The Game with Alex Hormozi - Life, Death, and the Game of Business (on Diary Of A CEO) Pt.2 - Apr. ‘23 | Ep 548

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

"We're unhappy when our expectations of how we think life is supposed to be going are unmet." Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on Diary of a CEO to discuss the pressure of external expectations set by social media and society on how life is supposed to be. He emphasizes the importance of shifting expectations and doing what makes oneself happy and talks about his perspective on work-life balance and the skill of making offers. This is part 2 of the interview.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.Check out the episode on Diary Of A CEO's YouTube Channel!Timestamps:(9:18) - Shifting life expectations(15:23) - Caring what others think(27:12) - The psychology of clicks(38:10) - The cost of ignorance(46:50) - Maximizing leverage and capital(49:42) - Reflecting on cherished failuresFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

And so I think it's like, do I want to be the artist or do I want to be the entrepreneur? Both of them are fine. It depends which one you feel like you're more naturally inclined to or have a higher likelihood of success doing. I feel like I've been decent enough to not make one of them the constraint. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer and how to keep them longer and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. A previous guest on this podcast called Mo Goudat said, we're unhappy when our expectations of how we think life is supposed to be going are unmet.

And in that there's something very sort of linked to what you just said there, which is we have this external expectations set by Instagram or whatever by people like us. Yeah. Who are in a position of financial freedom and have built an audience who, you know, admire those people for what they've achieved. And if someone wants to be admired, they think, well, I need to be like, like Alex, right? And that I could be working in a shop actually objectively, like subjectively having a great time in the shop, but I look up at Alex and go, my life sucks. Right. And like, so in that, I'm like, it's very difficult because of the pressure of external. I was just thinking

when you said it, then I was thinking this whole idea of like passion and purpose is probably like 60 years old. Yeah, it's bleakable. It's all brand new. And it probably originated when we were like connected, you know, like radio, TV. Yeah. All of it. this advertising which made us change our expectations of our own lives when living in the village and like helping out at the bakery was probably delivered the same amount of happiness, cool happiness than being on the private jet and whatever else does now. I think most people are just as happy and just like you're 50% happy, 50% sad for most of your life. If you're in an extreme circumstance, then change your life. If you're not like conditions,

like people get handicapped. They break their legs. They can never move again and they have a dip in their subjective well-being and they go back to the same baseline. And so like the baseline is independent of conditions. And so the world wants to tell us that we need to change our, you know, change our circumstances and then we will be whatever. But like every modern religion, every Buddhist monk will tell you that all of that's from the inside, not the outside. But these are words and words that me and you. Yeah. Can say. Don't follow. Yeah. Because I'm sure that you've, you've experienced like the attainment of a goal and then I just need to. three times more. Yeah. I'm referencing a study there where they, they ask people how much money

they would need to be happy. And all the way up the income wealth spectrum, people said three times more than they have now. So people with 10K said 30. People with three million said, you know, six, nine million. I couldn't do math. Three times three. And you, I imagine you still experience that now, right? Yeah. Different reasons. But yeah, for sure. When is enough enough? I don't think it's enough thing. I think it's more like who I want to be. Who do you want to be? I want to be the person capable of. Doing that, doing X. Like, we'll get to a billion and then after a billion, I'll make it 10. I already know that. You don't know what I mean, but like, I love playing the game. What is the game? Game of business. To what, to what end?

Or just, just for the play? To play. Yeah, I'm sure you know more about this than I do, but like, just game theory. Like, finite and infinite games, Simon Seneck has a great piece on it. But yeah, with infinite games you have known and unknown players you have no agreed upon rules and the point of the game is to keep the game going and so a lot of teams people will take a finite game where you have known only known players agreed upon rules and a set outcome um for winning and they will apply it to an infinite game so people are like i want to they apply a finite contract to health they're like i want to win health it's like you don't win health like okay you're in shape now what you stay in shape you keep staying in shape i want to win at marriage you don't win at marriage you keep the

marriage going. That's playing the game of marriage. If you want to win at business, keep playing the game of business. And so we want to take these finite contracts and put them on on infinite games. And I think that's where people get in trouble because they're, they're like, I have to keep moving the goalpost. But if the goalposts is to play, then you win by playing. And so for that, like, sure, we set goals for the company. But like, I'm a thousand percent super motivated. And at the same time, if we never hit it, I'm just going to be happy that I was able to play. I also know that in three generations, everyone will forget who I am. I saw your post about the queen.

Yeah. That was as stab as you. No, no, no. It wasn't for me, if I've been honest. But it's an interesting, what did the post say? Well, she amassed more wealth than 99.99% of the world. She ruled for 70 years. Was, you know, a female monarch, which is insane, especially 70 years.

It just like, all the, it's had an amazing family, all this amazing, whatever. I don't know the tabloids you do. And when I posted it, it had been, I think, five or six months since she had died. Exactly. And I was like, you probably haven't thought about her today except for this post. She probably accomplished more in her life than we probably will. So if you were afraid of other people thinking about you, just remember the six months after you died, they're not going to be. And so it's like we have all these fears about other people, but like most of them won't even show up to your funeral because they're going to be busy. And so like I think about death all the things. time. And that's what I think for me has given me a lot of freedom to take big shots. Because like at the end of the day, I think that it's not going to matter. No one's going to remember. People in Thailand don't know who I am today, let alone in five, 10 years, 100 years. It's a trap that the mind can quite easily fall into. They're thinking you are the center of the universe. And with that comes an immense amount of weight and pressure and anxiety.

Totally. I have a trick. I've never talked about this before. But whenever I feel, I feel, myself slipping into the trap of kind of overstating my importance. And what I mean by that is like, thinking my problems are big problems. I go on YouTube and I type in, there's this one video that shows a camera on Earth that just zoom out

and it keeps going. And eventually, Earth becomes this tiny speck. Then Earth becomes this tiny speck, which is the galaxy. Then the galaxy becomes this tiny speck and a bunch of galaxies then you can't see any of it anymore. And then also, this idea that like a hundred years ago, I didn't feel anything, didn't think anything,

nobody knew me, 100 years from now, exactly what you said. Absolutely. I mean, five minutes after I die, I think, oh, whew. But, um, and that feels really liberating. It, like, relieves of stress from my body, which is an interesting thing, because a lot of people don't like thinking about the death, you know, and a lot of people, yeah, all the time. I know from doing this podcast that a lot of people won't click if we, we post something about death. They won't, because they don't even want to confront the concept of it, which is, People are afraid of it just because they don't understand it. It's kind of like the hate thing.

How do you feel about death? I'm good with it. When you say I'm good with it, what would you mean? If I die tomorrow, I'm good with it. Like, I want to leave it all on the field. I'm going to try as hard as I can. And I know that no one will remember me on a long enough time horizon. And I'm good with that.

Like, I'm cool with it. If I told you were going to die tomorrow, would you be sad? I'd probably hang out with Layla a little, I guess a little more than I always do, but like I would say, I wouldn't be sad, I'd be bummed, be like, man, there's all the shit I want to do. But I don't think I'd be like depressed.

I mean, mind you, to be fair, maybe I'll find out and maybe I'll get hit by of us tomorrow. But no, I think like, I've lived life the way I want to live life. And I'm good with it. If you were to go today, had you really like given it everything, Had you lived the life you feel like you were really destined to live?

Me, absolutely. An interesting mind trick around the same topic is, so when Betty White dies, right, at 99 or whatever, people are like, she lived a good life. But when Kobe dies before his time, right, it's a big deal. And I see that as a contrast between expectations and reality. And I'm going to tell a story that hopefully people don't take the wrong way. But I had a cat and really liked the cat.

And it died at two years old. Really liked it. Young guy, heart thing or something, whatever. And I remember being like really bummed about it. And I was like, huh. How can I not think this? And so I was like, the only reason I'm bummed is because I think that he should have, should being the big word that everyone likes to use, he should have lived longer.

I was like, what if cats only lived six months and I got to have him for two years? I was like, I'd probably be pretty stoked about that. And all of a sudden, I was significantly less sad about it. And I was like, I got to have him for two years. I was like, awesome. And so I think like for me, for us, whatever, if we were to change our expectation, like, people think they should live until everyone thinks they're going to live to 100, which is kind of interesting. Because like the average life expense to you 74. And if you're like 36 year middle aged, if you actually do the math, which no one wants to do.

being middle age at 36. I know, right? I know, right? I don't want to go. Yeah. But I think if we shift our expectations that, like, expectations is the thing. It's the thing, right? And so we can, if we expected, if I expected that I was supposed to have lived 20 years and I made it to 33,

stoked. Jesus lived until 33. He did a lot more than I have. You know what I mean? And so I'm good with it. If I die tomorrow, like, only reason I would be upset is if I demanded from the universe that I live longer. But like 500 years ago, average life expectancy was like 35, you know, it was just not like in dark ages. Working hard. We talked about repetitions early. Working hard is quite a controversial

topic in 2023. Which is weird. Do you see what I mean, though? Yeah. I'm probably not in the circles where it's controversial. They're like gravity's controversial. I'm like, I don't know. It's controversial in the sense that they're There's like toxic work. Oh my God. You know, there's toxic hard work. And there's, I think society prescribes a certain amount of work, which is good. Yeah.

By their definition of, like, I'm going to say some stuff that's going to bother some people. I work all the time. I have no hobbies besides working out. If you can consider that a hobby like four times a week. That's it. I work all the time. That's all I do. And I work until I can't work, meaning like my output per unit of time starts to drop.

precipitously and then I know that I just need to take a break of some sort. And then I usually bend some sort of television because that's what for me works. Some people are like, I garden. That's not me. Netflix, I'm good. You know what I mean? Or dark room in a movie theater. Rocking. Um, comma. And that's okay. Like, why do I need to take their expectation of what they want with like, they're like, that's not healthy. I'm like, define healthy. I do as much as I can of the thing that I want to do with every minute of my day. Why is that not healthy? Why do you want me to do something that I would prefer to do less. Because I do what I do every other than the day because that's what I want to do. Almost like, how dare you cast your expectation of your

life onto me? And to be fair, the same degree, they can not work at all. It doesn't affect me. Like, I'm a big, big advocate for destroying should the word in general. Should is just like the expectation motor of like all of our psyches. You should go to school. You should get a degree. You should do this job. You should marry her. You shouldn't stay up so late. You shouldn't work so hard. You shouldn't be more balanced.

You shouldn't be working out so much. You're not working out. Like there's all these shoulds that other people tell us. And it's like, and you zoom out. And then you see that it's a galaxy with a little dot of dust. It's like, should what? There is no should. Do what you want to do.

At least that's how I see the world. That pressure applies to both ends of the spectrum, doesn't it? Because people that quote unquote overwork, they get hit, come back into the middle. and that people that underwork, they get hit, work harder. And then the presumption there in within society is that there's this sweet area in the middle where it's optimal. And like the question should become then, like, what is the measurement? Like, what are we measuring? Is it, are we measuring, when we're defining this amount of work as good work or healthy or whatever,

is the real measurement my happiness and my fulfillment in your view? Is that what you're like? Is that your measurement? Or is it just fucking how you feel? I work because I enjoy working. And I'm sure that if I stop enjoying working, I won't work as much. Like just being really, like not being, I'm not being simplistic to be, you know, annoying.

I work because I enjoy working. And if I, for some reason, I didn't get reinforcement from work, I'm sure that my amount of work would go down. Is there a, I think about like human needs? Yeah. But are there any human needs that are being sacrificed by always working in your case? I'm good.

Yeah, I mean, which gets to the point of the measurement, which is like, how do I feel? I'm good. Yeah. A lot of people really overanalyze a lot of things. And like, I don't think,

well, I do, I do spend a lot of time thinking about death and things like that, but I usually use those as frames to give myself permission to do the things that I want to do. And just do them without hearing the judgment

that I know that other people would probably cast on my life. They're like, why don't you have kids? because I haven't wanted to yet. And that's okay. And if I want to later, I will. Okay, I'll tell you an argument that I got into.

So I was at, you got into an argument? I did. I got into an argument with my stepmother. So Layla's father's, whatever, doesn't matter. Okay, it wasn't her. Different person. It's fine. Anyways, I was at the kitchen table and she said,

I would never want your life. And I was like, what? She was like, it's so unbalanced. I was like, okay, how? I was like, do you feel like I'm not in shape physically? I was like, do you feel like business wise financially? I'm not fit. Do you feel like romantically?

Like my marriage is in some way like not good. And so I like, would, where do you feel like? like I'm unbalanced or it's just that I do more than you or I do things differently than you do because to the same degree I wouldn't want your life and that's why I don't have your life and that's why you don't have my life. So it's good that we don't want each other's lives because that would be tough, wouldn't it? And so that was the argument that we got into in so many words and it just came down to the idea that like I think that person was casting judgment on themselves because maybe on some level, maybe they did want some aspect of the life that we had.

And I hope that doesn't sound like weird, but it's just like, I think we all do this. We see something. We're like, and then we look at our delta. And then we either say, man, I would like that or we cast stones at it so that we don't feel bad to our ego. So like, no, there's something wrong with it. They're not happy. Whatever. And I just, I would say that if there's one thing that I will try and beat out of me until I die,

is caring what other people think. And I think everybody cares what other people think. and I think over time we just care a little bit less. And so I feel like I'm 30% better than I was 10 years ago. And maybe in 10 years I'll be like 30% better than that. But that 30% has been very meaningful for me because it's enabled me to do things. Like I got married in eight days. None of my parents were there.

And I'm cool with it because that's what I wanted to do. And I work with my wife every hour of every day and people are like, is that healthy? I'm like, I don't know. We like it. Why do you care? Like how does it affect you? Here's a trap, though. I can relate in many ways to what you're saying,

and I mean, my team will know that instinctively. One of the traps we can fall into, one of the risks when we have that perspective is that we kind of cast that expectation on others, people that work with us. I think entrepreneurs oftentimes when they have that drive, which is sometimes driven by a shame or an insecurity that comes from their childhood too often,

so often, maybe not too often, but so often, that when they lead people who don't have that same insecurity, shame, whatever, that predisposition to, you know, workaholism, whatever you want to call it, they struggle to relate. You know? Yeah. Have you heard that? Sure. I think that's okay. Have you had to work on that?

Layla's better. I say that, judgment. But like, realistically, I think we try to maintain a culture of high performance. we're like on the screening parts on the front ends. But we're like, these are the values we have. Here are examples of those values at play. So it's like if your shift ends at five and somebody asks a question that's going to take 30 minutes to answer at 459, what do you do?

That's an interview question. We're like, and we need you to be honest. Because if you say you would work, but you would actually be dissatisfied, you're not going to do either of us justice because you'll come in and you'll get fired quickly and that'll be hard for you and hard for us. So like, we want you to win at whatever you do in life. So Layla's very big on like human first in terms of how she does everything that we do in the company is like human first than everything else. You can tell that's why like we are yin and yang for this kind of thing. But I think it's really just about expectation setting and being very truthful and as transparent as humanly possible about like this is what we expect. If you don't like that or your worldview is contrary to this, then you shouldn't work here because there's another company that totally shares your worldview and you would do great there. And there's other people who feel like misfits in the company. that they're in and then work all the time and they're frustrated that no one else does.

And they're all like telling them they should slow down. Come hang with us because we'll respond Slack at 5 a.m. on Saturday because we're on. But like I just I just hardcore reject there is a right way to do things. In that example, you've touched on something I wanted to talk about, which relates to your first book, I believe. Offers? Making offers to people. I read that you said, if there's one skill you have. It's making offers.

What do you mean by making offers? So offers are the terms of exchange. So I, right before I started my first gym, I went to this weekend workshop to learn how to market. And get this, this is 2013. It was on Facebook ads. And so I got lucky. So I learned how to run Facebook ads in 2013, two weeks before I started my gym. This is when you're getting penny clicks and you could put a great.

with a bikini and say weight loss click here and they would run. And so at this thing, I hadn't opened by gym yet. And the guy was like a gym marketing dude. And he said, do you know know the secret to sales? Because he could see I was way over my head. All the other guys there were gym owners except for me. And I was like, yeah, because I'd never at that point had never sold anything. I didn't even know the word sales was a thing. That's out of it what I was. And so he pulled me over the side and he asked me that question. I like pulled my notebook out to like learn the secret to sales as though it was one line and it kind of was. He said, make people an offer, they'd be, they'd feel stupid saying no to. And I like wrote it down and I highlighted it. And that actually became like a core concept that

we do in every business in every business that we have, which is like, how can we make this offer better? How can we make it more valuable? And that was why defining value was such a key thing because people like provide more value, make valuable content. I'm like, what does this mean? And so we boiled down value into four variables. And then there's, things that enhance value but like core variables and then things that enhance it so like one is like what is the overall dream outcome of the the customer and so a difference in juxtaposition is like for it guys if i say i can help you make more money versus i can help you lose weight most guys would pay more for the thing that will give them more relative status and so in that way between two types

two categories of outcomes this one will be more valuable okay cool now within everything and let's call it weight loss because that's an easy one everyone can understand within weight loss between a $5 ebook and a $50,000 liposuction surgery, the difference in those prices are the other value variables. And so the second variable is perceived likelihood of achievement, which is if I buy this thing, how likely do I think I will get the outcome? And so if I have a surgeon that's going to do this liposuction, for example, and it's the first surgery they've done out of medical school.

And there's another surgeon that has done 10,000 and has 10,000 five stars, which one would I be more likely to go to? The 10,000 five-star surgery, even if it actually takes that guy less. time to do it. How unfair. But my perceived likelihood of getting what I want is significantly higher. So it's actually the equal opposite of risk. Those are the things that we try and enhance in the offers. We try and have a very compelling dream outcome, try and make it very likely that they're going to succeed and give that there's lots of elements that make someone feel like it's likely

that they'll succeed. On the bottom half of the equation, so it's a fraction. There's two on the top, two on the bottom. You have time delay between when they buy and when they get. So if someone were able to click a button on a website and immediately look at their stomach and have a six-pack, that would be incredibly valuable, right? On the flip side, if it takes them two years in order to get that, it's significantly less valuable. And so for that same reason, you have to arm wrestle someone to get them to buy a personal training package. You have to spend an hour and a half to get them to buy a 20 pack of trading trading sessions, whereas women walk into the doctor's office to do liposuction and drop 20 times that amount of money because the time delay

is nothing. You get on the table, you wake up and you're thin, right? then the last the last variable is effort and sacrifice which is two sides of the same coin so effort are the things that you have to start doing that you don't want to do as a result of this purchase waking up early getting sore like in the workout example eating foods you hate on the flip side the sacrifice are the things that you have to give up that you don't want to give up as a result of this purchase and so that might be sleeping in eating the foods you enjoy margarita mondays whatever and so when we look at these variables each of them has a has a evil twin, right?

So you've got perceived like of achievement, which is the positive, and then you've got risk, which is the negative. You've got time delay, which is the negative version. You've got speed, which is the positive version. You've got effort and sacrifice, you've got ease. And so when we're trying to make an offer, we try and think through each of these elements of value

and think how can we maximize the upside, make it super, super likely that they're gonna hit it, paint the vision that they have it, and then on the bottom side, minimize the time delay between when they buy and when they get and how much they have to do. Because in a perfect world, the moment someone says,

I want that thing, that beautiful dream outcome. They'd be virtually guaranteed they would get it. It would happen immediately and it would be effortless. And I think that is the perfect ideal that we look at in terms of value. And as entrepreneurs, we innovate our way to just keep trying to chisel towards that perfect ideal outcome that we'll never actually get to. The other variables are like scarcity. If I have one gatorade bottle left on planet Earth, it's significantly more valuable. I didn't change anything about the bottle itself, but it's significantly more valuable than if there's unlimited gatorades, right? urgency is if gatorade, no matter how many gatorades the world on planet earth. I'll give a different example. If J.K. Rowling decides that

she's no longer going to sell Harry Potter digital copies ever again. As of tomorrow, there will be a lot of sales of the digital copy, even though there's unlimited units. Scarcity is a function of units. Urgence is a function of time. And so scarcity and urgency, add to the value by enhancing those other four variables. There's more. But like, those are the core things that we look at in terms of when we're trying to make an offer for a business, And so that becomes very relevant when we're trying to increase price for a business that we take on. So I'll give you an example. We had a PR company that we invested in.

That was a generic PR company for like small business owners. And they had really high churn, but they had a really good sales engine. I was like, okay, like there's something here. But like, I think we need a tweet. I just really like the founder. 85% of their customers were small business owners and turned out in like three or four months. 15% of their customers bought the most expensive package and stayed like forever. And I was like, hey, crazy idea, what if we only served these customers?

And they were people who wanted to get fundraising, very different than the traditional, like dry cleaning store, plumber or whatever. And so we redid the entire business model around finding only that niche. We only cold called, cold emailed people who were in that very narrow window. We're able to 10x our prices. because we and we got higher response rates to the emails than we did before because now we were targeting and speaking very specifically to an avatar and now we can provide so much more value to that specific person and so that's the maybe if Caleb were to answer that from a business perspective

like solving that equation is probably the thing that I enjoy the most because it is how I feel like I've unlocked the most value in a business which is like what are all the good things of this business has. What are all the things it can do? Okay, is there a way that we can rearrange it for a specific customer that will make significantly, that will make what we do significantly more valuable to them? And then that's what we try and repackage. And when we do that, that's oftentimes when we can, like with gym launch for me, I had the knowledge of how to help people lose weight, have the nutrition plans. I knew how to sell. I knew how to market. But it was only when I like rearranged the variables that I went from making a few million dollars a year in top line

revenue and basically no profit to millions and millions and millions of dollars a year in top line and bottom line profit simply by rearranging the variables. And that was just so ingrained in me that from that point going forward, I was like, I just have to make things that are so good that people will feel stupid saying no. And if we can't get enough people to say yes, we need to make the offer better. And to me, that's been like the single thing that it affects all aspects of the business. It's the highest leverage thing I think you can do in the business, which is why it was the first book. Because answering the question, what do I sell is the first book? The second book leads is, to whom do I sell it?

I got to get leads, right? And that's the second book. But that affects pricing. It affects profit. It affects marketing. It affects sales, affects delivery. Like getting the offer affects everything. And it's one of the hardest things to change because it affects everything, but it also has the most ability to unlock incredible wealth or value in a business.

Hey, guys, real quick, if you're new to the podcast, I have a book. on Amazon. It's called $100 million offers that over 8,000 five-star reviews and it has almost a perfect score. You can get it for 99 cents on Kindle. The reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book. And it's my biggest give to our community. So it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars so that later on in your business career, I can potentially partner with you. So that's my give. Go check it out, Amazon and back to the show. And the concept there is incredibly transferable. when you were going through the equation,

in some part similar to an equation we used to have for competitions when we were trying to get people to sign up to competitions, the idea, when we saw it like a, it was an equation where on one end, little investment, so just click here and you're entered, high perception that you have a chance of winning. So if there's 10 prizes, and you can see there's 10 entrance,

your brain goes, okay, all I had to do was click. And then in the competition aspect, we thought a lot about credibility, because that's a big fact. factor in competitions, like, do I think anyone's going to win? And do I trust these people to even give out a prize? And it's even the same thing. And it's even the same thing in content when you're thinking about a title for your

YouTube videos, five minute, six pack abs. Is a fantastic equation. Little investment, high potential reward, apparently. And that's also, you know, there's even another thing which I've thought about, which I've not been able to necessarily explain, which is why people are more likely to click on things. I guess it's ease when it says things like five steps to finding love versus like how to find love.

Five steps, I guess it's that ease point. Feels more accessible. Just five steps. Yeah. Perceive like an achievement. Like what's my risk of not achieving? If there's five steps, that feels easier than just how to, maybe. When you think about,

where you are in your journey as an entrepreneur and you think about it maybe as like steps how far are you at that staircase would you not know I was like I felt like that was going to be the question that you were going to ask and I was thinking I was like I feel like every entrepreneur

feels like they're just getting started like you talk to guys in their 70s they're like I'm just getting started you know I mean I'm about to cross a decade of being no I am right just at the decade point for me from the first business I started to now. So I feel like I've got a few seasons left, you know, if I can keep living, which I'd be stoked about if I can.

Let me ask a different question. Caleb in the corner who works for you, he's your creative director. If Caleb said to me, you know, Caleb said to you, he said, Alex, I want to be a millionaire. Yeah. What would you say to him? What advice would you give to him? He says, listen, I've heard you doing all these podcasts, you're running around.

I've been filming the camera, but I've been filming, I've been listening. Yeah. And this millionaire stuff, this sounds amazing. Yeah. So what advice, how old are you, Caleb? 29. What advice would you give to 29-year-old Caleb if he said to you, Alex, how do you, knowing me, how do you think I become a millionaire? So there's a lot of ways to do it.

It just depends on which way you want to go. So, say, first off, you can stay at acquisitions, not come. That'll probably happen on a long enough time horizon just because we're going to get really big. We're already pretty big. And we're just getting started. So, like, I genuinely believe that. and that's 100% my goals that every single person that we have becomes very, very wealthy because I'm going to die and it's not going to matter anyways. And if everybody else can make

them too, great. So that is a path. Another path is he peels off and goes on his own and starts a business of some sort. And so it depends on whether he wants to make the business itself, what his core skill is, which would be like media and maybe services around media or using the skill that he has of media in an opportunity to get two or three other people to maybe co-founded with you who have other complementary skills. And then he just runs that division or portion of the business within the larger context. And that's like a classic question of like, I'm really good at making wallets. Like, what do I do? It's like, well, you can continue to make them. And then when you can't make as many as you have demand because you're so good at it, you can either raise the price

and just continue to keep racing the prices until eventually become Versace of wallets. And you make tons of profit, but you don't have tons of units, and that's okay, and you're a luxury brand. Or you put on the business owner hat and you say, okay, how do I mechanize the wallet building process and I become more businessy? And so I think it's like, do I want to be the artist or do I want to be the entrepreneur? Both of them are fine. It depends which one you feel like you're more naturally inclined to or have a higher likelihood of success doing. I like the game of business. I've played lots of different games in terms of industries. Like, I like the game overall. I don't feel like I have a particular art. Like, I don't think I'm really good at any

aspect of business. I feel like I've been decent enough to not make one of them the constraint. Like, I'm not a great copywriter, but I'm good enough that that's not going to be the limiter. Like, I'm good enough at hiring that I can make sure that that's not the limiting factor. Right. And so that's kind of how I think about it in terms of business growth overall. And so it'd be the same thing with Caleb is like we have to identify what the constraint of the system is. And then deconstrain it. When you say talent stacking, How'd you say that a few times? What do you mean by that?

So this is one of my favorite topics. Many skills like one plus one equals five when you put them together. So let's say you have somebody who's really good at math in the beginning. That as a skill, not super monetizable, right? Okay. Well, then you learn bookkeeping. Okay. Well, now you had a proclivity for math, but you learned something that has value in the business world.

Okay. Then you learn to get your CPA. Now you become an accountant. Okay. More valuable. Then you start studying around. tax law and insurance and you're like, oh, significantly more valuable. Then you learn how capital markets work and how debt markets work, right?

And you understand how mergers and acquisitions work. And all of a sudden, you're a CFO. And then you learn how to sell and promote a little bit. And all of a sudden, now you're a rainmaker. And so you still needed to be good at math. But when you stack these other skills on top of it, the original math skill becomes significantly more valuable when you have these skills on top. but each one kind of requires the one before,

which is why one of the things I hate about kind of the entrepreneur world a little bit is like, they'll learn something new and then poo-poo the thing before. It's like, I'm not upset up the teacher who taught me arithmetic because I learned algebra. One was necessary for the next. And so as entrepreneurs, a lot of times it takes, I think, the self-awareness to say like, where am I at on my skill stacking adventure, right? And each skill, every skill you add to your skill tool tool belt, makes the rest of your skills more valuable, which is why I think it's so cool, which is why I'm

such a big advocate for education overall. And that's, I mean, mission of acquisition. Not going to make business accessible to everyone. That's why you put all this free stuff out there. It's like, if we can give people enough skills, they'll be able to stack them on their own and then just achieve whatever they want in a totally different way, if you allow me to go there. It's like, you look at Jay-Z, right? Maybe you're somebody who naturally had rhythm, right? And so then all of a sudden, he learned how to rap. Okay. Took his rhythm, put in a rap. Okay. And then he made his first CD. Okay. and then he learned how to promote,

oh, significantly more valuable. And then he learned how to make a label. And then he learned how to recruit other artists. And so he still needed to learn how to know how to promote the other artists. If you didn't know how to promote at all, he wouldn't have able to do it. But once he had the label, he got significantly more leverage on the skill of promotion.

And he could recognize people because of his skill in rapping and rhythm. And so like each of these skill stacks on top. And then eventually he pinnickled into Beyonce as his top skills. I'm just kidding. I'm just going. Like, where is he going? But no, but like, that's the idea. So like it, and that's why I'm just like, learn the skill, find the next skill.

And the nice thing is that it doesn't even matter how disparate the skills are. Like if Jay-Z is really good at math and understands capital markets and understands the label, those combined tune to another cool malange, right? A little French word, like mix of skills that's like unique to Jay-Z. And the longer you play the game, the more skills you get. And the more unique you are mix of skills is. And that to me is like the coolest part about business and just like education in general. I stumbled across a bit of a similar but maybe adjacent idea in my career where when I learned,

when my company went public on a stock exchange in Europe, I then learned from an investment bank when we're having the meetings with the banks. We went on this roadshow, met 20 different investment banks. We were considering an IPO in another country. they told me that our business would be worth four times more if it was just on a different stock market. If you move it to the NASDAQ, the exact same business would be worth four times more, which meant that my net worth would be four-xed just by taking the exact same business and moving it to a different stock exchange.

And I thought about that a couple of years later when I was thinking about the skill set that I had acquired over my career, which was this skill set of marketing and social media and entrepreneurship. And I was thinking, you have to not just have the skill, but know what market to apply it to. And what ended up happening, I've never told this story before. But I looked for an industry where my skill set was in least supply but highest demand and return the greatest. And it turned out that industry in terms of social media marketing and storytelling, I felt was most in demand and would return the greatest. value for companies that were about to IPO. Because essentially, when you're going to IPO, if you have a good story, it can swing

your valuation by hundreds of millions, or in the case of the first company I worked with when they're IPO listed at $3 billion, billions. And so my skill set of social media and marketing, I could do what with it? I could go help a local gym and get paid $1,000. Or I could go help a company that was in the lead-up to an IPO that was, you know, where I can potentially have hundreds of millions in advance. value and take seven million. Yeah.

As part of an equity deal. So upon leaving my first company, the equity arrangement that I had was valued somewhere between four, I'm going to say between, it depends because the share price fluctuated. But I think on the day of the IPO, the equity that I got for the 9 to 12 months work that I'd done was worth in the region of $7 to $8 million. Right. Nine months work. Yeah.

Basically freelance. Yeah. You know, same skill step. but applied to an industry that would pay me more for the same skills. And so I thought a lot about that. And that's ultimately why we started our company, which is now called Flight Story. We have probably at the time of airing this, about 100 people.

We started the company about a year and a half ago. Oh, crazy. And that's basically that. It's applying the skill set we have to industries that need it. And we started out in the IPO market, did a little bit of work in the biotech market. And now we've kind of broadened out. But people don't think about that a lot.

You're like, my skill set, where is it in high demand and can pay the most? 100% I thoroughly agree with everything you just said. I also think that that's a skill. I wish someone you just said it to me. No, yeah, totally. And that's the thing like, information to me.

It's like the most like, you know, the biggest debt, one of the things that I, I love saying this, but like the biggest debt, all of us pay is ignorance. And so I heard this close at this pitch years ago. And this guy got on stage and he,

and he was like, hey, ma'am, she was like, how much do you make? She was like $50,000. So you're at $50,000. on the whiteboard. And then he wrote a million dollars on top of the 50,000. And he subtracted it. It said, 950,000.

He said, you pay life $950,000 every single year for not knowing how to make a million dollars a year. And it was a crazy concept. He was using it to close the audience. But I, like, the most expensive thing that all of us are paying for is the information that we don't know. And that's like both frightening and also incredibly exciting. Because like fish in the best ponds, right?

like a good fisherman knows where to fish. And everybody can put a hook and a thing and stick it over the water, but like the best fishermen know where and when, et cetera. And that's exactly the story that you said is like, I had the hook and I had the reel and all that stuff. But like, I went to where the best, where the best fishing was. And like to me, that skill. Same work. Yeah. Same amount of time. Same rod. More zeros. One of the things in the first book is like you want to like sell better customers. So if you want to sell better customers. Yeah. Like the same. It's the exact same thing you just said, which is like if I were to do CRO work, so conversion rate optimization for a website, that's e-commerce, and I work for a store that's doing a million dollars a year, and I say, cool, I'm able to increase your conversion rate by 20%. Okay, cool. So now that's doing $1.2 million here. I made $200,000 in value, and maybe I can get 10% of that. I get 20% of that. I get $20% of that. I get $20% of that. I get $20% of that. I get $2 million. 20,000, 2 million, 100x.

Same work to your point. And to me, that skill, like to know that simple fact. Like I had this tweet that was super viral, which was solve rich people problems. They pay better. A lot of controversy around that. But it's true. And so find the people. And a different way of saying it is find the people who value what you have the most.

And I'm sure. Have you heard the story of the father and the son with the car? No. Okay. So maybe I have fun. Okay. No, it's good. It's good.

So there's a father who gifts his son an old beat up car. And he says, you know, hey, I don't know if it drives or not, but you can take it down to the, um, the dealership. See if you can trade and get some money. He was like, okay. So he goes down the street, goes to the dealership. They say, we'll give you a thousand bucks for it. And he comes, you know, hears him out, comes back home. He's like, dad, they say, give me a thousand bucks.

He's like, okay. He's like, go to the impound yard where they, you know, break the cars up just for metal. He's like, see what they'll give you. Goes there. And the guy's like, ah, I don't know, this might be 500 bucks of metal. Kid like, you know, comes back home. He's like, dad, you know, he said it was going to be $500. He's like, okay.

He's like, hey, go down the street to that antique dealership. See if they've got anything that use car a lot. He's like, okay. So he goes down there, talks to the guy, comes back home. He's like, dad, you won't believe it. He's like, this is. is a historic car. There's only like 10 of them left. It's like it's worth $100,000. And so the father smiles and he's like, and the lesson that I want you to know is that it's not

necessarily who you are, but the people that value you the most. And so you can talk to different people and go to the people who value you. And I just, I love that story because it's a huge, business story in terms of like sell, sell where the fish are, where the big fish are. Like if you, if you're going to go hook fish, go to go where the whales are. It takes the same work, but a lot of it's just belief. People don't think it's possible. And so a lot of times you have to just keep leveling up and you sell your first $10,000 thing. You sell your first $100,000 thing.

Sell your first multimillion dollar package. You realize that it's the exact same thing. It's just so maybe if I'm list, if anybody's listing right now, it is the same thing. It's the exact same thing. And sometimes it's easier. It's normally easier. Like, you know, you've seen that meme that says like, so what exactly am I going to be getting for this $50 thing, right? And then it's like, $50,000 clients like,

wire sent yesterday, like, what else do you need? Like, it's, and that's totally true. Um, but I think there's a skill in understanding where to fish. Certainly a skill. Um, information. It's information. It's even knowing that there was another lake over there. And that's why, like, listening to conversations like, this is so valuable for people because it lifts a curtain. And you go, what the fuck you guys were behind here the whole time partying? That's what my business life has been like. It's like a gradually, like, I think I heard Kevin Hart describe on Joe Rogan one time where he said, there's this other room

where these people are playing this other set of money games and then when you get in that room you're almost pissed off that nobody told you this room existed but then there's another door yeah and then you get through there

maybe a couple of years later and you find these other people these fucking billionaires that are playing another set of games and you're going what and they're chilling yeah they're just smoking cigars

they're not even doing any hard work and you go tell me the games that you guys have been playing in here yeah and then again the frustration is and that's kind of what I feel like in my business life it's been like where at the jump I'm charging I don't know I remember my first we found our first deck from 2014 charging I remember the package we had gold silver and bronze it

was like you know yeah 200 package for like support and then 500 and then the gold package where we threw everything in for a thousand dollars and I remember my one of my first clients um accepting that and then I think today like the only difference okay there's skills that have increased but information is the big thing knowing how to do it you know When you think about curtains that have lifted, that have really shifted the games you play from a value money perspective, like where someone's turned the lights on you, fuck, of course. Yeah. Is there anything else that comes to mind? Like big macro games.

Yeah. I think a big, you know, when I, the big, I will answer it with the stair steps of how each order of magnitude change in my income. So when I went from being an employee to self-employee. I went from making four figures a month to five figures a month. And that was for me just like, I'm now in control. The level above that was I started having other people who worked for me. I didn't even know that was possible. Sounds crazy.

But I was like, you can hire people because my members of my gym were like, you know, other people can work here. I'm like cleaning the floor and doing the marketing and teaching the class. They're like, I didn't think about that. Good call. Bobel mic. Right. And then went to six figures a month.

Right. And then from there, stayed there, did the turnaround business, still had the same organizational structure had another degree of leverage. And so the next degree of leverage was that I started licensing. So it was digital. Right. So the cost for, you know, cost of goods was basically nothing. And then that's when things started skyrocketing. That got me to seven figures a month. And then eight figures a month was using leverage through capital, which is where, you know, we're at now. And I would imagine that nine figures a month will probably be some level of technology or more media on my side. But all of these things are about leverage. And so this is like one of my

favorite topics in the whole world. But if we define leverage as the difference between what you put in and what you get out. So if you have a lot of leverage, you put a little bit in, you get a lot out. If you have no leverage or low leverage, you put a lot in, you get a little bit out. And a lot of times people who are listening to this and are not making as much money as they want, they're putting lots of input in and not getting a lot out. They have low leverage opportunities. And so understanding how to get more for what you put in is the game overall. And so the first level that I described was labor. It's just work. First, I was working for someone else, then I worked for myself, then I got other people to work for me. First level, each of those levels was more leverage.

Above that, I had media, which is the thing that I was licensing out. So another degree of leverage. I made it once and I could license it out infinity. On top of that, I have capital. I can take capital. I don't have to sacrifice time in order to get something for it. So it's high input output. Above that would be some sort of technology. You build the code once, in theory, obviously. you continue to improve the code, but theoretically you build the thing once and then a million people can use it. And so you want to stack as many types of leverage as you can and as much of them as you can because like Joe Rogan also has a show and somebody else has a podcast, they both technically are using media as their as their vehicle for leverage, but he has

significantly more of it. So it's not just like, I'm going to use all these, right? Yes, but it's also how much into what to agree. But like Facebook had other people's money. He used media, at other people's work, max leverage. Amazon, same thing, right? They used every element of leverage and they maxed all of them out. And that's at least the curtain. And Naval talks about this.

If you're familiar with Naval Ravakant, he talks about these things as the elements of leverage or four types of leverage. And understanding that for me has kind of been a blueprint for wealth overall. And then, you know, capital, there's degrees of capital, right? Like first you can get friends and family

to give you money. then you can get, you know, institutional money. And then you can get public money, right? Which, you know, you saw like the IPO money. Like the fact that the NASDAQ was 4X, the Dusseldorf exchange is that where it was, right? There's just significantly more capital in that market. And so same work, more zeros. And so I love this topic because I think that that's fundamentally like the people who move faster in life don't actually move faster.

They get more for every step. Are you happy? I'm stoked. Max Stoke. You know, I'm not asked this question for a long time, but I thought I'd ask it because it's kind of similar to what we've been talking about today. But if happiness was like a list of ingredients and it was a recipe, is there anything missing from your recipe that would make you even more happy?

And sometimes that recipe is about balancing the ingredients. You need two eggs and 100. Not 100 eggs. Yeah, one cup of flour. Yeah. for me it's always been about autonomy I just be able I want to I want to be able to do what I find interesting and that's that's been the core of it and what I do will change but the core of having the freedom to do it has been the center of it and so for me I don't think my freedom has I mean

not in recent history my freedom hasn't fundamentally changed in any way and so I would say that I'm the same level of contentedness as I was last year but I find engagement in what I do. And that's, that's, that's, I'll give you my definition of happiness, which is doing what you like to do with people you like. And doing that as much as you possibly can.

And that's my simple definition. Interesting. I've tried to, I've tried to figure that out that like professional, like I guess it's not even a professional thing, but I've tried to figure out and summarize, that's a wonderful summary. The place I've gotten to is,

if you're surrounded by people you love, you're doing something that challenges you, which I think is an interesting one. You've kind of encaps, It's absolutely just by saying things you like, but challenges you, gives you a sense of forward motion and progress towards a meaningful goal, and that's a subjective thing. Could be raising a kid or making a million dollars, whatever. I think that's kind of what I call it my Ike guy.

If I'm in that state, and it's a state, I think I'm happy. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. Without knowing who they're going to be asking it to. I'm terrified. Why does everyone get so scared when I do this? Like, aren't my questions scary? Like, everyone's going to like, try to stick the neck, like, okay, I'm going to think of a what's going to get, we have these conversation cards where we've taken all the questions written in this book and we've made them into cards so people can play at home.

I'm actually going to slide them over to you and just ask you to pick one conversation card. Okay. I've picked a couple there that I think are stitch ups. So I'm going to go from the middle. Okay. Let's see what it was. And the question is, what are the failures you cherish the most? I'm going to give two.

I am very grateful that I hated the job that I had because I think that I am the type of person because of how hard it was for me to quit that if I had liked a job enough, I don't think I would have left. And I think I would have gone to the business school and done the next thing. Like if I had had a job worked for people, whatever it was, that I enjoyed enough, just enough, I might not be where I am now. And I think that I cherish the fact that it was so miserable that it got me to change. Like that, that job changed my life.

From a like soul perspective, going through what I did with Layla, I cherish those times because a lot of people live worst case scenario years into their marriage, years into their relationship, and then they kind of like see what the other person is made of. I got to do that before I married the person. And so there haven't been any surprises since then. And it's something that's like shared misery to a certain degree, but like spiritual strength or spiritual, whatever you want to call it.

I know she's got my back. And there's an element to that story that I didn't tell. But when we really needed money at one point, I flew Layla out to do this launch. I couldn't go with her. And I actually, I don't want to say, broke up with her, but I was like, I can't do this right now. and so for 28 days we were not together and most girls people would probably have been like

screw this guy um but instead Layla set the all-time record for a launch that still hasn't been broken and when she came back I was like she stood tall when everything in my life was crumbling around me and she like made it happen and I knew that wherever I wanted a guy needed something like that with me. And so I cherish the failures of that entire season because there were many because I wouldn't know what I have today if I hadn't been through those tests with her then. Man, that's beautiful. We have another question, which is the question that people leave in the book. I thought I just nailed it. I thought that was it. This is the new tradition. I'm talking about the old tradition. One last question, Alex, but you did nail that. So I'll be honest you stuck that landing.

When do you feel the most emotionally connected to yourself? Literally my heartbeat thought was when I'm working. Like the first heartbeat thought. And then like if I had to be really specific when I'm in the throes of writing. I had a writing scholarship coming out of high school. I was the vice editor of the newspaper. I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine when I was in high school. I've enjoyed writing.

It's one of those things that for me, like you said like challenge. Like writing is a thing is a monster that only gets stronger and stronger and you get better and better at writing. And you see the flaws in your writing, the better you get at writing. And so it always feels like it matches, the difficulty matches my ability at all times. And so it is the thing that I experience the greatest degree of flow in the most regularly. Makes a lot of sense. Answers a lot of questions that we talked about earlier on as well. Alex, thank you so much for your time and being here.

It's been an incredibly diverse and enlightening and honest and vulnerable and inspiring and soul-filling conversation in so many respects. And I know for sure you're just at the very start of your journey. I asked you about the staircase. I know that you've just got one foot on the first step. And I think it's going to be incredible to watch the next couple of seasons of your life because you're destined for incredible things. There's absolutely no doubt in that.

So thank you, Alex. Appreciate your time. I appreciate that. Thank you. It's kind of words.