Only Two Ways to Grow a Business Now - Pick One.

The American economy is in contraction. That's different than recession. Most people who've been paying attention know it by now. We've got to spend less time debating it, negotiating with it, pretending it's not happening, like bad bargainers at a funeral. And start acting on what to do about it. 

Nick walks through the two games that every business, every market, every economy runs on: the Extractive Game and the Expansive Game. Not as a moral judgment about which kind of person you are, but as a structural reality about which direction your decisions are flowing. Because the direction matters enormously. It determines what you make, how you run your operations, how you build relationships — and whether those three layers are stacked in a way that builds something or slowly hollows it out.

He traces the Extractive Game from Standard Oil to Facebook to your content marketing problem — showing how each one starts at the production layer, taking something communal and making it singularly owned, then builds an operations layer designed to make everything dependent on the thing it grabbed, then covers the whole thing with influence peddling and PR. And he shows how the same logic — in miniature, without the malice — slips into small businesses every day when fear is driving.

Then he traces the Expansive Game in the opposite direction — starting at the relationship layer, winning by attention and clarity, distributing power through networks, and building production that actually comes from knowing the people you're building for. He uses the independent bookseller as the clearest example of a business running the expansive game right — and it's more useful than any Silicon Valley case study.

This is a preview of the core framework from Nick's book The Damn Rules, launching this fall at DamnRulesBook.com. 

If this episode speaks to you and you want to go deeper: podcast@culturecraft.com

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Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com 

Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Transcript

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I'm Nick Richmeyer, and this is Dams Given, a podcast where we explore how to free your venture from the extraction economy, realigning it to the timeless ways that humans build, collaborate, and buy. We've been talking about this since literally, I think, 2024, if not earlier. But this idea about the web getting more and more closed and the internet being less and less functional to as a tool to grow a business. And I have lots of content out in the world about that. And it increasingly, so does everybody else. You know, how can you question the most powerful economic force in the universe? And today, a little bit more than two years later, from writing that, um, there's just a broad consensus, particularly after the most recent Google announcements and some of these things, that this idea that you can use the internet as a fundamental infrastructure to just sort of like freely grow a business and you just sort of show up and you put some things on the internet and cool stuff, like that whole thing has sort of fallen apart. And today's video is not the video for discussing why that is or how that is. You can get that in other places here on our YouTube channel or other podcast episodes that we've done in the past. But what I want to really dig into, which is the question I'm getting more often, is now that people have accepted this, and now that there's a general resonance of like, crap, this is not working as designed or as I thought, or as it used to work, or in shidification and yada yada yada, what do I do? Right. So AI is everywhere. I want to run a human-first business. Some of you are not afraid of AI, but you don't, you're not like, hey, isn't AI is not going to solve my problems, right? It's very difficult to find voices that are thinking about these things and trying to figure out how to apply human-first sort of leadership and management and operations principles actually into a business. Because a lot of the people who really care about this stuff, and I don't blame them for this, but there's just a giant incentivized ecosystem for this. A lot of people are spending their time sort of writing think pieces and, you know, sort of sub-stacky op-eds and, you know, imaginations of a different socioeconomic order. And those things aren't bad. I read a lot of those things and I find them very fascinating. And I like to collaborate with some of those folks. But the reality is, as I'm sitting with leaders and here sitting talking to you, is that that doesn't solve your tomorrow problem or your next week problem or your next month problem. And we have to think in those terms so that we can keep moving forward. There's a lot of talk about human agency, and we have to have more human agency. We have to feel like we have our own agency. And I believe in all of that. I think it gets a little in our heads and a little theoretical because really where human agency lives is just making decisions and acting on them. That's human agency. You make some decisions, you act on them, you feel the full weight of the consequences, and then you go do it again. And you make some decisions and you act on them, and then you feel the full weight of your human, you know. You know, we get this framed a lot of different ways, but it's living your truth, right? You decide this is what I think is true about the world, this is what I think the problems are, this is what I think needs to happen, and then you go do things based on what you think. Now, I don't mean to sound like pedantic about that, but again, because we've lived in such a disembodied kind of the ideas are out there in the ether kind of way, we have to start here. And I'm gonna talk you through some uh structural ideas. Um, I'm very hesitant to use structural now because apparently it's on the uh LLM no list that it means that you're you wrote from AI, but I promise you, structural is my own word. I came up with it all by myself. We're gonna talk through some structural things so that you can see you and have a lens for the world. So anytime you're or you're on the pod or you're watching one of our YouTube videos and you're like, oh my gosh, here we are in theory land. We're there for a very specific reason, not because we want to live in theory, but because we need beliefs, we need frameworks to be able to understand and code and organize the world so we can shortcut through things. Our beliefs give us containers to put experience in. And so we go, oh, that's what that is. I don't have to spend a bunch of time processing that thing that just happened. It lives in this container because I have this organizing principle. And so we're gonna do a little bit of organizing principles today, and then we're gonna move that into what to do with this big question of now that sort of the structure of what we thought was gonna be the safe and reliable place to build a business and grow a venture and expand the economy. Now that that is fully in contraction mode, and it's interesting to watch people wake up to that. I had a colleague that I've worked with for many years that I thought, you know, we have a lot of similar thoughts, a little similar ideas. And he emailed me this morning and said, I get it now. I get what you're saying about everything being in contraction. And I'm like, okay, great. I don't love that we're there. I don't relish in you having that feeling, but very difficult for us to move forward until you have that lens. Because the first job of a leader is to define reality. So if you want to be a leader, if your job is to be a leader, your first job, God, thank you, Max Depree, one of the great leadership theorists of the last century in a book called Leadership Jazz. Um, the first job of a leader is to define reality. So, this framing that we're gonna do right now is one way of defining reality. And I'm what we're gonna talk about, and all this is gonna be in my book that's coming out this fall. You can find more about that at damrulesbook.com. But today you get a little bit of a preview, and we're gonna look at two games an extractive game and an expansive game. And all economies, all markets, all businesses run fundamentally on one of these two game boards. Now, we all are a little bit of both, because we're all a little bit of fear, and we're all a little bit of generosity and and vision and forward motion, right? So fear is always gonna pull us into the extractive game. That is, it is what it is. We all have a little bit of fear, it's fine. And our vision, our intention, our willingness to create, our desire to build, our want to actually grow wealth and have that wealth be generative for our kids and our grandkids and our communities. That instinct to build into the world is going to take us into an expansive place. Now, I want you to sort of some of you mentally just asterisk the subtext of what I just said, and I want to just jump on that asterisk, which is this idea of expanding wealth. Because some folks have decided that wealth is always extractive, that that making money, trying to make money, building up your own capacity for financial well-being is always extractive. That is simply not true. And in fact, that belief system is counterproductive. Because money, when it's handled in a healthy way, is a tool, is a transactional tool by which we can invest and build and grow communities. All the things that we want to have happen, all this local development, all of the having cool neighborhoods and walkable spaces and regenerative farming and all of these things that people want take money. So somebody has to make that money and then choose to carry that, to be a steward of that wealth in a way that is generative, right? Maybe that person is you. So the idea that winning means I can only have a little bit of money. Good luck figuring that out. Because what is a little bit? Is it enough for you to pay your bills? Is it enough to send your kids to college? Which college is enough? Is it right? You're you're going to be constantly negotiating something that's just can't be negotiated, which is what is the what is your personal ceiling for financial well-being? So the way you solve for that is to not test for something that's really capricious, like wealth or money or what much is in your bank account, because that is a very capricious, unreliable thing. The way you test for it is how are you building? Which game are you in? Okay, so I'm going to put up the graphic here. You'll see the graphic if you're on um video. If you're not on video, I'll talk you through it and you'll basically get it. Two games, each has three layers: a production layer, an operations layer, and a relationship layer. All right. So a production layer is what we make, right? Is every venture, every economy, everything makes something, right? So it we have to do production. And some of you make a service, some of you create connectivity. There's like lots of ways that that production layer can happen. But one of the ways that we've slid into extraction is we've gotten really mealy-mouthed about talking about production, about making things. And our resistance to that, oh, this is an experience economy, oh, this is an attention economy. All of those things have moved us into abstraction out of the idea that we make things because Facebook doesn't make attention. That's not its product. Facebook makes code. Code that creates a platform, a platform that turns people's interactions with the platform into advertising. Right? Facebook makes a thing. They have a production layer. And the more that they've convinced you that, oh no, we make experiences, we make connectivity, all of that's all of that is PR and messaging and comps. That is all an obs obfuscation. They make a thing. And the more we can get grounded in the physical world that they made a thing, that somebody sat down in front of a computer or an AI and someone else reviewed it or whatever, made some code, and that code does a thing in the world, and that thing in the world has consequences, then we can have a real conversation. So everything has a production layer, everything has an operations layer, which is basically how the business is run, the systems and processes by which a business is run or a marketplace or community, right? Everything has an operations layer. And then everything has a relationship layer. And that relationship layer is the connectivity and the attachments that are made through that entity to sort of uh stabilize it in the world. Those relationships usually fall into what I call a five plus one system. So the five plus one system of relationships is the capital, the founders and the investors. So the capital relationships. Founders then sometimes also move into a second group, which is the team, right? The team and the workers and whether they're contract or W-2 or whatever, the people who make the stuff, right? The second group, the third group is the existing customer base, the people who have already bought things. That's a really like heterogeneous and chaotic group, right? Because everybody kind of came in and bought things at different times in different ways, and you had a different workflow and a process. So the the existing customers is like the menagerie of, oh my gosh, these word people and these word people and these word people, and they don't, none of them really fit what you're trying to do right now, which gets us to your prospective ideal customer, the people that you're building for next, right? What I call your most valuable community, the people that you're building this thing around who you're attuned to their needs and wants and et cetera. So that's the fourth group. Every business has partners, out people out in the world, either they're vendors or supply chain or collaborators, or everybody, every everything has partners. And then the plus one is your physical community. So we don't need to do a you know a land acknowledgement on today's call, but the reality is every venture has a localized expression. It's where the employees are, it's where the factory is, it's where the servers are, it's where the leader sits, it's where you gather people to. It everything has a physical expression. So I run a business that is kind of all over the place. I have clients all over the country, in some cases around the world. I don't have a physical office space that's off my own personal property. Um, so my personal property and the area around it is part of my physical space, part of my locality. It's part of my community. But also part of my community is the clusters of people where I've built relationships. So there's a little bit of my work in Minneapolis, and there's a little bit of my work in Chicago, and there's a little bit of my work in New York and in Denver and in other hubs, and those hubs become part of the psyche of what I'm building. So when Minneapolis was going through everything it was going through early on in the spring, and all the people in my network and in part and in my uh people who I work with that were a part of that, well, Culture Craft was embedded, right? Was involved in what was happening in Minneapolis because the people we cared about were involved, right? So that sense of locality really matters. All right, so that's the relationship layer: production, operations, relationship. So an extractive game runs from production first to operations down to relationship. So the easiest way to think about extractive game is to think about sort of like the origin story of extraction. Now, this isn't the first extraction, but it's the thing that we're most familiar with, and that's oil, right? So you literally oil extracts. We pull it out of the ground. So the production layer of an extractive game takes something that is unownable because it was created by forces or is exists in forces beyond something that can be contained. So the example of that is oil, right? Oil really technically is very difficult to own because it's under the ground, it flows everywhere, it's in pockets underneath people's feet. Now you can sell oil rights, right? People get the rights to access it. Um, you can sell, you know, mineral rights is a big deal in places like Oklahoma and Texas and other places. But at the end of the day, the oil is communal. And so the first thing to understand about the extractive game is that at the production layer, it's taking something that is fundamentally communal and making it singularly owned. It's pulling it out of the community and pulling it into a central place. Right? So oil did that. There was a, we could have had oil and done it a different way, where one family didn't control all the oil. We could have done that a different way. We didn't do that a different way. Now, kudos to you know antitrust laws. It's a little better then than it was now. But that production layer is the starting point of the business. We found a thing that we can go grab, and by grabbing it, we can then make money for a small group of people. That's starting at the production layer. Now, if we take that same example into a modern sense, right? Facebook's a great example where people are putting their ideas and their thoughts and their pictures of their families and whatever onto this platform, those should be communally owned, right? That is something that my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings should be mine. My interactions with you, my our content conversation threads, those are like our connections to each other really should be unownable by definition. But the meta platform is built in such a way where everything that happens on their platform they own, right? So it takes something that should be communal and makes it singularly owned, and then tries to make money at it. So if you think about Meta, their production layer is how can we get as many people as possible to share what is private in our space so we can own it? That is the production layer. Because then once we can own it, then we can sell it for advertising. That's starting at the production layer. Then in an extractive game, then we go, okay, we grabbed a thing. Now, how do we build a system that makes everybody dependent on the thing that we grabbed? Right? So extractive systems then win by scale and by rent seeking. So again, we go back to oil. The initial oil industry, standard oil and that whole era, really was built around this idea of we have to eliminate other competitive forms. Everything should run on oil. Houses should run on oil, cars should run on oil, trains should run on oil, right? And let's build the pipelines, let's build the systems, let's build the octopi of networks so that it's very, very difficult to do anything but run on oil. And the oil business has done that incredibly successfully for decades, right? We've had decades of opportunity to move aggressively into a multi-source and multi-energy source economy. But we don't do it because this oil has operated, its operational layer has done what operational layers always do, which is we're gonna move in and grab the ground beneath your feet, grab the systems underneath you. And then by grabbing the systems underneath you, we're gonna break down the ones that don't serve us and we're gonna build up the ones that do. And then we're gonna charge rent on everything. Again, you see this very clearly in a Facebook style system, right? If Facebook aggressively, aggressively, there's all kinds of documentation to this, destroyed media uh in the 2010s, destroyed magazines, destroyed newspapers, intentionally, willfully did it. All kinds of documentation that this wasn't an accident, that this was on purpose. Because if there's an intellectual community creative commons outside of Facebook, then Facebook has a competitor. And Facebook hates a competitor. So they're going to build an operational layer, and they sucked in the newspapers, they sucked in the magazines. And if you want to understand this more deeply, there's a great book called Traffic by Ben Smith. Ben Smith was at Politico and BuzzFeed News and other places. And he well, he just is honest in that book. Like, hey, I was totally complicit in this. I bought into the lie. I thought we could exchange our ideas and our mark and our commons for traffic, and they screwed us over. And it's partially my fault that we are where we are. Uh, great book. Um, but the operations layer at of that digital layer is to say, hey, you don't need newspapers, you don't need media, you don't need anything, you just need Facebook, right? We're gonna undermine all of these pieces, right? There's a reason, for example, that Amazon is actively undermining the U.S. Postal Service, right? They have a vested interest in undermining systems that would compete with their extraction. And then an extractive game uses relationships to cover over the whole thing with influence peddling and public relations. So relationships come last. So we build relationships with politicians. We get really good at messaging and advertising, we get good at PR, right? The Standard Oil folks were brilliant at this, right? The the there was a concept that oil was going to make everybody rich and all of this sort of messaging about how this was gonna work. And obviously, enormous Washington-based influence peddling, a lot of politics. Of course, we're seeing all of this in the tech space too. There's a reason why people who had four decades voted for Democrats were in the front row of the inauguration at the Trump uh inauguration, the CEOs of five or six of the major technology multinationals. I don't think all of them had giant changes of heart. They just understand that their game is dependent on influence pedaling. And they had an opportunity with a head of state in the United States whose primary way of being in the world is influence pedaling. This is how he chooses, and all politicians influence pedal, but this is this guy's favorite thing, right? So it's like this is an opportunity, let's take it, right? So that's what happens with the relationship later and extractive game. Easy to look at that and go, that's dumb. I don't want to do that. Those people suck, right? But you have to think about how often we're doing little things like that, right? I see graphic designers or content houses or HR people who are like, well, I made this, I make this thing, and people need to want it. And why don't people want this thing that I made? Well, that is the mentality of that is starting with production. You're starting with production and you're going, I made a thing, and people should want it. And you understand, right, that that's coming out of fear. Fear that you won't be successful, fear that people won't want to buy your thing, right? I saw a version of this in the wealth management space where I worked for many years, where there was all kinds of talk about customer centricity, and we're all here for the client, and yada, yada, yada, which is all again influence peddling and consolidation. But really, it was here's what we know how to do. We know how to put stocks in a portfolio and charge 1% on it. How can we get people to want that? And more and more layers of stuff got wrapped around selling a portfolio of stocks with a 1% fee on it to get people to want the thing that actually made the money. Now that has changed a lot in a lot of really healthy and good wealth management firms. But at a fundamental layer, what was happening, particularly as you could start to get really cheap online portfolios and the fintech stepped in and the robo advisors and all that stepped in, was this like, oh, well, this is what we make. We produce this thing. We have to find a way to make this other stuff not work. And so this extract. Behavior starts slipping in. All right, let's slightly more quickly move through the expansive game because it, one, it feels better and because it's more intuitive to us. So at the expansive game, we always start at the relationship layer. And that's a relationship. So we're going in the opposite direction. We start at the bottom. We start the relationship layer and we win by attention and clarity. So some part of me, the part of me that's honest and clear and motivated and inspired, some part of me chooses a thing in the world to pay attention to. These people with these problems, this segment of the market, these kinds of business owners, these kinds of folks. And I choose to give them my attention and I ask them questions and I get to know them and I'm embedded in them. And I go to their conferences and I think about them. And I make a choice with my risk and my agency to go, I'm gonna care about these people and what they care about. Now that starts to slip into weird things like ICP and other sort of advertising technologies. That's just a different thing. This is a relationship thing. You make a choice to go, I want to make a thing that's helpful for these people. And there's gonna be a Venn diagram there. You who you are and what you have energy about, and them who they are and what they need. And somewhere in there is gonna be a sliver where things overlap. And that sliver is the business. And the more you have clarity on that sliver, the easier things get. And the way you get that clarity is by having relationships. That's the essence of the expansive game is the better the relationships get, the more you're in conversation, the more you're engaged with the people that you think you're here for, and they're engaged with you, and you're and you're showing up with your honesty. Remember, we started this episode with this reality that we have to show up with our honesty. We have to show up with what we really are. Otherwise, the relationship layer doesn't work because there's dishonesty happening. So if I'm pretending to care about them, or if it's all a game to get them to buy the thing I want to sell anyway, or any of these sort of layers of dishonesty, it starts to break down. So when you're running a business, this is starting, we start to get some of the application of this. The first thing you got to do is on a regular basis, go, am I being honest? Am I being honest with myself about what I want to be doing and how it impacts people? And do I even know and what I think I know about the people I think I'm impacting? And it's gonna create all kinds of insecurity and questions. We'll use again content marketing because I think this is an easy place to see this. This is like people in the content marketing space are really struggling with this because they're like, hey, I know how to do a thing, and I've always done this thing, and it used to be really useful. And there's still some people out there who find it useful, and so I'm gonna keep trying to make that work. And little by little, that Venn diagram is spreading apart, and it's getting smaller and smaller, and you can feel it. You are so smart, you're so conscious, you're so aware. If you're listening to this, I promise you, if you're still listening to this at this point, you are conscious and aware and smart. You can feel that little sliver of the Venn diagram getting smaller. And the temptation is to lock up and to go, oh my gosh, I gotta hold on to this. Instead of realizing what happens anytime there's expansion, anytime there's expansion, there's movement. So the extractive game wins by locking things down and constricting, by building rigid systems and locking things in and constricting. There's a lot of people, for example, trying to sell that the current expression of AI is this expansive thing. It is not. It is a lockdown system of how to, hey, the way things are right now, how can we do them in the most efficient way? That is a constrictive motion. There are times where we need efficiency, but a broad constrictive motion is gonna always sort of feed us back into an extractive game. An expansive game is gonna take us to places where things move. The clients move, we move, the marketplace moves, right? And we have to move with it. One of the things I uh tell people all the time is had this conversation yesterday, is that a venture is a negotiated thing. Once it's out in the world, it's not you anymore. It's a thing that's out here, and you're a part of it. And all those five communities I mentioned earlier, they're all a part of it. And all of you are negotiating. What is this thing? Now, you as the, if you're the founder, you as the founder are the leader of the negotiation. So you have the most chips because you have the most skin in the game. Those two things are equivalent. Skin in the game are chips. So because you have the most skin in the game, you have the most chips. So you can lead the negotiation, but it is still a negotiation. And as you start to feel because you have good relationships, things start to fray in the venture. The solution isn't to constrict, right? Because that's what fear wants us to do. The solution is to go back to relationship and go, okay, wait a second. Am I being honest with myself about what I want and what I'm negotiating for? Maybe I've changed, maybe I want something different. Are the people I'm working with, have they changed? Do they want something different? What do I know about them? Where are their needs? How have they shifted? And that's different. It's slightly but meaningfully different than where can I still sell what I've always sold? Now you can do that, and I'm not saying that some days you don't have to do that. But that's the is a different tactic, right? We may have to like find some ways to sell some things for a period of time while we're buying ourselves time to do some of this work. But the point is to get back to the relationship layer. Then, as we have a relationship layer, then we win by network and distribution of power. So we operate in a way where we go, how do we get more people connected to this work, whatever the work is? How do I get more people to connect to this work who buy into the vision, who are a part of the negotiation? And how can I empower them to expand the footprint of what we're doing? Not how can I enroll them in the marching orders, but how can I help them to be a part of the expansion? So maybe that's they want to work for you and they want to be a part of the team and they really want to get underneath what you're doing. So maybe it's a partnership, maybe it's a network effect of other people doing similar things. Maybe it's building a community of clients that all can learn from each other while they learn from you. But we operate in a way under the assumption that things emanate out, not flow in. And when we operate in a way where things emanate out, we don't have to be constrictive about power. Once we're operating in an out way, then we get to make things. So this is the thing where really people get confused about the expansive layer. Unless you're running a factory in 1932 that makes a very specific thing and you have all the die casts and it's very expensive to replace the casts, isn't it? Then even then, they converted like factories that made springs to factories that make bullets for World War II, right? Even the most rigid systems of production can be transformed. And let's be honest, the gross majority of us are running nothing that rigid. What we produce is a package of services, it's a it's an offering of a of a series of steps for a certain price, it's a it's a group of people on our team and they do some work for somebody under a certain like it's a lot of service-based business. It's a and even if you're running, you know, if you're running a retail store, a coffee shop, uh a butchery, right? You got a lot of flexibility. There are a lot of different kinds of coffee shops in the world, right? And you have a lot of opportunity to shift. You hear this a lot in like another community that's really good about this, that's really brilliant on this, is the independent bookseller community. So they know where they live, right? They live in the world of people who like to buy books. They have those relationships, they're constantly talking to people buying books, they talk to people who like books and sell books, right? So there's their relationship layer is robust. And they operate in a way so that they can very fluidly make decisions about what books to have when. So they have events, they bring in authors, they they build partnerships with publishing houses, they build partnerships with other local expressions so that people have a reason to go to the bookstore. They do all these different things. And at the production layer, they sell books, right? But a really, really good bookseller, local bookseller, has a very limited inventory because they know that they know that they know what their people like. So they don't, they're not, they're not Barnes and Noble. They're not stocking one of, you know, 300,000 books, right? They're stocking a select subset because it's coming out of the relationship layer. And they can pivot, right? As romanticy has kind of moved into the background and horror is moving and rising, right? Then they can pivot and they can start to bring some horror in and they can have some events around that. And they know that because they're talking to the people who buy the books, right? So those are the behaviors of the expansive game. So as we close this up, I want you to be hopefully this whole time, you've been thinking about your particular business, how it works, how it feels. But what you can do at any given time is you can take this graphic, you can screenshot it, and you can put it on your desktop, and you can say, okay, this decision that I'm making, am I moving from the relationship layer up or the production layer down? Am I starting with what I know is true about myself and the people that I'm working with? Or am I starting with, I need to make this thing and why won't people buy it? Right. And you can feel the fear versus the attachment, right? So if we start with fear, we're gonna move into extraction. If we start with attachment and connection, then we're gonna move into expansion. And we're we're all navigating this all day long every day, but that's the beauty of the human experience is that if all of us turn five degrees or 10 degrees or 15 degrees more into expansion, the whole thing starts to tip, right? And beautiful, cumulative, multiplicative things start to tip. And maybe on the really creative extreme engines, ends where there's interesting co-ops and regenerative systems and all of this sort of like reinventing social structures over here. You may not actually be participating in that over there. You may just be reading about it on Substack, but you were a part of it because you shifted the energy of the economic system slowly more toward expansion. And that's why we need you to lead. We need you to build your business. We need you to get off the bench and stop wondering about, well, I guess I'll just wait until things settle or I'll try to figure this out after the AI stuff. So we need you to get in the game and to be having experiments and taking risks and doing things. Because if you don't, the extreme force of extraction will continue to multiply. And they will do extractive systems will do what extractive systems do, which is undermine the competitive set, build out their operations layer, and add to the rent seeking. If you're wondering why everything costs something, why is everything monetized? Why do I have to pay $5 for this and $7 for that? Because that is the fundamental model of extraction systems, is to own the pipeline underneath the world and then charge you every time you need the pipe. That's the fundamentals of rent seeking. If you don't want that, sure, buy less from Amazon. You're not gonna starve Jeff Bezos. I saw a post about the other day. I promise you, you're not starving Jeff Bezos. Like that's never, ever, ever gonna happen. I try to buy less from Amazon. If you want to try to buy and buy less from Amazon, that's great. And what we really need is for you to build in an expansive way. So if you have been thinking about this and listening to this and you're like, oh my gosh, this is me. And I want to understand it more and I want to deal deep and I want support. This is a very personal CTA, right? It's not like a click on this and get a downloadable. It's not a this particular call to action is I just want you to email me. I want you to send an email to podcast at culturecraft.com and say, hi, I listened to this episode. I got something out of it, and I think you're talking to me. I just want you to send me an email and I will respond back and we will start a dialogue and we will see how we can bring the tools that we're building at CultureCraft to help support what you're doing. And if we can't, we'll redirect you to somebody in our community who's doing something that might be able to help you, right? So if you're listening to this, that's you, that's your next move, and you need more support. We all need more support, podcast at culturecraft.com. Thanks for a little bit of extended time today. Usually we try to keep these as our little skinny episodes where you get like 18 or 20 minutes of of good content. But this is a beefy idea because we want to really shift the energy that we're putting into our businesses and how that produces outcomes. Thanks so much for your time.