It's tough to even gain an inch at that level when you're in that rarefied air, but the consistency and the improvement has to be a big key.

Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, the credit goes to Jess, right? Jess has been incredible to work with.

Mark Merklin, myself, along with the rest of the team, the physios, the trainers, everybody.

I mean, there's a lot of work that goes into it, obviously, from our side, but the credit belongs with Jess.

She's had this... kind of tenacity about her that she wants to continue to get better.

Um, obviously rankings are important, but they're not paramount for Jess.

Um, you know, I actually just got off the phone with her 30 minutes ago and we, we had an hour conversation about, you know, kind of what we were looking to work on as a group.

bigger picture of what we're looking at there's less of a stranglehold at the top ego is going to go from outside the top two for the first time in several seasons you have a lot of players that are playing elite tennis but i think we can agree less of a consolidation of power at the very top of the game so it's been cool to see

Mm-hmm

... to kind of, you know, be tough on himself and go away.

Um, and so he was really-- I started coaching him the first, and it was obviously w- it was one of the best experiences I ever had because he was just, like, he was a sponge for all the information I gave him.

And he knew a little bit, I think, about my game as well, 'cause we had played each other a couple of times.

So he really took it, like, as gospel kinda to what I was saying, 'cause I was literally like, "Do not make the same mistakes that I made," right? Like, this, I know you think I'm talking, like, you know, but it's real, right? And, and I had some good examples growing up, too.

Like Jim Courier, a really good friend of mine, he was not always the strongest mental guy.

Like, when we were at Bolletieri's You know, Andre, myself, Jim, a couple other guys, we were all crazy.

In Slams, do you always go practice in, on the day off?

So in the business of creating content faster and cheaper, which is what all clients want, where actually in the process downstream, the stuff that you're doing, where does AI actually genuinely help, and, and where is it still misunderstood?

I, I can tell you definitely where it's misunderstood.

I think that in the early days, scale was like this sort of utopia of AI, but we weren't acknowledging how deterministic this thing was, right? That the repeatability of it was just not there, and it still isn't there.

You know, we deal with automotive clients, and a lot of them are trying to use AI on their vehicles, and all of a sudden their vehicles don't look like their vehicles anymore, right? They're missing a hubcap or they're missing a logo or they're missing a shut line somewhere, and I think it's that level of nuance that, that clients have probably been oversold on.

And I think that we owe it to our clients to not oversell those solutions when we know that they can't achieve the end results that they're expecting.

'Cause otherwise what ends up happening is that cost just ends up going back into the pot somewhere, right? You know, you make an AI image and then you've gotta go back into post and fix it.

Well, you've not really made any savings, right? So I think there's a lot of challenges with the repeatability of these systems that we're building and the predictability of these systems that we're building.

What is it that these people can do to stay relevant?

So how has there been that process for her improving her serve over the course of the partnership? It all has come together now, but what's been the key to finding success and working on ways to improve her Google serve, which is clearly a weapon right now?

Yeah, I mean, when she hired Mark and myself, you know, that was a main focus, right? She wanted to be able to generate some free points, you know, even get some aces and kind of have a serve, a weapon that she could rely on.

Obviously, she does so many other things really well.

And listen, she served well also when we started working with her, but obviously she's improved in that area tremendously.

And I think Indian Wells, right? Unfortunately, she lost that tough quarterfinal to Rabakina, but through the quarterfinals, she was the ace leader in the tournament.

So she was so pumped and so excited.

I mean, we wanted to kind of win that tournament more than anything because it would have been a great chance that she might have finished as the ace leader through the entire tournament.

How is the mindset, how is it instilled on your end to stay positive and keep fighting?