0477 | David Perry

Hi, I'm David Perry, the CEO of Cairo. That's getchiro.com and I'm getting interviewed by EA interviews.

EA interviews. Episode 477, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority effect interview. All right, Expert Authority World. You know the phrase success leaves clues and this episode is going to be chock full of it because I have David Perry. On today's episode, Creative Earthworm, Jim Matrix Video games sold his company to Atari and then sold another one to PlayStation and a lot more. And now he has another company, Get Karo. And we were chatting about that a little bit and I have some specific questions for him. But it's just amazing, his mind and what he does, he's super down to earth. So I'm just going to shut up now and we're going to get into the episode and you're in for a treat. David Perry. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, David Perry. David, how are you feeling today?

Great. Thank you so much for inviting me. Looking forward.

It's my pleasure. I mean, I wasn't joking. I mean everyone's heard the phrase success leaves clues. And it's like if you created one successful video game, cool, but you've done multiple and then sold it and then you were like, well that's not good enough. Let's make another company sell it to another big name video game distributor.

How did you get started with this? And even more impressively, you're still doing stuff. You were telling me about Caro and I want know more about that. But let's just start back at the beginning and why video games?

Well, the video game industry is, as you can imagine, pretty great. You get to charge video games to your taxes. That's, that's a good start to any career. But ultimately I was there very early. So the first games I were making were like black and white and just very basic and, and what I realized.

Luckily not even eight bit.

Yeah, no, it was eight bit. I was on, I was in the United Kingdom. I'm actually Irish. You can't tell that really from my accent. Now I've lost it. But I grew up in Northern Ireland. You can't tell from zoom, but I'm 6 foot 8 inches tall as well, so. But ultimately I grew up in Ireland and people thought I should be playing basketball and. But you don't really do that there. It's rugby. And so I ended up getting into the video game industry. And what I realized quite quickly is the power of branding. So if I make a video game and I call it Jumpy Boy, I have to convince everyone in the world to come and play this Jumpy Boy game. If I make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, people just play it and it goes straight to number one. And that's what I found. So by making licensed games, my. My career would take huge leaps forward. When you've had a number one hit, other people want to work with you. So I would try making some other games, and then I would go do the Terminator. And suddenly you've got another hit. And know. I did Aladdin for Disney. And the last one was the Matrix, which was unbelievable to be working with Warner Brothers and the. The directors of the Matrix. But in the video game world, that was about the hottest brand there was. And Atari ended up buying our company because they wanted to publish the Matrix. And so branding turns out to be really valuable in the game industry. But the game industry is also really fun because there's other opportunities too. So the. Well, the last thing I did there was I started to think about the future of gaming. So if you think about movies, we stream them now. I used to have all these laser discs and stuff, and I just don't care anymore. It's. I stream everything and then music. I used to have huge collections of CDs. And then I went into this whole thing of collecting MP3s. What a waste of time. Now I stream everything. So do you believe the video game industry is going to be the one that that doesn't happen to. That you'll end up buying discs for the rest of your life and you'll have walls of discs. I don't. I don't think that's the case. So we had this idea, what would that future be? And this is part of a sort of a trick. If you ever want to innovate on something, it's just keep looking down the track and saying, how would I beat that? How would I beat that? And the ultimate thing I think would be every video game ever made everywhere, instantaneously, at a really good price. Right? That would be the end of that track.

I can't think of Netflix for video games.

Yeah, I can't think how I would beat that. If you had everything everywhere, instantly, that's kind of it. So let's start building that. And so we, we patented the heck out of that space and we built the technology to do it. And, and of course companies found that really interesting. There's large entities like Samsung weren't even in the game industry and they were going to use our technology to get into the video game, into the video game industry because that means that all our televisions would suddenly have all the best games playable on them. And guess what? Sony bought our company for nearly $400 million. And, and that's a good example of just looking down the track and sort of whatever, whatever space you're in, whatever you're doing, how would you beat it? How would you beat it? How would you beat it? That's the direct, that's the direction you want to head into.

I was just talking to someone the other day literally about innovating, thinking down the road. And I did mention laser discs.

There you go.

That's really thrown it back. Because prior to that, I mean, was there anything prior to laserdisc or was it just go see the movie at the movie or theater? I should say to, oh, I mean.

There was a cassette tape, video cassette tape, but LaserDisc, you bought LaserDisc before you thought you're investing in the future. Like you're gonna have this, you wanna buy the best copy possible because you'll have that for the future. And now you go on ebay and they're selling for a dollar and so you could spend a hundred dollars on like a Criterion Edition.

So is now the investment like in some helium hard drives and SSDs and NVMe RAM that, you know, just stores all the bits of data and everything?

Well, if you think about that, clearly storage is a, is a pretty great place to invest. Is there any, any, is there any human that isn't generating a lot of data? Now if you think about it, we, if you were to plot a graph of how much data we, we are generating, it's going, it's going crazy. I mean my daughter has like a 2 terabyte phone, I think it is, and, or at least 1 terabyte. Absolutely full all the time. Absolutely full. Having to delete things to make space and that's, you know, you'd give her five terabytes, she's going to fill it. And that's, that's just the way things are going. So yes, Storage is fantastic because it's, it's.

What is it? It's not linear. No, you go, oh, you have a 1 terabyte phone. I remember when phones were like 16 or 32 and.

Oh, wow, imagine if there was even 100 gigs or whatever. Now you say 1 terabyte, but when you can record 8K video at 90 frames a second or even higher. Yeah, you suck that up real quick.

That's one shoot. And you'll shoot a terabyte at 8K, no problem. So what I want you about the.

Video games when, because this is interesting, you're talking about the future of the games and as a whole. But when you're designing them, why don't we give everyone a little glimpse into it? Because I'm not the expert in this space, but I do know a little bit about the bump mapping and how you have to cache it and make it. How do you program it so it doesn't lag in the game and you can get those higher frame rates and everything.

Well, that really matters, the feel of a game. It's absolutely critical. And so what you do as a, as a programmer, you're constantly trying to work out what's the highest performance. And what you realize quite quickly is a lot of things are simulated in games. So you'll see a tree in the distance and you're like, oh, it's a tree in the distance. No, it's not. It's actually just a flat postcard of a tree because it doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be an actual tree. It just needs to be a simulation of what a tree would look like at a distance. And fire burning isn't really fire, it's just particles and things to try to simulate it. And so we're always in the game industry, we're always trying to find ways to give you the illusion that you're seeing a lot more than this little device could actually deliver.

That's interesting. So recolor coding the sprites?

Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, there's all kinds of things Nowadays everything's 3D, so it's a little more. A little more complicated. There's not that much sprite games. They still exist, but not to the level they used to. But yeah, no, it's interesting. My thing with the game industry was also trying to think about, well, what is it that is making these games fun? Why do people play these things into the middle of the night? And I ended up sort of simplifying that right down to three things. Which is skill, risk, and strategy. It turns out if you can have those three things current in your game, your game will be addictive and skill. Meaning that you get better and better. You feel growth, you feel like you're getting better at it. Every time you play, imagine you feel like you just can't get better, then that's not going to be any good. Risk means that, you know, if I go this way and I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of do some rescuing. I think a great example is games like, well, the entire gambling industry is a good example of that. You know, if, if I put some risk in, is there going to be a reward for that? That does matter. And, and the third thing is strategy. And strategy means, okay, this didn't work. I, I didn't make it. Now do I have another way to do it or am I just gonna have to repeat the same thing over and over and over? And I've. The more strategies you can come up with in your head and experiment makes the game more addictive. And so if you're, if you're bored in a video game, usually you can identify which of those three is missing. One of these three things is kind of missing. And then everything else on top of that, like, you know, the confetti and the awards and points and whatever else, these are all nice to haves. They're all things that, that make you feel good.

They're visual eye candy stuff, but they're not crucial to the practice of it.

Yeah. And so if you ever really want to engage somebody, you have to think about how you're, how you're going to occupy them. But this works. I mean, you can go back to Tetris. Skill, risk and strategy. Was that, was that in there? Absolutely. It's literally you go to Call of Duty. Skill, risk and strategy, do they matter in that game? Yeah. And so that, that seems to be the DNA of something that's really, really addictive. And then there's some little things that people come up with over time, like leveling up. Leveling up is really interesting because you.

Find people in business took that term now and start using it to sound cool.

Yeah, I do it quite a lot. I actually think of life that way. So every time you learn something new, you just got a plus one in whatever you're doing. Right. You know, and the more plus ones you can get in life, the better. And so you can sort of rate that as you do things. I just went water skiing. Plus one and water skiing.

New Skill added. Throw down another arrow on the quiver.

Life is just like a video game. That's what we're realizing.

I thought the same. I think the same thing. And for years I've been saying, you know, this is Super Mario Level 39.7, like, whatever age you are, plus whatever month. And I'm like, okay, it's an iteration, just like software.

Yeah. I mean, it is interesting the way your life goes. And I. I'm a big fan of learning as many different things and getting as many points as possible, because in business, that actually helps you. So when you sit down with someone and their whole thing is water skiing or photography or skydiving, whatever it is, if you've experienced it, then you have rapport with that individual. You can talk about it and you. You understand it and you appreciate it, and you have stories to tell. I think it's a. It's a. It's a really fun way, and it is an. It's an interesting sort of thing to compare it to the, To a video game, because that's what they're ultimately doing at three in the morning is they're like, when. If I. If I just stay a little longer, I'll get to level 10, and. And I'll go to bed at level 10. But, you know, level 10 takes quite a long time to get there, and so they will. They will literally stay up to get it done.

Yeah. And what I've noticed some of the newer games, especially on the phones, the freemium model, where it's like, oh, it's a free game. You start playing, you can usually get through the first 10 levels or maybe 12, 15. It's like, oh, that was easy. That was easy. That was easy. That was easy. And now it's like you're sufficiently hooked.

To get to the next level. It's like, this is going to take 60 days unless I get this card pack or whatever.

Yeah. So you just hit the nail on the head. So the secret to game monetization is to save time. So I could offer you a hundred different choices. You, the game audience, are going to then work out which of these hundred items saves the most time. Time. And that will make the most money. So people will pay. It's like, I would say, do you want to walk or do you want to ride a horse? And of course they want to ride the horse. And then you go, well, did you want a fast horse or. Or just a regular racehorse?

And, well, that pack's only 9.99. But if. Yeah, before Saturday, we'll Throw in a magic sword.

Oh, wait, we have a flying horse. Now then people want to throw away their own horse, get a flying horse. So that's, that's just humans doing what they do. We value our time incredibly, and they, and they pay for that. And so I think it's kind of fascinating, there's mobile games that people spend thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on a single mobile game. I mean, if you had told me that 20 years ago that there's going to be these, you know, we'd sell our game for, you know, 29, 99, 39, 99, 49, 99, that someone was $1,000 on a mobile game, it would have made no sense. But in reality, it's just fascinating to see how the industries evolve.

And so, yes, I'm happy to say I kept myself around 250 or 300. When Jurassic World, the game came out in 15.

It was like, oh, this is pretty simple. And it's like, oh, level 12, I don't want to spend a month. I got business and life to take care of. Whatever. It's 10 bucks, it's 20 bucks, it's. And I looked back and I'm like, yeah, I just spent 100 bucks this month on that. And then after a few of those, it gave me enough edge where I could go through it quicker. And I'm like, I've never spent 300 bucks on a game. Maybe the Mortal kombats, those were 50, 60 back in the day.

What's interesting is a lot of the Western game designers haven't really studied the Asian games. And some of the Asian games have gone to the next level. And the next level is when you aren't just buying for yourself, you're buying for people that follow you. So imagine, imagine I, I imagine you're. You're wealthy and you, you instead of buying one horse, you buy a hundred horses. And. But a hundred other people can now ride with you, but only when you're around. Only when you're around. That means people are like, are you coming online now? What time are you going to be online? Because they want to be part of.

Your army and they're on Twitch or YouTube streaming it. Now, you're actually, that's a business expense. You're actually profiting from it. It's not just some random thing you're doing.

Yeah. So the idea of you equipping others using your dollars is pretty interesting. There's all kinds of possibilities there. And so this is what's interesting with the game industry, is it never Stops. It's just this endless evolution and, and then you get VR and all these other things happening. It just keeps evolving and that's what makes the industry so fun.

What else I find interesting? A lot of the parallels I'm hearing. I can't tell you how many different training modules, software, whatever course things are like, oh, but yeah, you can put a video in here. And 10 years ago putting a video in there was like, wow, it's this membership site. Then you add in. Well, we're also going to have tracking in the email list so you can build the list and you know it's password protected and we'll give you stats. Now I've noticed the last three to five years people are going, we're going to gamify it. And I'm like, we're right back to video games again. You're talking about leveling up, you're talking about how do you save time, you're talking about all these different things. And I'm like, it's exactly what everyone is.

The game of life.

Is just like business because of all these things. And would you say you're tapping into the psychology of it as well, not just how do I make it look pretty?

Yeah, I think that's psychology is why games work the way they work. And so if I say to you that games prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that saving time is valuable to people, then you could say, well, what business are you going to start tomorrow? Is there anything you can do to save time? And do you understand how valuable that is? If you think, think of Amazon. Amazon at the end of the day just created a store online. But what they did is this one click buy, which was compared to fill out a form every time elsewhere. It was so incredible. And how much time does it save? Just a little bit of time. But I'll tell you what, that is so valuable to people and so it's a great way to sort of put those glasses on and look at whatever you're doing when you're interacting with, with, with whoever kind of whatever customers you want is how, how are you saving time? I, I, I bought a car recently and, and sitting in the dealership, the amount of paperwork that I had to go through just, it was mind blowing. You know that in 2023 they still have that level of friction and paperwork and time wastage and the fact that I even had to go there.

At this point, I just want to sign a DocuSign once. Right. Whoever innovates that will actually end up finding opportunities to Sort of squeeze in and create new business. Customers love it when things are easy. They really do. It's that simple.

I was actually going to make a joke about. You probably would have liked a one click buy for that, huh?

Yeah, one click buy.

I mean, are you open to saying what type of car dealership it was?

Yeah, no, I'm a big BMW fan. I've been a BMW fan for a long time. It's the European roots. I can't help it. I don't know why. It's also being really tall. Those cars fit me. Like I tried to buy a Jaguar once and okay, I would have broken my neck every time I hit a bump on the road because it was just, it's that lovely streamlined look. But there's a, there's a price for that. It means I'd be driving like this everywhere I go.

I think you could get one of them to pull up with the, with the new car at your house and just sign something.

Do you go to different dealerships or.

No, just a regular dealership. There's just a lot of paperwork.

Yeah. It seems weird that they have so much of it now, especially if you've been with them for a while.

Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't you think because you're on file it would be even easier? No, that's the best thing.

Like do you want to auto fill this form in? Absolutely. Click, click. You know, what about your privacy? Whatever, just buy it.

Yeah. So it worked for Amazon. I think that was a really good.

And the other crazy thing they did for a unique advantage is not just innovating it for us, but making it that much harder for everyone else. And then you have the two day prime and then you get the bonuses of the movies and the other stuff in the radio, the podcast, the, all these things. And now it's like they're making it more and more difficult because there's times even on Amazon now, it's like, you know, as a publisher, I'm always looking at books and stuff and it's like, ugh, I gotta wait till tomorrow to get it. Where's the one I can pay extra for and have it delivered? Like by the time this is over with, they're making it faster and faster.

They are. And there's another business opportunity is you end up owning so many different assets. Tracking all of it's really hard. So like I have movies all over the place on different platforms and if I wanted to watch Harry Potter right now, I might not be able to work that out for some time. Like which Platform is that on that I. For that I. Or I've bought digitally at some point? I just don't remember. Yeah, and so there's all kinds of different.

There's a lot of new opportunities that come out of these things. I think that's why AI is so exciting. It's generating so many possibilities for new businesses and a lot of those businesses are going to succeed in saving time, which is wonderful.

Let me ask you about that, that you brought it up and I agree. We've been leveraging AI for a couple of years now for certain things and been looking into even more to bring a better product to you and obviously save time, increase profits from a business standpoint. But there's a lot of people freaking out about it too. Where do you see AI with gaming and business? Just in general, anything specific for the gaming and what do you think it's, where do you think it's going to be most applicable for business?

Well, I've been giving speeches for.

Maybe 25 years about AI saying how important it is that we, the game industry solve this problem. And what that means is if you walk up to somebody, they say welcome to town Traveler. And then I, I kill everybody in the town and I go back up to the person and they say welcome to town Traveler. And it's been like that forever. And, and so what's interesting is there's this sudden change that's occurred with these large language models that they can now actually have memory and the ability to actually generate endless new conversation and text. But the idea that they could add some context to that and inform this, this AI of what I've been up to so that they can respond to me intelligently is, is actually kind of fascinating. I think that's, that's going to add a lot to games. The ability to really feel like the world understands who's who, what's going on, what's happened, do they need to be scared?

That's a whole new world for games. And so AI is going to be great there. Secondly, in commanding others, if I wanted to have a fleet of 100 people or 100 spacecraft that I'm controlling with my voice, the AI could keep up with that. Currently.

It tends to not be great. You'll have some. And today in AI, you'll have a character following you everywhere and you walk in a room and people shoot at you, so you run back out down the stairs and your AI gets in way so like, like get out of my way so I can get down the stairs because they're coming and. And you end up wanting to kill your AI just to stop them getting in your way. That's terrible. That's not AI So the idea that AI can actually make you better is really the entire thing. And when you look at business, it's the same thing. It's like. It's not interesting. If, If I, If I write something and it rewrites it and it's kind of lame and I have to edit it, it's going to take forever. That's not good. But as AI rewrites it better than I would have written it then, then it's a plus one. I love this, right? I'm. I'm in love with this. I'll use this more and more. And so that's what it has to deliver on. I don't think AI is there yet because there's. There's a few things which I could get into technically, but ultimately the one thing that I would like it to do is, is. Is to just learn my way of writing and conversing so that as I write, it's. It's. I'm going to click approve right away because it's just nailing doesn't currently do that for me. And of course, some company and someone out there will solve this problem, no doubt whatsoever. But the other thing with AI is in general, do you remember there was a television show called Silicon Valley where they had this company called Pied Piper that, that. That made this compression algorithm that was magical. It. It basically, the way I look at AI in a way, it's taken all the knowledge on the Internet and just compressed it and found some way to recall it incredibly quickly. It. What gives you an idea that that's actually the case is when, when it regenerates a stock photograph and the watermark is still in the stock photograph, it's all blurry and. But it's there, right? Which shows it's. It's taken those images and really found a way to, to rethink and compress them. But when it comes back, it comes back with the watermark. Um, and that means that if there's something that doesn't exist, and I saw a guy doing a really great example of this is if you ask it really stupid questions because no one's written about that. Like, no one's. Like, if you have a certain shape, how many of this shape go inside that shape? It's really stupid. Easy. The answer is one. AI will sit there going, well, I think it's three. And it'll. It'll try to. It'll try to calculate it, but. But it doesn't really understand what you're asking because no one's asked that question. And, and that's what shows it's not really AI yet. AI is when it's, when it's, when it's truly a thinking entity, you know, a conscious thinking entity. And there's all kinds of problems that fall into that, which is. No one's documented even common sense yet. Common sense, meaning, you know, all the stuff you've learned as a kid. You know, that, that, you know. You know, if you, if you step over there and fall off that ledge, that's going to really hurt. There's a lot of different things that we just learn inherently. We grow. And so there's people out there, literally, there's a TED Talk this year. They're trying to document common sense. And that would feed into AI as well, which will be important for robots.

That'll be good. But there's so many people that lack it still. How are you going to accurately document it?

Well, you know, it's so funny because then you have neuralink, which is now going to allow you to download into your brain at some point. Currently it's reading, but someday it'll be downloading. That'll be like the Matrix, you know, when you, when you, when Neo is. Wants to fly a Bell helicopter and he just shut it and suddenly he can do it. Wouldn't we love that to be the future when you can, when you can do that really quick? But so AI to me is an incredible. It's come much quicker than we sort of expected, to be honest. There's a. Yeah, the curve is really rather dramatic. And so I'm one of those people that. I can constantly think of ideas forward from where we are today that are going to be exciting opportunities. So it's, it's not going away and it's going to get really, really good. But we still have.

This is the slowest it'll ever be.

Yes, that's exactly right. The AI you're using right now is the worst AI you will ever use. And that's a pretty fun way to think about it.

Yeah, I've told people because there's, you know, and I think what I've been noticing is you created the Again games from scratch. You had an idea. You brought it to life when people are going, oh, it's so smart. It made Angry Bird a version of Angry Birds. And I saw this article in like three or four minutes. I'm like, it's because it was already existing. It can copy it, it can anything that's existing, you know, proofreading or something for a book, it's like, yeah, there's. Grammarly has been around, geez, like a decade, I want to say. And it's like modified AI or whatever. It's like when you have a data set it can pull from, it's for sure going to be quicker. But when you go create this, that doesn't exist.

Yeah, well, it's, there's a difference. So.

Oops, sorry. There is a twist to that, which is the, if you, if you want to write a movie or something and, and I've tried, it doesn't do a great job. In fact, it doesn't even do a great job with very large sets of data. So if you give it 140 page script and say, read it in general, the current AI has a really hard time with that. I ended up writing Python code to break it down and, and, and, and read it that way. But ultimately it's not, it's not ideal. It's, it's again, it's just the beginning. I think of it as like, you know, it's version 0.1 of where we're going to end up going. But what a great start. Like a bewilderly shocking, you know, look what it did to the stock market. Stock market went crazy. And so I think it's amazing. And data is going to be what fuels this thing. And so there's going to be a lot of lawsuits. And so your point with the water.

Markets taking photos that exist and maybe they're watermarked. Okay, well, what we need to do and improve it is take off the watermarks. Oh yeah, that's going to go over well for royalties.

Yeah, not at all. And so, but what I did do is I, I'm into woodworking. My favorite woodworker is a guy called Sam Maloof. And Sam Maloof, I think was inspired by a guy called Wharton Ashric. And so you go into Mid Journey and you type in Design me a new table by Sam Maloof and Wharton Ashwick. You can take the two guys and put them together and it'll generate a table that's never been seen before. That's pretty great. Okay, that's pretty great. Now there could be lawsuits there because it's learned their styles, but the ability to generate incredible things that have never been seen before in any style, that's pretty impressive. So I think Mid Journey is also shockingly ahead of where it should be right now. Shockingly So I was just talking with.

Our SEO coach about midjourney a couple weeks ago, because we're doing some things. So, like you're saying out of the box, it's kind of like kind of one track, two track. I know when Whisper from OpenAI gets fully released and everything, it'll add the audio component. But there's a lot of softwares, like you said. I wrote some Python code to break it up. I've been brainstorming ideas for, like, obviously publishing with books. And you go, yeah, when you give it 30, 40,000 words, it's like, it does not compute. So you have to parse it out and, you know, like, you're talking about. But whether it ever can or can't, there's so many, I'll call them wrappers, where it's like, oh, you know, you can take this, take, take the API, drop it in here. And then we added all the functionality into it and I'm like, oh, this is going to get real interesting. I developed a Software to build WordPress websites automatically, like 10 years ago. And again, it was that whole, how do we do it faster and everything. So it's interesting from not just the business standpoint, but from a tech standpoint. Again, when you said write the Python code, I was like, that's cool. I don't know how to. I hired people, but I enjoy the process of figuring out, rearranging the puzzle pieces and make it happen. My question for you is, and I told you I'd ask you. We're talking about learning and the curiosity and AI learning and all these different things. You mentioned woodworking. Why do you do woodworking? That doesn't have anything to do with video games. You'd like to just learn. How do you balance. Here's my business, here's what I should be focused on. That's actually doing something and not going off on a rabbit trail of something that doesn't move your life or business forward. You just might enjoy.

That's very fair. Yeah, you have to. When you need to focus on your business, you need to focus on your business. It's usually for me, it's between businesses, is you get the real opportunity to go into a learning mode. The reason woodworking got me interested was because I found that everything I've been doing, my life is digital. So I've created a lot of digital content in my business. I'm creating spreadsheets and PowerPoints and whatever else. And I sort of realized, like, I have a daughter and she's not really into video Games. So therefore there's nothing that I'm creating that she could care about. Like, she's not gonna, you know, sit there and go, what a great spreadsheet. You know, look what my dad did. He did a PowerPoint that was awesome once. That's not interesting. So I was sort of thinking, what am I gonna leave behind in the physical world? And I, I, I realized when you look around your room that you're sitting in right now, it's filled with physical products that somebody, somebody made and obsessed over. Like the screw that holds this thing together. Someone sat there and designed what's the best metal and what's the best, you know, you know, what's, what's the thread, measurements, etc. They cared down to the screw. And so I sort of thought, well, if I, you know, why don't I at least try to contribute something? And so learning woodworking just seemed like an interesting thing to do. But funnily enough, there's all these people out there willing to teach you. And so if you can get in a room with those people, it's like the Matrix. You're downloading this incredible 30 years of information. They're just telling you because they want to tell you they're passionate about it. And you're like, I've learned so much. I've been with this guy for four days and in four days I've learned so much. Years and years and years of tinkering in just four days. And so.

That'S what I think is interesting about it. So you can't let it impact your work. But. So that would not be okay. But, but I do think it changes your perspective in the world. Like, I now, when I walk around and I'm in someone's home or in a hotel or something, I'm looking at the table with respect. Yeah, it's like, that sounds ridiculous to me. I've walked by tables my whole life. I could care less.

You see it as the artwork and the craftsmanship though.

Yeah. I now go, oh, nice job, nice job. Right? Or that's beautiful wood, because I actually care about it. And, and so, I don't know, there's something kind of fun about that.

When you learn these things. And then again, it really does help with rapport whenever you meet people that are into these things that you learn. So I think it's definitely a life balance thing, but there's certainly some low hanging fruit that are things that you can learn that will have a pretty big impact. And those are the things you probably want to do first.

I appreciate that and love that answer. That's what I wanted to ask you because there's so many ideas I have for stuff. I was in band, choir, drama. I actually have a keyboard right next to me.

Oh, that's cool. Like it? Yep. That's great.

You know, like for playing piano, saxophone, all these different things. Like my thing now is like looking up stuff on YouTube, playing it. And it's funny because right now I have the normal keyboard that lights up and then this one does stuff and I find myself trying to typing with the other keyboard and it's like, that's a lot of fun. And it's like, you know, time can just go by. The woodworking, I've done that glass etching, drawing, painting, like building stuff. And it's just. So when I was asking, I was like, yeah, like, clearly we got successful companies. But like you should be doing this because it's not all about work. But at the same time it's like, I think when you're naturally inquisitive and curious, you can rabbit hole any of this. And for business, it's cool because you like, it creates that breakthrough and you just tunnel vision it. But yeah, if you're supposed to be working on something, your team better be doing it, I guess.

Yeah, no, it, you gotta do this between gigs or maybe in evenings and weekends, but definitely not impacting your work. But what I would say is don't, don't go deep. Don't say, well, golf is my thing. I'm going to play golf every spare hour, you know, every chance I get, I'm going to go golf, golf, golf, golf, golf, golf, golf. That's not. I found that doesn't work as well.

I mean, try to mimic Tiger Woods.

You want to do that, that's fine. But if you actually learn a lot of different sports and of course including golf, and you may enjoy golf the most, that's okay. But it just, you'll see in life it helps. I want to give a commencement speech and I talked about.

You know, how all these different opportunities when you go into rooms and you meet people and they, they introduce to people or whatever. You know how that, that is something that's completely chaotic and cannot be organized. You don't know who you're going to meet, when you're going to meet them, under what circumstances. You're sitting at an airport or whatever. So when those doors open, are you, are you armed and ready to, to engage? And if so, if you go through those doors, new things are going to happen. In your life. And I sort of explained this during the commencement speech. You know, be ready for these opportunities and take advantage of them. But the dean hated my speech because he basically was like, it's not about luck. It's about education.

I thought it was funny because, yeah, education is really important, but. But there is, you know, whether you like it or not, there's some elements that are beyond your control. It's just that how you. How you deal with them when they come along.

I remember seeing in choir class in high school, and it gave me hope that I'd make it through high school.

It was a little calendar, and it had Einstein, you know, those quote calendars. And I remember, I swear, like, the first few days of school, it had Einstein's quote, and it said, imagination is more important than intelligence.

It's like, huh, all right, don't punch anyone too hard. Mostly.

Well, it depends on the. If you're a surgeon or something. I don't know if I agree with that. True, true, true. But.

And I always love learning. I just didn't like the. You're here 9 to 5 or 7 to 3 or whatever. You have to do this. I'm like, why? What? You know, what's the square area under the steps?

Yes.

When is this useful?

Yes. That's a whole different discussion on education and where education's going. Have you heard about where AI is taking education? Have you. Have you looked into that yet?

Not a ton. But I've seen the commercial where it's like a Internet company going, yeah, we need to get the server back up. How else is AI going to do our homework? And the parents are like, what?

Yeah, there was a South park where the kids were doing their homework using AI and the teachers were using AI to grade it. So it was just AI versus AI now where it's going is. Which is really exciting. It's going to fundamentally change. Teaching is the idea that each individual has certain misunderstandings. They don't quite understand how to solve this problem, and they keep solving it the wrong way because they're not understanding how to solve it. And AI is going to watch you as you do your thing and then say, you seem to be misunderstanding. This is not how to solve it. Let me show you how to solve this so that it's. It's actually correcting you based upon the issues that you have. And if you can run with it like you're getting it right and you're learning a lot quicker, gonna go flat out.

Instead of the teacher just doing one style, you know, Constantly writing on the board when you might be a visual learner. Learner or kinesthetic.

Exactly. So education was designed originally to allow people to trade. And a ship arrives in another country and we all count the same way, and we can count the apples or the weight of the apples. That old style of just filling a room with people and teaching them all the same thing, the same way isn't the future. And so for me, AI tools, it'll.

Ever shift or change completely.

Well, for me, the most important thing is, is there's. Which. Would you, I mean, imagine you were going to film class. Do you want to go to some guy who's never, ever had a hit film? Or do you want to learn from the absolute best in the world who've made millions of dollars and are incredibly successful? Those people are always willing to share. There's, there's a, there's always someone out there who's very successful in the thing you want to learn that's willing to teach. And, and sometimes they'll even, even if it's not public that they teach, if you just reach out to them and say, like, I'm super interested. Can I, you know, can I, can I come and spend some time with you? Sometimes they'll say, yes. That has happened to me.

Kidding.

And so.

Because you're so passionate and they can feel it and they, they love what they do and they can't wait to show you what they do and how they do it. So I just think overall.

The, the AI space is going to have profound impact on some things like that. And back to our original thing about saving time. Wouldn't it be great to learn? I call it the time to aha. Aha is when you understand something. Ah, I get it right. Time to aha. Does that matter to you? You bet it does. It's not, it's not about, you know, this class is 45 minutes. So in 45 minutes you're going to say, aha. I don't want to wait 45 minutes. If I can get that in three minutes, I want it in three minutes. And so that's something that a lot of teachers are going to have to deal with and think about how they can really embrace it. And speed is everything. And the amount of the quality of the information, the learning needs to be world class. And, and, and so it's collecting the information from those Jedis and sharing that. I think it's going to be very important as well. And I totally see that happening. There's really fun things you can do Today with AI, you can actually ask Steve Jobs to critique your new company idea. I don't know if you've tried that. If you just go to ChatGPT and say you are Steve Jobs, please critique this idea or critique this idea as Steve Jobs, it will do it.

And that's tried it in that fashion. I'll have to.

So fun. You can ask it to be Einstein and to critique your idea and it. And it will do that. And in his voice and analyzing it from his perspective.

See something about write a rap in the style of Eminem for Einstein.

Yep.

And it's like I created relativity. Now you've seen below and me and I'm like, well, I would love to see him rapping. That's cool. But yeah, it's so voluminous, the options. And it's reminded me a lot of those. Choose your own adventure games or the books or. And I love those because it was like, I don't want to take that path. I want to take this one. And then like you're saying with the learning, well, what happens when you go here? Roadblock. Okay, well, now go back and go try this one. And when you're mentioning it for the video games, it was like, yeah, it's exactly the psychology of what people are going through. So it sounds like you've really capitalized on all of this. And.

Was this the precipice for your newest company? Because you were telling me about some of the cool stuff with the E commerce for Caro and how'd that come about? Because I see the E commerce, save for the mobile games where they have E commerce in the game, but Aladdin, Earthworm, Jim, the ones we know.

It.

Was just you play the game, you get through it. How did you decide to get into the E commerce space?

Well, the video game industry we think of as being really big. Hundreds of billions of dollars. It's a huge industry. But when you look at E commerce, it's trillions of dollars. And so the concept is, I assumed everything would be done in E commerce. There would be a bow on everything. And so we just looked at it from the outside and we saw these platforms. Shopify, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud. You have all these different platforms and they're giving you the ability to create a little island on the Internet with no traffic. So you can create a little island, put your, put your products in there. And then you have a problem, which is you have to convince the Internet to visit your island and buy your products. And you need them to keep coming back as well. So come back, come back, come back and keep buying at my island. That's a very difficult thing to do, moving people on the Internet. And so what's kind of sad about it is you might have a great product and a great store that you've built on their platform, but because you don't have the skill to move people, you know, at a really low price, you, you actually can be out of business before you even know it. And this happens to a lot of people in E commerce. And so we were going, well, how does that work elsewhere? Like on retail? If I made a protein bar and I got my protein bar into Whole Foods, that would be great because now I'm getting to enjoy their traffic. But if I got into Costco and Walmart and Target, my whole team would be hugging each other. Because we've made it right. We're going to have all that attention for our products. And so we thought to our who's doing that online? Who's taking your products and getting them into as much traffic as possible so that you can enjoy all of those sales? And the answer was nobody. So we started working on it.

What about Amazon?

Well, Amazon is different. So Amazon owns all the customers. And so, and Amazon is also, ultimately.

They have multiple private labels and they make any product they feel is going to sell. So the worst thing you could possibly do is be successful on Amazon because ultimately there'll be a private label compete with you at some point. So if you're making toilet paper and it's going great, presto, toilet paper shows up. And so Amazon is like a closed environment where interestingly, new Amazon stores get very little traffic if, if almost zero, which means that those new stores have to then buy traffic from Amazon. So in a way, Amazon becomes the Google. You have a, you have a, an attention buying problem. They own all the customers. And if you do really well, they may actually decide to compete with you at some point. It's not an ideal situation this way, if you're out and you have your own store that you own, you own all the customers, so every single customer is your customer. And I think that's a more healthy relationship. You saw these companies come in and try to roll up a bunch of Amazon brands and then they realize, but we don't own the customers, right? We just have bought a company based on past sales and that didn't really work. So you saw those companies all collapse really quickly. So this idea of actually owning a brand, you need to own the Customers too, and the relationship with those customers so you can continue to do business with them going forward. I just think that's a very important piece of it. So what we got interested in was, could we do this? Could we build the technology to allow people to. To, you know, you know how I'm thinking. With one click, is it possible a bike store that doesn't sell helmets can add a helmet to their store with one click and have it appear in their inventory? And we built the technology to do that. So we have a lot of real helmet companies. This is not drop shipping from China. Real helmet companies, you choose the ones, they have to agree to let you sell their stuff. So it's like dating. You can go, I want to sell your helmets. They say, okay, you can sell my helmets. And now with a single click, you can place those helmets into your inventory. And now you have all the helmets and all the sizes and all the colors at absolutely no capital risk to you. And that allows you to go.

You don't need to warehouse it either?

Nope, no warehouse. When the order happens, they will ship it. So that means that we've actually just saved all that margin in the past. You would have to buy wholesale helmets, ship them to your warehouse, break them up, put them on the shelves, try to sell them. Oops, I didn't buy all the right sizes and colors. I'm going to have to have a clearance sale or I'm going to have to send them back with a restocking fee. And that's all lost margin. So the best margin for a retailer and a supplier is when the product only moves after it's sold. And secondly, for you to have all of the different colors and sizes in stock, always that puts you in a much better place as a seller. So ultimately, the helmet company wakes up in the morning, new orders have appeared from all their partners in their order queue, and they ship them out. And so to be clear, there's orders in their order queue that they had nothing to do with selling. They did not do any work whatsoever. They just, they get their wholesale fee and they ship out the products. And then for the retailers, they're now going, well, hold on. Helmets are selling in my bike store. Do you guys have bike locks and gloves and all the other things? So this is where AI comes back in and gets really interesting. If you actually own an online store, you should go to ChatGPT and type in, I own an online bicycle store. What are all the products I should sell to generate the maximum possible revenue? And it will just go Boop. There's a list of all the things you should be selling. And if that's not enough, type, continue and it'll just keep going and give you even more. That's your to do list. So do we.

Helmets, bike seats, pegs. If it's a trek bike, yeah.

It's the sports bottles and the drinks that you're drinking while you're riding your bike. It's the, it's the health tracking devices. Everything all becomes fair game. So the reason is if you don't do that and they buy it at Amazon, you didn't get it in your average order value, which as you know, is life or death for marketing. So how much are you making from the average person who visits your store? If you can increase that, you can increase your marketing. If Amazon's just taking care of that for you, you have a much harder time marketing. It also increases your lifetime value. Every time they come back, you have new fresh products. It was interesting. I was just talking to an agency today. We were talking about the idea of.

Pop up stores. So it's Valentine's Day. Why don't you add a hundred products for Valentine's Day? There's no reason why you wouldn't. Doesn't cost you anything. Just add 100 products market that come to my store for Valentine's Day. We've got all these great products and then take them back down the next day. There's no harm, no foul. It's perfectly within the system.

So with publishing, there's different printers, you know that obviously you have to buy larger quantities because maybe it's specialty or maybe you're getting a heck of a discount for.

Paperback mass market. But a lot of people like the print on demand. And this sounds a lot like print on demand, except you're just doing it with negotiations, little technology where these people are selling more helmets that probably wouldn't have. The bike store is winning because now they get to sell helmets and they don't need to inventory it. Everyone's making more and you're just connecting them up. It sounds like, yeah, I mean, I was just essentially giving products on demand.

I went in a local E bike store just a few weeks ago and bought my wife an E bike and she wanted a helmet and he had some helmets on the wall. And I'm like, oh, how cool is there a thousand helmets? They're part of our network. And then it turned into what? I don't have these sizes and I don't have those colors and I can't. And this, this Bag that goes on the back. I don't have those. I'm not kidding you. He said, I, I only use those for my, when I rent these out. This, this is the perfect shaped bag to go on the back of his bicycle. He goes, I don't, I don't, I don't sell those. I just, I, I just use those for people who rent my bikes. If you want one, go to Amazon. I'm not kidding. That was his, that was his answer. And I'm just like, dude, like sales 101. Just don't do that. You've got to. So Cairo solves the. If you, if someone says, I want this helmet in beige, oh, that's no problem, sir. Just go to our website. We have every color and every size all the time. And if you ever need another one, you can grab one. There's, you don't need to come to our store because his inventory is so limited in his store.

And, and if you do have the right sizes and you do have the right colors and multiples of them, just like a car lot, you need a lot bigger store, a lot bigger space or at least a warehouse of. It'll be a few hours. We'll have a run or go get it or something or tomorrow or whatever.

Yeah. We believe that the future of retail is, is experiential retail. So the idea of having, I, I, I, it's funny because I, I wanted to, my, my wife and daughter to, to hit golf balls with me, so I took them to a golf store and we went in and it just took forever. You know, I want this size of shoe, but he's busy with somebody else. And then he goes into this wall of shoes and he has to go up on ladders and everything to go get the shoes. And we're just, I'm just watching this behavior and him coming back down. Sorry, I don't have that size. Sorry, I don't have this. And now we're compromising saying, well, we'll, we'll buy the shoes we didn't really want because that's the one you have available in this store. That is just an absolute disaster because they're paying.

The cost of leasing that space in retail space to be a warehouse, which is lame. Like a really, really bad job on warehousing.

But then they put a mannequin with a polo shirt and a golf thing to make it look cool.

Yeah. And so the point is that in the future, the store can be much smaller. You should be able to come in and try everything that you want and it should be delivered to your home same day or worst case, next day. That's the future, I think, of retail. That means that malls can have. Have, you know, five times the amount of stores they have today. Yeah. So you go to your local mall and everything you can imagine there's an.

Expert still the foot traffic.

Yeah. Oh, the foot traffic would find it more fun because there would be all of these interesting stores that couldn't afford a big retail space but can afford an experiential place. And again, the product ships so you don't have to. You don't have to carry it home. And again, it won't work for everything, but there'll be a lot of products that. That actually just works fine for. Do you really want to carry that surfboard through the, through the mall and try and get in your car or.

You strategically go, okay, we'll hit up everything, then do lunch or dinner and then on the way out we'll go in there and they just closed an early because someone didn't show up.

And.

Well even fit it in this scenario. What's interesting is Shopify is building point of sale. They have it now and, and they've had it for some time, but they're really like. You can actually build apps for their point of sale. I don't know if you knew that.

But I did not.

You could build your own app for their cash registers. So there's all kinds of opportunities to impact.

This idea of experiential. We think there's two kinds of sales in the future.

There's impulse purchasing, which means I need a new iPhone charger. I don't need to go to the mall for that. I should be able to go to Amazon and just have that delivered to.

That's not a fun experience. I was actually going to mention that. I'm thinking of the mall near me that's an outdoor. You can walk around. It's like, oh, well, I got to go by here. We'll grab lunch and then I'll pick up a charger and it's like, that's not a fun thing. They don't have it in stock. It's the wrong one. They got to send it to you anyway.

Yeah. So experience. So. So everything. Everything impulse driven. The white socks or, you know, just batteries for something or whatever. It should all just be. It will. Amazon will end up just taking care of a lot of that stuff. The, the things that are experiential where you actually want to try the shoes on or sit in the chair or Touch the feel, the grabbing. Yeah, you've got to put sunglasses on your head. All of that is experiential and sometimes it's. And we believe there'll be more expert driven stuff. So if you were going to go mountain climbing and somebody has done it before and is recommending this jacket, how. How do I find that jacket? How do I get to that jacket? In retail, that's not the case today. That's quite hard to do.

Unless you go to a specific store. And so again, making it easier for those stores to get into all malls would be a wonder.

The only thing I'm thinking of, maybe, maybe, maybe Instagram, where it says paid partnership and they're modeling it or whatever. And when you click on it, it takes you to the link. But again, that's still E Commerce. Not in person.

Yeah. So you can see where we've started here, that we've started on this journey and we have so many amazing partnerships. There's a company called blendjet who makes a portable blender. And I just think it's an interesting idea that they have this, this blender that you blend as you drink. So your drink never settles. It's just always. Which is a really cool idea. The problem is they're an electronics company, so they make blend yet two, at some point they'll make blendjet three. But with Cara, what they did was they said, well, can we sell everything that goes in the blender? And we don't want to. We don't want to be a company with dealing with lots of perishable goods and refrigerated warehousing, all that. That's not our core thing. We're making the blenders and marketing them, but we'd like to sell everything that goes in. And the thing that was so impressive with those guys was they started selling subscriptions to things that go in the blender, which is kind of hilarious. They're getting monthly payments for things they don't even sell. Think about that. Like, they don't, they don't personally make, but because they found the customer and got the customer to take action, they're going to make money month after month after month. And so I think it's fun to see the innovation as people use this technology. We have interesting companies that, you know, like barstool, sports and people like that. There's all kinds of different entities that are in our network that are taking advantage.

And you can go in here and just partner with any of them or whatever.

Yeah. Well, we also even have TV networks so we can Put you on Univision's tv, Television, live selling or. Or on. On NBC. There's all kinds of opportunities there as well, because the more people that join the network, the more people there are to partner with. And so in a way, that's what we're kind of excited about, is can we keep generating more and more and more potential relationships for people? Because the scale is. Is potentially enormous. Yeah. Limitless. And in the future, the AI that comes into that allows us to then say to you, look, we already worked out what you're missing in your store, and we know what sells. So the products that are going to solve your problem and maybe double or triple your sales, those products, here's a list of them all. And with one click, we'll add them to your inventory. I see that as being a really exciting feature.

That's impressive. I am definitely going to check this out more, and I appreciate you for sharing that. It's just incredible. I mean, how I kicked this off. You got successful A, successful B, and now you're like, I still got more in me. Let's do this. So just amazing. I have the wheel of whatever here. It's a little fun thing I do. You have to pick yellow or black.

Let's go yellow.

All right. Yellow. Oh, look at that. Question.

What do you like to do with your family when you're not changing the world and creating all the fun stuff we enjoy?

Well, I like to. I like to do two things. One thing is I think travel is very important. And if I'm busy working too hard, I still want my family to travel. And that's not common where people go, okay, go and travel without me. Yeah, I. I would like. My daughter just flew her very first trip alone somewhere. She just flew to Tokyo. And that sounds crazy. Like, why would you let your daughter go to Tokyo by herself? The. The answer is it's so incredibly. It creates so much self confidence when you travel around in the world and you experience it and it gives you lots of stories and all the rest of it. So I think one of the key things is travel. Of course I want to travel with them, but if I'm really slammed with work, I. I won't. But in general, travel is huge. The second thing is my. My daughter is into. She. She just wrote a movie, and I'm finding. I'm finding that kind of fascinating to see.

At least high school or something.

Yeah, she just left high school, so she's 18. She wrote a movie. She's now writing the novel, and she's working on the television show. And the reason is, is because then when you pitch it and they go, well, actually we're only interested in movies right now, then that. We got you. No, we're actually only interested in TV shows right now. We got you. And so in a way, I like to help in whatever they're doing because it's something. It's interesting to me and it's fun to watch them sort of develop and I'm a big believer. It's very hard to finish things. It's very easy to start things. So part of a. An ultimate character thing is can you finish something you start? And, and you know, it would be really easy to say, I'm going to make a video game and have an idea, but then not make the video game. That's, that's. There's a lot of people do that, but if you actually make the video game, then, then I would applaud you because that's very hard to do. And so that's partly what I'm doing as well, is sort of, in a way, cheering my daughter along. There was a really interesting.

At the TED conference, they once gave away a million dollar prize to an idea which was called the School in the Cloud. And they found something very interesting is that kids, when they are. One of the most amazing things you can do for a kid is to just be impressed. It's the craziest thing if you just go, wow, you did that?

Really? That's incredible. They. It's like. It's like nuclear fuel to the. Yeah. Just. They, they actually did tests by bringing in like they would actually have. They had these, these, this concept which was kind of crazy with these grandmothers who had lots of spare time that could actually be just appear in classrooms through zoom links to, to just flatter the children and just go, wow. And be so impressed by what they're doing. Look, I did this picture. Oh, my goodness. You drew that? It's amazing. And it makes them want to draw more. Right. You can imagine.

Good positive response.

Yeah. And so that in a way.

Making yourself available to do that, I think really you can inspire and help other people. And so that to me, one of the most fun things for me, honestly, is people pitching me their company ideas. I love it. It's so fun to hear someone pitch their company idea and then you pitch it back to them and sort of brainstorm on their idea. It's really fun. So, yeah, that's what I try to make. Whatever time. I only have one daughter, so whatever time she needs, I'm going to try to make happen. But overall.

The goal is to try and whatever she's passionate about is to try to fuel that passion. That's what I enjoy doing.

That's awesome. Yeah.

Congratulations. I'll just leave it at that for now. I'm going to behave and.

Yeah, it seems, it seems like you've figured out not just the business side of life but personal side as well. And so I always just ask fun questions there and everything. But thank you for everything so far. We're going to thank the sponsor and we're going to come back with the imperfect action round. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours and it's true. And that's why I'm launching my new book@eapublishingmethodbook.com so you can learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori, I went from having.

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Unmanageable John Cody.

I've worked with Mario over the phone.

And online and he's been very helpful.

In getting me where I needed to.

Go with promoting my books.

Rocio, there's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past. It didn't serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process.

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Hey, their words, not mine. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com.

And we are back with the imperfect action round. David, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Let's do it.

Three questions for you. Rapid fire answers. What? Number one, what is the fastest path to the cash?

Fastest path is to ask a question that always gets a yes as an answer. So you have to invent the question. So if I said to you, imagine you're any brand and I said to you, would you like to know which influencers buy your products? The answer would be yes 100% of the time. That's a great question. So find your question that gets 100% of the time they'll say yes.

I like that. That is probably one of the best answers I've gotten on that. You got me thinking.

Number two.

You really got me thinking on one. Number two, what is. Which one is this? This the problem one? Yeah. What's the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

The biggest problem I would say is that they are stressed about the economy, stressed about their sales, and instead of focusing on, on just what they're currently doing and trying to do more of it, but to try to think of what other solutions are there. And we're, that's effectively what we're doing as well. We're trying to help them think, how can we. Because the, the two problems they all have is attention and sales. Every single brand on planet Earth, every single day wakes up to I wish I had more attention and more sales. And attention meaning awareness and more sales. They can never have enough. So that's, that's basically.

That'S the place to focus and there's just an unlimited amount of people we can help.

Excellent. And number three, you had alluded to it earlier. What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

Yeah, customer lifetime value means that they have to come back. And I'll use E Commerce as the example. The store has to stay fresh. It has to be interesting. Collaborations with other people is really smart. But market together. So collaborate but market, make it interesting. Sound like your company's got lots of partners and lots of energy and lots going on and fresh. And every time I come back to the store, you feel like you're alive. You're not just three products and it's been the last same three products the last five years. That's not the way to merchandise. So it's as simple as that. Just keep it fresh and exciting.

We've talked about a lot of things, including books. What books have impacted your business the most? Or life?

There's. I watched a YouTube video which there was this guy trying to stop everyone on the way to. To their private jets and he figured it whoever's going to their private jet are worth asking, you know, how do. What do you do? Or how do you. What advice do you have for me? And someone actually said, would you like to get on the plane with me, I'm going to Boston. And during the flight he was interviewing him and the guy said the thing that changed my life was a course called the four Day MBA by Keith Cunningham. And so that's one I'm checking out and I think it's really impressive so far. So I like where it's going. He's also got a book called the Road Less Stupid and that's pretty fun. And then the second one is a guy, Robert Cialdini, you've probably come across his stuff, he's very famous. He has a book about persuasion and how you can change things just by changing words. So he has endless examples of how you can fundamentally change a business just by changing words. An interesting one I just saw him talking about was the idea of selling loss versus selling gain, which I thought was fascinating. So the idea is instead of me telling you about my service and how great it's going to be for you, you just say look, you've missed out on 1.5 million of sales so far because you're not using it. How long are you going to put up with that? How long are you going to wait? So the idea is to try to market the loss to them like this is kind of a no brainer and you've already lost a lot of money because of it. It versus trying to say no, it's great and it's going to make you money and just trust me. So it's just, I love.

I love these writers that think outside the box and a little differently because yeah, it might fit, it might not fit with your business but that Cialdini is really, really interesting and he started a new institute and he's teaching, he's actually teaching people to teach these concepts and just spending some time listening to this guy talking. If you look at someone's website, you'll just look at it differently. It's going to change your perspective on how they are doing and how they're messaging and how it could be different. And so I'm finding it again. This is a new thing so I'm just getting started with this but I think it's really interesting too.

Well, I appreciate those recommendations. Where would you like people to go to learn more about you and your products?

So for me the best place is to track me down on LinkedIn. If you go, you know LinkedIn n, d, p, E, R, R, Y, then that's me. There's, there's tons of David Perry. So that's how you get me. And then for our company. Our website is getcharo.com so that's get C-A-R-R-O.com Carara if you are on Shopify and you install Caro, please make sure to email us and tell us so email helloetcaro.com and tell them that you heard about this podcast and we will take really good care of you. So that's just. Just make sure to mention this podcast. And by the way, Caro, just, just, just for fun, the way we came up with that is we said what's the most important thing in E commerce is the cart. So we took the word cart and put it into every possible language and we had a bunch of social media influencers look at all these names and ch favorite and they chose Carl.

I was going to ask you about that. I've had it up over here and I would have never guessed it had to do with the cart. But I like it.

Cart's pretty important. E commerce.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for everything. I wish we had more time, but you're a wealth of wisdom and appreciate you for sharing it with us.

No, thank you for inviting me. It was fun.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you on the next one. Have a great day. You're all the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 24 7? And if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethod book.com to get started now. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it if you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.