REAL AF with Andy Frisella - 485. Part 2 - The Process Of Building An Empire Ft. Alex Hormozi

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

In today's episode, Andy & DJ are joined in the studio by author, investor, and entrepreneur Alex Hormozi. They discuss how Alex started his entrepreneurial journey by opening gyms in California, how to find opportunities especially when you're at the lowest parts in building a business, and the role that personal development and action play in success.

all right guys welcome back to part two i want to give a tactical tip yeah so when i you know join these networking groups and stuff early on, like that gym owner group, things like that, this is how you can employ that in the real world. What I did was I reached out to every single person that was in the network. And what I did was I pretended they were a client of mine. And I had certain skills. For me at the time when I was starting out, the only thing I knew how to do was write sales scripts, build sales processes. So I offered every single person to go review all of their sales scripts, review their sales processes. And I did it like it was an actual project that I got paid for. And so I'd hop on the phone and I would have pages of notes, how I'd rewrite everything.

And they were like, whoa, dude, I thought you were just going to give me a couple. Dude, what you want them to say is this is too much. Dude, this is too much. Because what happens is you stack something, you get an IOU, which is incredibly valuable. And it's one sided, like you now gave them something and that can come in handy later down the road. And for me, those are the things that I cashed in when I didn't know how to run Facebook ads. Like I learned something from that guy. But later on, I needed a way deeper understanding than the one weekend workshop that I did. And I hopped on with a person and I had hopped on with plenty of others who have never given me anything back, comma, and that's okay. Because when I did need something,

I did have somebody in my phone book where I was like, oh, I did that thing. I wonder if I could hit, I wonder if they'd help me out with this thing. And so what happens is you basically plug into everyone else's network and skills by giving first. Now, some of them aren't going to return the favor, but you're net positive on everything. Because if they don't return the favor, one, that's fine. Two, they're not going to have anything bad to say about you. Now, obviously, there's pieces of shit for sure. No, no, no.

And it is okay. It is okay if they never give back. Because, dude, keep going. I'm sorry. I know where you're going. Yeah. Because most entrepreneurs, we say we want to make an impact and help people it's like well that's what that looks like if you give something to someone and they don't give anything back then it means you

just gave to someone that's it great yeah but congratulations and if you talk about personal brand wouldn't that be the brand that you'd want to build anyways yes and so i got into this other networking group and they invented an award for me uh which was a member of the year they never did it but they were like dude we just want everyone to do what you did which is like i hopped on every single person and i took every single call and i treat it and this is the big point here is like you don't go on and show up at the call and then start thinking about their problem you do homework before the call. Like it's amazing how much- Bro, you just tweeted this. Yeah.

You just tweeted this yesterday. It was, you could become incredibly, you become infinitely more smart by just 20 minutes preparation before the call or something like that. Yes. It's the truth. You'd be amazed how much, yeah, it's exactly that.

Isn't that what you said, something like that? Yeah, it's exactly that. Like how much more intelligent you can seem with 20 minutes of prep. Yeah, dude. That was gold. That's it. Yeah. Because you've done it, right? I had a call with somebody. And a lot of you guys probably ask Andy, and I get this question all the time. They're like, how do I network with people who are above me? Yes. Right? It's a hard question. So number one is you don't ask them, what value can I provide you? Because now you're asking me to do homework to figure out what you

can do for me. That's me doing work, which I can just keep living my life. What you do is you do the hard work of figuring out what can you provide to me that you have. And then instead of offering it, you do it and then give it to me. And I'm not telling you to do that for me. I'm telling you, this is how I did it. This is how it works. Yeah. Yeah. And so if you have someone who's ahead of you, do whatever your niche skill, if you're a fucking carpenter, then build the most amazing table of all time and send it to somebody. And you know what they're going to do? They're going to get it and be like, this is too much.

I can't believe somebody did this. And then what happens? Hey, sound familiar? Does, doesn't it? That's how he's here. You're explaining how he got here. That's the game, right? Half the editors I have, they're like,

Hey, I went through all of your old clips that are on YouTube. I clip 20 of these short reels. This is what I did. And they sent them all to my, you know, my creative director. And he was like, Oh, this kid's good. Now, mind you, if you're not good, that's also good feedback. And I will tell you this, that guy and most people would give you at least the time to tell you what you could do better because anyone will help someone who starts helping themselves anyone will help someone who takes initiative and if you over deliver and i'll tell you this because when we're talking about that little room that private room the players recognize one another and so like when i see the young guys coming up the guys with the blue check mark and the rolex and the like this isn't i'm not not yet

posing in front of the lambo they rented for the day right yeah or whatever i stopped doing that a Guys with the blue checkmark and the Rolex and the, like, this isn't, I'm not. Not yet. Posing in front of the Lambo they rented for the day, right? Yeah. Or whatever. I stopped doing that a few years ago. No, no, no. And, by the way, they were never rented. Yeah. Nine.

Yeah, yeah. But, like, those people only impress people who don't know what players look like. Yeah. Like, we all know that that guy is not a player. Because the guys who are players at their age and twenties and they're in there, maybe thirties, whatever, like right at that stage,

like they're hungry, they're, they're savages and they're in the grind and they're doing the work of giving first to as many people as they can over delivering, knowing that that goodwill will compound. And like, it's just like that, that single skill has served me

so well because that's how I've been able to get into rooms that I didn't deserve to be in was by just saying like, okay, what am I good at that I can help this guy out with? Well, there's, you've broken it down masterfully by the way, uh, to make it practical. But I also do believe that there's an energy aspect to this dude. I believe, cause like dude. I live like that. Real talk. I live that way. I know you live that way too. Some of the things I can't explain though. Some of the good shit that's come back to me, I'm just like, this has to be for me consistently just doing this. This is the word of mouth thing that I think is wild. I continue to be inspired by how much word of mouth actually matters.

Every year, I feel like it sets a new record in my mind for how important it is. Because people right now, I see this all the time. People are like, it's all about influencers and whatever. And sure, the tactics of ads and all this stuff, that's great. But the only thing that is still viral is word of mouth. Everything else is linear in terms of the relationship. If you spend a dollar in ads, you get X back. If you do a cold reach out, you get X back. If you do 100, you triple it, you get 1,000. It's 1,000 to 1,000. Whatever that relationship is, that ratio, it's fixed. Word of mouth is the only one that is exponential in

nature. One tells two, two tell four, four tell eight. And so if you want to have an enduring business, you have to have the monster of word of mouth working for you rather than against you, who's building a reputation rather than eating it from underneath of your feet. And I think that like that stuff that you were talking about earlier, where you're like, you're doing this goodwill and it's coming back to me. I just see that as like the invisible hand of the word of mouth that just like, I mean, you've had it happen a hundred times, I'm sure, which is like you go and you meet somebody like, dude, my buddy saw you at an airport and you like stopped and answered his questions and whatever.

Yeah. And, and mind you, to be fair, if I'm like somewhere and I can't, it's the thing that bothers me. The absolute milk is sometimes I have to be placed. Me too, bro. I hate it. I hate it. I feel like I'm just, I'm like, I do too.

I feel like, like, dude, I, one time, and actually I became really good friends with this guy because of that exact scenario, dude. I had a guy, his name was Roman. I'm still friends with him guy because of that exact scenario dude i had a guy his name was roman i'm still friends with him good fucking dude came up to me a speaking event and i was like i he's like hey man you got time and i didn't and i'm like no i can't i can't and uh and dude he was like he had been going through all this crazy like really bad stuff yeah um and then i dude it was bothering me like fucking bad dude like like i thought the whole time I was speaking the whole time afterwards, I'm like, fuck, I gotta find that dude.

Cause I got time now. Yeah. Weirdly enough. Uh, I was at another event and I fucking ran into the guy and I was able to apologize and say, Hey dude, I'm like, and he was like, you know what, dude, I actually, that really really made me mad. I'm like, I'm like, bro, I get it that really really made me mad i'm like i'm like bro i i get it i i felt bad about it yeah you know but that shit bothers me too brother and i think

that for the audience i think the bigger take like sure the tactics that we're sharing right now are like useful but i think the biggest thing is like the perspective of there was that person that bothered andy enough that it kept kept him up at night and i think that if you if you can develop whatever that is where it's a splinter, because it's those thousand splinters that become the bundle that becomes a very strong stick that you can wield or it's wielded against you. Mm-hmm. And for me, I think about the products we build in the same way where the only way to build an

enduring company is either to sell stuff that people never stop buying from you, or to build a company where people never stop selling for you. Those are the only two ways to build an enduring business that just continues to thrive over and over again. And if you're one of these guys who is, and I get the get, because I actually came from the direct response world of understanding how the arbitrage of ads and all these different- That's where I started too, bro. That's where I started when I was 18. Right, because you think transaction. I was writing fucking classified ads

for a credit booklet that I wrote. Credit repair booklet. I was writing classified ads to put in fucking newspapers. Yeah, yeah. Like we didn't have the internet. I'm a little older. But what happens is as you scale,

I'm going to get a little bit higher level business, but hopefully you guys will ride with me. Yeah, they'll get it. So as you scale advertising spend, you go to colder and colder audiences, meaning there's people who have less trust and they're honestly less of a fit than the warmest. Like if I was like,

I'm going to only market to vegan powerlifting women who are moms over whatever, and I had a product that was just for them, I'm probably going to do okay. But if I want to market to the nation, there's just a less of a fit with my product. And so what happens is your cost to acquire a customer goes up because ad costs will only go one way for the rest of time. They will go up. And your conversion on future audiences that are colder will only go

one way, which is down. So how do you combat two things that are inevitably going against you? You have to have one thing that is nonlinear in nature that fights that fight, which is word of mouth. Because when that one customer comes in and tells five people, it allows you to continue to scale because you have decreased cost of acquisition. I'm getting a little bit like business stuff here.

But it's the only way that it gets big. If you want to grow something big, then having the strong word of mouth base, which is why you can get into transactional sales stuff. Sure. If you know how to market, you can become a millionaire. You can absolutely do it.

You can probably become a decamillionaire just by learning how to sell shit. And I'm using shit in the true poop word, like terrible stuff that doesn't matter. But if you want to achieve a certain level of scale, my recommendation is to continue to do the thing at a scale way below your friends until you figure out a way to get everybody who buys stuff from you to tell a friend. This is a mental exercise I like putting people like our portfolio CEOs through. I said, okay, the marketing gods have decided that you are no longer allowed to market anything. And they eliminate all of your customers except for one. And every single customer from this point going forward has to come from that one customer. How do you treat that customer?

And what happens is you start thinking like, well, shit, I would do this differently. I'd do this differently. It's like, well, then do that stuff. And then what you'll see is that the result you get from the remaining efforts of your advertising will compound. Rather than continue to go linearly in the wrong direction, they compound in the right direction. And so this has been something that's taken me too long to learn.

And I'm trying to ram this right now because the biggest mistake that I made with Prestige Labs, which is my supplement company, I'm glad we wrapped around, was that I treated the supplement business purely transactionally. I did everything that I'm telling you not to do. I did it. That's why I'm telling you that it didn't work. And by the way, that's the norm for the supplement industry. Right. 100%.

So it's not like you were doing something abnormal. That's the norm. Another normal example of like, hey, if everyone else is doing doing it it's probably not the best idea but anyways um and so i i basically built the whole brand off of transactional sales and teaching how to hardcore close because that was a skill i had so i was like okay i'm gonna hit it with my sales hammer because that's like yeah everything looks like a sales hammer when you're good at sales and so i taught all the scripts all the processes how to set up the lobbies how to like how get assumed closes in, how to get people on subscriptions, all that stuff, right? The thing is, is that it actually happened with First Form.

So this is a plug for you. A close friend of mine was a First Form athlete, right? And I was like, dude, sell Prestige Labs. It wasn't because I was, you know. No, I get it. It's like- We didn't know each other. Yeah.

And I was like, dude, sell my stuff. And the commission that I was paying was significantly higher. and I was like dude sell my stuff and the commission that I was paying was significantly higher and I was like and I'll give you the special homie like I just

like come on like we're going to dinner let's be on the same team you know what I mean all the time and the thing is is that he continued to he and haul

and to this day he still sells first form and I was like I don't get it because I did have this really super doctor like make all the products and like make them accept

like that part I felt very strong about and i knew my commissions were higher so i was like the products are very good and you get paid more and i just like i couldn't compute which meant that i had a distortion of reality i saw the world in a way that it wasn't and that hurt my business and so when you're taking these lenses off and Andy's squeegeeing your eyeballs so you can see things more clearly, the thing that I missed was actually the soft stuff. It was the brand stuff. Actually, my creative director sent me a podcast, my eighth podcast of all time. I'll tell you the title, Stop Branding. Because I felt so confident about the fact that I was like, you don't need a brand. I was like, you need to run ads. You need to do cold and cold, cold outreach.

Yeah. See, you're the guy I'm talking to. You're the dude I'm talking to saying, hey, use those skills to build a brand. Yeah, dude. And I didn't get it. And what's happened is it's like brick by brick. My belief in this first was like, okay, brand and the direct response stuff and knowing the hand-to-hand are equally important. But the longer I've been doing this, and you've been doing it longer than me, the more I'm just like, it's just brand over everything. Because if the brand's right, everything else follows. And the reason that he didn't come over to quote my team was because I had no brand or I had a negative brand, whatever you want to say. I didn't have a

brand that was as strong as first one. He didn't want to associate his brand with my brand. Got it. And that was the thing that I just missed. I didn't get it. And so as soon as I learned that lesson and it took me selling the companies and doing all this stuff to really reflect, what could I have done better? That's why we built acquisition.com. And I was like, so if you think about getting customers, there's eight ways you can do it. You can reach out to your friends and family individually. You can reach out to strangers individually. You can post content or you can run paid ads. Those are the four things that one person can do. Leveraging other people, you can get referrals. So you get customers to tell people. You get

affiliates. So you get other people who have businesses to refer their customers to you. You can hire agencies to go get you customers or you can hire employees to do the first four, right? Those are the only ways that you can get new customers. And I had built a business off of every one of them except for off of content. And so I was like, with acquisition.com, I'm going to build it off context. I don't know how to do it. So I'm going to figure it out. And it was only through building content that I understand that it was all about brand. And what's weird is that when you do start building a brand or a personal brand, you realize if you do, in my opinion, if you do it the quote right way, which is just give and you give and you give and you give and then you take a breath and you give and you give and you give and you give and you're

like, wait, should I? Nope. You keep giving. You keep giving. And there's a popular saying that Gary has, which is like, give, give, give. Sorry, Don. He says- Jab, jab, jab, right hook.

Yeah, that's what it is. Jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? I think that that's actually the perfect ratio for a mature platform. So if you actually look at television, the ad to give ratio, which is the content, the actual shows is 47 minutes to 13 minutes. It's jab, jab, jab, right hook. If you look at Facebook, which is a mature platform, it's three news feed from your friends and family or whatever, and then an ad. So that is the ratio for when you're maintaining your current level. But if you look at the platforms that are trying to grow, what is TikTok?

Or when they were growing, they didn't have any ads. They just, it was all content. It was all give. And so the nuance, at least how I understand it for that strategy, if you're trying to build a brand, is give, give, give until they ask. Which means that you just keep giving. And if no one's asking you just keep fucking giving yeah and in my opinion that's my whole strategy yeah yeah as a person

all the players yeah we're like so there's you've seen these ads in the direct response where they're like the the secret the one percent don't want you to know it's horseshit there is no secret but there are things that the 99% refuse to believe yeah dude dude big facts on that's fucking gold and so like and and i say this stuff because it because it i went like you i felt so much pain for such a long time because i just didn't understand the way the world worked especially as it related to business and so like if you can build the brand when you actually do it as i've now you know been doing it like you realize that you were wrong before. I can just tell you clear as day, you know that this is the right way to do it.

And it's slower. And you eat shit for a year or two years or three years of you building it. And what you're doing is you're finding your voice. You're figuring out your values. And you're learning how to actually do it. Because if every person who comes to you only came from just consuming value from you ahead of time, the type of the customer is different, how bought in they are, they share your values. And so it actually builds this base that becomes a pillar that just keeps expanding on your behalf. And it becomes kind of like,

it's too little for you to notice until it becomes too big for you to ignore. That's how compounding works. If you start, you invest in the S&P 500, $100 every month, it becomes tiny. And then all of a sudden it becomes unstoppable. You know, what's crazy, dude, is, you know, I don't run ads on this show,

not even for my own shit, you know, and when we poll people as to why they come buy our products, it's one of the highest fucking polling things. You know what I'm saying?

They listen to the show. I don't ever talk about first form. I don't ever talk about any of the other things i do except in passing but i give my shit away for free yeah like like it's like dude you and i share that opinion give your best shit away for free i fucking do it you know the secrets yeah just give away all the secrets so like there's more tactical stuff that i can't really talk like like like when you start saying like dude this is higher level yeah you know there's level of level level yeah right and like i'm not gonna

have podcasts about that or i'm talking to this many people yeah but uh dude that's how i live man it really is people like why don't you why don't you take ads why don't you do this why don't you do that because like dude that's like i know that if i come on and and share with you guys and help you guys you guys help me back and i think it's cool i think it's a it's not it's human nature there's actually science behind it yeah i'm sure you know it too yeah yeah one of the interesting things that was a big belief breaker for me was um i was actually really against making content for a long time and it was because i actually saw the content as uh temporary and i'm big on like long-term stuff and so i was like why would i make a short video that's going to disappear in the newsfeed and never get seen again? It just

felt like a complete waste of time. But what I realized was that the media is not the compounding asset. The audience is the compounding asset. And so you feed the content to the thing that compounds over the long run. And that was like, it sounds so stupid or so simple, whatever, painfully obvious. I didn't get it. So that was why for years I never made it. Cause I was like, why would I make content? Cause it's going to disappear. It's like, but the audience doesn't. And they're the people who tell two people or four people, et cetera. And then that becomes the base. And like, I'm, I'm sharing this right now because like, it took me too long to figure it out. Dude, I think it's everything. And I talk to a lot of business owners too who have an existing business, right?

They have, see, here's the thing. This is what I'm thankful for in my own journey is that I did start before the internet was around. I did start before social media was even a thing. And that lesson that you talked about where you're saying, okay, you only have one person. That was literally how I did it. Like, and I'm not exaggerating.

That was literally like the first day of fucking business. I saw one person. Second day, I saw zero. Third day, I saw another person. That person bought $23. Took me eight fucking months to have a day of $200. Recently had a buddy who started his own business. He did $1,000 his first day.

And he's like, is that good? I'm like, bro, fuck yeah, that's good. But before the internet, that was the real thing. That was really how you did it. That's how you do it. And so I try to communicate consistently and have over the, you know, the greater, you know, uh, scale or course of my content over the years to make people understand that concept and that how, how amazing our opportunity is now with technology. If you

can grasp that concept and you can translate it to, to, dude, you're fucking on it. And like these people, they get so greedy with the idea of I can gain a hundred customers or 500 customers or a thousand customers off a post or a sale or this or that. Motherfucker, you're missing the boat. You only need one and you should pour everything into that one as if it's the only one. And if you do that across the spectrum of your entire, now you have a machine that is compounding excellent story about you, a legend, word of mouth, however the fuck you want to call it, that's going to grow your business. And dude, so many of these people that have these smaller businesses, they're like, fuck, that sounds like a lot of work, bro. Blah, blah, blah. Dude,

you're seeing, you see 50 people a day. Do you know what you can do with 50 people a day if you actually pour into them? Like it's insane. And I've lived it. So I know, like I remember, like I went from one customer to zero customers and dude, uh, 10 years into our business, we still had days where we would have stores that wouldn't see anybody. You know what I'm saying? Like, but once we figured this out, like truly figured this out, everything fucking changed everything. We went in the worst economy up until 2020 that had ever existed between 2008, 2012. And it's all on the simple concept of what we're talking about, dude. It's giving first. It's creating experience for people that is worth sharing. Unloading value over value over value over value to the point where they feel

obligated to use you, right um which is what you're saying when they ask right like when they say dude you like when you're looking how can i support yeah dude right hey run my card for five grand yeah like that's that dude i have so many people to hit me up and i appreciate the fuck out of all you guys they're like what can i do what can i do just support my shit like that's all i ask like if, if you're going to get in shape, use our shit. If you're going to, you know, whatever, whatever business, you know, like just support the people that give. And I think it's, I don't know, man, it's, it's very, once you figure that out and it clicks, it's real simple.

And it actually gets fun too, because it's fun. Feels good. Yeah. Dude, it feels fucking great. One of my favorite things about business is not the big business it's not the money dude it's not like once you start once you have enough money it's like there's a there's a there's diminishing returns to have more for me that was when i could go to a restaurant and not look at the bill. Okay? See, I would order appetizers. Yeah, dude.

Really? Yeah. You being serious? 100%. Bro, this moment, I explained this on the show. So you guys that listen, you know this is true because I said this a hundred times. My point to where it became diminishing returns,

like people think it's like my car collection, right? Because I'm a huge car guy, I have a great collection. That's just my Hot Wheels, bro. Like That's just me as a kid living out my little fucking- Learn about Hot Wheels. Yeah. It's cool. I fucking like it. If you don't get it, that's fine. You don't get it. Some of my best friends in the world. It's great for networking. You meet some of these people that you would never meet otherwise. There's lots of pluses, very little minuses. It's cool as fuck to roll up in some badass shit, all right but the point is is that when you start to uh like consider how much joy

you get back for making more money for me dude it was very simple it was being able to go to dinner with whether it just be me and you or whether it be this whole room or whether it be this whole company it didn't fucking matter we go to dinner you can order whatever the fuck you want and i don't have to look at the bill to pay it that's after that like to me it made no difference like it doesn't as long as i can do that dude it was now after that it was diminishing returns i mean did it make a difference yeah fuck it makes a difference like i can fly private and shit like that that's cool that's like a time machine i know you enjoy that too um but you know and there's something to be said for that like dude i can stand in my living room and two hours later be

in manhattan you can't fucking do that without the means to do it like it's it's an incredible thing you've experienced it quite a bit you know uh not bad commercial stuff yeah it's uh it is tough yeah because this the disparity between the two is it's yeah it's worth it's worth the effort get there yeah the reason it's priced that way is because it's worth it um but dude it's yeah no shit dude the funny thing is is like it's after that man it becomes more like what do you really enjoy doing? You know what I mean? Like then it becomes a little bit more about the passion part of it. Like when you, when you have the means, then you can be a little bit more luxurious with your decision-making about passions. Yeah. And you get some cushion on mistakes. Yeah, for sure. I want to hard close

the audience on something. Yeah. So we were talking about you know giving making sure that the product is exceptional like because we so those are those are fucking that's those are automatics you have to do that like everything we're saying here guys like there's certain prerequisites that have to be met like your product has to be fucking good it has to be what you say it is it has to wow people when they open up this motherfucking first form energy can, which I'm not about to do an ad for, but if I was, it would probably look something like this. Right, right. Right? But the point is when they pop that shit open and they drink it, it has to be fucking good. If it's shit, it doesn't matter how nice you are.

And I'm going to sell you on why it's probably not because some people are like, well, yeah, my thing is that good. If it were that good- They'd be talking about it. ... then you wouldn't have an issue getting customers. Yeah. That's my point. Because I used to hear these speeches and these talks from people way ahead of me and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. My stuff's good. My stuff's great. I just need more customers. It was always the thought process. But every guy who's... The best lawyers, they

don't need to market. In fact, they have a waiting list and it's impossible to get into their best investment advisors. They have a waiting list. It's impossible to get into them. Like if you're very, very, very good, you don't have a lack of customers. Charlie Munger said the next customers is on your desk. It's the work in front of you. And so like, I love that because it's like, that's where the next customer is. He's like, it's doing the work that's in front of you and they will always come. But the hard close that I wanted to have on this with a, with product is if you actually... So we look at buying businesses. That's what we do. And so we have to analyze the value of a business all the

time. And so you want something that compounds. Because if you're trying to create wealth, everything comes down to inputs to outputs, which is what do you put into a system and how much do you get out? And so the wealthier you get, you put less in and you get more out. And the one thing that all of us have is time. And so it's really like, how much more do you get back for your time? And so if you have to sell, let's say, 50 customers every single month, then as soon as you're selling that many customers, if you have a super transactional relationship, if you do the same amount of marketing and every month you sell 50, it means that tomorrow or next month, the day you stop marketing, your company dies. That is not a very valuable business.

And so if you sell 50 and then next month you sell 50 with the same marketing effort, but the other 50 come back, you now have 100. And the thing is that the marketing effort can be linear in nature, meaning you do the same level of marketing, but every month you get more and more customers because you treated the first ones right. If you aren't growing and you're doing the same level of marketing, it means the product's not good enough. I'm trying to sell you on this because I nodded along with so many times I'd listen to these things and I'd be like, no, my product's good enough. The reality is that you're just not as good as you think you are the market tells you yeah the market tells you it's what you said a minute ago uh 99 of people what'd you say they

won't believe they've chosen not to believe it the market fucking tells you dude yeah and if you if you do have a business and you do have customers right now and you have the the the fucking blessing of having people that are interested in your mediocre company right now and you have the fucking blessing of having people that are interested in your mediocre company right now, you should fucking understand that the way to really compound that is to improve your product and then improve the fucking story that they're going to tell about you by overwhelming them with goodwill and positive resources around what it is that they're trying to solve. I got criticized by, I'll just leave the name list.

I got criticized because I spent 3,500 hours with my editor in total, his hours plus my hours for the book that's coming out. And they're like- What's the name of it? $100 million leads. All right, cool. It's coming out in a few months.

All right. It's 99 cents. So there's my get rich quick plug. And I saw this with the first book because I spent a year writing that one too. And it was just me. And it made no sense. This is like I had Jim Launch. I had Prestige Labs.

I had Alan. We had the deals on the line. Believe me, you don't make money on books. So I just throw it out there. But what happened was you can spend a year writing an exceptional book. And I'm talking like six hours every day is the first six hours of my day when I'm freshest, et cetera, reworking only 160 pages, which is the first book. And my launch for the book was a post when I had 10,000 followers, which is not a lot of followers. I just was like,

hey, I wrote this book. Layla told me I should post it because I was actually going to make it an internal document. This is how we think about making offers for all the companies. And she was like, no, publish it. And I was like, fine. So I published it. And from that day on, we have no ads. We have no anything to promote the book specifically. And it sells more each next month than it did the month before. Every month. And it's now been 20 months, I think, since $100 million offers came out. And now it sells 25,000 to 28,000 copies every month.

Word of mouth. Sounds like a book I wrote called 75 Hard. But it's exactly that. And so you can either... It actually fucking helps people. Guess what? They're going to buy it. And so you can either spend a year or two years building an exceptional product, service, experience, software,

whatever you want to thing, right? And then let your customers market it for the rest of your life. Or you can spend a month building a mediocre product or service and then spend the rest of your life trying to get people to buy it. Dude, I did this shit to get people to buy it. Dude, I did this shit. People don't understand. Before First Form, there was other shit I sold. It just wasn't good. It just wasn't good. People weren't going to buy it twice. And I think that's a big mistake most people make. And it's the inputs to outputs. Because everyone sees the year for the book that you wrote.

They see the year. They see all the time you put into 75 hard, right? They're like, that doesn't make any sense. But if you think about how long life is, if the rest of time people are spreading that, the input to output of how much work it takes to spread the message and wider than you'd ever be able to do it if it was just you on your own, you get the highest leverage from thinking about it from that perspective. If you spent a month on it and it was mediocre, you would have to pump it on every single podcast and it still wouldn't sell as many copies as it does. And you'd have to do it until you died.

Yeah. And so if you're thinking about having high leverage or high return on your time, it makes more sense to spend more time making the thing you have actually exceptional. Keep doing it until people keep coming back and then the scale will happen. But like it's an input. It's like it's a math equation. How much of this do you because like I have my opinion on this, but like how much of this do you feel like? Struggling businesses like like this one idea that we're talking about right here, to me and my personal opinion, bro, this would fix 97%. I'm making this up. But the vast, vast, upper 95% of businesses could be

fixed by just this thing we're talking about. In the converse of that, how many businesses that have exceptional... The only thing that would drown a business that has an exceptional product is they'd be mispriced it's the only thing like yeah their cost like they can't the economics of the business don't work yeah that would mean that's the only you know you know how easy it is to fix that you change the fucking price tag yeah that's how easy that is two seconds right yeah so if you want to have the like guarantee the insurance like you want success insurance like what do i have to pay in order to make sure that like i'm always covered it's make the thing exceptional yeah and that's the thing is that most undeniably fucking great is that most people don't understand how much actual effort it takes to make something exceptional like i you know i look at some of the old

presentations that i would make for my company and i'm like embarrassed that the thing is i remember thinking when i looked at it, I was like, this is exceptional. At the time, that was probably the best you could do. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is,

is that at the end of the day, the market's the one who makes that decision, not you. So I might have, and I think is, I probably was listening. That's where the fucking

disconnect happens, bro. Because you think, you think, because it's the best that you did, that it's fucking great. Yeah. But in reality,

the market says, no, it's not as good as everybody else's shit. I heard some motivational. That's real shit, man. Dude, it's fucking great yeah but in reality the market says no it's not as good as everybody else's shit i heard some um motivation that's real shit man dude it's huge yeah it's um i never thought about that until we just started talking about it like you like you because that's the best that you can fucking offer you assume it is the best yeah because it's your best yes man fuck that's some powerful shit i heard this guy say this and i just like it's and it's been ingrained in my head so much so that whenever I don't want to do something, this is the actual phrase that comes to my head. He said two sayings that I love.

One was that he's like, boys are confident, men are certain. I just wanted to share that because I just love that saying. The other thing is he's like, it's not about doing your best, it's about doing what's required. And whenever I have a hard thing like i'm like i can make more videos for content or whatever i don't want to do this podcast whatever it is like literally my immediate thought that's like my subconscious is like i will do what's required yeah like that's always my initial thought and so right now if the thing is the thing's not as good as you think it is right people aren't coming back like you made of you might have given it your best but you didn't do what was required dude i'm sitting here thinking because like i'm going through this phase right now that's very helpful to me personally thank you for saying that because i'm going

through this phase right now where i'm very financially comfortable like forever it is what it is um and like some of the shit that is required yeah it's not really required right yeah fuck that's some powerful shit because now i'm like fuck dude it is kind of required it's not required because of you motherfucker it's required because other motherfuckers depend on you yeah that's the internal con yeah so like because like dude my purpose is not me my purpose is not me it's these dudes it's these people out here it's yeah it's these people listening yeah right it's it's fucking man that's some good shit you're smart dude yeah bro uh i love that i love talking about this i mean i love talking about business because it's like i think if you can see if you can see the business world clearly then it applies to every Bro, I fucking love that. I love talking about business. I mean, I love talking about business because it's like,

I think if you can see the business world clearly, then it applies to every other aspect in life because I think entrepreneurship is the single greatest path for personal development because it's the fastest feedback loop. There are very few other situations where you don't have... The market will just slap you. Dude, that's what I'm saying.

You go around and talk to your friends about your good idea, they're all going to tell you it's fucking good. Now launch the shit. And now we'll find out if it's really good. See if they get their credit card. Yeah. Because people.

Yeah, that's right. That's right, dude. And the feedback, dude, that's so good. Because like, it's so true. Like, it's such a, you learn so much about yourself. You learn so much about people and the real the reality behind people um i actually believe that you're paying customers are some of the most honest people that will give you the real shit like sometimes i just ask random customers like what they think about

like how i'm doing or what this is that because i'm like all right well this person feels strongly enough that they're willing to trade me my shit for their shit yeah like the minute that i don't do it they're not going to do that anymore um that's a hard thing for people to really process too man because like you said the market will fucking punch you right in the face they will tell you that thing that you spent two years on giving your absolute fucking best they will tell you in one day that it sucks and then you have to deal with it yeah like and it's there's no arguing with the market like it's not like oh you guys are being good no but that's where people fuck their shit up they get fucking so frustrated with the reality that they refuse

to look at it instead if you would just look at it and say okay well this is what it says i'm gonna make my adjustments i'm gonna go, which is the whole game of business. The whole game of business is develop shit, put it out, find out what's wrong. Okay. That's wrong. Fix it. Put it out again. Find out what's wrong again. Dude, the defeat, you get defeated a thousand fucking times before you get that fucking first victory. It's just the way it is. And you might get, and I'm talking about a victory. I'm not talking about, I and i'm talking about a victory i'm not talking about i'm talking about 46 million dollars i'm not talking about you sold one thing to that guy that one time i'm talking about a victory i'm not talking about a fucking win in the war um it's just a it's just the way it is it's the way it fucking

is dude and like people think it's glamorous they think it's like all these wins and all this shit and like bro and it really isn't it's you got to be built for the fucking game and the game is get your balls kicked in every fucking day uh and then figure out how to get them kicked in a little less the next day and then maybe like move to the left a little bit so it doesn't get both of them you know what i'm saying like you start figuring out all the little tricks to not get the fucking kick, right? So this is really interesting from a topical perspective because one of the things that's benefited me as an investor now, because that's technically my full-time job, is that you start to see businesses' assets and your identity becomes divorced from them. And so I'm looking at businesses.

Imagine I buy a business. Now I own 100% of it. If something happens, I'm not butthurt about it. The problem is that when you're starting out, your identity is wrapped into the business. And so when you get feedback, you call it failure. And so then you think, I'm a failure. And so it's just a transitive property from high school, whatever. It's think it was like a personal well this is your thing yeah this is my thing i spent all my my limited skill set and all of my effort on savings account yeah but

see it doesn't matter it doesn't matter that your skill set your skill set is limited it just is that's what it is you're you not there yet, bro. This is part of the process. The skills are going to pay your bills, bro. That's the reality. And if we don't develop a skill set by being willing to be open to hearing the critical feedback, how do you ever get better? And this is why most people don't get better. Most people don't get better because they can't hear the truth. If you redefine the work you're doing, this is just something that's been helpful for me. If you redefine the work you're doing as the job title that it falls under, because in the beginning, when you're a small business owner, you are all the jobs, right?

You wear all the hats. And that's a figurative term, but hear me out here. If you're not getting customers in the door, it might just mean you're like, oh, my marketing director sucks. That's me. But my customer success guy is amazing. That's also me. And so if you can start thinking in terms... And I know this is like, I'm trying to go big business, small business. But if you start thinking about it in terms of departments within your business, even though you are the head of all of the departments, then you can start disassociating. Because what's going to happen is if you are successful, if you keep listening to stuff, if you keep doing this stuff, you will gain enough success that you will actually have somebody who's going to fill that role for you.

And then all of a sudden, if they fail, you wouldn't be as butthurt about it, right? But it's still your business. And even when you get into the CEO hat, right? Eventually, I mean, we hire CEOs for the companies that we own. You're just the owner. If Apple fucks up and you own stock of Apple, you're not like, oh my God, I suck.

It's like, well, no, that product sucked or that messaging sucked. The story wasn't there, whatever it is. And so if you can start drawing the line and saying, these are the functions of a business and I am not good at this function. The person who does this job is not good at this function. Maybe I need somebody who is good at that function.

But then what happens is, in my opinion, for me me at least it's giving me some buffer between the failure and me as a bro i do the same shit i do a little differently yeah so how i do this um is when it's still to this day i do this when i have to do when i i i pretend that i work for andy forsella yeah i pretend that when i show up here yeah or wherever i go i work for this Frisella. I pretend that when I show up here or wherever I go, I work for this dude, Andy over there, right? There he is right there in the picture, right? And I'm just a dude that works for that dude. And so when I get feedback on the business, I'm like, okay, well, I got to fix that. I don't take it like, oh, this is an attack on me because I work for that, right? It's not that- You'll just let Andy know.

Yeah, that's it. I'm just gonna say hey we're fixing this bro it's it's a weird it's a weird thing but i do that too and especially when i have to make hard decisions like when i have to make hard decisions and mostly the time the hard decisions revolve around personnel totally because you care about people and you give a fuck um it's it's i have to answer to this person yeah you know what i'm saying and that person is not me even though it is actually you know what i mean totally like it's such a weird thing that's so weird yeah dude that that's how i describe it i describe it and you guys have heard me talk about this on the show i come in i fucking hang my my my hat of uh you know

being andy right i hang that on the wall and I put on my work uniform that I work for Andy, right? And I'm walking around and make decisions that I think he would want to make, right? It's so fucking weird that you do the same shit, dude. I feel like if you look at enough people who end up doing whatever you want to do, I think the things you have to do to get there are surprisingly similar. And so people have different names for them. And if you listen to different podcasts or whatever it is, wherever your sources of information are, look for the commonalities. Because at the end of the day, all of that just came down to, for both of us, disassociating the work from the identity

and being able to step into the identity of the person who's required to do the job, whatever that job is. And to your point about personnel, because I think this is one of the things that I struggled with really early on, was that my tolerance for mediocrity was very, it was extremely high, very high tolerance for mediocrity when I started out. Because what happens is, you can write this in your journal, the best talent has yet to come. You don't even know the talent that is in the future of the people who are going to work for you. And you have to be the leader that's worthy of that person.

Because like right now, you're one hire away from your entire business being transformed. Like, if you look at, because we can see this across the portfolio, we can see huge inflection points in a business up or down based on key hires. So we put a key hire in, huge inflection point. There's very rarely a massive inflection point that happens without a key personnel change, hire or fire or promote. And so the thing is that that tolerance, and this is again from the players, we're giving the open the kimono of the players room of how those people think is like, it's all about, I'm about to say, it's all about the people and your tolerance and your expectations of their performance. And you think

you have high standards until you've met a player who's 10 times bigger than you're like, oh my God, I didn't know that level of performance was possible. Cause I remember my first, my first $50,000 a year employees, cause all my trainers were like 30 or 20 right here. And I was like, whoa, I was like, this is the shit. This is what I'm talking about. And then I had my first $50,000 a year employee because all my trainers were like 30 or 20 right here. And I was like, whoa, I was like, this is the shit. This is what I'm talking about. And then I had my first $70,000 a year employee. I was like, all right, now we're talking. And then my first $100,000 a year and then $250,000 a year and my first million dollar a year employee. And I was like, each time, and I can't wait to hire my first $10 million a year employee. I don't even know. They're out there and we're going to find them. And you listen to Steven Schwartzman, who's worth

$36 billion, who started Blackstone. He says the biggest regret he ever had was letting Larry Fink go. Larry Fink owns BlackRock. And he let him go, even though he called him an 11 out of 10 in terms of his skill set. And so the only way, and if Steve Schwartzman, I'm just paraphrasing him, he's way richer than I am. If he had been the leader that he is today, when Larry Fink came to renegotiate that contract, he would have been the person that Larry Fink would have continued to work for. And so that's where the whole becoming aspect, because very quickly, your amount of time that you can do with your hands is tapped out. As long as you have some level of work ethic and you work all the hours a day, there's

not that many hours. So you have to work through other people. And that's where the influence and the sales skill, now we're going full circle on this, but if you have that skill, the world unlocks to you because whatever problem you have, there's a person who can fucking solve it. I think there's a lesson there too, bro, for employees and what you're talking about. I think a lot of employees believe that if they still believe this old shit that their parents taught them, if you stick around long enough, eventually you move through and you get a raise and you do this.

Listen, motherfucker. Let me tell you the whole thing. It's real simple. Learn some fucking skills. Real simple. And then go execute them. Whatever your role is, whatever it is you do, however much money you're getting paid, it's about giving first. Okay. So if you can, in your own time, I'm giving you the fucking exact hack. Like all you motherfuckers think there's a hack. This is the only hack. Okay. This is it. Skills pay the fucking bills. All right. If you're making 30 fucking grand a year and you want to make a hundred grand a year, you have to become skilled and offer value to make the company or whoever it is you work for say, fuck, that dude's worth a hundred grand. I'm not letting him fucking go. And your job as an employee is to drive

so much fucking value that you can literally extort your fucking boss. You can walk into the office and you can say, Hey motherfucker, I'm leaving or you got to pay me. And that's the fucking game. Like that's the game. And if you can figure out like you're, like I said, you're making 38 grand right now. And you're like, fuck dude, I'm getting underpaid. I'm blah, blah, blah. You're not underpaid. You're fucking not underpaid. You're paid exactly what the fucking value that you're offered is.

Now, if you think it should be 70 grand or you think it should be 700 grand, then you have to learn the skills of the $700,000 employee. And then after you learn the skills, you've got to prove that they actually produce in a real world environment. Then you go in and you say, fucking pay me. This is how the fuck it works. Okay. So many people, especially you young motherfuckers have a wrong idea about how the fuck this works. You are not going to sit there. You will rot. You will rot your life life away you will not sit there and go from 38 to 55 to 75 to 150 to your fucking dream life being here or there or anywhere that's existing dude and that's the fucking mentality that is, I think it comes from parents who try to instill the proper values into these kids, not because, but they can't because they don't understand. They don't understand themselves

because they never fucking did it. Right. So they're like, Oh, stay loyal. Just keep showing up. Keep doing. No, that's, that's good. That ain't good enough. What's good enough is I want to be here. What does the skill set of this person up here have? What is that? Surround yourself with people and learning. And fuck, dude, we got fucking YouTube, dude. You can fucking look up how to change the O-rings on a fucking washing machine. Or you could spend it to look at, you know, bullshit fucking people.

Oh, this guy destroyed his Lamborghini Urus. Or you could watch really fucking wealthy people teach you how to fucking have skills. And then you could take those skills and you can go to your place of business and you can display those skills and be a fucking superstar. Like, those are your choices. Like, either watch the bullshit or watch shit that actually helps it's free dude there's so much free game on the fucking internet like for somebody like me who started with no internet no social this is like a point of like super frustration because i'm like what the fuck is

wrong with you guys like what the fuck is wrong with the with the generation from 30 to fucking 20 right now you motherfuckers have all this free game in your fucking face all fucking day long and you want to watch someone drop a fucking wrecking ball on a fucking lamborghini like what the fuck is wrong with you and then you want to complain that you don't get paid enough and you're underpaid and this is i'm underpaid you're not underpaid where the fuck that's the market you're underskilled dude there you go that's it dude you're not underpaid you're underskilled and it's so dude it's it goes into the 99 you don't want to see the reality because you don't want to fucking admit that it's the truth yeah but the quicker that you can admit

the truth the faster you can be who it is you want to be. And that's the reality of success. Like, dude, it's very simple. It's just, you have to accept what it is. And so many people want to look around and they want to say, oh, you know, they don't like me because I'm this, or they don't want to do this because I'm that, or these fuckers, they blah, blah, blah. And bro, this is a common thing on the internet. I see this on the internet all over the fucking place now. People jump from thing to thing to thing to other thing to overhear this thing. How the fuck can you learn any skills doing that? Real talk. How can you learn?

You can't. You know, we have to have this understanding that to get paid, I've got to have the skill set. And it seems like people have gotten away from like even understanding that basic basic reality dude basic reality. Yeah Are you good or are you great? Are you great or are you undeniable because I can tell you the only motherfuckers that get rich are the undeniable That's it and you can get rich inside of a company or outside of a company But it's the it's not not good is not the standard. Great isn't even the standard.

No motherfucker that owns a company is going to say, hey, you know what? That guy's great. I'm going to fucking pay them a million bucks to do this. That's not what they're going to do. They're going to fucking pay you a little bit more for being a little bit more extra than everybody else. But when you're undeniableiable that's when you get to name your fucking price that's when you get to say no dude because you guys need this and if you don't

have this it costs this much and that's what it is like to me it's very fucking clear and it's so rare that people can even understand this concept like can i put something out to you guys let's talk to that demographic of 20 to 30 right because I feel like one could argue that part of that issue and what we just got done talking about is information overload. It's too much information out there. So like, do you guys have any tips or advice for that demographic? Right. Because like, yeah, there's plenty of wealthy people out there or the gurus, the coaches.

But is it information overload how do you siphon through that like who should they be listening to how do you how do you vet those people if you don't you don't know what you don't know right so what do you guys have some tips on that where do you want to start i think it's i mean i think we're gonna say the same thing i don't think it's i don't think it's information overload. I think it's implementation underload. Success on me shit. I'm going to consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, never execute. Yeah.

So this is an interesting one that might be worth for the audience. I remember reading many, many, many self-help books when I was in my path before I quit my job. And I realized that after the 10th book, I was like, my life's the same. And so it shifted the way I saw things. I actually never consumed a piece of sales training until after I'd already built a massive sales team. I was like, oh yeah, we should get some other training besides just me. Because I was like, I'm sure other people have done that. But I was so confident at that thing. And so if you want to learn a skill, I'm going to say something that might sound a little contrarian. I don't think you should read books. I think you should do it and then read, because if you read a book on sales and you've never done a sale, you will have no context from which to actually understand the information. It's just

going to float around in your brain, but it won't have, it won't have like a Matt, think of it like ornaments on a Christmas tree. And then try it before you start reading. Right. You just need to have, yeah, absolutely for education. You have to have a point of reference. Yes, exactly. Because otherwise you can't hang the knowledge on anything. Yeah. So you're just reading all these chapters.

Oh yeah, I've got to build rapport. That's a fair take. So I, because every school I've like, I think one of the things that's undervalued is one-on-one tutoring. So when I, so I've done a lot of different things for learning like skills, but one of them, I wanted to learn how've done a lot of different things for learning skills. But one of them, I wanted to learn how to do national retargeting for Facebook ads years ago.

This is me when I was still running them. I was like, where the fuck did I learn this? And so I got on the phone with an agency owner. And he was like, I don't sell my time. And I was like, it's America. Everybody sells their time. And he was like, fine, for $7.50 an hour. And I did not have a lot of money at this point. And so I showed up one hour once a week. And I was like, and this is, I did not have a lot of money at this point. And so I showed up one hour once a week and I was like, deal is I have to use the mouse. I have to click and I'm going to do it, but you have to explain what you're thinking and why you'd make the adjustments. It only took me eight sessions with the guy to learn how to do the thing. It cost me six grand.

That skill made me millions. And so it's like, if you do the thing, you'll have point of reference to hang the thing on. And I make this point because, and I'm a little bit extreme on it because everyone always has another reason to feel like they need to be more prepared. And they think that reading more information or watching more videos is going to make them more prepared, but you will learn more in your first 100 cold calls than you will from every single book you have read. I like what you're saying, dude. And I think that's an important point. I actually agree with it people are probably surprised that that i would agree with that because i talk about reading so much because i've learned a shit ton from reading huge advocate of

reading just to be clear here but the thing that you pointed out that i haven't communicated is that i was also doing while i was reading right and that's a huge deal i'm not just no no yeah but see i took that for granted because I've been doing this thing since I was 19. Right. So I've always been doing it. You're in the game. Right. Yeah. And every, so that, that's a point, important, uh, important point of, of, of context for, for something that I never realized. Like a lot of people do kind of sit there and they're not doing at all. And they're just consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, go and consume at the same

time and you'll get exponentially better there was a ted talk on this but it takes that's a fucking great point yeah i love it yeah there was a ted talk and the guy talked about how to learn most to become proficient in most skills it takes 20 hours so like you want to learn the guitar it's like the 80 like you'll learn 80 of what you want to learn the guitar. It's like the 80, like you'll learn 80% of what you need to learn the guitar in the first 20 hours. The last, to be clear though, the mastery comes from the next 20. But for everyone who's intimidated by it, it takes 20 hours to learn, to get proficient. When I wanted to learn to build a landing page, like a website, I put it off for four years. Like I hired it i hired it guys i got so frustrated one day i was like i'm gonna fucking learn how to do this and so i sat down on a sunday it took me four hours

to build a page and you spent four years fucking with not doing it yeah and so it's like i've and the thing is is like we don't even fear failing we feel we fear feeling stupid at least for me yeah i just like i don't want to feel like a fucking idiot. Or looking stupid. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, feeling or looking stupid. And so for me, just knowing that stat that I'm like, I'm 20 hours away from learning something. That made it way, not this amorphous, how am I going to learn how to build? I was like, in 20 hours, I could look at a week and be like, here's four or five hour chunks. I'll learn it. I'll become proficient. And with YouTube, there literally are step-by-step tutorials. You didn't have to pay.

Nowadays I could have just Googled how to retarget, blah, blah, blah. Like I didn't have that. So I had to hire a guy to do it. But like we could, you could Google it,

just do it. And so, um, there were two points I wanted to make when you're making the employee thing. I have to go like, but you stay in poverty until you learn all the lessons that poverty has to teach you. And the first lesson of poverty is my fault. It's it.

Like, it's my fault that I'm here. The second point that I wanted to make was with regards to employees leveling up. We talked about how like you want to network with people above you. You do all the work before the meeting. You do it as though it were a paid project that someone had hired you to do. If you start doing the job that you want while also doing the job that you're paid for, it will become inevitable that you will get that job because you're already doing it. And so if you front the work, if somebody on Andy's team's like, dude, I think we should get on Snapchat. I don't know if you're on Snapchat. Whatever.

I'm just making this up. And it's like, dude, I already cut up the next 30 days worth of stuff. I already did this thing. I already did it. There's two things that'll happen. One, I can virtually guarantee you that he'd be like, if you can run it, run it. Either he will give you a... He'll be like, dude, because of the increase in responsibility, I'll give you the pay bump. Sure. But the smart ones of you will be like, no, because of the increase in responsibility, I'll give you the pay bump, sure. But the smart ones of you be like, no, I'm just here for the brand. Like you can deny, like if you're smart,

you'll deny the short-term pay bump and you'll gain the long-term goodwill because he will recognize you as a player. And I'm telling you, this is what the people in the room, like they see each other like he's a winner. Like I already know it. Like this is how you do it. This is how you move up. And that's's i love the way you said undeniable because like one of the other rules of poverty is that no one wants you to be rich and no one's going to give you their riches

no yeah like no one wants you to be rich like you have to want to be rich and you have to make it i mean this is steve martin thing where it's like you have to be so good that they can't ignore you that's it and and when someone can't ignore you then everyone then acquiesces they just comply they're like he's got you have to gain leverage over other people because of how much better you are at the thing and then when you have the leverage you can do whatever you want dude it's by the way i want to clarify i love my fucking employees these guys get it here we we promote from within it's it's a it's a these guys get it um so but but like i'm talking about what i observe in general and uh you know what you said

dude like it's uh poverty it's there's very few people on earth contrary to the social fucking environment that we live in uh and this is this is the dose of reality that a lot of people don't like to hear, there's very few people that aren't exactly where they deserve to fucking be. Very fucking few. Very fucking few. Very few.

Except if you look on the internet, everybody deserves to be better. Everybody deserves this. Nobody deserves to be where they at. Listen, bro, you deserve what the fuck you got because what you've done has produced what you have. Now, if you want something else, you're going to have to do the things that produce the other thing.

And then that will become what you deserve. And so stop thinking of it that you deserve anything. Cause the reality is there's nobody out there that thinks you deserve fucking anything except you. That's a big problem in the culture, dude. We can't fucking sit here and say oh i deserve i deserve i deserve look around you dude look at the car you drive look at your bank account look at the person you're with look at where you live look all this shit that's what you fucking deserve because that's

the actions that's the result of the actions that you've taken to produce this and the great thing is we live in this three-dimensional well it's more than three-dimensional if we want to actually talk about it. That's the other episode. Well, yeah. We talk about a whole, that's a whole different thing. We live in this multi-dimensional world that is a blank canvas for us to create in. And so like when you sit there and you say, I deserve better, but you're angry about what you have. Now you've created a situation where you are not even capable of producing any better because you think you're getting fucked on what you actually deserve, which isn't even the truth. The truth is it's inputs and

fucking outputs. It's one plus one equals motherfucking two. And there's nothing that can change that. There's not an opinion. There's not a temper tantrum. There's not a social movement. There's not a fucking hashtag. There's nothing that can fucking change that. And if you want a different result, then you must acknowledge it is my decision and my fault as to why I'm here. And you could blame your fucking parents if you're young. You could be 20 years old and listen to this and be like, well, I didn't have much. Listen, bro, you may not have had much opportunity yet, but take what I'm saying now and apply it because it may not apply to you at 20 years old because maybe you are the circumstances of an unhealthy environment. Maybe you were born into a shit situation. There's lots of people that were a whole lot of people. In fact, most people most people okay but the reality and what separates people from staying there and people who escape that is not defining their identity as someone who's being screwed saying i deserve better you don't deserve better you can create better but you don't deserve it and by the way once you create it but you don't deserve it. And by the way, once you create it, you still don't deserve it.

You're just producing a result from the actions that you take. If you plant a fucking seed and you go out and water it, some shit's going to grow. It's that simple. And that's how we have to look at reality because that's actually how it works. There's very few people out there that have been born into such a shitty situation or have such shitty circumstances that they cannot move forward. I'll say this in America, maybe other places, but here in the United States. We have a scenario where we have a culture that feels entitled to literally every luxury on the fucking planet for breathing.

And that is not how it works at all. And if you're going to live your life like that, if you're going to continue to go down the path of life, thinking that because you're born, you're special and you, because you breathe, you deserve to have all these things that these other people have, you're going to be disappointed and you're going to be bitter and you're going to be frustrated. And guess what? You ain't gonna have shit ever. That's how it works. So, you know, I, it's hard for me because I understood this from the beginning. Like when I, this was not something I had to learn. This was something I understood in the beginning when I was 19 years old and I was broke as fuck. And I spent my fucking only $12,000 that I had to start supplement superstores,

which turned into fucking all kinds of different shit over the course of time. I did not expect anybody to fucking do anything for me. I expected that. Okay. I expected to be rich in fucking a year because I was a stupid kid. Okay. But after that year went by and I wasn't rich. In fact, I still hadn't gotten paid. Here's how I looked at it. I said, well, I got a year into this. I don't want to throw away that year. All right. So I do another year, get another year, still didn't get fucking paid. All right. I looked at it the same. Well, now I got two years in this. I know a little bit, still didn't get paid. I got paid after my third year. And I said, okay, well, I got three years in. I'm starting to get paid. I don't want to throw that away. So I just kept fucking going. And

that's how I ended up here. And like, when I say we're going to do X and you guys think I'm full of shit, I already know it's going to happen because I know how it works. I know the game. I know this is fucking chess, not checkers. I know how to play fucking chess very fucking well at this point in time. You know how I learned to play chess, bro? I get my ass kicked by other motherfuckers that play chess better than me. All right. And we go and we keep going. We go and going. And like now I consider like, like, yes, there's days, of course, where I'm like, dude, fuck this. I don't want to do this shit. But you know what I say, bro, you got 24 years in this. Why the fuck would you throw that away? You learned all this shit

You got all this opportunity now you have an opportunity to build something iconic you built a successful company now you can build something iconic Who has that opportunity? Not very many not very many people ever get to that So like I just continue to roll it over roll it over all over but to say I deserve it Because i've been doing it for 24 years is an absurd statement. It's fucking absurdity. I don't deserve shit. I deserve exactly what produces from the inputs I put in.

And that is fucking it. And like, dude, if the whole world, like if you guys could understand this right now and operate this way for the rest of your life, you're going to have a successful, fulfilling fucking life. But this idea of deserving because you breathe or earning because you put your time in,

those do not compute in reality. Distortions. Yeah, they are. It's time in does not equal result. Skills equal result. And applied skills equal result. Actually, not even skills equal result. Applied skills equal result.

I'm super pumped that you said all this stuff about deserving because it's it's probably my least favorite word in the english language like and i love that you clarified the point at the end there which is like i've been doing this like because a lot of people like they said like you deserve i was like i did it and they're like well you earned it i'm like no like i did these activities and this is the outcome and i used to tell that to people because I was like, I don't think I deserve to success. And I was like, and that's not like a mental limitation in terms of like, I've got sabotaging thoughts or limiting beliefs. It's like, no, like, I don't think I just, I don't think anyone deserves success. But what you can do is you can still do the stuff that gets it. And it's like, you don't deserve the super hot girl that

you want. I was like, you can still do the stuff that gets her. Yeah. Right. By the way, when you eliminate the idea of deserving it, it actually creates more gratitude for it. Yeah. Okay. So like when you, when you, when you, when you don't deserve the success and you realize you don't deserve it and you realize that it's a result of the, of what you did here. Right. Now, all of a sudden you're like, okay, well I did this. It created this. I definitely don't deserve it, but I'm very glad it's here. It's easy to be grateful. Yeah. I want to talk about blaming power real quick. Yeah, let's do it. So I said, the first lesson of poverty is two words. It's my fault, right? Now, I'm sure that there's some people spinning their tops right now on that idea. And I want to lean into this for a second because you may have suffered racial inequality. You may

have suffered gender inequality. You may have been born in Bangladesh. You may have been born, you know what I mean? Like you may have had your uncle rape you every single day as a child. That's fucked up. I'm not denying it. But where you place the blame is where the power goes. And so I had this realization when I was 19 years old, I was a very angry kid. And I blamed my parents for who I was, where I was, et cetera. And I resented both of my parents at that time in my life, pretty hardcore, did not like them. And I had this realization that I was blaming them for my life. And then what that meant was, because I translated, because I had to hit my own ego on

this. I was like, then that means that they're the ones who have power over me. These people at the time that I don't like, I'm giving them the power over me not being successful. And so wherever you point the finger of blame is where the power goes. Until eventually it points at your chest, that's when the first day of your real life begins. Because you're like, you know what? All these things happen. I had all of these things that were unequal or unfair or whatever you want to call it.

The terrible uncle thing, horrible, comma. I'm still here. You're still there. You're still here. And first rule of entrepreneurship, use what you got, right? And so if you can accept that it is your fault it's an awful way of saying it's your responsibility because like if you blame the

parent you blame the uncle you blame your race and i know i'm going to get a lot of heat on that because i'm because i'm not here you're my guy that's real shit but the thing is is that like if you blame that then it means that that's where you put the power yeah and so it's like that a hundred percent i know it a hundred percent may be true. Comma. So what? So what now? What you have? No. Yeah.

You have no. Now what? Okay. We all acknowledge it. Now what? It's as simple as it gets, dude. And like, what are you going to do? Spend your whole fucking life telling that fucking sad story that, that honestly, all

your friends and family are fucking tired of hearing anyway. Like they really are. Like I've been talking about my shoulder being fucked up for fucking two years now, 18 months. And it's a legitimate thing. I have my shoulder completely reconstructed. I fucking lost my entire physique. I've been working my fucking ass off and I had thing after thing after

thing happened to me in a row. And it's a fucking terrible shit story. But you know what? I'm not 350 pounds like I fucking used to be. I'm in pretty good fucking shape and i consider that a massive test pass what am i going to do now for the rest of time am i going to so am i going to quit training and i'm going to quit lifting and i'm going to say shoulder yeah like what are you going to do like that's some weak ass shit dude like that's why i haven't even been

talking about it on my fucking stories like because i'm like god i'm fucking tired do you want to say it like and dude the truth of the matter is too alex is like all of you guys listening do you guys have these excuse and yeah the mountain's gonna be big it's gonna fucking take some time to climb but there's people who have like not only like people there's not like one or two people there's fucking thousands probably millions of people who have like not only like people there's not like one or two people there's fucking thousands probably millions of people who have faced the same exact adversity if not worse that have become what it is that you were looking to become so if they could fucking do that after going through all the same exact shit even worse shit then what the fuck are we talking about that means it's possible. That

means it's actually a very real thing. What one man can do, another can do. It's a real fucking thing. And the disadvantages that you have right now, if you think about yourself as the hero of your own story, right? What creates the strength of the hero? The obstacle, the monster. The bigger the monster, the bigger the hero, right? And so I remember in the early days when I was really going through it, I used to tell myself that this was gonna be part of the story I would tell. And so like the many disadvantages that you have

become advantages to the story that you have. Because sure, Alex, white guy, guy born to well-off dad you know what i mean he's a doctor you know yeah cool that was my life and i so here's a story i will never be able to tell i'll never be able to say that i was a black man born in africa who made it all the like i can't who got who was you know an orphan and had been raped and some in kid, I can never tell that story, but there is a guy who can. And so like, if you have those disadvantages to you, you become, you can become the hero of that story and you become a bigger hero than I am or Andy could be because of the things that you are, that you had the opportunity to overcome. And so like that becomes the part of the story that you can tell. And those becomes the monsters that you slay and also pave the path for everybody behind you who doesn't think it's

possible. That's the key. The key is that last part. Why not work to be the example of the person who overcomes the shit so that other people who are in your scenario will see you as a guide through the fucking forest of how to get from where you are to where you want to be. Like, bro, what's more noble than that? I just, I don't think, I don't think there's much more noble than that. Like by creating a life that guides other people out of their fucking shit into the life that they want to live through your own story, not your made up shit, not the fucking fake. I'm standing in front of my fucking hurrican and this is my story bullshit i'm talking about your real fucking story your real shit

dave stewart here in st louis black man you know that dave stewart is grew up group black black man grew up probably the richest dude in this in this city i mean i would say in the midwest for sure dude grew up up in fucking north st louis and I would say in the Midwest for sure. Dude grew up, up in fucking North St. Louis and Ferguson. One of the fucking shittiest parts of the entire, you all know Ferguson. Y'all heard of it before. Cause we've had fucking riots here.

Um, what great area, actually great people in that area, but it has been known to be a very rough area historically. And it was a rough area for that man during that time. And this dude has come through now. He he's he he's a little bit older now but he he's built worldwide technologies he's overcome all kinds of shit and this dude has with his life experience painted a real fucking path for other black men who come from those neighborhoods to believe that they can actually

do similar things what is more noble than that what the fuck is more noble than that and he's also paid at the same time like he's fucking he's he's fucking loaded yeah you know i'm saying no i think he's the wealthiest by a lot yeah there's a lot yeah but i mean dude like your your obstacles and your overcoming is the nobility. Like there is no nobility in victimhood, bro. There's a tension in victimhood. There's fucking shares in victimhood.

There's fucking fake comments in victimhood. Let me tell you something, dude. Like when you start telling that sad ass story on Instagram, dude, and you get those likes and those comments, those aren't the likes and comments that you actually want. In fact, most of those people probably wish you shut the fuck up. I'm being real because I know I do. When I see you motherfuckers bitch on there over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over about the same fucking shit over and over and over and over and over. Like, I'm like, shut the fuck up, dude. What'd you do about it? Like, and I'm not the, I'm just the one telling you that.

Like, everybody else thinks it. You know, you guys are all like, oh, Andy says what everybody's thinking. Well, I'm telling you right now. That's what the fuck people think. And then they think when you like want to hang out and you want to fuck, they're like, I'm not fucking hanging out with that person. That person's a drag. They suck the energy right out of me.

Like, dude, there's no nobility in that. There's no nobility staying a victim. There's no nobility. And, and me telling a story of how I got stabbed, uh, fucking 20 years ago, which actually is coming up 20 years this year. Uh, and talking about how it ruined my life for 20 fucking years, I could have chosen and said, oh dude, uh, you know, this dude fucking stabbed me and this shit happened and I could say it fucked up my life. It gave me PTSD,

gave me concussion syndrome, which it fucking did. I got white lesions all over my fucking brain because of it. I got to live with that shit my whole life, okay? I can fucking tell that story and every single person

would be justified. He'd be like, fuck, that's some fucked up shit, right? But what the fuck else would it do? I'd be the person, I'd be the old man now who doesn't have shit, who doesn't have fucking anything, who's not out here, you know, hopefully, you know, some of you guys have been inspired by me. I'm not doing that shit because I believe my own story and I stay in that spot.

You can't stay in that spot, dude. It's a bad fucking spot to be. And there's no nobility in it. The only nobility cup and there's no nobility and fucking pacifying it either. The nobility comes in overcoming the nobility comes in creating such. It's what you said. Success is the only revenge. It's not the ultimate revenge. It's the only fucking revenge that the path that you're on, that you're trying to create, you getting to that point where it's undeniable that you have achieved that to where every single human being that has ever fucked with you whatsoever, that thought, there's no way, it's not going to happen. There's no way they're going to do that. Which by the way, I've been told all of it my whole fucking life.

I don't have to say a motherfucking word anymore. I don't have to say anything. I don't have to talk shit. I don't have to say, hey, watch what I do, or this is day one, or wait until you see me. Motherfuckers just know. They know, okay? And because they know, and because that story is undeniable, other people that come from the same fucking hood I came from over here in South St. Louis,

those people look at that and they say, fuck dude, if that dude did it, I can fucking do it. And that's the whole point. That's the whole point of the journey we're on, dude, because stories are passed down generationally. They're not, it's not just about us. It's not just about what's going on today. It's not just about your Instagram following. It's about what fucking life are you actually living and what message does that life send and how does it actually affect the people coming behind you? Because dude, to me, you know, I'm, I'm a little bit older than you and a little bit older than probably a lot of you guys

listening. Like, that's all I really think about anymore. Like, I don't think about like, what can I get? What can I do? I think about like, all right, fuck dude. How can I make this so great that people fucking are inspired by it? Not, not in a little way, but in a massive way, how can it change people's lives by just living that story? And like, dude, you guys all, every single human being listening to this right now has that opportunity, bro. You have a blank canvas. You have a blank canvas in front of your fucking face that you get to create with. And a lot of you motherfuckers are ruining it because you're sitting there saying, I deserve better. Well then do better.

It's that simple. You can spend the same energy justifying your victimhood as justifying your success. Yeah, man. You ain't right, you ain't wrong about that. Or any of the other shit you said today. So anyway, dude, we're going on three hours, man. This is like a record for us uh any closing thoughts

man i really appreciate you making the time to come out and be on the show dude i was looking i was i was texting uh andy like a little kid i was like 14 days yeah like well i was i was reciprocating those texts because i was just excited. In fact, I told DJ that today. I said, dude, I'm excited to do this show with Alex because I truly believe, bro, out of all the people I've come across, that you have one of the best entrepreneur brains going out there. And, you know, I mean that shit. Like, it is very obvious. Like, it's from an operator to an operator, right? Like, there's guys that have put out content. You're like, yeah, that's true.

That's good stuff. Like that's good. Then there's guys and there's people that put out content that most people are like, what the fuck does that mean? And then you can only really understand it if you're actually operating. And, uh, you're one of those guys, man, I appreciate everything you do and all the content you put out. And, uh,. And I think what you've done is fucking amazing. And it's cool as fuck to be your friend and just hear all this shit, dude. Because it's very parallel to my journey. Very, very, very parallel. It's fucking cool, dude.

Well, I'm incredibly honored to be here. I was looking forward to it a ton. I mean, you're an inspiration in terms of what you have built. You will build the iconic company because you won't stop. I don't know how to do nothing else. Right. And I think for the audience, on a long enough time horizon, if you gain the repetitions, you can't. So I'm going to redefine success real quick. So if you think about any worthwhile endeavor, they're actually not finite games, they're infinite games. And so a finite game, Simon Sinek popularized this a little bit, but I'll just recap it real quick. A finite game is where you have known players, agreed upon rules, and agreed upon way of winning.

An infinite game is a game where there are known and unknown players. There are no rules. And the only point of the game is to keep the game going. And so where people fail is that they apply a finite construct to an infinite game. So like the US lost in Vietnam because Vietnam was just trying to stay alive. That was all they were trying to do. They weren't trying to win. They weren't going to stop trying to stay alive. Exactly.

And so we try to have a finite outcome to an infinite game. That's why we lost. And so people try, like most games worth playing, you can't win. You can only play. So marriage, for example, you're not going to win marriage. The point of marriage is to keep the marriage going. At health, you don't win health. The point of getting healthy, being in shape is to stay in shape.

And you don't win at business the point is to stay in business and to stay in the game and to keep playing and i think when i redefine that all of a sudden i realized that by being in the arena i was a success and so i was able to enjoy the fact that by that definition of success i was winning and so i think if if we are able to and anyone who's listening is able to remove the expectation of some finite outcome that's going to happen, because I promise you, all of us here in this room have achieved some goal

and then we just move the goalpost, right? And it's more just a game you play with yourself. Just like when you're on the cardio machine and you're like, okay, 30 minutes is three tens. And you're like, okay, it's five sixes. You play the game. But the thing is, is like with all of the games that are worth playing, the fact that you can play is like with with all of the games that are worth playing

they the fact that you can play them is what makes them worth the effort and so i think that if you if you can redefine that then it means you can't lose and if you have a fear of failure making your games infinite games guarantees victory i love that dude it's fucking true too I spent the first 18 years being in business not realizing that I could have enjoyed that entire process you know what I'm saying yeah because I lacked that perspective that you just said

I could have enjoyed that entire process because I'm still going to get there can I throw something else in real quick so old person said this, what you don't realize when you're young is that it's always the good old days. Yeah.

That like, for some reason that like hit me because I was like, I think, you know, I talk about the time when I was sleeping on the gym floor and at that point I was like,

this does not feel like the good old days. But when I was a little more successful, I was like, man, I remember when I was sleeping on the floor, when I had like six gyms before I lost it all again. Right.

And then going through all the shit that happened that you heard, you know, the beginning of this podcast successful, I was like, man, I remember when I was sleeping on the floor, when I had like six gyms before I lost it all again. Right. And then going through all the shit that happened that you heard, you know, the beginning of this podcast, like, I was like, man, this is horrible. I can't breathe. Right. But then like, I look back on that. I'm like, man, those are the good old days. Like I was forging me, you know, at that time. And so it's trying to put on my hat of saying like, right now I'm in the good old days of future me. And that's been like a really helpful frame in terms of thinking like how to enjoy it days of future me. And that's been like a really helpful frame in terms of thinking like how to enjoy it a little bit more. And the other way I've tried to think through this, I'm going to give you a couple things that have helped the audience

or helped me a lot. But I struggle with gratitude. I'm not good at it. And so I've had to come up with these things. I have to focus on it too. Yeah. One of them was whatever we're doing right now, many times it might be the last time you do it. And so I've had to come up with these things. And so I have to focus on it too. Yeah. Yeah. One of them was, um, whatever we're doing right now, many times it might be the last time you do it. Like I, I, my last sleepover, I think I was 11 years old or something with a friend.

If I had known that that was the last sleepover I was ever going to have, probably would appreciate it more. But there's a lot of lasts that we do before we die. We think that when we die, like that's it. Like the last time you might go to Europe and like backpack might be in your twenties. And like, I'm never going to backpack in Europe. I accepted that. I was like, it's never going to happen. I'm just at a point where it's not going to happen. And so I was like, wow, I missed that. It's never going to happen. And if you're in that, whatever your phase is, there's these things that will be your lasts. And if you can appreciate them for that, they just taste a little bit sweeter. And the last frame that's helped me out is I call it

the grandfather frame. But try this out one time. like if you're driving or you're working out right now, imagine you're your 85 year old self, like you're really old and that you woke up today in your body as it currently is. It's a weird, it's like, it's, it's kind of trippy to think about it, but like if you're 85 years old and I'm actually here, like I zoomed into this moment, dude, that's fucking awesome no i'd be like andy's so young yeah because i remember because i'm 85 yeah and i know what you look like when you're 85 it's like dude man my knees don't hurt you know what i mean yeah my my shoulders are right and i look at leila i remember when we were this young right man we

were just getting you know we were just building acquisition to hire we're just in our first or second year like this is so cool like and all of a sudden, my morning coffee becomes this reliving of a moment that I have when I'm 85 years old. And it's just been something that's like, I try and practice these things because I think they're like muscles. You just try and keep remembering those frames. And so I think that if you can practice those while you're in the game and in the arena, it makes it a little sweeter, even the very painful losses. Well, I love that, dude. That's an awesome perspective. I've never even thought about like that. I struggle with that shit too. I think when you're ambitious, bro, it's hard to,

you struggle with gratitude. Yeah. It's hard to be satisfied when you want more. Well, brother, thank you so much for sharing everything today. It's awesome to have you on the show. I'd love to have you back sometime for sure. I know we'll do that. Guys, I appreciate you guys tuning in. Alex, where can they follow you? Where are you doing most of your stuff? The deepest stuff is the podcast.

So the game, just type in my name, Alex Ramosi, the game, wherever you listen. That's the one. I have a YouTube channel that I'm pretty active on. So that's a lot. A lot like my longest stuff is youtube and podcasts um but if you just want to like check out some of the short stuff uh instagram twitter i'm super active on twitter me personally like i tweet all the time yeah um just because i think i'm fancy and i write words yeah um so yeah if you're on twitter which no words are fancy yeah but yeah you're on Twitter, which no one is. Word's are fancy. Yeah. But yeah, I'm on most of the major platforms. But if you like the longer, deeper stuff, YouTube and podcasts are the place to go. And I have the $100 million offers book, which right now I think has 12,000 five stars on

Amazon. That's awesome. It's $0.99. And Amazon keeps 66 of it. That's not my get rich on there. But hopefully it's helped a lot of people make more money with their business. Well, guys, if you're unfamiliar with Alex, you are now a little bit more familiar. might get rich on there. But hopefully it'll help. It's helped a lot of people make more money with their business. Well, guys, if you're unfamiliar with Alex,

you are now a little bit more familiar. And I believe 100% that you'll find value in the things that he does. Bro, again, thank you so much for making the trip out. Guys, that's the show. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys. Please pay the fee on this one.

I know that you definitely got value on this. If you didn't, you're full of shit. All right. So please pay the fee. Let one. I know that you definitely got value on this. If you didn't, you're full of shit. All right. So, so please pay the fee. Let's share this out there and I'll see you guys next time. We're from sleeping on the floor. Now my jury box froze.

Fuck a bowl. Fuck a stove. Counted millions in the cold. Bad bitch. Booty swole. Got her on bank roll. Can't fold. That's a no.

Head shot. Case closed.