Coffee, Values, and Humanity: Direct Response Lessons From The Marketing Mercenary With Ron Lynch - I Love Marketing Episode #459

I like the process because it does your vetting things and you're seeing who's serious about themselves but also gives me exposure to good ideas. And.

I'm all about implementation.

If I charge someone $1,000 to sit with me for an hour or two, they're probably going to implement what I said.

Yeah, they'll take it way more seriously.

Then it'll probably work. Then what happens to my intellectual stock? With them there's people that I won't charge. Known quantities are completely different than unknown quantities, but it's how you kind separate the unknown quantities.

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So Ron Lynch Ron is a unique creative force in the marketing industry. He's a prominent direct response television producer, screenwriter, director, inventor, author, investor and philanthropist. He has brought in $5.5 billion in DRTV Direct Response TV. He teaches marketing through his four star gold rated course the Marketing Mercenary. This teaches both young marketers and experienced how to think about wealth, money and ethical sales from an audience perspective. It is a Guide that over 200 people have used to launch businesses over the past three years. On March 14, 2020, the first day of COVID he launched the global feeding network charity IntelliHelp. Utilizing tech to connect people in need and givers. This Uber meets the Red Cross model connecting over 100,000 members international in a matter of weeks. A background in retail operations.

As a grocery Operations Director. He has a CEO level understanding of supply chain labor and P&LS. Most often associated is the creative strategist for GoPro and 70 other brands including Rug Dr. Orange Glow and OxiClean, Samsung JJ SC Johnson brands. He has several patents, has had a hand in over a dozen films and produced a library of over 400 television commercials. He's on the board of several tech and food oriented startups as well including all 33 and the back strong chair. He has authored five books friggin lazy Guy and currently has a dozen technology patents in play for three web 3.0 products. Ron has a passion for ethically bringing world changing innovations to consumers that solve real problems as the key to brand building. He's happy to offer counsel and perspective to open minds and hearts. Thank you, thank you for being here. And I do have to give credit to Laura Cattella here because she had her Diamond Day event where we were both at and that's where we had a chance to get to know each other and talk. And it was awesome. And one of the things I kind of want. So thank you very much, Laura.

Thank you.

And what I would. I love this one conversation we had about you have a thing where you do a thousand dollar cup of coffee. And so I'd love for you to explain this concept to everybody because I think they will find that kind of valuable, useful thing.

Yeah. If you're an entrepreneur, you probably get the question a lot. Can I pick your brain? And don't like my brain picked. I like my brain the size it currently is. And so I like to challenge the person to see if they really believe in their idea. And I say absolutely. I have a thousand dollar cup of coffee. I'll sit down with you for $1,000 for an hour or two and we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about and I'll give you what insights I can give you about it. And that right there knocks out about 80% of the people that are going to because they actually don't believe in their idea.

So the ones that do sit down amazingly start to take you seriously and start to take themselves seriously. And then I can feed them back a document that is only one or two pages long. It's really my notes from the meeting that gives them a clear perspective, kind of in short form of what they think they're doing or where they think they want to go. Because I have some watermarks in business that I have learned over the years. It's a great tool to one direct somebody towards another vendor that can help them, get them to take themselves seriously and their business seriously or get me to evaluate if I want to work with them. Because evaluation to me is one of the most important things that we skip over in business and in relationships. And I love upfront, direct, evaluative tools.

Well, I'm going to stick with this whole theme here and just ask you how you go about evaluating someone's idea and then determining either a it's a crappy idea in its current form or you need to fill in these blanks or okay, this is awesome. Here's what we do. Before I do that, one of the things you even said to me when we were talking is if they're not willing to spend $1,000 to sit down for a cup of coffee with me, they're going to pay me any real money anyway. Right. And so I think that's just a great filtering process to begin with.

I like the process because it does. You're vetting things and you're seeing who's serious about themselves, but also gives me exposure to good ideas. And.

I'm all about implementation.

If I charge someone $1,000 to sit with me for an hour or two, they're probably going to implement what I said.

Yeah, they'll take it way more seriously.

Then it'll probably work. Then what happens to my intellectual stock with them? There's people that I won't charge. Known quantities are completely different than unknown quantities. But it's how you kind of separate the unknown quantities.

There's so much of that saying, you know, if they don't pay, they don't pay attention. And there's a lot to be said about that. And so I've learned that painfully over the years. So let's go to the assessment part. So when you're talking with someone and you're. I mean, I often say this about copywriters too. People, they'll get sticker shock when they hear, like a world class copywriter, how much someone's going to pay. And they think that someone's sitting down writing a letter. They don't realize the amount of research, they don't realize the amount of detective work one has to do to evaluate and assess something in order to even build strategy and stuff around it. So I'd love to hear your model.

Oh, so yeah, that's the next kind of step. So there's a cup of coffee that's $1,000 to see if they've got an idea. Then if they, I agree. And they agree that, hey, this needs a second date. There's two second dates. Typically with a corporation, it's a $25,000 day or two where I go in and I do the evaluative process and deliver back a document that's 20 to 40 pages long. And I'll tell you what's in that and what the criteria are. Or it's a $5,000 consult on something very simple. Like if somebody's already got. I just did a consult for a company and they won't care that I said it's a company called Circle. It's a beverage company. They have a water bottle that's got a valve and a thing you put in it that's got flavor in it. So you're utilizing water, you're adding the cartridge and it's got, they've got 50 or 60 flavors. So 50 or 60 flavors goes from replacing Gatorade to replacing Starbucks cold coffee. There's all this weird stuff that's going in it. It's very difficult to market a clear message to that and everybody's selling flavored water in the world. But we all know we would need to drink more water. So when I went in, I just repositioned the company as water. It's finally your favorite beverage because we all know we should drink more water, but we hate it because it tastes like water.

So I just took that. So that could be the anchor for the company. Now you can plug in all the flavor cartridges and it opened itself up at the top to the broadest consumer segment that could let us lay in all the flavor profiles underneath, whether you were an athletic person or a Starbucks person or a fitness person or all of that stuff. So that's like a $5,000 day in a $25,000 day.

I actually go in and do research and they provide me the research. I just know how to log it. So I go in and I go, what's your problem? What's your olution? What's your USP? And I go, what's a USP? So there's a little bit of education in the day. What are the features? What are the benefits? Who are your audiences? And my criteria for any business being successful is you have to have in my mind an innovation. I have a hard time selling commodities because the commodities sell on price. Innovation sells on life changing opportunity. So innovation is key to me and there's got to be an audience for it. You can have an innovation. If you don't have an audience, you've got nothing. Then you have to have margin. There's a lot of people that can make products, but they don't know how to get their retail price. I very much like to anchor at the highest possible retail price I can find so that I have margin. Because if I'm going to build a brand through direct response, the audience is actually paying for the marketing. And I know if I do a great job of that, it ends up in Walmart. And I just lost 50% of the retail price in wholesale goods cost to Walmart. Make sense? Yeah. So it's, it's that then the last piece is what I provide and that story.

So when I leave, I have all of their data, hopefully and their research and how does this work best? And give me your CAD drawings and all of the technical pieces like the CEO gets for the company and then I walk away and I rebuild a suite of marketing products for them based upon the problem they're trying to solve and their audiences and then specify audience per creative. With GoPro, that was one of the things we did. We actually matched creatives to Television stations. So you saw car racing on the Velocity Network and skiing on the Ski Network. Because I would rather have 20 really efficient producing commercials and pieces of content that were pointed at a vertical than one $35 million campaign that's pointed at nothing. Right. That's it.

I like it. So you. How did you learn all this? Let's go back to the beginning of what were the things that allowed you to really understand and then first off, comprehend marketing, but then structure it into creating campaigns that work. Most people that I know that are world class direct response people have just spent so much time and years studying and learning and writing and, you know, you know, the whole. It's in the. In the real world, it's called failure. In the marketing world, it's called testing.

Yeah, yeah. First of all, I agree with that. I believe everything's an experiment. Everything. My marriage is still an experiment. 32 years into it, it's all an experiment. So I came to this differently than most people did. I was a kid who was going to college. I thought I was going to be a lawyer. I wanted to skip school. One day my college roommate said, hey, let's go. I got an audition in a movie. So I went and auditioned for a movie just to skip school. And I got a lead role in a movie that Robert Altman directed. So I was in Seattle, and suddenly I had a SAG card. And it was the late 80s, mid-80s, and they were making a lot of movies in Seattle. So there was me and Brendan Fraser and Tom Skerritt's son, Matt Skerritt. We were like the three guys in Seattle with SAG cards. So movies were rolling through town and we were getting in every single movie. And when I got in a movie, I'd get $1,000 or something for being a day player saying a few words. I asked to stay on as a PA because I didn't want to go back to my job at the grocery store. And so I'd stay on for 10 days, 20 days, 30 days as a PA and I learned how films were made and how sets operated. I did that for a long time. And I was sitting in the Union Station waiting to film a scene with Jeff Bridges, the dude. And I didn't know him. And I stand next to him. He's kind of tall. He's about six, two, I think Jeff knows him. Really nice guy. And I said, hey, how do I get to be in your chair? Cause I had visions of being a movie star now. And he said, it's super easy. I'm like, really? And he's like, yeah. Make sure your dad's Lloyd Bridges. Your dad's Lloyd Bridges.

That's actually pretty damn funny.

Is there any other roots, you know? He goes, write. If you can learn to write, you can. Writers always are working in Hollywood. I hated writing. Like, it was the thing I hated the most, but I listened to him. But this is one of the lessons I've learned, is do the work first, and then the universe rewards you. I do not hope for anything. I do the work first, and then the thing shows up, right? So this is truly how this happened. Went home, wrote two movies on a typewriter.

We were not in computer land at that point. I was in college writing a typewriter still. And I worked in a grocery store. And this lady used to come through my store every day, and she was a talk show host on the local Seattle afternoon talk show. Her name was Dana Middleton. And they talked about the soaps, and whoever had a new book out or whatever is coming to Seattle.

So she came through my line one day, and I said, hey, Dana, I don't mean to bug you, but do you know anybody who. I've written a couple movies. Do you know anybody in Hollywood? She goes, as a matter of fact, I do. She goes, bring me your movies. So I went to Kinko's and made some copies, put them in a plastic bag, and kept them under my grocery store check stand on the express lane for a couple weeks. She popped in and I was like, dana, I got that. I walked over with this plastic bag with these two scripts, and she goes, wow, you really did. You wrote these? I pulled them out. And most people in Hollywood, they just. They say they've written a movie, but it's really an idea for a movie. They didn't actually write it. She goes, well, I'll take these and read them. Do you mind if I give them to my sister? Like, no. She goes, well, I assume that's why you asked me. I'm like, no, who's your sister? She goes, my sister's Kathleen Kennedy. I'm like, this is pre Internet days. Who's that? She's Steven Spielberg's partner. She's produced all of his movies. Like, like, okay. Two weeks later, I get a call from Kathleen Kennedy, and I'm living in my shitty basement apartment. I just got married, and Kathleen Kennedy's on the phone, and I'm looking at my wife, and it's like four in the afternoon. Like, my wife is like, I don't know who that fucking is. She's not impressed at all.

So she says, how do you do this? The dialogue is really good. It's very unusual to have people sound like different people. Most writers, when they do this, when they're young, every character sounds like the same person. I said, I just see it and I take dictation and I see another character come in and I just write the voice. So they liked what I'd written and said, hey, we're thinking about enrolling you in this thing we have called the Chesterfield Film Company. So it's a writing program. So that kind of moved along. And I had this decision whether to move to Hollywood and pursue this or here I was married to this gal, and we were just starting out and we had our families in Seattle. And I chickened out.

Wow.

The gun was to my head. And I was like. I backed off and I went into the grocery business.

And I ended up being a store operator, grocery store manager. Wow. And then I was building new grocery stores. Like, I accelerated that. I found mentors in the grocery business because I was very hungry. And I learned how to operate retail grocery stores and build new stores. One of the aspects of what we were doing was taking stores in gentrified neighborhoods and turning them from crappy stores into designer high end, whole food style stores. So I went to Austin and I learned from Lex Alexander and I looked John Mackey, and I went to these stores and toured and I really learned how to be a retail gourmet grocer. One of the features of the store were we had these cooking kiosks where we taught the audience in the store to buy better food. So these were people that were buying macaroni and cheese for 35 cents a box. And we had a French chef from local restaurant who was very cool, and he'd come in and cook at the kiosk and he'd make brilla pasta with Asiago cheese and tomatoes. And, you know, there was nine dollar choice instead of the 35 cent choice. And we taught the audience to do that. And I said, chef Jacques, this is one day. This is delicious. It's fantastic. And he goes, it's fucking Macalonian cheese.

But that was a very important thing for me to learn was you could take something that was the same thing and reposition it, right. It was just macaroni and cheese repositioned as French macaroni and cheese.

The cart. I know if you're seeing 10 million people through a grocery store in a year and you get $7 more out of all of those people. So Now I'm learning about offers. And this kiosk is an infomercial.

Yeah. So my friend calls me. He says, hey, Sam Perlmutter's coming to town. He's George Foreman's agent. Want to meet him? Like, sure. So I go to dinner with Sam Perlmutter. Turns out he produces all these Jean Claude Van Damme movies.

Dinner. I can't help myself. Like, I wrote a movie. He's like, oh, really? Thanks. Thinking to Sean. Thanks for. Thanks for bringing this guy, Sean. He goes, well, and of course, we got a bag. Will you read it? He's like, I'll read it on the plane. So I wrote a movie called the Real Vanessa, which was a. I was telling you about this last night. It was a sex comedy that I positioned around Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley. He called me last the next day, and he said, I just got off the plane and people on the plane were looking at me because I was laughing so hard, I was crying. He goes, I have no idea why I'm doing this, but I'm going to option this film from a grocery dude.

So my friend called me and he said, hey, I heard you sold a script to Sam Perlmutter's agent, George Foreman's agent. I said, yeah. He goes, do you mind if we come in the store and shoot some George Foreman girl spots in the store like you're more than welcome to? So we arranged a deal. They came in and they used the kiosk because they were doing man on the Streets infomercials. You've seen this. How does it taste? How does it cook?

So the guy again said, hey, how did that work out with Sam Perlmer? I said, oh, so far, pretty good. We're negotiating. I think I'm going to sell this because you think you could write an infomercial? I said, absolutely. What's an infomercial?

And then I realized an infomercial was a cooking demonstration. So the very first commercial I wrote, I wrote a short form for space bags. The bags you put your clothes in and suck the air out and store it. And that I worked with John Johns at Space Bag on that. Like, he was my first client that I ever faced. Then the second one was for a group out of LA called Silmark, and they had a product called the Ultimate Chopper, which was a food processor. And I quit my job at the grocery store when became the creative director of this agency. And my first infomercial did $80 million in the first six months. My second one did $100 million. My third one did $100 million. And it was just a boom, boom, boom. Changed my whole life. And then fourth, fifth, and sixth did nothing.

Nothing.

You think you lost your edge or what happened there?

I think that I thought I was so smart and so cool. What? I hadn't realized that the people were giving me products were very well versed in what they were doing. And they knew exactly how to pick horses. And I did not know how to pick horses. I was picking me. Right. My head was so full of me that I couldn't do any wrong.

Pop. God comes along and goes, ho trip. So then I got real concerned about that. But I learned how to pick. Wow. So picking is one of the most important things you do in life. So that's why I qualify. I have tests. If you want to be my friend, there's a test. Not kidding you. If you want to be my client, there's a test like, I qualify people to appear in my life on the basis of ethics, morals, values. There's a process to it. And then I'm like, if you can sign up for me, this is who I am. I see who you are, and they go, yeah, okay. And I make agreements right up front with people about who we are and who we're going to be in integrity moving forward. And I hold them to it, and they hold me to it.

That's really cool. I like that.

I'll tell you guys what it is because one of my very first mentors taught it to me. Do you want to do it?

Yes, absolutely.

So, Joe, tell me three people, living or dead. So no fictional characters. You can't pick Tom Sawyer, but you can't pick Mark Twain. You could have known him or not known him. Three people that you strongly admire. Don't tell me why. Just give me three people.

George Carlin. Jesus Christ. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the God version that people have. Just the human and what it represents. And Abraham Lincoln.

Oh, very similar list. Some of those people have been on my list over the years. So let's start with George Carlin. What are three character traits of George Carlin that made him pop to mind now? Not results. Character traits.

He said what he wanted to say.

What kind of person does that?

Someone that has conviction and confidence.

Conviction and confidence. Saying what you want to say is outcome of the character trait. Conviction and confidence. Okay.

Second, he can say things in a way to where he could other people just couldn't say it. His ability to be able to push intensity right to the edge, but not over courage Courage and just funny. Just humor. He brought. He could package it up in humor and wanted to make people laugh.

Okay, let's go to the JC of Nazareth.

Three character traits of him.

Caring, caring, compassionate.

Compassionate.

And willing to die for what he believed in.

What type of people are willing to die for what they believe in?

Courageous.

Third person.

And faith. Faith too. Abraham Lincoln, for one. His ability to overcome failure and adversity. I mean, he failed numerous times. Resilience. He's a collaborator. Incredibly effective communicator.

Now I want you to. I want you to go someplace dark for a second, okay? We don't need to pick the person. I mean, you need to pick the person. We're not going to say the name. And I want you to pick the antithesis of that. A person that, that if they walked in the room right now, you'd say, hey, Ron, gotta stop the interview for a second. Eunice.

Right. Or you'd go, I'm leaving because I can't be in the room with them. Can you picture such a person?

Yeah.

Okay, can you give me three character traits of that person?

Evil, Manipulative. Self serving.

Narcissistic. Sociopathic. Psychopathic.

So let's go to yet another place. What does the word integrity mean to you?

Being consistent with what you say you're going to do and doing it. Keeping your word. Honoring other people. Ethical. Not just doing things right, but doing the right thing.

And what does the word honesty mean to you?

Truthful. Congruent.

It's very difficult when you first get to know a person, who they are. We can get into business relationships or marriages or things that go on for years and years and years. And then we discover that that person was not who we thought we were dating the entire time. This is a very fast shortcut because it's very hard for Joe to sit down at the first meeting and say, this is who I am. That positive list of people. Read his positive list. The first, the character traits. Conviction, Confidence. Courage. Humor. Caring. Compassionate. Belief. Resilience. Collaborative, articulate. Ladies and gentlemen, my friend Joe Polish. Tim, right.

To a T. I know exactly who I'm dealing with. Now you're thinking, oh, the dark side. We've got Joe's dark side. We've exposed Joe's dark side. No, we haven't. What we've exposed is the things that Joe has been hurt by in the past or the things that really are the thorns to him that should he pick up the bottle one day, which he doesn't do. But let's say he had that Night and went off the rails the next morning. He would look in the mirror and go, you were. That would be on the list. Those things would all be on his list. You did this. You did this. You did. That's. That's why it's such radar too, for other people. So my list. Well, I'll tell you in a minute. The next is I ask integrity before honesty. Integrity and honesty are my two core values because those get us to everything else in life. Integrity means that I do what I say I'm going to do and I don't do what I say I'm not going to do.

Most people forget the second half. You have to announce your can do's and your don't do's. And if I know that for you, we've got that agreement that we decide that's what integrity is, and you can live with my definition. I now can trust you in the foxhole. I can walk away from the company and I know exactly what's going to happen because Joe's told me the list of the things he's going to do, things he's not going to do. He can be my assistant, he can be my line producer, he can be my boss, he can be my friend. That's honesty. The reason I asked that before, honesty, by the way, is so I know if a person's ever thought about the word. I hear a lot of crazy answers to that question. I hope that this is a tool that you all implement going forward. I really do, because this will be a huge shortcut in life. Honesty is you tell the truth. That's why he said truthful. And I was seeing me lean in to stop him. Like, don't say anything else, Joe, please, just leave it there. It's telling the truth with tact. Because you have to tell bad truths. You have to tell the ugly side from time to time. You have to have the courage to do it. And you can't sit in silence when the truth needs to be said. You have to step forward and go, hey, I gotta tell you this. I don't want to tell you this. It's not gonna land real great. But it's gotta be said.

That test I've done with probably 2,600 employees in the grocery industry, which is what made me an adequate CEO in that industry. I've done it with every employee. I've done it with every one of my friends. Taking that forward, one of the more interesting pieces of this again, I've given this 2600 times in an employment setting. And Probably a thousand times more in additional. After the grocery business, employment settings and friendships and what have you. One of the curious things to me is who doesn't ask for it back?

And I understand why most people don't. Once you pull somebody's guts apart and front of them and you show them, I got all your cards, they recoil for a minute. The people that I really love are the people who go, what about yours?

And then you go, oh, this is a keeper. And it doesn't happen very often. You'll be surprised. Use the tool. It does not happen very often that the person that you do this to goes, tell me about yourself. They're so, so. Yeah. One, overwhelmed by the experience of it and two, so basking like it's a psychological off balance moment for them. So I don't.

Think ill of them. I just watch because I want to know the character of the people that I invite into my life.

First off, I got something to share with you that I think you're gonna find so bizarre because we never talked about this, but what are yours first?

So, I mean, my people change from time to time, but Da Vinci is one of my people. Polymath. Polymath has to be interested, has to be curious.

Has to.

Love creation.

Christ appears on my list often for a little bit different reasons. In a way, I love the idea of the rebellion.

The way he channeled his anger was so useful. There's a character trait in how you express anger. And you wouldn't think anger is necessarily. Or consternation is on the positive list. But I think we all have to deal with that. So how we deal with that is a big character thing to me because I'm a person with a temper. So how I deal with, with my temper and had to like deal with that over the years, like, okay, that's important to me. So.

Robin Williams appears often on mine too. Yeah, funny. Spontaneous.

Empathetic.

I think empathy might be in that. Questions of integrity and honesty. I might add empathy in that sometimes because that to me, that's the ultimate. And back to the love and trust issues.

Without. Without honesty, there isn't love. Trust actually comes before love and that a lot of us experienced growing up with our parents, this conflict of. Your parents didn't trust you when you were a teenager, therefore that's when you felt the love meter drop. And then as an adult, they never reinstitute the trust meter because they realized they had psychological power over you without trusting you. And they love their position as authority and as you go forward in life, they like to hold on to that authority and you like to relinquish it to them. And so you can do things in life and you're. As an adult, you're still like, God, why am I, mom, dad, still question meaning or asking me this? Because you're handing over the key to authority by them not trusting you. And then you go, my parents don't love me. And you have this. What's wrong with the relationship of my adult self with my adult parents? Why can't I resolve this? And that's usually right in the middle of it. Yeah, that. It's a. It's not an intentional. And as a parent, you could probably, if those of us have kids, could go, oh, I could see myself doing that a little bit. Bit. Because it gives me an edge over. I already got your number, kid. We like that. We like to have the other person's number, particularly our children. And so when you have a kid that's a high performer, then it becomes really wacky and out of balance.

So tell me something crazy.

Well, let me ask you first, though, how would you define ethics? Ethical.

Ethics are agreed upon, are an agreed upon lattice work of society. So you find people who. It's a social construct of agreement. We decide what's ethical. I was very curious when Chris talked like, gosh, does this exactly what you do work in every culture? Would this work in Japan? Because it's a very different process of how societally the mind of the Japanese is put together compared to ours. It's a different brain. And so I think that what might be ethical here is not ethical there. And ethics is a religion that we sociologically practice.

Yeah, very good. So here's what's really weird. So I was talking this in a.

Restaurant in Chicago after a strategic coach meeting by a guy that I can lost track of him over the years. This is over 20, probably 22 years ago. And it was your purpose in life. And he had me write, he taught me this thing and he's like, I want you to. It's one of the best ways to learn about other people. We never had a discussion of what you took me through. And I have taught this to thousands of people. There's a handful of people in here I think I've probably taken through the Purpose in Life exercise. It's a great thing when you first start dating someone. It's kind of a. You know, I was trying to tell Neil Strauss he should put this into it if he ever writes another book on. But anyway, so.

The purpose in life, you Date it. You take a piece of paper, you draw a line down the, the middle of it, and then you draw a line. And then you have six. You draw six boxes on the left and you basically list three names of people that you know. And they know you. They could be dead, they could be alive, they could be, you know, parents, they could be friends, teachers, whatever, but you know them and they had a relationship with you, so you both know each other. And then on the right side, you write three quads, qualities and characteristics of each one of them that you like and admire. And then on the bottom column you write three people that you know of but they don't know you. And they could be dead or alive. They could be mythical figures, they could be actors, they could be, you know, if you're into, say, you know, Spider Man. Or it could be, you know, it could be a made up fantasy figure, it could be a spiritual leader, it could be a warlord, whatever. And you write three names and then the same thing. And then people write three qualities and characteristics that they like and admire. And then you end up having basically 18 qualities and characteristics. And then people will do that. It takes a few minutes to do that. I have them then fold the piece of paper in half and then read, well, say who they are first and then do it. You know, explain who the person is, just what you do. And then I have them read, okay, now leave out the names. Just read the, the quality and characteristics. And I'm like, that's your purpose in life. The reason you have the ability to like and admire somebody else is because there's qualities. And you wouldn't be able to admire a quality and a characteristic if you didn't want it in your own life. And so when you did this, I was like, this is absolutely bizarre. This is like, it's because we never had this discussion.

No.

Which is really cool. So I really appreciate it. And I would just reiterate. He's absolutely right. You know, this is one of the greatest ways to know what other person's value system are, what they care about, what makes them tick. And it's really interesting in a position like this to do it. What happens is you'll see a lot of the same things when people have a list of 18. You'll often see caring or funny or driven or whatever. The thing is, intense people have intense things. People that are really reflective. But it's, it is a great way to understand. So it's a great test. Thank you, Ron, that was awesome.

Thank you.

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