Taylor Holiday Explains Why I'm Bad At Business transcript

how much money should you be spending on Creative production relative to your ad spend if you're trying to grow your ad account more and you're you're sort of past the big wins phase we have spent so much time recently thinking about the operational system that's related to creative production I think it is a huge gap in the way that most people work because every ad is functionally a bet that's right okay which means it has a cost yep and it has an expected value yep and the relationship between those two things is wildly important for the second time I am back with a long wide ranging episode with Taylor holiday crossposted both here collab episode and the e-commerce Playbook podcast feed Taylor and I got to a wide range of stuff as we do in these episodes in person over a beer in his office in Orange County with all the people gone in the evening we talked about uh all kinds of business stuff like incrementality spent a lot of time on that creative budget and creative production in particular in regards to Ai and um had a little bit debate about sort of quality versus quantity and humans versus robots and some of that kind of stuff we talked about outsourc Labor and the effect that has on growing e-commerce businesses as well and then we got into a bunch of other stuff too talked parenting and kids a little bit talked about the idea of mental Fitness uh you're going to like this if you have liked the last one of these that we did you'll like this one too let's get into it me and Taylor holiday for those of you that are new to this this is our second random show this is inspired by uh Tim Ferris and Kevin Rose who are two obviously podcasters who would get together and just talk about life and so this is an excuse for Andrew and I to hang out and catch up uh because we don't get to as much as we used to uh for a myriad of reasons uh but so we're selfishly using this as a chance to catch up and then entertain you all with a bunch of random topics that aren't directly related to creative testing and cost controls no creative testing and cost controls on this episode I mean maybe we'll get there yeah well I mean I think we'll do like last time I some business we got a few topics lined up for for top of- mind business stuff this is like you know you and I just do this all the time like Marco Polo here's the thing I've been thinking about send you a video and you had this is a good idea by you just like hey let's just sit and do this for a little while so yeah so we keep a Google doc kind of running in between episodes of just stuff we come across that we think will be fun to discuss with each other maybe a little bit of parenting maybe a little bit parenting exactly a little training always some baseball usually gets woven in there and uh hopefully you enjoy it people look at our two bodies and say how do we get those bodies tell yeah we'll give you some fitness inspiration uh so we drink beer exactly what is this that you gave me it just says beer on it so we share an office with one of our clients Skull Candy uh which is cool because people like the office and it's we use it for entertainment and other things um and sorry there's always stuff in the fridge and so there's like we have a couple brands that come by and use the studio to shoot production um and this is one of them it's a art by Merill Smith Merl Smith Studio on Instagram and it says open beer and uh that's it that's all I know but it's cool cool it's good yeah Fort Collins Brewing New Belgium I don't know oh new that's funny so it's like a New Belgium white label because New Belgium is uh is you know that's a big Brewery that's a fat tire oh okay that's that Brewery Mak sense it's from them there that's cool oh collaboration with New Belgium open brewing.com interesting cool well it's good thanks thanks for the beer um so to kick things off I'm GNA just I think I'm going to ask you this every time because we sort of have an underlying bet or at least I have a bet with myself about the inevitability you want to find some way to put to like get yourself some upside in this I think you're GNA have lose so many bets to me like you already have about your long form explainer for bambo that you didn't make for those of you tuned in in the last episode I told you I wasn't G to make it I have um Dave Dave can you please get with him and make him make you this ad I will I should do it just but it would be what do you the problem with doing this with you is that even if I do it you will notke yeah you will be like oh that's not the reason it worked it's not because of the thing you said would work yeah but it's but that's good because if you just don't do it you can keep saying that too which is good yeah everybody wins so my question is what is the thing that you never do with uh you won't do with me typing test you've been telling me you can be me a typ I'm so much faster I like as I've told you before I think it's possible that typing speed is my actually the thing I'm best at in life I think you're aging though r small you have small children right now you're your error rate going up exactly yeah yeah all right so my question is okay are you building an agency yet or where what's going on with AJF growth what are you what are you doing are you an influencer okay can I who are you so okay so good question uh the short answer is no I'm I have and here's the definitive way to answer the question I have no more clients in terms of total clients since we last talked about this okay do you have employees yes the same numb as I had before okay so I do have two three two in the US actually I do have one more in the Philippines so maybe a little step towards it I have an additional one or two people okay got it yeah no no because I have I had before four in the Philippines now I have six in the Philippines okay so you have six basically I added a designer to be able to support my current client load better as they grow and then I have uh I added somebody to take over ad builds so basically like the very very sort of Junior Med buy our how long ago did we record couple months so every two months you grow 40% in size I think we've got a real compounding agency that's could be you might be 100 people in two years please please don't let that be where you're headed no um yeah uh I don't so I don't think so and I've actively said no to clients on account of not wanting to uh staff them with other people Etc so I still do the client work okay um there's there's some slight tweaks to that so I I think I and I think one thing you're right about with this is that uh talented people need to grow and like I added people who are talented so um creating opportunity for them is important but I let's take this so there's that let's take this back though a step which I think is actually maybe a more interesting question for a lot of people I remember hearing somebody say recently maybe you'll maybe you'll know what the provenance of this is um I don't remember but somebody was saying I think on Twitter that um the basically like the opportunity you decide to pursue has like this massive impact on the potential outcome right like essentially like let's say I'm going to work 40 hours a week every week okay which which is about what I work I don't I don't tend to work a lot more hours than that not withstanding a week where I come down here at night sometime sure um I can apply The Leverage of that 40 hours to any number of problems that's right and so the person was saying what every body underestimates is that your wedding what everybody underestimates is um is how important it is to pick the right thing to work on right Yep this is sort of an obvious point and yet what he says is this point is obvious to everybody and yet almost nobody thinks that hard about they don't take the time to really think seriously exactly and I would say that's been a lot of my own career um and so I am at a spot now where like I said there's an additional demand for my services and I have this decision to make which is like is that the best use of my time next and what I am currently deciding is that it is not for a couple of reasons um so this guy was saying before he quit a job or something like that he took three months researching opportunities trying to think through these from every angle he he basically tried to apply serious critical thinking to the selection of what problem he wanted to solve and you know you could take this on a very large scale right like you could try to solve world hunger you know or something like that at 40 hours a week and and all that and so there's this question for me career-wise which is like okay if I'm going to put in that much time what is the actual highest leverage opportunity so even aside from anything we talked about last time about like is this about making the most money or whatever else like however you define that what what should I actually do with my time and is building an agency the thing that I want to do the answer for me right now to that question well let me pause do you have any thoughts about that idea of of problem selection sure I I just don't think that's actually has anything to do with the framework that you're using to make decisions what do you mean like I don't think you're looking at your time and going what's the biggest leverage opportunity and trying to find it and allocate you don't think I'm doing that right now no not at all well because you just said you could choose world tonger you could choose whatever so I don't or nor are you trying to choose the thing that you think could make you a billion dollars so I don't think it's about the highest leverage activity I I I see you as operating you have a fairly low ambition monetarily and you're sort of satisfied so I think you're playing yeah like even the thing that you just told me about which I don't think we're talking about yet on camera maybe we will in a couple months yeah yeah that is like insane to me yeah it's totally playing them yeah like it it doesn't feel like an actual attempt to apply the principle you just described way so well it it is if you yeah well we can't talk about that yet yeah we'll do that maybe I'll roll that out someday on the random show yeah there's a yeah so I think you're right about that and I think I'm also doing I think you can apply that advice um imperfectly and still apply it better than if you don't think about it right like essentially like if you apply the pick your problem advice within a smaller framework even it's still helpful um which is like what and I mean I guess everybody is trying to do this all the time right like what's the next best place to put my dollars or something like that right is a question about Roi and some of that so I I'll go back to the original question I think the most interesting opportunity for me right now and I'll tell you how I got there is continued content output and to do that across podcast and maybe newsletter and sort of audience growth around those things and there's there's a re a positive and a negative reason for that the negative reason is I do think I'm a bad process Builder and even aside from that potentially self-limiting belief um I uh I don't like it at all I take no joy in doing it and so it just feels like work I absolutely have no pleasure in it's a bit like running as part of my workout routine like I would like to be able to run I think you can't really be fit if you can't run I don't like to go for a run you know there's people who like just adore they run or tie all that stuff I my wife's like that like and I just I have no pleasure in it but I'll do it because I need to but I don't want to run all the time I'm not run I'm just not gonna run a marathon anytime soon because I it's just too much running for me um and that's how I feel about building processes and actually you're a big example of this which is like uh you I what I've watched happen at CTC is that the more you've committed to build incredible process all the way down through entire team the service has become incredible and frankly that's actually part of the reason I don't want to build an agency is because I don't want to compete with you and what I mean is I just feel like I couldn't I don't think I could make my service good enough to where I wouldn't to be able to look somebody in the eye and be like you should choose me over CTC you know like I think right now I like I think for my particular kind of client that I can make that case credibly but I just don't think I can I just think your your thing is too good it's too good you would fail a bunch of times on the way I think you'd have to be get more okay with saying it and being wrong yeah one of the biggest things I I think that's actually one of the things reasons I think a lot of agency owners stay small is they they have this language that they use about how important the quality of service to them is but it's really just this sort of like trap that you fall into which is that um you get hung up on this idea that ever failing at the promise would be somehow so uh unallowable to you but in reality you fail all the time like it's just you're intention really matters in that process um I I think I think you are retconning history so bad on your own story with this right now retcon roning retroactive retroactive continuity retroactive can we add that to the discussion later I think no it's when it's when uh it's when like TV shows or movies I think the way to do it like you think I was hung up on quality I think I think what you're reconning is the is how much it hurt right now no doubt I'm not I didn't I say it wouldn't I don't think I I I just think what you realized in the process of trying to scale CTC fast yeah in the way that you did and I I I get pissed off when I hear people say oh CTC only cares about money or what like yeah yeah yeah Insanity yeah right right like it's like no it's hard it's it's not that he it's not that but like the what I think is is that you are underplaying right now like how much it hurt you personally when you realize your name was being associated with a quality of service that was bad oh I so my point is like you actually sat here on the podcast last time and said I wouldn't go back and do that again well I okay there I mean there's a lot there's levels of there's levels of failure that you are are not willing to go and do for sure but I don't think that we're talking about the level of uh the pain that I was describing last time being singularly associated with the failure of expert clients and the perception of me in that I think it was much broader than that the consequence of having to lay off so many people like there was so much more than that um I don't I don't think that you should be afraid to grow your business under the pretense that you may say to someone I'm going to do my best to deliver this service for you and you may fail in some way to do that yeah uh because I think you do that anyways sure yeah of course so but I yeah I just yeah I think I'm I just don't think I could do a good job right now training people to deliver service at a quality that I would feel good about what if you didn't have to train them what if they were actually additive to the Quality all on their own what if you found people smarter than you depart uh I still wouldn't have good process I would still just be like hiring if they were good at process yeah so that would actually be the way I would do it if I was going to do it I would have to find somebody who I could install on day one as essentially a COO and and from an early stage we saw vision for it split the equity whatever you know that would be the way I would do it if I was going to do it um I don't really want to do that right now I also like the the control of having owning 100% of my business and all that stuff so um here's the the other side of that okay uh to not get hung up too long uh is that I think one of my best skills is teaching and explaining things that's what a service business is well and so I think that there's a way to leverage that uh with uh with content output and uh yeah I think you should absolutely keep doing the content and I think the greatest Leverage applic for it would be service what is what is a better leverage application for building the audience what's the audience for uh for the content put to monetize in what way like what's advertising partners and that sort of thing people make a lot of money with newsletters and podcasts and stuff I I don't know how many people in our space make more money than I do getting that so I know but that pales in comparison to the money we making Services yeah but your thing is so yeah I yeah uh but how much money you could make from content is enough for me you know that I think is is the question and and also I think there's a way in which there's the potential uh frustrations of a service business maybe would be different in a Content business there would still be frustrations I know enough to know now that everything looks greener on the other side we'll just stop here we'll just check back in check back in next time as you continue to grow your business and uh continue to lab it a so what do we call it now though I call an agency I call it bouti agency okay I mean it's definitely an agency it's just that it's it's a we've crossed the line from consultant individual freelancer yeah yeah as soon as I hired people I'm was willing to call it an agency so we've moved to Boutique agency yeah so maybe by the next episode we'll be that may okay got it maybe so um yeah what what I mean when you think about well we should move on because we got a lot of other stuff to talk about so but I I the thing I'll put in the sand is like this thing that you're doing I I unless it's like purely relational is insane relative to the opportunity that you have in front of you what do you mean what's the opportunity in front of me for AJF growth you think it could be a bigger or better agency more yeah right many if not most meta advertisers at this point are using a third party pixel to get upgraded tracking from their website back to meta so that uh your site will send maximum amount of data back to meta which will help optimize performance and also give you the most accurate reporting in your meta ads dashboard the tool I use for that for my Brands is called Billy b l y. a Billy Billy is an awesome tool it's actually a One-Stop shop replacement for Google tag manager like click up a button you can use it for your metap pixel you can use it for your Tik Tok uh Snapchat ads if you're running those Twitter ads Google ads with enhanced conversions ga4 oneclick setup like that's amazing ga4 is a mess for me to set up for Brands before this uh it's a really cool tool and it works great it's also really competitively priced I don't know anybody else like it so if you're looking for a 100% server side tracking tool using conversions API to track your meta ads that's the number one value prop for for me and for most of my listeners it goes beyond that as well go check out B ly. billy.

A probably for a lot of you you will need to generate like two extra conversions per month uh for it to pay off and you can actually get started and even test it like literally just run it side by side against your current pixel uh you can test it for $1 for the first month so um so it's a very low commitment to get it onto your site go check it out b. aai to get 100% server side tracking with Billy today um I've been thinking about this thing specifically for for brands that reach a particular leverage point because if let's say you're sub5 million yep how much money should you spend on content relative to your ad spend okay and my answer to that question is basically as little as possible okay like kind of simp simp L right like you you can take you can up until five and five Loosely right so maybe it's seven maybe it's three I don't know whatever but somewhere in that range mid seven figures you can have giant like steps forward in your ad account by like saying saying the value proposition better you know what I mean like essentially like big creative wins happen at that level of business to where you go from spending 50 Grand a month to 150 Grand a month off of two ads that got better right yep you have those moments those moments slow down over time though right you you stop producing that those kinds of Step function growth in your spend um on the one hand on the other hand e-commerce I I've actually been thinking about this recently you can comment on this if you want but I think somewhere around three to four million is one of the hardest phases of e-commerce because your business is big enough now to demand a lot from you but you still have not reached true e-commerce economy scale like it's just it's really I mean they probably all the phases of business are hard but uh but it's it's just a very hard phase of business I think okay um but I think there's another phase for a lot of brands at least where they get to 10 plus million and they actually start to create more um economy of scale in their business particularly if they're disciplined about their Opex um if they're disciplined about their Opex that's where you can begin to get to sub 10% Opex pretty pretty consistently um and if you have let's say let's say you've got a good margin 65 70 points of margin if you've got a little bit of LTV in the business your ads spend can become you know 25 30% of your p&l whatever it is and suddenly you can be running a business with like 20% bottom line depending on how fast you're trying to grow all those kinds of things um so now you you may actually at that phase of business have some money to throw around and and think about taking larger bets this is something you've been talking about a lot recently which I I've really loved your conversations about this recently actually like the idea of like think seriously for these Brands about about big product Innovation giant drops Big Marketing moments you it's hard to do that when you're sub 10 million right I think I maybe you disagree with that but I think it's really really hard to to take too big of a swing there so okay put all that together there's this question for me that's interesting really tactical um how much money should you be spending on Creative production relative to your ad spend if you're trying to grow your ad account more and you're you're sort of past the big wins phase yeah okay so disagree with any of that part of the premise that you want but that's what I'm thinking about so I we have spent so much time recently thinking about the operational system that's related a creative production I think it is a huge gap in the way that most people work because every ad is functionally a bet that's right okay which means it has a cost yep and it has an expected value yep and the relationship between those two things is wildly important so the question of how much you should spend is relative to the value that each unit you produce creates so and I mean that in marginal value so y I'm looking at right now we track people may have seen my outlier ad Series where we look at the spend that we can produce per ad we'll look at this contribution margin per ad it depends on this is a brand where contribution margin per ad the one I'm looking at doesn't make sense because we drive to break even on first order so it's like it doesn't follow that long so we think about it in spend so if every ad produces let's just use some easy math $100 in spend which we would say you know is a measure for value okay and let's just for simple math say that that creates $100 in Revenue whatever um then there's the question of okay what is the cost to produce that unit and brands that can drive down the cost of production of that unit have massive leverage over other businesses in the same way you do have you have low Opex y or great margin yep creative scale and production at low cost is a massive leverage Point yes so this is why AI I think is such an important part of this conversation because it's the biggest factor I think in potentially driving down cost per unit of production so the answer to the question has to do with how efficient you are so how much margin you have to spend per ad um relative to its performance and the value of each unit that you produce but that relationship between the cost of each unit of production and the value of each unit of production is something you should track and continue to try and improve do you think there any heris that could give somebody there in terms of spend 10% of your media y let's let's assume that most brands set their Ras Target and drive their overall business to their absolute marginal threshold okay I bet that most people don't include creative in that calculation correct and so what I would say is that you are going to likely have to begin to include some cost associated with production in order to get to that idea which is going to your roas Target and to see if you can get there so I I think it probably deter you essentially think that the creative production ought to go under your the advertising and marketing portion of your p&l I don't think so because it it doesn't move in the same linear fashion like it's it is chunkier as a fixed cost but the relationship ahead like so when I think about planning a month I think about how much Bend I'm trying to get to how many units of production that's required and it's different every month because I'm bringing with me a different amount of uh of spend spend each month from my previous month yeah but that relationship between the incremental amount of spend and that cost of production has to have some relationship it's one of the main reasons why I don't think that creative should be an internal resource creative has to be a variable cost in your business in the sense that you have to scale it up and down relative to necessity it's one of the biggest mistakes I think people make on Opex is having in-house creative in-house creative makes almost no sense in an e-commerce business yeah okay so do you assign the expected value of an ad uh of a unit ad unit right we'll call it right do you assign that expected value differently relative to some assessment of the quality of the ad what I mean is so I think every brand should Define a baseline standard that in order for an ad to be considered an ad it has to achieve the standard so you don't even get to be an ad unless you've achieved the quality so if I have to make 100 ads you the brand owner to find the gate through which I have to enter into in order to be I'm an app this is your argument against the Post-it note for example right like it's like it's just too low of quality for me if I was running a brand if I was running well there are some brands for whom I think the posted note makes sense I think like and I I love hex Cloud right it Grieves my soul to see them run posted know ads like if I was in charge of the brand and I have tons of respect probably crushing whatever maybe I'm wrong on this but from a pure brand ethos and this is very subjective I think that there are a lot of brands for whom that shouldn't meet the threshold yeah okay okay um so do you assess the potential value of a let's go extreme here a 10 minute long ad video long explainer problem agitation solution vssl that kind of thing right do you do you assess the potential value of that ad versus a well-designed still image so differently no this is the problem is that I actually don't think there's any predictive value that the long form has any higher upside well so long form is a Frau term now in these conversations because of because I've used it in a specific way but I forget forget that particular thing what I'm saying is like essentially an ad that is a higher amount of investment is there or or is the entire game for you keep the investment as low as possible because as long as you meet the threshold that you talked about like as long as they get through the gate keep the investment as low as possible and take as many bets as possible because it's so impossible to if I was a small brand I would run almost no video because the it's just a bet game it's an expected value calculation that the cost to produce quality static image ads is basically zero dollars um so you can make so many of them yeah and I just don't see any proof that any video any AD type has a higher expected value than any other AD type well Stills are almost always retargeting Taylor you didn't know that yeah um the the um tell the people you're kidding so they don't get I'm kidding I'm kidding I hear that sometimes and I think probably in some account somewhere um the that's interesting um I think it's probably still wrong I still think you're too um negative about the ability of different ads to produce different outcomes I don't think it's about format by the way I like I I do think you can do a the most important variable uh because I think it just depends on the the brand some in terms of like what actually communicates their value prop best I think there are Brands where it's like you know the Caleb silicone ring ad like you know black white like that product doesn't need a lot of explanation the steel image does a great job communicating what the value proposition is and so you don't really need to do I could do a longterm explainer for that ad but it's like it's piece of rubber on you know whatever um so I don't know maybe it would work better but I'm I'm not sure the um the the uh but I what I'm thinking about partly here is like that that agrees with you is is this is this is like an Alex formosi principal here where he talks about I think it's in gym launch Secrets he talks about you know when you're making your ads with this kind of thing he's he's like here's your headline here's your body copy here's your d d now move them around on the ad as many different ways as you possibly can and then just launch all of them because it's so cheap once you've made the first ad to make a million more and there is a principle there that I do agree with which is like this is part of the well here you go creative testing conversation is that like instead of instead of iterating off of Winners instead do the testing at the ad creation level create 10 versions of the ad because actually drive the cost up do that the funny thing about iterations is that the highest cost in the creative production process is the human spending the time um it actually it often destroys the cost benefit uh in in really wild ways but um well so okay so let's let's take the AI example yeah exactly yeah so do you I mean do you think that you should go and get on Claud right now somebody watching or listening to this right should go and get on Claud right now and get it to spin out a million variations of something and then get on another AI tool and just go make all of those yeah and upload them in the ad account yeah I think that there's going to be brands that um that do this that obliterate people at a scale that is hard to imagine which is they are going to remove all of the Legacy human Gunk around what has to be true how many people have to approve an idea yeah and and they're just going to go like if you go into I was I play with this sometimes where I just go like bamboo earth like show me make a flatlay of like Cactus and and like let's just say I made 500 of them and put them all in the ad account tomorrow what I know about bamboo Earth performance is that there's nothing precious about the way that anything is happening in a way that we should really hold a an insane gate yeah to that idea but the cost of production is actually still really high yeah um now the alternative to this is a different path which is marketing storytelling which is you want to talk about making video production I actually say okay okay have something subsi to say yeah um otherwise the cost of production is almost entirely wasted so I think this is I think in some ways tell me how this does not disagree with all of the content you've been putting out recently about this point which is like you have you have said like don't test background colors and things like that right like you know so to be clear when you say test testing to me infers the idea that you're attempting to create a learning no no I'm using a term way looser than that I I mean so I'm make a hundred ads random great that's fine so but you've also been a big believer in like push really hard on better marketing moments yes but what you think is that that doesn't really happen at the ad level no the ad is just the last step in communicating that basically it all happens before the ad that's right I I so okay let me say something about this I think that you're probably wrong about the quality versus quantity thing I'm watching this really closely with a couple different clients right now a couple people who are really I'm still okay with a quality gate yeah well I'm okay with that you you get to you can Define that I'm anti ugly app yeah I actually don't think that these things are as as that the idea that to get quantity you have to degrade quality I think this is a madeup idea so yeah I I think that might be wrong but I'm I I'll actually withhold that criticism here I think I think it's probably wrong that's where my that's what manuring is like if you think about think about producing a Tesla right uh nobody says that in order to make more Teslas you have to make the Teslas worse what you solve for is you build an assembly line to uphold a standard of quality and great Innovative people build better assembly lines to produce large scale amounts of high quality things it happens all the time you don't have to always trade those things off yeah what I yeah okay I see I see that point that's fine I'll give you that point for now because the actual thing I think is more interesting in this conversation in some ways is uh the notion that that more the mistake people are making is actually in some ways just like throw more ads at it and that that what this thing that you've been pushing on recently I've been I've been thinking about it a lot it's been a really helpful thought to me which is like go make your brand more uh reach deeper into a person's emotions essentially right so think of it yes you're born primitive example right where it's like D-Day shoes with this whole thing it's such a good example and here's the here's the thing the like like especially for some Brands like there's there's a thing where you think think about how your brand meets a customer's life in a real way and they have this emotional connection to it and and what operators ought to think about is like okay if you're selling that more than the more than like the cloth of the clothes or whatever right you're selling the way your brand connects to this person's values and emotions and stuff like that how do I as a brand go get deeper into that place Y and what do I do to do that and I think that question is worthy of much more reflection for much more brand so much that I don't care to argue with you about this point because I think I think even if you're wrong if people actually focused all their attention on the thing you're saying it would really help Brands I just think that you should really broaden the Spectrum or like move into polls here which is that if it's just an attempt for Pure ad performance that all of the thinking about how we're going to make a better thing here is really minimally impactful like this ad format versus that ad format this font versus this like this is a where all the energy and waste happens and the variation in outcome is so small between the things it's unpredictable and nobody actually knows it now completely agree if if you're FR on formats and that I completely agree I think this is all about messaging yeah it's about communicating ideas that's what I think yeah and I there are probably people who are good at that but the vast majority of people are the same at it I agree I agree with that too like if you pulled all like all the creative strategist off of Twitter and you gave them Bamboo earth like they would produce roughly the same outcome yeah I think that's probably right and so the alternative is let them all do whatever they want and do it as cheap as possible and hold them to massive creative cost constraints and then on the other side go build an amazing story about an amazing new product an amazing thing and spend all of your energy and money on that but don't spend it trying to come up with a bunch of different version like time and energy and video cuts of cactus exploding or something yeah um yeah I think and I think this is where some of the iteration stuff conversation goes really wrong which is like and and where I think Brands need to get better which is like it is about when I analyze creative for Brands right now what I try to do is I don't I TR I actually don't break down ads into their component parts I think instead about like how is how is this brand communicating its ideas and what of which of those ads seem to be resonating with people and I just make a hypothesis it's not very scientific but I just go like using the instincts I can looking at the ads that I'm looking at what ads are resonating with people and and my assumption is that is primarily not about still versus video or anything like that or about length or about camera quality or about any of the things that people want to put that on you know what I instead think it is is about uh how good of a job do you do actually communicating the messaging of meeting of your brand relative to the customers uh life that's it I just think that like the percentage of ads that I see anybody like could you give me an example maybe of what you're talking about like because if we took everybody's favorite creative strategist on Twitter and just said like could you just show me like I'm pulling up foreplay right here just like a way to look at a bunch of ads like um I'll give you one I'll give you I'll give you I'll give you an example right now I think we may be able to show this ad later too right I I'm working with a a fruit farm in San Diego okay and what I have come to learn is that there's a subset of customers who love Farmers Market quality fruit they love they they think of Farmers Market quality fruit as being better than grocery store fruit yeah it probably mostly is actually for all kinds of reasons and they like the taste of it and so you can show fruit and say this fruit is good eat it but the actual messaging that has to matter and there's a million formats that you could use for this yeah but the messaging that matters the most is to explain to people as clearly as possible and as compellingly as possible um this fruit was grown on a farm and it is better than the fruit that you get from the grocery store that is the idea in somewhere in the brand that's why actually the the brand exists right they they created a farm in the US to do to deliver that to people there's people who like the taste of really good fruit and so that's not a that's not a now there's probably some layer deeper where that gets into their emotional life or whatever that's that's not the that's not the most story driven version of it if you wanted to you could go into Farms as a story and some of those kinds of things but what I saying is like the thing that will make ads work for that brand is being at least for that particular subset of C customers there's probably some other things too there's like a gift customer and some that kind stuff right but like is to be able to communicate that in as clear and of compelling as way possible so but let me ask you something in terms of how to do that yeah um what's it called good Hill Farms good like if we took um the about page for good Hill Farms because like I like this point that you made that like the brand exists for a specific reason and has a specific story yes um and we fed it to chat gbt and we gave it the prompt that you just described which is right with immense clarity and specificity write 400 headlines that communicate about the unique value proposition of good Farms do you think you're going to outright that um and who like amongst the 400 do you not think that there's Clarity somewhere in a way that could then be automatically translated into headline copy image on ad take all these images put them onto things and like it how is that not the inevitable end conclusion even if all you introduced to the AI is the principle yeah so so first of all I think that principle requires some arriving at but you've got it so yeah but but I think that's actually the hard work I think the hard work I in this case it's maybe not but it it's I think it's I think there's there's more hard work in seeing what it is that people care about about your product than than a lot of people let on and this is actually where I see a lot of AI driven ads go bad so far in my experience is that they don't actually connect to the thing that people care about so they do a really good job describing the product but they don't actually and particularly at the hook level and and I I want to preface this like this is a really active area of exploration for me right now yeah I I don't I don't not telling anybody don't use AI the opposite I'm playing with it with some clients I have one client who's very AI forward he's awesome at it he's he is doing the thing you're doing and he's he's writing these long form emails um related to the value of his product that like smash for him and he's doing it in Claude in three seconds and and it's incredible um so uh so it's I'm probably gonna do an interview with him at some point but the the the thing I haven't seen AI do yet and and I actually was gonna have a topic today with the topic was gonna be I'm sleeping on AI which is like me personally like I'm realizing this that I'm probably slow to it uh but is that like I haven't seen it like analyze I haven't seen it arrive at the true value proposition and frontload that into a hook that's actually compelling and works yet I haven't seen it I I bet it will happen but I haven't seen it yet be able to generate those hooks now if you could do 400 um I think chat you're using chav GPT right now I think Chad GPT is a lot worse than Claud too by the way so I think Claude does a better job but um as a writer but um but I think that like the hooks that so far I have seen from from AI driven ads um don't do a very good job of capturing people's attention yeah but I don't know maybe if you could spend you just I just don't think that there's any math that validates that experience and I just I don't I don't think that if you took a human and you had them WR 50 headlines that they would outperform the 50 headlines here on a consistent repeatable basis I think you'd get probably random results but the cost of this is zero and the cost of you is high and so the problem is well yeah the human would write 10 5 to 10 right they wouldn't write 50 the cost for me to get a human to replicate what I just did which is I put did this I copied the about page into right is is so it's so incomparable yes right that you cannot possibly outperform it at the scale of your cost yeah so even if you're cheap like but the problem is creative strategists aren't cheap they're not cheap they're actually wildly expensive to the tune of like $100 an hour do you uh sorry go like imagine that that cost right if if they could however many headlines they could write in a $100 of hour of cost I could probably 5,000x their production maybe in infinitely outproduce their production right so there's just can you actually get those in into the ad account and all that for the same cost like can can you can you T this is what I was gonna ask way way faster because again you the creative strategist doesn't even get them into the ad account they get turned into a spreadsheet that a media buyer then goes and uploads that entire process can be completely yeah absolved that's yeah yeah but there is some point at which the cost of turning 50 headlines into ads does add up versus turning five headlines and ads like it theoretically if somebody could write five better ones then let's say of this 50 five of them work right like you have to then go create the 50 ads and who does what do you mean well like at some point those headlines that you're writing have to make it onto still images or whatever you know that all happens automatically yeah so that's that's part of my question and then actually you know some like go add them to the ad account and build the ads uh you can API upload directly into meta yeah spreadsheet I guess that's true yeah so that that's what's the the thing about this and really meta is building the AI right this this is what's actually gonna happen all GNA move saying all you're G in his latest earnings call is saying all you're going to do is give me your business yeah that's the only thing the human at the end of the day is gonna actually be responsible for now you're going to have probably some sort of creative constraints here but but again for the sake of this kind of creative work there's you have no chance there's no chance to outperform this mechanism now again the bigger story about what Chad gbd does in control is what Goodhill Farms plants on their Farm that's right what products they make whether they're actually good or not you know um who who is this person and why do I care about her I'm looking at one of the founders something um what do they do with their money do they care for people do they go reinvest in other local farms do they do they actually build inherent in their story something that matters this point I think is is the point you've been hammering recently in a lot of these conversations that I think is extremely helpful and different than what a lot of people are saying about this and I think I I just like would just double down on that I think like it's there is a thing where you have to you have to think more deeply about that connection point between your your actual brand and your customer and that is actually really hard for AI to do right like like to be that creative and unique and thoughtful about these really deep connections you know well and they're just not going to that's not going to proactively do it for you um it may be able to suggest to IDE about what you could do but again to decide what you plan at your farm at this point um it's not going to okay let me ask you another question yep um let's you have been tweeting recently yep about something and I've have noticed that you've been tweeting about it and I know how your brain works and so what I have noticed about this thing is that there is a reason you're tweeting about it and you you have seen something somewhere that is making you interested in it and that is a discussion point that actually not that long ago in some ways I would have assumed you would have rejected yeah and that is the conversation around incrementality yes so I just want to ask you about that uh why are you interested in this right now what are your what first of all let me ask what compelled you to do this what what data did you see somewhere that made you go I need to tell the world about incrementality and how they're all wasting their money um a few things one is there's a massive market demand for it everybody wants it so that's just like a market tactic thing that candid Le was like we're going to play in this space everybody's demanding it um we're going to come up with a solution for it two uh almost every incrementality result reinforces our position and so it yeah gives my methodology orage which what is that is know what it meta is the most powerful incremental channel that pmax is really destructive in a lot of ways that brands are just limiting that view conversions are challenging like all of the things that are in terms of where we move people these are all things that you that I have agreed with you about for a long time and so incrementality studies which it like um Google in their G2x like which is their uh incrementality like conversion lift study that they run has this whole thing where I think we should put in the show notes the actual research paper that Google has um published about um geom matching holdout and the their methodology I think it's a good read for anybody who's interested in this topic um but they call it the gold standard of experiments you'll hear this language a lot which is that um this is the most scientific way to evaluate causal impact of advertising um and so in that sense like I think that we should uh try to always hold the highest standard to uh obligating ourselves to making sure that our ads are actually causing incremental impact for the business like we want that we all want that I think and this is the best standard for upholding that um so that's like the the next um the the other thing I would say is that it it kills attribution softwares because what I watch in business is that this it's the third data point that uh destroys everything what is the third data point if B if data point one is your business the actual revenue on your site let's call it new customer revenue for the sake of that's like the core metric yep the second metric is the in platform number uh it's the third number the MTA number that causes this triangulation that causes immense confusion and what incrementality does is builds a relational bridge between the platform reported number and the the the number so that I can use the platform data and set my cost controls according doesn't attribution do the same thing build a bridge between the two no why not because it does not give me a relationship between new customer revenue and platform reported gives me a third number so maybe I I've heard you talk about this before but maybe re explain the difference between attribution and incrementality attribution is an attempt to assign value to a stage of the funnel or to to different ad platforms based on um well let me take a step back attribution is just simply a method for assigning value to advertising channels or advertising efforts there are a million types of attribution models I was starting to slip into MTA multi-touch attribution where you're attempting to assign partial value to multiple touch points across the Spectrum um incrementality or what attribution doesn't attempt to do is to ask the question of would there have been the impact had the ads not existed at all um so it's not an attempt at understanding the causal relationship um it's closer to a correl relationship it's saying these ads occurred um and there was uh clearly an interaction there was a click there was a view there was some action across the Spectrum but it doesn't isolate or specifically create a hold out to answer the question of what would have occurred had the ads not existed at all yeah yeah okay I see what you're saying yeah so um so let's say um so maybe maybe frame up an example for people for incrementality so if there's uh H let's say I have a 2 to1 row ass in Facebook ads dashboard right what what would an incre incrementality number be that would and what would it tell me that's right so it's going to give you the actual incremental Revenue in comparison to the total reported Revenue right so so if I spent $100,000 then the total reported revenue is $200,000 the incremental Revenue what what number will I actually never used incrementality software what number will it spit out well so there's different sof so let's let's say like a meta conversion list study is going to tell you of the $400,000 of what did we say of the $200,000 of reported Revenue only 50,000 of it was actually incremental and so you would have gotten the 150 anyway so you spent $100,000 to get 50 so now your actual iro ass is the term would be 50 yeah so your spending five exactly instead of the two so now well yeah exactly well but now what you can do is you can assume that people what they do is they take a weighted factoring yeah to their meta reported number or you could set your cost control let's say you wanted a 1x you would set your cost control at a 4X right right right same thing with pmax so it actually gives you the relationship that you can now understand how to set your cost control yeah so what's the big so what's the you said this this all ultimately reinforces uh for you meta is really incremental pmax is a a dister I don't know did you see this video that I no I did not watch it I saw that you said it the idea is that if you think about incrementality as existing on two axes on the X AIS is your optimization setting and then on the Y AIS is your exclusion or your targeting and so the more that you obligate I call it a physical action an actual click and you measure it in a short window and the tighter your exclusions are the more incremental the ad spend is yeah right so the worst example like I call it the most criminal ad product of all time is display remarketing on a 28 day click 28 day view measurement it's basically not incremental at all ad roll right exactly CIO roll Etc so that's like the least incremental thing because it's just literally a display ad that someone happens to see and you measure their 28k window insan right versus the most incremental which I I mean this relatively incremental is that if you run a one- day click with the tightest possible exclusion if you actually are able to generate Revenue you are likely the platform is going to under report the actual impact so in those cases we see like when we run s-day click or one day click in meta we actually see incremental factors that will increase the road yeah I remember you said this in your podcast in a way that actually interested me you said I believe you said that some of the readings you were saying is that the actual closest reading to the True Value sometimes was 28 day click plus one day view yeah so that essentially that was like that was like mostly all incremental that's right so that you off often time so 7-Day click I I the thing I put in my tweet was that if I was running 7-Day click on an incrementality basis I would bu default use like a 25% increase to the Roos as the actual incremental impact just on.com forget if you add Amazon or anything else and when we see when we run incrementality studies we see it as high as 250% that the actual incremental Ros is two and a half times the platform reported number there's this giant Trope that people think meta under or over reports and it massively under reports yeah I I've thought this for a long time it's really crazy so you're saying even on a 28 day click basis on on a sday click yeah well so yeah 28 day click forever yeah um and and and I have basically done what you've suggest what you're saying here which is I actually build my bid caps my tros targets or cost caps as the case may be uh I build them with an with a with an adjustment for a purchase multiplier yeah that is basically assuming inity validates exactly so you're just giving exactly what we want an actual answer for yeah okay so um so I mean you before we were talking you said hey have you been thinking about incrementality about to me you said that to me like so what what I mean what are the other big takeaways here like give give me the well so so I think that one um just understanding that like so house is one of the players in the space measured is a our close preferred partner just raised $20 million like the that's and I I say that as a as a way to give you the sense of demand now my honest belief is that the cost of this is going to zero I have heard that it's on shopify's roadmap to offer Geo holdout testing using their data meta already offers conversion lift studies for free Google is now offering conversion lift studies for free there's no reason that you should be paying $10,000 a month to get incrementality testing you can get access to it for way cheaper than that and oh it's it's it's just a it's not a business it's a feature it's a it's a math equation that can actually be done fairly easily um so so people can get access to this for for cheaper for sure but it is happening everywhere and it is becoming the primary starting point to determine Target setting in channels for brands that are ruthlessly committed to making sure that they can uh Drive incremental contribution dollars um yeah that's interesting I I mean I think part of the reason I I haven't paid that much attention to it it's because I tend to work with smaller brands that have less total channels so there's just it's a little easier it's really easy right you just look at meta ads relative to new customer revenue and it's pretty clear what's driving value and what I'll say is like sday click if you're using a one two factoring or whatever already like you're GNA be really close yeah yeah and if anything the only thing I think it might be a reason to validate is you might be under I so I I have I have at least one client for whom I've thought about this for and maybe a couple um so yeah I think that's that's so this I'm I'm going to show you something so you can look at this you can describe what you're seeing so this is measured reports you'll see the tactic the media spend percent incrementality measure Facebook prospecting 127% Google pmax 42% that's right yeah and look at some of these Advantage Plus campaigns so this is the actual iros versus what meta is reporting yeah so so you can see that like the reason I think it's important is that if you were running this the client might be me but if it's actually that that's scaled to the Moon right but yeah you can repeatedly see how bad like everything everything else is is that like it is just universally the case that every channel that we run this for and and you can get this for um this is exactly but this yeah this is exactly what everybody has been suspicious of for a long time right well I mean at least maybe I'm saying everybody this what I've been suspicious of for a long time it's the reason why so let me ask another question what happens when you do this for forget Google because everybody already hates pmax um right although although it seems like we should hate it more from some of the data that you've been putting out yeah what um which by the way anyway what about when you do this for like Tik Tok or something Tik Tok ads yeah it so same thing Tik Tok YouTube Pinterest it's all garbage yeah well but here's here's the thing are you how sure you this is right I mean again what's your confidence level in the math the the challenge so let's just talk a little bit about how it happens you take they go through and they model geographic regions that are indicative there's two ways to do this I'm going to talk about measured for a second or or uh they and you go into your ad account and you exclude those dmas States from your allocation okay and you see what Revenue they yeah that's right and they model the revenue before and after so they have a predicted amount of Revenue and they have a synthetic spend prediction and they can tell you what happened as a result they back test it to see how accurate is obviously the more data you have the more consistent the behavioral set there's all sorts of ways to introduce error into that kind of problem now meta is even a conversion lift study on meta is even better because they can actually truly hold out customer demos they don't have to depend on state isolations Etc they can literally create a hold out cell um and and do it even more accurately and then Google has a has a um a their methodology goes even further which is that their regions they compare they find like regions where the shopping behavior is actually similar between City a and City and then they create the hold out that way so it's a little bit more advanced in terms of the selection process yeah um so how certain am I that it's right um certain enough as as certain as any other information that I have to make a decision what about um have you run this with any non conversion optimized uh Facebook ads yeah what's the Takeaway on that brutal brutal um so you can see here's some Facebook awareness there's your media there's your incremental impact it's zero there's literally nothing yeah right so this and this is a big way like and right now Tik Tok prospecting zero same as Facebook awareness it's like literally two $130 like it's just it's amazing to me this is and what I appreciate about meta and this is this is a shout out to meta versus Google is meta is actually totally willing to grade their own homework right now and I've seen their conversion lift studies showed that their accounts are a disas yeah and they they own it they go through it Google is really hesitant to do this because they know their ad products are in real trouble with you do yeah um but they're actually being forced into it now have you have you done um Twitter yeah so there's Twitter is on here yeah I'm curious because I've heard some little bits of chatter it's like 65% I think that's pretty decent yeah and here's the thing it's really you can still make it work right right because it doesn't mean there's no incremental impact it just means you need to adjust your target accordingly right yeah I mean yeah okay yeah this one was 6 yeah 62% for the Twitter right there that's interesting yeah I mean because if you're getting a three to one and you get 62% of that that's enough probably that's right exactly so here's that any of these channels have incremental impact the question is just what does that mean you need relative to what they say in the dashboards right exactly yeah that's the thing that everybody's been looking for for so long and that's why they went to attribution tools and all all that kind stuff this yeah it's interesting I um because the key for me is I need to understand where to set my cost control and so what attribution attribution doesn't answer that question for me um this answers that question because it gives me a relationship to the platform reported number um so that's what that's why I find it moreful okay that's really interesting um okay what's next that's good anything else you want to say mentality no I no I think I I mean your pmax thing is interesting if it's in general if it's actually 33% it's it is I sent that to a client who's running HP Max and was like hey uh and then I think somebody brought up in the responses to that what if you're already excluding branded search and then you said 50% yeah so it's like still still very problem and a lot of that has to I've kind of wondered for a long time if I was undervaluing Google it's because Google's default attribution model is 331 and when you use pmax you introduce display YouTube and other things so if you got to feed only excluded let's argue about this why so so I mean because display remarketing you said is the the famous exactly terrible yeah so why I mean if pmax is GNA have that oh you said you're going to go to feed only no I'm saying that's why it's poorly incremental even when you exclude brand terms is because the attribution is 331 so why not go back and assume let's I just think a a Google search click uh or Google search term uh right uh uh let's say uh leggings okay categorical term so non-branded y okay is real different than a YouTube ad let's say because a YouTube ad is attempting to create demand I mean create demand quote unquote you know what I mean it's it depends on who you're Target but it's it's outbound relative to inbound the in it's and so um and so those are so different that that even the idea of showed on a website visitor yeah well exclude those right so make it Prospect follow the Y ACC yeah so any app so so my point is like why blend them together at all why why why not separate why not run the incremental study separately because maybe standard shopping and maybe YouTube and display remarketing and search all have different incremental values right and so why blend them all together into pmax in the first place well I the reason separate them to me it's the same thing is and this is where I think we we have this text exchange where I think it's the same as the same reason you don't isolate IG feed versus IG stories or anything else is because I actually think that the primary value with advertising is reaching a specific user wherever they are I actually think the incal value is often the customer um more than it is the placement and so the value what you don't want to do is constrain access to a person because the person when in Market is the what you're trying to reach wherever they're at more than it is about um the the specific uh trying to get more people who are on YouTube so then the the non-incremental aspects of those channels then are because the channel is incapable of generating clicks of well of doing the thing that meta is the best at and has been the best at for a long time which is putting the right ad in front of the right person I don't actually think that's the problem I think it's that the people don't click okay so but then I mean that's yeah I mean that's really different for again stand shopping versus YouTube people click on standard shopping yeah for sure I think standard shopping is great so why why combine them up at all why not separate them out run the incremental separate that's what I'm saying I I why why why bother with pmax is really what I'm saying what's the what's the point that pmax has more volume right is that is that but do you want do you want that if if I know the incremental factor and I can set my target my tros in the pmax relative to the incremental Factor then my assumption would be I could get more volume that it's the same thing as yon's argument yeah you should run 7-Day click one day view but set a Target higher yeah right than running just 7day click it's just the idea that I could get more potential volume in that way within with a blended average and you're willing to have some non-incremental display REM marketing mixed in there because because the net result is still more efficient volume total as long as I know the incrementality factor of that campaign and the distribution doesn't suddenly change now the challenge with incrementality tests like is that they are a historical result not a predictive result so if the yeah if the if you ramp up your budget on pmax and suddenly it just gives you more display remarketing your incremental could could be problematic I think this is a really good argument for splitting it out yeah like I think I think I mean all all I hear when you see this is like unless there is so much more volume with pmax you know it just feels like I I don't have a problem if standard shopping is where people want to live in Google I think it's their best ad product I think it's probably the safest way to play the game so we you are obviously you got a big sponsor here for this pod we're big fans of them more Staffing more Staffing out in the Philippines correct more staffing.com go visit it right now I've hired my team through them yeah so you have 100 employees uh through more Staffing um and there is a growing Trend we just launched this past month something called the CTC Global accelerator which is a service dedicated exclusively uh to providing seven figure Brands um support through International labor you found literally the best employee in the world though literally um I mean people don't know you're tweeting about this and people are going be like oh you're just promoting your product like I I I'll I'll tell you really honestly I talked to one client of mine and told them I think it's possible you should leave me and go to this program because this person is so good yeah and that the economics will work better for your business yeah and the price of it like we just no one can beat this price so it's $5,000 and you get basically our full growth service but it's because we have Outsource International Labor led by a young man in India named Joy um and joy did two coaching calls with me I think probably because you told him to is my guess no he just does that if I talked well about you he okay and then he was like okay thanks I think we're we're good and he said something like this and I I was talking to him on these calls and just like he wasn't giving me a lot of response but what I could I could read he was going like you idiot I already know all of this you know I absorbed you okay moved on yeah right I yeah I I could just tell he like he just wasn't that interested in the content and I I needed some feedback like like tell me do you need me to go to a different place here like I you know whatever but he I just think he was like no I'm smart than I don't yeah so um and we have and this is we have 50 leads this month that we and we we can only take five and the demand is just insane for this it's what brands need more than anything is cheap quality service at that size of business um so but the point is the reason we're going to suffocate every small US agency in the world is because you can't you can't small US agency with us full-time labor make money at the price that I can offer and make money because International labor is so good and so cheap um and this is a problem for us labor generally and the point of this topic was that you're all in on hiring this way we're watching this happen all the time I'm looking at this going these employees might actually swallow my CTC business at some point because they're so talented and the quality of applicant is so high and this this Trope that this is like VA doing busy work is so wrong completely wrong um and it's just it's a huge to domestic labor and Bill Deandra who's a a client of yours and a friend um he sent me a message when we were talking about this on Twitter the other day and he said basically like I think this is the biggest n macroeconomic narrative in the United States in the future and I'm trying everything I can to find some way to make a financial bet on what happens to markets when all the US Labor basically collapses because Outsource is cheaper and more effective tab in my interview with him the other day he said Canadians are 30% cheaper than the US like you don't even have to think about this as Philippines or Latin America or whatever it is like the UK is like meaningfully cheap you know so um yeah I it's a it's a really big deal I mean to the point about quality this is this is the thing I try to say in my adre for more Staffing all the time is like and I've had Greg K on who was the guy who um Greg founded more Staffing with their CEO Lara out of his e-commerce business because he said it was like for him as an operator when like I did an episode you should go listen it's sponsored so like very you know it's lower listen count than my other stuff but like it's a very good interview he talked about like for him when he went and did this he he found that like a light bulb went off and suddenly like all of these things that he was thinking about like were were free from his brain and I've because I've talked to Lara from from more Staffing and one of her business partners Gaza um right like what I can tell you is like they are the two smartest supply chain people I have come across on all of e-commerce they are so good it is stupid they're so good and so um so yeah so you know I think that I think the it's interesting I mean are do you want to go towards the how to make money off of it or do you want to go towards the what's going to happen to the US Labor Market because one thing I wonder is if the the counter to that is if you and I are so plugged into this world of this kind of thing that it isn't catching on quite as broadly but I don't know J think support sheer right exactly like how many businesses like that are there like Jesse puji created one you've got more stat like there's like a hundred of them yeah um that are growing really really fast and it's like um this so this this is the the most recent um the newest employee for the C Global acceler grator is the cev um and he's from Trinidad in Tobago and he has a masters in statistics and has been running credit risk at uh a bank like his like versus a Us Media buyer imagine me Imagine Me versus him working through a SP just exactly and this is and then you add in the price cost of an entry-level Us Media buyer relative to and the Delta is so wide that I don't think this is what people are ready for is that the the discrepancy is so dramatic that it's kind of crazy to think about not sourcing it's just the problem is it's still cumbersome it's hard to networks aren't really very developed so as that continues to mature and get solved and more and more countries get unlocked and more and more people realize that they can make money this way I know what I know here's the bet I would make right now yeah let's hear it uh start an e-commerce business yeah and and staff the whole thing well that's right yeah like this is the thing we talked labor leverage or or you know where you know where there's more labor leverage than you know where this Services yeah yeah I actually one of the things I've thought about doing is that I've thought about making a massive Financial bet on publicly traded uh service businesses because I think that there they're all going to go do this between Ai and outsourc labor leverage benefits more than the company who all their cost is people is people yeah um I've watched my margin double in 14 months like in a way that is just it's it's hard to understand how much more that is the most compelling thing you've told me about why I should push into agency that there's that there's a margin opportunity related to those things that I'm you have the relationship already here yeah yeah yeah that's super interesting I mean yeah start question is is more Staffing is it is their talent e-commerce related though it's I don't I mean I don't I I always tell I mean I have designers and editors there I think like I haven't tried to hire them for media buyers and email people or anything like that I I think but I think it's this is actually one of the things I think is sort of silly that like that people do is they'll be like I don't know are there good uh like email people there was like the Phil the Philippines is like 150 million people right like what do you mean are there good yes they are there somewhere like like how do you evaluate that you get their resumés and then you interview them the same way you would with a US employee why why would you just write off on the front end the idea like there's nobody in the Philippines who can like who can do email well like it just seems crazy to me so um what I know for sure about more Staffing at least is that they they have particular expertise in supply chain part of that is geographic it's it's because it's a it's a puddle jump to China from the Philippines so um it it's just there's like a geographic advantage to that to where they can get in and out of China very fast and quickly and get to Major manufacturing areas and go meet manufacturers and hang out with them and so so like I think especially on outside of the business yeah it's a no-brainer yeah that's like the uh I was listening to on The Operators podcast for somebody was talking about China and how like of the world's like tooling experts like there's like a hundred of them that are like the absolute Pinnacle level relative to the amount that exists in the United States just because that's the concentration skill there so what's happening though is like so that that's sort of like the Philippines thing right which is like um if all of the if all of a sudden all these these outsourc labor are going into a specific sector does skill bubble up there in a way that yeah in the way that seems like that's probably real like Israel software development for e-commerce suddenly there's all these people there that get they build these companies and then the skill spills over and so it's really interesting to think about like Downstream consequence like one of the things I've thought we actually I don't know do you run any ads to the Philippines for any Brands uhuh it's like a125 cpms 8 cent clicks like if there's any development to the actual e-commerce infrastructure there selling there yeah it's kind of crazy and that's like an interesting thing is they get more connected into the US market in this is this is this is like the other thing about this is like I just like sort of love it in one sense because it's like there's just it creates opportunity in these places for people in a way that is like so financially beneficial to them that I think is like well if you're if you're into globalization and not a nationalist well I am so if you want to talk about that we can yeah I don't know didn't know that about you yeah yeah I I mean I don't begin to understand all of the complexities of that conversation but I I'm I have a I like all people so yeah that's yeah cool there you go what are you do you disagree with that no no yeah no big big global global elitist that's I I'm a big fan of globalization yeah yeah anyway um yeah I mean I think I remember Mike beckh I'm talking about at simple modern just like when they built a manufacturing facility in Oklahoma City you know he was just talking about like how much of a pain it was to sort of get the tools you needed or something fixed or whatever because there just is no infrastructure in the same way you know and so there there is this thing and I wonder if there is an element where you want to tap into different pockets of like you know go get your supply chain people in the Philippines and then go get you know whatever if you could go find sort of what that what those different places and and people are because of because of all those things and yeah I mean I have found there's some interesting things that people sort of can undervalue with that like cultural distinction does matter and the way people relate to to one another I had I heard a really interesting comment from um one of the folks at Mor Staffing I was actually she lives in Colorado now and she um she and I were having lunch together she said you know the thing you got to remember is that we are a colonized and conquered people for a really long time so um and so that that still is in there a little bit and it's sort of ingrained that we say yes to the person above us and so you have to really work hard and really make it explicit that you want us to go outside of the directions you know or what ever but like people will they're smart talented creative people just like anywhere else you know and that kind of stuff I think is one of the challenges with with global hiring is like it's very hard to be attentive to cultural values like that and to sort of see them happening in front of you and to figure out why people aren't doing that but but you know look cultural values are hard in America too so it's not it's not necessarily the case that it's it's only there you look you heard us talking about it offshore labor in the Philippines makes all the sense in the world and you could do it with my friends at more staff who have helped me build my team and can help you build yours I just got another piece of positive feedback about a great employee in an e-commerce business staff through more Staffing you should go reach out to them to go get yours going as well the value proposition is really simple you can attract incredible talent in the Philippines with DP Commerce resumés do not think of this it's just getting a virtual assistant look for a players who are really really good across every part of your business uh and you will attract great talent because you will pay more than local Philippines rates and you will pay at the same time significantly less than that same talent in the US everybody wins when you do that go to more staffing.com [Music] staffing.com getting to have that's really a byproduct you so um you obviously worked with Drive what tell me oh yeah yeah so thank you thank you for building a relationship with Mike and the team at drivve line yeah you want to explain to what drive line is real fast you'll do it better than if you really want to um to get to know Drive Line you should go back and listen to my interview um with drivve line with Mike rathwell the CEO of Drive Line baseball as I said to you last time we talked about them a little bit last time um one of the most interesting businesses in the world I think they they it is not too much to say they revolutionized not only baseball but all of pro sports y um and the revolution is still happening to some degree but is mostly at least in medas race right like it's happening um it is happening for real across there and it's because they revolutionize the way baseball players get trained by bringing huge amounts of measurability to training anybody who's played Sports knows this feeling right a coach tells you to go do a thing and you listen to what the coach says because the coach told you to do it and theoretically that's going to make you better at this at the sport of the thing right the problem is what happens when the next coach tells you something different and how do you know the coach's advice is right or whatever it is right so um so what they did is they brought measurability to training and really applied the idea of deliberate practice which is a well-studied thing to baseball and to baseball training and then they also applied some really specific practice tactics basically to to baseball and the result is a really fascinating Services business uh they actually are a hybrid service e-commerce software business they have all three um and uh and it's a really really cool thing and you and I both knew Drive Line we've known him for a long time because we're big baseball nerds um and uh and and so I they were a client of mine for a little while and you played pro baseball and so anyway there you go yeah so so I think you must have just we we must have come up in conversation together along the way because at some point Mike just reached out to me on Twitter and we just started talking all the time and so we would just Jam about stuff I reference your ideas like they're my ideas all the time so yeah so and Mike's on Twitter and so we we we've interacted and so my sons are 10 years old uh and what I've learned about trying to coach them in baseball is that I'm a bad baseball coach is that I I thought eriously and I don't really know why but that being a good baseball player would make you a good baseball coach and it is definitely not true especially to little kids like the language is all different their bodies move different like none of almost nothing I knew translated in a way that was other than being energetic and fun like but but mechanically trying to help them get better I find myself constantly frustrated not knowing what to do yeah um it turn coaching is a different skill set than the actual playing it it's it's really hard entirely and so I I wanted to start learning how to be better at it and feeling a responsibility to help my kids develop and in a weird way like like they more pressure in baseball in particular like feeling like Dad like you should be able to help me with this thing like um and so I've wanted so I've read a bunch of Drive Line stuff I buy all their gear like I I so I'm sort of a an evangelist and and uh disciple but I now want to go and try and get even deeper and so I I asked Mike I said hey I want to would you be open to me coming up and spending a few days watching you guys teach kids um and getting to learn and ask questions Driveline Academy their their kids program is the coolest thing yeah it's so cool so I just I wanted to just go be a fly on thewall see their process and learn from them about coaching as much as I could and he was like perfect I'll trade you if you come in and talk with me about Services businesses and e-commerce and the things you have going going on we'll do it here's the dates and so I'm flying up there in the first week of September to go spend three days just watching Drive Line train kids and there's probably a thousand things I can learn better go you better go hit Baseballs in your underwear too you should put video of you hitting baseballs in your underwear so they motion capture you and they read you back your biomechanical data so we can find out like how hard Taylor can hit the ball and some of those things that needs to go on Twitter Taylor and your underwear that'll get clicks so what's funny is like they actually have a similar problem to CTC in some ways which is that their talent constantly gets poached um by other organizations who pay their people more money and move on now they have an even bigger draw than our people do which is their their talent gets poached by MLB league so they their people go work coest jobs in the world exactly so um but they have the same thing which is like how do we think about how much is systems in process versus people in talent and how do we keep them and so I'm excited to get to chat with them about that and talk about training and also learn about how to train kids um and one of the things he talks about early he said the number one thing you're going to learn is talk too much uh and then you're going to talk less and you're going to realize you still talk too much and the key is to create environments uh what they call training environments which is create the circumstance where kids can get their own feedback and make their own adjustments uh relative to you trying to talk at them well it's there's a couple fascinating principles in there that I have learned that I I mean it would be hard for me to design the training environment quite like that but um but like one of them is that in sports like people's bodies are already really good at queuing them yeah uh right so like one of the things I say is there is no perfect swing like actually the best swingers uh in baseball are people who can adjust their swing in real time really really fast and can Barrel balls whatever you know so um so there are some principles that matter you know for swinging a bat fast and whatever else and like bat speed matters and blah blah blah but like there's no perfect explain so they they like are trying to say like your body actually cues you really really well I I shouldn't PIR with their stuff too much because I don't want to misrepresent it but the uh your body cues you really really well and so this like goes into the don't talk too much thing um where you you create drills that would allow that would and use tools that would give the body feedback that it needs without you without you as a coach having to say move your hands differently right so they have these these soft balls that you hit that are like uh they're like sand they're like uh sandbags basically right like a like a you know small little balls F anyway and so you can feel exactly if you hit the ball right and it cues your body back uh because it's full of sand and you it's sort of like donuts funny if you hit it the wrong way or whatever right so there's that so they create a tool that actually leverages your body's ability to go and get feedback and then um and then they say like oh you know people are more engaged with their training if it's fun and if it's a competition and so just like you mean think about this if you and I did typing test like we joked about earlier right you and I would type faster than we normally would do right and it's even then if you told us to practice Ing and it's because like competition makes you want to want to get better and want to be your best or whatever so okay so create an environment where there's a competition involved instead of just like hitting a kid endless ground balls and saying you know here's the Fielding triangle or whatever right exactly and so it's a really fascinating thing because I I have spending time with them I've thought a lot about like how in the world could we create those kinds of things in business principles is there some way and I even for them it would be interesting to ask them like are you trying at all with your employees to create sort of like team training environments it's it's so much less physical of an activity that's hard to think about like what are the feedback mechanisms you give somebody if you want to teach somebody media buying how do you give them the right feedback mechanism so that they get cued without you sitting in a meeting and coaching them you know yeah well it's interesting so one of the things I've thought about you think about the environments that we occupy and we've talked about this before is that what what data should you show someone in ads manager um yeah so like I I think that We've joked all the time about like yes yeah and but I've never actually done it neither have I and but I wonder why like how much would it alter Behavior if the only thing somebody could see was spent yep um and so I think that's an example there's also another thing I've thought about is have you heard of this poised Ai No Okay so poised AI is a tool that you can put onto a zoom call that shows you how your words per minute that you're talking while you're talking um and your tone so for me it would it would give me many words per minute right so it shows you your pace your tone in the middle of a zoom call so if I'm talking um it can just it'll go red when you cross a threshold that's sort of scientifically proven to be like people aren't understanding and so it just gives me that feedback instantaneously and imagine that versus someone telling me Taylor you talk too much you should practice these things versus just the data signal instantly showing up makes me go okay yeah there's that's a training environment it's it's a decision you set up in how you set set up your way of doing the thing that's right that gives you the feedback that you want and I think care you know like careful thinking about that kind of thing is like a very fascinating it's a very fascinating idea it's it's uh it's it's I I I tried to think about this with like you know e-commerce and stuff and I just don't know I don't know there are people who are good at this though there are people who are really good at building like the right dashboards and the right you know daily feedback tools and and making sure they don't have the wrong one there's one that I sort of like that I think is is that I use with clients that is like a weekly report on a few key metrics but yeah I don't I don't really I don't know I don't know exactly what those ways you could do this are and it probably is worthy of deeper thinking yeah somebody who is listening to or watching this should should help us think about this my other thing is right across the street from here my kids go to this soccer training place called TOA okay and TOA is a brilliant business it's actually I think closest to what the consumer version of Drive Line could be but is you go in and they've created this product which is these little mini goals um that have a sensor around them then there's a big screen with software on it uh and then they created these balls which is basically like a size two soccer ball so imagine a ball that's smaller than all other soccer balls okay and there's a machine that shoots balls out so you have two little goals with frames and sensors and they come in and they put you in the and they start with an assessment and they work through a series of collect pass how fast you touch it how your response time the accurac drive starts with an assessment too they do the same thing so they your kid comes in they don't say a word there's a coach in there operating the machine they don't say one word the kid goes through the whole assessment at the end they go they tell you exactly how good you are exactly now we have a baseline because like immediately that is so valuable so compelling too right the idea that like you could know how good you are and what parts you're good at and what parts you're not good at you know that's so and so then they take you through then based on the areas of improvement they have pre-programmed extra drills this this is absolutely Drive Line soccer yeah and so you go in and my kids I drop them off they love it they have so much fun the coach doesn't say anything to them it's all feedback on the software and the exercise and whatever and they get they get way better I bet they get better and by the end of it they can show you that they got better yes right because they reassess yes here's the speed of your kick here's so how do we do that how do you get somebody not just to do the thing you want them to do but to assess train the right thing next isolate the skill you know because maybe maybe um forget the AI conversation for a second but like maybe like ad writing is a skill or ad ideation is a skill versus um versus uh media buying you know like and so how you know and then you reassess you know how do you give people those feedback mechanisms yeah so we we think about this like um at CDC we have uh what we call um growth maps and we have a sequence of behavior that everyone in the growth map uh has to participate in um we call it one map and the way that they enter into these things all gets tracked and then people's responses their frequency of completing the action gets tracked and responded to and gets displayed publicly inside of the organization so in this way we have a collective set of behaviors that at the very least we want them to get better at the behavior we track it map it set expectation around it and display results so that that's a pretty common training modality right is that here's an expectation here's Clarity of training of action here's an assessment and clear visibility to your completion of that action to the level that's expected um and that kind of thing is like it's it's good to create like a robotic set of behaviors it doesn't it doesn't solve SK development yeah skill development that's what I was going to say it's like it's a different thing right yeah yeah and that's like the the sort of the missing thing you know like yeah now the question is could you could you come up with behaviors that in so much that they're done repeatedly do lead to skill development right right and I I think I actually think you are doing that right now like it seems like your people are coming out of your thing because the behavior lad to the outcomes and then the outcome that everybody sees is a more profitable business on the other end of it so that like doing that actually what it reinforces for you is that they're doing the right behaviors yeah and that's what we're trying to orient towards what do I want you to consider all the time and so I'm going to obligate you to attask of consideration and so if if a task is to describe to me what was yesterday's performance which campaigns were ahead or behind that's like what a map note entails yeah doing that every day is a behavior of constant analysis and constant analysis is a thing that leads to better critical thinking and understanding um so there is some way in which the behavior does develop thoughtfulness or skill um especially if it's given feedback if if those notes are sort of left unruly they could say anything but if you have oversight and you provide question and followup to it then there's sort of like a almost like a Socratic way to to have dialogue about ideas yeah well it'll be interesting to see what you say to them about their business problem of uh major league teams poaching their employees too that's a that's a hard one to solve but I know you've worked really hard on it yeah I mean well there's actually Kyle bod's a good follow in this the the founder of Drive Line Kyle bod I think on Twitter he because he's very AI forward um you know he's he's like really just tried to embrace it and figure out how to keep using it and he's he's I mean it's a baseball training company founded by a guy who's a programmer you know and so totally yeah I think I think the question and it's the same thing I ask all the time at CDC is like what is the human really doing yeah like really what are they doing if you actually could Define their tasks this week yep what did they do and this is I got into a a sidebar conversation with um cam who runs who's like the head of advertising at um hex Cloud about Staffing and how I because in my one of my 25 hot takes I said that like everybody has twice as many employees and as an employee that's probably a nightmare thing to hear because one he like feels like we we never we we always have too much to do and I was like that's actually that's not because of the employees right that actually has nothing to do absolutely wrong signal twice as many employ resp still feel that way there's infinite things to do right so of course there's too much to do that's actually the default State you should never respond to that but what I what I said is before I would allow anybody to hire ever I would want to understand what everybody's tasks are and figure out which tasks we could eliminate before I would hire anybody else right and this has been a big thing at CDC is that so often early on in a service bu in particular I would respond to people saying we need more people yeah um okay cool let's hire another person versus like what could we make other people not do yeah before we hired somebody else yeah yeah interesting um okay here's my training thing recently totally unrelated yep I think you you had put in the original random sh thing like let's let's do something about like physical training stuffff and I think partly you had been thinking about uh this from some of your own training I know like you did murf this year RX for the first time which is really awesome um I um I have been thinking about mental training a little bit so not physical training uh really at all I have been thinking a little bit about um mental training and this is like for anybody who meditates regularly they're all GNA be like yeah dude this is why everybody's been talking about meditation probably I think but I don't meditate regularly and I've never been able I've tried a few times right I've never really been able able to get into it um and um and at least not the kind of meditation I think people think of when they think of that term but what what I've been thinking about here was actually the thought starter for me and I'm curious what you'll think of this um I went and saw Deadpool versus Wolverine the other night okay it's funny yep as I expected it to be um it was did not ask profound questions right was this wasn't mental training it was not mental training it actually madebe so I walked away and I was thinking about like what is the value of that and places it have in my life and just to be upfront about this I I'm not saying I'm not saying I'm not saying no one can ever go watch a fun movie okay I'm not saying that it just for whatever reason I watched a million fun movies in my life and I just was thinking about it this time for whatever reason okay so I don't know maybe someday I will say you can never watch a fun movie right but right now I'm not saying that um but it made me think about like it felt like the equivalent of eating an extremely large cinnamon roll you know or something like that yeah I love cinnamon rolls um actually that's not a good example because I thought that was okay um but uh so it's but it felt it was movie junk food you get the idea right y maybe another analogy that I think is not totally far off is it felt a little bit like getting movie obliterated you know like and uh and just like really hammered movie wise where you're just like immersed in this for two hours and there's nothing else going on and I was thinking about like are there sort of second order consequences to that kind of that kind of movie and Indulgence you know to use that um to use that way of thinking about it and should I be thinking more about what goes into my mind and how much command I have over that uh and and and sort of like should I should I regulate the diet of my mental intake more carefully around things like that um the other very obvious example like time on Twitter and just some of those things because I've certainly noticed the thing where it's like harder for me to sit and read a book now because I because I just like have the like you know oh well I don't know what did Taylor tweet today you know you know that kind of thing so I've just been thinking like should I be engaging more with like more actions built around me what I and I would I think the training framework is a helpful one the idea of like making my mind work better for me not only in the moment that I do the training but actually for the broader effects right if I go and work out it's not just for what I do during the workout it's actually for that spillover effect on the rest of my life so it's it's a very half-developed thought but it was like just something I was thinking about the other night when I watched it I'm just curious what you think about it so do you think that like have you ever played like like an app like this what is it so this is this is something called uh impulse okay no and it does mental it's like mental training so you Lo in every day and there's like number memorization match the pairs like art like candy I've never done it they're intended to be that kind of that like you get better at doing Mental Math like yeah in the say like so it's fun I sometimes will go on and just play whatever they give you scores they show you what percentile you are compared to other people all the kinds of things that are talking about the drive line right yeah training environment where there's competition that's right now I've never tried to see if like I've made a bunch of progress or if it's improving in some way but if you think about like Dementia or these other things they do this kind of work to try and help people um with brain elasticity and and memorization and things like that um but one of the things I'll say about the content consumption um is I think that one of the advantages that I have in our space is that I don't know that anybody consumes more content in our space yeah it's partially an unhealthy amount of Twitter consumption but also podcast I just really like it and so I just endlessly listen to it yeah all day long um like my phone screen usage is like 11 hours can I tell you something this is one of the reasons why I think that you and I think differ about what we're building which is that I listen to almost almost none I listen to you sometimes um but I don't have the Love of the Game quite like that like you do yeah so keep going and so so I think that there is now that's a very narrow application of mental training to in a thing that's really only useful in a very narrow band it doesn't make me good at chemistry yeah but um but I do think that you can so that's more about the content diet is that that being thoughtful about your content diet relative to the things you want in your life I think one of the things that reasons I quit Fantasy Baseball yeah is that I actually had to decide that spending as much time as I did reading about Minor League Prospect was actually counter to what the things I said I wanted in my life were right and so I quit and because of a sh scoring decision yeah and I had a complete in utter meltdown and anger over a ruling absurd ruling by probably Matt Morris who I still blame in my head but um yeah but yeah so that that kind of thing I do think that the choice of the content diet relative to your goals should be aligned yeah um that's actually I think that is a helpful thought to what it is because actually I as you're saying that I'm evaluating this relative to some goals of mine which are which are broader than this which is like um about my ability to stay focused in convers to read like I value reading books about large topics philosophical theological topics so it's funny because I bet one of the things that's actually hard for you is that there's this other part of your life that's like supposed to occupy a lot of your mental uh my faith yeah yeah and like getting rid of that created an immense amount of bandwidth in my life yeah I I believe that like a crazy amount okay this is why I told you I want to talk with you more this this is exactly the kind of thing that I want to hear about more um right okay yeah do you want to say anything more about that just that like yeah narrowing the amount of things that I cared about um actually made those decisions easier in religion particular I felt an immense constant toil that every available moment of my brain should go towards that thing okay so here's an an this so that's interesting because here's an analogy I heard somebody say the other day which is like you want uh this is a a Christian Pastor Theologian right he was talking about he said like your faith should exist as an iceberg where like the large chunk of it is under the water right and there's a little bit over the top and what he means by that is like you you just can't like we like here's for example I can't have this conversation with you yeah um and be thinking as we're talking right about faith and about Jesus I it's what I mean by can't is like it's actually like basically literally impossible and in fact the way that I serve you and the people who are watching and listening to this and sponsors and all whatever in this moment is to be as present as I possibly can with the conversation and so if my faith has formed me in such a way that my the version of my presentness is includes the values that I care about which would be like you know listening to you taking your opinion seriously trying to think the best of you we talk you know whatever all of these things that are there those values maybe get formed in me in a way that is I'm actually not thinking about am I listening carefully to Taylor right now I'm just I'm just being me and hopefully being me has been formed by those decisions like like what content intake I have had over time so the content intake this is what I mean by the spillover effect the content intake has all of these other impacts on my life and then there's some really specific things which is like like I said like I'm bothered by the fact that like it's harder for me to read as many pages in one sitting because my my monkey brain goes goes Twitter crazy you know like so there's like that's like a very specific thing and that's where I think like a lot of people are sort of aware of this right like just the sort of like sort of dialed into the Matrix all the time but um but yeah that that's exactly it is like what is the value of that kind of content and what and and how ought I to think about my content intake decisions your your fancy baseball example is a good one for that yeah I I think I I think also this is where I still experience you as playing um yeah in life which like to me there's and that's okay like it's not good or bad it's just I think that there's periods of life where you're sort of sampling on the content side which is like you're kind of trying to figure out whether it's what you enjoy or where to go deep or where you want to be all in or maybe you're not all in right now and you're kind of just trying different things and I'd say that for the last couple years of my life I I just have a very narrower set of things I I this is so clear to me yeah it's like I and even letting go of all of the other CTC like closing down dreamlabs getting rid of my participation in bamboo earth like I cut down so many just little open browser tabs in my brain um that I think that is it was underappreciated how much that took up like yeah I believe that and and again this is part of why I'm hesitant to go push in more on some things work-wise because I think they will demand certain things of me in a way that I'm not sure I'm ready to do that and and and so yeah I think I I think you're right here's another actually interesting thing kind of related to that and I'm you know I don't know I'm not making any judgment about what decisions you did and didn't make here but like the um the uh the other thing that I have I heard somebody say this recently I think it's true so we'll just leave it that um that the actual thing that is most helpful for pushing off dementia is relationships yeah uh and so like more than any like sort of overt mental training it's like those kinds of things and so there's this thing here this is another thing I think about like if it's harder for me to and play with my four-year-old because my Twitter brain is going crazy or because I you know whatever I like I'm drinking in cinnamon uh cinnemon roll content you know and it's like that is like a sensory content overload or whatever there's like a there's a real cost to that in these other areas that is that is or you know if I well maybe I think you would have to assess the quality of your relationship that's right that's right and I think that there maybe is right this is again I think like relationships um like the quality of them are things that are like really destructive to them there are things that are like sort of destructive to them and I think yeah there's there's also sometimes an impossible standard that you people right well and but but all the time I think I I think most people should try to and it's hard to self assess sometimes so you can maybe this is where good friends or other things matter but is is to be able to say like yeah how is my marriage how son how is our relationship you know like to try and take stock of those things in a way that considers the experience of the other person not just but to ask yourself but also ask the other person some way um is