Modern Wisdom - #610 - Alex Hormozi - 19 Harsh Truths About Human Nature

Episode Date: April 3, 2023

Alex Hormozi is a founder, investor and an author. Alex's Twitter has been one of my favourite sources of great insights over the last year. Today we get to go through some of my favourite lessons from him about life, human behaviour, psychology, business and resilience. This is really good. Expect to learn how your ego is keeping you poor, why you never need to care about what anyone else thinks of you, why having a life that sucks is actually a blessing, whether most easy opportunities are just distractions, how to conquer your tiny impulses, why you are built to deal with things being hard, how to beat anyone who ever copies you and much more... Sponsors: Website in 10 MINUTES, no coding skills required: https://hostinger.com/modernwisdom (code MODERNWISDOM for 10% off) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/AlexHormozi Follow Alex on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hormozi/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Alex Hormosi. He's a founder, investor, and an author. Alex's Twitter has been one of my favorite sources of great insights over the last year. Today we get to go through some of my favorite lessons from him about life, human behavior, psychology, business, and resilience. This is really good. Expect to learn how your ego is keeping you poor, why you never need to care about what

anybody else thinks of you, why having a life that sucks is actually a blessing, whether most easy opportunities are just distractions, how to conquer your tiny impulses, why you are built to deal with things being hard, how to beat anybody who ever copies you, and much more. I find Alex absolutely fascinating. I think that he has this really great blend between pithy, lovely philosophy, bro insight stuff, and real world applicability. So the strategy and execution coming together to work very well.

There's so much great stuff in here. I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. If you do, don't forget to hit the subscribe button. It is the only way that you can ensure that you will never miss episodes when they go up and it supports the show and it makes me very happy indeed. So, just take two seconds and go and do it on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Ah, thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Homozzi. I'll look so mousy, I'll give it a shot. Thank you for having me. My pleasure, man. One of my favourite things to do is to scrape through people's twitters that are aphorists

and come up with little pithy statements and then break them down. So I want to go through some of the things that I've learned from you over the last year or so. Go into those. And then there's some talking points that I don't think I've heard you speak about before as well. I wanna get on to. Yep.

Beautiful. So the first one is, so many lives would transform overnight. If they realized my life sucks, I have nothing going for me, really means I have nothing to lose. And that makes you a very dangerous person. So, in any kind of game position, so like in business, right, every position has advantages and disadvantages.

A lot of people look at the really big guys and they're like, man, they look at me like, must be easy for Alex, right? And I remember when we had Jim launch and we had a very big company, I would tell the guys who were coming up, I was like, if you're trying to compete against me, I was like, you have advantages. I was like, if you're on a sales call, you're like, listen, you're just a number to Alex, you're never going to talk to Alex, right? Here with me, you're going to get my attention. I'm the one, right?

I was like, that's how you're going to throw stones at me. I was like, but on the flip side, if it's me marketing to the masses, I'm going to be like, this kid's in his mom's basement, and he has no idea what he's doing. He's been in business for 12 months. And of course he has no idea. Like, wouldn't you want some of his thousands of success stories behind it because we've made a system?

Like, both sides have advantages. And so what happens is people are in this small position where they're more nimble, they can give more personalized attention to people, et cetera. And they see it as a pure disadvantage. And so you can flip the fact that you have nothing going for you with you have nothing to lose. And that means that you can take lots of risks very quickly

and end up in the exact same position you are, which is nothing. And so if you eliminate downside, it should decrease your action threshold. Meaning you should be able to do more things faster rather than do fewer things because you don't have a great life or things going for you. And so I think if people flip that, a lot more people would take action because they actually realize the advantage of their position. Jack butchers says you get rich by taking lots of risk with

small amounts of money and you stay rich by taking small amounts of risk with lots of money. Yes. I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't know that was just quote. He may have repurposed it. There's something called Churchill and Drift. Do you know what that is? No. So it's a phenomenon. And it's Churchill at the core. The opposite. It's that quotes that weren't said by Churchill often get like erroneously attributed to him. It's like all quotes lead back to Churchill even though they didn't. And socrates. Yeah. It's like it's just one of those things with like, I think the Churchill once said, get rich by making larger amounts.

It's like, no, he's fucking, but there's another one as well, that a good friend, James Smith, talked about, which is if you're succeeding at a job that you hate, imagine how good you'd be at a job that you loved. And that's kind of the same, this person is starting from essentially zero. How much fucking worse can it get? Right.

It's the downside. If you can eliminate someone's downside for action, it's like then the bias, it should bias you towards taking action. Why is it that people in that case, if they do have nothing to lose, still feel like they have lots to lose? Because I think most of the times, so this, I think this is really important, is that they have nothing objective to lose. And so everything that they feel like they have to lose is purely made up in their mind. It's stories that tell themselves about what other people

are going to think about them when those people aren't even thinking about them to begin with, right? But like, that's where they live, all of their lives, or live out, all of the potential downside is in the mirror reflection of what other people will think about them in the future should they fail. And I think that is the, like, if we were trying to get real on my talk and somebody like, well, I mean, because I know that if I actually had somebody in front of me, they'd start squarming, right? If I said the first thing, right, like you have nothing to lose.

And then because then they do have something to lose and I just have to name it for them and be like, okay, who's the person in your mind? Who's the voice? It's like, blah, blah, blah, six questions deep. It's my uncle. Okay. Why like, let me say it this way, will your belief that you're going to be viewed as a failure by your uncle be the sole reason that you live the rest of your life below your potential and regret everything that you don't do because of Uncle Tom. That's the wrong one, Uncle Harry. When you say like that, all of a sudden they're like,

I don't know what Uncle Harry have that kind of power and then all of a sudden it breaks and then they like get free of it. And so I think it's getting really specific and really narrow on the, because people say it's society, it's other people, it's like it's usually one or two voices. And if you can get really specific on whose voice it is,

then you can name it. And then like, I think I'm a big believer in like, shame only exists in the shadows, which is like, once you put it in the light, you look at it and you're like, my mom, that was really it. Like when I really think about it, it's because it's not even just my mom,

it's my mom in this circumstance. When I come back home for Thanksgiving, I just am so afraid of the combat that she's gonna make. I'm like, well, what if we confront that? Okay, your mom, you sit down at Thanksgiving dinner and you haven't made money yet and you quit your job. Now what? Is that better than you spending the next 60 years hating her

or resenting her for the fact that she held you back? And then it's like, when you give the real scenario, they're like, well, shit. And then like this, wait, comes off and they're like, fuck, I guess I should do this. And you're like, yeah! Shame on me, this, shit. And then like this weight comes off and they're like, fuck, I guess I should do this. And you're like, yeah. Shame on me. Because this in the shadows is nice.

I like that. And it definitely is cleansing to just be like, look, here it is out in front of you. And it realized just how irrational it is. Because we don't want to look at it. Because it's in the shadow. And we put it in the shadows because of how it makes us feel about ourselves, in my opinion.

And so it's so scary. We avoid it. We avoid scary, we avoid it. We avoid it, we avoid it, but it's like, I think the faster you can kind of build that muscle of like, huh, I've got this hesitation, what is the real reason? Because logically, I can do that whole thing, cool, you have nothing to lose, you're poor, great, zero, all right?

Okay, but then what is it that I do have something to lose? It's relational capital, it's status within my tiny micro community that doesn't matter, but like my perceived status. Okay, name the names. And, but by pulling it out from the shadows, but like that confrontation from here to here is I think where all the fear is,

because it's embarrassing to be like, it's my mom. The other perfect thing or great realization, I think for anybody that's starting out and is feeling self-conscious about what other people are going to think is when you're starting out by design, there are so few people looking at you that even if you do fail, no one fucking sees, right? So this is something we realized when we were running nightclubs that we would try and launch a new event around fresh as we can September.

We would have this great idea and it would be, everything would be about flamingos or everything would be, it would be a would be about flamingos or everything would be It would be a smart night on a Tuesday so people could go out after they've been to sports club of whatever it was And then it would flop right and we do 150 people and all of the guys that work for us would be stood outside looking destitute and upset and they go There so it looks like there's more room. Oh, we had so many tricks We'd pump the pump the room full of smoke. We would pad the back off so that everyone had to go to the front.

We get the DJ to play music. Oh, also to shit. But all of the boys would be like, fuck, this makes us look so bad. Everyone's going to think that we're shit. I was like, no, no, no, no, no. 150 people are going to think that we're shit. Like the advantage of running a shit business

that doesn't reach many people is that not many people saw your shit business. And that's when you're starting out. People that are concerned about becoming a content creator. I'm worried about starting a podcast because what if everyone sees how shit my podcast is? It's like, dude, no one's going to see your shit podcast. It took me three, three and a half years to get even an appreciable amount of people listening

to this show. And it was effort three times a week. No one cares when you start. So you can be liberated from that as well. And it was effort three times a week. No one cares when you stop. So you can be liberated from that as well. And it's just objection handling, objection handling, objection handling all the way down. I think a couple of frames that are, just different frames are on content making

since we're on the topic that helped me was one is seeing it as practice rather than the game. So like when we're doing a podcast, if you start, you're like, hey, we're gonna do a podcast and we're gonna post, it's practice for me getting better for future May rather than like, I'm like, this is the main game.

It's like, no, the game is the whole thing. And this is just like, we're still in preseason. Like these scores, these touchdowns don't even matter yet. Right? Now you can say yet, even though like I can still feel like I'm a preseason, but I think from a mental framework, it actually decreases the stakes associated with doing it.

And I think that's been helpful for me, especially it was in the earlier days. The other one was the equal opposite of this problem, which is not wanting to start because no one's watching, because it feels like you're doing all this work. Let's point. What's the point? I actually, the little mental trick that I had was one I track lots of stuff, and the more ways you track, the more ways you can win.

It's a little thing that I found out. So, like, if you track 100 sets, then you only need one of them to go up, so you feel like you made some progress. So, that's like an easy one. And the second thing around the tracking is that I would look at like the biggest possible number. So, a lot of times, you can see like the impressions of, you know, a post that you make. Even if you only got like 16 likes, like, I like 100 impressions. And I thought to myself, I was like, well, if there was a room that you make, even if you only got 16 likes, I got like 100 impressions. And I thought to myself, I was like,

well, if there was a room of 100 people, I'd be stoked. Like that would be awesome. Especially in the early days, I was like, that would be, I would totally feel like that was worthwhile. And so taking those little impression numbers and pretending that they were like micro events that I was making the work or the content for, all of a sudden made it feel worth it for me.

And so the combination of, I can have a small room and I'm really impacting, like when I get a view that has like 13 views on it, you know, I'm for like a video. In the early days, I'd be like, well shoot, I made this video and 13 people saw as like a small room, like that works. But looking at both absolute growth and relative growth. So it's like, okay, well, I went from 10 followers this month to 15 followers this month. It's like, well, you can say that you only gained five followers. I was like, or you can say that you gained by, you went up by 50 percent. And that was exciting. And so then I, because I'm a sell projection guy, I'll like, okay, well, if I do this every month and

the team knows this, because I project everything out, I'm like, we do this because I, I'll predict where we're going to be in like 12 months and usually hit it. Very. Really? But how do you account for the unforeseen 5 million play video that comes in? Well, that's my padding. Right. So, I'll project out with no white swan events. Yeah.

But I mean, we're something good happens. But just if we keep doing what we're currently doing at this trajectory, we compound at 13% a month. Yeah, that's what it is right now. So 13% monthly, and that's just on one of the platforms run. And so I can just see what we're going to be at six months, and that's exciting. So James Smith gamifies it in the same way. I do see.

Yeah, absolutely exactly the same way. And he always says that it's just like playing levels on a computer game in this month. Wow, like I got another XP point or whatever. And I think that's very important because social media and the fact that it is associated with status, even though everybody says, oh, you know, it doesn't really matter and blah, blah, it does.

Like it's very hard for us to remove the human hierarchy from what is evidently just quantified fucking status, right, on a screen. And what he did was he removed himself a lot, existentially from that by saying, it's not comment on my worth as a person. It's not a comment on whether I'm, you know, going to be loved or accepted by the world. It's me putting some stuff out. And wow, we won this month. Yeah. And this month, oh, maybe we didn't win. Why didn't we win?

Well, I'll go back. The same way as if someone beat you at FIFA, unless you like a pro FIFA player or whatever. But again, with that, what's the difference between the amateur FIFA player and the pro FIFA player, the pro has put his existential connection to his content and the success of it. All right, so many little things on this that I want to go into. One of them is that, so Dr. Cashy's my closest friend,

he's like a behavioral, whatever, loves studying why humans do things. And so people who are most successful, a lot of times, it's not that they necessarily have more well power They find ways to they find other ways to reward themselves And so he's like the more skills you have the more ways you have to reward yourself And so somebody who

Somebody can extend how long their time horizon is because they do gamify it So people who don't have the skills of figuring out ways to reward themselves in the meantime Can't make it the whole way. But that's like when you're doing cardio and you're like, okay, it's five times five to get out of here, right? You create microgames within the longer game to keep yourself going. And the thing is, I've seen that across verticals. So like if you look at, Travis Mache is a Olympic lifting coach out of North Carolina and

he has this really cool way of getting lifters to PR every workout. It's every personal record every workout. And what he does is he have them map every single set and rep range for every single lift at every weight. And so what happens is all you have to do is go through your book of 200 lifts and every single weight and you can always find one that you did a year ago.

And you're like, oh my God, this is my 8 rep max PB on good mornings. Yes, and you're like, well, I can hit nine on this or I can add five pounds to it. And so every workout they win. Yeah. And so they get excited because they get rewarded every workout. And so that's why it's like the more easy track,

the more ways you can win. And then I think that those little micro wins can keep you going over the long game that you have to just keep playing. One of the other associated tweets that you did was if your life sucks the easiest things to change your environment. Oh yeah. This is something that I saw moving from a very good life in the UK to now as excellent of a life as I can imagine in Austin. And I met about a million people throughout my time as a clip promoter and had a handful of friends. And I was like, fuck, I feel like my people met to friend conversion should be higher than this.

I feel like the funnel is very wide and the conversions are very low to use your terminology. And then moved out to Austin and I have more friends than people I've met, which is just fucking insane. So definitely changing your environment, what other ways, given that not everybody could move to Austin, what other ways would you say if your life sucks, the easiest thing is to change your environment, what other ways could someone do that? I mean, the environment is, I mean, this is a, I'm an attendant, I'm going to come back. So if you've ever heard somebody say like, man, I hate Cincinnati, Cincinnati sucks, right?

Or they go some city and like they go there for two days and they make a judgment across the entire city, right? But it's like, okay, let's go really deep. You ate at three restaurants and you saw seven total people in Cincinnati. Does Cincinnati suck or do the two restaurants that you went to or the seven people that you were with, not are they not that cool? Well, it's so easy to just move like two miles down the street. It's the same reason people do stay-cations.

It's like you don't even need to change cities. You can be in the same city and still change the environment. Like, just moving out of your mom's basement, you know what I mean? And just going into another place with four guys can change the environment. And so like, that's the thing that, to me, was so telling on this was,

so heroin addiction, super-addicting, I'll put it that way. And when a bunch of soldiers came back from Vietnam, they had been addicted, I'll put it that way. And when a bunch of soldiers came back from Vietnam, they had been addicted, I don't know if you've heard of this, right? 25% of soldiers who went to Vietnam tried heroin. It was like an insane statistic. And in the US, 90% of heroin addicts who go to clinics relapse. So they have a 10% long-term success rate, tough.

The stats are completely reversed from people who got addicted or did heroin in Vietnam and then came back to the US, which then you could make the, you could draw the line, which is it's better to change your environment than to even do anything else, because what happens is you eliminate all the triggers and cues that are associated with the habit that you're trying to destroy. Do you see that the American government was absolutely concerned that there was going to be an epidemic? Yeah.

They were adamant. The all of these soldiers were going to come home and it were going to be these veterans that were all addicted to heroin. Yeah. Wild. And there are, for sure, but so much proportion less than their quote should be because the problem with the current system of, like, if anyone's listening, you can still extrapolate the principle or the concept.

People are in the environment that they are addicted. They change environments and they go to a clinic. They change the environment, they change their behavior. And then, they go back to the same environment and their behavior changes yet again to match the environment. And so it's like if you want to change your actions, the easiest thing you can do is just change the environment.

Because if you can do that, a lot of times, a lot of the negative things you have, you just don't get triggered, you don't get the cue for the behavior, it just gets extinguished. So the way that I've worked this into my home working setup is I think I have six or seven different places that I can work at.

Yeah, and I do different tasks at each one of them. So I've got a place, I'm writing a book, I've got a place that I write my book, that's first thing in the morning. I've got a place that I do my emails book, I've got a place that I write my book, that's first thing in the morning. I've got a place that I do my emails at, that's a recumbent desk bike, which is fucking unbelievable dude. Zone two, 180 minutes a week of Zone Two cardio, 180 minutes a week of emails with Zone Two cardio. The place outside, I've got my studio record inside, we've got two living rooms

at different houses that I can go into. And I'm like different spots for each one. And if I'm in this vibe, I'm over here, and I say, oh, everything's a bit, go for a walk, come back, move somewhere else. Now I'm in a different mode. Totally. And I, I'm actually, so it works in the equal opposite, too. It's if you want to start something.

Right, so like what we were talking about was extinguishing bad habits by changing the environment by eliminating the queue. But on the flip side, if you want to start a habit, like for me one of my, quote, famous ones is like, I wanna put sunscreen on. It's like this time, it's like, one habit that's like 80-20. Why do you need to put sunscreen on so much?

Because, oh not, not so much. If you do like, it's like kind of like walking. Like if you just walk once a day, and if like, if everyone just did that, like you add 10 years to everyone's life, it's like, what are the few things? It's like baby aspirin walk. Like if you do that, crushing it, from a, like, skin cancer prevention, A, and then

B, just like less wrinkled Alex future, um, suntan lotion or SPF stuff, uh, is like the 80, 20 of that, right? Instead of having a zillion other things. It's like, okay, I don't like it. I realize the reason I don't like it is I don't like oil on my hands. Sounds so stupid, but like, that's enough punishment for me doing it that I stopped doing it. And so I had to overcome two things. One was that I hate the oil on my hands

and the second is that I don't remember. So I put one thing of sunscreen at each of my watering holes. So I get queued because I see it as soon as I sit down. So I eat lunch at the same table. I work at the same table and I'm in my nightstand. There's three places that I spend my time. And so I have one in each of the three places. And then the type of sunscreen I have

is that I have one that's dispensed through a thing. So I don't actually have to touch it. So it's like, do I know what, if you can identify why you don't like doing something, then you can isolate why am I being punished for this behavior and think, okay, is there a way I can fix it? And the other is how can I cue myself on a more regular basis by changing my environment rather than setting an alarm on my phone

where it goes off right now, and a little podcast, I'm not gonna pull out suntan lotion, or I'd have to carry everything with me, which I would never do, right? That would punish me far more than just not putting it on to be in with. And so just thinking through both of those things, anyways, that has been really helpful for me in starting and queuing myself to do new behaviors that I want to do,

and then also stopping behaviors that I don't want to do new behaviors that I want to do, and then also stopping behaviors that I don't want to do. Very nice. Most distractions come dressed as easy opportunities. This is interesting because as people begin to accumulate the success that they say that they want, this becomes an increasingly big problem. Yeah. I think it was Indy Grove who said this, probably Churchill.

There we are. Chalking on the one up for Winston. It might have been Packard. I think it might have been Hewlett Packard. It might have been one of those guys. He said that businesses die of indigestion, not starvation. And so they overeat, they're not starving. It's the entrepreneur that, and this is, like you get back to human behavior,

which almost all roads lead back to it, but the entrepreneurs get reinforced for changing direction because nothing work, nothing work, nothing work, you change direction, something clicks. And so what happens is you learn a lesson from that. You're like, oh, so if I change direction, good things happen, but that's not the right lesson, which is one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship

is making sure that we learn the right lesson from the from the from the instance or the circumstance. It's like I hired a sales guy, he did a bad job, all sales guys suck, not the right lesson, right? But that's actually something that is pervasive in even the internet community of like lessons that people they'll tell the story and then they'll say the lesson, but sometimes the less, all we know is the facts of what happened, not necessarily the thing you took from it. Anyways, I was making a point, Churchill, start-action, easy-up-a-channity.

So, the higher up in business you get, the more attractive the opportunities that you have to learn to say no to. And this has been really hard for me because at every level, like I thought, great, I have, I can check the box on distractions. I've learned to say no to $10,000 opportunities. But then when you're making $100,000,

then you have to be able to say no to 100,000 opportunities. And the thing is, is I call it the woman in the red dress. But the woman in the red dress, have you heard this little analogy I have? No. Okay, this is one of my favorite analogies. So in

the Matrix, Morpheus takes him through a training program to teach him one thing about agents. And so they're walking down the street and there's all these people going, going, going. And he says, were you listening to me or are you looking at the woman in the red dress? And he says, look again, it looks back. And the woman in the red dress you walk by is an agent pointing a gun in his head. And I see distractions the same way, which is that the better you become, the more attractive the woman in the red dress is. And so you can say no to a six,

but what about a seven? And 12. Exactly, what about hypothetical thousand, right? Like that's really what it becomes because there is no limit on the upside. And so that's why having like some of the soft stuff of like this is the vision, this is what we're trying to do. And there's a hundred other things I could do,

but each of the cost of those things is the one thing that matters most. And I think that one of the things that Layla's been so good at helping me with, and I think a lot of my success earlier on was propelled by the fact that like, when I met Layla, I had apractor agency, I had a dental agency, I had five gym locations, I had a gym launch business where we did turn arounds, I had all of those things

going on and there was no CEO besides me, I see of all of them, because I didn't understand how the stuff worked. And I also made no actual, I mean, I made money from all of them but no income. Like everything was just enough to break even and it was nine spinning plates. And it was because like, I was so opportunistic

and it's very classic new entrepreneur to just say yes to everything. And Warren Buffett said that the difference between really successful people and the most successful people, this is me paraphrasing, is that the most successful people say no to almost everything.

And I've tried to take that because it's so hard. And I think that a lot of the, you know, it's so simple and so hard, which a lot of success habits are, which is like, if you do the same thing for a very long period of time, I think this is Neil, uh, shoot Shane. I can't remember the name, but I'll say that, yeah, it's Churchill again. He said success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. And I just love that quote. Why do you not need to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are? You're doing the same thing. I think it's because you think you can handle both. And so

you're like, Oh, I got. Okay, because if you did think that you were smarter than you are, you would then start to take on more stuff. So quote from John Maxwell, which I absolutely adore, that says, you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything. Which is just fucking perfect. And it's the cool, it was, so Greg McEwan's essentialism is one of my top five books of all time. And it's for this precise reason that it's an antidote to the type A fallout. Right? I can do it all, I will do it all,

watch me suffer and bear this burden. And you go like, look, you can do the hard work thing, right? You can do that. But the working hard and being spread thin are two different dynamics. And one of the interesting idea I've been playing around with a little bit recently is periodizing work. So in the same way as your weightlifting coach will have the guys doing his sub-max for 90 days, he is building up for 90 days, he is comp rep, he is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, mobility. That's a much easier way to blend what we're talking about here.

Maybe a little bit earlier. I think you need to specialize more as you get bigger and bigger because the distractions are going to be even greater. Special, how so? So if you are the CEO of your company, and then someone comes in with, you've got so much more downstream from you that if you get distracted,

the repercussions, the ramifications of you becoming distracted, are magnified even more. What do you think about that? Do you agree? I think the specialist piece is the piece that threw me because I always feel like the higher up you go, the more generalist you become. In terms of skillset, but not in terms of projects,

or in terms of projects. Specialized in projects, generalized in skills. There we are. Yes, I like that. The first step to achieving a massive dream is conquering tiny impulses. I think it's exactly what we're talking about earlier. It's like, if you, like,

I got a, there's a tweet that I may, actually you, you were the one who made it go viral, right? Which was, when you quoted me quoting you, David Guggen, it's just this endless human centipede fucking homozy quotes. It was really Churchill who said it first. It was. But it's like you don't you don't you don't feel confidence by shouting affirmations in the mirror, but by stacking. Oh, having an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say you are. Thank you. That worked yourself out. Thank you.

I'll quote you to you, which is a new, a new low. So, so that, right? A lot of people were like, no, but what if you don't have any successes? Like, how do you get started? And I still think that the quote is 100% valid, is that they don't realize the validity of the smaller things that they have done up to that point. And so it's being able to transfer your successes of like,

okay, like, did you get dressed this morning? Like, did you get in front of the computer? Like, you have evidence, it's smaller evidence, but you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this. And then, you do that enough times that you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this. And then you do that enough times that you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this and support it. And I think that's where the big outcomes come from lots of constrained tiny impulses,

of saying like, you know what, I'm going to get this tiny victory. And I know how to say no to that. I know to say no to heroin today or whatever. Yep. That would be a hard one. A lot of your information. Probably larger. But that's the idea. It's just stacking as many of those pieces of evidence

that give you proof that you are who you say you are, that you have done what you say you can do. Yeah, it's the challenge of action or belief first is something that I've been playing around with so much. My friend James, he wrote a book, the C-word, like confidence. It was a book about how to be confident, right? And I do feel like a big footnote summary could have been that quote from you. Proof. And the problem is, this is something that I've seen as well.

A good example coming from a world where I was successful in business before I was successful personally. I have a skill set now. And my capacity within this particular skill set and the performance of what that does are intrinsically linked. Right. There's almost a linear relationship as I become better at networking with guests with recording, with doing all of the other things, the showing creases. When I run a business, there were so many degrees of freedom

between my inputs to the business and the success of the business that someone with like malignant imposter syndrome could always explain away how things had gone well. So I would say, oh, it's because we timed the market, right? Oh, it was because of like this member of staff that we brought in. I mean, I trained him, but really he would have been great without me or whatever. And self-doubt can sort of weedle its way in in very sort of nefarious ways when you do that. Then switching to something where you have a relatively undeniable stack of proof, even undeniable to the part

of you that wants to deny proof, which is that imposter syndrome. After a little while, it's just a crushing weight that you, I call it imposter adaptation. So, you know, if you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world and it persists, you have to admit to yourself that it's got nothing to do with your capabilities and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter.

This is just a trend of how you think about the world. You're looking for competence, you have competence without confidence, which is a lack of belief and confidence without competence is soft illusion. Right. So you need to have this balance between the two. But people when they say, well, surely self belief becomes before action.

I'm like, well, not particularly, not if that's not your nature. I don't think like you're asking for delusion there. And it is significantly easier for you to think, I am a fitness person. If you just went to the gym and did 10 push-ups, then I am a fitness person when I go to the gym tomorrow and do 10 push-ups. Like, where's the... Show me, spit and sawdust. Where's the fucking reality of this, you know? I agree.

Good. Opportunities only look like opportunities in the rearview mirror. Today they look like risk. How does someone get around this, this asymmetry between the fact that in retrospect, it seemed totally obvious. And yet, the thing that you're looking at right now, looking forward, you go, that might not be obvious in retrospect again. It's tough because a lot of the big wins, like Uber's the classic example, right? Like, let's start a business where strangers pick up girls who are 16, you don't even

drive them to their friends' houses. Like, that sounds like a terrible idea, right? Like it just, but in retrospect, you're like, no, it'll be totally fine because there's going to be a mutual rating system and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? Taking out the fact that there are people who've been captured and whatever. We'll put that to the side, right? And the thing is, is like, just because we're on

the investing side, what we found is that there are always reasons to say no to a deal. You can always find reasons to say no, because there's nothing that's risk-free. Even treasuries have risk. The US economy could collapse, and treasuries could be worth nothing. You could create a really compelling argument. Lots of influencers spend a lot of time doing that. Is it likely, maybe? I don't know, but it's probably less likely than a bank failing. Because if the US fails, all the banks might have fallen are also failing.

So which of these is great to risk? So then you start comparing risks rather than trying to eliminate risks. And so if we're looking at opportunities, that's why risk-adjustive return is one of the things that a lot of investors look at, which is like, is there a way that I can appropriately adjust this risk to normalize different opportunities? And I think that that single skill set is

One of, if not the most important skill sets as an entrepreneur because fundamentally it's betting. Like, that's what we're doing. We're making bets. Every day we bet, whether it's time we bet with our money. With the limited constraints we have or limited resources we have against unlimited opportunities. Because that's the hard part, is that there are unlimited women in the red dress. Now there's some fours and there's some sixes and there's some eights, but you have to both rate the girl, right, the opportunity, and then also how crazy is she, right, or whatever, you know, whatever risk factor you want to associate with this, is you're going to stab me in my sleep?

I don't know, right? Does she have a crazy expert for it? I don't know about it. I don't know. Right? Does she have a crazy expert for not know about it? I don't know. Right? And so that's what we do the Dildes process. But like the way that we, because I just

just tied up this chapter in the book that's coming out, is when we're organizing opportunities that we're going to pursue with a business, we look at what are the ones that we have the absolute high slightly to success that we need no new skills and no new effort. If we can do that, or the least amount of new effort, and no new skills, that would be the first thing

we're gonna do. And then once we take off all the ones that take basically no effort and no extra skills, we're like, okay, which ones take more effort and still no skills? And then once we do that, then we're like, okay, now we can start learning a new skill and of the different skills that we could learn,

which of these is gonna give us the highest leverage as in most output for the least amount of input. And that's pretty much how we tick down which of these opportunities we want to pursue, because those have the lowest likelihood of not happening. Does this work in the personal world as well? This one that isn't investor, that isn't in business, that's just thinking about life opportunities. Do I want to learn to salsa dance or code?

I think that the investor frame is simply people who have been scored and quantified on their ability to make decisions. And so I think that we can learn a ton from how investors make decisions overall. It's like why Ray Dalio's book, Principles, became like a best seller, even though 99.9% of people who are reading the book aren't even investors, or definitely not investors at his level. But the principles of good decision making are just quantified and we have a scoreboard for these guys being excellent decision makers.

Whereas most other people, you don't have a real scoreboard so we can't tell how valid is their advice. And I think that's what makes taking advice from really world class investors who've been doing it for decades as a great source of information because we can validate that they have a stack of undeniable proof that they are who they say they are. Very nice. Okay, so this was not Churchill this time. So this was, this is something that I've actually relied on a little bit myself. Whenever I get to a low point where I think, why do I even bother? I just remind myself, this is where most people stop,

and this is why they don't win, and this relates relates to another one which is a reminder for the gladiators in the arena who feel beat up and scarred with no hope in sight. Building a business is hard, hard feels shitty, this is what hard feels like and this is why most people can't do it, but you can. This is what hard feels like. Is so fucking nice to lean on. It is so nice to lean on. It is so nice to lean on. Take me through that low point stuff.

There's actually a story, I'm gonna go a little goosebumps telling it. So I was way back in my day, like you, a party promoter, but I was in a fraternity. So I was president of the fraternity. And this was my first semester being president. And so you have a pledge class, you get two pledge classes as a president,

you get a fall on a spring, and then that's your tenure, and then another president comes in. And what we knew, and this would be really interesting for the audience from a human behavior perspective, is that like clockwork, every time we'd start a new pledge class within 14 days,

10 to 14, it was like clockwork. They would all get together and they'd revolt. And they'd say, we don't wanna do it anymore. This isn't what we signed up for. This is way fucking harder than we thought it was going to be. We thought we were just going to party with you guys. That's what we expected. Which also shows you how long it takes people

to adapt or acclimate to a significantly more difficult situation. I'll tell you what happens after, and then I'll tell you what happened in between. After we have this talk that we had, and I'll tell you how I explain it when I was president, all of a sudden it all vanishes because their expectations of reality

have completely reset. We break reality, like in the first 10 to 14 days, it's so painful for them because it's such a contrast from what they have been doing. Not the fun stuff. What's not fun? Oh my God, I mean, they can't drink,

can't talk to girls. They only people they could talk to were brothers or each other and we're mean to them. So they could really only talk to each other. And the whole point here is that we're trying to get them close together because there's a bunch of dudes who don't know each other from different parts of the campus, right? And then we have to get them in eight to 12 weeks to leave as one unit of people who know everything about one another, that trust one another, that know everything about the other people in the house. So it's like, how do you do that? Well, there's only a lot of communication you people in the house. So it's like, how do you do that? Well, there's only a semantic communication

you can have every day. So let's cut out anybody who's not us. Okay, and then if we really want them to be close together, we'll also reinforce that we're mean. But part of what they had to do is they'd learn everything about everyone else in the house. And so every pledge has to do something that would impress a brother.

And then they get a signature from the brother, meaning like, I approve of you. And you have to get every single brother signature by the time you're done, right? And so that's where each of those side quests become as insane as you might imagine, right? And there's lots of, you know, there was lots of hazing back in the day,

which is not fun and, you know, a lot of sleepless nights and things like that. And you go from like, parting with girls, feeling like you're top of the world, all these brothers feeding you drinks, be like, you're awesome, dude, to then like the next day. And this is literally how it happens. This is how like the break and reality happens. We do the huge party to like launch the new class. And the next morning they all wake up, they're all like, they all sleep at the house because that's one of the requirements. And they're all hung over,

they've got their ties like vomit in the corner, whatever. And we're like, great, clean it up. And they're like, what? Because up to this point, they haven't cleaned after a party. Because all they did is got to party, see the girls, and then leave. But then all of a sudden, they're like, mopping bottom in the corner. And they're hung over. And they feel terrible.

And they're like, what the fuck? This is what I signed up for, right? So anyways, two weeks of this, they get together. And they wanted me to meet them, and this always happens. Cause they want to meet on their turf. And I'm like, all right, guys, what's up? And so it's just me all right and my vice president and like 25 guys So there's like a you know, there's like a size comparison of like Just animalistically. There's way more than there is of me and so I just asked them a couple questions

I was like who here before pledging started was like I want to be a part of this house like guys are like you know me Okay, okay got okay, got it. Who here thought it was gonna be easy? I'm like, who here thought it would be hard? They raised their hands. I'm like guys, this is what hard feels like. And all of a sudden, there's just like this big exhale in the room, they're like, expectations get reset.

This is normal. You wanted this thing. You expected to be hard. Reality now matches conditions. Sorry, expectations now match conditions. This is what heart feels like. And then all of a sudden, it's like they got permission to feel shitty. And by getting permission to feel shitty, they stop feeling shitty because they're like,

this is just my new world. And so then you know you're like, listen, you give eight weeks, you're going to get three and a half years, other people are going to drive you around late at night, other people are going to clean after you, it's a good investment, right? And it was a good deal. Like you give one semester and you get the rest of them to just do whatever you want. But that concept, like that quote, and both of those came from that experience. Of having someone tell me, this is what heart feels like. This is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win. It's also another beautiful bit of motivation, and given that I spent a little bit of time

with Goggins and Cammayns, two guys, I was telling you about this before, you said, it must be nice as we walked in. So Cammayns, Bohunterk's Rodinaire, lives in Oregon, and he has behind the power rack in his garage where he lifts. He has must be nice written. And I was like, why have you got that put up on there? And he was like, it's because everyone says must be nice to be you, can't must be nice to be sponsored by height. And all of these like top level bow things and go on Rogan. He was, there was a video that went super viral of Goggins losing his shit after John Jones won last weekend and the guy that he's hugging his camp. So it's like, it must be nice for you to be

backstage at UFC, it must be nice for this. And I've seen what that guy does and that guy picks up a rock that weighs about 80 pounds and it's got the word poser written on the front of it because people call him a poser and he carries it up a hill that is maybe like a thousand foot of elevation, mile and a half high, with no fanfare at the end, no finish line, doesn't post it on social media unless the team's there filming it with someone else and then carries it back down, puts it in the boot of his Raptor, drives away. And he just does that because he needs to remind himself that he's doing the stuff that is hard. And this is where most people stop, and this is why they don't win,

combined with this is what hard feels like, justifies things being hard. Now, I do worry, and I find this in myself sometimes as well, that you can be so good at dealing with suffering, that you can actually push yourself a little bit too far. And you go, I'm starting to bear more burden than I can basically take on. And the art of not burning out is something

that I think a lot of people, if this resonates with you, the art of not burning out is something that you really, really need to be able to feel. And like, realizing what happens when you just start to glance off the bottom side of it and go, okay, I'm just going to ease off the gas a little. I need to take this afternoon to go sauna and get some sunshine and chill out and get some

food and then I can put my foot back on maybe a little bit tomorrow and we'll temper it. But it just, it justifies the fact that I use this stat all the time. Ninety percent of podcasts don't make it past episode three. And of the ninety percent that do, ninety percent don't make it past episode three. And of the 90% of the 10% that do, 90% don't make it past episode 20. So by making 21 podcasts, you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history. That's what hard feels like. And that's not even hard, it's just consistent.

Fuck me, it's less than half a year. Yeah. Insane. I hear stats like that and I just think, man, it is so easy to win. Like that, I mean, like when I hear that, that's exactly what I think. I'm just like, man, if everyone is like struggling to win, it's like, you, like most of the pain that people experience is purely in their own minds. And so to your point, I think there's an interesting one between like,

burnout versus hard. And so like, for me, burnout is when I would define it as my output per unit of time decreases. So I can see that, that's measurable, right? Now, I can say like number of pages that I edit are the quality of the content that I create. My output per time, the team knows when I'm like six hours, seven hours into recording something, they're like, I literally start slumping.

You're like, physically, I just start slumping and're like, I physically, I just start like slumping and I like, my cadence isn't as, like I'm just not as sharp, right? There's that versus emotional burnout, which I think people mislabel as burnout, when really it's just like, they don't know how to reframe reality. And so what it really is is they got a comment

on a post that bugged them. And like again, it's like pulling it from the shadows. It's like, no, this stuff doesn't work. It's like, hold on. What's the one voice that actually is coming through? What is the real thing? Well, there is this comment. Okay, great.

It's embarrassing to even have to say that. But when you say it, then you admit it and all of a sudden you put it in the light and the shame kind of starts to evaporate because then you can name it and be like, is this comment better than my, bigger than my future? Is this comment bigger than me? And one of the things that I, that has helped me was saying like, what's true about this? Because if someone said Alex, you have pink hair.

Are you familiar with Byron KT, you know her? I've heard her name. Yeah, the work, she does the work. And one of the first questions that she asks you is, is it true? How do you know that it can be true? Yeah. And so it's like the same thing,

bring it from the shadows, right? Into the light. Okay, you have this sense. There's no shit. It's like a fucking smell. It's like, maybe something's a bit, maybe something's, maybe I might be like a piece of shit. Maybe I'm not competent.

Maybe I'm not whatever. I think, okay, that's... And the next one is like, what if we confront it and say like, what if they're right? Now what? Because a lot of, I think a lot of effort gets put into trying to deny reality, right?

Like there's this clip that I shared from Tom Billy when he was talking about how he gets made fun of first years, being big, right? And I think it's a really good clip because his point that he was making, because it's such a visual easy example for people to understand. He's like, is that, it's true.

I do have big ears. And. And so that's like, if they're like, you have no right to be making content. Are they right? Okay. And, I'm going to do it anyways. Because the thing is like, one of the things that I had earlier out of my career was like, I didn't think I was a really good person. Like I was like, I'm not a good person. Yeah,

like some people like, yeah, I just had that, right? And I had a history, you know, whatever. And one of the things that gave me a lot of respite or relief from that kind of thought process was like, comma, that's okay. Because I can still do the things that create success and not deserve it and still get it. And that actually felt very powerful for me. Because it was like, I don't have to deserve to success. I can still just do the stuff that gets it. It's like, you don't have to deserve the girl,

but you can still do the things that get her. And do you deserve it when you have her? I don't know. Who knows? I hate the word deserve it when you have her? I don't know. Who knows? I hate the word deserve to begin with, right? Yes. But that concept, because also I could segue into gratitude around like if you think you deserve it,

then you don't enjoy it. But that has been super powerful for me, which is like, what if they're right? And? Because a lot of people just spend so much effort trying to fight the fact that the comments might be right. This might have been a fucking terrible thumbnail. You know what? This might have been a boring video.

This post might have been regurgitated content. This post might have been inspired too closely by someone else's post, right? What if they're right? And does it make me a piece of shit? What if it does? And... You end up getting down to base, which is pretty much nothing. Does it make me a piece of shit? What if it does and You end up getting down to base which is pretty much nothing right all that there is is actions all that there is is what you're going to do in response to this You know what another brilliant Add addition to this that you kind of mentioned. Yeah, which is the fact that this is what hard feels like most people get to this stage

And they decide to stop and now the bar is set so low. Goggin said this in the episode with me and it gave me chills when he said it, who's like, it's so easy to be successful nowadays because people are weak. Yeah. Everybody's weak. Dana White says it as well.

I tell my kids, it is so easy. If you are even a like weekend savage, you will run these kids over. And for every single person, it's gonna be chilled again, for every single person that likes to castigate the very padded victimhood mentality of the modern world, okay, cool, like you can rail against people that say that the world is against them,

even though it's not and et cetera, et cetera. How does that inform the way that you should operate in the world? Well, okay. What you're saying is, everybody else is fallible, weak, fragile in some way or another. How does that inform the way that you act? The way that you should act is, holy shit, if I have even a modicum of resilience, this makes the market environment for me so much easier, whether I want to get the girl by the house, become successful in whatever domain I choose to, the bar is set solo. Yeah.

This, if we're going tweets, this segues into one of my favorite ones, which is you stay in poverty until you learn the first lesson of poverty, which is you stay in poverty until you learn the first lesson of poverty, which is two words, my fault. And so, when I was younger, I was really angry at my parents like many people are, right? Justified or not doesn't really matter. I was very angry and I blamed them for the woes of my life. And I realized when I was 19 that these people that I hated, And I realized when I was 19 that these people that I hated, I was giving all the power over the fact that I wasn't the person I wanted to be. And I was like, well, it's their fault.

And the idea that I had actually given these people that I hated, power over my success was ultimately something that made me feel sick to my stomach and was what allowed me to point the finger of blame inwards and say my fault. And then at least take ownership over the fact that like, and like, sure, maybe your dad didn't hug you enough or maybe your mom was in present or whatever it is, right? It's like, and, and like, I said this the other day and it'll probably piss off a lot of your audience

so, you know, we can put our soft earphones on. Like if you were, if you, if you suffered from racial inequality, if you suffered from gender inequality, if you suffered from being born in Bangladesh, if you were raised, uh, now it's sexually abused your entire life, you would be completely justified in the fact that you are not achieving the things that other people who didn't have those disadvantages have achieved. And I say this as a white guy who was born in America to a doctor father. I understand that. But at the same degree, you have the opportunity that Chris nor I have, which is that you

can be an inspiration to people who just who went through the same thing and succeeded come at a spite those circumstances. Because I can promise that there is somebody who has had it worse and has done it better. And I think that that one single point of proof and like there's a global point of proof that you can look for for sure, but like you can be that very local point of proof in your community or sub-community. And I think as soon as we shed that, that's like I just am a big fan of Power Follows the Blamefinger. So like wherever you point the Blamefingers, where the Power Follows.

If you point it to the government, government has the power. If you point it at your spouse and say, it's their fault that I'm not in shape, it's their fault, they never let me do anything. It's like, well, you're giving them all the power. And so it's like until you're like, it's my fault. It's also because my fault is not your fault.

What if it's not your fault? It doesn't matter. And? Also, because it's not your responsibility. What is? What if it's not your fault? It doesn't matter, and. Like, I can't run marathons because I lost my leg at birth, and either you can just never try or you put the metal thing on, and you do it anyways. So this is one of the themes that I'm very interested in to do with your work in general. And it's one of the reasons why it bridges the gap from what we're going through, which

are some really lovely philosophical insights on all of the rest of it. The differences, you seem to have a knack to be able to drag yourself out of the philosophy and get yourself into action. There's not too much mental masturbation that goes on. So let's say that there's someone who's listening to this podcast, you know, thousands of people that are listening who are that person. Thousands of people that are that person. There'll be a lot of people that are listening to work, don't worry. That person that goes, I love when I hear these aphorisms and things and maybe it goes on the whiteboard that's on the front of my fridge for a couple of months, how does that person get from mental masturbation around it to action, that this impact my life in a tangible

way that actually makes a difference to me, any of the things that we go through today. All right. Two things. One is knowing the input output equation. The second is knowing what your fuel is going to be. So if you can't define the inputs and outputs that are going to get you what you want, then there's no way to start, right? Because you don't know what you're supposed to do. So you have to define it down to like the most basic first action.

So it's like, if I want to start creating content, then it means I have to post something. If it means I have to start doing code, I always think in terms of business because that's what I'm in. But like, I mean, they're doing a code reach out. I'm doing a code, code call, code email, code DM, whatever that is. I have to make a piece of content. I have to post it. I have to make a podcast. I have to make a YouTube video. I have to make a short, whatever that is. Make a blog post. I have to run that, right? I have to run the ad. I have to press go. I have to spend the money. Whatever it is, like whatever that core initial action is. It's the gym left the way. Put the shoes on. Yeah. Whatever the input is, you have to run the ad, I have to press go, I have to spend the money, whatever it is, whatever that core initial action is left away, put the shoes on, whatever the input is, you have

to define what the input is that's going to get you the output you want. Now once you know what that input output is, the next one is why aren't you doing it? And so I think a lot of people are looking for something that is very hard to find. And so, and then they attribute their lack of success or lack of action because they don't have passion or motivation, right? And I was the same way. And so, the short story around this was that, I watched all the TED Talks in college.

Like that was like what I was like, I'm not watching YouTube, I'm watching TED Talks. And I was like, and then I heard the Terminal Mastervation and I was like, oh, that's definitely what I'm doing. I was like, my life hasn't changed at all. And then I got my job, so out of college, and I would read all the self-help books.

I read every night, it's all I did. I read all these self-help books and I found one of them that said, there are people who are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. And I remember hearing that word, entrepreneur, and I was like, it made me feel sad. I was like, I wanna be fucking watch-proners. I was like, I'm not some bitch.erpreneur, and I was like, it made me feel sad. I was like, I don't wanna be fucking watchpreneur. I was like, I'm not some bitch.

Like, yeah, but I was like, but what if they're right? I am a watchpreneur. I'm not an watchpreneur. I want to be one and I'm not. And from that point, it took me six months to quit my job to actually decide to do the entrepreneurial thing. And the thing, there are many things

that contributed to me being able to leave. And I think a lot of it's not like, we were looking the entrepreneurial thing. And the thing, there are many things that contributed to me being able to leave. And I think a lot of it, it's not like we were looking for one thing. It might be a big bag of wise, a lot of them, right? That add up together to be above your action threshold. And I think in the early days, people are looking for the big carrot, they want the big vision,

they want the big passion, but they don't have it. But I wanna, I'll give you the first rule of entrepreneurship that I've learned, which is use what you have. And a lot more people have pain, a lot more people have anger, a lot more people have shame. And if you can use that as your gas in the beginning, you'll eventually get to a point where you can get out of that loop and then find something that you are really passionate about. But if you can't tie your shoes, you can't lift the weight, you can't send the DM, then

you have to start with whatever you have. And so, for me, it was hatred of my current existence. I hated being a watchman or I hated being a wannabe, I hated being one of those people who like talked about all the things they were going to do and didn't do anything. I hated living the life that my dad wanted me to live. I was his bitch. That's what it was. I was his bitch. I was living his dreams out on mine it was. I was his bitch. I was living his dreams out on mine. And that was led to that other tweet, which was sometimes your parents' dreams

have to die in order for you to live. And for me, I realized that the idea that my father had of me as his son, that image had to die in order for the image of myself that I wanted to be to live. Because I kept trying to quit my job and go be an entrepreneur. And every time I'd have the conversation, you'd be like, come over, we'll talk about it,

we'll have dinner, you know what? And you'd always talk me off the ledge. It was always over and over again. Good thousand. Yeah, and we're great authoritarian. You don't need to persuade when you have compliance. And so everybody has that person, or it might actually be somebody who's talking off the ledge,

or might should be a voice in your head, it doesn't really matter, because that voice in person that only happened once or twice probably keeps talking to you when you're at home. But the big thing for me, when I decided to make the jump in mind you, I was such a bitch about it, that I had to drive across the country

before I called them to tell them that I'd left. Yeah, I remember that stuff. I didn't want to confront them, which you then flew off the handle about. But I just knew, and this is the Tony Robbins quote, but it's just that when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change. And I think that I think pain moves people far more

effectively than pleasure does. Like, the easy thing to a way to prove it is, like, point a gun at someone's head and you have absolute compliance and they will do what they need to do, right? Automatically, just like that. Like death is the great motivator and the gun just reminds you.

And so, I think that if you can create the figure of gun to your head of the pain that you're experiencing and then I'm a big fan of future casting out negative scenarios. So people are talking about like positive visualization. I prefer negative visualization, which is what if I keep doing what I'm currently doing for the next 10 years. Well, my life will click then that usually takes my current pain and then just magnifies it and then that allows me to get my action threshold high enough that it goes over the edge so that I can take that first move. And so if you know what the inputs outputs are of what you need to do, the guy who has the little quote on his wall, and you figure out whatever fuel you've got, not the one you wish you had, but the one you've got, and you use that to do the first input, you

cross the line. You're in the game. I told a story on the episode that I did with Guggins about bullying in school, and this is something where I opened up about a topic that I haven't spoken about. A ton, because it made me feel weak and it made me feel vulnerable and so on and so forth. But one of the things that's only really recently happened, and it's actually been assisted by the guy that reached out and messaged me. This dude messaged and said that he was sorry for what had happened. His daughter was going to school and it made him reflect on his time at school and how he

treated me and he was like, dude, I just wanted to say that I'm sorry, I don't even know if you're going to see this. I'm happy that you seem to be happy, but I just had to get it off my chest and that really helped. Not that I was carrying much, but one of the questions, you've spoken about your dad and this kind of authoritarian relationship and living out that dream. How did you avoid or how have you got yourself to a stage now where you're no longer driven by a chip on your shoulder toward him? Because I think that there are a lot of people that go through challenges in

their past that find fuel in it. And they go, wow, I can be fueled by hatred. Phenomenal. I can al fueled by hatred. They are phenomenal. I can alchemize this toxic thing into something which is useful. Thorough. But I would imagine that that has a shelf span. That if you keep on using that for long enough, there are more optimal ways that you could start to move

perpetually under your own motion, transmuted into something else. How did you get past having this chip on your shoulder about the relationship that you'd had with your dad and where it had set you back or forward or whatever? I'll have you. Yeah, I think I have. I think my realization was, first the goal was make as much of my dad, then it was make more than my dad, then it was make more than my dad had ever made. And I realized that the approval that I had, that I saw it, was always going to be moved. Right?

I mean, I've told this story before, but maybe not to your audience. But like when I, when I, my dad and I didn't really speak a ton, you know, we texted, you know, two-minute, phone call, hey, you're alive, okay, cool. But for that was kind of like for like five-ish years after I left home to go do the gym thing. And only once gym launch was like printing money. And so we were, I think I was taking home million and a half a month at like 27 or something like that. And he gave me a call out of the blue

and like my dad doesn't like cold call me you know and so I'm sitting at dinner and I step outside and he says hey you're gonna want to sit down for this and I'm like okay he's like I'm sorry I was like about what he was like everything and I remember in the moment actually feeling nothing nothing. And thinking that was curious, and then being like, huh, okay. And I probably should have just like accepted it for the Oliver answer that he was probably trying to like lean out to me. But here's what I said instead. I said, you know how people get up on stage when they win the awards.

And they're like, I just want to thank my mom and dad for always being there always believing in me. I was like, I'm not going to say that. I was like, because you weren't, and you didn't believe in me. And right after that, he was like, well, we'll see how long it lasts. And so,

it was after that phone call that I realized that everything that I'd done to that point was to try and beat him at his game because everything my dad cared about and not everything he's a good guy. We're fine now. But when I was growing up and it's fairly common in most foreign families to be very like money-driven. And I always knew that kind of subconsciously, he would never say this, but I felt it because whenever he introduced somebody, he'd tell me how much they made immediately.

He'd be like, this is John. John makes this. Like this is John, John makes this. Like, this is Paul, he makes this. Like, it was just like the worth and the name was like immediately tied together. And so I realized that I was trying to win his game rather than playing my game. And I think when that happened, it was the same instance of kind of like the blame finger, but just at a different level. I'm still playing his game. I'm winning not my game, I'm winning someone else's. I think when I was like, okay, well, then I have to define the game and the meaning of the game that

I want to play, I have more responsibility now because I have to define the rules, what matters to me, et cetera. But that was where I feel like I got, and maybe there's more that I'll unpack later, but that was kind of the next level, at least for my awareness of how I perceived what I was going after. Do you remember you, I think you spoke about people that break the law in an attempt to make money. You said, we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it.

So we sacrifice freedom for money in the hopes thing that's supposed to get it. So we sacrifice Freedom for money in the hopes that the money will give us freedom. Yeah, down stream from that This is one of the best things that I learned for all of last year and you Created the framework and then I filled it in so I talked about the tension between Success and the desire to feel like we're enough. I think that this speaks to what you're on about here Success is a strange thing presumably we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness, meaning and fulfillment. Here's the problem. We sacrifice the thing we want, happiness, for the thing which is supposed to get it, success. Failure can make you miserable, but I'm not sure that success will make you happy. And if you end up with an equation, if you could imagine

like we sacrifice happiness to achieve success in the pursuit of happiness, like if you just remove success from both sides of the equation, what are you left with? It's just happiness. People are happiness. Now there are, we can't deny the fact that we're statusful beings, that we, you know, we require external validation, we can't just, you know, go and live in a cave and in peaceful bliss and all the rest of it. Like there are things that we need to do, but I do feel like a lot of the time we overclock our lives

with regards to success and the pursuits that we go through in an attempt to do this. And that we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing which is supposed to get it is like, I see that all the time. I always ask myself, am I over complicating this? Like, am I doing more than I need to do? Is there a simpler way to do this? I think this is actually a game theory thing. And you're from okay. So I can I can go on it or I can not. I've got bring it on. Bring it on. Yeah. So I mean,

Simon's in that popularized this, but you have finite and infinite games, right? finite games. We have known known players agreed upon rules and an outcome that wins the game, right? And then infinite game you have known and unknown players, no rules, and the point of the game is to keep the game going. And what happens is that people apply finite rules to infinite games, and then they wonder why it's not working. And an example. So a finite game would be like baseball.

No, the players at the end of the game, the person you tell, I have the ones with the most runs, and you win, and you can't hold the ball and run it around the bases like there's rules of play. With an infinite game, the Vietnam War isn't a simple example that Simon's in that gifts, which is basically the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because they were applying a finite structure, which is we're going to win this war. And the Vietnamese people were playing an infinite game, structure, which is we're going to stay alive and keep fighting.

And as long as someone is staying alive and keeping fighting, they will beat the person who's trying to end something. And so the infinite frame always conquers the finite. And the thing is, is that most of the games were with playing our infinite. And so if you were trying to get in shape, you don't win getting in shape,

the point is to stay in shape for the rest of your life. You don't win at marriage, the point is to stay married. You don't win at business, the point is to stay in business and keep doing business. The point of the game is to keep playing. I think if the six, and I would imagine success, if you put all of those things together, it's an infinite game. And so the point of success is to do the things that make you successful. And so if you're doing the things that are making you successful, then you are by definition winning. And I think that for me, of redefining what is a perfect day, and living as many of those days in a row as I possibly can,

to me, that's winning. And I, and I obviously have a relatively contrary and worldview, but which is that like when we die, nothing happens. And you know, we know what it was like to die because we've all been dead before, which is when we were before we were alive. But I don't think that what I will do will ultimately matter in 500 billion years. And so that kind of eliminates a lot of the pressure for me around like the external outcome. Sure, I'm human, there are definitely motivators.

But if I can just over time chip away at how much that weighs on the scale, and I can keep putting more and more coins on the other side Towards the infinite game of like the point of the game is to keep playing and like there are some things that I remind myself over and over again It's like the point of the game is to keep playing. That's the point That is the point is to just keep playing the point of the game is to keep playing I very much like that What was that you found out?

The three trait the three most common traits of highly successful people. Do you remember those? Yeah, it was, it's so funny. A spirary-arty complex. So the three most common traits of hyper-successful people that they looked at, and it was interesting because the influencer world wants to be like, you have to wake up at five

or you have to do cold plungers or whatever the fuck, right? But the thing that, but there was actually very few that they all had in common. So number one was that they had a superiority complex. They thought they were better than other people and that they deserved more. The second is that they suffered from massive insecurity and feeling that they would never be enough. And third, they had impulse control. And so you've got this combination of people who are like, I want to do this big thing.

So there's big toward thing. And they've got this big away pain that's like, I'm never going this big thing. So there's big toward thing. And they've got this big away pain that's like, I'm never gonna be enough. I always have to do more. And then they have impulse control that keeps them focused on the goal without seeing the woman in the red dress. Or getting pursued by her.

And that, like, so it's like, shoot high, have a big thing that, that motive, like have a big tiger behind you and stay on the path. If you ever heard Jordan Peterson talk about that study of starving rats in a tube with a spring attached to that? No. Fucking brilliant.

This is what you're talking about. So starving rats are placed into a tube, and they have a spring that is attached to the tail that can measure the force that they pull out, and that's a proxy for desire. Then they waft the smell of cheese in from the front of the tube, and the rat pulls, and they measure how hard they want to go. And you think these rats are starving, they would be pulling pretty hard. Then they do another iteration of the study.

This time they wafth the smell of cheese in from the front, but they wafth the smell of a cat in from behind. And the rats pull harder. And what's the lesson? The you not only need to run towards something that you want, but you need to run away from something that you fear. Now the problem, and this is, I like super, super, super crippling insecurity, impulse control. I like that. The problem is, the people who we admire the most, due to the most success in the real world, don't necessarily have the

most admirable internal states. That, to me, isn't necessarily the most peaceful, blissful way to live your life. What does it say that, especially in the modern world, we revere the people who have external accolades of success, and yet the three most common traits of these super successful people lead from a place which is almost objectively... miserable? unadmireable. Yeah. How do we, how do we square this circle?

I think it's just what are we solving for? So like, I mean, a lot of people, I love watching last dance, which is Michael Jordan's, you know, mini-documental. phenomenal. Yeah, unbelievable. I think most people could see him there and be like, I don't know if I really envy this guy's life,

like he still seems like pretty upset, despite being a billionaire, despite all these, these, these other things. And so I think that if, like, what are we solving for? Like my closest friend, Dr. Kashi, he has a statement because he coached Olympic, Olympic teams. And he was like, champions are broken. I was like, huh, he's like, people look at champions and try and find something that that champion has that they don't have. And he's like, but it's not that at all. He's like, they lack something everyone else has, which is an off button.

They just don't stop. And at the end of the day, if we're optimizing for outcomes, then the most broken person will win. The person who has the absolute biggest desire for achievement, the absolute biggest fear or pain that they're running away from, and the hardest impulse control. Now, impulse control most people would agree is a good thing. The other two, not as much. And so, what are we optimizing for? What problem are we solving? It's probably the number one most frequently asked question that I asked

to our portfolio companies, whenever we're about to do anything, which is what problem are we solving? If the problem that we're solving is that I want to be content, well, there's a lot of ways to do that, and you don't need to do all these other things. If the problem that we're solving is that I want to be content, well, there's a lot of ways to do that. You don't need to do all these other things. If the problem you're solving is that you want to be the richest man in the world, well, you're going to have to have a lot of superiority complex. You have a lot of crippling insecurity and you're going to have a lot of impulse control and you're going to have to wait a long time.

There's a quote from Jason Pargan that says, accept that all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods that just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. Yeah, I agree with the statement. Fucking money. It's just so interesting to me. I've been thinking about this to do with Billy McFarlane.

Let me just get this in. Hit it. And that's okay. Because if they wanted that, then that's the problem that they're solving for. Like I get criticized all the time for work life balance. People are like, well, you don't have any hobbies, Alex, and you don't, whatever, right? And I'm like, I don't fucking want any. So why do I have to sacrifice things that I would prefer to do to do things I don't

want to do to satisfy your objective measure of what you deem as work life balance? Why? So that's what, this is where you were talking about, was it optimized for the outcome or what's the metric of success? Yeah. You were saying, what is it that people are optimizing for? Right. It seems to me that you have stepped back and decided axiomatically,

this is the thing that I'm optimizing for. That I enjoy most doing. Yes. That's I enjoy playing the game. And so everything I do is about the game. Yes. My podcast is called the game. I draw pictures all day about business.

I write books about business. I make content about business. I spend the rest of my time. I've never seen a picture. I do. 100 million offers. Zillion pictures in there. Oh. Well, they done by you.

100% all of the pet drawings are mine. And 100 million leads is like 100 doodles in it. Is it? Okay. When are you good? Are they nice?odles in it. Isn't it? Yeah. Okay. Money good. Are they nice? I think so.

Are they cute? Yeah. You got little animals in? Yeah. They don't have animals in. I'm not, I'm not going to look at them. There's little back of money, big back of money. Like that's how nice.

Dead serious. Sweet. But no, but like, and I spend the rest of my day doing business. Yeah. And so it's like, well, why don't you garden? Because I don't care. He's the other thing, right? I always talk about this. Steffi Graf.

They, one of the greatest female tennis players of all time, and she gets tested when she's 10 years old, 11 years old, and she's in some tennis academy. And they gauge the players on two criteria. They gauge them on desire to train and skill set. And she was 10 out of 10 on both. So, okay, not only has she got the raw materials to make a phenomenal tennis player, but she'll out work you and to her it won't even feel

like work. That's fucking terrifying. And that's why I do think, for the people that look at yourself and say, Alex is on a road to burnout, it's because you are using your theory of mind about how you would feel if you had to work as much as you do. But okay, what is the thing that you can do longer than anybody else and to them it looks like work and to you it looks like play or feels like play? What would that be? Oh, well for me it would be computer games are knitting or rock music or whatever it is. Do they? Okay, so imagine if you just got to do that all day, but instead of it being rock music it was fucking business. Yeah. Someone commented the other day, was instead of it being rock music, it was fucking business. Someone commented the other day,

was it you're sprinting on a treadmill, they were concerned that the pace that the show is going out at was going to cause me to burn out. And in retrospect, I'm five years time, I'm like, oh, fuck yeah, I was moving too quick, but I don't think that, like, I work at the pace that I like to work at, and I also like to see where those limits are, and that's exciting to me, to go, okay, just how much harder can I go here? And then again, you've got a temperate with, that's burnout, that's just the beginning of it. And you only know that after you've burned out, like 30 times.

But it's tried to say after a time of cabbage by James Clear, right? But the intersection of what you love to do, what you're good at, and what you can be paid for is like, slap bang in the middle of it. Slaves worked all the hours they were awake for their entire lives. In American history, in Egyptian history,

in the rest of the world that had slaves, which is most of the world at some given point. I think like if they can do it so can I. Now you're like, well, did they have a happy existence? Well, they didn't get to pick the work they did, but it means that you can work. That's if you have the cap behind you, you can work every hour of the day.

I'm like, well, if you get to have the cheese and you get to eat the cheese the whole way you're going, then I mean, there's the famous quote, the person who, the person who loves walking walks further than the person who loves the destination Right, and so like I think it's the same thing, but the Everyone so many people want to project their idea of of what they think your life should be like onto you And it's just completely irrelevant. It just doesn't matter. Like if all I did, if I weren't married, right?

Cause people were like, okay, well he is married and like I am in shape, but I also just like working out. But if I didn't have either of those things and all I did was work all day, more people would talk about the work life balance thing for me than they currently do. And who cares?

I just like, I fundamentally am like, you are gonna die and you're not gonna matter. And I'm gonna die and I'm not gonna matter. So why do I care about what you're gonna say when you're not even gonna show up to my funeral? Who gives a shit? What is it? What is it that you're taking an enjoyment from then?

The one step deeper than this, there is something that you're optimizing for. Oh, I love the reward. What reward? The micro rewards I get every day. Like, of operating a business. Of all things business related. Yep.

So I love writing the book about business. I love talking to my editor about what we're changing. Oh, that's a really way better way to say it, right? Or I like tweeting about the thoughts that we have. I love doing discussions like this because I talk about my theory topic, which is business, for the most part. Like, and I actually am pretty averse to punishment.

I've learned that about me. Like, I do not like it. And when I say punishment in the formal sense, like things you don't like, right? And so like, I avoid them like the plague. I don't do them. And so I just do as many of the things I can that reward me as frequently as possible.

But from the outside to a lot of people that looks like punishment. Right. Yes. Right. Yes. Interesting. How can someone cut through societal expectations, the ways they've dealt with past trauma, expectations from parents, all of the things

that aren't their thing? Yeah. How can somebody, because what you've done again, axiomatically, a priori, this is the thing I want to optimize for. How do people find the thing thing I want to optimize for. How do people find the thing that they want to optimize for? I don't have a thing.

That's fucking great for you with your business. It just happens to be something else that's at the intersection of making a shit ton of money. Yeah. How do I find it? And I was lucky with that. Yes. That just happened to be the intersection

because if I love knitting and I didn't like business, that's a whole set, because you can turn knitting into a business, but if I only like knitting, then there's a way to make a living from that. But to get to the person who's like, how do I find my thing, I'm a big fan of being directionally correct rather than absolutely correct. And so I think what happens is most people are trying to find the perfect answer when they have no perspective from which to make a judgment. They're trying

to find the perfect thing to do when they haven't done anything. So how would you have perspective to be a judgment? Like if you try a lot of things in the beginning, which you have to know what your inputs outputs are, decrease your action threshold enough with either a cheese or a cat, whatever you need, most people have more cats than they have cheese in the beginning. So use the cat to start running towards something. And the thing is is the rat it's so simple, it's like there's cheese here. But what you really just need to know is that there's cheese out there. And there's a cat behind me for sure. And so if I just go anywhere away from the cat,

I have a higher likelihood of getting closer to the cheese. Not that I will find it, but I will get closer to it. And I think it's, and I've lived my life through a series of rapid iterations, not trying to pick the right thing. Because I just like, even when I started my first business, I was between frozen yogurt, test prep, and a gym. Those are the three businesses that I was choosing.

It makes complete sense, yeah. It's all a lot of things that I like, right? You know what I'm saying? So I was choosing between those things and like, why were those the things? I was like, well, I was pretty good at taking tests in college, so I get that. I like frozen yogurt. And I mean, it sounds simple, but like, I was like, everybody, I was pretty good at taking tests in college, so I get that. I like frozen yogurt.

And I mean, it sounds simple, but I was like, everybody likes something, right? And I actually didn't know that I was gonna like business. That's the crazy thing, because also, when you and I were younger, Instagram wasn't there. You took, like, none of this shit existed. And entrepreneurship wasn't cool yet. And so I just hated my job a lot,

and I hated where I lived a lot. And so I was like, well, I will just not be here. So, cat, don't know what city I'm gonna go to, but just not this city. I went across the furthest place from Baltimore, which is California, and then I was like, okay, well, what do I hate doing? Well, let me not do that, which is, you know,

sitting on meetings all day and doing whatever, you know, doing grunt work for shit that I felt like was meaningless. And instead, I was like, I'll do fitness, cause I like fitness. And I was like, at the very least, I'll do something I enjoy, which I liked fitness at the time.

And if you're like, well, I don't like doing anything. Well, it's like, well, then that's impossible, because your brain is wired to be rewarded for things. And so you are doing things that reward you. That's why you do them. Like, everything we do is because we've been rewarded for doing things like that in the past. And we project

the same activities and we predict that doing things like we did in the past that reward us reward us again in the future. That's where our behavior comes from and so it's like, okay, well what has your reward had you in the past? Where's the cat? Go the opposite way. Yeah, so the reverse role model is something similar, but you're almost taking this into a lifestyle perspective. So the reverse role model is if you live in you're almost taking this into a lifestyle perspective. So the reverse role model is, if you live in a town or you grow up somewhere, and there's no one around you

like the sort of person that you want to be like, but there are tons of people like the person you don't want to be like, you can say, there's a way marker, I don't want his relationship with gambling, I don't want the way that he mhandles his finances, I don't want the way that him and his wife communicate with each other. It's like, okay, there we go.

Warren Buffett, Munger says, like an amazing amount of success has been achieved by not trying to be smart, but avoiding being stupid. So there's your way, Mark, is there. But what you're saying is that this is almost like an abstracted lifestyle version of this. These are all of the things that I hate to do. What's the opposite of that? And the challenge of, I don't know precisely what the exact thing is, therefore I can't move toward it, is one of mine, which is perfectionism is procrastination, masquerading, is quality control. I was going to say, it's a fallacy. It's a decision making fallacy. This is why investor frames can be so useful. If you're looking for the perfect investment,

you won't find one. There's always downsides. Every investment has a risk. Right? And so, using that frame, you're like, well, there's all these paths, which one do I choose. It's like, well, you have to, the one thing it's guaranteed is, if you keep the money, it will go down in value,

because it'll inflate. Right? So, not investing is the only way you guarantee to not get a return on your investment. Is that the fact that inflation exists? Do you think that's a useful motivating force for business people? You could imagine a different form of world economics where embedded growth obligations weren't there and whatever inflation didn't happen.

Do you think that that motivates people to actually be like, oh, fuck, I need to do something with this money. I can't just sit and leave it in the bank. I think you're going to motivate investors. Yes. Yeah. But the business people would just sit and leave it in the bank. I think you're going to motivate investors. Yes. Yeah. But I mean, the business people would just like probably keep more coins in their vault and just keep transacting.

It's a less-moving duck. Yeah, they'd be less likely to deploy capital faster. Because if you feel like there's a cost of capital that's higher for keeping it like letting it sit there, then you have a higher urgency to do something with it. If you have less urgency, then you only do it when you know it higher urgency to do something with it. If you have less urgency, then you only do it when you know it's gonna crash. You gain nothing from underestimating your opponent.

Mm-hmm. How does this relate to your world? So a lot of the tweets that I have actually come from conversations I have with our portfolio CEOs and so they'll say something, right? And they're like, oh, we're way better than those guys. And I think somebody said like something like that on a meeting. And I just thought about it and I was like, what a stupid thing to say.

I was like, you gain nothing from that statement. I was like, you literally gain, like, what do you gain from that? You gain complacency, right? You increase the likelihood of looking stupid in the case that they do crush you, right? I was like Because on the flip side like how many ups like the only things that upset the guys who are on the top of the mountain is hubris Like there's really no reason that the guy on the top of the mountain should ever lose He has the most resources. He has the most. He is the most the highest perspective He is the most vision like he is everything. He's all the food at the top of the mountain and yet

history shows us humans act like humans. And so we lose because of our egos. And because it hurts to say, what if that person's better than me? And so I think that if you, it actually is really parallel with it, a different tweet that they kind of took off, which was, people underestimate how much smarter you can see if you have 20 minutes of preparation. Yeah, that's so fucking true. Right, and so like, people get into businesses and like, well, what if you actually had to face this team? People were like, why don't I want to practice? It's like, why not? Like, why wouldn't you practice like for a lot of fighters show up not having prepped for the fight, not really hard? I'm like, what do you gain from that? Because if you practice really hard you get better

Period and like all it is is purely an ego play The only the only when you get from not prepping and showing up to the fight is that you appear to be more naturally gifted and I would rather be known for my work I think than my natural gift as an aside But you appear to be more naturally gifted, and then you win by less than you would if you prepared. You gain nothing. And so it's purely an ego thing,

but we do it all the time. And so I wanted to, like my Twitter stream is just thoughts to self. I deleted it because I didn't have enough room on my profile to say, but it was originally like, notes to self. And it's just like to remind me of things as they come up,

because I fall into that trap too. I'm like, oh, we're gonna have to perform this guy or like this company's gonna crush it. I'm like, but we don't gain anything from that. It's like, so we just have to assume that we're always the underdog and then they've got to trick up their sleep that we don't know about.

It's like that's the whole, only the paranoid survive. A reverse of that or something that's interesting to do with people at the top of the pyramid is there's only one way I know to beat people who copy you, get bigger. It's not by direct conflict, but by making them shrink into a relevance by comparison. I agree. I just, I mean, especially when it comes to content creation, I imagine that this is something

that, you know, you see one thing that becomes effective and then downstream from that a lot of stuff happens. And if you've done the hard work of forging ahead, trailblazing, pathfinding, split testing, wow, we finally came up with this thing, and then within four weeks, you're like, oh brilliant, this is all over the internet now. Well, I always see it as like a first mover thing,

which is like, they need me. I don't need them. They require me in order to iterate their content. I don't because I don't look at theirs to make mine. And so it's because like, my everybody knows man as well. Everybody knows every single person that's copying thumbnails, that's copying subtitles, subtitle styles that's, you know, going after the same talking points. They know deep down that what they're doing

is creating a rough, human pixelated equivalent of what they think they can try and be at best, what you can hope for is being the second best Alex Homosie in the world. Right. And I'll win that game, but like, they would beat me at being whoever they are. Correct.

I mean, this sounds so tripe, but like, I'm trying to say this in a different way so that it hits because people over there, there's only one version of you. There's just so much actual meat to that concept because this is Gary originally did the document don't create thing. I think that the reason that the content that we have is, quote, original, is because we document through Twitter the things that come up that we have is, quote, original, is because we document, I document through Twitter, the things that come up in my actual life.

And so it's not like, what's trending right now? It's like, well, I had this meeting with a CEO and he fucking said that thing about the competitor and that's my tweet. And there wasn't somebody else in the meeting also going, oh, brilliant, that's a lesson that I can take that I can use for my Twitter. Right.

Right. And so it's all from like original source. And if everyone else, like, and this is on the flip side, if you're the person who's doing this, like you need to find what your original source is of content because like you will always be second or who, second, you'll never be first is really the statement.

And like, at least for me, if I'm playing a game, I wanna play for the long haul. And the point of the game is keep it game going going. And if you want to keep the game going, then you can't be dependent on someone else. There was another one that I thought was quite interesting, especially given the kind of current world of men's advice and rich guy existence online. More people stay poor because of their egos than get rich off them. At the moment, it seems like egos are being valorized on the internet, especially among men's advice. How is it that more people stay poor because of their egos than get rich off them?

If there's a bunch of examples of people with seemingly big egos that also have money? I think that's what's the fallacy. Whatever the cognitive fallacy for what's in front of your eyes. I think the form of people, was it? Availability by this. There you go. I think there are far more people who are successful and significantly more successful than the people

who are visible on content. And I would say many of those people aren't actually that successful. And so if we're looking at the objective measure of success as like net worth, just for the sake of this conversation, there are far more people who are rich and anonymous than there are people who flaunt their Lamborghini's that they rented for a day.

Now, they're, I mean, if you really think about the influencer world of business, there are not that many guys who actually like are really in the game. Like most of those guys sell something from their platform about building a platform. Like that's 90, not even 95, it's probably like 98, 99%. And so there's only like a very small select,

and to be fair, those guys are all pretty humble. Like you look at the Gary's, you look at the Andes, you look at the Tom Billy, like these, at my lab, like the guys who have become, you know, in the business space, you look at the Tom Billy, like these Edmila, like the guys who have become, in the business space, like, they're not particularly ego-tistical guys, and it's usually because they know what hard feels like, and they know what it's like to be inadequate

over and over and over again, because you only can be inadequate if you go to another level. If you feel amazing, it's because you haven't moved up. Does that mean that if somebody wants to be successful and they feel like they've still got an ego that they need to do some work on dissolving that? I think they just need to do harder things.

Like you need to fight harder opponents. Like you're waiting a little pool. The only way you can maintain an ego is by believing that you're a big fish and a little pond. Right. Or a big fish and whatever size pond you think it is. And if you're a big fish and not in a big enough pond. It's totally delusion.

It's hard to comprehend. Like, Bezos, if you've heard any of his interviews, seems like a very humble guy. big enough puns. It's totally delusion. It's hard to comprehend, like, Bezos, if you've heard any of his interviews, seems like a very humble guy. But like, you could have a hundred billionaires in a room, and he is worth the same amount as them. And then if you had each one of those billionaires is a thousand to millionaires,

he's still worth the same amount as 1,100, whatever, a hundred thousand to millionaires, and it him. So like, there's just levels to it. And I think the moment you get to ego is the moment you stop growing because you feel like you beat the level, but you just keep repeating the level rather than moving up because there is a harder boss. And they just haven't faced it yet. I suppose it's an easy way, you know, if you were going to a karate class, but you decided instead of going to the adult one to go to the one that's under 11s, and you're going to kick the fuck out of all of these.

And you video it and you're like, look, and it just happens to be that they're the same size as you. And like, just imagine they're like dumb on the inside, but they're cute, you know, adult size and you're kicking the shit out of them. It's like, yeah, do it to Jones, right? Like not going to happen. And so like, I I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna try to say this the way that I take this the way I mean it.

I get comments from people who are like, love your humility, Alex. And like, I don't think I'm that humble of a guy being real, at least internally in my own head. But, I am reminded daily of my inadequacy on the business game. Because right now we've moved up a level in terms of like, now we're doing deals, now we're investing in companies,

we're taking a big risk, we're writing checks, like another level of the game than just not to say that only one business and growing it is not hard, it absolutely is a different kind of hard. But like I'm getting into this game and I'm absolutely the small fish. Like one month of me, $90 billion on the trade

you made an app on 2020. One move, right? And so I'm like, I am entering into a, like, how could I say that I'm good? Like, even if I was exceptional, it's still gonna take 20 years to prove it. So like, I can't say anything. And by that point, I'll probably have other guys

who are, you know, who are fucking titans at that point to remind me of the fact that I'm not as good as them. So in your estimation, is the presence of an ego something which artificially limits the size of the vision of how you want to climb? Yeah, 100%. And because you cannot, you can't both say that you are, you cannot admit death sits and say you're awesome at the same time, in my opinion. Like I can't say like I suck at all these things and then also be like, I'm the bad, like you can't do it.

You either like, you suck at all these things and I think it's the done and career effect, which is like the more you learn about something, the more you realize you don't know. And so I think that if you have a tiny, tiny subset of things that you were studying and a tiny subset of people you're comparing yourself to, then it's really easy to feel awesome about yourself.

But if you compare yourself to, I mean, I compare myself every day to warm up it. And like, he's my, him and Munger, like my heroes, mostly because the way they lived life and what they, like, just everything about the way they lived is something that I just love. And like, I have, uh, Buffett's net worth by age, tracks, and I have like mine tracked, and I'm like, all right, just gotta stay above that line. And he's got to, he's got to, he's got to, he's got gotta stay above that line. And he's got to believe it at the moment. I am right now, but like I had, you know, like his world was different. Yeah, like I got, Warren didn't have Warren to learn from.

Yeah, it's very interesting. It's, I mean, you talk, we spoke about this at the very, very start where you were saying you have the opportunity of using the blueprints that has been laid down by me. Yeah. So if you've got nothing to lose, do the me thing. You know, you have all of the mistakes, all of the failures and all of the successes. And there was another one where you said the rarer you are, the rarer the people are

who share your perspective in this way, the greater your success, the fewer people you can share it with. I was playing with this quote from a lander boton from the School of Life for Ages, which was, loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to a tone for a certain complexity of mind. And I'm really not sure, because since I've been in Austin, the complexity of mind thing, which is that hasn't stopped, but the loneliness changed. And I figured that that was a big function of change of environment, and maybe like whatever embracing or acceptance of what was going on. But again, is this a byproduct of success that a lot of people don't necessarily realize?

It's a price that's going to be need to be paid. If you want to achieve a ton of success, you end up at this rarefied strata out in the troposphere somewhere. And you're like, well, you're like five people that I can talk to that understand what I'm going through at the moment. Or another question as well, is that a combination of hubris and self-delusion? Like, is that true? Or are there things that the bus driver or the lady that serves you at Whole Foods can actually relate to you on. So two questions. One is I would probably reject the notion that it's a price overall because like being

in, like if you think about it as a mountain, there's less, there's less square footage at the top of the mountain. Just is there's fewer people there. And the air's thinner. It's harder to get there, harder to breathe, right? And you have to adjust to it, you have to acclimate. And the people that are around you, like there are fewer of them, but you can make the argument that they have even more context than anyone else possibly could.

And so maybe the relationship you have are potentially deeper. Even if they're not, humans don't need that many relationships. So like you just have a smaller pool to choose from, but like most people only have two or three good relationships in their life anyways. And so like you just have a narrower pool to choose from, but like most people only have two or three good relationships in their life anyways. And so, like, you just have a narrower pool that you can make that selection from. And, I mean, for the people that I have interacted with who are far above me on the mountain, that's been there, that's what they've related to me. But it's only bad if you think it's a cost. If you're okay with it, because there are plenty of people who are lonely right now and don't have shit.

So, and you already know those, but there's no one's being lonely and solitude. And one is seen as bad, the other is seen as fine or good. And some circles that's seen as self-care. So, to me, it just means that I think your tolerance or your standard for friends raises. And I'll share this and hopefully it comes off the right way. I entered communities as I was coming up and was like, wow, everyone here is bigger than me.

And then I was able to, through achievement achievement rise through that and then I lost context with that group. I think there's just more free agency, a friendship that happens on your climb up because you're just moving between strata more frequently than it is that if I settled at one of these levels, then I would eventually find all the people at that wrong. If you're constantly on the move up the mountain, then more of that is in transitionary period on the climb. And it's only a problem if you'd hate it. I don't. What don't you hate? You don't hate the fact that sort of people come

and go that some of these relationships are kind of transient. Yeah, it just doesn't bother me. I think it's like a should statement, which is like one of my big things. It's like, why should I? Why does it have to be? Why must is like one of my big things. It's like, why should I? Why does it have to be? Why must it? It doesn't must anything. It just is that way. And that's fine.

Talking about social media, we mentioned this earlier on. What are your predictions for the next six months to a couple of years in terms of what you think is going to be big. Any focuses or any interesting trends that you're noticing at the moment? I always say first off that I'm not a social media expert by any stretch, but just, you know, I think AI is going to be the main driving force behind the future of social media. And I don't know how we're going to deal with it. I mean, there's already the deep fakes of Rogan doing entire podcasts with Steve Jobs

that are going out there and the entire thing is both created and recorded with AI. And so I think it'll be really interesting because right now it's still not as good as the best creators, but in a few machine generations, it'll make the best content every time in seconds. And I'm not sure what's going to, I think I know the verification checkmark

is going to matter more. It'll change in its meaning right now. I mean status and the future. It'll mean real person. So I'll make that prediction that the verification of bot versus human will become more important in the future. I can make that prediction.

And that there will be more AI generated content in the future than there is today. And how we respond to it, I don't know. It's scary to think that what we basically had for the last five years or so since the algorithm started to get really tight is a three-way feedback mechanism from algorithms designing better delivered content to users. It also nudges the user's preferences so that they are easier and more predictable to predict. That was that two-way street

was something I learned from Stuart Russell and he's fucking amazing. Everybody needs to understand that. It's not just you programming the algorithm, it's the algorithm programming you. And it's one of the reasons that it explains increasing division and extremity because if you are far right or far left

or super whatever or super the other thing, it makes you way easier to predict. And that's a byproduct of any algorithmic optimizing function. And then the third element of that is audience capture by the creators, because they are the third element of the creation of the content, right? That they go, how well did that perform? Well, we'll read that a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And then you end up on your knees like cooking for the audience, right?

The fourth element of this is going to be then you are able to algorithmically create content that understands the back end of the algorithm that can nudge preferences and can get feedback and all of that. I mean, that to me is, fuck me, if we think that, you know, like the degree of overbearingness that social has on our lives at the moment, like that's a very, very big deal.

Well, it could cut out the middle, man. The creator being the middle man, and then just becomes a vertically integrated platform that creates content on its own using AI and just feeds it directly to the audience. That's what I said. As soon as those, the AI images of Hot Girls came out and then chat GPT, you go, look, like only fans, you're no longer an agency, you're now a tech company. That should be the move that you make. Every single person should have their own curated, wifey girlfriend online. And that's what you, that's your thing. And it would be infinitely scalable.

You know, like the perfect dirty talk, completely curated and twiddled to your specific, whatever it is. But that doesn't both particularly well for how much the limbic hijack and freedom people have from social media, because it is only going to become more and more compelling, which isn't necessarily a good thing. I mean, good bad, no idea. I think there will probably be a little bit of a counter-movement of people who want to do more things in person. Make social media human again. Well, you know, an interesting thought experiment

that I had, I was like, because we've taken some things, and I do think, hey, it's gonna happen, but like, it will continue. But I was like, we accept all technology as inevitable. And I was thinking about this and I was like, has there ever been a technology that humans have created that we were like, nah, we shouldn't do this. I thought about it. I was like, there is one, nuclear bombs. We all were like, I think it's better if we don't, we should just not do this. And everyone just agreed, we're like, we're not gonna do this. And I think the rate of AI, how disaggregated it is,

like we'll prevent that from happening, but I just thought about that as like it just, there hasn't been any other technological thing that I've seen besides nuclear bombs, that we all together were like, this isn't good for us. Have you seen how tabletop genetic sequencing machines work? No. This is a really good example of what you're talking about.

So the way that pretty much all of them are cloud-based, and in order to sequence whatever it is that you're looking to sequence, it sends the request up to the cloud, and there's three gradings. There's green, amber, and red, and if it's green, you can just do it no one checks. If there's amber, you have to submit a proposal for what it is, where it's going, BSL, level, amber and red. And if it's green, you can just do it, no one checks. If there's amber, you have to submit a proposal for what it is, where it's going, BSL level, et cetera, security security. And if it's ready, you just can't do it.

And then, presumably, someone comes around and goes, excuse me, what the fuck are you doing, trying to make smallpox? Yeah. But that, there's been, I think it's, either two or three times in the history of gene sequencing, that has been a moratorium placed globally on this. Everyone's gone. Every fucking machine goes off. Everything. Stop until we work out what's going on. So there are

situations. That's a great example. Like cloning. As you just said, as soon as you start to atomize that and disaggregate it and distribute it between enough different actors, how are you going to be able to control, and the other thing is with genetic sequencing, the kind of machines that you need, the hardware is complex. Yeah, it's expensive in this room. Yeah. The hardware is not complex for anybody to code. And the reward is...

Everything. It's the world. It's the world. It's domination, it's money, it It's, it's, it's domination. It's money. It's success. It's all of those things. This is why I don't know, man, like the fucking, the techno optimist thing, ever since I read Super Intelligence by Nick Bossram five or six years ago,

I just don't see an AGI future where stuff doesn't get fucked. I don't know, whether we get the general bit of AGI, Super AGI is like, still up for a big part of debate. But if you end up creating this very strange world in which everyone's limbically hijacked with their own personal news feed of perfectly, you remember Cambridge Analytica and the scandals around the Hillary Clinton ads, it's like, I know your preferences and we're going to create these perfectly done ads. It's like, okay, I mean, the ads were still created by a human, and it was still you were bucketed into a content

with other men of this age, with these interests in this area, with these voting habits. Imagine if every single news feed, not just post, news feed was perfectly curated to maximize time on site. So, hey Chris, I think that's the first line of every ad. Yeah, crazy. Well, but it might just be the same as email,

the first time there was personalized email. All of a sudden, you stop becoming responsive to your own name So like I think they'll they'll they'll be push pool On that stuff, but I'm with you on the AGI long term you know as a as a weird thought experiment if you think about what God looks like in terms of most most definitions They're like an omniscient omnipot being, and I think we're just creating them. Like, what is AI know? It knows everything, right?

What can it do? Everything, immediately. Like, weird. Usually God would be benevolent. Yes. Rolling the benevolence in there. Yeah. Might be good.

If we could. It's God's long term benevolent. Ah, but short term sometimes mean, yeah, you are true. You're almost definitely wrath. Yeah. In almost all things. What are you working on now? What can people expect from you next?

A hundred dollar leads, $100 million leads, which is the second book in the $100 million series, is going to come out this year. So that's exciting. We will be done. The edited final draft within seven days. So I'm like, it's been, we put in 3,500 hours together, my editor and I combined over the last two years doing it. So it is the first four to six hours of my day every

day. Like before I came here, I was editing the book and that's what I did yesterday and that's what I did before. So there could be really, really good. And so that's the big creative side of me is the book. It'll be 99 cents. There you go. I get 33 of that, by the way. Yes, yeah, around the rich.

And then the rest of my life is all about deals. It's just we've got some really interesting companies that we're investing in. They're very, very pumped on that side. So yeah, if you've got a $1 to $10 million at EBITDA business, and you would like a growth partner, go to acquisition.com, you can let us know. I really appreciate you. I really, really enjoyed this today. It's been cool to come and see.

The thank you for having me. Appreciate it, hopefully the audience got what they wanted.