 Okay. My guest today is Professor John Zhang. He is a Wharton professor, but more importantly, he is one of the world preeminent experts on pricing stuff. He's got two PhDs. How about that? You buy one, get one free thing, get one free. But no, he teaches at Wharton, which is obviously one of the most respected business schools. And his book, Smart Pricing, is something that I've been recommending for years. It's on my tidalopiz.com slash books. It's in my top 50 books everybody should read. So we're going to just have a little talk right before we got on camera. Let's start there because it's controversial. Will Durant, the famous writer, said that nations are born stoic and die epicurean. So they're born hardworking and they die when they party too much. You're also an expert on China. So we were talking about how China is really how you see China growing. Forbes just this year listed said that China has surpassed the net worth of the United States. There are more billionaires in China than in the US. Yeah. So when you go back and forth to China, what do you see as the main difference that the US and other countries are going to have to do to keep up with China? That's really a very good question, Tai. I think that before I answer your question, I do want to make a couple of points. Number one, that in fact that Tai has been very, very impressive to me. And not only he's a good looking and also really very thoughtful. And he looks really good on the video. And in fact, if you meet with him in person, he looks better. I like that. The one thing I really feel good about you is the fact that and you really have so much energy. You're constantly doing your thinking. You constantly want to do something. You really want to change the world. You want to somehow that impact on all the people around you. I think that's kind of a leader that I will be looking for for sure. So I think that this trip to Puerto Rico, if nothing else, I think that's one dimension. I really see that in person. That's really not something that you can see on video. I hope that people out there, you realize that with this leader, you're going somewhere. So I think that's the first point I want to make. The second point I want to make is that I think you really have a very, very good eye and seeing the value of the book that we wrote 10 years ago. And this book, I would have to say that my co-author and Raju, and we put our, and basically that all the wisdom into the book. And the present book is very different from the leadership book. Leadership book, you could have every week, you have a new fashion, new fact, and the people come up with all kinds of different ideas in terms of what do you need to do to be a good leader and so on and so forth. But that changes. Remember that at one point, Jack Welch was such a great leader and every company should do whatever Jack Welch does and make the company as big as possible and make it as comprehensive as possible and so on and so forth. Now people realize that that's not the right way to do it. But in pricing, in fact, you're going to see that 10 years ago what we said still works today. By the way, the China had just translated this book once again. They translated it twice. They actually published this book in the end of the December and it's called Innovative Pricing. Basically they realized that what we put in there is really the science. Science doesn't expire just because time goes by. So I think in that sense that you really have a very good eye. I really appreciate the fact that you recommend everybody to read the book. You really feel yourself. Learn something from the book. I think that's something that I feel so good about. And in terms of the China and the US, I would have to say that when I first came to US in 1980s, at a time that I noticed that everything in US is done and faster and better. People work so much harder. Because you can easily just take a photo, take a picture of what people do when they dig a ditch in US versus what people do in China when they dig a ditch. And you can look at how the police do their work in this country. And then you can look at how the China did work. At a time, my distinct impression was that US was doing everything better. There is no reason why US is number one in the world. But I have to say that sadly today if you do the comparison because I go to China before the pandemic, probably like 10 times a year, I mean fly back and forth very frequently. Now you realize that in fact that in US basically everything that the US is doing is so much slower. You could have a road that blocked for a whole year, never get repaired. But in China within a couple of months everything is paved over. I mean there is just that kind of difference. So what does it mean? Because Americans, I'm American and we think we have this governmental system. It's not central control like a China, like a Soviet Union used to have. And so we consider our system more efficient. But like you see also you see TikTok pretty much flying past Instagram and Snapchat. And that's a Chinese company in five years almost usurping Facebook and Instagram. So what's the cause? Is it that people are just more hungry in China? Is the government changing in China? Or is it more a factor that American government is going downhill? Taxation? Is it maybe also that because of virtual work now you don't have to come to America so America can't capture as much of the talent in the world. People just stay in Sweden and they build Klarna and they stay in Canada and they build you know shop fire, Ireland, Stripe. And so that there's not the competitive advantage we got as Americans from all that immigration. And now America has become pretty anti-immigration, which may we may have shot ourselves in the foot. What do you think is the causation of this rise of China? Well I think before 1980s when I was in China and I remember I was a farmer in fact that in the countryside essentially that and we worked together and in fact that regardless whether you work hard or you don't work hard in the end that you're going to get more or less the same thing. And people really did not have the freedom to do the things that they want to do. There is no way that you can actualize your talent. I remember that for the production brigade for instance if we have to weed the weeds and basically we weed the field and then basically the way we do it is we all line it up. We all move at the same speed. You can imagine that kind of situation that if you move too fast I'm going to be mad about you. Why I want to work so hard. And on the other hand if you work too slow that's also going to be a problem because at the end of the year you probably have nothing to eat. So what happened is that everybody will follow the production leader. Let's say Ty is the leader in the field and how fast that he works really determines how fast we would work. But everybody actually knows that. Then we would select the most elderly person to be the leader. You can imagine that that kind of system doesn't really encourage the individual initiatives, the creativity and a lot of different things. Which by the way, not to interrupt you, that's a pricing of sorts. People don't think about price. When we talk about pricing we don't just mean charge $50 at Pier 1 for a curtain. We're talking about how you meter out economic rewards. In that case whoever your leader is is the economy of the field. Right. So people did not have the right incentives. There's absolutely no question. And then you have the economic reform and people are allowed to do all kinds of different things. And you can get rich first and all those kinds of incentives. Because of that of course the people really put their creativity at work. And then all of a sudden you have an explosion of creativity. And they know that in fact if they work a little bit harder and they can provide more for their family. And in fact for the first time in history, in fact the Chinese people have the freedom and to show people that I have the creativity. I have actually the energy. So you allow people to run as fast as you can and get to the objective as fast as you can. And I think that really has motivated a lot of people to work really hard in a very creative way and then move the whole society forward very quickly. But if you look at the U.S. of course that the U.S. has gone through that process. If you go back to the 1920s and 30s and then and it's a fair game. Right. So it's a free competition. Everybody just put in their bit and see what and how in fact that your fortune is going to change. Okay. But today of course that you look at everything. Okay. You look at the road building and you have a lot of safety regulations. Right. And obviously that and they're all kind of a procedure that put in place that there's certain things you can do and cannot do. Right. And even if you dig a ditch, you probably have a five people that just do the flagging. Right. The cars don't go around and so on. And one person doing the digging. Yeah. But in China, everybody's doing digging. Okay. So of course that because the regulation America somebody falls in the holes. There's a lawsuit. So everybody is China as litigious as America? No, not yet. No one is litigious. I don't think that that you would say China is one of those countries that really care a whole lot about law. Okay. There is law. I mean, there is no question. Okay. But the law of course that is not as rigorous as in U.S. Right. Okay. If you really sort of are in the position of power and if you know what to do and you can always get around it. Yeah. And in fact, that that's a test. Yeah. And whether you really have made it or not, if you have made it and you're above the law, if you're not, if you have not made it, of course, you're subject to the law. Yeah. Yeah. So I think in that sense, I think that probably is not wrong. Okay. So don't pass the information around. Okay. Don't pass. Now let's switch subjects for a second. I want to come back to the China thing, but I agree. You know, I mean, America has become over-regulated. Elon Musk had a $3 million lawsuit against him by an employee in California. He lost and then the judge added 130 punitive damages. The next day Elon Musk took Tesla out of California and put it in Texas. I don't know if that's related, but they probably are a little bit, even all. So the book smart pricing, which I've been recommending is I own a lot of retail brands. I talk to Professor Zhang all the time about, you know, how do we price things at Pier One in Steinmark and Ralph and Russo. We have different Ralph and Russo is almost the most expensive clothing in the world. It's a brand that I bought in Pier One is Home Goods, you know, huge brands, Radio Shack, these different ones. And one of the chapters in your book that I found so interesting, I think it's the second or third chapter, is that there's only really four levers you can pull in business. First one is gross revenue, top-line revenue. You try to get that up. If you want to make more money, that's where a lot of people go. Secondly, you can focus on your fixed costs, the cost of your rent, the cost of your employees. Third variable cost, the cost of whatever you're selling. If you're selling a couch, you can try to negotiate the cost of the couch down. And then there's a fourth one, which is optimizing your pricing, but everybody I meet as entrepreneurs, they mostly talk to me about gross revenue. Sometimes I'll talk about profit, but I mean, by the way, these four levers are what create profit. But so people go, I want to make more money, need my gross revenue, or, hey, I figured out a way to cut my costs, or hey, I can deliver the product for cheaper. But in your book, you have this graph and it shows that that's almost exactly backwards, depending on your industry. So I'm in retail, e-commerce. In your book, it's like, if you can optimize pricing by 1%, you can get a 20% swing in your profit. And then the next one is variable costs, negotiating that. And like 1% optimization gets you 15 or something like that. Fixed costs gets you like 1% optimization gets you like 5% increase. And top line is teeny. Top line, in fact, you can often go broke focused on the top line. So let's talk about that for a second, because I've had some questions when I explain that to people and I've got the source right here, the co-author. When you say optimizing your pricing strategy by 1%, can give you a 20% lift in profitability. Is it as simple as saying, make one little tweak and you see people's net income go up by 20% in an industry like retail? Right. So it may not be as simple as that, but certainly one of the things that we have found. I personally, I only do the pricing research. I only teach pricing and also I only do pricing consulting. And over the years, of course, that we cover all kinds of different industries and work with a large number of executives who have a responsibility for revenues. And what we found was basically that most companies actually pay a lot of attention to value creation. So they work with the employees, in part of the employees that reduce the production cost and make sure that you create the most valuable product you can put out there in the marketplace. But when it comes to the value capture and the fact that you have to set the price to capture part of the value so that you as a firm can be profitable so we can serve those customers forever. And firms don't really think twice about it. That's really sad because I used to be a farmer. In fact, I was an educated youth in China. I was sent to the countryside and work with the farmers. To me, that's just so odd, somebody because you basically, what you're trying to do is that you work for a whole year. You created this bumper harvest. And at the time of harvesting, you said, let's just take it easy. Farmers will never do that. But our executives actually do that. They don't pay much attention to the price and how you're going to capture the value. What are the different things you could do to capture the value for the firm and also make the customers happier. When you want to be in that situation that the customers are happier and you make more profit so that we have an actually mutually beneficial relationship for a long time. I mean, that's exactly what you want to do with the pure wine. And so in that sense, I think that definitely is the case that a firm, a lot of firms don't do this. Okay. If you come back to the numbers, in fact, it is indeed the case that by any kind of a calculation based on any kind of an industry, we use numbers across different industries, you can actually look it up in the smart pricing book and then you're going to see that in different industries. The ranking order has always been that the price is the most effective profit driver. And relative to everything else, you can imagine why that's the case, simply because as a firm is working on everything else for so long, I mean, at some point, you're going to reach the point of a diminishing return. And the pricing really stands out. In retailing businesses, that's especially the case. Just imagine that if you sell every product in the retail setting and for one more dollar, that multiplied by the 10 overs over the course of the year, how many units you are selling, that's a huge amount of money. But the problem is that a lot of people don't really think in that direction. And they are not really thinking that, okay, so within this store, I have hundreds of thousands of different products. Each one of the products of consumers is really paying different attention. And they probably care about the price to a varying degree. If that's the case, why you cannot really find a way and to make a customer feel that they're paying a pretty low price, yet as a firm, we make more profit because we can serve you better. So that's essentially what we are trying to do in the book. And so we were talking yesterday when you got here that if you look at an innovative, there's a couple of different things that I always think of as innovative pricing. And one of them doesn't work. So let's think about airlines. Airlines are pretty dynamic pricing, right? So they don't do, in the book, you'll read, there's a couple of ways people price cost plus is the most common. You buy something for 10 bucks and you mark it up, you know, to 15 bucks, kind of a flat percentage. And then there's competition based where you look at your competitors and go, Oh, well, they're selling this couch for, you know, 500 bucks. I can't sell it for 600. Nobody will buy. That's competition based. But there are these more dynamic ways. So you go to an airline, if you're ever on an airplane, ask everybody sitting next to you what they paid. Probably the person next to you, Patey, they're a little more or a little less. So airlines have this sophisticated Yeah, they have this algorithm that's based on, you know, a predictive model and how many seats are left in the time of the day and the weather. But they're not very profitable. You look at Louis Vuitton on the flip side, which probably uses maybe a less sophisticated model, but they have huge margin, the most profitable margin retail business in the world is Louis Vuitton. I have like 30% net margins. But then there's a third one that I thought was interesting. We talked about this here, which is Google Adwords. So Google, I was listening to Peter Teal, the co-founder of PayPal with Elon Musk, and he said he likes monopolistic businesses. He wrote that book zero to one and he says a great example of it is Google. But he doesn't talk about in this YouTube, I was watching, he doesn't talk about the reason Google has captured the value as a monopoly, because you could be a monopoly and go broke. But he was a, they captured value with Google Adwords as an auction. And you said your mentor or advisor is the one who built that for them. So how can more businesses do like, like is there a way I could take Pier 1 and create an auction for everything? I mean, we have 100,000 SKUs. So I'm trying to, I like to learn from the best. What can the average entrepreneur learn from the most? And maybe there's other really good pricing systems. Well, and obviously that you raise a large number of questions in the process of your commentary. And I think that certainly that if you look into the airline industry, you would say that the airline industry probably is the most sophisticated the pricier. And there was no question about it. They do the EO management and the long time ago and they use a lot of a data process and then try to assess customer willingness to pay in different kinds of situations. And then they would basically sell every seat to the people who are willing to pay the most. And yet today, if you look at the whole industry, it's not very profitable. I think that there is a good irony there. And in fact, that's what we wrote in the book too, is basically that individually as a firm, in fact, when you have a pricing flexibility, it's good for you. If a competition doesn't do anything, if you're flexible, you can always offer all kinds of different deals and steal the customers away from the competition. But probably in the airline industry is that everybody also have the same flexibility, which means that everybody have a lot of different weapons to hurt each other. Imagine that if you have a game where that you have people who have a lot of weapons to hurt each other, in the end of what will happen. Everybody kills everybody. Everybody gets hurt. So that's exactly what happened in the airline industry. When you talk about the Google, for instance, Google, of course, that has been very smart. In fact, this is a so-called two-sided market. Google actually is supported by the search engine. Search engine, of course, serve the user who does the search and also serve the advertisers. In this case, in fact, as a Google, I can charge both the searchers. I can also charge the people who basically advertise. In this case, in fact, that there is actually a good economic principle that basically says that in this kind of case, you want to charge the side that less, that's more price elastic. You want to charge the side more. That's more price in elastic. So that's why they charge them. That's why they charge the most to the advertisers. So in fact, you can go to the extreme. It's basically saying that I'm only going to charge the customers. I'm only going to charge advertisers. I'm not going to charge the searchers because there are more eyeballs. You're going to enhance the value of my service to the advertisers. You can charge even more to the advertiser because of the feedback loop. In that case, of course, for Google, that you actually want to charge advertisers, not the end users. End users are basically useful for free. Exactly. So in that case, you generate more eyeballs when I deliver those eyeballs to the customers, to the advertisers. Of course, they are willing to pay more. So the point I want to mention that is that in person, it's really very different from anything else. You can imagine if you're a leader, if you're the manager, and you work with the people. There are a lot of intuition and that the guide you in terms of how you're going to treat people nice, the motive people, to work a little bit harder and to get the most creativity out of the people and so on and so forth. But that's not the case in pricing. You really have to understand some of the principles behind it. Somebody because what you're trying to do is really put in place the economic incentives that will motivate people to do the things you want them to do and you induce the right behaviors. So in that situation, what I'm saying is that coming back to the peer one, for instance, obviously the situation is going to be different. The product itself is going to be different. The customer who come to you are very different. And in order for us to do the best possible pricing in that particular market, obviously we have to understand who are those customers and what kind of incentive I can put in place to induce the right behavior from everybody so that we are the best price and for the product like this. So that's a little bit different. So I would say that it is definitely very relevant to compare the peer one with Google. But there I think that the comparison ends and if you actually don't actually pay attention to special characteristics of that particular market in the peer one and also what customers are looking for and so on. Yeah, because we don't have, nobody comes to our peer one website that's there to just get a search result like they are in Google. But one of the things I hope you take away from this episode is just that you have to become sophisticated on pricing. It's funny, there's millions of people on social media and I see all these people that are like really sophisticated, for example, entrepreneurs with their fitness program. They're like, Ty, take this vitamin, I do this yoga exercise when I wake up at this and then but I'm like, what's your pricing strategy? And it's like the most primitive caveman. It's like, I don't know, I charge what my I'm gonna do 30% all over the 30% or a lot of people. Let's talk for a second about people who are following who have service businesses. So if you're a lawyer, realtor, although that's a little more fixed, but I have people that I've trained to start marketing agencies, right? So one of the things that I did when I started teaching with market agency program in 2016 and I said, listen, there's not a lot of people who know how to do Facebook ads. Most restaurants, most doctor's offices are really have a every new client you bring them is very valuable. So you can just start off charging $1,000 a month, you get 10 customers paying you $1,000 a month. Now you have a six figure business that's almost all profit. But maybe now as you think through it, if you could charge $1,000, how do you know whether you should charge $1,500 or if somebody's watching in their lawyer, you know, or a CPA, if you're watching this, just because everybody else is charging $400 an hour, maybe you should charge $300 or maybe you should charge $500. So how do you think an average business owner who maybe doesn't have a huge sample set, what's some some ways that they can become more sophisticated and how they price their services? Well, yeah, for lawyers, I mean, I don't bring you sort of a deal with lawyers a lot. And so I always stay and far away from the law. How about a consultant? Just because of that. But one of the things I always notice is that as a lawyer, for instance, you always sort of keep one third of whatever money you recover for your client. And that's for a good reason. And for a good reason, somebody because, for instance, if I hire a tie as a lawyer for me, and the moment that we sign the contract, how do I know that you're going to work on my behalf and then put everything into it and try to maximize recovery and for me? Because you're going to have a lot of work to do. So you basically sort of, you have a case number one, case number two, you have a case to take care of, your wife to take care of, and all kinds of different things to take care of. And how do I know that behind my back that you're actually putting everything you got into this particular case and help me? Okay. So in this case, essentially that as a client, of course, I want to align my interests with yours. So if you recover more money and you get more money yourself, and I also get more money. So in that case, of course, this is so called the performance-based pricing. And we align our interests. You see that in a lot of complicated agency problem, like the realtors, I also pay you 60%. So on average, if you go to IPO, for instance, in maximum banking, they always charge you 7% of whatever achieved the IPO value. The reason is because once I put a 7% in there, I just know that there should be enough incentive for you to work on my behalf to maximize whatever the IPO value that you can achieve. Okay. And indeed, that also stabilizes the price competition. Nobody, I as a client, I would never ask a time, can you reduce the rate to 6%? Even if you agree to it, I probably don't feel good about it. Right, because I'm shooting myself in the foot by taking away your incentive. I go to the ocean and do the surfing instead of working on my behalf. How do I know? So that's essentially that kind of a consideration that you're going to make. So what I'm saying is that in terms of a pricing, pricing is nothing else but the economic incentive you put in place to motivate all the people around you and relevant to this particular business to do the right thing. So that's how complicated it is. You can imagine you have to think really hard about this, who's incentive, how you're going to align what kind of incentive different people may have and how I'm going to align all those different incentives. If you align them well, ultimately what will happen is that everybody should do well. So that's why working in pricing is just such a fun thing to do. Somebody because we look into the people's incentives and motivations and what they want to do, how we're going to induce the right behavior from people, that's what you're thinking of. Yeah, because you think about taxes, for example, that's the government price to live in a country or to live in it. The state of California has this really high tax and they have to think about, I don't think they're thinking about it very intelligently, but if you overprice, California has the highest, whatever, 13%, guess what happens? People go, now I'm going to move to Arizona or Texas and you raise the tax but you actually collect less money and then who leaves first? It's worse if you think it's not going to be people not making much money because people are not making much money. So what happens is all the people who used to pay the most taxes leave. So France did this, for example, they imposed, they tried to impose a tax on your net worth, even if you hadn't actually liquidated your net worth, right? And all these millionaires moved from France to Belgium overnight. They lost like half their millionaires. So then you get less. So you also have to think about, like you said, when you're pricing something, like if you're hiring a lawyer or an investment bank and you're doing it on a contingency basis, you maybe don't want to negotiate down too far. Also, if they say yes, they're also signaling maybe that they don't have any other options. You would say a minimum you would suspect that that's okay. So there's wrong with them. I think what you just said is exactly right and the fact that if you put high taxes in place, right? And people like a time may move to Puerto Rico. And from California, California, of course, is a beautiful place. And not only that, I think in addition to that, there are people who would normally do more work, somebody because if I do more work, I got like 80% of my income taxed away. Why I want to do that? I probably would just spend the time with my kids. So for those people, remember that when the high taxes hit those people, those are the most talented people. These are the most creative people. These are the people that society should reward more so that you can bring everybody up. But because of the fact that you change that those kind of taxes, they work less. And the whole society suffers because of that. We have to recognize the fact that it is the case that there are people who do more and then the others. There are people who are more capable than the others, right? We certainly want to have equity. There is absolutely no question. I think that if you don't have a more equitable society, and I think they're going to be all kind of different issues. But on the other hand, you have to recognize that the different people are making different contributions. And those are the people who make more contributions should be rewarded in some way, right? And that's only fair. And that's probably good for the society that's good for the US as a whole. And the thing about it that I would add to it, forget, like you said, economics, macroeconomics or psychology, even let's say you want the world to be more equitable. Sometimes you have to do what seems non equitable. And the repercussions are things become more equitable. For example, going back to the California situation, if you want Californians to have a nice life and less crime and so on, you want to have people that are employing people. So there's jobs, for example, and government is handing out money actually doesn't create the same kind of happiness for somebody's life. So people who work for their money are happier. Interestingly, in California, crime is through the roof in California. And I'm telling you every person that I know that's made money is leaving or thinking of leaving. And those are the people that employ people and also don't commit that many crimes. Maybe people would say they do white collar crimes, but they don't shoot you in the face. And so I saw an article in LA somewhere in LA Times something this weekend that LAPD was saying to tourists, don't come, we can't protect you. Think about that California. So pricing by the government has repercussions. We talked about firms. What about hiring a lot of people who work or watch me, our employers, and you're trying to hire a freelancer, you're trying to hire a secretary, a business partner. With my business partner, Alex in Pier 1, we just kind of were like at the beginning, let's just do this 50-50. That works pretty well in many ways. If I'm tired, he has a lot of incentive to work. If he's sick, I have a lot of incentive. Do you think that the average company doesn't do enough real incentives? I mean, when Bill Gates went public, I think it was 1986, 12,000 of his employees became millionaires. It's kind of a cool story. So he had built Sam Walton in his book Made in America says, make your employees own a piece of what they're doing. Do you think that holds true as the science there that there's a, because it seems common sense, but I know you've studied. There is definitely that, I mean, this is not something new. So there is this so-called efficiency wage theory. So which of this means that if you pay people above the market price, and which of this means you pay a little bit more than what it takes to hire somebody, that somebody is going to work a little bit harder. And the reason is somebody, because if I look around, I know that this particular job is going to actually pays more. And because it pays more, therefore, I'm not going to look around. I want to do everything possible to hold on to this job. And because of that, of course, that you would increase the productivity from that worker, you will reduce the labor turnover. And of course, ultimately, it's beneficial to the company itself. I remember that I got into the business simply because one day I was wandering into the University of Pennsylvania library, and there was a book that was just put on the table by somebody. And that was the scientific management by Frederick Winslow Taylor. So this is the so-called father of management. So his idea at the time was basically that you can do some time study of your employees. You see that your employees do a lot of things and in a very hard way, which means I have certain habits. I probably would have a lot more moves to process a certain part of the production process. And because of that, you can imagine that a lot of inefficiencies in the process. So what Frederick Winslow Taylor did was basically saying that why don't I just really study ideally what kind of a move you really need to have and how long it should take and to do every one of those moves. And ultimately, the home going to actually increase the production. So he does the time study. Once you do the time study, he went to the worker basically says, so how about this? I offer you this particular deal. And I increase your salary, let's suppose, by 30% or 50% or double your salary if you do what I tell you to do. What I tell you to do is that when you move this product to here, you do this way, not the way you're doing. And when you move the next process, you do this way, not that somebody and the way you will do it. In that case, you reduce the time and increase the efficiency to produce the product. Ultimately, even if you double the salary, the company as a whole will gain a tremendous amount from it. So if you look at China, indeed, that's one of the things that's happening. Somebody because think about it. China actually since the 1980s experienced economic growth and the GDP growth is like 10% every year. And the salaries, people get that increase and doubled and doubled. And what kind of a motivation that really provides to you in terms of every day, what do you think about? You can think about the work, how am I going to do it better? And because there's a lot of opportunities out there, and I can do way better for myself and so on and so forth. I think that's one of the philosophy you believe in. I mean, I talked to you and you basically really believe in that. It's not like just you want to do well and push everybody and to work as hard as possible and so that I can do well. It is the case that you want to actually sort of everybody around you to do well. And the way to do well is basically that you do the efficiently and follow a specific direction and the direction I charted for you. I think that probably is the right way to do things. Yeah. Yeah. And like you said, like I said, ad hoc, you know, the average when I have 480 people that work for me in one of my holding companies, retail and commerce measures, and when you look there, it's like you said, sometimes it's like 480 different backgrounds, lifestyle, education, childhoods. And so your job as the leader, as a CEO, is like you said, you have to say, listen, the way you answer emails is too slow. I have employees that'll fly out. I had some fly out and I was watching one of them use the laptop and I was thinking, you're wasting an hour a day because they don't have a mouse. So they're going every time they close a window, they have to bring that they're moving their finger on the little touchpad. And I was thinking, it's like you said, going back to pricing, I could pay that person more per hour. Let's say they were an hourly person paying more per hour, they could have more vacation or more rest time. Yeah, they chase or have it. I win because I could pay them less. They'd actually make less per job completed. They get more free time and a higher wage per hour working. But people don't like to learn. It's not in our DNA to really be open to change after a certain point. No, I think that's a very old American idea. I certainly that when I moved from China to US and as a student, that's one of the first ideas I learned. I was thinking, wow, this is basically why the US was so strong. And ultimately that everybody put the best into the job and they get the most out of the job. And ultimately the firm is better off and the employees are better off and the society as a whole is better off. And somehow that philosophy is just not very fashionable. Yeah, it's more fast on China. That's really disturbing. Because you go to China, in fact, that indeed the people do have that kind of spirit. They think that if I put more into it, I'm going to get more out of it and the company is going to do better. And the company in the end, of course, will keep me longer too. Exactly. That's your job security. Exactly. Doing it well and efficient. That's your job. Nobody lets somebody go. That's an outlier. I think that we do need to keep this big picture in our mind. So whenever we are sort of making some kind of demands and doing certain things, you have to think of that ultimately and all those things where they're going to need to. I think that's actually very important and to have that big picture in mind. Well, this was awesome. As we come to the end, I want to tell everybody, remember a lot of takeaways. Most important one that I've learned is become more sophisticated as you think about pricing, as you think about what you're going to charge for your services, as you think about how you compensate people who work for you, business partners. If you're a service provider, like a lawyer, accountant, a marketing agency, think a little deeper about how you're going to price things. But start with this book. I don't get paid to tell you this, but smart pricing. It's on tyloopis.com slash books. Thank you for coming. We don't get paid to write the book. We want people to know and all that. I think that we feel passionate about and that's really the truth. I think that in terms of our pricing, if you look into the book, it's really not about how you do things in different industry for different kinds of situations and so on. Those things we do talk about. But ultimately, pricing is really about way of thinking. Thinking is basically that how you're going to put the economic incentive in place in such a way that you will motivate everybody to do the right thing. When the famous English economist and Adam Smith was talking about the invisible hand, invisible hand, that really direct people to do things that's ultimately good for the society. The price is that invisible hand. I think that if you really want to understand the role for invisible hand, how invisible hand would change and motivate the people around you to do the things that ultimately not only for individuals, for the company and also for society as a whole, you've got to look into pricing. And I think that this book is something you definitely want to read. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming. All right. Good. All right.