steward my relationship with my boys in a way that is, they're my responsibility uniquely in a way that they're nobody else's besides my wife's. And even that there's like some different ways in which that happens in our relationship. So like, yeah. So I think about that same kind of thought with business, which is like, should I, should I push myself harder to do something larger precisely?

Because I think I have the capacity to, well, it'd be like going to the gym and deciding that you're only going to lift 135 pounds. I'm not sure you're never going to do. I think a better analogy is what if you are Six foot eight, right? If you're born like LeBron, exactly. So, because I couldn't be LeBron, right?

Like no matter how hard I work, I'm not going to be LeBron. And, uh, in fact, I probably can't, I couldn't have made it to the NBA if it was all I worked on my whole life. I don't think I just, I'm not athletic enough. So. Yeah, I think that I think that's a more interesting question to me. And that actually is the thing that pushes me much more than a goal for the sake of winning a capitalist game because I don't really value, like I said, I like making more money because it feels the same as like when I was a very small kid.

Small child and I got pretty good at Chinese checkers at like a seven year as like a 7-year-old. And I was like, I wanna play Chinese checkers because I can beat people at it, you know? It's fun. That's what it feels like to me. It doesn't, you know, we, I got into this world because of a fantasy baseball league you and I were in, right?

Like, and so like it's, it is exactly that thing to me. That's what it feels like. It's a game to win. It's a game to play. It's not, otherwise I don't care very much about. The rest of it, but yeah, the question of, yeah, is there an obligation? So what was your answer to Edward or what do you, what do you think?

Do you have, how about you? You're, you're, you are uniquely talented. I'm getting, I would say the number one thing I get from mentors and I think it's criticism of the business I'm choosing to participate in it as it is not a big enough opportunity. Yeah. So people tell me this all the time and I kind of reflect on it.

Like, why do I keep getting, why do they keep saying this? And in some ways it's like intended to be a compliment, but it feels belittling. Like it's a, it's a weird interaction and even talking about it feels like some sort of lame thing like that. I should deserve to be doing something more like, yeah, part of it's I'm 10 years into the journey.

And so I feel like entrenched it in this way that yeah. That is about finishing a story that matters to me. But, um, I think that right now I've created this framework for what I value in life around these three goals. And the reason for that is that I think that marriage is the hardest game that you can play in human relationship.

And so I think it's the highest achievement of human relationship to have a sustained 50 year marriage. That's, that's my friend. Two is the best friends with my adult children. I didn't choose to bring them into the world. I feel a unique obligation to their wellbeing. You didn't choose? I mean, I, sorry, they didn't choose to be brought into the world.

I chose to bring them into the world. I feel a unique obligation to their care. And to me, the idea that they would choose me in relationship at the end of that signal that I did something that they value. And then post economic by the time I'm 40, it's just a way to say that like, I hate being beholden to people for money.

I'd like to not be. But I recognize that there's like, there's nothing objectively good about any of those things in my mind. You don't think there's something objectively good about dying married to your wife? I really don't. I don't know that that's the case. I don't know that marriage is a really like, it's a weird construct.

It's like really hard and requires a lot of like, yeah. Sacrifice of life experiences that you didn't have that. I don't, I don't know what's good. I don't know. I'm choosing it right now. I think it's the best option, but I don't know. I don't know. Like sometimes I think about like, Whoa. What would it be like to be Ryan Gosling?

Would I choose the same thing? Like, would it, would that actually be the best choice? If I was rich and famous and the most beautiful person on earth? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what those. Why don't you approach a data driven answer to that? Which is what? How many people get to married? People are meaningfully happier than non married people.

What is happiness? Well, there's a lot of different ways. I mean, I think you could interrogate the data about that. About the point of life. You could, I mean, that's a, I think that's not going to be a data question, the point of life, but I think, I think to the question of the point, I mean, the point of life and what's going to give you the most joy or two questions, two different things, but I think maybe I actually think they're one thing, but, but to the point of what you said about Ryan Gosling, I mean, one way you could answer that question would be to take a data driven approach to it.

And that would, that would, well, I don't know how many people get, you can't create counterfactual experiences for Ryan Gosling relative to the choices that he made, right? Like where he's like, So I've been married to one woman for six years, and that's one where he's not. Yeah, you can't, but you could take the average that you see across things and see how sociologists measure this kind of thing, right?

There is a field called sociology where people try to exactly get this kind of thing. And you could attempt a data and you would do all the things you would do if I presented to you a spreadsheet about whether or not, I don't know, for example, comments on, on ads matter. Um, and you would, you would interrogate that data and you would try to answer and you say, where's it a good study, where's it a bad study, right?

I'm saying you could approach this question that same way and bring it back. all of your same concerns about it. So I think you can get to an aggregate view of an average answer for humanity that would be like broadly true and specifically false. Um, and I think that's, that's part of the challenge of it.

And then you get to the definitions of words of like, like happiness or joy or these things. And so that brings to one of the other points, which is, let's, let's, let's just, let me just pause there and note. Yes, I'm speaking in terms of averages. I recognize that many people who are listening or watching may have different experiences than this, and I'm not trying to, you know, condescend to anybody's experience.

I'm speaking in terms of averages. So it's a challenge with averages and data, which is like again, this is probabilistic thinking or anything else, right? Or when you say even the common thing is such a good example where what everyone's provocation or response that often is. But this one time this thing happened where the comments made a difference.

And that's totally possible. Yes. Right. I could totally concede that that is true. And what I'm saying is true, you know, but this is a good, this is actually a good like Facebook tactic thing or whatever, which is that like people, I think do this a lot with a lot of Facebook tactics, which is. They go, like, the one I hear a lot is creative testing, you know, people, people get so mad at me about the idea that I'm saying you should not build creative testing campaigns.

I mean, your way of saying framing is slightly different than mine, but I think we basically agree, um, like at my point, just that, like, let the machine decide which ones. And the response I get all the time is, yeah, but this one time I ran this ad that was getting no spend when I ran it on the machine learning, but then I forced spend to it and it worked great.

And then it spent a bunch more, it became my best ad. And my answer to that is that that's totally possible. But, um, I'm interested in probabilistic forecasting and I have to play I'm not trying to generally create outlier outcomes in terms of like those sorts of things for something like the distribution of my ad spend.

I want probabilistic forecasting that yes will be wrong because all forecasting is inherently flawed and All probabilistic forecasting is inherently flawed in the classic example. This is 5 38 prediction of Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump. Right. And they said, what was it? Hillary Clinton could win 25 percent or Trump would win 25 percent of the time.

And everybody said, Oh, 5 38 got it totally wrong. It's like 25%. It's a lot. That's a lot. That's a lot of times. It's not the most time, but it's a real chance. So anyway, like, I think this is something people do all the time with that, though, which is that they They misunderstand the relationship between the individual outlier thing versus what you should expect in the aggregate.

And yeah, and I also think that what's hard is that when you're dealing with one account and you're making decisions about what is working there versus the seat that you and I said, which is trying to make a recommendation of what is most likely to occur. Yeah. Is that. Those are very different things.

It may be true that in your account, this specific tactic is working and therefore you should continue to deploy that tactic while also being true. That is right. That I don't recommend that. And on the average that you should have principles of what to do and what not to do, because the other thing I despise the most is actually could have been my business strategy, my business observation, my business obsession right now, which is like, people just love to say every account is different.

Things are always changing all the time. And I think that's just the biggest fools aren't like, I I'm going the extreme other end of that. I am like, no, no, no. I want a D to C doctrinal statement. I've actually thought about putting to bring back at a rumor. I told him I was thinking about putting together a documents like the 10 commandments of D to C media buying and people would be annoyed at lots of them because I do a little break them all the time, you know, but like to frame it that like, I think people need to have, I just did an episode about this.

Like you need to have point of view and perspective. And yes, Change it when the data changes. Yes, there may be times when it will not apply to your specific account, but stop going back and interrogating the fundamentals. Like instead, stick your feet into the fundamentals and then go do things that are actually unique to your business.

Like the way your product interacts with your customer, which is unique to your business, you know. Yeah. And so I think that's a, that's a hard principle, but I think it underlies this back to this question of like the business, it's like, what is the fundamentals of business? And then what are the reasons that you would deviate from it?

Yeah. It gets to this, the, one of the points that I'll go back to my next thing, which is, is it, so I wrote down in our sheet here, is it important to maximize your plan? Okay. This is good. And so the, there was this big viral thread that, uh, it was a video, right? Who was that? Yeah. He was giving a talk to Stan.

I'm going to pour you a little bit of whiskey. Um, and he was giving a speech about suffering or about his experience building NVIDIA. And he was speaking to Stanford students. And he was basically like, I'm going to TLDR this and you should watch it. It is good. Yeah. This represents the context in some way.

Yeah. We'll, uh, we'll put the link in the show notes. I'm going to jot it down. He says, I wish you suffering because suffering is the only way to build resilience. And resilience is the key to success. And so. My question in listening to that was like, is this a worthwhile trade? Is resilience a worthwhile trade for suffering?

And should you pursue suffering for the sake of developing more resilience so that you can maximize your success? And I was like, you know what? I might be willing to have less success for less. Um, and I, I think that I would never wish that on somebody. I actually think about a lot of kids, right? It's like, yeah.

Would I, would I offer them suffering for the sake of their resilience? Yeah. And I. Do you do that in your parenting? So first of all, I think we'd have to agree on the term suffering. I don't. Yeah. Hardship or like, I don't think that's a good gym and running hard on the treadmill is suffering. You know, you say that, but think about how hard it is for some people.

I think, especially for my friends who, I mean, you were a professional athlete. Right. So you, I think there's an element. No, that I ever suffered. In my training. Exactly. Word is so driven. Exactly. I think that there are some people for whom going to the gym is suffering. I think at the very least it's emotionally suffering.

I think about some of my friends. Here's the closest experience I can do this. And I think again, this is probably not quite there. I graduated high school six foot two. Probably 150 pounds. I am just built incredibly stringy and I didn't do anything to select being skinny. I just have been a skinny, skinny dude my whole life.

I am currently, yes, right. We were friends in junior high. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I just, it's part of the reason I didn't play baseball for longer. I just couldn't hit the ball or throw the ball far enough or hard enough. Right. Because I just wasn't big enough and I didn't work out. I didn't know how to do it in high school or whatever.

So, right. I was reasonably skilled. I just wasn't strong enough. So. I remember going to the CrossFit gym. I've been in the CrossFit gym a lot of times with women who are stronger than me. And as a dude, this gets at your dudeness a little bit, you know, like it is, it's like a thing to be strong, right? Or whatever.

And I had to accept the fact that I was going to really suck at the workouts in the beginning. And I was going to lift a lot less weight than other people, including than some of the women in the gym. Now, I think that's not that much suffering still. I was going to say, where does the suffering start?

But I mean, it was emotionally taxing on me at first. And I had to work through that. And I think that's not that extreme example of some people's relationship to the gym. I think of some of my friends who have struggled with their weight at different times. And going to the gym for them is a brutal experience at 1st.

That's what I think. Yeah. And this is a spectrum. And so I think it's hard to draw lines of where these words begin between, like, I have, you know, and we can all pick some extreme example of, yeah, I have, you know, some close family friends that have had to, like, Decide to give up on their daughter because of her heroine.

Yeah. And I watched them. Yeah. Right. Yes. Right. And I think that's fair. I think that's fair. That for no one. Yes. Whatever resilience they develop in the name of that. That's right. I would want for no one, but go going in the cold plunge. Like, okay. Yeah. Learning to control your body in a moment of like where your vassal nerve.

This is a good point. You're making. I I just want to draw a line of what we're offering to people in this statement of, I wish you suffering. And you're like, well, maybe, but I think whatever, and I don't agree that that could build resilience. Yeah. Like that, that kind of extreme suffering would make you resilient.

But I'm like, I don't want to be that resilient. Yeah. Like I'll be less resilient. No. I think about this all the time. I mean. Yeah. Like, I think you should choose your suffering as part of it, right? As much as, as much as you're able to write is that you should decide which things are willing to suffer for.

And this goes back to the, like, business game thing. Like, I think part of the reason I'm not trying to grow a bigger thing is because when I think about the what it would take to get there, it requires a bunch of challenges and stress that maybe I could accomplish, but that right now I think I'm stewarding things fine and I, I'm not willing to do that.

No, that may, that may change when I don't have a two year old and a four year old. Well, he says in an interview, the CEO of NVIDIA, one of the three most valuable companies in the world. It's an interview that said, like, if you could go back to yourself when you were starting, what would you say? And his answer was, don't do it.

Yes. So he's sitting in the reward of it. And he's saying, looking back to himself, what would he say? And his answer is don't do you think he believes that I can only take him at his word. I don't know. So, so this is a part of what I was gonna say is like, I think you're straw manning him a little bit.

You're sort of taking him no, no, no, on the suffering thing. Like on the suffering thing. I think, like, I think if you interpret what he's saying there in the context of Talking to a room full of Stanford people, I think what he's, what he's probably saying I would have to go back and watch the clip is that the obstacle is the way essentially, and that that would be a more fair interpretation of what he's saying, and that probably what he's saying is that, like, the challenges are the thing that create value.

And I think knowing you, you would say the same thing. So I again, I both agree with the premise. And I, which is to say that, and I'll say this at CTC right now, I am the best CEO I've ever been. There's no question because I suffered extreme failure in 2022 in a way that I was ready to quit, but I would, if you gave me the choice, make it never happened to me.

And, and so what I think the hardest year of my marriage, I say the exact same thing about, yes, I, people have since, well, don't you learn so much and you grow so much closer. And my answer is no, I would, if I could go back, I would not have done that. Yes. And so I look at that and go, you are right. It builds resilience.

It made me more conscious, more capable, have to survive. And if I could go back, I would make it not happen. And I think that I hear from him too, because it was miserable. And I don't even know that I like the person I am on the other side of it. That's interesting. What if you could suffer in a way? So that's the one difference between what you're saying about the Marriage example.

I just gave a near example. I do like the person. I am a lot more than I liked the person before. Would you like the person that never did that thing better? It's really hard counterfactual. It's a good question. I think it's a really fair question. I mean, you and I've talked about this. Was there another way to learn it?

Well, the question is, did you have to learn it? Not everybody does. Yeah. So I get that, like, again, am I sitting on the other side of it going, I probably need, but to learn it to become what in order to build a profitable business? Yeah. I needed to do that. Is that a necessity in life? I don't know. Like it's, it's the game I've chosen and I'm winning it more than I ever have before, but I find myself to be less hopeful, more Naya, like less joyful naivete, like, yeah, like this.

So this is, this is exactly the point. So I mean, doesn't this exactly go back to the conversation we were just having, like But it's the game I'm in, but I recognize that I'm conscious. Well, why, why don't we go back to a world? Why don't, why don't you try to go back to the world where there's six or eight people playing office mini hoop basketball in a tiny office?

The thing you talk about in Kayla all the time, right? What if you could get paid enough? But what if there's enough money can't undo the idea that I should have a 13 week cash flow forecast and to think about like all the things like you, but couldn't you have a 13 week cash flow forecast in that business and still be okay?

I mean, maybe, but it would be a simplified business highlight how dumb so many of the decisions are like, right? Like that's the thing about what it does. But I don't think, I don't think the dumb decisions are the important part of that experience. I think the important part of the experience is the being in it with friends you care about and think they're like, like, say, like building a glass whiteboard that has an electronic on and off switch that makes it frosted and unfrosted because you think it's cool and I'm bending like Eight grand on it.

When you have like a hundred grand in revenue total, that's so dumb. And I don't cut that out, but the glass part of it, it's like play ping pong for four hours a day. Yeah. Yeah. And you still never beat me the entire time I've ever played. Yeah. It's like thing that you're in. That's not true. Taylor's beat me.

Not that often. No, it's probably 50, 50. The. Yeah, I, I think it's interesting. I mean, this is really the most interesting thing to me because like, like it's actually gets to like, you have one life, like what is, what are you going to spend all of your time on actually for those of us in this world have this unique ability and this is the ultimate privilege here to actually make some decisions around that.

Like a lot of people just have no ability to decide that. And so given that opportunity. What is the actual best use of that time? I think is a, is a, is an important and, and pretty hard question because I think there is a world like if you think you're less joyful, if you think there's less of that, like, I don't know, man, I think there's a, there's a world where you, so I don't know, like I look at my kids and one of the things my wife and I reflect on is like the frequency of how often kids laugh relative to adults.

And it's just their day is frivolous and stupid and funny and yeah, all day long they laugh, but at, at some point in your life, like farts aren't quite as funny. Yeah. I don't know. I've been making that joke for 40 years. It's still pretty funny to me. It's just like, it just fades a, you know, fatigue. No, I get it.

Yeah. In a way that, and so I don't know that there's a way to to, to maintain the novelty of it all as you go, but there's a richness to it and that I think is a different kind of appreciation that I have. And I feel proud of my capacity, uh, and that I didn't have break or quit. Yeah. So different than maybe joy and laughter, there's a different sensation.

Yeah. They're both, I think, in some ways, valuable or experientially good that I like. So I don't know. Yeah. You, you, you try and you try and sort of, I just don't know in this idea, like we hold up Jensen Yang and we look at it and. I don't. I've heard Elon Musk say this too. He's like, you don't want to be me.

I don't want to be Elon Musk. Right. But I don't want to be Elon Musk. Like the societal vision. Yeah. But this is, this is part of the point is to me is like, this is the reason why my mentality is fix the next thing next. It's like, I, I don't want to be Elon Musk. I don't want to be Jensen Yang. I don't care about it at all.

Now. I think the thing that's really interesting. I thought of a treadmill that takes you in that direction. You're just not. Why? Why don't I just keep doing the thing? I mean, I don't know. Business is growing. Sure. But at some point, I do think the point of life is to maximize your joy. I think that's the, I think it's the whole point of all of life.

And so I think if you are actively doing things that are not going to maximize your joy, and I think this is, there's a short term, long term thing here. This is the, in some ways, the, you know, the, Hedonistic paradox or whatever, right? Where it's like a lot of things people think will maximize the joy actually maximize their suffering, right?

Heroin, for example, would be an example, right? So, uh, and that's the concentrate off for almost everything in life, actually. So I do think that and this is where I think. The broader game of life subsuming, subsuming the smaller game of business is challenging. But I think, I mean, you got this in our prep for this, but it made me think about it.

Like one of the reasons I think that is that I think I'm very good at selling e commerce products on the internet. Elon Musk is creating brain chips that make it so that people whose brains don't work, whose bodies don't work. I don't have that intellectual capacity. And so maybe what Elon Musk has to steward.

In his mental capacity and his company building capacity is different than me running 100 million. Could I run it? Probably. Could you be the CEO? Probably. But how important is that in the world? I mean, I guess the way you would make it, the way you would make the argument for the importance of that is if the product was really meaningfully helping people's lives, or if the culture and the people and the jobs that it created, some of those things really were going to make a meaningful impact on the world.

I think those things could could all be arguments in favor of some of that. And those things is it. In some way would ladder up to a sense of joy that I got by making, creating impact because because one of the things I'm assuming here is that like impact on the world generates joy. Yeah. But I, yeah. And one of the other things I think I'm trying to be conscious of too, is that one of the things I've learned along the way, and I've heard this from a lot of people is that it's not harder to do something big than something small.

You're just aware of that. That's interesting. Do it. So that's interesting. That's really interesting. Actually, that's actually really interesting. Back when we were at Quail, you remember Nima? Uh, just an amazing human and I have stayed close. And so I did not, we, we look at deals together sometimes and we're looking at a deal right now and we're on the call and it's, you know, 50 million in revenue, 4 million anybody.

And he's just like, this is not worth our time. He's like, it is no harder to solve this problem than it would be to solve a business at 15 million in EBITDA. Let's, let's just stop. And I was like, Whoa, like that's really interesting. I would never have that conscious awareness. of that reality. And so I would persist in the smaller problem.

And, and that's where I go, Ooh, that's somebody awakening me to a different reality that I'm just not aware of. That's very helpful. So that's where I go, like, well, am I playing this game because it's just the only one I'm in and know, or am I playing it because of some like deeper truth? And I think it's mainly, I think that's, I think that's the best challenge to my approach that I've heard from you tonight.

I think that's really helpful. Yeah. think it's really good because if I could actually maintain a level of work, not eating up my entire life and Yeah. But even that's not even really the main point. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like just, yeah, I think that's a pretty interesting idea. And actually, I mean, I've hung out with a simple modern guys.

A lot have been Oklahoma city a few times, like they're a good example of that. Like they live super normal working people lives, you know, they're not crazy work obsessed and they're building up. They just have a huge thing making, you know, I mean, they are really serious. They shut down their whole company for a week every year.

And have a generosity summit where they bring all their giving partners. And I mean, they're really serious about their generosity goals. And yet at the same time, it's not even their whole lives. I've talked to the people about parenting as much as I have about anything else, you know? So Russell Brunson has the metaphor of the car that you get in, right?

It's like, we all push down on the gas and it's like, it takes the same amount of effort to push the gas. That's really good. Yeah. Some of them go way faster than me. Right. That was the, his comment, Alex Formosy too, right? Like if you're playing the wrong game. Yeah. So I think, I think a lot about that. It's like we all got in a car and you got in the agency car 'cause you knew me and, but like yeah, it was just networked and it was, it was easy.

That's, that's the one you got in. And same thing for me. It was like, oh I went to Lucid Fusion 'cause Zubin invited me into it or I got into Power Balance because I knew Josh and it was like, so we walked into these cars and it was like, oh, but it wasn't 'cause we thought it was their best option. No, no, no we didn't.

No, there was no cold analysis. Okay, so let's do, let's do something quicker and then we'll go into some of the fun things. Okay. Quick one. Tactic. Tactic that you're interested in right now. What's like a, what's a tactic that you are excited about on a pure tactical level? Like just like give some people something that's just fun.

So I'm good. Not excluding. Oh yeah. This is a good one. Yeah. So not excluding your entire customer list from that. Okay. Go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. So. Especially for a more mature business. Like, let's say you get to the 20 million plus range where you have hundreds of thousands of customers or tens of thousands of customers, but a lot of them have lapsed.

Like this. One of the things I think is really true is that people assume that their customer file grows up into the right forever. And like numerically, the number of customers you have Does, but the ones that are likely to purchase again, do not actually the vast majority of them are never coming back.

And if you only trying to communicate to them via email, they haven't opened an email in years and they are not communicating with you and you're actually actively excluding them from your app. Yeah. Now I'm as big a proponent as new customer revenue as anybody, but a thing that I have seen. So we, we had a customer that came to us saying my existing customer revenue is down.

And I think part of it is because you are not speaking to my customers in that. And I'm mad about it. I want you to speak to my customers. And I said, fair, like, here's what I think the steps are. And so we deploy two two things. One was to narrow the exclusions down to only active customers and then to even with the active customers on key moments after the email has gone and has gotten through 36 hours, we deploy ads to the active customer.

And it's made a meaningful difference. And it did two interesting things. One, it improved the overall efficiency of the ad account, which is obvious because now you're including longer hanging fruit, but, but it also improved the new customer acquisition efficiency. So this is the interesting part to me, which is that the, it seems, and again, Four week, five weeks into this test that the increased signal that you're getting from the conversions on a lot of these campaigns are getting more volume to both new and existing customers at a greater efficiency.

And this is a contention. I've heard Tom who runs your friend of my space. Founders of chubbies. He and I would argue about this a lot, but I've had people tell me that they believe that the inclusion of existing customers is, uh, actually an important signal for metaphor, the sake of optimization for new customers.

And the early evidence in this case is like it has improved both AMER and MER existing and new customer revenue. Uh, I have a client where before. I was working with, I don't think she'd mind me saying this. Nazrin, mixed by Nazrin, I'm going to have on the show very soon update. I did my first opening the books with her very small business at the time when she was running things herself.

She's running ASC, didn't even have an existing customer list excluded. She didn't even know what it was. She's just entrepreneur figuring it out. Yep. Amazing. Building business. So I forecasted, I did a cohort based forecast on her customers and we just kept missing her returning customers. The only customer I had, only client I had.

Yeah, we're way low. Like her returning customers were coming in my forecast. Sorry, let me just be as close as possible. I was over forecasting her returning customer revenue. So I kept saying that. And so, and of course, one of the first things they, when I got the account was I set up her customer exclusions.

And at some point I realized, wait a minute, she was not excluding her existing customers before. And of course it's an apparel business. She was launching new products all the time. Isn't that right? Like, yeah. And so we went back and started including existing customers and it immediately made a tangible incremental impact on her existing customer revenue immediately.

And in this case, in this, okay. And I think this is one of the, one of the categories where this makes the most sense because you're releasing new products all the time. And the reality is people are going to Not pay attention to your emails and they're just going to forget about you. They just don't care.

There's too many things to do. So I think it makes all sense in the world for these businesses that are releasing new products all the time to go and, and do this. So yeah. And, and it, now it didn't get all the way back to our forecast. I think there was some seasonality things in that too, but it got, it definitely made a meaningful difference in it.

And it showed me really clearly that that existing customer spend was meaningfully incremental. Yeah. Now I think the thing for me that's really clear is that where I wouldn't do this is like skincare. Right. Where it's like, it's probably something where like, if they've churned, they just aren't using the product anymore.

I don't know. Maybe if they've maybe, maybe at the turn level, I would still do them. Right. It's different. I think I'd be careful about supplements. Yeah. If you're always releasing new products, like customers need to know about that and keeping them aware of it is really, really valuable. Do you hold them to a different row s target?

So the problem is like inside of an A. S. C. It becomes harder to draw those distinctions. So we were playing with a lot of different ideas and of what what should the we're playing with the idea of do you have you? Do you know about? Yeah, totally. Do you know about manual bids? Have you ever heard of this?

Drawing multipliers. Yeah, I think that a lot of people are talking about these days. Um, but yeah, we're exploring right now. Uh, but what I found right now is that the ASC efficiency on new and returning customer revenue went up at the same time. So it wasn't actually, what was the expense of the other?

And that's really the key is that you still have to keep an eye on that's the efficiency of your new customer acquisition. That's a good argument for ASC too. And ASC is really interesting, right? Cause you can set the exclude, like when you say existing customer cap. What it references as your existing customers is whatever you put exactly right.

So you can really make that whatever you want. That's right, exactly. So you could make that only active customers. You want to exclude 100 percent of active customers and then you're still getting so that's going to call those new in ASU report. I like the idea that that's going to increase the signal to both.

Yeah, that's very interesting, right? Especially if you're a newer brand, I think is another place where I was just like, probably not be that concerned. Yeah, there's this idea that like, Meta is going to over deliver only to your existing customers. But the reality is at some point, the next incremental purchase that meta can get is not your existing customer.

That's right. Right. So, so actually for this, for, for Nazarene, like the, we've actually, the way we're doing our existing customer bidding now is we have an ASC. It's the only thing I auto bid and I just keep it at a low budget. Yeah. And because I, because I, I want meta to create it, to have essentially a different value for existing and new customers.

And by keeping it a low budget, I get a little bump on new customers, but meta also can give the next deliverable or delivery ad delivery to the best place, which sometimes is not an existing customer. And so what ends up happening is like, we get, you know, a two to one or three to one or whatever it is for new customers and like a five to one for existing customers.

And I just kind of maintain the budget there. I'm not really trying to maximize squeeze the perfect efficiency with a clear bid cap target or whatever. I don't have that. That target in that case, I'm just sort of monitoring basically to make sure that's the case. That still may be under optimized. I think it's would be reasonable to say that, but it's, it's fine for now.

I think, you know, okay, here's mine. Long form explainer. Uh, let's let, let me tell you about it. It's like, that should be your bio in your Twitter account, by the way. So Andrew Ferris. Is I, to be honest with you, I've thought about the possibility that the best upside for AGF growth to the other thing is for me to become in a long form explainer factory because people suck at it.

And I think my, my one core talent in creative is clarity. Essentially that's an interesting, that conflicts with the idea of long form explainer to me. It's because all I do when I write long form explainer ads is attempt to explain as clearly as possible everything that a customer needs to know about buying this product.

And here's, here's the thing that people miss about this idea. It's not about how long it is. It's not. I call it long form because it's longer than most ads, but I don't care if it's a minute or if it's 30 minutes. I don't care if it requires 30 minutes to explain the product, then you should take 30 minutes.

Yeah. You like gave that hook opener on Twitter the other day, the idea that like we are brand X and we make product Y. So this is literally my, my number one ad hook right now. This is brackets product from brand. This is what it does. Yeah. It is the exact same muscle. That I exercise when I do this podcast and explain a concept.

It is literally, there's no difference when I go on this podcast and I say, here's why bid caps are better than auto bidding. And I say, and I try to tell somebody, convince them of that position. And I try to answer their objections as objectively as possible. And I try to give them clear validation for that.

And then tell them what to do next. It's the exact same thing. And I think now I do think, and I tweeted this the other day too, but like, I do think there's somebody who probably has a different skill set than I do to be more creative and do the same thing. So the point to me is not even really that like, you can't be creative.

I think you can, I think people could probably come up with better hooks that would be more engaging than what I could write. I'm just not a creative, I'm just not a creative guy, not, but I think the thing that, Here's the real core principle. I think the thing that people really forget is that in your amount of ads, what you're trying to do is take somebody who has never heard of your brand or product and move them from there to getting their wallet out.

And that's actually a pretty significant journey. And the thing they need to do that. Is information and trust. What people really underrate is how much like the thing that's standing between a customer and purchasing your product is they just don't know what it is. They just don't know enough about it.

They don't understand what it does, why it's different, why it's good, anything like that. And so, so for me, Like the idea of the long form explainer, it actually isn't even the only mechanism for doing this, but like basically taking that mentality and saying, how do I convince some, or how do I tell somebody everything they would need to know to buy the product?

That's right. So in the earlier days, you, I mean, you, I feel like I never hear this term anymore, but people used to talk about VSLs a lot, video sales letter. And that idea was like to take the direct response marketing style of like a sales letter. And apply it to video, right? And those were often like the sort of mashable style text on screen.

No, no, no. Video sales letter is what I always heard. No, I heard it as an ad concept. I mean, maybe we heard of two different things. So, so this, I think is the. What is everything the customer needs to know in order to make a purchase? Okay. And that might be how it fits with the return policy is the price.

It may be a long list of things. And the question is between the ad and the landing page. Oh, I don't care. You have to cover all of them. Exactly. I don't care which one you do on as long as you can do it. That's right. So if you go long form ad, then you should drop them directly into the cart and you should make it as frictionless as possible.

Yes. If you go clickbait ad, you better go long form landing. So there has to actually be a relationship. And what you're saying is I need all this information to get to the customer before they make a purchase. And so you're going to just take the responsibility of doing that in the ad. Yeah. And the point is, the point to me really is that like, I think this ad type is better than other ad types.

And this is the other thing I say is like, The question is, what does the brand require? So if we go back to one of your favorite ad examples, the silicone money ring from that, for the active life product on white, that's all the information you needed. I think that's exactly right. But same thing with apparel, but photos work though.

So I am smashing an ad account right now in apparel ad account with long form explainers because it turns out there are all kinds of questions people have about their clothes. They have all kinds of questions about like how does it fit and why is it now? This probably depends a little bit on the kind of apparel.

So again, I'll just referencing. I don't think she'll mind at all. Mixed by NASA. The thing that has unlocked that. Is explainers. Now she's selling jumpsuits. So there are all of these questions about how jumpsuits fit and about how the buttons are versus the zippers and how much you can, how stretchy they are.

And there are these questions that customers have, and we have massively unlocked that account. Literally. We don't make any other ads besides long form explainers for right now. She now knows the thing. And she just goes in and just like every day, it's just like another product. And she takes her denim, this and her, her spring collection, that and just goes boom and it's.

Massive unlock. And I, I think this for some of the things now, I think if you were fresh green threads and you were selling a gray t shirt, which is what I'm currently wearing or the sweatshirt, probably not, right. There's just not enough long form, but I might still say something. I might try it still. Um, I might try something that still got there and it might be only 45 seconds.

You're right. It might be, it might be shorter, but even in that case, what I might do is try to make the explainer about the unique mechanism that makes, which is a concept that I had Cody Plofker and I talked about on a podcast that he referenced. I still think the thing that makes. Fresh clean threads good is that it fits really good every time.

And it's solid color that fits, right? Like that might be the thing that I say in that case, it's not really a, the feature of fresh, clean tea to fresh green threads is that I'm a dude who doesn't really like shopping that much. And if I have a shirt that fits right every time, I'm just going to buy 50 of them.

Right. And so that's probably what I would sell in that case is it wouldn't be about like exactly the fit, you know, whatever I did, it would, it would be about that kind of thing where it's the value proposition is that I didn't have to shop. So, but I think, and so it can be whatever relative to the value you provide, but I, what I think is that like brands just consistently underestimate.

How much information people need about their product. So one of the things I'd be interested in, I don't know if you could pull it up right now, is that what, how many people actually watch this thing? I have no idea. And I don't care for as long as you think they do. I have, Oh, I don't think they necessarily do.

Well, well, so the completely actually, no. So, so the, the problem is the reason that this won't work is because you don't know about how long purchasers watch for, because what's possible is that only a small subset of people watch them. But this, but this is another thing that's really important. You're not talking to everybody.

You're only talking to a tiny little subgroup of people, but it's all relative to other apps. So if there were some subset of people that make it through 10 minutes of the video, and those are the purchasers and the average time would go up. There's still the average watch time would be higher. And maybe it is in a long form video, you're going to have higher average Washington than a short one.

And it's just in the nature of the possible. Sure, sure, sure. But I, I do think one of the things that I constantly find, this is actually my issue with the idea that comments matter all the time is that we substantially overestimate how often people actually engage for more than a fraction of a second.

More broadly, you get a click through rate of 2%. You're, you're over the moon. That's, that's really, really good. That is two out of a hundred people who will see your ad. And then of that group, if you get a, if you get a conversion rate of 4 percent for many businesses, Exactly. Which means you are simply not talking to everybody.

And this is part of the thing about the long form explainer. What people will say is that like, come on, nobody's going to watch that. And the answer is no, you're not going to watch that, but neither are 98 out of a hundred people. And that's fine with me. What I care about is That one subset of that one subset.

Now we're talking about, now we're talking about what? Like, I don't know if I'm having trouble walking back and back, but like four out of a thousand people or something like that who are going to actually purchase off of this, I just, I don't know what's happening is that like, you remember the, what's happening is that all my ads work, Taylor, shut up.

Yeah. Okay. So Adrian, who works at CDC, she created it because of UGC. Yeah. And it's like. Her talking for two and a half minutes. Dude, the best bamboo earth video ever is a woman talking for six minutes. Okay. Right. But going through the whole routine question is, is it the, is it what happens from second five through six minutes that matter?

Or is it what happens in the first five seconds? So both. So here's what I, so you do have to hook people still. And so part of the strategy here is you build every time you launch an ad, you launch it with five to 10 variations on the hook. And I think now the reason I know that's not the only thing that's the mechanism for it is that I do that with every kind of ad type I make and long form explainers ultimately work.

So I always launch various a bunch of variations of one ad type. Here's my challenge to you. And I wonder if natural, you can't possibly think that long form explainers don't work. I just don't think the long form part matters as much as you think it does. Well, I don't think anybody watches it. I think that what happens, I think it's better than you think.

I'm going to pull it up five seconds of all of those long form explainers and ran them as ads for five seconds. You might get some of that would be my hypothesis is that's wrong. That's wrong. You're stupid for five seconds. And like, so I'll give you an example. One of the things I think about my Bridges content is I don't actually think anybody watches them.

No. No. No. Nobody watches my videos. , it's like a cultural signal that like the video starts to matter and you turn it on for a few minutes, enough to say that you understand the content and then you like, you're like, oh, I'm supposed to like this, I like it and I know it now. Mm-Hmm. . And that's how like the idea that people consume long form content, I think is, uh, it's really, really small numbers.

Okay. So I've got on this video, 50% is 1000 people. Outta how many impressions? Well, let's just, let's 30. Let's do it as a cost per, let's do it as a cost per 50% view on like a three minute video. Right. 11, 185. So we're looking at a great podcast that yeah, so I've got video plays at 240, 000 video plays, right?

And I see 2000 people. I'm paying 5 and 45 cents to get to watch 50 percent of that video. Yeah. That's just pretty cheap. So that you would have to convert what's your CPA on this one and like, you'd have to convert like what? 10 percent of those people in order to make that worth it. Well, I don't know. I mean, let's see how long this video is.

If I'm paying, I mean, I'm willing to generally pay a couple bucks for a click. 5. 40 for a, this is a three minute A minute and a half video? This is three minute and twenty seconds? You would pay someone five dollars and watch this for a minute? A minute? For a minute and forty five seconds? There's no way that you would, if I gave you Dude, what's the average, what's the average, what's the average amount of time somebody spends on a website?

It's like, it's less than, yeah, so I'm getting a minute 45 before they even get to the website. You're paying them 5 to do it. That's minimum wage in the United States. You can get them to work in an hour for an hour and subway for that much money. I don't know. So I mean, I'm just saying like, is that really a good value of 5 for a minute?

Yes, it is. You know how I know it's a good value because it's out of smashing the universe, signing it to the idea that the long form that are value matters. I just think that you, I don't care. I don't care. You have less than 1 percent of people that watch it for 50%. And your conversion rate is higher than mine.

I don't care at all about length. Length is not what matters to me. What matters to me is that it explains The name of it is literally long. I know. It's actually not named very well. I need another, I need another name for it. How about just Claire, Claire Explainer? Claire Explainer is fine. That's fine.

Great. The point I mean, we just created Unity. In this case, it, the point is not that it's long. The point is definitely not long. I should be crystal clear about that. I don't care about it being long. I care that it gets the information across that you need to make the purchase. Because I think that your, your bad 30 second play video might be your best.

Well, who cares about Ross? What matters is spend, Taylor. This is manual bids, bro. What are you talking about? The highest spend is On this. So this one was yesterday. Yeah. Yesterday. This one's been yesterday. Well, because it launched three days ago, bro. Yeah. What do you want? I want this month. Okay. And I want to see most spend.

Oh, I'm sorry. Did you want to do that? One of them is way better than all the other ones. It's a, it's a, cause I run super consolidated campaigns shops. And that's how you win. It's cause I run to campaigns. No, look, all of them are spending the right. What do you want? Don't want to see the cost per three second view for the best.

Oh no, it's not going to do that. I don't, I don't have it in your columns. No, it's predicated on video. Literally put the only thing in my column being an outspent and that would be fine. But you don't know this because AOP matters because I'm running cost bid caps. And so, yeah, come on. Where'd you just get rid of it?

No, it's right here. Cost per three second view. Nine cents. Okay. On the top spending one for the last month. This is the one I just showed you a second ago, one, two days ago. So it is a new product. 37 cents. 10 cents across the board. 15 seconds or the full length of the video. That's really good. 50 cents for a 15 second view.

You're wrong. That's not bad. Taylor, you're wrong. The point is, no, no, you're wrong. Customers need to. So I think the thing is I'm dealing with brands that are often sub 10 million. They're trying to create their space in the world. I actually. I don't know if I think this is the thing that matters for brands that you're dealing with, which are all plus 10 million, right?

I don't think people get, I think you, you assume humans are this like logical, thoughtful group of people. They're not at all logical. They're idiots. Like we're all idiots. Like I got a text from driveline about a baseball bat and I've just accepted that they're the truth. And so I just bought it without even reading what it was because brand matters.

That's not news to me. Well, exactly. So it's just sort of like, Oh, I'm in. Yeah. I don't know what they said. It's because drive on is one of the most trustworthy brands in the world. Well, and all these surrounding things that they literally run everything they do, the scientific tests. Exactly. So I'm like, I'm in whatever you sell.

Are you trying to convince me right now that brand is important? Of course, brand is important. I'm just saying that the influence on purchase decisions is not this like No, it's information. Really People, people, people Information. Have all of these questions about the product. They have all of these No, they don't.

Yes, they do. They're not that thoughtful. No. Yes, they do. You're totally wrong about this. They, when they, when they Some people have questions. Yes. You know who does? A lot of people find them without them being answered. You know who has questions? Think about the checkout aisle of target. Do you know what they do to answer questions?

It's like nothing. They just put it in front of you. Because you're standing in line and you go like, Oh yeah, give me the candy and I'll take it. How much are they charged for the candy? Like four bucks. 4 for a Zappa. I don't know. Oh, your target is ripping you off a bottle of prime at the local literally snack bar.

Yeah. That's because everybody knows the snack bar. I'm just saying like whatever it is. No. So this is a 200 jumpsuit. I was listening to Jordan Peterson and destiny argued. I didn't watch it, but I heard about it. One of the things, well, I like destiny. Right. Just don't really like Jordan. Yeah. But one of the things he was talking about is this idea that he doesn't accept any, he doesn't trust any third party entity.

And he was like, what are those jeans you're wearing? Are they leaking lead into your legs? Do you know? It's like, no, of course you don't know because you don't actually answer the questions to all the things that you presume you think you want to know about the things you do. They assume that's not the case.

What they want to know is if they are walking in their jumpsuit, does it make their legs feel funny when they, because the denim stretch is weird or whatever. That's, that's the question. They'll do this, their butt look good. And you answer that too. That too. And so the image solved that problem. And they, so they're aspirational and they click on it.

Well, so images in a pro also often work for the exact reason. Yeah, they smash, right? That that's the case, but I can tell you, I've run a lot of images in this account and they have, drastically underperformed explainers and I've tried all kinds of different products. So, you know, and I, I do think some products are different than others in terms of how much, how much explanation.

This is, this is, this is where I think probably our core fundamental divide between one another is that you think that there's a categorical kind of app that works and I just go nonsense. It's a magic random eight ball. No, I, so I think in, in many cases, well, I'm actually coming around. I think. There are some, there are some things that are consistently true and creative.

And I don't think it's totally random. Yeah. I think, I think there are things that are consistently right. It's the wrong. And do you know why I think that it's because I have a very simple creative playbook that I run with all of my clients and it's because I don't know how to do anything else. And there are some, Every time I try to go outside of those things, it doesn't work.

So if that's what I do, I just do this thing all the time. It's true. It's so such a small sample size. 100%. I, I completely, one of my, one of the things I'm considering right now is creating creative as a service. I was just going to say, if this is true, then you have, like, if, if this is true, you have an endlessly valuable business.

I couldn't agree. I couldn't agree more. It's a very simple group. I'm actively exploring this right now. So I have a client who I've done some coaching for where they're deciding, should we invest more dollars in this business or an aggregator? Should we invest more dollars in this business or not? And with one of the brands, and I said, I don't think you've seriously tested creative.

Let me try something. We'll scratch those back here. There's one instance that I've seen of this in my whole life. Actually, I take it back. There's two, there's a group right now. One of the, one of the founders of athletic greens is running a video agency in the supplement space. Yeah. And I think what they do is Uh, that's a good example.

It's a, it's a narrow framework, very narrow. And the rule is you have to let me say whatever the hell I want. Yes. Right. And so it's all Dr brands that are like, yeah, you hit it, you scale it, say whatever you want. And they, they hack the psychology of social in a way that provokes people and angers them and repeatedly solves the problem of getting people to watch this content and engage with it at a massive level and sell the crap out of it.

And they're really, really good at it. And I actually think that they have a mechanism that works completely against what you're saying, which is that like, in a narrow band, there is a specific type of social content that when someone is allowed to behave that way, they can pull on human psychology in a way that allows you to generate consistent results.

Force for more people than not. Sorry. I know I'm yelling and it keeps typing quieter onto the spreadsheet. I don't want to tell you to shut up. My neighbors are going to, but yeah, I've actually had long arguments with them on the phone about how they think that they have some framework for, for, because you're probably wrong.

This is so funny. So Taylor, what's so funny about this is that you are the King of there's no objective truth, except that you are claiming objective truth here. What? Which is that there is no, which is that there is no objective truth is not objective. Yes, it is. No, it's of course it is. It's a claim about the absence of what you are saying.

What you're saying is there's no consistent way to make ads work. And that is a strong claim about how reality actually is. So, okay. So then, so then for the sake of debunking this, like stupid counterintuitive or counterfactual thing that you're doing, I'll just say that I have never experienced it and I've experienced it.

That's fine. And so it may exist and, but in the event that it does, it's such a small percentage of the realities that you shouldn't try and find it. So I think that's possibly right. So this is how I think thing to me. It's the same thing. If the likelihood of success is 1%. I can acknowledge that the 1 percent exists and also say, let me tell you about my experiment I'm running right now.

Yeah. I'm, I'm not ready to go all the way in on this because I think what you look, I'm not an idiot. Like I think I've been around to the block a long time too and seen a lot of people make a lot of claims about creative. Just do this for bed. Just solve my, this is, this is super easy. We both have a massive financial incentive to solve this.

You can't do this. I told Dave the other day, do this for bamboo earth. Right now. And everybody listening, Andrew has a claim about his capacity to guarantee creative success. And so it's very simple. He owns a brand. He has a massive financial incentive to solve this problem. And if it sells for a hundred million dollars, So solve it and I'll go great.

I'll tip my cap and go Andrew's right in this instance, but it hasn't happened. Why? Because, because as you know, as the owner of a business, it takes time to scale up processes and operations processes. I'm not, I don't need a process. I need one app. Do you know what, no, you need a process for ads.

Everybody made a bunch of tries. Oh, so it's a random union. It's like multiple looks. And you need one core app. Okay, great. You make it. I'm doing it right now. Okay, Dave. Okay, so listen, I have, please come get your, Dave is next after this. I have, I have. So this client has an aggregator. They're deciding what, what to do with this business.

I've told them, let me take a crack. I don't know if this work. That's not what you're saying. It is what I'm saying. What I'm saying is I think it will probably work. I think it's probably the best ad type. I think if you give me a crack at this, I'm going to, I think it has a better chance than anything you've done so far.

That's what I think. That's what I will. I will. Everything since I met you, that's what makes Andrew special is that he delusionally believes that about everything. And you keep promoting me and giving me better jobs. Well, I don't have a chance to do that. I know that's because I agree. Okay. But look. Um, so this is easy.

This is easy. You do this for bamboo with and I will come back on this broadcast in a second. So literally Dave is next. Dave can tell you, I can show you the slack receipts. I told him I am. He is next on my list after this project that I'm doing right now because I want to test it because Ian, Dave, Insane, they're getting their ass kicked.

Look, they're not getting their ass kicked. In the short term, in the short term, they're solving it, but right now. So, here's the thing. If I actually can solve this, what I've begun to build is a roster of creators who can create the ads for me. I will add editing talent to my team if I need to get the video editing to happen.

And I will begin to create. A cast business creative as a service. Have you seen my Outlier's episode? Have you ever watched it? No. I don't watch your content on the last person's content I need to watch is yours. I talk to you all the time. I know everything you think. So here's what the claim you're making, I just wanna put it in content.

So Bamboo Earth. So my outlier's episode is what I do is I pull every ad that's ever run and the average spend per ad. Mm-Hmm. . And then I look at the one that is the highest spending out of all time. Hmm. So, um, so we look at the mean. Median mode and max. Mm-Hmm. of all of your ads ever run. Okay.

Scatterplot show it. Right. And the point is that the outlier ad is one in 10,000. Yeah. So Bamboo Earth has an ad Yeah. That's spent 600,000. Yes. Yeah. It's a version of any, but it's, I shouldn't, it's, oh yeah. But the point is just that like. Dave is by all accounts really smart. I think so. Sadie by all accounts.

Great design. Fantastic. Ian by all accounts. Smart dude. Great making. And they have all made over the course of the last five years and including a time period where you were there and running the ad account. Yeah, but I wasn't good at it. Oh, he was bad then. He's good now. We've talked about this a lot. F running.

But as a CEO, not as a Facebook creator. I think I was pretty bad at Facebook then. That's the actual truth. You sucked. Whatever . Um, I conceive your point. So there was the, you've made 10,000 ads. 10,000, yeah. That's like an insane number. Yeah. And you're sitting here saying. Yeah. I'll do the one in 10, 000 things.

I'll do the thing that I don't necessarily know what else to do, but, but like, at what level do you think you'll perform? And what does it mean to be like the best ad type or a really good ad is I just go like, you know what? You're going to be another dot on the scatterplot. That's the much more likely scenario.

This is actually the best argument against this tactic, which is That the reason my thing works is that I'm doing it for brands that are have very mature out of count. They have less dots. Right? Exactly. And so it's moving the things forward for brands that are, that are pretty small. But what I'll say is those brands are getting meaningfully more spend than they were.

And then other brands that have been doing it for a long time. And so I think there's a good argument that it is actually working pretty well. I think the question where I, where I'm not as confident. It's for like the mid eight figure brands, but not for five years that has like a bajillion ads in their ad account already.

I think it's possible that they've already kind of found that because I also do believe that like, it's not the only ad type that works. And so like, I mean, I certainly don't believe that. And so, but I think it's something that more people should try earlier on. That's what I think. I don't, I don't even have a problem with like, it's like, it's a framework, vary around like ugly ads.

Like this is a good example, but it's, it's a helpful framework for people. But it's the idea that post it ads. Are going to in some way disproportionately outperform every other ad is just not true. Now what happens is the story you hear, because that's the only thing worth sharing is everyone that works.

So every time it works, it's survivorship bias. Every time it works, someone tells Barry how awesome it is that it works and 10, 000 other times, but it's tried and failed. You've got just like every other one. Yeah. I, what I think is about that is that the reason people should run. That kind of ad is cost impact ratio.

It's very cheap to produce. So, and, and that you should, and you can produce them at meaningful scale. So I have added to my team member, to my team, a person in the, in the value of that equation is how cheap it is. Not it's like, so it's, it's actually, it's both because the cost impact both medical. I have also, no, no, no, no, they do.

They do because I've run a lot of different kinds of this kind of ad and they pretty consistently get some level of spend. So they're not always the big super winner in the ad account, but they almost always get some spend certainly relative than lower cost and it is higher impact. It's not. It is the same.

No, it is. No, you're wrong. No, it's not. I'm telling you. You're wrong. So let's, let's just listen to me. You're wrong. You're absolutely wrong. There's one. Let's say that every ad you ever launched has a one in 10, 000 chance of being a represent. Yeah. You can create that could be that bamboo or that that makes it.

Really awesome. Okay. That means that there's an expected value calculation that you can assign to that. If it's worth 600, if it's spent 600, 000 and let's say they were trying to write a one and a half to one, then it's worth like 900, a million dollars. Easy math that's worth a million dollars. So you have a one in 10, 000.

Let's do some quick math here. So one divided by 10, 000 equals 0. 001 times a million. It means that that ad is worth a hundred dollars. That means if you can produce it for 50, you can produce ads for 50. You have a very high expected value and you should make 10, 000 of them. So this is actually what I believe about Facebook is that that's the game.

So I think it's not to assume that your ad has a higher likelihood of success. That's hubris. I think it's both. I think that do math and validate it because otherwise it's pure hubris. No, I think, I think. I think that there is a difference in quality from some than others. And look, I just walked through this with another client.

Yeah. I think, I think there is a difference in quality. I think the idea that there's no skill here is incorrect. It's entirely random. No. Is that what you believe? It's yes. that you could grab any human and that their likelihood of success of generating that ad at one in 10, 000 is basically the same across every single human.

And when it's not, it's unknowable that it is. And so the best bet, the right bet to actually make is to make 10, 000, 10, 000 ads at 50 a piece. I think you should make multiple bets. So I think you should do that to be clear. I think you should do that. I think you should find I think you should find a way to scale up production really cheaply for some, and then I think you should also invest in places where there's a better opportunity.

And if the investment gets too high, you should do it because there's a, there's definitely a chance that long term exploiters don't work for you. Right. So like, and those take real time and effort. I mean, it takes me a long time to write those scripts and like all those things. Right. So it costs money.

So you, you shouldn't do that at a level where it costs so much that now it's a disproportionately bad bet. But I, I think that it's a, Better type, because I see it work across every addict on our own, which is like, that's true, but I've also done it with coaching clients. I don't know. I think I've seen it pretty consistently.

You, you've been trumpeting this for like eight months in total. Yeah. That's I think many people are bad. This is, this is, this is part of the point. I think people are insanely bad communicators. They cannot think clearly what are you offering them in the idea of deploying this strategy through their lens of being terrible.

So this is actually, so I have the same question for you about bridges, right? People can't do what you're saying. I'm not, I don't think you don't care that you should have them hire you to do it. Exactly. Yes. So all I'm doing is validating my authority. I agree. And so I think it's possible that like, I think it's possible that what I should build is a creative in the service machine could be better than what I'm going to test.

I'm going to test this because I think I could sell it all day long if it works. So I'm not ready to except for the fact that you would have to scale it beyond yourself, which it all collapses at the end of that potentially. That's potentially true, which is the same reason why every, every creative agency.

Yeah, I think this is right too. The end result is you would have to not only be you yourself a unicorn, meaning that you could produce outcomes at a disproportionate level, you would have to repeatedly find people who are also able to do so. Yes. At a price that you could, here's, here's one of my theories about this and this is, this is 100 percent untested.

So like just, this is my theory and I, you've probably heard me say this before, right? Which is that like, People partly pick the wrong people for creative that this is a DR game and what people go pick is like Designers in that and video people and what they should pick is essay writers. That's what I think and this is part of the process Yeah, I think that you so I am seriously considering going to my alma mater.

It's not very far from here going to English classes I'm considering going to the great books program program there. People who are reading Plato all day. And we're back to La Masia, the Barcelona training program. Yeah. So, but the idea here is I want to find the people who are going to make no money writing persuasive philosophy essay in their lives and get them to write ads, telling people to buy jumpsuits.

Is that easier or is it easier to make? Budget. Do both. Why not? have a person in, I don't know why you have to choose. I have a person in, well, you will have to choose everything all the time because sort of limited resources are sort of at least. So I have a team member. I have an intern overseas who has not paid very much money.

Do you want to get that? Staffing staff. They, they've already been plugged in. I'm sure you, they're amazing. Um, who will on a weekly basis deliver me 80, what I call text and context ads. The Okay. But it's pretty good 'cause I don't pay them that much because it's an internship. It's a, it's a step into the it e-commerce profession for them.

Yep. And so they're probably 19 years old and they go and like, do this and it costs me very little money and I can produce a lot of ads for not very much money. And I get the cost as low as I can. Yep. And I'm trying to do that because if I can do that with letter boards, post its and whiteboards and the world is your campus, right?

On anything that you want, Mike, we're in my backyard right now. I want my children to write with chalk on the driveway and put a product next to it and do that because. I regular. It's not because it works. It's both. This is the No, they work too. They work too. I'm telling you, they work. It doesn't imagine that this were true.

Imagine the idea that a post-it note made your ads better. How quickly a capitalistic society would instantly It is. It's happening very quickly. It's people're doing all the time. It's not no one. The, the idea that this ad is making businesses better and helping people's ad accounts grow is just fundamentally not true.

Go listen to Facebook. All we did all month was complain about how bad it is for everybody. This is just insanity. This idea that we are making some creative that has made, if it were true, that I could write on a post it. The name of my ad and make my ad account better. Absolutely not. Zero. I do it for zero.

Yeah, so then don't tell me it's not true. No, it absolutely is not true. You have literally zero data to talk to us. I have data that says that every ad format ever created produces roughly the same expected outcome. That's possibly true. Yeah. I think it's possible. They all go build this plot for every brand and tell me that you'll see that every ad is roughly the same distributed outcome.

And then there's some random thing. So what you're saying that's right is that like part of the reason the thing works is because there's no question about that. I think, I think that's totally right. And I don't even want to begin to say that I disagree with that, but, but that's, and that is part of the advantage is that you can do it for very, very little cost.

You don't want to know what the best ad format ever created is the DPA it's, it is in every instance that almost every scale, no act over the history of a brand, the ad creative that has generated the most revenue over time. And if you did it relative to its cost. Is actually the highest return not even close is DPA and I think that's, are you, are you assuming both upper and lower funnel there?

Could you grow your brain on, on DPA? In a lot of categories, I think the answer is yes. Yeah, I don't think that's totally wrong. I think, I think, I think you're right that basically that can work very well, but I don't think it's true that. Yeah, I don't think it would. I think I'll take my Nazarene. Yeah.

And it's fine. Not very much money. A hundred bucks a day. It's bad. It's not making a meaningful difference. I'd have to check the accounts first. You continue. You want to look right now? It's, it's been capped. It's, it's exactly the same. I just remember when we were running together off, like that's all, but see, see, I think, so I think that is exactly.

The difference, which is that like, once you get to a certain level of brand notoriety, sure, the values change in the ads that you create. And that's, that's because it's functionally retargeting. Everybody already knows the brand. And so, and so this is why I think law enforcement is powerful is because precisely exactly, exactly.

You have to go from, I've never heard of you to get my wallet out. And that's the thing that I think you're undervaluing here is that like, It just depends on the stage of business. And this is why I think for a lot of your clients, I wouldn't go back to Kalo. And I just feel like that was not the experience, but that client that Kalo you, so first of all, yeah, Kalo uniquely had the ability to explain everything really clearly, really fast.

And I'll say, I do have one brand right now. That is a category creator brand that still images work really well. And it's precisely for the same reason, which is that like, you kind of get it the moment you see the image. And so I think, I think the magic, the best ads actually do this thing. But there's no very, there's no objection, very concisely jumpsuit.

Actually, customers have a lot of questions about, but there was objection. What was the number one comment in every KLO app? No, this is as cheap as an o ring. Why don't I just go to home depot and pay three cents because commenters are not customers. It's not, we're now we're getting back into it. You're going to get blown up by the two.

It's not in that, in that case, it's just like, who cares? This is, that's precisely the kind of objection, but that's not a real, it's not an objection. It's not a question about how does this do the thing I want it to do? Oh, I already did the jump seat. Like people think it's, they already. They see it and they think it's cute.

That's not the problem. The problem is, I've tried a lot of jumpsuits, they don't fit right. I've tried a lot of jumpsuits, and so, so when she walks The headline was just like, the jumpsuit that fits right. It probably wouldn't work that well, because people wouldn't believe that, because I've already heard that a million times, but I don't know, let's try it.

I'm just saying, like, my point is, is that you're, you're just wrong. You're wrong. It works. I do that all day long. Today, you're off to a terrible start.

It's 1030 at night on the east coast. It's 1 30 in the morning there. It's off to a terrible start. Shut the whole thing down. So anyways, you'll know, I will announce on this podcast that he's never going to actually launch a creative service because he's just, Andrew is just an influence. He's not actually a service.

That's like the worst thing you could say to me. The idea of me being an influencer, first of all, that might lead to a meaningful fight with my wife. It's nothing I can imagine. Okay, let's move on from who cares about Facebook ads, family and fitness. Was that the other topics? Yeah. You don't believe that I'm going to do with a 40 year old.

I didn't say that. What is your comment? Scroll down. What did you write? Scroll down to yours, your side. You wrote What will you actually do? That's not about you. Oh, I thought it was a response to my, no, tell me about the four year old combine fitness. Go 40 in four weeks, which you're not coming to. You're like, I'm sorry.

I've got David Smoller and John Sickler. They're coming. They're coming to my party and you're not even going to show up. Yeah. No, I have another birthday party tonight. Really? That would be amazing. Um, Um, But anyway, so I turned 40 in four weeks, and I've been thinking about like, okay, what would I want to be able to do?

I turned 40 three weeks ago. Yeah, so you're already So the idea was, could you do the thousand pound club? Um, which is squat bench and deadlift over a thousand pounds. Could I run a sub five second 40 and could I run and then a sub eight minute month. So that was like, that's a good mix of things, right?

Cause if you have the strength to do the thousand pound club, it's going to be harder on a Sunday minimum. But go ahead. So that was, that was like, you heard about the CrossFit guy who did 500, Yeah, like three to one. Well, the one I had heard was a five minute mile. And then within five minutes, did a 500 pound deadlift.

So I saw a guy that did a 500 pound squat, 400 pound or no 500 pound deadlift, 400 pound squat, 300 pound bench. And two eight hundreds within a minute or something like that. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Whatever. The only person in the world that ever. Yeah. Right. The idea is that like these things shouldn't both work.

Exactly. Right. Um, so I was like, okay, well what's a 40 And I saw Sam Carr and do something like this where they did a combine, like the NFL combine, like broad jump, whatever, how many reps at 225. And I was like, Oh, so that's, that's an interesting thing. So I was like, Oh, I think I'm going to, I'm going to try and do this.

On my 40th birthday. See what, see what I could do. So I don't know. I may tear my hamstring. So you're going to do it on your 40th birthday? Yeah. You think you'd be talking about right now? So I got to 990 the last time I tried it. So, okay. So you could do it. Well, that was like six months ago and I haven't been lifting as heavy.

So I don't know. It's going to come down to my squat. My, but it's not, it's not my best left. It's going to come down to my ability to do that. Deadlift's like 450. I can deadlift a lot. That's great. Yeah. Okay. So I would not be able to do like my squat is hilariously bad. Yeah. My all time max squat is like 225.

Yeah. It's like terrible. You're so tall. I know. I couldn't be built worse. The hardest part for me is getting actually in the sub 8. I'm bad. I have a terrible distance. Is that true? Yeah. You couldn't do a sub 8 in that? I don't know. Because you're fast. Yeah, I can run fast. That's why I think I can think I can get the sub five second 40, but I don't think I can the miles actually that is shocking to me.

Yeah, do you think that's a willpower thing or like a body thing? No. Yeah, I'm probably willing to suffer. Yeah, exactly. I'm not into suffering. So actually, it's a good question. Do you, how good are you at suffering? How mental are you? My best. You are a professional athlete. Yeah. My best workouts are like, am wraps.

Like I, I can usually you do crosscut as like a, like I did the open for fun. Yeah. To try, but I don't, you smash me. I don't normally do. I can't do, I couldn't do the muscle up so I could, couldn't do. Yeah. But it was, uh, so I do things like that, but not specifically CrossFit. I don't go to CrossFit. I work at the house.

But it's CrossFit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, so I don't know. I, yeah, I don't know. I don't think I'm. So why are you doing that? Why are you doing the 40 year old combat? Just to like, yeah, to see like, I don't know what's it like to be a good 40 year old athlete. I don't know. Yeah. My, cause the, the thing I, I'm actually trying to do is not die, but like, that's really boring and I don't know if I'm actually winning that game.

I agree. It's hard to know because it's like 40 years from now, hopefully. Yeah. Plus you get it by the truck. Yeah, exactly. So, so it's like, well try and do something else along the way. Hope you don't, by the way. Yeah, I know , but I, I also really don't wanna get injured. Being injured sucks. And it's so impressive.

So my, my great friend and the guy who programs our CrossFit workouts for our group, it's all, it's all, I mean, I'm two doors down from my neighbor who I work out with, who's got a rig drilled into his driveway. Another friend of mine lives 400 meters in the other direction. I know that because 400 meters is the amount you run for certain workouts.

Key programs for us and his comment is fitness is a, what does he say? It's a long journey to a distant horizon. And the slowest way to do that journey is to get hurt. And it is the hardest thing. And this, there's a, there's a dude ego thing here. I think, I don't know that there may be for women too. I've only ever been a dude, so I don't know, but like where you just have to be willing to like lift a little less and dial in your form a little bit more and all those kinds of things.

Because there are people going faster, go slower. Yeah, that's right. You just have to be willing to just go like, and. Yeah. That's actually the hardest part a lot of times. And so I'm not that mental of an athlete. I think like when it gets really hard, I'm like, I'm just gonna take a break. I'm not going to cross.

I've accepted that. So, so yeah, but I, I think, I think that that comment has always been helpful to me, which is like the moment you injure yourself, you're, you're slowing down your journey. To get there. So like, it's a helpful, helpful bit of feedback. So, okay. That's cool. And you have to, you have to record.

I hope you get it. You can get a name in a mile. You need to, you need a rabbit. You need somebody to run it with you. I can read some, Hey, I can run it with you. That'd be fun. I would love to do that. I can go. Well, there's a track down the street. We go to it. I would love to be the rabbit for that. That would be really fun.

Okay. So I'm not fast, but I could definitely do that. Okay. Here's my fitness thing. My fitness thing is, will you actually do it? This isn't this is like the question about fitness to me for almost everybody is like, as they come is the, uh, the trade off between optimal and actual essentially, which is like, yeah, So I, here's what I believe from the best of my knowledge.

I have, I think CrossFit is one of the optimal ways to work out. It may not be totally optimal. I don't really know enough science to know, right? Like, I think, look at what Peter says. It seems like zone two is maybe more important than what a lot of the aggressive. Yeah, right. Exactly. So, um, but it seems to me that the basic logic of CrossFit being that, like, essentially you create a broad capacity across a lot of different domains.

Over a very long period of time, and there's a, uh, nutrition component, sleep component, all those things is something close to optimal for the average athlete, right? If I'm not training for something specific. So great. Okay, fine. Whatever you disagree with me, that's fine. But I think there is also a really big difference between what you will What you will actually do and what is optimal and what definitely is not optimal is things that you won't do.

So like when I got into CrossFit, it was not because I was convinced it was optimal. It was because I had never been a workout guy in my life. It was at Kalo. Kalo sponsored a CrossFit game. So we started getting into CrossFit as a company and I found that CrossFit had a couple things for me. Somebody told me what to do.

Somebody told me how to do it and it was gamified. I like playing sports. I don't really like working out. I like it more now, but I don't, I didn't really like The idea of going into a gym, sitting on a machine and like, Doing X reps for X for Y rounds was not appealing to me. It was boring. And so I just could never create a consistent habit around it.

And that point I think is like the thing that is most striking to me as a 40 year old dude now watching my friend's age, all those things is like, I would love all of them to come do gross fit with me. I think it would be good for them. I think they'd have fun. I think after they got through the first month of it, they'd feel really good.

They'll just suffer for a month and they, and I think suffer is not a terrible word for that for that first month. But the thing that really strikes me is like. At the same time, if they will go play pickleball five days a week, and that's the thing they'll do really consistently, it's probably suboptimal, but it's a lot better than not doing anything.

And it just seems to me that there's like, there's just like trade offs with fitness. And so, so, yeah, that's, that's like the observation I watch, like, whereas this friend of us, like we were programmed our CrossFit workouts for us is 52 years old. He is. Naturally, he would tell you if not a good athlete, he's just not, not a super athletic guy, but he's freaking shredded.

And it's because he's, it's because he loves CrossFit. He's been doing it four days a week, every single week for like 15 years. And it's like, you know what happens when you do that? It just works. And so, so yeah, that's, that's like my big fitness observation recently is like, and I think in our world, in the econ world, like it's like a very optimized world to listen to various people listen to like, you know, whatever.

And there's all these people who are telling you exactly what, you know, Peter, Tia, Andrew, whatever. They're telling you what the right things to do are and the right way to do it and all that stuff. And that's great. If you'll go do that, fantastic. Go make it more optimal. If you're the kind of person who will go make it more optimal.

Um, but for me, like I also look at it and go like small kids, there's only so many hours I have to work out. The time commitment matters. I'm just like, she's not going to run a marathon anytime soon, which would probably be optimal anyway. But like, You know, and, and so like, that's, that's like the big thing for me.

It's like, what can you actually do consistently consistently? That's the thing that I would push people towards, which is really hard for people. What do you think determines what someone will actually do? So this is the actual hard part. There's another layer of this, which is that like, Actually, what to do for fitness is not a very hard question, I think.

Well, there's endless access to that. Correct. The actual problem of fitness is to do it for people, in terms of their health. And that includes their nutrition and sleep elements of things. And so, What determines it is a hard question. I think I think it really depends on where they are on the health and fitness spectrum.

I think some people just need a community to do it with, you know, they they would like to do it, but they don't know where and how and with who and if you give them an opportunity, they'll show up every time. Like, I have a friend who does that with us right now who like, You know, he's just kind of kept showing up and it's because there's friends to do it with and he likes it and he's whatever.

I think there's other people who need something different than that, which is like, have you seen the Ben Affleck video where he's talking about alcoholism and he talks about tall stuff? Have you done that? He says, this is come back suffering comment. He says, I think it is great. But the thing that actually helps people get out of alcoholism is suffering.

So you suffer enough and that actually creates the impetus for change. And I think there's some people for whom that's the truth. There's, which I say with no condescension, by the way, life is hard. I agree. I think that there. Dane has this formula. So Dane who runs employee development of performance at CTC, he runs something called men and women with discomfort, which is for this group that I've been a part of previously.

And he has this formula. He says that change occurs if and only when your dissatisfaction times your planning, like is, That is strong enough to create an impetus for change, right? So you actually have to increase dissatisfaction with your present state in order to create change. So it's sort of like when you've suffered enough and, and I remember for me, there was this moment, it's weird.

It's like not even a big deal, but Josh's dad said, Josh, my partner, his dad was sort of like a second dad to me. Someone who was really close to growing up. I remember one time I showed up his house and he made fun of me for being fat. And like, I remember leaving feeling like, wow, I feel really dissatisfied with how that felt.

It became an impetus for change. And I think somewhere along the way, we all have a version of that where it's like, I am so unsatisfied with myself that I will now pursue change. And unfortunately, you can't actually offer them the positivity of the other side. You actually have to die, like drive into the dissatisfaction piece that I think is what I watched before.

People encounter and there's a weird like, like, so now how do you apply that to friends or somebody else? Do you try to harm them for the name of change? I don't think so, but I think that tends to be what humans interact with. Yeah, you're right. There's, there's an element where people are so dissatisfied with the current state.

Hopefully that happens before it really gets bad. Yeah, exactly. Where before, yeah. Before battery's about to run out. I just discovered this. Great. So we need to do two things. Give me lightning round family observation. Okay, and last, so yeah, this is good. Lightning round anything life observation. Okay, so my family observation, where am I looking at?

I wrote, oh, playtime. So I have found that in my life the thing at this point, so my, I have twin boys that are 10 and a daughter that's 7. And between phones, screens, whatever else, like this idea of intentional playtime that I participate in, where I go into a world to challenge myself to whether that's shoot hoops and play hide and go seek is potentially the most valuable thing I can offer them.

That's a simple observation. I think it's true. My family observation lightning round is. And this is terrifying as a parent, how much crap is caught, not taught. They are just watching what I do, and they're doing the same thing that I do, and it's freaking, it is terrifying. Totally. Little mirrors to your soul.

Go. Brought to life observation. I, so I've been reading super forecasters. It's a book that I like. Yeah, brilliant challenge to the merits of what makes someone a good forecaster and how hard it is to outperform basic trend analysis and the really rigorous standard that requires you to say honest things about your ability to be predictive of the future.

And I want to be good at this and I want to be challenged in the ways that I'm frivolous in the way that I do this. So great book, super thought provoking and Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Go read super for coffee. Okay. My, my life thing is that context switching is incredibly hard and I work from home, so I finish at five o'clock and I have a hero on the four.

I hope you want to play with me at five o'clock. I have found, I did a podcast episode about this, but in faith terms and the Christian Jewish traditions, both we talk about the concept of Sabbath, uh, the idea of taking one day completely off every week. Is a monster context switch. It basically reinforces the idea that I'm not entirely a work person and that there's other things I do where I, where I literally don't, I don't, I actually try to turn my phone completely off.

Like, and it just makes me present with there. And it reinforces for me, the idea that there's more to me than just work. And whatever your work goals are and whatever, you know, the conversation we had earlier, I am astounded at how important it is for me every week when I do it, because it just, it just builds this thing in me that reminds me that there is more to me than just work.

And I really love work. I'm not saying work. It's just like, that has just been really, really good. It's like a, it's like a week. Weekly context switch. I also think that's why I went back to the office. I think the distinction between home and work is actually matters. All right. You're going to die. Yeah.

Hey, thanks man. I would love feedback from you guys. This was three hours long. I was at three hours, two, two and a half, whatever. Oh, two hours. Not even bad, but let us know what else would you want to hear? Is this annoying? Was it ridiculous? Yeah. Maybe I'm off camera the whole time. I don't know. This was not our best production effort.

Yeah. We're just normal. Guys that this is our chance to hang out. Yeah. Yeah, please do. We have a lot of conversations. It's fun to talk about and hopefully that's not also an annoying podcast of two guys who think they're smarter than they are. Well, we're certainly not. Yeah. Okay. That's it. Outro is coming next.

You know, all the places to reach out to me or to Taylor. Yep. Thanks for driving up. Likewise.