The Game with Alex Hormozi - Attention is the New Oil | Ep 460

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Get them hooked, get their attention. Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how his multiple beliefs about personal branding and creating content were thrown out the window after seeing highly influential figures do it, how “attention” is the new “oil” in business, and the factors you need to get that attention from your audience.Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(3:10) - Reality shift: Personal branding's power seen through influencers' success.(8:29) - Attention, today's scarce resource; audience is the real output.(16:07) - Long-term success requires significant patience in the game.(34:12) - Huge success needs compounding, multiple leverage forms, time efficiency.(39:23) - Personal branding: Offer value, not just self-focus; audience-centric.(42:56) - Building personal brand: Sell values, ideals, not just products.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

Four out of the top five biggest companies in the world are not built on the old oil, but the new oil. And the oil of today is attention. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning. I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with Acquisition.com. I always wish Bezos, Musk, and Buffett had documented their journey. So I'm doing it for the rest of us. Please share and enjoy. So a friend of mine, Ryan Fisher, just showed me a clip on his phone of a podcast. that did with him. This is when I wasn't really, actually I didn't do any podcast. I wasn't

doing any speaking stuff. Like all I was doing is building Jim Longer and Prestige Labs. And in the clip, he's like, dude, I found this gem. And I'll show it to you in a second. But it shows how I was like, screw content, organic is stupid, like just run ads and do outbound. Like you don't need anything else. I don't want to be known. I want to be rich and unknown. And it's funny because he was like, and now you're not doing that. And so what I'm going to do is kind of wall. through my transition from I think organic sucks why would you build a personal brand only do ads and outbound to clearly what I'm doing now which is going all in on media personal brand content etc and so there was multiple beliefs that I had to

have broken because I was very against it and so I'll walk through each of these things and hopefully you can take away if any of these are beliefs that you currently have I'll just walk you through how I at least overcame them and so the first one was why does this even make sense money-wise right because in the beginning when you're making the content, you don't really make any money from it. And you don't do it, make any money from it for an extended period of time. And so for me, when I was seeing this, I was like, if it doesn't make me money, I'm not interested. And so just being real. And then what happened, and this was like the day that like put the first huge crack in the belief shell that I had

around organic was when Kylie made the front of Forbes as a billionaire. And she was 20. And at the time, I was 27 and I think I had taken home 17 million in income the year before. I was on pace to do like 13 to 15 that next year in terms of taking take home income. And I thought like I was hot shit. And then this girl is seven years younger than me fucking crushes me in net worth. And I was like, wow. And so it was just this huge belief shift for me where I was like, what am I doing wrong? My ego felt hurt.

So I started protecting myself. And I was like, oh, no, Chris Jenner's her mom. she's an absolute gangster. She was born into this royalty. It's not that she did it. It was someone else and blah, blah, blah, right? So that's right. And I was like, okay, ego protected. I feel okay now. And then I went back to my life. And then Huda Beauty sold a percentage of her thing for 600 million at the time. It's worth of over a billion today. And I was like, some makeup chick? Six hundred million? And then Connor McGregor came out with proper 12 and 12 months later. Boom. It was a 600 million dollar deal. And then the rock had terra mana tequila, which is now worth like four billion that it came

out with. And I just kept seeing this again and again and again to the point where I was like, I believe something that's not true. And so I talk about how skills, beliefs, character traits are the three things that hold back entrepreneurs. And this one for me was something that I believed about the world and I was functioning as though and it was not. And so I was trying to find those things because they construct our reality. And we make our decisions based on the things that we believe to be true. And this was a statement that I believed that was not true. And so I basically was walking through a reality that was not real. And it was that personal brand sucks, personal marketing money, and seeing these overnight

billionaires made a click for me. And so you'd still think, okay, so that's when Alex started to do it. Nope, not when I started to do it. I then read a bookmine of all Ravocat, which is an almanac, which is really good, really quick read. And you talked about the four types of leverage in the book. And so in increasing order of leverage on the leverage pyramid, you've got labor. You get other people to do stuff for you, which means you get more of your time back and you get output. Above that, you've got capital. So people give you money. You invest the money that other people

give you and you get leverage by extension. The last two levels are code. So you got software and media. So if you think about this, you make a piece of code and then 10 million people can use it over and over again, that's leverage. You put one-time investment and you get infinite on the other side. With media, it's the same way. If I take however much time it takes, it takes, me to make this video, one person, a million people, a hundred million people can see this video, which is what gives it leverage. And so when I saw that, that was what made everything click for me as to why these people were giving these crazy, crazy numbers when they had, like, I heard Kylie had a team of seven, and she was doing 200 million a year. I was like,

team of seven, and it was because she had a compounding leverage vehicle built within her business. And that was when I looked at my own businesses at the time and realized I had nothing that compounded, nothing. And that was a huge moment for me because I knew that whatever, like, I almost became dissatisfied with the business that I had because I realized that whatever I wanted to do next, I wanted to have a compounding vehicle, something that multiplies unto itself over and over again. So Warren Buffett could build Berkshire Hathaway because the money itself compounds and compounds and compounds. And on a long enough time horizon, when you keep rolling the snowball, after you do that for 40, 50 years, you have a big fucking snowball, right? And I had no

snowball machine. And for those you who are listening right now, if you think about your own business, if you keep doing what you're doing over and over and over again, if it's not significantly, not just twice as big, but 10 times big or 100 times as big 10 years or 20 years from now, then you don't have any compounding vehicle that's spinning the machine. And so if right now, and you want to become ultra-wealthy or you want to become, you know, bigger than you are right now, you have to unlock one of those four types of leverage. And so when I looked at that pyramid, I was like, well, I understand the leverage of labor. So I've got that. I'm now in a position where I have capital that I can deploy.

Now, I don't have other people's capital because that's not what I want to do with my life right now. But when I looked at software and media, I was like, well, I'm not a code guy. That's just not my, like, what can I be really great at? I thought, given my skills, et cetera, I could be better at the media side than I could at the code side. And so that was just kind of me saying, this is me. I think I'm going to go in this direction.

And so that's why I decided to do the media thing. But I still wasn't there yet. Because now I looked at these people that are ultra famous and I was like, huh, well, I'd still rather be anonymous because, you know, they've got all these stalkers and weirdos. And, you know, hey, it is what it is. When you get exposed to 10 million people, if you figure 1% of people are crazy, you got 100,000 weirdos, right? It's a lot of weirdos.

And so anyways, I go to have dinner with a front of mine, Dean Graciosi, who's Tony Robbins right hand, and he was huge on infomercials for a long time. He still does tons of stuff, media-wise. And he gets, like, weirdos that come to his house and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, how do you deal with this? I was like, why do you think this, like, how is this worth it? You know what I mean? Like sell me on this because I just was like, I'm not sold.

And so he sat me down. He was like, dude, if a couple weird letters, you know, every day or every week is the price I have to pay for the impact I want to have, he's like, I pay that price any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And there was just like this pause when he said it between when he said it and he looked at me and I just felt like it hit me because I was like, God, I'm being such a pansy. Like I'm just, I say, I want to make this impact. I say I want to help all these people.

And yet I don't want to be inconvenienced. You know what I mean? And I was like, I just don't think that when I'm 85, I'll look back and say, wow, like, I got stopped at dinner a bunch of times by fans. I'm so high and mighty that that would bother me. You know what I mean? And so that was the moment that the watching other people hit it big overnight, understanding the why behind it with the leverage and the media and how it worked,

give me kind of like the mechanics of it. And then having Dean kind of break my belief around fame being a vehicle for impact rather than an inconvenience for my life, those are the big things that kind of like big dominoes had to get pushed over for me to start doing this. And so one of the interesting things about this is that right now the entire economy is shifted. So if you look at from like a century perspective, the last century was a century about power. And when I say power, I mean like energy, right? So like the biggest four out of five companies 20 years ago were all energy companies.

They were all power, oil, et cetera. And then if you shift today, four to the five biggest companies are what? They're media companies. And it's not even media that's the output. The thing that is being pumped and drilled every day is the attention of the masses. And so if you think about what makes money is it's the things that are scarce, right? Scarce resources are the things that are the most. viable. And so oil was the scarce resource. And now attention is the scarce resource. And so that's

why attention is the new oil. And so if you want to have a machine, you should be pumping and drilling for the most viable resources out there. And so now maybe you'll make the next Facebook, the next TikTok, the next whatever. Those are the platforms for pumping. But then you have all these little mini drilling companies, if you can think about it like that, that you used to have, you know, got like oil is the big thing. And then you've got Exxon, mobile, whatever. But now you've got. Gary, Tom, Ed Milette, Andy Fussel, like all these other guys who are pumping, Lewis House, you know, pumping oil, the attention of today, the oil of today, which is attention. So I thought that was really interesting. Now, one of the last things that I didn't like

about the whole content media stuff, this is a little bit more mechanical, is I hated the idea. I hate, like, if you've followed any of my stuff, I hate doing something that I don't get credit for later. And what I mean by that is like, if I do a rep at the gym, gym, I build that muscle and that muscle's permanent. It sticks. Okay, not forever. I'm 85, but like for a long enough time that I'm okay with it. But when you go out and you make a decision about what you're going to have for lunch, to me, it's such a waste because I'm like, that decision is not going to stick with me. You know what I mean? And so I want to build something that I don't have to rebuild again later. And so the idea of making a short that is going to float today and then disappear into the ether

tomorrow, right, or make a post on Instagram that's going to be gone in a week. Like, no one's ever going to see it again. To me, taking the scarce reasons of my time and then having it vanish, it's just I couldn't, I couldn't make that work for me. And so it was a huge belief that I realized that the media, the content is not the output, is the input. The output is the audience. And the audience is what compounds.

The audience is what sticks. And so you're not wasting your time on something that's going to disappear in a while. You're gathering the scarce resource. And the audience is the thing that pumps attention over and over again. You're actually increasing your landmass for attention to drill from. If you think about media in this way, right? And so I thought it's like me thinking that like every time I pump something for oil, it was a waste. When in reality, that's not the thing that I'm doing.

the output is the thing that I'm doing. It's the amassing of the land. It's the pumping of the oil that is the long-term output of the behavior. And so once that shifted in me, I'd stop seeing it as a waste because I thought if I got one more person who's going to see this short or see this long or see this post or see this tweet or see this whatever, that was the point. And so once I shifted that, then I stopped feeling insecure about like wasting my time, et cetera. And so one of the really interesting things with media and audience. All right. So this is from a cost perspective. when you expand the time rise and is that media will only become more expensive over time. It literally only goes one way, which is up on a long enough time rise.

Advertising becomes more expensive. Content creation becomes more expensive. It becomes increasingly fragmented, so it costs more to do it across different platforms. It just becomes more expensive. But here's what's interesting. Audiences and their attention becomes more valuable over time. And so we had this unique pairing of something that will never be cheaper than it is today, and the output of that thing will never be less valuable than it is today.

So the audience becomes more valuable. The cost of getting the audience becomes more valuable, which means the best time to start is now. And as soon as I realized that I had a cost curve that was going up and the resource, the value of the resource going up on the other side, I immediately felt the sense of urgency of like, oh, my God, I should have started this five years ago. And so I had this tweet that went viral that was like, my biggest regret is that didn't start sooner. I got a bunch of people who were like, dude, you don't seem like the type person who would regret things. And I really don't. But that feeling of knowing that I have two things that are working against. me gave me the, it decreased my action threshold enough that I was like, I'm going to do this,

right? And so that's what got me to take that next step. As a fun side note about media businesses in general, media is the only business where marketing and delivery are the same. So think about this, the way you market the brand, if you had, let's say, a show like Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan's marketing for Joe Rogan is his delivery for Joe Rogan, which is one of the ways that media creates even more leverage because if you think about from operational perspective, you can just have one team that does all days focusing on marketing and expanding the audience, pumping and drilling and pumping and drilling the audience because it's getting you new people and the more people you get from your marketing, the more eyeballs and earballs you sell on the back end through sponsors and

endorsements. Now, we're not doing that, but I find it really, really interesting to think about that is that there's no other business where the thing that you market and the thing that you sell are literally the same. Kind of interesting. And so one of the things about audience growth that I started looking into was you've probably heard give, give, give, give, ask, right? Or if, you know, my kind of ism on that is like give, give, give, give, give, get, because people just start handing you things. But if you look at platforms that are trying to grow, right, they're trying to grow the audience, they're trying to find more oil to drill, right? More land to drill oil from, rather. The ones that are new have a different give to ask ratio.

I don't know if you've noticed that. So when a new platform comes out, they don't have ads. They just have content, content, content, content. And so if you think about that in terms of like giving, all they're doing is giving, giving, giving, giving, giving. And then what happens is they have this radical expansion and they just gobble and gobble and gobble market share. And the moment they start introducing ads, right,

the viral growth starts to decrease. And so it begs the question, why would you make your asks if you know you are multiplying unto yourself, you are compounding the longer you just give before making your ask? This is why having a long time rise. it's interesting and important. So there's been a ton of research that's actually been done on this,

and I looked into it. So the mature platforms are not in expansion mode anymore. They're in mining. They're in reaping and selling the eyeballs and the earballs as much as they can. And so if you look at like television or radio, they have roughly a four to one ratio

of giving to asking, if you would have put asking as commercials, right? So it's 13 minutes per hour that's dedicated to commercials compared to 47 minutes of content. per hour. Kind of interesting. And so if you look at Facebook, Facebook right now, if you scroll your newsfeed, it's four to one. They've figured this out. They know that people are willing to give four units to everyone roughly as they consume content. Now, here's what else is interesting, is that the audience

that is on there has been conditioned and reinforced to continue to want to consume it, and they're willing to incur the cost of the commercial. But somebody who's new may not have been whether or conditioned over that period of time of slow integration of ads, that they might not be as interested in staying on this platform. And so the moment you start integrating the ask and integrating the takes or whatever way you want to say it is the moment that you consciously decrease your growth. You consciously say, I don't want a bigger, better audience than I have today, or I'm willing to trade some of it off. And that's okay. You've got to eat, et cetera. I understand. But if you're thinking like super long, you have a compounding number that you were literally slowing down your rate of

compounding the moment you start doing it. And so if you think that you're going to be in the game for a long time and you want to be as big as you can later and you want to give to the audience, all of the things of providing value are literally aligned with massive growth. It's just you got to wait. And so rather than reap and harvest the way TV has and why Facebook doesn't grow anymore because they're overly added, you know, advertised on, et cetera, it's the platforms that have the lowest amount of ads, they get the most amount of reach, the most amount of compounding. Now, they have a business model. They have to make money at some point. I get that. But the longer you can wait, the bigger the ass can be at the end. The longer the runway,

the bigger the plane that can take off from it. So one of the things interesting about digital media versus old forms of media is that other media made zillionaires too, right? Newspapers back in the day, direct mail stuff, billboards like radio. Well, radio is digital but, but we'll just go with me on this. Warren Buffett invested in so many, town newspapers because they were monopolies. There wasn't enough room for another paper to come in town, and a newspaper had two monetization things, which may never be available again. And cable TV had the same thing. People would pay to have access to the content, and advertisers would pay to have access to the eyeballs. They got paid on both sides, and people became exorbitantly wealthy

from this model. The cable TV became absurdly wealthy. The newspapers became exorbitantly wealthy, and they were able to justify it because there was a cost of distribution. There was a cost to distribute the newspaper. Now, they probably could have lived on just the ad revenue alone, but they chose not to because they were business people. They were like, if they're willing to pay for it, and so are they. We'll charge them both. But the thing is that digital media eroded that first sale to the customer,

which is when Facebook came in and said, it's free and it always will be. Right. And they stuck with that because they realized that because it was free, they're able to gobble up so much more media, their cost to acquire eyeballs at a, a platform level so low that it made more sense for them to not try and monetize the audience except through the advertising. And so media has changed in that you can now make one video like this, and 10 million people can see it. And so that is what I, it took me way too long to realize

that the game had changed fundamentally in terms of how media is monetized and how media can grow a brand and the amount of reach that a single video, a single bout of effort can deliver. And so I'll make a prediction right now. So if the Rockefellers were built on oil, the new generation of ultra wealthy people would be built on attention. Zuck is going to continue to be a gangster because he has the attention economy. You know, he's buying attention. Then on the creator level, you've got Mr. Beast, right? And people who have mega amounts of attention amassed and pumping towards them.

I think he opened up a restaurant in a local area and had 10,000 people show up at a local restaurant, right? Like, I don't think people still understand because we as humans can't fathom or comprehend the difference between a million and 10 million, because we can barely even comprehend what a thousand is. So it's hard to understand what a million versus 10 million versus 100 million is, but I'll put it to you this way. If, and this is with all the love to Gary, if Mr. Beast lost all of Gary's attention from the amount of attention he has, he would still have over 100 million people. It's kind of like Elon Musk losing all of Donald Trump's net worth and still being worth the exact same amount of money. Like there are levels to this game. And so I don't think people realize

that he's 24 and media compounds. He's number one comma and has 60 years in front of him. And people are judging his business acumen today when his acumen was built on building media. Once you have tons of media, the monetization is the easier part. The question is just which way are you going monetize? Are you going to monetize it through endorsements? You're going to monetize it through companies. Are you going to monetize it through moving markets, which when you're that big, you can do that? There's so many ways to monetize it at that point that I will make a prediction that he will be a cent of billionaire, not just a billionaire, but a sense of billionaire, which I know is bold. And I just think that anybody who disagrees with that is always entitled their opinion,

but you haven't played it out. Like you haven't given 60 years and he's conquered every new platform right he's he's the fastest one on ticot that most followed person on ticot right he just recently decided to get on there like just recently was like all right i'm going to start doing this and boom he's almost got 50 million people on his ticot right and so he's growing faster there than he did on youtube so think about that and so it means like he gets the short game he gets the long game and so becoming a master of media is a huge way of creating leverage because if kiley can just point or mr bese can just and then you have 100 million people who buy anything,

you have a billion-dollar-plus company. And so for that reason, my whole goal, once I just started to create the content out there, was that I looked at all the things that I just said. I knew that the people who build the biggest things don't ask, and they grow the fastest. So that's why I was like, I have nothing to sell you, right? The people who have the longest time horizons

allow the compounding to work in their favor for a long period. I realized that the audience was the output, the attention is the output, not the media that I'm creating. a realization for me that allowed me to get over the fact that some things that I make vanish forever. I realized that for me to have the impact that I wanted to have, if I claimed, which I do, that I want to make real business available to everyone, I want to make real business education available to everyone, if I claim that, if I say that that's what I actually want

to do, then I need to match my actions to that. Otherwise, they're just empty words. And so that means that if this is the price I have to pay, if getting stopped when I'm walking out and, you know, if I'm at the gym and I have to take my headphones off a couple of times because someone wants to say hi or take a picture, if that's the price I have to pay for make the impact I want to have, then it's a price that I'm willing to pay because this is meaningful for me. And I think when I'm 85, I'm not going to look back and be like, you know what? I'm really glad that no and knew who I was and that I had all this information that we've gathered. And it's just that is going to vanish with me. And so it's like, I'd rather have that knowledge not vanished with me at all,

be completely spread, have a whole horde of entrepreneurs who are younger, better, faster, sharper than I was who can pass the torch on. And I hope that those guys will pass it to the next generation. And then as a species. You know what I mean? We just move forward and get better. So that is why I decided to make the plunge and do the stuff that we're doing now, pump out the amount of content that we're making. It was because I had an internal shift of realizing that if I wanted to make the impact I want to have, then I was willing to do it. Hey, Mosin, A minute, quick break just to let you know that we've been starting to post on LinkedIn and want to connect with you. All right, so send me a connection request and note letting me know that you listen to the show and I will accept it. There's anyone you

think that we should be connected with, tag them in one of my or layless posts, and I will give you all the love in the world. All right, so let's get back to the show. The wealthiest individuals of the last century were built on oil. They were built on energy. And then if you look at fast forward today, four out of the top five biggest companies in the world are not built on the old oil, but the new oil. And the oil of today is attention because attention is the scarcest resource on the planet right now, even scarcer than oil because people are willing to pay even more for it. And so the companies that have figured out to, A, how to grab the land, they're literally buying up the real estate of the collective attention that exists, right? Think about every sense

that you have. You have 24 hours a day that your ears are open. You have 24 hours a day that your eyes are open. And so the idea is how can we capture as many of those hours from as many people as possible and the war for our minds? And so the people who are creating the platforms that other companies can come and drill, they're basically the digital landscape. They've enveloped the world. the oil tycoons had to go and buy a state, negotiate, haggle with the farmer to get his things. The new world today, they don't need to haggle with anyone. They just take it, right?

They're only competing against each other. They're competing against the couch. They're competing against television. They're competing against radio. But they're fighting a war that they can't lose because they have so much more analytics. They have so much more real-time data that they can adjust how they combat the old school, which is why they're killing them. And so the total amount of attention that exists is every human's eyes and years,

collectively 24 hours a day. That is the pie, and they're fighting for it. And so the ones that are able to map to as much of that, which is why the AR thing gets really interesting when they think about that, if they can literally be the lens through which you see the world, they own your most precious resource, your site, 24 hours a day, Friday. And in that way, how do they, they can put an ad there. They can have you pay every month to just not have ads. Like, there's all these different things that they can do. And it's because that is the new game. Our senses are the real estate and our attention is the oil that's getting pumped from it. The reason Huda, the Rock, Connor McGregor, Kylie were able to translate their fame, their attention into money is that, one, they spent a

long time building it, right, and amassing that attention because they knew that the moment they did decide to monetize it, it was right there. Now, the mistake that you've heard me say a million times I'm going to say it again that many newer creators make is that those people waited years. Think about how long the rock has been building the brand of the rock before he signed his deal with Under Armour, before he made Taramana, before he made Zoha, right? Before he did these things. He was in it for 15 years, 20 years he'd been building this brand. And so people piss and moan about the fact that they built, you know, they posted content

for four weeks and they're not famous yet. It's like this dude put in literally 100 times the effort. And that's what you're just posting once a day. This guy's everywhere. He's doing speeches. He's on WWE. He's making movies. He's in shows. He's doing all of that every day. And he's been doing it for 20 years. And so some people were somehow surprised that he's crushing them. Right. And so one is they waited a really, really, really, really long time. And they didn't ask. They just, they gave, right, in their own way because everyone's giving, you know, Kylie's give looks different than the Rocks does, but they give to their

particular audience. The next thing is that the thing they chose to monetize from was on brand. And this is like a key point. It was on brand in that this is. This is a, is something that their audience already dug, right? Like the rock signing to deal with Under Armour makes complete sense because fitness is a core part of his brand, right? Him working out, put in the 4-I.M grind. Like all of that is something that Under Armour wanted to tap into to associate their brand with. And so what's interesting, if you think about this, is that the biggest brands that exist come from the endorsements of celebrities. So hear me out. We can't be Kim Kardashian. Like a girl can't be Kim.

right so kim is the ultimate status then dulcine gabana signs kim and says where are shit people then see the status that kim has and associated with dulcine gabana and then little lady who's got money and doesn't have status trades her money for the bag that she can associate with kim to get the status that's the game and so that's kim status now if the rock did it he does kind of dress fancy but it probably wouldn't be on brand for him to start rocking like Like, you can feel it right now. You're like, I mean, I guess he could, but it wouldn't really make sense, right? But him doing the underarmor deal completely makes sense.

Him doing an energy drink completely makes sense because he's all about, he's like powering, you know, grinding, going hard. It's on brand. Same degree, Teramana, he always does his cheat days and he has his little sipper of tequila, and it made sense that he'd start his own because it was on brand. If all of a sudden he started a whiskey, right? Even an alcohol. Think about how tiny of a difference that is. If you just started a whiskey, it would have been weird.

It's not on brand. And so what these guys did is they waited a really long time. They figured out which of the messaging buckets are the things that are kind of they represent. Like this, I believe. This is what I'm about. Right. And the people who follow me vibe with not only one, but a lot of times multiple of these dimensions, which brings up another point, which is that the people who are the most famous,

if you look at the big ones, you look at Rogan, right? He's got UFC that he's into fighting, right? He's also a really amazing comedian and loves the comedy community. He's also got a fitness background. So he loves talking about fitness and biohacking and supplements and all and like brain stuff. He loves all that stuff. And then he loves aliens and UFOs, right? And so you talk about all these different things.

And these are all totally different. But the more dimensions that someone can go deep on, the more they'll get an audience from comedy and then they'll cross-pollinate them with fighting. So all of a sudden people who really like comedy are hearing Joe and being like, you know what, I'm going to go see the McGregor fight, right? Which seems completely contrary. flip side, you got these guys from fighting who are like, you know what? UFOs might be real, right? And so it's this total pollination which ultimately compounds the audience even faster. So like, what is it that the megastars have? We had the rock. He's got movies. He's got TV shows. He's got his drinking thing, not that he drinks, but like that he likes to relax and peel back.

He's got his wife and his kids. That's another bucket for him, right? And then he's got his hardcore fitness vibe in terms of him training hard. But he also had, I would sub-segment this, is that his 4 a.m. wake-ups, his no-excuse attitude is like a whole other bucket that he demonstrates from a psychographic standpoint. And so these people have multiple, and he had his W.W.E. forgot about that. He has these multiple dimensions. And so these megastars go deep on many things. And in so doing, capture bigger and bigger audiences that compound on themselves. And they wait because they stay loyal to their brand. And then they appeal to a segment of their audience or they try to cut across the one that appeals to the most of them. And in that way, they'll monetize

of the best and not detract from the brand. Because when you're monetizing, you're rarely building the brand unless the product is exceptional. Now, I don't know if most of their products are exceptional. I'll be real. I don't know. But the next level of this would be that they not only serve the most of their audience, but that the product they give is actually so good that the product does the expansion in and of itself rather than just their personal brand. And so there's only two ways for people to find out about the stuff you sell. You can tell them or other people can tell And there's only one of you. So think about which way is easier.

It has more leverage. That being said, now because we have the megaphones we have with media, a single person can have tremendous leverage, unlike we've ever seen. But still, when you've got Caden and Anne sitting across the kitchen table and she's like, oh, I tried Kylie's lip thing. It's actually pretty good. That's where the purchases are made. I think Seth Godin said, it's a million whispers.

It's not one megaphone. And that's where the real virality hits. So Kim Kardashian and Dolce is an example. The Rock and Under Armour is an example. But let's look at LeBron and Nike. They wanted to sign him because they figure he is going to be iconic. He is iconic, right? They're betting on the fact that his brain is only going to continue to grow

because media only continues to expand, right? Over time, and they wanted to associate Nike, victory, with somebody who's victorious. And so they reinforced their brand position through the endorsements they get from people who actually do it. Because a brand can't be victorious in and of itself. It's not a person, right? And so they've got to find the people. who embody the spirit and the values of their brand, they make the endorsement, people make

the association in their mind, and then they buy the brand to get the association of the thing they could never do but always aspire to. So there's two terms that get tossed around a lot in the entrepreneur community. Leverage and compounding, all right? Leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out. All right? So for example, literally Archimedes had his stick and you've got a little full crumb, which is a little triangle. You got a stick on it. and depending on where you put your hands, more weight you can lift. So you're the same strength. But depending on where you put the stick on the full crumb,

the more power you can have on the other side, right, the more lift. And so leverage is the difference between what you put in and what you get out. And the more leverage you have, the more you can get out, right? And so if I make 100 phone calls, that is my output for eight hours, whatever. If I spend eight hours hiring eight people and then they now make 100 phone calls every day, I spent eight hours one time and then I get 800 calls every day from now until I, you know, until, till kingdom come from that one eight hours. So if I had eight hours of calling versus eight hours of hiring somebody and training them to make

those calls forever, which one has more leverage? Right, the second one. So that's labor. With capital, it's like I can go gather all this money over my lifetime or I can just ask people to have gathered all the money for me, and then I say I will allocate it for a percentage, but my time basis is zero. The only time basis I have there is literally just the getting of money from those people, not the income generation. It's just literally getting the money that they spent their time generating to give to me to then invest, and I get a percentage of that with no time spent,

which is how Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, some of these huge people, David Rubinstein, which is Carlisle's CEO and founder, all these people built their next level of wealth. So like ancient Egyptians leverage through labor. Old school American tycoons leverage through capital. And the new school is through code, software, and media eyeballs. So the compounding, the second part of that is how does something feed on itself. And so the way that something compounds is that the baseline that it starts with never gets lost. It only grows onto itself. And so if you think about a dollar getting 10%, right, more it's a dollar and 10 cents next year. Now if I get 10% again, then I get 11 cents on my dollar in 10 cents.

So now it's 12.1. If I get 10 again, then I get 12.1 cents for the next year, which goes to 132 point, whatever. And so the idea is that when you have a long enough time horizon, that little bit that went from 10 cents to 11 cents, 11 cents to 12 cents in 40 years goes from 1 billion to 1.1 billion. Right? You just add zeros to the machine. And so if you want something that's going to become huge, you need something that compounds. And ideally, even multiple forms of leverage, right, that compound unto themselves. And so if you look at Facebook, for example, which is a simple one, they had leverage because

Zuck wasn't actually doing the stuff inside of his company. He got capital because he got a whole bunch of other people to give him money rather than trying to make it in order to build the thing. He had code because he had software that they could build one time and then infinite number of users could build it. And then they had built on media, right? So it did all four, which is why it's, you know, one of the most valuable companies in the world. And so you look at Amazon. Same thing, right? The media they have is of buyers and customers.

People search for shit they want to buy. It's media. Literally high intent media. You look at, you look at Google, same thing. They're searching for stuff they want to know. Amazon searching for stuff you want to buy. Facebook's searching for people. They're all search engines in their own way, but of different commodities. I'll make a prediction. I do think that there will become micro, more fragmented channels over time in terms of media. I think there'll become, they'll be deeper drilled, just like old school media did. They had four channels and they had 100 channels. And then we went to four channels, which is Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. And then we're talking about like, oh, man, when I was a kid, there was only four platforms for social media. Now they're

hundreds. And so that's Alex's prediction of how I think media is going to transform over time, which also means that the people who are really going to be able to stay big and stay relevant will have to build the infrastructure in order to package their content in such a way to be present across all of them. And so right now is why it's one of those crazy times where if you run an ad on one of the four TV channels, everybody knows you. The fact that Mr. Beast is 24 and can have 100 million followers is something that I believe is a blip in time. And then for that to be recreated 10 years from now will be significantly more difficult because he wouldn't be able to start and immediately have access to the entire world.

Because also, because social media is becoming weaponized, right, from a propaganda perspective, and for those who you don't like, propaganda is an actual part of military warfare. There's a whole thing about it, right? Sciops. I agree or I think that media will become nationalized for many, many countries. It already is in a lot of countries. America is just one of the only ones that doesn't. So we allow businesses that are owned in other countries to own the media and the attention

of our population. It's kind of wild. And so I don't know if that's going to continue forever. I don't think it's wise that they do that. But if that's the case, like, you know, Russia's building their own version of YouTube. China's building their own. So they want to, everyone wants to control media, right? Which is why, you know, the First Amendment's of the U.S. are freedom of press, right? So we want to be able to have that. We'll have to look at what that looks like. When that law was written, the U.K. would have no way of doing it. But now, the U.K. absolutely could own the newspaper that everybody reads, right? Now, we don't have a beef with the UK, but you understand the point. And so big picture, leveraging compounding, leverages the difference

in what you put in and what you get out, the people who make the most money are the ones who have the most leverage, because everybody has the same amount of time. It's just who gets the most back for their time. Right. And compounding is that now that you've made that trade with your leverage, that trade that you made one time, is it going to compound unto itself and get you even more back? Because compounding is a form of leverage. Because if it compounds, it means I made this investment one time. And then 20 years from now, I get even more back from that one-time investment. So it's another way that you get leverage. Attention to scarce resource because there is a fixed amount of it.

You only have so many hours per day and so many senses, ears and eyes that are turned on. That's it. So there actually is a fixed amount of the resource, right? Just like oil, just like land. These are all fixed resources. And so the interesting about right now is that attention was going wildly under monetized. So up to this point, the vast majority of people's days, their eyeballs were not being monetized. the things they were listened to were not being monetized.

And so right now, it is a land grab for the entirety of the pie of our collective attention. And so right now, that's why these companies are just gobbing up so much money because they can just sell it at zero cost to other people 100% margin. Like, think about this. When you pay Facebook a million dollars a month or $5 million a month with some of the companies that we have do in our portfolio, we don't even get a rep. Like, think about a business where you sold something and someone, someone paid you $5 million a month for the thing and you don't even get a representative to talk to.

And the cost for the media, the cost basis is zero. Now you have the people who run things, you have the software development, but the actual cost itself is zero. Like that is how you make so much money. Like the cost basis on oil, once you bought the land, is zero. You had the equipment, you have literally the energy to pump the stuff out, but like it's like water, except they sell it for $200 a barrel, right? That's how it works. So when I was looking at virality, viral growth, people who have compounding growth in their media because they're audience compounds.

So if you have 10 people and then next month one of those people brings a person and you can count on that consistently, then next month you have 11 people. And then the next month you have 12 people and then it keeps compounding, right? And so that is how audience compounds, right? It's not actually your media that compounds. It's the people telling other people. That's the compounding vehicle behind media. And so the more giving you are, the more your audience is going to want to share your stuff because there's relational capital that they gain by sharing it.

Right? So if you think about like, people only share stuff because they're self-interested. They say, hey, if I share this funny thing or I share this insightful video, this person will think more of me. Right? It's not because of you. It's because you provided enough value to them that they think they want to be able to, just like the bag and the status, they want to be able to associate the value you provide with themselves. And so that they get status as a result of sharing your thing.

And so you want to make the stuff you have as good as possible with as few takes or ask as possible. because you want to make it as shareable as possible. Because if there's a take in the video, the likely that it gets shared is significantly lower, which decreases your own virality. The platforms that grow the fastest are the ones that give the most, because if they give the most, the audience then shares them through word of mouth

and through sending them to friends, et cetera. And if we're thinking about our own content in that way, we want to, at least if it's me, if I want to grow as fast as possible, I want to decrease my give-to-ass ratio to such a degree that it becomes crazy that someone doesn't want to share it. like my whole goal when I started this channel and all the different platforms that I have is that I wanted people to say one thing. This is better than the stuff that I've paid for. It's my favorite comment when I see it on YouTube and when I see it on the on the Instagram comments and LinkedIn and TikTok and all the stuff like I can't believe this is free.

That is always what my goal has been because if I can do that, then I can siphon a whole bunch of the market share up and not monetize anything. Right. And everybody who's trying to compete for the same attention is going to do that, but they have to throw their asks in because they got to make money and I don't need the money. And so that gives me my long-term enduring advantage. And as a side note, if you ever would have a competitive advantage, have it be patience because no one wants to copy it. So with all that being said, how do you reconcile the whole give, give, give, don't ask, be patient with like, dude, I got to pay rent. I got to like feed my kids. Like this is all awesome. But like, how do I actually do this in a way that I can feed myself?

Good question. So I think of it like this is that you promote publicly, you give publicly, you sell, you ask privately. And so if someone follows your stuff, right, and they're interested enough, they will seek you out. And then when that happens, by all means you sell and sell like you mean it. That way, you get all the compounding of the top of funnel that keeps multiplying itself. And this isn't compounding, but it doesn't need to be because it's attached to a compounding rocket. And so if you just know that you're going to monetize 10% or 1% of your audience every year, if your audience compounds, then so too will your sales, even though the sales exchange itself,

isn't necessarily value additive. You want it to be, but people aren't going to tell their friends, like, dude, you got to go through the sales process I just went through. Like, it's not really something that people share that way. So how does this stuff work with outbound? Right? Like, how does all that stuff that I just said, like, work with outbound? Well, you're not going to outbound from your personal brand, right?

But you'll outbound from the, on behalf of your business. Now, when you have an outbound strategy, and this could be totally separate, whatever. But if you have an outbound strategy, the idea is that you recreate the organic experience that someone would do on their own if they found your personal brand organically. And so, like, Acquisters.com could reach out to companies and say, hey, you know, you should partner with us. But I don't have context, right? And so the deal structure I'd have to give would be significantly worse, and I'd have to take them through a significantly longer process. And so if I wanted to get the same types of companies who had the same values as me, who had all these other things, I would have to take them through a tremendous amount of filters and indoctrination in order to recreate the same end customer from that process. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. It depends on the complexity of the thing you're selling.

If you're selling Salesforce, the software, you absolutely can do reach out. But the thing is, is that when you're building the personal brand, you're actually not selling the software. You're selling values. You're selling ideals. And so outbound works very well in a transactional environment. Like, I could start the brand and then the brand has an outbound team. It's better than Alex being the outbound team, in my opinion. So just like Mr. Bees, The Rock, Huda, Connor McGregor, my prediction for the people who will become the new sense of billionaires, et cetera, is going to be people who can do three things. They have to be able to capture. They have to be able to hold. They have to be able to multiply. attention. And so not only do you have someone's attention, you have to be able to capture it first. You have to behold it for an extended period of time because you are interesting. You are fascinating.

Fascinating. You're really fastening them down and pulling the attention from them. And then you get them to tell other people. And that is how your attention's attention multiplies because your audience grows. So the people can do those three things are the ones who are going to become ultra, ultra, ultra, ultra wealthy in the future.