[Unedited Transcript]
Paul Ford: [00:00:00] Richard,
Rich Ziade: Paul, it’s Labor Day. You laboring?
Paul Ford: I’m laboring. We’ll be out tomorrow morning. It won’t be Labor Day anymore, but our labor is never done.
Rich Ziade: I don’t know if anyone works anymore anyway.
Paul Ford: I don’t even want to have that conversation, but I definitely do notice when I ride my bike over to your office, and I’ve been working in the morning, an unbelievable number of people are out walking their dogs, talking on their phones. I’ve 600 years. And I never saw anything quite like what’s going on right now.
Like I feel like this is, it’s the fall of Rome and they’re, you know, we’re just kind of like hanging out, walking our dogs, talking about stuff on social media. But that’s not what,
Rich Ziade: on the phone?
Paul Ford: dogs are on the phone. Actually, they are. They’re on, uh, they have little collars that dial home. Um,
Rich Ziade: more initiative than the owners these days.
Paul Ford: Oh God, yeah. I respect the dogs.
Look. Um, hold on, hold on. I’ve become conservative [00:01:00] my old age. It is a little weird. It is a weird, like, as someone who just, like, reads the vibes, I’m like, is anyone working? But I am, because I come over to the office and we work, damn it.
Rich Ziade: You do?
Paul Ford: So look, we’re doing a podcast and I have a topic. You ready for the topic?
Rich Ziade: I am.
Paul Ford: I thought about this over at Liberty Weekend.
Rich Ziade: Uh huh.
Paul Ford: Personal brands are dead.
Rich Ziade: Whoa. Um. Okay, this is Paul Ford talking. Very well recognized personal brand. First off, define personal brand.
Paul Ford: Gladly. Um, a personal brand is So this was a real concept that took flight in the 90s, and it was the idea that instead of working for a company [00:02:00] and being associated with the company’s brand, that you would identify yourself as an expert, as a, as someone who has value and expertise, and you would go out into the world and you would Say I am the expert.
You should pay me money. I am my own business. I am my own company. Uh, pay me to advise you on how to build websites. Pay me to advise you on marketing. Pay me. So the real function, there are all sorts of like, obviously celebrities have personal brands and, and small,
Rich Ziade: Athletes.
Paul Ford: Or even like carpenters, right?
Like people who have small businesses that they run solo. But the idea, this was sort of like essentially. You’re going to be the consultant. You will be the one person consulting firm. You’ll be known as the expert. Um, and so you ended up with, uh, people who were online in the early days who would get out there and talk about like Windows or Android or, or, you know, they’d become.
You know, and there was always a lot of like future of work. They [00:03:00] gave a lot of conference talks
Rich Ziade: hmm. A lot of tips in threads in Twitter, on Twitter or whatever. It’s like, let me tell you the five things you need to do to kickstart your blurb a blurb.
Paul Ford: that is exactly right. That’s exactly right And so like and I frankly I read that stuff in the 90s in Fast Company magazine on paper And I was like, well, that’s I guess what I got to do because I was I was seeing myself as a writer Not just for magazines and stuff. That was out of my reach at the time I wanted to be a freelance copywriter and you know, write that wrote write the brochures And so, uh, so that obviously kind of lined up like I’m in marketing and so on and so forth.
So I’m going to build my personal brand. And then I started my website and, you know, sort of like, and it kind of coincided
Rich Ziade: A personal website. Not a business. Yeah.
Paul Ford: And it coincided with a lot of early internet stuff, this concept. So like, I’m going to go out there and I’m going to, and essentially it was like, you know, I’m building my identity as an expert.
I’m accessible. People can reach out to me [00:04:00] and then people will give me money. And, uh, and it will all work out. I will be a one person conglomerate. That was, you know, kind of, and that was seen as a radical idea. It was like, Oh my God, you’re going to be like a rockstar, but of business. Like it was, Whoa.
Rich Ziade: look the the rise of the internet in the 90s was Was this bizarre moment where? Storefront real estate became free
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: could actually, like how else did you find out about, you know, a set of speakers or what tire to buy for your car? It was just brute force marketing on TV and in magazines
Paul Ford: Oh, no. You remember you’d get the daily news and there’d be like the PC Richards ad,
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah, and then all of a sudden if you you just go on, you know GoDaddy and then you had a domain name and then or just sign up to one of the platforms and here I am Hello world
Paul Ford: I’m on, you know, whatever on YouTube on whatever. And, uh, [00:05:00] and so, uh. I don’t think that works anymore. I’ve been thinking about it. Like if I was to advise, because I still get asked, I’m like, Hey, how do I build my personal brand? Or like, you know, every now and then in the course of my career, like some CEO would take me aside and be like, I’m interested in working with your agency.
But my real question for you is how do I get published in Wired Magazine? I’ll tell you what, I love that conversation. Always very comfortable because anyways, you know, early days, my answer,
Rich Ziade: about you eat shit for 30 years and then finally get there.
Paul Ford: days, my answer was like, well, you know, really think, you know, like work your thoughts through and what are you passionate about?
And later days, as I became more seasoned, my answer was more like, uh, sit in a room for 20 years and never ask that question again. Right? Like, it’s just like, and then they’d laugh, right? They’d laugh. They’d be like, all right, all right. Okay. Like it is okay to tell people that something is too hard for them to do unless it’s the only thing they want to do.[00:06:00]
Rich Ziade: Hahaha. But, uh, let me throw some, let me. Push back here. Like there are people with like all they do is is make cakes on tik tok and they’ve got three million Followers, I don’t think
Paul Ford: Absolutely. They are. No,
Rich Ziade: aren’t those personal brands,
Paul Ford: Those are, those are, and now we call them influencers, right? So now we have these influencers who are doing these things. But I would argue the goal of the personal brand and the idea was that you would have economic power separate from other giant platforms and you would have control over your own economic destiny.
So a good example would be, I’m a good example. I had a personal brand associated as a real. thinker, writer about technology. You came to me and said, let’s start an agency. I had lots of good practical skills, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the reasons you were doing that was, Hey, Paul can speak at a certain scale to a large audience, you know, and
Rich Ziade: of it.
Paul Ford: yeah, and I, at that point, I was mature in enough in my understanding of myself to know that there was real [00:07:00] value there that I wasn’t going to be exploited.
It was going to be on my terms, but, and so we talked about that and negotiated where the limits were. And there are certain things that, you know, I’m just never going to do to sell myself. And there are certain things I will.
Rich Ziade: Yeah,
Paul Ford: we’re doing it with a board right now. And so like with our, with our product, the sponsor of this podcast.
And so, so that, but the whole point was like, okay, Paul, you’ve been out in the world, you’re seeing a lot of, a lot of money and a lot of resources flow through you.
Rich Ziade: mm,
Paul Ford: you start an agency so that you have control over your own destiny? And then maybe you can help other people lift up their identities and personal brands.
That was the goal.
Rich Ziade: yeah, most people do not think that.
Paul Ford: No, but this
Rich Ziade: wait, how do I get my piece?
Paul Ford: No, but this was the personal brand deal of the nineties.
Rich Ziade: Yes, it was, it
Paul Ford: going to
Rich Ziade: and, and,
Paul Ford: Gary Vaynerchuk is like the purest example. I’m going to sell wine online and now I’m going to start VaynerMedia and it’s going to be absolutely enormous. [00:08:00] And most people, people might roll their eyes at it here and there, but it’s an economic powerhouse.
Rich Ziade: I, I have not had a job for a very, very long time, like, as an employee with a W 2 from someone else. Like, it’s just, it’s not really my makeup, right? And, I was, uh, I came out of law school, and for years, I was sort of this kind of, like, mercenary. Like, I would just hop from place to place, and I did well.
I figured out a way… to make a living by being effectively a freelance consultant, um, for years. And I ended up down in Atlanta and I was doing work for, uh, Georgia Tech, the Georgia Tech Research Institute at the time. Then something happened. Then a friend, uh, who I’d worked with in the past called me up and said, I need your help up in New York. [00:09:00] And I was like, do you want my personal help? And he’s like, yes. And he was working for a very large, like global conglomerate professional, uh, publisher, publisher of medical information. Uh, and, and at that point I was like, okay, good for me. Personal BA brand, uh, is working except there’s one of me. My reputation is tied to my name and, uh, I have to either quit Georgia Tech and go up and do it, or tell him, I’m sorry, I can’t help you, I’m in Atlanta working for Georgia Tech.
And that was the end of that. And it
Paul Ford: you quit, you quit Georgia Tech. That’s what you’re
Rich Ziade: I, well, I said, then I sat down and I was alone in a corporate apartment down in Atlanta, and I sat down and wrote a one page memo. And I said, the only way I’m going to quit and go up to New York is if my friend agrees to hire [00:10:00] my agency, which didn’t exist yet.
Paul Ford: You’re going to create a business entity and so
Rich Ziade: I was going to create a business entity because I can’t scale.
I think the thing that people run into when they think they’re building a brand, you can build a brand, but it is a one lane highway. Highway and it is bottlenecked because it is just you and your goodwill and your reputation is tied to you as an individual
Paul Ford: real. I have a friend, you know him too, who works in online advertising. He is the best guy for a certain kind of online advertising. Good guy, ethical guy, creative, good worker, classic agency guy. And, um, he didn’t want to scale. He wanted a lifestyle business. He moved to a city where he could do really well.
And he lives a great life, but
Rich Ziade: And he’s ha and he but he’s still he is a solo mercenary you
Paul Ford: works with, he works with, you know, a rotating cast of characters, but yes, essentially, like, there is no business, there’s no office, there’s no virtual office, it’s just he, [00:11:00] he does the work that he’s asked to
Rich Ziade: He’s built a healthy Rolodex of people who rely on him, who mill around and who move around jobs. They’re like, Oh, I was here. Now I’m there. I’m going to call Joe back, whatever his name is. And then off you go. And that’s something you can do. I think the, the mistake people make is that they view the internet as mass marketing, which it kind of is
Paul Ford: It can be.
Rich Ziade: you ever see like the, the like.
The five second video that blew up that they didn’t expect to blow up. And then the first comment in the thread is like, Hey, if you like this, you should follow me. Cause I’m actually clever in other ways
Paul Ford: Yeah, well, no, it’s the, um, check out my SoundCloud is the archetypal.
Rich Ziade: it’s like, holy moly, I just got a lot of traffic, right? I got a lot of attention. The problem with that is if you’re going to do that and you sometimes it, it pops.
Some people are very clever on the internet and they get hundreds of thousands of people to see them. The problem with that is your funnel still narrows down to one [00:12:00] lousy lane. And if that is, if you are an expert in some field or, you know, you think you’re a great freelancer, you’re going to find out very, very quickly that you can’t just.
pretend like there are five lanes, it doesn’t work. You have to essentially let your personal brand die and something else that seems immortal, i. e. a limited liability corporation or a C Corp has to come to life.
Paul Ford: I think, you know, listening to you talk about the Georgia Tech stuff, and I think this is real, there were different frameworks for doing this. So framework one, I think you, you were, you’d been a lawyer and you were like, yes, people pay for consulting services. And when you want to do more, you create a law firm.
And I think like you, you had these patterns in your head that you’d seen up close where you’re like, I’m going to apply this over here in technology world.
Rich Ziade: Yes. Yes. Yes. That’s right. It was, it was, it was the classic, you know, Um, Flannery, Flannery, [00:13:00] Flannery? What’s that? What’s that? That name? Flarity?
Paul Ford: let’s, yeah, maybe what’s, what are we talking about?
Rich Ziade: It’s like, I just wanted to say like, you know, like Williams, Williams and sons,
Paul Ford: oh, oh, yeah,
Rich Ziade: off as a law firm of like me and my son decided to also go to law school.
Paul Ford: now it’s like 30, 000 people and
Rich Ziade: And it’s like 30, yeah, I mean, they all have the name, right? Skadden Arps, right? Like Ogilvy Mathers, and these are people who started
Paul Ford: people who don’t know is an ad agency, right? So yeah, your name’s on the door. So there are different models for how I’m going to scale. One is I might start a media property. I’ll be the editor and I’ll get other people to write and we’ll publish.
That used to work that, that the market isn’t there. One is I’ll start an agency. Clients will come to me because they know my creative brand and I will have other people do the work. That one’s, that one still works, but you need the profile. Um, one is I will just provide professional services under a shingle and we’ll, you know, we’ll market and brand that and so on and [00:14:00] so forth.
So that’s personal brand, scaling the personal brand. What I think has happened now, and this is what I wanted to talk about, is we have, we’ve gone from the personal brand, which is I am going to use my own identity. Kind of, I’m going to sell out a little bit, but I’m going to do it on my own terms, and then I’m going to grow something.
And instead, what’s happened is we have the influencer instead. And I think that it’s a very blurry line between the two, but I would, I want to characterize the influencer differently. This is the person who is saying, I’m going to tell you about the thing. I will be the expert. They’re still communicating it.
They have much greater reach than they used to. They can reach millions of people. You can be, you can do your consulting. You can show people new gadgets and so on. And you can get millions. of people to pay attention to
Rich Ziade: Mm
Paul Ford: But I think that it’s harder to turn it into an actual living and even harder to scale it past that than ever before, because you’re on these platforms like, like YouTube or Tik Tok, where most of the value and the money accrues back [00:15:00] to the platform.
They aren’t interested in you bootstrapping your business and bootstrapping a future for yourself because there’s always an infinite supply of more content coming down the pipeline.
Rich Ziade: Yes, I have a great cautionary tale for you. And it may be incorrect, because maybe she blew up. I don’t know. I’d rather not say her name, because I’m drawing some conclusions here. Um, she has, let me pull up the number, 2. 57 million subscribers on YouTube.
Paul Ford: okay.
Rich Ziade: She is a, like, hardcore workout. Uh, trainer, essentially, personal trainer type, who makes these pretty well produced workout videos for
Paul Ford: hmm. Mm hmm.
Rich Ziade: had, she’s put up 639 videos on YouTube, and just killing it.
Every time she put a video up, it would get millions of views, and also they’re very evergreen. Like, if you want 30 minutes of, like, core exercise, five years from now, it still plays, right? So, it’s [00:16:00] amazing,
Paul Ford: just record in 4k, right? Like it’s that’s all you got to do.
Rich Ziade: exactly. So, about a year ago, she stopped. And she, she, she put out this video of a kind of like goodbye and I’ll be back soon with some exciting news,
Paul Ford: Mmm,
Rich Ziade: And then she comes back out with what? A full blown app. She left YouTube. She comes out with an app.
Paul Ford: bad advice.
Rich Ziade: She invested in the app, like she invested in building a full blown workout app. And look, it looks pretty good. It’s available on iOS and Android.
Paul Ford: that email from that team that one night and you know, they’re like we know what to do here We’re gonna help you get rich.
Rich Ziade: We’re gonna help you get rich, right? And, and… I don’t know how it’s doing. I, but I’m gonna go ahead and draw a conclusion that she was making a [00:17:00] lot of money on YouTube.
Paul Ford: Mm hmm.
Rich Ziade: she probably invested a lot of money in launching this app. And the app looks pro, like it looks good. And my guess is you, it’s nowhere near.
The level of engagement that she was getting on, on, on YouTube. Like I, this is so hard to pull off because you’re essentially saying, I don’t care about cellular networks. I’m going to start my own cellular network that lets me keep all the money. So nobody else gets any
Paul Ford: this is the problem, right? Which is that how she got to a certain scale And then it felt absolutely necessary to skip a bunch of steps to get to the next level, because there was no way for someone who’s got 2. 5 million followers to be like, you know what, I’m going to open up a small gym in my hometown, and I’m going to make 24, 000 the first year if I’m lucky,
Rich Ziade: Yeah. Here’s what I don’t understand though, Paul. She’s got, [00:18:00] let me see the number of, yeah, 2. 57 million subscribers. And, and, here’s what I, I’m not getting. Uh, I, I don’t know why she didn’t put, like, why doesn’t she promote the hell? Uh, uh, maybe you’re not allowed to on YouTube? Like,
Paul Ford: you can do… You can do anything. You can have paid promotion. It all works.
Rich Ziade: okay.
Cause she put out, like, a, finally the next chapter video, which is kind of a teaser. Like, why wouldn’t you you have 2. 57 million subscribers, like why wouldn’t that person
Paul Ford: Look, I’ve, you’ve shown her to me. She’s doing fine. She looks great. Everybody’s okay. Right? She’s, she’s, she’s got better, better core strength than, than, even, than, definitely than I do, and even better than you.
Rich Ziade: man. I she once ended a workout. She’s like now we’ll do a hundred burpes I was already
Paul Ford: and you just sat and sobbed. Yeah, yeah. No, I
Rich Ziade: I watched her. I watched it like it was the Godfather. I just watched her do the hundred burpees. As if she was, like, eating a bowl of, [00:19:00] like, raspberries. It was kind of frustrating to watch.
Paul Ford: it’s terrifying to see what some humans can do with their bodies, right? What’s the advice here, Paul? Like, this, you’re right. actually are renting space. The analogy I like to use, you are renting space.
this goes back to our, our classic or advice, which is there are no shortcuts, right? So like I built my personal brand, God bless me. I hate using that term, um, over 20 years and I did it because I was obsessed with a problem space. And the problem space was how to put things on webpages, right?
I just, and I thought that we, more people should know how, and I wanted to talk about and so on. So I, Um, you know, and you and I were launching our new product. Now, I just called you before we started this conversation. We had a 15 minute conversation in which I said, I think I can tell the story of tags in our app using this technology, like this idea, right?
And like, this is [00:20:00] just my brain. I need to tell stories about technology to feel okay. And that is who I am. God bless. Now, so if you have that thing, what’s tricky is that. And I saw this in my own career, and this happens to everyone. You’re going to lean in, you’re going to change the world. You’re going to become an influencer.
And the reality is probably in about a year, if you work really hard at it, you can get an enormous amount of attention, more attention than you’ve ever had in your life.
Rich Ziade: Sure.
Paul Ford: That attention has no value.
Rich Ziade: Hmm,
Paul Ford: I’ve been there. It has no value. The feedback from people telling you they’re smart or they’d like to collaborate or whatever, you have to treat it with tremendous, it’s tremendously dangerous.
Maybe one out of a hundred and fifty or one out of two hundred interactions is, is, is valuable. And I don’t just mean in terms of money. I mean in terms of people who will sort of take you seriously, engage with you, and aren’t just trying to get something themselves. And you can’t, you don’t have the tools to discriminate early days.
You just, you’re just getting signal for the first time in your
Rich Ziade: also, it’s, it’s [00:21:00] exciting and validating, like people are paying attention to you. Wow. That’s so nice.
Paul Ford: I, I, I think it comes back to actually archetypal advice, which is what you were saying earlier and so on. There’s one path to success. It is not the apps. It is not expanding to ever another hundred million. Viewers or to, or to the first 50,000, it is building something that probably looks like a traditional business with employees who you are also helping along.
They might want to be influencers or, um, personal brands themselves. And so get out of their way when it’s time, but they need to learn too. And, um, there’s no escape. There’s no escape from that structure. And everybody’s always looking for the escape hatch. And every five, 10 years you realize that. NFTs collapse or crypto collapses or AI will hollow out or whatever and it’ll come back to I started a limited liability corporation in Delaware.
We’re going to be very ethical [00:22:00] and we’re going to do these three things and I have to put up a website and I’m going to keep using my audience to bring attention to the limited liability corporation and then we’re going to try to grow from there using principles that would be utterly familiar 14th century merchant of silk in Florence.
Rich Ziade: look man The I think you said it the attention isn’t the endgame. It is really kind of the beginning
Paul Ford: But it feels like the end game. And that’s the danger of that whole archetype. Yeah. Whole, that whole personal brand influencer thing. You cannot eat attention. And it’s very confusing because it feels like you can.
Rich Ziade: that’s right That’s right And and how you translate that may mean you’re renting warehouse space to sell your innovative like pottery
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: And that sucks because you know what happens? They break when UPS sends them and then there’s angry customers and that is [00:23:00] Actually the endgame that
Paul Ford: but those transactions,
Rich Ziade: sent me my tracking number I need my pot
Paul Ford: transactions have a margin that is not approaching zero.
Rich Ziade: That’s right, that’s the work
Paul Ford: the platform economics approach zero in the interest of the creators. Right. And, and they will continue to, no matter what you do. Everyone says they’re going to pay you a little extra and they’re not. They’re going to give you 0. 00001%. You see it with Spotify.
You see it with, they’re just not going to change you. And so what is the boring business? You could go get those books that are like starting your business. They have names like that, like
Rich Ziade: That’s where the real, you know, we can bring this full circle. So it looks like we actually had a thoughtful approach to this entire
Paul Ford: Thank God.
Rich Ziade: Um, the real work we were talking about is anyone working in dogs on cell phones? When we started this, the real work. Is that chunk underneath the attention [00:24:00] that you have to try to turn into money, whether you decided you’re selling hats or iPhone cases or a subscription to X, Y, or Z.
Like, I admire this person. I hope she’s doing well with her app, but boy is it hard and it’s a grind.
Paul Ford: you what, you know what, you know what too. It just feels terrible when you are motivated and excited to connect with millions of people, and now you have to charge them money and they’re upset about that. It feels because it’s personal. It’s like everything that is personal that you are
Rich Ziade: thought you loved me. I thought you loved me. Why are you giving me two stars?
Paul Ford: now reduced to gross transactions and awful emails. It’s, and it feels bad and it feels like selling out and so on. God, I wish I could find a way to magically put dust over influencers. Like, like, you know, Google could be generous, you know, it could say like, instead of for the shareholders, we’re going to be for the people who make all the content that keeps us surviving.
They’re not, yeah, you’re laughing, right? You’re like, cause that’s, that that’s essentially communism. We’re not going to do that [00:25:00] right now. So that, that’s it. My advice is be very mindful of your personal brand. Be very mindful of your influencer hood. If you’re thinking of leaning in that way. Look for the real business that you’re going to build that looks like an old school business.
Rich Ziade: I you know, I’m gonna say a few more words if you are doing well And you are scaling and you are going from like Williams to Williams and Williams and Sons
Paul Ford: hmm. Mm
Rich Ziade: Then you’re gonna start thinking about things like HR and operations and accounts receivable and why you haven’t been paid in 40 days That is life.
That is most businesses. That is the boring stuff and that hasn’t changed man Even with the internet that has not changed.
Paul Ford: but you know what else is real is that the margins necessary to support that infrastructure are far and above what Patreon can cover.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, absolutely
Paul Ford: right, so this, that, there’s that, there’s like a, it’s kind of an order of magnitude change where like you actually need a lot of money to get to the next thing.
And that, that chasm is [00:26:00] hard,
Rich Ziade: it is hard.
Paul Ford: but you know, also make your fricking YouTube videos. I’m making some right now to talk about our product. I’m learning Camtasia studio, not an endorsement, uh,
Rich Ziade: I’ll endorse it. I mean, we’re not paid to endorse it, but it’s very good. Uh, if you want to make pro level, like, screen recording videos for your product,
Paul Ford: it will turn your mouse cursor into an ice cream cone.
Rich Ziade: Bingo. Yeah, you want to make money? That’s how you make money.
Paul Ford: That is real. The Camtasia. No, let’s be, before we go, when you, when you go to Camtasia to buy a license, it’s a hard sell on the web, like 1999. Like you’re expecting a monkey to run across the screen.
Rich Ziade: Oh, no. I opened my door. There was a Camtasia representative waiting for me on my stoop.
Paul Ford: And then you get the actual software and it does some low level Mac screen recording stuff that you know is like impossible.
Rich Ziade: No, no, no. These are people that I’m glad are doing this and not creating spyware for China.
Paul Ford: Oh, they could easily get into our [00:27:00] computer at any time. Yeah. These people know what’s up. And, um, and so yeah, good old Camtasia studios. So look for some screencasts. Rich, this, this podcast is brought to
Rich Ziade: not our sponsor, is it, Paul? Who is our sponsor,
Paul Ford: a board, a board. com. And you know, what’s amazing about a board. com is you can go there right now and you can sign up and use it.
It’s a tool for organizing, collecting everything on the internet and all your data. Put it all in there. Uh, put it into folders, tag it. You don’t even know you’re organizing it. We just got a nice write up from the verge, um, in one of their newsletters saying, you know, like you don’t even realize essentially that you’re using this thing.
Just kind of, that’s the highest praise.
Rich Ziade: You could spend 20 minutes and it’s a wall of beautiful visual cards. It’s actually kind of
Paul Ford: Whatever you want to organize. I’m using it right now to organize the TV shows that my family wants to watch because we fight so much about the TV shows.
Rich Ziade: Sounds like there are underlying issues there, but that’s not what this podcast is about.
Paul Ford: do that. We’ll do another podcast. Um, all right. So
Rich Ziade: Aboard. com.
Paul Ford: that’s right. And check us [00:28:00] out on Ziade Ford on Twitter, um, or X or whatever the hell it’s called this week. Check us out. Uh, you know, you know how to get to us and then send an email to hello at ziadeford. com if you have any questions. All right, Rich, it’s Labor Day.
Let’s get back to work.
Rich Ziade: Let’s work.
Paul Ford: I don’t think that’s what it’s for, but what the hell?