Why every product sucks now (enshittication)

Transcript

Does it seem like everything we buy sucks now? The portions are smaller, the average price of basic things is ridiculous, and the quality of things we used to like is significantly worse. Brands that used to stand for something are the same as everyone else, and it's hard to actually navigate the web of lies about what's made where, what quality, and what's going on. This is the age of unshittification, and you are not alone. It is happening to all of us. In this video, we're going to talk about why. We're going to talk about the lies of what's made where around the world. We're going to talk about the quality of cashmere and leather. We're going to talk about the education of the consumer and how that both helps and hurts the scenario. We're going to talk about everyone starting brands and what that has actually meant for the products we consume. Mass production, internet advertising. You can learn to be educated both as a consumer and, if you're someone that partakes in this economy, as a marketer or a brand owner. I am fascinated by this topic, the culture of dupes, design, who owns what ideas, who makes what where, and what this means for our collective taste or lack thereof. I'm excited for y'all to explore with me. Just lock in. First, I want to start with this idea of provenance. We used to be able to know what we'd get from buying something, based a lot on where it was made. We used to assume if something came from China, that it was some sort of crappy mass-produced good. And by contrast, if it was made in Italy, that it would be something amazing. But along the line, we began to get sold lies. Let's start with the luxury brands and the lies that they've been telling. A few years back, outside of Milan, Italian authorities raided a Dior factory, and they found terrible conditions. Migrants were living there, safety guards had been taken off the machines, and people were working far beyond Italian labor laws, who were not people from Italy, to produce goods that are made in Italy. Similar things have happened to Valentino, to Armani. You can read about the charges for these people online. In some cases, it may be, oh, this is a rogue member of our supply chain. If it's an Italian factory coming from an Italian company, it's only so rogue. At some point, it's actually part of that company's infrastructure. And it highlights this idea of made in Italy as luxury. There's the concept of something made in a country, and there's the concept of how and who makes it. For instance, when you are bringing in migrants from countries like China or Vietnam or Burma, who make those things for the rest of the world, and you're simply having them do business inside your factory, and then removing all of the safety guards for what is allowable by regulation to work, and that good is still legally made in Italy, are you buying that artisan experience that gets suggested? This is what the luxury brands are selling you. Now, if you remember last year, when there was a bit of a tiff in the trade war between China and the US, and the TikTok Illuminati made sure, forced into our feeds on TikTok, and in the response videos, there were all of these conversations about the factories that really make your goods, that make luxury, that make Hermes, and there's a lot of conversation around that. And I, as someone who spent a lot of time in China, you've probably seen lots of my China content, I've also spent time in Italy at the shows and textile and sourcing there, been in factories in Portugal, all across the world. I had a few thoughts on this, right? Because I have been in factories where I have seen products from European manufacturers, Givenchy, Remova, brand after brand, being made there. And I don't say that to say that it is a bad thing. The places where I saw those things being made are artisans. They are places where I make extremely high-quality stuff on projects. I don't, as a consumer, feel bad for a second about buying an item from those brands made in those places, because there's a wide gambit of production in China. I will tell you the tale of two people I know. There are two brothers, both of whom run factories, one of whom runs a smaller artisan-based factory, where the people execute truly excellent work, best in class. You could put it up against anyone in Portugal or Italy. His brother, by contrast, is a little less on his luck. And we visited that factory purely because I wanted to see, because they were producing for Sheehan. And once I heard that, I was like, cool, I've heard about those factories and their conditions and all. Let's actually see what that looks like. And that factory, not pretty, not some massive abuse, people chained to tables, child labor, anything like that. It just happens to be chaotic, filled with people that don't have a lot of expertise, with not a lot of management, and crowded hot areas, doing crappy work. And they take those gigs because the factories take the production they need there, buy the cheapest items, because that's the business that they have. But that gambit, from the highest end to the lowest end, can exist within miles of each other. And the problem was, people didn't understand the upper bounds of what China was capable of, I feel like, until recently. People also didn't understand the lower bounds of the rest of the world. You can get something crappy made wherever you want. And the problem is, the brands have decided to lie to us in the middle. It began when Italy was outsourcing more and more production to Portugal, and it's ended with this obfuscated global supply chain, a lot of which functions on the fact that you only need to have a good that's made in Italy if the last real procedure done on the product is done there. You can, quite literally, legally just finish a good assembled and produced somewhere else. This is not the case in the US. You need to have the majority produced with the majority of materials in the US, and brands get in trouble for this. Shinola, who used to have it was made in Detroit on their products, had to stop doing that. There's significantly more protections than Italy has. Italy actually has a 100% made in Italy designation that you never see because no one does it. And so this leads to this time we're in now that's really interesting, where the consumer is actually really educated. When I started sharing videos inside China, in the big factory mills at Zongda, inside the factories, showing what the textile sourcing was like, there had only been one other video ever filmed inside that environment. Now there's hundreds. Consumers understand how things are made. People realize they can start a brand. But this happens purely from a consumption standpoint as well. Let's take this idea of natural materials. Lululemon, aloe, and their ilk blew up, created clothes a lot of us wore, and didn't feel great in. You don't feel great running wrapped in plastic. And it became a huge conversation around natural materials. Can we work out in linen or cotton and moisture wicking, and the popularity of merino wool now as an in-between? But really, the point is, consumers care about the products that they're buying a lot more than ever. You have your low-cost consumer. They'll get Timu or Shein or whatever. They don't care. And then everybody else above that lowest common denominator has more education than ever, is making more decisions. And guess what? If you're choosing between $70 and $90 leggings, and you have the full internet to help you research and hunt down the thing you want, you actually have a lot of options. And so, as consumers think about what they want and why, and are more enabled around that than ever, plus we have this social media-driven desire for luxury. People want to post hot stuff. They are influenced. You have all the knockoff Goyard in the world making everyone want a Goyard wallet. It seems like everyone has everything. When you said that, be that was on reality TV, and now you have this combination of, does it look like that? Did they actually buy it with real money? Are they just renting it on a service like Nuuly? Is it a dupe? And no one can ever tell, but they're participating in the game in one way or another. And even if you aren't participating in the label chasing, et cetera, you're still looking for interesting things that represent you, like any consumer is. And you have more choices than ever, and you're more aware of luxury in the higher end of this than ever. And because of this popularity, the biggest brands in the world have put the foot on the gas of mass production. I remember growing up and working, and my boss at one point bought a Porsche 911 Turbo S. And it was the coolest thing in the world. It was extremely sick. It was the only car of that kind I'd ever seen. Fast forward to today, if you actually tally up how many Porsche 911s are on the road, it is more than a million. There are more Porsches on the road than adult residents of San Francisco. And I don't mean Cayennes and McCanns and all the other Stryver wannabe cars. And even if you aren't participating in the label chasing, et cetera, you're still looking for interesting things that represent you, like any consumer is. And you have more choices than ever, and you're more aware of luxury and the higher end of this than ever. And because of this popularity, the biggest brands in the world have put the foot on the gas of mass production. I remember growing up and working, and my boss at one point bought a Porsche 911 Turbo S. And it was the coolest thing in the world. It was extremely sick. It was the only car of that kind I'd ever seen. Fast forward to today, if you actually tally up how many Porsche 911s are on the road, it is more than a million. There are more Porsches on the road than adult residents of San Francisco. And I don't mean Cayennes and McCanns and all the other Stryver wannabe cars. I mean 911s. So while you may enjoy that experience of having a car like that, it's not rare. It's not a luxury per se, because there is some degree of scarcity that has to come with that. It is as available as anything could be. Rolex, the same. They make over 1 million Rolex watches every single year. There is no rarity. There is no scarcity. There is just mass-produced, psychologically influenced demand. If someone says they're buying it because it's a good watch, sick, you really need to read the time that closely in 2006. It is purely an influenced choice. And while there are many other luxury watch brands that make immaculate products that take a significant amount of time, maybe worth the money for whatever reason, reflecting artisanship, Rolex is not one of those. But with this demand comes this idea of inshittification, where if they have to make more than ever, if the luxury brands are saying, we're selling more Louis Vuitton than La Ropeana, another one that's been hit at the center of scandal of where they're manufactured and how they're abusing migrant workers and things like that, if you have more demand than ever for these ultra-rare things and you begin to mass-produce them, they are going to get worse. And that's what we've seen happen across luxury while they've kept raising the prices. And so establish this ridiculous standard where nothing is worth it. At the same time, you have the rise of every brand. Creators like myself have shared factory links. I used to share factory links at the start. When I worked much more on supply chain, I would share, oh, okay, this is a factory that exists for that. These are these people I found. Here's where we made this merch. And encourage people to start brands because, guess what, those other brands are taking advantage of you from a margin perspective of an uneducated consumer. Now we know what things cost. Businesses can survive on a four-to-five-X markup. It's different in luxury when that becomes 200. And that's an exaggeration, but not by much. So as these people began to develop all of their own brands, they also began to democratize the economics of what building a brand looks like. So you begin to know more about what's real. But also, all these new brands are figuring it out as they go. You buy from something off an Instagram ad, you support a new creator brand, they're figuring it out. They don't know the difference between this weight of T-shirt and that weight or what this wash looks like or why certain people do Bluetooth componentry this way or that way. You have more people than ever learning and figuring it out at the consumer's expense, which makes the quality of everything worse. And this began really in full in the Amazon marketplace economics, right? Where it's like, cool, I'm searching for a bar of soap or pasta or whatever. And I get a brand, I get a brand that looks like it, I get some kind of knockoff, I get all these Chinese versions. I can't tell what, and I just buy it. It's kind of whack. And people are just competing over the arbitrage of demand for the lowest cost that they can execute on. So this entrepreneurial opportunity and this education about what they buy leads us to this really interesting place where, especially because we're buying on the internet and some of these nomenclatures, like made in Italy or 100% cashmere, which I'm about to get to, mean nothing. Where does it go? Let's talk about material for a moment. 100% cashmere is an extremely misleading label because based on the microns, the type of sheep, the way the yarn is spun, full cashmere can, even length of hairs, it can mean so many different things. A really high-end sweater versus a low-end sweater. You can buy a La Ropeana Gift of Kings wool $12,000 sweater and a Zara $95 sweater that are both 100% cashmere. And you as a consumer have no idea how to judge that. Same thing when people are really into weights of T-shirts. I'm going to buy a 300 GSM T-shirt. All of a sudden, everyone on the internet knew GSM and knew what a weight meant. But then, for instance, when I launched T-shirts with my valuables brand, people would be like, I've never felt something like this. And yeah, it was a certain weight. They were super heavy, but there was a special finish on it. We had a finish on the shirt. No one talks about finishes. Consumers don't even know what, if I was to describe it, they wouldn't even know what they're buying. But the feel is actually different. And at the same time, you see the rise of what I call polyester smut, brands like Comfort, right, who sell tons and tons of blankets and upcharge, provide a mystique experience. So a level below luxury level, above average. But they're doing it with really cheap materials that are designed to feel as good as possible. So the consumer feels like they're getting something they love, but they're actually doing it while inhaling stuff that's terrible for them, for lack of a better way. And this happens a lot. Prada is the king of this material arbitrage, right? Prada sells stuff that's mostly in nylon at the prices that other people are doing leather. It costs them truly fractions of what it is. At least Potega uses incredible leather that's really hard to get. I've been at sourcing places where people have brought out the leather that Potega buys from them that I can't even get access to because Potega buys everything. And it just feels extraordinarily better than what I'm allowed to buy from those tanneries. That's operating at a certain level that does not exist with nylon. If there's one brand that is the largest amount of scam of the luxury charging, it is the Prada nylon. And so within that world where we can't feel it, we can't describe it, how do you even know what to buy? And that's led to people taking advantage of that, brings us more to inshittification. So the new discovery stack for our website isn't just Google search and the results that come up one to 10. It's happening on ChatGVT, Claude, especially on the Gemini recaps that come up at the start of search, and Perplexity. And every business I work with, most of the ones I talk to, are making a plan to get ahead of this. So one of my favorite tools from actual traditional SEO is Ahrefs. And they just launched something called Brand Radar specifically for this problem. So this is a quick look at the tool and how we used it for traditional SEO. So I can see this is a website I used to work on. It shows me my organic traffic, how it's changed over time, the ranking of all my pages, the backlinks that are going to those individual pages, how that traffic changes over time. But now with Brand Radar, you can track your AI share of voice across ChatGVT and Google AI and see where your brand shows up in Reddit discussions, YouTube videos, comments. Because in ChatGVT's own words, Reddit and YouTube is what builds results, not traditional PR or backlinks. So Brand Radar is built on millions of real search queries. So you're seeing what people actually ask and what AI answers back. You can research brands, products, competitors, regions, even people. There's unlimited projects, and you can benchmark against competitors to see exactly who's gaining attention via AI and who's losing it. So if I was making a plan right now, I always want to give something educational. I want to uplift my brand's AI presence. I would start on Brand Radar to monitor competition and my progress and build baselines. I would write descriptions of my products, the headers, their titles, and everything on my site because AI doesn't read clever names. It wants actual descriptive information of the content you have and what you're selling. Agents look for solutions to questions, not vibes. And I'd write really thorough info guides, knowledge bases for my products, and via text on product pages, category pages. So that way, I'd make sure that the site is optimized to tell what needs to be told and explain why you want to buy. And I'd focus on entering the conversation on Reddit and YouTube organically with partners, seeding, and owned content because that's getting so highly weighted who's gaining attention via AI and who's losing it. So if I was making a plan right now, I always want to give something educational. I want to uplift my brand's AI presence. I would start on Brand Radar to monitor competition and my progress and build baselines. I would write descriptions of my products, the headers, their titles, and everything on my site because AI doesn't read clever names. It wants actual descriptive information of the content you have and what you're selling. Agents look for solutions to questions, not vibes. And I'd write really thorough info, guides, knowledge bases for my products, and via text on product pages, category pages. So that way, I'd make sure that the site is optimized to tell what needs to be told and explain why you want to buy. And I'd focus on entering the conversation on Reddit and YouTube organically with partners, seeding, and owned content because that's getting so highly weighted in what the actual results are that are getting shown. There's a link in the description of this video to learn more about Ahrefs Brand Radar, and thanks so much to Ahrefs for sponsoring this content. Now let's roll over into internet advertising. So one of the other reasons why we end up with products that aren't good essentially inside our hands is that, really, the internet is less a game of product and more a game of who can sell that product best via these new tools we have. You hear me talk about this endlessly on this channel. If you are good at meta ads, at creative strategy, at organic, if you were to think about what these more traditional companies are doing to be able to buy anything, the fact that they have eight figures in programmatic spends with agencies that are getting backdoored to be able to sell them trash traffic from websites or banner ads, you are competing against such antiquated old agency graph that it's no wonder so many young brands are winning online. But it really comes down to how to make a good ad, how to make a compelling product that people want, you can move units, and people will consume those units. We've seen this in dropshipping culture for a long time, and now with AI content especially, dropshippers are getting crazy. There's this example of this lobster handbag where people are acting like they're artisans making this ridiculous bag, and they're getting dropshipped some trash for a low price because there are so many people that want it quick. They want their econ brand to hit quick. How many channels and people on there are being like, you can hit 10k or 100k a month with your clothing line or whatever, but what they don't teach people is the weights and finishes and the product quality and making patterns that fit and refining everything. This goes for clothing, it goes for bags, it goes for candy. We got influencers doing dropship candy out there, right? What do they know about the food science of it, right? Typically, when you started the brand before, like I invested in a beauty brand a while back, Experiment, where there are two chemists, organic chemists, who had some really interesting ideas for products to serve Gen Z. But note the first part: organic chemists. The expertise level to go into a world where product differentiation in terms of how it shows up on AI or what people's experience is like to get someone to buy more is extremely important, is the differentiator. And then in a world where everyone's starting those brands, whoever has that helps it get to the next level. But the question is, are you willing to pursue that? The guru that taught you to get the $10,000 a month selling your products via meta ads, are they the ones who are going to teach you about the weights and finishes in cashmere and going to China and putting all that together? And that's something that brand owners really need to think about because this next level, this next generation that pulls you out of the initiation era, is going to be brands that take this really seriously and master the craft. But one of the other product-related topics is this idea of design and copies because we deal with that on the internet too. You see all these things. You probably see the shop where it looks lightly familiar. I got some shoes the other day that look like the Bottega pattern, that look like they're Bottega shoes, but they're not quite Bottega shoes. And you know what? That was fine with me. I'm never going to buy Bottega shoes. I liked the way that the woven thing looked. It was going to work with a particular outfit. Bought it. But it got my eye because it looks like something that already exists. But then play this a step further. Furniture is the key category of this, right? Look at Interior Icons. This is a brand that dupes other designs. They basically work through the legal loopholes of the US, sometimes brazenly, sometimes not, to be able to just copy any design that exists. So let me explain to you a bit of how this works and why you see it so much in furniture in particular. So in the US, furniture is treated as a functional object, not a creative work. So copyright protection is pretty weak, whereas in the EU it actually lasts like 70 years from the death of the designer. It's really well protected. Basically, what it means is it's really hard, if you have a table or a chair design of any kind, even if it is from the last 15 years or whatever other protections look like, but especially if it's older, to not just allow it to be copied. It is fully legal for it to be copied. It cannot just be represented as the name. You can't call it an Herman Miller chair or an Eames chair or whatever when you do it. If you just present it in that look and form, that's why you see a million Togo sofas, the Ultrafragola mirror, all these things just reproduced indefinitely, is if you don't call it that, you can basically, with very little recourse, sell it. That's the difference between a counterfeit and a replica. A counterfeit pretends to be the original. It's pretending to sell you an Eames chair. Illegal. A replica, they're just taking that design. Maybe there are a couple minor changes, maybe not even, but they're not calling it an Eames chair. Replica. This is all fully allowed. There's some complexity here because it's not necessarily a bad thing. People act like, oh, the designers aren't getting paid. The designers aren't exactly done, particularly cleanly, by a lot of these furniture companies either. Sometimes they'll pay estate fees and things to the designer or to their estate after they pass away to continue producing those or pay out licenses, but in the majority, much like we go back to the luxury conversation, they are charging a ridiculous amount. DWR, whoever it is, is charging you an outlandish amount, all of which is profit, versus the dupe companies who are making things that are sometimes less quality, a lot of times just as good, for a fraction of the price. And I've been there. I saw some of my content last year. I went to Foshan in China, which is where all of the furniture is made. We saw CB2, we saw high-end stuff. So much of the world's furniture is made in this one region, and then there are an infinite amount of, you basically go to these massive malls, look at all the things they have, and just order one-off and custom whatever you want. We got a lot of stuff for our house and office space, and I originally learned about this when I was furnishing retail stores. You have this entire economy of one-off. You can fill up a container or a half container, and then you get to learn the quality of which and what things actually cost, and you realize that those brands, again much like the luxury brands, have just been surviving off this massive markup, which doesn't pay the designer or the creative a ton of money. Maybe it gets them a little. It gives the executives private jets, it pays for massive corporate offices, and so we're in this kind of awkward place today where maybe you would say, okay, if the designer's living and they're getting paid really well from their designs, they're selling it themselves, I wouldn't buy the copy. Completely understood. I wouldn't either. But for something that existed a long time ago, now you're offering a newer version of it or putting your own spin on it or you're just purchasing it for your house, you need to feel bad about purchasing it from one of the dupe brands. This leads to the complications of the initiatification because on one hand, you buy it from the real source, you're getting ripped off. They're overcharging you. You buy it from the dupe, you're participating in this oddball economy. And I've been thinking a lot about this because I've seen a few items in real life that are vintage that I'd like to produce a version of, that I know I can produce in Foshan, that if I was to introduce a couch, for example, where's that line? And where's the line as a consumer versus a brand owner versus as a creative? And while I may have that in the back of my head, being like, what's the right thing here, the vast majority of consumers and business people won't think about it at all. And we're watching this game play out in real time now because it's happening with the big brands too. You've seen me do videos on Gentle Monster. I talked briefly about this in my Tokyo video as well. Gentle Monster commands a massive margin. They overcharge massively for their sunglasses. The markup is completely insane. But they do that to be able to do these cool marketing and activations and pop-up. Blue Elephant exists and has been sued by Gentle Monster literally to reclaim a lot about this because I've seen a few items in real life that are vintage, that I like, I like to produce a version of, that I know I can produce in a faux chan. That if I was to introduce a couch, for example, where's that line? And where's the line as a consumer versus a brand owner versus as a creative? And while I may have that in the back of my head, being like, what's the right thing here? The vast majority of consumers and business people won't think about it at all. And we're watching this game play out in real time now because it's happening with the big brands too. You've seen me do videos on Gentle Monster. I talked briefly about this in my Tokyo video as well. Gentle Monster commands a massive margin. They overcharge massively for their sunglasses. The markup is completely insane, but they do that to be able to do these cool marketing and activations and pop-up. Blue Elephant exists and has been sued by Gentle Monster, literally to reclaim that margin. Most kids, myself included, I wouldn't buy Gentle Monster. It's just too expensive. There's just no reason I'm ever going to spend that kind of money on that. It doesn't say anything to me. But if someone makes something that looks just as cool as one of the ones I want, and it's in that middle range, and you know that they're just keeping that margin, where does that line become for you as a consumer? And so Blue Elephant is that brand, and they're one opportunity. That's one of those things that's happening right now. It's going to happen across everything, every reason where someone's overcharging these. Just said, cool, you can't get the Mew Mew New Balances and the other Mew Mew popular sneakers, we're just going to make variants of them, and they're going to be at a more reasonable price, and they're going to be great, and we're going to have a big ecosystem around it. And that is a rock with which a brand can grow. And it's funny that that is, and Keats, and all these other products that say we are going to de-middleman and take that margin back and give you a great experience, are thriving. And a lot of them make good product, and it makes sense because we're in what I'll call a distrust economy. Reddit is game. Reddit is the most game social network on the internet. We used to go there and be able to trust the people on it were regular people. Now even the regular people I know are taking payments to post on there. Everything is botted because of the power of the SEO search, and it is now the least trustworthy place on the internet. Influence is gamed. The expectations are almost ridiculous. I have Mountain Valley water in a lot of my videos. I also have beverages in a lot of my videos. Now I have people in the comments ask, is there a reason you put the beverage on there? Is it a psychological hack? Or people will be like, this video is sponsored by Mountain Valley. My brothers in Christ, I just want to have a beverage when I sit here and talk for 45 minutes. But people are assuming commerce in anything even minorly influencer-related, and they're probably right to do so, even if wrong in that scenario. And if people are doing this, if younger entrepreneurs or creatives are doing any of these things, is that better than these ivory tower companies making all this money and not paying creatives? That's the life that we were in the previous 30 years. So I don't look back and look at what happened previously as better than this whatsoever. This is the age where, if you're a creative person, you have more opportunity to make money related to doing something you love. You have more of an upside to make total money overall than any time in history. This is the best time for you ever. If you don't believe that and you're worried about all the other things happening in the world and this or that, they've gotten to you. I'm going to end this with what do brands learn from this? What do you need to do in this era? So I think you have to show it, because whether you're made in Italy or made in China, you need to show it one way or the other. If you're made in Italy, show the artisanship. Triple down. Show that it is actual artisan people making this, and it is not a bunch of migrants in a factory with the wheels falling off. Prove it. And if you're making in China, don't be afraid of it. I made those gorgeous luxury fermat bags in China and silk scarves at a quality level any luxury brand, from the highest end, Chinese factories, and I've shown those factories in content, and I'm proud of representing that. But I can also show it, because I remember there was the brand, what was the brand? It's a popular streetwear brand, Tricko, where they went to China and did the China factory content, and the factories were pretty dark, not the kind of factories we go to. And they were making the content, and people were commenting, like, bro went to the sweatshop. But hey, they're showing the reality of it, so I will at least give them kudos to that. But it was an interesting microcosm in that influencer, new-age streetwear brand moment where you're actually seeing what that looks like. But you need to know what your experience is and show it and prove it. And even that learning experience, maybe they moved on to nicer factories now, right? But give people the full resolve. If you're selling 100% cashmere, explain it. Don't make them feel ripped off if you told them it was better than it is, and don't undersell it if it's not good enough. You read the descriptions of some of the products I have that I'm calling out specifically. This is going to be one of the most intense things you've ever worn. This amount of weight, this texture is a feeling that is completely different than what you wear before and has this upside and this downside. This is the area to explain that in text and in video. And most of all, you have to feel it. You have to give a shit. We had this whole era. Look, I'm just as much a part of the problem as anybody. I've encouraged thousands and thousands of people to make brands. I was tallying the other day DMs of people that said they've actually made brands. There's 176 I could find. Think about all the ones beyond that. We're encouraging people to start that entrepreneurial journey, to begin working on that. Now there's going to be levels of those people. There's people that did it because they can make money, that did it because they thought it would be cool, that did it because other people were doing it, and maybe they find a way there. But for some of them, maybe they're making crappy products. All the difference between where you're at there and the next level that you can be proud of is just giving a shit. It's just really caring about everything, and probably caring about it over the economics. Because when you really give a shit about anything, whether it's your content, whether it's a product, whether it's the things you choose to consume, people feel it. A convoluted topic, but one I have a lot of thoughts on. I appreciate y'all bearing through it with me. I have a really solid video coming up about pricing, archetypes, personas, the really in-depth tactical marketing I know you guys love. So that is coming shortly. Examples, questions, thoughts on the institution of everything in these brands, there's a lot of nuanced topics here. Definitely drop below and I'll chime in on all of them. As always, I appreciate y'all watching, and I hope it inspires you to think a bit about how you consume. I just want to have a beverage when I sit here and talk for 45 minutes but people are assuming commerce and anything even minorly influencer related and they're probably right to do so even if wrong in that scenario and if people are doing this if younger entrepreneurs or creatives are doing any of these things is that better than these ivory tower companies making all this money and not paying creatives that that's the life that we were in the previous 30 years so I don't look back and look at what happened previously as better than this whatsoever this is the age where if you're a creative person you have more opportunity to make money related to doing something you love you have more of an upside to make total money overall than any time in history this is the best time for you ever if you don't believe that and you're worried about all the other things happening in the world and this or that they've gotten to you I'm going to end this with what do brands learn from this what do you need to do in this era so I think you have to show it because whether you're made in Italy or made in China you need to show it one way or the other if you're made in Italy show the artisanship triple down show that it is actual artisan people making this and it is not a bunch of migrants in a factory with the wheels falling off prove it and if you're making in China don't be afraid of it I made those gorgeous luxury fermat bags in China and silk scarves at a quality level any luxury brand from the highest end Chinese factories and I've shown those factories and content and I'm proud of representing that but I can also show it because I remember there was the brand what was the brand it's like a popular streetwear brand Tricko where they went to China and did the China factory content and the factories were like pretty dark not the kind of factories we go to and they were making the content and people were kind of commenting like you know like bro went to the sweatshop but like hey they're showing the reality of it so I will at least give them kudos to that but it was an interesting like microcosm in that influencer like new age streetwear brand moment where you're actually seeing what that looks like but you need to know what your experience is and show it and prove it and even that learning experience like maybe they moved on to nicer factories now right but give people the full resolve if you're selling 100% cashmere explain it don't make them feel ripped off if you told them it was better than it is and don't undersell it if it's not good enough you read the descriptions of some of the products I have that I'm calling out specifically this is going to be one of the most intense things you've ever worn this amount of weight this texture is a feeling that like is completely different than what you wear before and has this upside and this downside this is the area to explain that in text and in video and most of all you have to feel it you have to give a shit we had this whole era look I'm just as much a part of the problem as anybody I've encouraged thousands and thousands of people to make brands I was tallying the other day DMs of people that said they've actually made brands there's 176 I could find think about all the ones beyond that we're encouraging people to start that entrepreneurial journey to begin working on that now there's going to be levels of those people there's people that did it because they can make money that did it because they thought it would be cool that did it because other people were doing it and maybe they find a way there but for some of them maybe they're making like kind of crappy products all the difference between where you're at there and the next level that you can be proud of is just giving a shit it's just really caring about everything and probably caring about it over the economics because when you really give a shit about anything whether it's your content whether it's a product whether it's the things you choose to consume people feel it a convoluted topic but one I have a lot of thoughts on I appreciate y'all bearing through it with me I have a really solid video coming up about pricing archetypes personas like the really in-depth tactical marketing I know you guys love so that is coming shortly examples questions thoughts on the institution of everything in these brands there's a lot of nuanced topics here definitely drop below and I'll chime in on all of them as always I appreciate y'all watching and I hope it inspires you to think a bit about how you consume