251 - He Failed for 20 Years, Then Built a $1B Brand in 6 with Ryan Bartlett

26:19It's crazy. And he would talk about this thing where he broke down the strike zone into 27 different sections and he knew exactly where his fat pitches were. Yes, the ball would be in the strike zone and it was technically hittable for him, but it wasn't his, his fat pitch. There was a certain area where he had a much higher percentage chance of, of hitting the ball. And so we'd wit, he'd sit and he'd wait on those pitches until it entered the head zone. And obviously he'd take a hit. Warren Buffett has taken that and he's like we at berkshire wait for our fat pitches we're not just like placing a million bets on a million things we know what we know and when we see an opportunity we go big and i i love that philosophy because i think that for many of us there's a couple times in our life where there's a fat pitch and we got to make a decision knowing everything that i know i have an unfair advantage i think i see the future i'm gonna go ahead and make a bet on this and the question is just whether or not you're willing to bet big.

27:11And for you, it sounds like you were like, I think this is a fat pitch. It was, but I also felt like even if it doesn't work, so what? And I think that a lot of people I talked to, a lot of young entrepreneurs are so worried about failure and having failed so many times, it just did not feel like it was such a risky thing for me to try to build a t-shirt brand. If it doesn't work, I just close shop and move on. Like I didn't care. I was just like, I'll move to the next thing, right? It would have been, if it wasn't true classic, it would have been a lab diamond. If it wasn't lab diamond, it would have been matcha.

27:43I would have just kept going until I nailed something. It just so happens that true classic work. There is a component of business to where it's like, you can go into a million things, but knowing what to focus on is, is truly very important. And I was, I was passionate about this particular space. I was, I also did my homework, right? So for anybody listening that is in that, like, I could do anything mode. Yes, you can technically, but you have to do something that you actually want to bleed your eyes out doing every day for years and years and years, or you will absolutely not make it. You have to love providing real value in the form of some product that you can stand behind.

28:26It can't just be like, I saw Mr. Beast make chocolate bars. I want to make chocolate bars. It just can't be that because you'll get so tired of chocolate after six months that you'll never want to look at it again because it'll be such a difficult business. So like I was willing to play the long game on clothing to try to make it work because I loved it that much. But a lot of it, again, goes back to like when you say the 40 percent doing my homework got me to that 40 % where I knew I was, it was higher than 40. It was like 80 to 90. That was what I was swinging on to get there because I did so much work and research and research and just every night on my phone, talking to apparel people or going into Facebook groups or going onto Amazon and validating product options.

29:16And like, I was obsessed with learning. And I think that is, that is a big part that people don't talk a lot about. yeah i think the curiosity of pieces is massive it's huge i'm just curious did you ever struggle with like man what am i doing i wasted so much time because you could easily look back on 10 years wasted music poker whatever absolutely dude i feel like music and poker were a huge waste on a lot of levels but i i do derive a lot of skills from those industries that i have been able to pass on through business music, but the creative poker with the incredible risk tolerance. I mean, you know, we take bets here on product inventory to the tune of tens of millions of dollars on a whim in a, in a boardroom in a 30 minute meeting.

30:01So like if I didn't have so much at stake in poker in the early days, and I was able to put my rent on the line today, I would not feel comfortable making those bets, but it's just, you know, I have a lot of grit and determination and will to bet on myself and the upside that it just feels normal for me to take bets at this point. Looking back though, do you look at it now and you're like, okay, yep. It's a good thing that I had those experiences. It is now. That's what I was going to say is like close to it or even like during it, were you beating yourself up? Were you like, I'm such a moron or did you move on pretty quickly?

30:39I did move on, but like, I think at the time you reflect on how much time wasted there was. And man, I wish, like when I talk to guys that are young and they're crushing it, I'm just like, so jealous. I'm like, Oh my God. Like, cause I punted my twenties. So I'm just like, you're already this far along in your mid twenties, dude. You're going to absolutely crush it by your mid thirties. Like it wasn't until my like early to mid thirties that I started crushing it. So, but I also didn't beat myself off about it too much. I was just like, I was always an eternal optimist so i'm just like yeah you know chalk it up to a few failures but we'll figure it out eventually i don't know maybe this is me just making myself feel better i think life's about finding leverage points where you can you can bet really big and some people find those leverage points in their 20s and some people find them you know when they're 40 and they launch a business and the timing sucks yeah i'd love to have found those leverage points earlier but also frankly for me i wouldn't have been able to take advantage of some of those leverage points in my 20s because I didn't have the maturity.

31:43I didn't have the dexterity or the knowledge to actually take advantage of them. So as much as I would have loved to be killing it, I just wouldn't have been killing it, which is hard to say sometimes. You know, I wish I could say that differently. I think leverage is an interesting game that you bring up because even at this level, six years in, I am constantly trying to create leverage for myself. And so has Ben, like we're one of my executives, like that is the full game at our level is like, How do you create leverage and get your time back so that you can focus on the things that really matter?

32:14I want to focus more on philanthropy. I want to focus more on making people feel good, making people look good, helping with initiatives that help the company or help homeless people or whatever it is. I want to do the stuff that I want to do, not the stuff that the business demands of me because, man, does it really demand every second of my attention. Let me step back. How quickly did you get to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year? Two years. okay i'm gonna say that's because of your genius is that fair it's partly i hate giving myself all the credit but no i what i would say is like part of it is i had amazing co-founders that is that truly is part of the luck factor here is like i had great co-founders that believed in me who were willing to not step on my toes and just let me be me and do what i do and not fight back on things, but actually be real leverage for me in spots that I'm deficient in.

33:11So like Matt, for instance, was like the CFO finance M &A guy. Nick was like the apparel manufacturing, knows how to talk to that world and bring my apparel vision to life guy. And the three of our trifecta DNA just played the absolute perfect full circle picture of what it took to really build this business. So - Yeah, said a different way, I would say. you played your role to perfection right it's like you were steph curry on the warrior you needed to just shoot freeze and you yes but i need to dream on and i needed i needed clay thompson like i had to have those guys to make it all work when did you get to the point where you're like you know what i know that my native genius got us here but now i need to kind of pivot out yeah right after we hit 100 million so basically year right after year two we hit 100 million and I was like, okay, it's getting too big now.

34:05And I don't, I'm uncomfortable managing this size of a team. I've never dealt with like HR and like all this other bullshit that came along with business. I had to just like figure out on the fly. And also just like scalability issues that I had never encountered or dealt with and 3PLs going out of business. And I mean, you name it, dude, there was like a million fires. Even to this day, we have a million fires, But it wasn't until I brought Ben on, who's our current CEO, that he created unbelievable leverage for me. And he was a version of me, but even more intelligent and just like could figure any.

34:43He was like a UCLA grad, business grad. Like the guy just he worked at Meta, like uber smart. Like, you know, he's always the smartest guy in the room. And that is what it takes to create leverage. You got to find those people. And then you have to also convince them to come aboard and see the vision that you see. Because he had a really cushy life. He didn't need to come to this, you know, fire startup where everything's just chaotic. It's like a zoo here, man. It's just wild animals running around in the office like every day. It's just nuts. Oh, my gosh. Dude, I mean, that's the thing. Whether it's a$100 million company or a$5 million business, as you grow, you hit new inflection points.

35:21And it's like, okay, at$250 ,000 in revenue, my skillset was amazing. And a million dollars in revenue. I don't know what the freak I'm doing. I got to bring other people in. Was it hard for you to recognize that? Or was it pretty obvious? No, it wasn't hard because I was drowning. And I was just like, I'm very, I have super high awareness of what my capacity is and what my ceiling is talent wise. I knew that I would always be good for this company in the creative aspect. Like I still, to this day, I can have creative just about anybody. It's just like my thing. Like I'm just, that's what I'm really good at.

35:54Not so good at ops, not so good at finance, not so good at many parts of this business. But what I am good at, I'm the best at. And that is why I'm still kind of useful to this company. But I would say that like in the early days, we had just a lot of scrappy entrepreneurs. Like everyone that worked for us was like a multifaceted jack of all trades kind of guy. And that worked really well in the early years because everyone was doing the job of like five to 10 people. now there you need like absolute specialists in everything that you do like you need a real cfo not like a guy who knows finance and accounting a little bit right like it needs to be really focused so that's a big transition everyone's got to make though have you found that transition hard because what i've noticed i've done it a couple times with businesses that have scaled the people that you hire to go from let's say zero to 50 or zero to 100 million they're not the same people who i would hire completely different completely hard sometimes because either they leave because they're not happy anymore or you've got to let them go because like the team is suffering but that's freaking hard because they were there in the beginning it's the hardest part of it it's there's no question and i think you know this that the people component to business is always the harder part of business i actually think business is wildly easy.

37:12I think it's complex, but the challenges are always wildly easy to solve in the big scheme of things. There's just nothing, Ben and I always say that, there's just like nothing we can't figure out. And we always do. Even when things seem stacked up against us and there doesn't seem to be a way out, we find a way out. But I would say people are so unbelievably complex and they're going through their own journeys that you have known nothing about. And then one day they just up and quit. And then you find out later that they were so in their head about something and that wasn't even reality. They just were in their head about it.

37:45They didn't bother to reach out and they were stewing on it and then they just gave up and quit. And so, you know, I guess you learn to touch base more with people and find out where they are in their current journey. And that helps you get to the truth of where they're actually at versus where you think they're at because people play a game, right? They, they act like everything's fine. And then one day they're just gone. And then you look back and you're like, damn, what could I have done? Like they didn't actually need to go anywhere. I would have actually promoted them. I would have given them more money, more opportunity.

38:16I would have given them everything, but they were just like, Oh, there's no more upside here. So I'm, I'm capped on the ceiling here. So I got to go find something else, but it's very difficult. I've done it a couple of times and I hate it where like, I find out somebody was like, Oh, I thought you didn't want me here, but you know, like, we'll like reconnect a year later or something. And I'll be like, dude, no, I hurt my feelings. Like I, I really, and you were here from the beginning and I enjoy working with you. What did I do wrong? Like, I feel like I screwed up a relationship that I had actually found really valuable, but you don't have time to like sit and stew and figure that out.

38:50You got to move on to the next thing. Cause there's another fire the next day. It's kind of, it's a hard part about scaling hyper fast. Yeah. And if you have a lot of people, how can you possibly sit there and talk to every single one of them every single day? Like it's just, it's quite literally almost impossible. You can touch base very quickly, but like if you don't sit there for real extended time periods, you're never gonna get to the actual root of where they're at. And that takes really detailed questions. It takes a lot of them opening up and no one's gonna just sit on a five minute huddle and open up like really quickly off the top of their head about what's really happening deep down.

39:27Like it just doesn't work that way, right? So you're right. It's a difficult journey though. So it's hard though. It's hard to make the switch because you, at least when you're building businesses, you feel productive when you're doing something. I ran a Facebook ad today and I got a, you know, three X row as right. Money hit the bank. I immediately see it. There's immediate feedback when you start growing and you realize, Oh, people are the ones who are executing on my vision. I got to go build relationships with them. There is not that immediacy with the feedback. Did you find it hard to make the switch of like, okay, I got to be more people focused than necessarily ops focused or did that just come over time?

40:03I would say it came over time. I also learned the hard way like you, where like people would leave and then you'd find out why you need to realize in hindsight that you, that like, I just didn't do enough to communicate. And there's so much of my job really needs to be that, even though I do need to actually solve problems for the business because there's so many problems. So it's just this constant juggling of people's feelings, what you can help them do in life. But then also like the business is a machine that I just have to adhere to. I have to give it my attention as well. So you need to find other really great managers that can do that job for you, I think is really the punchline.

40:42And now we do have those people who can help soften and figure out where that person is without me actually having to be the one to get it out of them. Are you continuing to focus on the stuff that you feel like is your native genius? Like, are you focusing a lot on the marketing, creative branding? Yeah, I would say that it changes. Like there's some weeks where I am heads down trying to solve a really tough problem. And there's other weeks where I'm just like making content all week. And it's like amazing. So it just ebbs and flows with the state of the business. If you could go back to you, 20-year-old Ryan, or let's say 25-year-old Ryan, who's just like in the middle of it, what advice would you give yourself?

41:20I would have told myself that I don't need to make music. I don't need to make money from music. And I don't need to make money from poker. I can do both of those things and just have them be fun hobbies. And I don't have to do it for a living to actually make a living. I can be completely fulfilled doing something else, making money, something being an entrepreneur or a business. And I would have just, it would have started me a lot sooner than later. You know, it would have saved a lot of time and energy. but then in hindsight, you know, it did help develop those muscles that got me here in the first place.

41:54So it's hard to say like, would I've changed anything? Probably not. Would it have been nice to maybe take a few years off of each of those industries and give back to the business? Probably. Yeah. When I talk to people, sometimes they're like, I would have told myself to not be so hard on myself, you know, go easier. You're going to be fine. I'm always like, well, did you end up being fine because you were hard on yourself? You know, I'm not saying sit in your closet and be like, you stupid idiot. You're the worst person I've ever like, yeah, don't do that stuff. But you kind of needed that fire to get to the next level.

42:25What advice would you give to a 30 year old, 35 year old, 40 year old who is sitting there thinking, gosh, what have I done? I got, okay, I have some skills. I didn't really leave my dent in the universe. I didn't really leave my mark. What am I going to do? I think that there is, listen, there's a couple of things going for people that are in that age range with what we have in our day and age, which is like this unbelievable technology and AI and all these things that are evolving very quickly to help businesses get more visibility and do a lot better, a lot easier. I mean, just to live in a time where we have the ability to leverage Facebook ads is one in a trillion.

43:04Like there's no true classic without Facebook ads. I'll just, I'm, I'm, I'm happy to admit that, that like there is a certain amount of luck that I lived through the years of Zuckerberg and a lot of businesses, you know, from the nineties and below just didn't, and they didn't have that luxury. So, you know, that I'm very thankful for, but what I would say is that, you know, you don't need a lot of money to start something these days. That's a, that's the great news. You have an unbelievable distribution engine like Facebook that you can test things on at a very small scale for not a lot of money.

43:35I mean, you can start drop shipping items and flip a few products for a few hundred bucks very quickly and easily and turn a profit on little to no effort on literally a few hundred bucks on literally just some elbow grease, getting some products in a Shopify store, connecting the right apps, having everything kind of working for you. That's provided you've done the research to know how to set it all up correctly. The white space is endless for starting something. I think people just get in their heads about, I got to have the perfect plan in place to get it, or it's going to fail. And it's like, yeah, so what?

44:12Then what? Then you do it again and you try something else and then you fail again. So what? Then you move on again and you just keep going and going and going. But people are stuck in this mindset of like, I got to get it right the first time or I'm dead. And then I just instantly die. The end. I can never do anything again. It's like, dude, life is long. You have a long time to figure this out and you don't have to do a product for like 50 years. You can try it for like two or three months. See how it goes. What did you learn? Did it grow at all? If not, kill it. Try something else, right? So like nothing is final.

44:45I get this like attitude from people that like, if I do this thing, it's the end of me if it doesn't work. And it's like, my God, dude, it's not that serious. Yeah, and it's almost like the failure. Let's say you do do something and you fail. It kind of sets you free because you realize, oh, that's what I was worried about. The world didn't come crashing down on me. It just went away. Dude, I love that. I love that. That's what dropshipping is good for. Honestly, if there's one thing I would leave people with, it's that if you learn dropshipping and you learn that a product doesn't work, you move on to the next product.

45:17And then if that doesn't work, you move on to the next, and you just keep going till you find a winner, and then you scale a winner, and it makes you realize that I actually had to fail 12 times to get to the 13th winner, right? And business is exactly the same way. Now, hopefully you don't have to fail 12 businesses to get to the 13th business, but you may have to eat a few businesses, three or four or even five before you get to your scalable e-com company that gets you to where you want to be well it's building the muscle it's just you're building like muscle memory on identifying oh this product works this doesn't work oh this this marketing creative works this marketing creative doesn't work that how i treat people this way works how i treat people that way doesn't work like every single experience can be a muscle building experience and it's easy to say looking back on that right but i i'm just like encouraging you that if you're in the thick of it right now and you feel like what the frick am i even doing everything is compounding and there will be a point in your life where there is a you can take a fat swing and you're not only just gonna get one fat swing you'll get multiple fat swings the trick is don't die yeah exactly don't kill yourself over one mistake i would also say that like if you have a way and i don't know if there is a way.

46:29I'm sure there is. If you have a way to develop creativity, I do think it's the ultimate hack in business. I think without it, we are just another t-shirt company putting out average content like everybody else. And we're not getting this surge and through line that puts us above everybody else. If you have a way to develop that creativity, I think you'll look back and realize how unbelievable of a superpower it actually is in business, not just with product innovation or creativity, but how you deal with people, how you show up in meetings, how you find solutions in a room of people that, you know, I sit in these rooms sometime with these people who are all smarter than me and somehow, some way I'm able to navigate out of a situation quicker than all of them because creativity leads you to the real answer, not what the smartest answer in the room actually is.

47:20Right. And I know my strengths, but I also know that creativity breaks through all the noise and all the intelligence hands down and it has gotten me some unbelievable solutions that none of these smart people could have thought of because they were so stuck in what they thought the answer was they weren't able to paint outside the lines and man that painting outside the lines is truly the real intelligence you need to seek i absolutely think creativity can be developed jerry seinfeld talks about this a lot where he sits and writes every single day that's a part of his process he writes whether he feels like it he writes whether he doesn't feel like it it's every single day and so yeah is there probably some level or some degree of innate creativity that some people have more than others sure just like there's going to be people like lebron james who can just jump out of the gym freaks yeah that are just freaks but then there's going to be other guys who are like i'm going like way in my sports bag here bruce bowen they're not freaks they just worked at their craft every single day and they they tried and they got in and they figured out how to do something that was replicable.

48:23I think that creativity is very similar to that. There is definitely some innate creativity that you just either have or you don't, but you can develop the muscle. You can understand what is it about this phrasing that people like, how do I, how do I say something that captures attention, but doesn't close the loop so that someone is actually willing to click to figure out what's on the other end of that ad creative. There are definitely ticks, tricks, and tactics that you can do. It just takes work it's just work by the way have you been playing with sora at all oh yeah i am obsessed it's ridiculous dude i think i have 700 soras in my in my draft folder like i just sit in my bed at night now and i don't scroll anymore i just create sora videos non-stop for like are they in your draft folder because you're like because you're like i can't i can't like be that guy who's releasing no i don't care about that i don't care about that you know what it is is like Like Sora is one of those things where you have to do 10 to 15 iterations before you get a really good one.

49:20So I'll prompt it. I'll get like a B - version. And then I'll prompt it again, and I'll get to a B. And I'll have to keep prompting it until I get to the A because it's not a perfect system. It's wildly better than VO3, though. I will say that. But it has been such a game changer. I just don't think people really realize what's happening with Sora just yet. but it is mind-blowingly amazing. Okay, what are you using it for? Like, what do you have 700 drafts for? So right now, I'm just using it for organic content on Instagram. Like, I'm just creating posts that are funny and I just put them out.

49:54And I just put them out on Instagram and people laugh and say, this is hilarious. And that's it, that's it. I'm just, it's just purely entertainment purposes. I don't need to make an ad. Yeah, I don't need to sell anything. I don't care about that. But yes, you can build ads with them. You can sell things with them. but I don't treat it like that personally. I just like to be creative and funny. Well, I mean, again, you're building the muscle because I'll do the same thing, but you learn over time, you're like, oh, I need to prompt it this way. Oh, I actually need to tell it explicitly to do this or not say anything about this.

50:25So it's actually getting better in that respect than ever before. So that is where VO3 came short. You used to have to prompt in like JSON language or some sort of arbitrary code language to really like nail the scene the way you wanted it to look. Whereas Sora, you can go as basic as one single sentence and it gets you like 90 % of the way there, which is the advancement from where Vio was to where Sora is. And that's what makes it so much better because it levels the playing field with creators where you don't have to be an engineer to write a prompt anymore. You can just literally write a sentence that's funny and say, you know, I want to make a like have a guy win true classic and a price is right scenario.

51:16And boom, Bob Barker comes out and he's like, the price is right. And he opens the curtain and there's a pack of true classic sitting there. And you're just like, oh, my God, I did that in 30 seconds with no effort. but that's what i'm saying is even understanding how to put the the simple sentence in place in order to get that version of sore that even looks good is still a skill like how to prompt chat gpt to give me the answer that i want is so you can do that in chat gpt a little bit like you can say hey i got sometimes i'll go to chat gpt and go i want to create sora videos and i want to do it in a 10 second framework right and it's going to be in portrait mode so i want to do it around this concept.

51:58Can you give me some ideas that fit within 10 seconds, make them super short and punchy, make it dramatic, make it a thriller style, whatever it is, like whatever you're going for. And it'll give you like 10 versions. And then you can kind of look at the 10 and go, this one's kind of good. Ah, this one's what I do is I'll take one that's kind of good. And then I'll put my sauce on it. And then it'll get me to the better version. So it doesn't come out perfect on ChadGBT. And then you just copy that little excerpt, throw it back in Sora and unless Sora try to create it. Have you ever done a series?

52:29That's the only thing that I can't quite figure out is the continuity. No, not yet. That's my thing. It's like, I'd love to do six of these 10 second videos and stitch them together. But you won't need to because pretty soon, like they just advanced it to 25 seconds. They were at 10 seconds. Then they were at 15. Now the web version has 25. So pretty soon it's going to be up to a minute and then two minutes. And then you're just going to be able to do one prompt and have a two minute long piece of creative that you won't even need to storyboard at all. You'll just tell it what to do and it'll do the whole thing.

53:00It does have a storyboarding component now on the web application, by the way. They just rolled that out three days ago where you can storyboard the scene and then it'll break it down in increments of seconds. So it'll say like, if you want to do a sentence long prompt, it'll show you how to break it down. So in this part of the sentence, I want this to be about three seconds. And then in the next three seconds, I wanted to do this. And then the last four seconds, I wanted to end with this. And so it gives you kind of a play by play. Yeah. Yeah. I see it. There's a storyboard on. Holy crap. They're already doing it.

53:36It's happening so fast. Dude, what do you think about the way that they released Sora? I'm curious to hear as a product person. Like the invite only thing? Any of it. Before I give you my color, I'm just curious on what you think of how they did Sora. I don't know really the background i just i just know that they did it super privately and it was part of chad gpt and i have an unlimited account because i create way more than 30 a day now i'm just i'm just on fire with it but yeah i i really have no context so the invite only was cool whatever because it creates scarcity but i i think i don't know that he thought of this but releasing it as a social platform could turn out to be one of the most genius tactics ever because what it does is it makes the product stickier.

54:22It's not just some guy sitting, for most of us, most people who aren't you, what am I going to create a Sora for? I don't need to have a branding thing. But if you're on Sora and I'm on Sora and we're friends, dude, I'm sending you videos all the time. Hey, look, this is us on the top of the Eiffel Tower in 1870. Dude, listen to this. Last night, I'm sure your wife loves this show, but last night, I had my wife create an account and do a cameo just so I could create a love is blind between me and her on Sora. It was amazing, dude. And literally we both come out and we're like, oh my God, wow, you look great.

55:03And she's like, yeah, you're taller than I thought. And like it's this whole like it was she was dying. She's like, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah. And so now they've created this product. And how do they get people to use it? They create the social aspect to it. And so now they're sharing stuff back and forth. I just think that that's so smart because it's not just this niche product that's kind of stand like nano banana standalone VO three stand like what else? Very smart. Yeah, you're right. And the component of the remix is what makes it so easy to go. Oh, I love that creative.

55:34Let me remix it and do my own prop. So if you see like, you know, some monkey or some like Donkey Kong swinging from building to building, you can just be like, put my grandma swinging building to building. And then it instantly changes it to your grandma. And then it's just this old lady swinging and you can just do iterations of everyone else's creative. And it helps the creativity just flow unlimited, man. It's, it's amazing. How do you view that? Like you're a creative person. You like you, you do this stuff for a living. How do you view this impacting the ability to run and generate ads? Is it, I think it's a future job.

56:09No, no. I think it's all upside for us. I I think that as long as you're not using it in a way where you are trying to kind of like we're an apparel company and we and we're focused on fit. We don't want to use fake AI models for to show off our fake digital clothing. Like that's the component I don't like about AI. But everything else is fair game, in my opinion. Like everything like entertaining content wise. That's why I'm playing in that space more than anything, because I see more of the upside there. It's just another tool in the tool belt. Yeah, dude. And it's so easy to use. And you don't have to know anything about anything to create content to use this and wield it well.

56:49Do you have any advice? How do you make your cameo look like you more? Like when I create stuff, sometimes it looks exactly like me. And other times I'm like, who the freak did they think I was? I think it'll get better over time. I just don't think it's all the way there yet. I'm with you. Like I've tried to do different angles, different shots. I've recreated the cameo a few times, but a lot of it is lighting. lighting i've realized like you really got to have the lighting dialed in to get every contour of your face and piece of it because that's all it's using is is really what it can see in the camera lens so you got to make the most of the lighting to get the best picture you can and even my wife last night like because she took the cameo without makeup on and then in the love is blind she was wearing a dress but she didn't have makeup on so she was like oh i don't like it it doesn't show i need makeup on or whatever so i'm like oh you have to recreate the cameo with makeup on Like, that's it.

57:42Because like you and I have hours of high definition video that we could upload. Like it could look really, really close to the way that we actually look. Dude, the Sora is the future. It's only getting better. You know, this Atlas just came out with where it's like a web browser, the OpenAI web browser. I'm using it right now. It's unbelievable. I just think Sora is the future. Yeah. And it's a chat GPT is built into the browser. so any page you go to you can just ask it questions and it does all the work for you instantly it's amazing but on the Sora front dude I am so bullish on it I think it's just I think it's changing the game and people just gotta you know start creating fun stuff and treat it for what it is just you know use it for entertainment value would you use Sora to create creatives for like Facebook if you were starting out again to do like drop shipping or something I would do a hybrid probably i would probably always use studios and things but like from a production standpoint dude it's next to impossible to get anything even close to sora for what it costs i mean it's just pennies on the dollar compared to because we do big shoots now and they're very expensive so um i love that all right ryan it's amazing where's the best place for people to come find you twitter instagram website yeah yeah any of them i mean it's just my name you can pretty much find me anywhere go check out true classic.com we have women's dropping in a week so now we have everything men women kids boys girls everything in between so next it'll be dogs and cats i'm sure i don't know what let's go yeah 10 billion dollar brand two years from now 10 billion dollar brand let's do this thing we'll see dude we'll see i love it all right man all right hopefully you like that episode and if you've made it this far you're either really committed or you're stuck doing yard work and you can't actually skip on your phone.

59:29So while I have you, the show is growing, but I have a favor to ask of you. Will you please help me grow the show? I want to reach more people. There's a couple of things that you can do. Like and subscribe is the simplest thing. Obviously you want to get notifications for when the next episode is coming out. But if you go the next step, will you leave me a review five star on Spotify or Apple? What that does is it tells the algorithm that, Oh, Hey, this is a high value podcast because more people are leaving reviews for it and it then pushes it out to more people. So that's why when people are like, will you like and subscribe and put the five-star rating?

1:00:03It's not just to make themselves feel better. It's actually to get more exposure for the show. So if you do that for me, I would greatly appreciate it. And I'll see you next time.