The Iced Coffee Hour - Alex Hormozi: The #1 Strategy That Will Print MILLIONAIRES In 2025

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Rocket Money: Try Rocket Money for free https://RocketMoney.com/iced Oracle: Cut your cloud bill in half—switch to OCI today https://oracle.com/iced Tecovas: Right now - get 10% off at https://tecovas.com/iced Ramp: Now get $250 when you join Ramp at https://ramp.com/ich Follow Alex Hormozi : Website - https://www.acquisition.com/ On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@AlexHormozi On Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hormozi/ On X - https://x.com/AlexHormozi NEW: Apply for Graham’s networking community: https://www.entertheindex.com/ Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:13 - Success is easier than ever 00:02:27 - Comfort vs. potential 00:04:59 - Top opportunities today 00:07:12 - Is Hormozi a billionaire? 00:09:58 - Common business bottlenecks 00:11:33 - Scaling issues at Acquisition.com 00:13:18 - Commonly ignored advice 00:13:28 - Sponsor - Rocket Money 00:15:22 - Converting free to subscription 00:20:38 - Psychology and sales 00:22:58 - Underrated business KPIs 00:25:26 - Turning no into yes 00:28:05 - Why people fail 00:31:51 - Intuition in business 00:32:58 - Sponsor - Oracle 00:34:02 - Spotting BS 00:36:45 - Too-good-to-be-true deals 00:37:13 - Intelligence in business 00:41:12 - Can billionaires be ethical? 00:43:32 - Costly mistakes 00:44:59 - When to Cut vs. fix a business 00:45:53 - Ethical assessments 00:49:43 - Eliminating distractions 00:51:10 - Distraction vs. opportunity 00:55:45 - Graham’s motivation story 01:00:35 - What holds people back 01:03:58 - Sponsor - Tecovas 01:05:08 - Sponsor - Ramp 01:06:34 - Emotional attachment to outcomes 01:17:21 - Upcoming book 01:30:11 - Impact of anger 01:34:29 - Evolving business criteria 01:42:13 - Skool partnership 01:52:04 - Best business right now 01:55:25 - Hiring A-players 02:01:32 - Hormozi’s current focus 02:14:12 - Loneliness and success 02:15:23 - Tiers of wealth *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Manifestation is bullshit, and action is the only thing that matters. A huge amount of the delay that happens when people are starting out is the amount of time it takes for them to realize there is no easy way. This is the blueprint to becoming a millionaire, and I'm going to walk you through the levels to becoming one. So where do most businesses get stuck? Suffering is constant. It's just the nature of the suffering changes. It stops being about how hard you can push. Sometimes it's about how long you can wait. Sometimes it's about how focused you can stay. One of the really interesting things about entrepreneurship is that you get these unlimited lottery tickets. You just pay time to get them. And so a lot of people just will choose not to cash their tickets in at all.

And you only need one really big win to change your life forever. And so it's really just sticking with it. What's going on today that people aren't recognizing the potential in? There's a huge supply demand discrepancy right now. I know a lot of people who are really never done much. And then just like within 60, 90 days or doing a million a month. Alex, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me. I've been a huge fan of your Twitter lately. It has been on fire. You seem to be tweeting all the time. Really insightful stuff. Recently you tweeted that it has never been easier to be successful. Why do so many people feel like it's not? I think it's just never been easier to be distracted.

So it's like the bar has never been lower, but the bar is even lower to not do it. And I think people have never been more comfortable than they are today. And so it's like Netflix and Chilling and like Uber and DoorDash and all of that stuff has just made everything like comfort or like comfort maxing right now. And so like all of these other tools like, you know, these software platforms and AI and all the stuff is like lowered the bar for people to make content or start businesses or advertise or whatever they want to do.

But it's just like it's so hard to take a risk when you could literally just do nothing. And the way that like society is now, it's like you're not going to go homeless and you're not going to starve. So, like, which I see is the most exciting part because you could just, you could take a huge shot. And the worst case scenario is like, you're not going to starve and you're going to have shelter. So do you think it's a blessing or a curse? I would say it's a blessing. I mean, at the end of the day, I think technology is always going to move things forward.

So that's like, it's never been easier than it's today. And 20 years ago, it was never easier than it was then up to that point. So it's like it will always get easier for people to start businesses, which I think is a good thing. In terms of optimizing for comfort. Yeah. What is the downside of purely just being someone at home scrolling all the time? How big is it for them not to reach their potential? I think it's a them thing.

So I don't see it as a problem at all. I mean, I think it's only a problem if you're making some sort of demand of the universe that your life must be a certain way. And so I think that's where, and it's kind of all the shoulds. Like my life should have meaning, my life should have this impact, my life should, all these things. If you believe that, then yeah, it'll be an issue because. is it's a, like, I believe in conditional shoulds, not absolute shoulds. So like, if this,

then you shouldn't probably scroll on your phone as much. If you want to get in shape, like, maybe don't eat more than you burn. Like, but don't eat more than you burn as a general statement. It was like, do whatever you want. That's, it's your life. I just have the issue when people want something different than the way they act. Do you think it's overall lowered the bar for excellence? Like a lot of people can kind of just become successful by happenstance or by luck now? I think there are definitely people who get lucky, repeat and serial entrepreneurs less. So I've only really encountered maybe like a couple people in my career from the entrepreneur side that I'm like, this guy was just lucky.

I think there are elements of luck, but it's like luck becomes a like it becomes gas more than the thing that like built the car. It's like they were going to be successful. They just got way more successful because they had like kind of multiple things in the line. Can you give us some examples of luck like that? Yeah, sure. Like if you were, if you were in Amazon in 2013, 14, 15 and you put up a product, you could

just crush. Like, you didn't have to, like, really know anything. There was just all this demand that was there. If you were running Facebook ads in 2011, it was just, like, not hard to crush. If you, if you were doing SEO in, like, 2008 and seven with, like, you could literally just put, like, coffee in, like, white, white font on a white background. So the whole background on the website just said coffee. But, like, if you looked at this out, you wouldn't see it. But if you, like, took a cursor, you could just see just this coffee. Because the algorithm. rhythms weren't like that advanced. And so you can just rank and get all of Google's traffic. So there was just like a lot of the things that were lucky were just like typically, I'll put it

differently. Luck will come from a supply demand discrepancy within a window of time. And so where there's a huge amount of demand and a small amount of supply and then you happen to be one of those people who gets in on that. Now that being said, part of that is like recognizing opportunity. And to like to what degree is that luck? You know, I think the question of whether it's luck or not is whether you can repeat it. So I'm curious where those opportunities are today, because it seems like every few years, in hindsight, you could look back and be like, that was the best time to do that. What are, what's going on today that people aren't recognizing the potential in? I think there's micro and macro opportunities. So like from the macro perspective, I think we've

had like three big ones. So at least in my lifetime. So it's like we've had internet, which is like kind of opportunity number one. Opportunity number two is kind of like Web 2.0, which is social. And then Opportunity three. is AI now. So there's the three macro ones. Now underneath of that, it's kind of like, well, Facebook ads was kind of like a like an opportunity kind of like within that. And then like Google search was an opportunity, like all of those are kind of like sub kind of like micro opportunities. Like I think like TikTok shop right now, a lot of people are kind of kind of like in that Amazon of 2013, 14. Like I know a lot of people who are who've really never done much and then just like

within 60, 90 days or doing a million a month. And it's just because there's a huge supply demand discrepancy between the amount of influencers that are there that I want to make money and the amount of products to sell. And they will just continue to populate it until eventually it becomes a stabilized market. But it's like when those market, those land grabs occur, that's when there's typically outsized returns to be had. What do you think people need to be able to capitalize on these opportunities? I think you have to have skills. Just straight up. Yeah, like you just have to have skills. Like I remember it was really funny. Like our first ever conversation that we had, I was like, man, if I had your amount of following, I was like, I'd be a billionaire. And I saw that as a supply

demand, like an event. So like when you asked just a few minutes ago, like, you know, what's the, what things are there now? Like, I still kind of see social media still thinks there. I still think that opportunity exists for people if you're good. But maybe it's less so than when Instagram came out in 20, whatever year it was, when you could just like just post pictures of you on the sunset and have like a million followers and people would just buy because you just had this insane reach. But I saw it as a, as a, as a, the fact that we could still, the fact that we could still advertise ourselves and get paid to do it is still mind boggling to me, that that like opportunity exists. Like you can build a brand and get paid to do it, which I think is insane. Okay. Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas,

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The classic answer. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to make claims around things. Market values for enterprise value for illiquid assets like private equity investments and, you know, companies that are owned really depends only on the time that somebody's going to buy it. I have had some of the biggest banks that you've heard of, things like that out to this headquarters to see what we have going on.

and they've been like, this is insane. What do they look for? So what they want is what every investor wants, which is what, you know, I tried to set out to do in the very beginning, which was they want proprietary deal flow. So they want people who want to specifically do deals with one person. So it's not like they're shopping.

They're like, I want to do a deal with you. And ideally, you have some sort of captive market or niche. And so for Acquisition.com, we are kind of low mid-market in terms of what companies or businesses are kind of attracted to my stuff. And so it's typically the business is doing like between one and $100 million a year. And so, and this was kind of the thesis of acquisition in the beginning was like, okay, everything's sub a million. There's tons of people who help people get their first customer, a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue, first five clients, things like that.

Like there's tons of kind of like the coaching consulting, whatever, you know, coaching course world is there. Then if you go like 100 million and up, then you've got like McKinsey, B.C., Dilloy, PWC, EY, like a lot of these Gartner, like all these kinds of consulting firms that deal with like, kind of above there. There's just not a lot in the like the one to a hundred million range. And what's interesting about that particular range is that that's where a huge amount of like alpha is created in terms of investing returns. And so like for example, if you have a business, this is probably going to lose half the, half the audience. But if you have it, if you have a business that's doing, call it like three million dollars in EBIT or profit, right, per year. And you can make a handful of tweaks and get it from three to eight million. The three million dollar

Aibit of Business might be worth $12 million, maybe. The $8 million EBIT of business can probably get somewhere between like $80 and $100 million in a sale. And so it's like you have a huge multiplier effect that increases once you get above about $5 million in profit, and especially as you approach 10, where you now become a target for institutional-grade investors. Because they can write, they have to put to work hundreds of millions of dollars. And so they basically become the customer of buying the product, which is the business that you created. And so our thesis of Acquisition.com was like, well, we want to get people right before there at that level, buy at really small prices, make the changes in the business, and then

capture this huge upside. So where do most businesses get stuck? I mean, businesses get stuck at all different levels. I mean, because all you'd have to do is just look at the revenue breakdown. It's like 95% of businesses are less than a million dollars a year. So a lot of businesses just like barely even get to the million dollar in revenue point. above that, I think it's one in 250, so it's 0.4%. Get to $10 million a year.

So is that a market problem or an operator problem? I think it's almost always an operator problem. Like, unless you're like, people will name these like really random weird businesses where someone like tries to come up with something entirely new. But I see there's kind of like three kind of types of big type buckets of risk in terms of picking an opportunity. You've got like a product market fit risk, which is. I'm going to come up with something that no one's ever done before and see if people want it.

That's like an Uber. Like we'll see if strangers will pick up strangers and taxis. Like maybe it sounds like it may sound crazy at the time, right? So that's a product market fit risk issue. Those are in my opinion extremely risky. The second category are technical risk issues. So like if I just said, hey, I can come with an AI salesperson that can take all your phone calls for you. I don't need to guess whether people are going to want that.

They're for sure going to want it. The problem is how likely you can actually do it. It's the difficulty of actually solving the problem, right? The Uber thing, it's like, well, there's some technical risk there too, but will people even want this versus they want it? I don't know if I can deliver it. And then the third category is what I would say is the vast majority of business owners, which is just execution risk. There's other long care businesses that do $100 million a year. The path is really literally in front of me.

The only risk is whether I'm skilled enough to do it. That's it. So what are the biggest operating obstacles you've personally ran into trying to scale Acquisition.com into a billion dollar business and how did you overcome it? suffering is constant. It's just the nature of the suffering changes. And so it's like the hard is always hard. And it just, and I think what makes it more difficult as the business continues to develop is that you end up trading things that you didn't expect you'd have to trade. And so like in a lot of people's minds, it's like, oh, I can push really hard. It's like, it stops being about how hard you can push at a certain point. Sometimes it's about how long you can wait. Sometimes it's about how focused you can stay. Sometimes it's about what kind of person you're able to attract to the business. sometimes it's just the quality of your decisions, right? Well, a lot of times the quality of your decisions. And those are just kind of like micro examples. But like, you know, in the very beginning, you have to overcome a lot of environmental issues. It's like you have your friends and family who are telling you that it's not going to work, whatever, and they think your idea is stupid. And so you have to overcome that. And then maybe you have to overcome your own limiting beliefs. So you have to overcome that. And then you start doing things and you start advertising and letting people know that you have stuff and selling them on your services, your product. And then quickly, you have to learn like the first level of management. So it's like, okay, well, now it's not me. It's me and maybe a couple of, you know, virtual assistants. And then you're like, okay, this is too much for part-timers. I need some full-timers. So then you have to level up to basically being a manager, which you

haven't done before. And then once your manager, it's like, okay, well, I'm managing this half, I have to get somebody else, then you get your first manager. And then all of a sudden, you have multiple managers. Now you're a leader, right? And then you have to attract leaders, which is a totally different skill because you have to lead leaders. And so at every level, I see entrepreneurship as a forcing function for pain, but also a forcing function for progress in that you will stay in pain until you progress and then you will find new pain. So what's something that you've tweeted or said that people clearly agree with, but just don't implement?

I mean, like, we could pull it up. Where do you want to start? Now, if there's one thing I absolutely can't stand, it's wasting money. And I know we've all done it. We've signed up for subscriptions that you don't really realize in the moment. You forget about them. And then pretty soon, you're charged out the wazoo for things that you never really needed or used. That's why, no joke, I started using today's sponsor Rocket Money. With Rocket Money,

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Thank you so much to Rocket Money for sponsoring this episode. Where do you want to start? You think Twitter's like a high ROI activity for you? Twitter's, it's like, I can't help myself. You just can't. That's what of your indulgences? Yeah, like, let's see, let's see what did people not understand about this? Suck at something, work for free, lots of times, suck less.

Wait until people ask for free work and you can't take them on. Now you have more demand than you have supply. begin to charge money, boot out the free clients for paid clients, and then offer to keep working with those clients for money, congrats, you have a business. So I will say, I agree with that. Now, here's a counterpoint to that. It is hard to take people from free to paying for a service. Totally. What is your way around that? Well, it depends. So it depends on how high value the service is, number one. And number two is we start with free because you need to get reps because you probably suck. And so it's like you're really getting

free feedback from people that otherwise like shouldn't because you, will be terrible. But the transitioning people from free to paid really comes down just how good you are. And if you are, like, so for example, if I was redoing all your YouTube thumbnails and I said I would do it for free now at your level, so everyone who's listening, don't immediately DM, because you already have somebody. Right. But like the thing is, go for somebody who's like one tenth of grand size who can't really afford it. Give that guy the thumbnails. And if your thumbnails beat his thumbnails. He will if you're like, okay, well, I have now all these people are paying me. So you can pay me what they're paying me or I'm just going to work with them. At that point,

he'll either pay if he's making any money on his channel or he won't. But like, there's real value that's being created there. But the idea is you want to get your roster filled so that at that point, and I think part of this, I give this advice because a lot of people in the beginning don't believe they can charge anything. And so it's like, fine, don't charge. Get better. And then once you literally can't take people on, it's like, dude, I can't take you on. And then they're like, well, what would it take? And you're like, oh, money, money. I could do that. I could do it for money. And then now it's like, you actually can help someone break through the belief of like, yeah, you can ask, you can ask for money for stuff. Do you think there's something to look out for

for people who just want something for free and will never pay for it? Well, I'll say this. My big caveat for free, if I'm going to give it away is I have to give, I'll give something away for free. I'll give stuff away for free that cost me money if it's to a qualified prospect. So if I'm giving, you know, if I'm trying to get into enterprise IT services, right, I'm not going to start with a local, you know, dry cleaning business who can't afford what I would like to eventually charge. So I want somebody who has, you know, Bant, which is budget authority need timing. So do they have the money to spend? Do they have the authority to make the decision? Do they have the need for the specific thing is now a good time? If I can get those four things, I'll give that person free

stuff. Like if it's like, hey, I'm only doing back massages for billionaires. Fine. Then like, you got to be a billionaire and I'll give it to you for free. Eventually, I'll charge. But no, the homeless guy on the corner of the street will also take free massages, but he'll never be able to pay. And so it's not that we want to give free to anyone. It's just that we want to get the most qualified prospects, get good feedback from those customers, which we should treat them like customers, so that we can then eventually charge people just like them based on the feedback that we got. Otherwise, we'd be building a product for somebody who's the wrong product. How do you make your offer unbeatable then? Where it's unfair. If people feel stupid saying no. There's four elements

of value, as I've kind of defined in the book, the $100 million offers book. So you have the dream outcome, right, which is like, what am I actually going to give this person? Every product is the outcome, every service is a dream outcome, which is like, what's the thing that they want to have happen? Okay, cool. So that's going to be our baseline in terms of value. Like, if I'm going to help somebody make an extra million dollars a year or $10 million year, that's going to be a baseline. But there's still going to be a discount that's applied to that. And there's basically three factors that apply to that discount. Number one is how fast is it going to happen? Number two is, how much effort is it going to take on behalf of the customer? And then number three is,

is how likely is it to occur? And so, fundamentally, those are the elements of value that are either multipliers or detractors of what you can ultimately charge a customer for whatever it is that you sell. So how do I make it fast, how to make it easy, and how to make it risk-free. And so within each of those components, like part of the way of making it risk-free to them is if I have 10,000 other people I've done this for, it's much less risky, right? That's proof, right? You could also do that with covenants in terms. You could either do it based on performance that shifts more of the risk to you. You could also just give guarantees and satisfaction. You get guarantees that are conditional based on things that they do. Those are all elements of things you can do to decrease

risk, which you can reverse into price. And so said differently, I could say, hey, I'll charge you $5,000 to do this thing. And if someone says, well, no, it's like, okay, well, I'll do it for $3,000, but I won't give you a satisfaction guarantee. And then what you'll find to happen is like, oh, well, I'll do it for $5,000 with the guarantee. So people resell themselves on a higher price if you take away a component that's valuable. So that's the risk one. From a speed perspective, I would say that the more I've studied like human behavior, sales persuasion marketing, the more I really lean into speed. Like, if you want to enter any new new marketplace, just look at what everyone else is doing and see if you can do it in half the time. And there's just so much value in speed. Like, humans are

so immediate reward focused. Like, almost every business can offer a speed version. So it's like, you're a YouTube thumbnail agency and you say, cool, I'll get you thumbnails in a week normally. It's like, oh, if you want for 50% more, I'll get them to you in 24 hours. And for 300% I'll get to you in the next 60 minutes. The same cost to you. It's the same work. But you just give someone priority access and it's all a margin. So it's like you can always play with speed as another variable of value.

And then the third element has two pieces to it, which is ease. Like how does it have two elements? Well, one is what are the bad things that I hate doing that I get to not do as a result of buying, right? All the stuff I don't like, you're going to take away. Great. But I also want to make sure that I don't prevent someone from doing the things they do enjoy doing. right and so I give a classic example of like if you sign up at a gym all of a sudden you have to start doing things you don't want to do but you also have to stop drinking margaritas you have to stop taco Tuesday you have to stop having cupcakes and stop having your mcflurries

so it's like you have to give up stuff you like and you have to do stuff you hate which is why it's such a hard sale so do you study psychology in order to be a more effective salesperson I wouldn't say I study psychology um I would say I just look at data of business because I the the one advantage that I have is I have a huge amount of data that I I sit on top of between the companies that we invest in, the companies that come use our services on the advisory division, and the companies that we own are the companies we invest in. And so it's like, I get to see a lot of different data. And so when we make changes into a sales process or a change in terms of an offer, I could see the improvements in conversion rates. And so that's where a lot of my like these Cs have come from. Are you ever surprised by the data or is most of it kind of just confirming your intuition? All the time. I can't surprise all the time. What's been like one of the biggest

surprises about this data. Yeah, we had a we had a company that sells B2B services and I had this guess that based on basically we could collect the data of the size of the revenue of the companies that were basically leads that were coming in the funnel. And so I wanted to shut off the bottom third of the leads because they were the lowest revenue leads and just have the team focus on the top two thirds. And so I was like, hey, just pull pull the sales data because I'm going to bet that all the conversions happening on the top end. And the conversion, it was actually evenly spread. And so I was like, huh, like almost to the percentage point. I was like, that is not what I would have expected. And again, that could be unique to that specific business.

I would still posit that in general, more qualified customers buy on average more and spend more money just in this particular business. And maybe that means that that business misprice, which would be a different problem. But given that date, I was like, huh, that's interesting. We have people who are 10 times the size buying at the same rate as people who are one-tenth of size. Wild. And it's way more of a stretch for these people than is for these people. So maybe we're missing our message. Did you ever find out why? Have you dug into that and gotten to the bottom? It's a great question because I try. It's really hard to say why because I think a lot of people like to use because it's very compelling. But I just try and stick with like this is the data that I have within this given context and in this situation it worked. And I know there are principles like things that are fast will sell better than things that are slow. Things that are easy will sell better than things that are hard. Things that are risk free will sell better than things that are not risky. I can take that to the bank.

So, like, I try and think, like, what are the few principles that it will always be true? And then the rest is application. What's something that you track within a business that most people don't even look at? I'll give you a handful of metrics that I track. So you'd be like, I didn't need that many. So if I had to solve for two things, it would be gross margin and revenue retention. So fundamentally, like, what do we make per sale in terms of, like, is there a lot of margin that's there? If so, like, that's more attractive to me.

And then secondarily, how likely is that this person is going to continue to buy from us next year and the year after that. So if I have a business that I have hypothetically 100% gross margins and 100% revenue retention, that's an amazing business. They literally just print money and they never lose it. Like that's cool. That's a very attractive business. So if I only knew those two things, the only other thing I'd want to know is what's my cost to a car customer versus my lifetime gross profit per customer. So how much money does it cost me to get somebody and then how much do they pay me over time? And so basically that fundamental, the LTV to KAC ratio or LTGP to KAC ratio. I know fancy acronyms. But that ratio between those two numbers is the

fundamental economic arbitrage that exists within businesses. And fundamentally, that's why private businesses will get the highest returns in terms of returns on capital. Because in, in so few places, like if you were to put it in the S&P 500, those companies are already at scale and it's harder for them to grow, you know, at huge, huge percentages, maybe you let's say you put $1,000 in and you get 10%, so you're $1,100 at the end of the end of that. the year. In a business, you could put $1,000 into paid ads and make $30,000 in gross profit in 24 hours. Like, that happens all the time. And so it's like, that's how somebody can go from $0 to a billionaire in four years because the returns on capital are absurd. And this is also

what I think one of the big opportunities of social media is, is that like, okay, why is social media so powerful? It's because it drives cact to zero. Do you trust customer satisfaction? I take it as I'll take surveys. So we survey across all the company. that we have because I like to have leading indicators in terms of like what's going on. I like I care more about the reason wise that they give. It's kind of like the comment section. Like I care more about that. But I care far more about renewal rates.

So if we're getting bad scores but everyone's buying, then I'd be like, okay, well, we found something that people need but hate that they have to buy from us and it'll be very quick to switch. But as of right now, there's no one else who can do it either better, faster, or cheaper than we can. But I would, renewal rate, like how you spend your money is what I care the most about. And I would say what you think. It's kind of like, what do you want? And people are like, I want faster horses versus the car.

So it's like, I care about that a little bit, but I care far more about what the data suggests about purchasing behavior. When you make an offer to somebody and they say, no, I'm not interested. How often is that able to be turned around? Across what setting. Is that in a sales setting? In a sales setting? I think it depends on the reason the person said no. So that would that would be like, there would be a discovery question after that.

So it'd be like, well, what are the variables you using to make the decision? And sometimes, like, I think there's a big difference between a no based on value or a no based on details or a no based on authority or a no based on timing. Like just kind of said, budget authority and timing. These are the kind of components. Well, how do we make sure that we can, can I control? Can I overcome some of these issues? Now, if someone's like, love what you have, I don't buy coats because I live in Panama.

I'm like, okay, there's no need. Like, I could try and sell whatever. We're like, hey, I've got a gym membership. Why aren't you signing up? It's like, well, you're in Iowa and I live in Florida. Like, I'm never going to get there. So it's like where, it depends on the reason for the no. What if it's a price issue? Where do you draw the line between lowering the price and cheapening the product? I never lower the price. But getting someone who's qualified or keeping the price the same, but losing the sale. Yeah. So I'm a very firm believer in never negotiating with terrorists, including price terrorists. And so if someone wants to, like if someone says, hey, can you do it for cheaper?

You know, we always, I mean, we train on saying, like, we can do it for more. And people are like, okay, yeah, I got it. I'll buy it that price. But I, the price that you quote is the price that you stick to. Otherwise, as soon as you negotiate once, every price you have is negotiable, which sucks as a business. It is a pain in the butt, and I hate it. So, and you want price standardization anyways because you don't want different people

getting sold different prices. People could talk. It kind of sucks. So my big thing is price in terms. And so if we have this price, if I'm going to, change it, then I will also change terms. So if someone's like, hey, I would love to buy the $5,000 thing, but I can't afford it, if we've already looped a couple times and said, okay, why can't you afford it? How important is this to you? What would it cost you to not do this? You know, quantify as many

these things as possible. And they're still like, I literally just don't have this amount of this is, here's my bank account. I have $3,000. I will buy it for $3,000. Then, and then it's just like, I can't ethically sell you the same thing as somebody else for $5,000 for $3,000. I can't do it. What I can do is I can remove a component. So let's look at these things that we have here. We have this guarantee, I can remove the guarantee, and I can knock $1,000 off. Does that work? Okay. Also, instead of, you know, coming to the gym, you know, three times a week, if you come to the gym twice a week, will that work for you? Great. Well, let's just do that. You can do one work out of home. So I'll, I'll, I'll want to change the terms of the agreement if I'm going to change price,

but I can't, I won't just say, sure, I'll do it for less. I just won't do that. Why do you think that most people fail? Is it a skill gap, a belief gap, or is it just distraction? I think it depends on how we define failure. So for the people who don't start, then it's probably a belief issue. Like they failed by never starting. And that's the vast majority of the people. They failed before they start the race. Of the people who do start the race, I think just for people, $7 million, almost, you know what?

I don't even say that it's at all levels. Distraction is a huge one. They start six businesses in the hopes that one of them will take off because they fundamentally don't understand how business works. Like you only have very constrained resources in terms of time. money, effort, human capital, people. And you have to allocate all of those things to one business to just have a hope that it's going to work. So I think focus is a massive one. So that's kind of equal opposite of distraction. And then in terms of beliefs, the belief is the

early days. Distraction kind of is pervasive. Sometimes it's just business model things, which I would just translate up to skilled efficiencies. So once someone gets started, I think there's just two buckets. You've got, you've got, you've got procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge, which is basically the two types of knowledge that exists, which is knowing how to do something and knowing that something exists or that something's possible. And so this is where people talk about mindset, mindset, mindset, mindset, mindset, manifest state, whatever. It's like, fundamentally, it's just like, you have to believe that something's possible. And so if you meet somebody who's doing $10 million a year and their same

age as you, growing in the same hometown, you're like, well, I guess that's possible. Right. And all of a sudden, it's like, man, my perspective totally changed. Like my mindset, I manifested, who knows, whatever. But like, you fundamentally now believe it can happen. Cool. So then the only delta that you have is how to do it. Right. That's procedural. So I could talk like we could talk about private equity all day on here and someone could listen to every private equity podcast in the world, you understand that people are doing it, but you don't understand how to do it. And you can understand all the steps, but until you go through it, there's, you won't, you won't know how it works. And then what you do, then you can do it again.

So what's some of the low hanging fruit that people could start implementing today that'll make a big difference long term? I think shrinking the time between when you make a decision and when you take action on the decision is probably one of the strongest correlates with like high, high producers. And I think- You always talk about that. Was there like a specific moment that you kind of had that realization

and then ever since you made that decision, you're going to decrease that amount of time that like the business, what exponential? So two things. So one is if you define a God being as omnipotent, then as they think things, things would exist.

And so if someone is ultimately powerful, that means like the moment they think of it, it happens, right? And so it's like, okay, if that's the hypothetical idea, deal, then everything reversed from that is less and less powerful. And so if I want to be a more potent person or less impotent, then I should shrink the time between when I make a decision and when I act on that decision and try to make it into a reality. So that's number one. The second

issue are when it comes to decision making is that the vast majority of speed, I think, that happens within a business comes down to speed of decision making. Like there are so many decisions that have to occur every single day that most of the time, and you guys experience this within your own business, it's like, you know, the team says, hey, what do we do with here? And then you're like, okay, let me think about that. Or let me give you a couple, like, give me a day or two and I'll come back to you. But one of the good frameworks that I have is just asking myself the question, will I get more information to make this decision?

If the answer is no, then make the decision. Like, you're not going to get more information to make it. See, might as well just make it now. And so that, the interesting thing about that is like that speed, though, a lot of times people take, let's say seven days to make a decision or even a month to make a decision. But if I can make a decision now and then make a second decision two minutes later, make a third decision two minutes later, like in a very real way, I could operate a thousand times the speed somebody else's. And I think that's fundamentally like how Elon operates and how he can just get so much stuff done.

He also obviously distributes a lot of decisions making to people who are intelligent. How important is intuition when it comes to making a decision that you just feel one thing over the other? Well, I think intuition is just like a really, really amorphous word for having a history of reinforcement with variables that you can identify or have trouble, trouble identifying. So it's like, you know, this girl walks in, I've got a bad feeling about her. That's my intuition. Well, you have a history of seeing lots of women walk in. And if you have people or women who looked a certain way or acted, you know, the way they carried themselves, the way they dress, the way their hair looked, the way they did their makeup, the way they talk, the way they breathe, the way they, all these other variables that you're taking in. If somebody else in the past you had a negative experience with, you would then say, oh, I'll get bad vibes because it's just harder for you to be like, hey, subconscious, what was the variable that you identify? that was similar to this other past experience that sucked. Harder to do. So do I trust intuition? I will definitely pay attention to it.

Will I believe that it's some magic power? No. I just think it's just like there's something that I haven't been able to identify. Maybe I spend more time thinking about it. I could maybe, you know, it wasn't this. It wasn't this. I'm like, you know, this is what it was. Now, you might not know it yet,

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See if you qualify for half off at oracle.com slash iced. Again, Oracle.com slash iced with a link down below in the description. Thank you so much to Oracle for sponsoring this episode, and now let's get back to the podcast. Do you have a BS meter to tell if people are fake or if they're just maybe a bit of of a fraud. I don't, I don't know if I have a BS meter. I think that asking questions can help a lot. So like if someone just walked in and said like, I am a this, I'm like, I don't know. Maybe, you know, if I asked 10 more questions about that thing and I know more about that thing than they do, then I would have a better idea. If someone's talking about how to train a sales team and they're like,

I know how do you think about this? I'd be like, okay, well, how do you think about this? And if they gave bad answers, then I'd be like, okay, we don't really know how to train a sales team. And so it depends on my skill level within that domain that someone's supposed to, you know, be good at. I think that people have a lot, I think people have far more, I think people have far more experience deceiving other people than we do protecting against deception. So I think there's always going to be people who are more skilled of deception than people who are better at detecting it. And so I'll say, honestly, I operate from the perspective that I don't know and that I'm probably being deceived and would I still do it anyways within these guardrails. And so I just try and operate that way. Mine tend to be if someone's

doing really posed photos in front of expensive cars, usually, it depends on the industry. Bad vibes. Usually head-toeat designer, like they're really all about it. Ripping in Gucci. Like it has diamonds on it and stuff like that, unless you're in the music industry, which is fine. You have to be in the music industry, I feel like. That's got to be fake. It can be. Usually that's a red flag. And then also when they describe what they do and you still don't understand how they make their money.

There have been some people that just say, oh, I do this and that. I'm like, I don't get it. You explain it. And they explain it. And I still don't understand. And then it turns out the dude's just like siphoning money from somebody else. And it turned out the whole thing was smoking mirrors. I'm like, I had a feeling about that guy.

That I will say, well, it's funny because you say that because then it gets into a domain that I feel comfort with. Yeah. Where if someone's like, well, this is how we market, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or this is how we sell. This is how we sell. This is how we, you know, anything that's business related, I'll be like, no, that doesn't make sense. Yeah. And it's like, I'm like, I feel confident enough in my, in my skill level to say like, no, that doesn't make sense. But yeah, so I think it's going to, it's going to be domain specific for me to be able to say like, I'll have a better judge of character.

But still, even then, you know, I get, I get, I get, I want to see deceived, but like, I make wrong picks all the time. You know, like with team and people hiring things like, it happens, you know, just part of the game. What about things that are too good to be true? How often are people pitching you things that seem to be that way? And they're actually accurately representing their skill or the value of their business. I think the too good to be true happens all the time. I've yet to see something that has been too good to be true. I think chat GPT when it came out, I was like, that's too good.

to be true and then it was. So like, then they became a gazillion dollar company. I was like, okay, that checks out. That tracks. But most things that are too good to be true, like, the saying exists for a reason. How important is intelligence and entrepreneurship? I think it depends on what level of success you're shooting for. I think, like, if you were like, I wanted to get into AI, like, you've got to be probably really smart. And I think it's not even because, like, you're the one who's going to be the engineer doing it. It's like, you need to be smart enough that an engineer who couldn't do that is impressed by you. Right. So I think, I think it's really in the recruiting aspect where high intellect, if you will, will matter more. If you were, you know,

use the long care example, like you can succeed in the long care business without being brilliant. You can succeed in the gym business without being brilliant. You can succeed in a lot of businesses. I'd say most businesses without being, you know, above 50% IQ. I think there are, skills which people say as traits that are more important. I think courage is incredibly important. I think high agency, so the ability to make your own decisions without being influenced by others. I think, I think honestly just like perspicacity, like being able to endure and persevere. Because one of the really interesting things about entrepreneurship is that you get, life gives you this like these unlimited lottery tickets and you just pay time to get them,

but you just can always get them to cash them in. And even if you cash 10 tickets in and they don't work, it's like you still have an 11th one. You still have a 12th one. And so a lot of people just will choose not. to cash their tickets in it all or even grab the tickets to begin with. And I think that that ability to persevere is what gives you more shots on goal. And you only need one really big win to change your life forever. And so it's really just sticking with it.

And I think that's the like on a long enough time rise and somebody sticks with it just gets enough. Like they just get so many chances that something, that luck does happen. What percentage would you allocate to being the person in charge of running it versus the business itself? Man, I'll say 50-50. Like I was going back and forth. It's like, you know, because Uncle Warren has. great manager, bad market, bad market wins. You know, good market, bad manager, good market wins. I think that, like the market is for sure the most powerful thing, but if we control for market,

like, you know, if you're selling toilet paper in COVID, you're going to make money, whether you're an idiot or not. Like, it's going to work. But I think the vast majority of marketplaces are not on either extreme. You're not selling to newspapers and you're not selling toilet paper during COVID. Most businesses are just kind of like in the middle. They're in markets that are just normal. And in those situations, um, the business model obviously has to be sound, but the business model is a reflection of the entrepreneur. And so if we remove market, then I'll say it's entrepreneur, um, for sure. But market is more important if it's in one of these extremes. What qualities do you see in those people? Are there similarities between the two?

Yeah. There's, you know, it's interesting because there's like, there's, there's for sure similarities. I think there's far fewer than most people expect. Because, um, like even if you look at the top, like, I think Bezos and Elon are some of the goats of all time in terms of entrepreneurship so different in terms of their personalities, the way they behave, their even values, like all of those things. I think they have some significant differences. But in terms of like, what are the commonalities about how they operate? They all, they focus on speed. They focus on having an exceptional product. Both of them talk about just, I mean, Elon doesn't say customer's chest.

He says product's obsessed, but they translate to the same thing, which is like they focus on product first above everything else. They're super long term focused. people might have something to say about me saying this but I think they both have high ethics they're like oh he's the devil but whatever I won't even comment leave it there

but high ethics high customer obsession long term perspective huge ability to tolerate pain and the ability to tolerate risk which is to have the courage to do it and because both of them had so many moments where they just went all in on Amazon or all in

on Tesla or SpaceX or whatever. It's like you have to have some ability to go big and bet the farm. And I think that every entrepreneur that almost every entrepreneur that I know who's made it really big has had a moment where they're like, this could not work.

And I'm just going to try and make it work. It's so interesting because I feel like there's a huge trend online right now and also maybe for the past like five, ten years of there can never be an ethical billionaire. Do you think in order to get to that level of wealth, there needs to be a time where you compromise your ethics

or do you think that's just a bunch of stuff that people like to throw out there to maybe self-aggrandize themselves? Well, somebody's, whatever. Go ahead. I am biased. So I'll state my bias. I am trying to hit it or in process of hitting it.

And so I obviously don't think that there's an ethical, like that you have to. I think I'll say it differently. If you took a random slice of the population, just America or even the world, you're going to have a certain percentage of people who are ethical and have a certain percentage of people

we're not ethical. And the skills to run a business, I think, can operate in some ways independently of those things. So you can become super financially successful and be unethical, and you can be super financially successful and be ethical. And so I think that you'll have a distribution that is normalized at the top as much as you do in the middle. Like how many people are divorced, how many people are married, how many people are, like you're going to have, how many people have kids, how many people don't have kids? Like, you're going to have a random distribution there. And I think people will just cherry pick bad actors. And there's also like allegations, basically, on like regulations. Like if you look at all the big fortune whatever companies, it really starts

to come down to like, what do you, if we, I mean, it gets into ethics, which is a totally different can of worms. But if you were to say like, you know, the TCPA, which is telephone consumer protection agency, whatever, they go after a company. And it was because the company didn't put the right language on their, you know, landing page. And because of that, they sued Facebook for $700 million. Is Facebook being unethical, or are they operating in ignorance? Oftentimes, when you have more laws than you can keep track of, or somebody makes an oopsie, those things happen.

And so it really depends like, okay, well, are we now saying that Facebook's unethical? Now I'm not saying that I think that they're good for the world, but I'm saying fundamentally, like, I think mistakes can happen. And so the idea that people will say a billionaire might be unethical is probably different than a billionaire has made mistakes. And I think those are two very different things because for sure every billionaire has made mistakes and for sure has done things that they wish they hadn't

because that's what humans do in life. What's a mistake you made recently that may have either cost you time, money, or credibility? I invested in a company that I didn't do enough due diligence and they were doing some things that weren't compliant that I found out about later. And I just said, I don't want to be associated and I lost millions of dollars and I just said I'll

give you the equity back. I don't even want it. I just don't want to be associated. What could you have done differently? Could have done better in hindsight. What do you look for when we probably could have reviewed, you know, reviewed the internal data better, probably could have done more in-depth interviews with some of the key employees, could have done more, you know, customer call reviews, both on sales side, marketing side and also on the delivery side. We probably could have done more of that. If you were to observe all of the mistakes, that Acquisition.com makes. And aside at like a pie chart,

would you say the largest slice of the pie would be lack of due diligence? Or where do you think you lose the most return or value? Honestly, I think the biggest mistakes we make are hiring. I think it's people. But it's really, I mean, fundamentally it's going to be people at all sides. Like people on the deal side, it's going to be people. Like, even when you're bringing in talent, like, it's a deal.

Like you're signing an agreement between two parties in exchange for money. You know, so like it's, I mean, you're just, the thing is the number of deals that we have to do, every day, every week, every month, every year is a lot. And so we're just going to make mistakes. We're going to try our best to learn from them. And we're ultimately going to be rewarded by the quality of our decision making, but we're going to mess up.

When do you know how to cut the business or try to fix it? Like in that case, I would be looking at that and thinking, well, is it worth trying to, or is it just, we can't work with these people? No, it's a good, it's that last thing you just said. That's really what it comes down to. So if someone, I think, is, knows about it. it and hasn't done anything about it and then we find out about it and say hey you should do something about it and they don't do anything about it that's where i'd be like okay this isn't

going to work if you know a founder's made aware of it it's kind of like the tcpa thing like if let's say you had opt-ins on a page and you just didn't have like all the disclosures that you're supposed to have to make it compliant to like text somebody or call somebody or whatever right if someone did that i'm not going to be like oh my god this guy sucks i'd be like oh he didn't know like let's let's let's fix this stuff and so that's kind of an example it really comes down to the willingness of the founder to make to make things right. I think that's anybody. Do you have assessments of ethics of the people

that you end up partnering with and how important would you say ethics are? Do you not really consider it? And you just kind of look at the data as you suggest it. Because you can ask someone why they do something and they could say whatever they want, but you don't necessarily know until you've known them for a while. I feel like there should be a personality test.

Like the Jordan Peterson personality test. Does you have them? He does. He's paid $10 or $15 or something. Understand Myself.com. I think is what it is. Okay. It's interesting because you can also, with this data, compare how two personalities will interact with one another. So, for example, Graham and I, we were pretty different in a lot

of categories, but it did say that we had good cohesion. Oh, sweet. Yeah. But they have studies for, like, business and for personality and for relationships. With large data, you could probably get a pretty good approximation. It would be interesting. I don't think we have enough data to actually do, like, big data, like analysis for that. Just if you think of 20s, 30s, like it's not a lot. It's not enough. You need, like, 30,000. A lot. more and to have statistical power. We actually used to do a lot more tests earlier on, and I think we ended up foregoing them. Same on the recruiting side. We used to do a lot more like personality testing, things like that, mostly because the recruiting team ended up being like over-reliant on tests and

then would just like have a star candidate. And they were like, well, they scored. I'm like, this guy's just thought, like, bring this guy in. And so we ended up doing away with it. I think everybody wants a test to tell them the answer. And so I think, I think, I think, think in a job where you have a lot of decision making that has to occur, it's hard to not default to tests because it's so quantitative that you want to just like, it's just kind of like trading algorithms. Like if the algorithm says, like you want to have that. And so fundamentally, either it's like, you know, I tend to be somewhat binary in this, but like either we believe this 100%, or we kind of don't. And the only times, and I'll quote Layla on this one, but like if

we do have a test that we're going to have somebody take on like of the recruiting side, the only time that we would really use it, if it's a red flag, in that it seems like it's completely contrast from what we're seeing. And so if someone's like, oh, I'm really detourented, I'm really timely, I'm really whatever.

And then they get on, they're like, I'm a creative, and I'm so all over the... And they're like, that doesn't make sense. So then we're just like, okay, now it's just an ethical issue that's lying.

So you're saying you don't want to focus on qualifying someone because if you're testing them, that means you probably have some dissonance between what you think about them and what they say about themselves. And if you find, yeah. Yeah, I think you will, like,

This is me talking more as a company owner than anything else, which is like, if you tend to give a team a tool and they have to make a lot of decisions and the tool supposedly helps them with the decision, the law of least effort will typically reign and they'll just start using the test to make all the decisions. And I think that makes for worse decisions than actually just using everything else. So if someone's studying you, let's just say, what do you think is the biggest misinterpretation of your strategy or character? I think most people think that I'm meaner than I am. I think. He's a sweetheart, guys. Alex is really a nice guy. So nice. On and off camera,

a very, very outstanding gentleman. Thank you. I think that. And then also in like a different setting than like a podcast. You know, it's like, you know, it's a different. Like when I'm with my team, I joke around a ton. And so I'd say like I do a lot of jokes a lot.

And I think I have, I mean, Daniel could probably say, but I think, yeah. What's your funniest joke? Can't say it. Give us a joke. I have a lot of, I've, I've, I've, I've, like, dirty jokes or like, inappropriate. Like a true grandma, man. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of, that's what your mom said. That's, that's, that's, that's a classic.

It's a classic. For Jack, I'm always like, yeah, like your mom. Mom's going to watch this. Yeah. Yeah, cats out of the bag. Yeah. Smoke shower, no. But no, I'd say that there's probably the two, the two bigger misconceptions.

So moving on from that. How do you eliminate distraction? Oh, this is fun. Okay. So I eliminate it by eliminating it, and that sounds ridiculous. But I think the vast majority of productivity hacks can get boiled down to remove everything that isn't work. So, like, my office has no outside light.

I try to minimize all the sound in the office. I also put on earplugs and headphones. There's a great app that you can use that, like, blocks your phone. So, like, nothing can get through. So including text, phone calls, slacks, everything, not just, social media, like, it's a dead element, essentially. And you have to physically move across the building, which is how I do it for mine, to, like, unm mess up your phone. And then I just have a clear idea of the work that I need to do. And so it's like when you eliminate everything else, and then I just

had a kitchen timer for how long I expect of tasks to last. That is when I'm like peak productivity per unit of time, because there's nothing else to do. So is this science or is this just to you? because eliminating natural light, why light? For me, like I get, oh, I get so distracted by light. I get boosted by, like, seeing the outdoors and seeing greenery. It's nice.

It doesn't work for me, man. Yeah, and I'll be clear. Like, if you find something that works for you, I'll say, do that. And for anybody who's like, I do it, do it your way. I don't care. Like, I'm just saying, this is what's wrong for me.

I do think there's a decent amount of day that suggests that anything that is not the work distracts you from the work. How do you differentiate between distractions and rest? Great question. So I think there's kind of like micro macro. So like from a micro perspective, if you work for 60 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever and then you're like, okay, I need a break, if you take the five or 10, you know, 10 minute like walk around the building or walk outside, to me, that's where you can get your natural light and all of that stuff. But then you come back

and then you're fresh again and then you hit it. I see that, I see that rest as productive because it increases the overall net production over a larger period of time. So if you work like that for 12 hours and you worked without doing that. Maybe you can only work eight hours or you can work the same 12 but you don't get as much done. So for me, it's really just the net productivity of human being is what they get done over a period of time. So productivity has a temporal component to it and an output component. So maximizing output per dine of time is productivity as I define it. And so it is, okay, anything that increases that rate of work, which for the most part is just deleting the things that aren't work. Because few people actually work faster.

You just don't work when you want to be working. And so I think if you just limit it all the time that you're not working when you want to be working, you work a lot more. And if you've ever done the timer thing, which I would highly recommend, you see, if you, like, you truly take your phone away and you block out every single notification and you have, you know, you have the script to YouTube video or write an email or make a script or whatever you have to do for your business or write and make a landing page, you'll notice that like, you'll be like, oh my God. Like you're like monkey brain like wants to reach or something. when I keep looking at the time and thinking, oh, man, another 10 minutes went by. That's another 10 minutes I'm not going to be sleeping. Do you ever look at the time and see, oh, 10 minutes went by? Now I only got this amount of time.

And that reminds focused on the time and not the task. I don't think about that at all, actually. If I, like, if eight minutes goes by and I work to the eight minutes and I'm like, oh, my God, I was only eight minutes. I'm like, I have so much time. Like, I did all that in eight minutes because I was focused all time. And I only went to go reach from my phone at eight minutes. I'm like, oh, my God, I have six more days for this hour.

So you don't see the time is a distraction? No, not really. Do you have any distractions that still sneak past your filters? Oh, I mean, not on the phone. I mean, that thing's done. Like, it's cooked. Twitter? No, I mean, when I'm working, I'm not going to... What about music? You listen to music? No. Only when I left. Just silence. Yeah, I have earplugs and headphones. Like, it's true silence. What do you listen to when you lift? Oh, just like the same songs I've had for like 15 years. What sounds?

I really change. I like Lincoln Park a lot. Like Little Lincoln Park. I listen to 50 Cent. I like 50 cent. Get Richard Dye trying. I like that entire album. I still also like some of my white boy music. I'll still listen to Little Green Day. Little Third Eye Blind. That's good. But yeah, I like, I only have like, you know, 20 or 30 songs that I can listen to like in a workout. So it's like I kind of have like a list of 100 and they randomly shuffle and that's like my life. How often do you skip the song? It depends on what kind of set I'm doing. Okay. It's like if I'm early, like if I'm about to hit a work set, like I want to make sure it's a good song. But I think that's everybody. So do you think distracted people then just want it less?

I don't even know how to define wanting to less. I would say that for whatever reason, they're being more rewarded from their current path than they perceive the reward of the path that they're trying to get on. Like, it's just, I mean, I think of everything in carrots and sticks. It's like they have enough stick of other people judging and enough carrot of staying the same that they don't change.

They just have to overcome inertia, and they just can't do it for whatever reason. And I don't want to pretend like I have some, like, superhuman willpower. It's just like, you know, I had, you know, it's funny because like when I quit my job, which was still to this day the hardest decision I've ever had to make it my whole life. Because believe it or not, I'm actually very risk-averse. I can take bigger bets now, but it's because I have more. And so like if I lose, it's not like the end of the world.

But at the time, there was like risking everything or what felt like risking everything. And that was because I was so miserable. it was the only reason I was able to do it. Like if I had been employed, probably just even a different job at a different place, I probably would have been fine, and I don't think I'd ever even be here. So I don't think I had a high, like,

predisposition towards entrepreneurship. Like some people do. Like, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. Like, I wasn't. I didn't start any businesses. I did well in school. It wasn't like,

oh, school failed me. Like, I did well in school. Like, I studied hard. I got good grades. And I graduated three years from Vanderbilt. Like, I did well. And then I got a good job, you know, in terms of all in paper after that.

And it was only like when I had done two years there and that normally you'd go to like business school that I was like, I hate this. I don't want to do this again. And I would rather take a shot. So it spurred from being discontent with where you were at. That's interesting because that is exactly what led to me trying out all of these different business ideas and starting up this thing with Graham. But I never asked you like what motivated you in that beginning that planted that seed to try to, you know, become big in real estate or on YouTube. Was it because you were discontent with where you were at or just yeah. Honestly, it was just. It's just. It's just. It's just. It's just. It's just. It's just. It's just. It's the stupidest thing. It was that accounting. Yeah, with data, it was doing data entry. I wanted to be an investment banker just because I was like, they make a lot of money. I just wanted to be successful. And I would email all of these investment firms just asking to do anything for free. I'm like, I'll get you water.

I'll make copies. Just let me do anything. And I'll just be there. And I emailed maybe like six, seven places that I found on Craigslist. Like two of them turned out to be like MLM. companies. And one emailed me back and said, yes, actually, we're looking for a data entry position. If you want to interview it, come on in. And I interviewed and it looked fantastic. And they had like a sales team in the front and a back office in the back. And they hired

me to do data entry at, I think back then it was like $8 an hour. And I was so excited to go in because they made you wear like a suit every day. And I was like, I get to wear a suit to work. That's so cool. And I went in there and everyone is a zombie. Yeah. And everyone just hated life. Yeah. And the first day was okay.

But I started getting in trouble for stupid things. Okay. Like I wanted to wear a headphone to listen to something throughout the day. While you're mindlessly. Yeah. And they said, I couldn't do that. Okay. And then I made a comment about us.

They had styrofoam cups and I said that like the paper cups were better for the environment. And they said, we're not changing. They got really upset that I even made that suggestion. And then I went up to the CEO's office one day. This was all in the first week. Just to say hi to the guy and introduce myself. And I'm like, I've just started working here. And he wasn't in the middle of something.

And he was friendly to me, but I got called into the manager's office later that day. And they said, hey, there's a chain of command. Like, you can't just go up to this person and talk to him. You have to talk to this manager, get their approval. It goes to me. And then I could, it made no sense. But I hated it there. And the only time that people came to life was Friday at like 4 p.m.

And you started seeing people laughing and joking around and, like, being themselves. And then I remember there was like, they had like a casual, like one day a month. Yeah. They had like a casual day where people could wear like jeans into the office. I thought that was just stupid after a while. Like, I didn't get it. But yeah, that, that single job made me hate life so much that I would do anything to never return to that. Because I honestly thought if this is the next like 40 years.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If this is it. That you were willing to do something for free. which was assistant to the real estate thing. Correct. But also, during that time, they had a sales team in the front. I said, I'd be a great salesperson.

I just want to do sales. And they were making like 100 to 300 great a year doing like phone sales. I wanted to do that. And I was told, you have to work your way up. You have to do data entry to go into the mail room to go into like this thing to this thing. And then that was like years away. And they also told me no one would trust me because I was 18 at the time. Like no one trusts you on sales at all.

And yeah, so, and then I got into sales and did well. Yeah, that doesn't matter at all. But that for me was like the big to six weeks. It was only there, six weeks, but that made a lifetime impact. I want to highlight one thing that you said, which is just for anybody who's listening, Graham said, I'll do anything. And then they said, well, we do have this roll up and do this. I would strongly recommend if you want to, quote, do anything, then just look at the jobs

they have available and try and do that. So rather than just go in, like, empty, just be like, oh, you have a data entry position. I'll do that for you. And then in all of the extra time, that's where you try and have lunch with people. That's where you try and basically build your network within the business so you can start leveraging, like,

relationships to gain more skills. And then you can start, you know, moving your way in and learning what you want to learn. What about applying to businesses that don't need your help or aren't hiring? One of my things, I always thought it was great to approach places

you'd want to work and to say, I'll take on any rule. I think it's, like, I think it depends on, it depends on the visibility of the company. So if the company has like a, a really big social media presence. They have so many people doing that that the supply demand of

people asking for that specific thing is super not in your favor. If you went to a business that's not based on that, like you go to an electric, you know, like an HVAC company, you probably could find some work there that they'll let you do. And so I think it's, again, it's like try and shoot where, like the big, the big arbitrage in life is finding supply demand discrepancies that are in your favor. And so you have a supply of work. They have a demand. Now, if there's way more supply, so many people offering it, then they can dictate their own terms. And if they don't need it, then they don't need it. What's holding people back from excelling beyond average? Do you think it's talent, belief? I think people don't do very much.

Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the Orange One. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Haboniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. I think people do a lot of talking about doing, not a lot of doing. And I think it's the doing that does everything.

And I think that's the, and whether it's lack of motivation, lack of focus, lack of, like, lack of 100 different things, it just comes down to a number of actions taken pre-unit of time. And I think the vast majority of people just wildly underestimate the volume that's required. And I think that's like, I hit on this so hard because like, like when, I'll tell you a story to illustrate the point. When I, when I had my first gym, I had a mentor who told me that he got all of his leads off of flyers. And so that's what he did. And so I put out a flyer and I waited two weeks and one guy called me and said, hey,

you dinged my Mercedes. And I was the only call I got. So I called them as we're up two weeks later. And I was like, hey, how'd that go? And I was like, it didn't work. you know like and he was like and he like totally took it in stride and he was like well what was your test size and I was like what do you mean he was like well was your test amount and I was like well I mean I put out 300 in total and he was like oh man he's like hard to know if anything's going to work with 300

he's like we test with 5,000 per batch he's like and then once we find a winner he's like we do 5,000 flyers a day and I was like oh so he's doing 150,000 flowers a month for his business and I had done 300 And this is why, like, I think the vast majority of people dramatically underestimate how much volume it is. Like, I mean, right when we started this, you're like, seems like you tweet all the time. It's like, I post that often on a lot of platforms. Now, Twitter is my home base for how, where everything is generated from.

But, like, we make 450 pieces of content a week. And so we were like, hey, man, I've been making content for 90 days. And that would already put them in the top, you know, 1% because everyone gives up. But if you actually made a post every day for 90 days, it's amazing. That's 90 posts. I do that in two days. And so, but they get there and they're like, but I'm not Mr. Beast yet.

You know, and it's just, and there's just, people think that someone else is doing two times or three times as much. But it's more often that they've done a thousand times or like two, 10,000 times the amount of work that they have. Like if you count of the amount of videos that you've put out in terms of longs and shorts or minutes of content that you've put out over the last four or five years compared to somebody, it's not even, it's like, it's so, so ridiculous the discrepancy. Same thing with sales guys. They're like, hey, I've been selling for 90 days. I'm like, okay, so how many calls a day do you take? And they're like, I end up taking, you know, five or six live calls. I'm like, okay, so you've been doing it for 90 days.

You've taken, like 400 live calls. It's like, okay, well, this is John. He's closed 4,000 deals. Not calls taken, deals. That's why he's better than you. It's just like there's just a dramatic misunderstanding. And that probably with a 30% of full. He's taking 12,000 calls.

It's like, he's done 300 times the work you have. Like, it's a lot or 30. But like, it's a lot more than people. So how do you compete with that guy? Because I bet there's a lot of those guys out there. You start. I mean, I think it's like you just start. And I think it's like, I think a huge amount of the delay that happens when people are starting out is the amount of time it takes for them to realize there is no easy way.

So they spend a huge amount of time. They figure out how to do it. And then they spend a really long time trying to figure out if there's an easier way. And then they give up trying to find an easier way. And then they just start the hard way because the hard way is the only way. Now, you might have noticed that I'm someone who pays close attention to trends, and lately, I've been noticing cowboy boots everywhere. It's pretty clear that a great pair of boots isn't just for the ranch anymore.

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Yeah, it depends on the outcome. What outcomes are you still emotionally tied to, even though you may know better? Well, I think if the book launch for my next book that comes out, like if that goes well, I'll be stoked. If it doesn't go well, I'll be bummed. You know, like, those are like, I'd say on a micro level, like we always hope that a, you know, YouTube video does well, we hope that.

But obviously we have our constraints of like, okay, well, do I want this to be for a business owner audience or do I want this to me for more of a beginner audience? If it's a beginner audience, I have to kind of recalibrate my expectations because it'll get way more views. So it's not like I'm a robot. I think I would say that my emotional regulation's just gotten better over time.

It's not like it doesn't exist. What other parts of your identity have you had to kill to become where you are right now? Um, plenty. No, one was attachment to the approval of your dad. That's something that's been spoken about quite often. Any other? Yeah, I think so it really depends on how we define identity. But if we define that by the actions that we take, like if you were to describe somebody like he is this way, you really describe it by the actions that person does, right? It's very hard to say someone is something without doing something about it, right? We even describe people by what they do. Like he's a carpenter. He is selfish, which means that he acts in selfish ways. It's all based on activity. And so for me, like the changes in behavior, which then ladder up to identity, I've had to become more patient. I've had to figure out. which I define is figuring out what to do in the meantime. I've had to just had times where I'm like, I just, I need to let, I just need to let the,

let the turkey cook. I just got to let it cook. There's nothing. Like, I shouldn't, the right, the right task for me to do is nothing. I've had to learn that. Wasn't an easy change to like permanently adjust that? No, and I don't think it's permanent. I think you have to fight it every day like addiction.

And so you think there are certain characteristic traits. People just naturally have aspects of their identity that they will have for their entire life. They just have to be able to detect which ones keep them weak and then it's an active battle for the rest of their life? I guess instead of anthropomorphizing, so kind of like humanizing the things that we're fighting against in terms of behavior, it's more thinking, like, I have been rewarded in the past for behaving in this way. And so it's hard for me to change that behavior, but I realize that that behavior no longer serves me. Now, you're still going to have the memory

of the reward of doing that thing over and over again. And so what's really tough about human behavior is that punishment fades, but reward sticks. Meaning, like, when you go out and drink, if you drink too much, the next morning you're hung over and you're like, I'm never going to drink again. But then a week later, you're like, you remember the reward, but you don't remember the punishment, right? And it's the same reason that people go back to ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. It's like they remember the good times, but they forget about the bad times. So punishment fades, but reward sticks. And so the hardest behaviors to change are ones that have rewarded you in the past because you will tend to remember the reward and want to repeat them.

And so the only way to really beat those is to find something to do instead that rewards you better. What's one of the things that worked for you in the beginning that stop serving you as you've gotten bigger or more successful? Well, one of the biggest ones that I talk about is when you quit the job and you start entrepreneurship, you get rewarded really big for taking a risk, for doing something different. But you don't need to take those kind of existential risks all the time.

And the problem is that you get a massive reward for doing some of the beginning. And then you almost have to immediately unlearn that and then stick with this current path for an extended period of time. But you kind of always remember the hit of trying something new, which is why I think so many entrepreneurs tend to always want to do lots of new things when most of the time they need to just get better at the thing that's in front of them and confront whatever problem they don't know how to solve so they can get that thing to the next level. And so they think that by doing something new because that's what worked for them in the past, that's going to get them to next level. And in reality, they just end up distracting themselves and trying to chase two or three masters at a time and never getting there. What's a small hill you're willing to die on that some people might just think is trivial? That manifestation is bullshit and action is the only thing that matters. Wouldn't you say that manifestation is the first step before action?

So it depends on how we define manifestation. So if we define manifestation as like an electrical signal occurs in your brain, sure. But I don't think that's how most people describe it. So I would say be totally on board with manifestation if we define it as knowing that. Like I know that this is possible. Like I saw this or I have some perspective that has changed. To me, that's just knowledge. So if you have knowledge that you can start a bank, you have to have the knowledge.

that you can start a bank before you start a bank. That makes sense. So fine. But the bank doesn't occur until you take the action. But the idea of like the mindless ideation of like I'm going to manifest my husband into existence is I think relatively bullshit. Now that being said, there's some people who do that and then also take actions that then change their circumstances and then they get the husband and then they misattribute what was the thing that caused it. And so for me, I think, I mean, fundamentally the position that I'm in is trying to identify causal relationship as accurately as possible. And so, you know, the logical worth that I use with this is just simply mindset plus no action, no outcome, you know, mindset plus action outcome, no mindset action outcome.

So the action's really going to be the only thing that's going to create the outcome. You need some sort of mindset to have the action. Like I'm kind of big into manifestation. So it's interesting to me. That was my head on. There you go. Like to me, like the example of people get so upset by this, by the way, when I bring this. I find it really interesting. What's their main contentionment. Well, they have a history of being reinforced for talking to other people about manifestation. And so they want to talk about, have other people nod and smile and agree with them. And those are all pro-social behaviors. And so I think it makes sense that they would do that. Again, it depends on how we define manifestation, which I've yet to find anyone who's been able to define

it well. Actually, you can define really easily. And so that's the, that's the part, right? So it's like, it's really just this word that has all these positive connotations. I just think it helps you with focus. But like, what is manifestation? Let's say the, let's just say the boyfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend example. Where you manifest the perfect... But what is manifestation? You thinking clearly about your wants, needs, goals, what to look for, who this person is. So prioritization.

Correct. Now, by manifesting that, you're going to be on the lookout for those sort of qualities in another person. But is the manifesting the prioritization or the man, like we said prioritization and then manifesting. I think the problem is that you're kind of using a derivative definition of prioritization. This is fundamentally why I have an issue with it. And then because you're using manifestation to indicate some sort of data. or information, a lot of people that have a different definition of manifestation are going to apply that to their definition of I just think people know what manifestation is. No, they don't. That's actually my point. I think a lot of people think like you sit down and you

manifest something and then they think it's going to walk right through that door. Like they think that cosmically everything just like somehow get bestow. Like law of attraction. I don't think that that's doing better than nothing. But I don't think that by there's there's data that shows that you can trigger the same dopamine receptors. When you think about getting a billion dollars, then when you get a billion dollars. Like, it's a similar thing. Obviously, it's going to be a lot less intense when you think about it. But when you daydream about all these amazing things that are happening, it doesn't actually change the reality of your existence. It's only giving you small dopamine.

When you could get yourself to have a firm belief that something is going to happen and that nothing is getting it in the way, your actions are going to be reinforced by that. Well, the action is the only thing that will matter. I think there's got to be a belief in yourself to stick with those actions. You have declarative knowledge, but also those are skills. And so, like, so if someone tries 100 times versus 10 times, I would say the fact that they took more action is the reason they got to where they're trying to go. Now, when we try to get to, like, why did they do that, I don't think anyone has the answer to that. I think the reason for that is because no one knows why they do. I think they have a core belief in what they're doing. So that dealing is going to have an outcome. To defend Graham, when I first reached out to Graham to try to provide value to him. Exactly. I managed outside of my room. You manifested this podcast. I had no skills whatsoever. The only thing that I had. had was high confidence in my aptitude and confidence and competence. I knew that I could provide value, but it was more of just like something that existed in my brain. I don't know if I necessarily had evidence to

support that. I just knew that I was competent enough. And so maybe I manifested that. One could argue that. So the big, zooming all the way out here just for context, I think the reason that people get really up in arms about it is because like, I mean, these are these are dogmas, right? These are belief systems, which people operate at their very core, which really just means ways of being, which means ways of behaving, and ways of talking is included in that in terms of behavior. But people have a very hard time

defining what the hell they're talking about when we ask some of these words that are amorphous. And so I have, by and large, just removed them from my vocabulary so that I can describe the observable, and it has been probably the single most productive thing that I have done in my career. And so is it a small hill?

It is probably the only hill and the main hell that I will die on, which is that behavior rules everything. And you have a history of past, you know, reinforcers or punishers for a set of behaviors and you repeat them in the future. And that's the only thing that I'll say about why someone does something.

You've been rewarded in the past for reaching out to people for doing things. And it can be cross domain. So it's like maybe you reached out to girls and they was able to jump into business and you were able to reach out to business owners. Definitely not the girls though. Well, I know that.

I know. It's a hypothetical, obviously not jack. But like, but like you get the idea of like it's across. But like those are just sets of skills. Those are behaviors. And so folks, exclusively on behaviors and unbundling terms that are amorphous has been, I think, the key to my ability to communicate to people, train staff, and kind of enlist people to where we're trying to go.

And I think that, like, that has really been, like, when people are like, man, I feel like Alex is so good at making things clear. It's like, because I just do not use amorphous language. And if I want to use the term, I will define the term. So now, by the observable. But I believe to shift belief starts with mindset. Well, it's like we're so many, it's like what's belief, what's my, like what's belief, what's mindset, what's manifesting. You're going with this is like, this isn't not to put like, I actually just, I just want to help.

Not, not you guys, everyone else. No, but I just, I don't think it serves people. And that's why. And like, I just don't like, necessarily like, I mean, yes, you feel great about it. I'm glad that if you, if you had the option between making 100 phone calls and sitting there and manifesting, you will get further making 100 phone calls. And so I'm trying to decrease the amount of time it takes people to just do this. thing. It's funny, the first podcast we had with you, you were mentioning that you had recently removed the word. I think it was should. It was should. You had also removed like because.

Yeah. Cause of relationships. We don't know. You, you remove all of these words in every single podcast. You're like, I've since removed this word. And now I guess it's just like you've gone to the meta of just reducing amorphous descriptions of things. Just to the observable. Just to the observable. just to the observable on this existence. It's been, it will be, I'll call this, I think that the book that I write on behavior while it's how all of my books put together. Tell us about the book on behavior.

I'm curious about it. Well, it's not, it's, it's outlined. You're cooking though. Yeah, it's cooking. But I have this belief, and it's probably my own limitation, but I want to have a publicly verified billion-dollar plus net worth so that I can then, I think, have the pedestal, or at least the pencil is not the right word.

Credentials. I'll give you an explanation of what I'm named by this. So it's like in the beginning we have to start defining terms of like what's the, what's the meta concept that I kind of operate off of? And the biggest one is fundamentally that, like what is learning, right? Like what is learning? Rappitation. So it's same condition new behavior.

That's fundamental, like from a behavioral science perspective, it's like if you were, so if you're, you know, person is condition A. and then we teach them something. When they re-enter condition A, they change their behavior. So it's observable. So same condition of behavior. If the phone rings and you say X, Y, Z, and then I say, hey, don't say X, Y, Z, Y, W. The phone rings again.

You say X, Y, Z, Y, W, you have learned. If you say Z, Y, W, you have learned. If you say something else, you've learned, but the wrong thing, right? But fundamentally, it's a change in behavior within the same condition. And so it's like, okay, if we say that as kind of like tenant number one, the next tenets, like, okay, then what is intelligence? So intelligence is going to be rate of learning. So if I have to do that, you know, example, 10 times with, you know, Jack and five times with Graham, then Jack has less intelligence than Graham does in this context. This is a hypothetical Jack and hypothetical Graham. These names are completely taken at random. But then it's like that, but the reason I think that's important is because then it allows people to have direct influence on their own intelligence. So if you learn faster, you change your behavior faster than somebody else, then you can in a very real way be more intelligent than them. And so when we asked originally like, you know, do you have to have wrong intelligence? I think it depends on what type of intelligence we're talking about when it comes to,

it's learning behaviors, this is how I define it. But beyond that, it's like, okay, well then, like a lot of words, be like, so what's an excuse? So, like, an excuse is a statement to avoid punishment, which is very simple. It's like, okay, that's what, it's a statement that, like, someone says something, like, what's an excuse? Like, show me when an excuse has occurred. And by looking at, like, you know, patients, I've defined this plenty of times because I had to use it all the time, which is figuring out what to do in the meantime. So if you say to a young kid, be patient, they don't know what that means. It's a bundled term. It means nothing. Be patient. It means nothing. So how to give some directions on how to be patient,

figure out something else to do. That's all you have to do. We are all being patient right now for our S&P 500 accounts. We're doing something else. That's all we have to do is just something else. And so it makes patients operationalized, right? Like, how can I do patients? So you're really just kind of redefining all of these words, or at least simplifying them.

The words that are important, and by defining them, it's more putting them into a context that... We're all talking on the same plane? Well, it's defining them within the observable universe. Oh. That way we can all agree. these are the things that we see. When someone has exhibited resiliency, it means that they've returned to a baseline of behavior

and how resilient they are depends on how quickly they do that. If someone's not very resilient, it means that they extend the change in behavior for a long period of time. If they're permanently, quote, traumatized, it means they never change their behavior. Right?

So it's like, what's trauma? Right. Trauma is a permanent change of behavior based on an adverse stimulus, a negative stimulus, right? But then the question is, okay, if we have this trauma, right? And then people are like,

I store trauma in my spine. It's like, what? Where is there? Is there a hard drive in your, like where, what cell is this being? People just say things. And so it's just, it's a permanent change of behavior from something bad happening. Okay. Now, if you're a little baby and you touch a stove and it burns your hand and that's an

aversive stimulus and you change your behavior, you don't touch hot stoves again, was trauma bad? I love that. I actually, like, once you said that you're redefining everything into terms of the observable universe, I think that that, like, I can be more excited. I think it'll be my most successful. I'm curious, though, for something. as, I would say, like... Like, what's courage?

What's courage, right? So the interval of time, a potentially bad thing, affects whether you do it. What about something that's so like, like, purpose or meaning? Those, I feel like are really... Like, I can't imagine how to define those.

I don't know. I think they're definable. It just takes a long time to really think, like, the question you have to answer is, what would someone do for me to say purpose has occurred? I guess maybe you could track something. That's why it's so hard.

That's why it's, you have to, because you have to completely shift how you're seeing things and be able to observe them, kind of like firsthand. And so it's like, what's authenticity? It's how you behave when you have no risk of punishment. And someone that obeys all of the terms that you've outlaid in that book.

It's not of obeying. It's just like this is tip, like, I have to define these terms in order to talk about them because they're also amorphous. If I never define them, then I would just be making face noise and other people would be perceiving my face noise in whatever way they think it means, which they haven't defined anyways. And so then there'd be a lack of communication. I think fundamentally, like good communicators are able to transfer ideas efficiently

because they use language that everyone understands and ideally things that everyone can observe with their own two eyes. And so I try and stick to everything being observable. And so as a result, it's made persuasion way easier. The most important one is that like if I want to train, which happens a lot in a business setting, it's like, how do you train someone?

And you're like, be more confident. What does that mean? Tell a six-year-old, be confident. It means nothing. It means nothing. They might just say like, that means talk louder. I don't know what that means. Right.

And so it's a bundled term. So we have to break the term down. like, okay, well, this is actually a series of many behaviors underneath of confidence that when taking an aggregate, we then describe that person as confident. So maybe they look at you in the eyes when they talk. Maybe they nod their head when they're listening. Maybe they repeat back the last thing that you said. Maybe when there's something that has potential risk or downside, they're willing to do it. Like these are all things that we can observe. And they say, okay, well, if you have these, these, you exhibit these traits, these skills in this setting, people describe you as confident. Does that make sense?

And so being able to break things down like that has allowed me to help my team when I'm like, hey, you know, I've told the story before, but basically I had a guy who, you know, a lot of people were saying, hey, this guy's acting like a dick.

But he was a star performer. We're like, okay, well, let's see if we can save him, you know. And so we talked to three or four of the leaders in the company and he was still a dick. And so I was like, well, what did you tell him? We were like, oh, we told him to stop being a dick. I was like, okay, well, so I ended up meeting with him

and I was like, I want to be clear. I don't really care if you're a dick or not. I do care if people describe you as a dick. And I want to, like, the purpose of this meeting is the decrease of like that everyone talks to me about you again in a negative context. Cool? Great. So that was the agenda.

It's like, all right. So in order for that to occur, let's talk about the things that when you do them, people don't like them and they call you a dick. So it's like when you interrupt people during a meeting, they think you're a dick and they call you a dick later. When you tell someone how to do their job, they call you dick and you try and force your agenda, whatever. It was two or three examples.

And he was like, so that's all I have to do. I was like, yep, that's all you have to do. So what if, you know, I present this thing and then they don't execute on it? I was like, then that's not on you. That's on the manager. And I'll talk to the manager and make sure that they're executing. That's not on you. That's not your role.

And so once that got clear, all of a sudden, he just stopped doing the three things that everyone, the three behaviors that people then laddered up to saying he's a dick. And then they stopped calling him a dick. And then everyone's like, oh, he's like, night and day, totally different. But it was just like no one's specific with their language. And so no one knows what anyone was talking about. And I think the vast majority of people don't communicate well with one another because both people are saying words that neither person understands and no one's to find anything.

And that's why most people can't communicate at all. And that's why most people are dissatisfied with their life. And that's why they can't manage their relationship because they're like both people get upset. No one knows how to communicate. And then that's it. They just like they want the other person to guess what behavior they don't like. And so it's like even if I said, oh, you know, John's lazy. You have to think.

And this is why most people don't do is because it takes work. You have to think, okay, I think John's lazy. Why do I think John's lazy? What occurred? What did I observe that then made me think that? Now, you might find out, it's like, you know what? He's actually just slow to respond. Okay.

Is there anything else? There was one meeting he came ill prepared. Is there anything else? No, I think that was actually it. Okay. So when I go to John, instead of being like, hey, you're lazy. I'm going to say, hey, I need you to speed up your responses to under five minutes. And when you come to a meeting, have your notes ahead of time.

Just send them to me. All of a sudden, John's not lazy anymore. But it's because it was this very micro thing that we then, ladder up to this amorphous term that no one can understand. And so this is, this has been a huge area of interest for me in defining reality. And I think that honestly, it's helped me navigate reality really well and make higher quality decisions. Someone reads his book, how would it be actionable for them to get those ideas across with somebody else who hasn't read the book and they would have to define the terms? They would have to define the terms.

It's getting a complicated word and then simplifying it into the layman. Right. So then we don't have, Well, they're not, they're currently not communicating with that person. So, like, how would they talk to somebody who hasn't read the book? The way they always do, which is nothing, which the thing is, is the point that you hit on underpins the fact that most people can't communicate well at all. Right. And so if a lot of people want to be different than they are, and I am, you know, first in line on that. There are many things that I've wanted to be different about myself for a very long period of time. And this book and these ideas have been the culmination of trying to change these things. about myself. I would say I want to be more authentic. I'm like, well, what's authenticity? How do I be more authentic? What do I do? Well, it's like, okay, well, authenticity is how you behave when there's no risk of punishment. And so if there's no risk of punishment, how you behave, basically, if you're alone and no one can find out about what you do, that's you authentically. Now, the problem is that in society, we also have rules that govern other people's behavior, right? Which means that the only truly authentic person is someone who behaves the exact same way alone as they do in

public, which will probably have something to do with your preferences. And so can you be truly authentic only in that subset of people who act with complete freedom, and when they act with complete freedom, act within the rules of the law? Anyone else who has any inclinations to do anything that's outside of society's preferences or the rules that govern how we interact with each other or the laws, right, has to, by the very definition, not be authentic or be less than 100% authentic. And I see many of these traits as not binaries, are you authentic or not authentic, but how authentic are you and also in this setting. And if it's like, man, this sounds like it's a little bit more complex, it's like, yeah, welcome to reality. So how have you been holding yourself back in

terms of authenticity? Well, it's also the question of, uh, is being 100% authentic something that is I should be. I mean, realistically, probably not. Right. And so again, but the thing is, is once we define the term, we actually can have a discussion about it because now we're all talking the same language. And it's much more productive. But it's also way less charged from a, Like if we had never defined the term, then you would have maybe been like, what do you mean? Like, you don't think you're authentic? I'd be like, well, not 100% of the time. It's like, wait, so you're lying to people, right?

And it's like, we don't define the term. And then all of a sudden we're attacking each other rather than just saying like, well, no, I act differently in private than I do in public. To a certain degree, I walk around naked. Like, if I walk around naked in public, that would probably be just, but I'm being a little bit inauthentic right now. I'm wearing clothing. I normally wouldn't wear clothing, right? You know what I'm saying? And so, again, that what we're doing?

is it adds nuance. But B.F. Skinner, who's a famer behavioral scientist, said, if many variables exist, many variables must be studied. And so a lot of people want a very neat box with clean lines and say, like, this is the way it is. And I don't think reality is that way. Like, it's not, is this person honest or dishonest is how honest are they? How loyal are they? I'm curious, you take a blank slate person. They read and apply everything that you write in this book. What does their life look like a year down the road, five years down the road? Great question. So the book will by no means be a here is how to live life because that assumes that I know and that I think they should do something I think it's more if you want these things these are the recipes for achieving

them so if you want to be perceived as patient figure out things to do in the meantime if you want to be perceived as authentic behave more in a way that you do in private and public if you want to you know be perceived as more courageous then decrease the time between when you perceive something as risky and when you take action on it. All of a sudden it's like, oh, so I want these traits. And so this would, in my opinion, be the first way that, at least the first place I've seen where there's like a recipe, like do this. How would you explain it to a child who doesn't know what the words mean? And I think that's what allows, well, I mean, it's what allowed me, is what has allowed me to exhibit more traits that I wanted to have versus traits that I didn't

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And until I had that, I just was like, why do people describe me this way? It was because I couldn't break down what I had to change it, but what I did to change basically reality. You're in a great position to talk about it, too. It's interesting because you've mentioned this years ago that you had an issue. I think it was with anger. And you also had the patience thing. Yeah. But it does appear as though you've made pretty significant strides in applying corrective behavior to those traits.

More on patience, less on anger, but better. And how does anger affect? negatively, maybe your business or your life? Like, what have you noticed? Okay, well, I'll say that the negative effects of anger for me have probably just come in almost entirely from the way that people treat me, not in terms of negative outcomes business-wise.

I think the reason that I still have anger is because it has served me. So I think we repeat things that have served us in the past. And so I think one of the reasons that people misunderstand why they do things is because people ask the question, what triggered that? You ever heard that? It's like, oh, something triggered this behavior.

But it's not about what happened before. It's about what happened after the last time you did it. So I'll give you a real example. So if Layla gets upset, and this is something that I've really actively worked a lot on, if Lila gets upset and she gets, like she cries if we're having some, you know, whatever, I had a tendency to try and comfort, comfort for a short period. And then if that didn't work, I would get angry. When I would get angry, she would get scared.

when she would get scared, she would stop crying. And so when I got angry, she stopped crying. And so I learned that if I got angry, I got my wife to stop crying. And so it was a very reinforced, I only figured that out later. And so it's a very reinforcing thing. It's like, oh, if I can, this gets Layla to stop crying, right? And so to the same degree, so I've been rewarded in that setting. But obviously, she's like long-term into roads.

So then I have to work on that, right? If I value the relationship, which I do. But the same context with my team, right? if I am quick to anger or be cold or sharp with someone, and it doesn't even have to happen often. Like if you do it once or twice, or even if you do it in front of somebody, not directed towards them,

they're like, well, I never want, because modeling is a great way that people learn. If someone shows up late and I yell at that person, then everyone else is still afraid of me and doesn't want to shot a plate either, right? And so what happens is the flow of communication from other people to me slows down because they're afraid of getting punished by me.

And so I see that as not positive for the business, is me not having the information. Now, how do I cover for that? Well, I have somebody like Layla who always gets all the information, and that's why she's CEO and doesn't have direct reports. And so we've been able to manage that within the business operationally. But in terms of me personally, like, I want to be better about that. And so that's like an example of something that I'm working on. What's interesting is I kind of have a similar thing in terms of like if I, if someone's emotional to me, I have very, very little patience, unfortunately for it. And it's one of my shortcomings. Yeah. Since you fixed that, how have you noticed?

Oh, fixed. You know, better. Sure. Okay. Since you try to improve upon that, how have you noticed that change in real observable ways? Well, I mean, Layla has now also, because she understands how this stuff works too, because we talk about all the time, like she has tried to reinforce whenever I'm not angry and she's upset. And so either in the moment or immediately afterward, she's like, thank you for not getting upset and thank you for being there for me and thank you for just hugging me and, you know, just waiting it out, essentially. And so I just have to remember that when I'm in those settings. And the more times she reinforced, it, the less strong the other reinforcers is, the stronger the new one is. A lot of this stuff has come from suffering, like, being like, why can't I be this way? Like, I want to be this way, and I can't. Like, why can't I? And it's like, because I don't know how. Why don't know how? Because I have no

words that have described how to do it well. So how do I change this in reality? And so it's been, it's been the result of a lot of seeking and a lot of pain. And that's, so I don't, I don't see it is logical. I see this as just descriptive. Like, this is, this is how it works. But, but you're able to, to assign a new timeline in terms of when you learn something to, to, to, to a longer period of time, rather than most people, which assess things over a shorter period of time. For example, like, you know, when you would get angry at Layla, like, she would quiet. And they're like, okay, like, this works. But then you're able to then see way deeper into the future and then make decisions based off of that. Even that this isn't going to work long term? Yeah. Well, yeah, I'll get feedback.

And I mean, to be fair, I'll get feedback immediately afterwards where, you know, she might not be happy. Fair, yes. You know what I mean? And so I think, like, it comes down to what are the things that we want to change and then how do we change them. And ideally, we want to have some sort of reward cycle as fast as possible with that new behavior. And that's, I think that's how fundamentally you can change what you do, which then letters up to who you are. Moving on from that, in terms of Acquisition.com, how has your criteria changed for businesses over the last two years? It's just much bigger.

It's just the businesses have to be a lot bigger. They have to be billion-dollar opportunities now. When I first started, I think honestly, when I first started, the goal was like $50 million opportunities. And then it became like $250 million opportunities. It's almost like five-axed, actually. Like every like 18 months or so, it's almost five-xed. So how does it work exactly? A company reaches out to you and they say, hey, we want to be-

They'll go through acquisition.com on the site. And what do they do? They submit their info. that they want money or they want to sell? It depends. What is it? So we have, we have, we have, um, we basically have three kind of places that someone can go. So for like seed capital, SaaS, you know, software type startups, we have ACQ Ventures,

which is our venture arm. And so those are typically like smaller checks that are between like 50 and a million dollars, like check sizes. And so we do, you know, a lot of those deals. We do probably like a couple deals, three, four deals a month sometimes. Like December, we did four. I think we did four in January. like we do a decent amount of deal volume there. And those deals are much more like meet the founder, understand the idea,

cool, we can just deploy. We have the private equity side, which is kind of like the big, big boy side. And those businesses, like, if we're going to do a deal, they're all bespoke based on, you know, the values of the business, where we think the business can go, what our value at is. And typically in that side, it's like right now we're 40% SaaS, 40% B2B services and the 20% consumer services. And we're shifting over time towards just a blend of

SaaS and professional services. That just tends to be where we just do really well. And so that's on the private equity side. And then we have the advisory division, which we started in January of last year, which is companies that are like not really portfolio ready. And so that's kind of like that, you know, $1 million, $10 million, $30 million,

sometimes dollar per year business, where it's like they need to change a couple of things. And the reason that happened was for the three years prior to January of last year, we'd look at a business. We'd do four, five, six diligence calls, get to understand the business. And a lot of times, like, 90 times out of 91, we'd be like, not a fit for us or not for us right now. Maybe change these two things, move this metric up. And when you do, like, call us back. And what ended up happening is a lot of founders were like, this was more valuable than anything I've ever had to go through.

And thanks for doing it for free. And for me, it was like, it was actually super expensive because I'm doing that 90 times, times however many calls, lots of companies. And I was like, I wonder if we could do this in a way that we could charge, do the same, basically, assessment of a business and say, here's all the things that we would do. Here's how we change it. And so then we, you know, we wanted to see people were interested in. So January, I was like, hey, if anyone else to come out to headquarters, you can meet my portfolio team, we'll kind of assess the business and be like, these are the blockages to either making it more valuable or scaling it. And so it's like, you'll meet with my head of marketing.

He'll be like, okay, change this on your webpage, change this on your ads, change this, whatever. We meet my head of sales. If sales is a constraint, these are the things that we do. And people have really, really, really liked it. So it's been exceptional. And I think the reason that it works so well is that there's kind of what I was alluding to the beginning is that there's just not a lot of help at that one to $100 million range. And I think we can provide that. How do you make money from that?

Are you taking distributions from the company or have you sold some? No, no. We sell it as an advisory service. It's just a service. They're just overall for acquisition. Yeah, yeah. Oh, overall. Well, no.

We have distributions that come from the private equity side. Okay. The venture checks, obviously, I'm not going to see anything for that. for 10 years and then services just normal business. Why don't you have a website or a place where people could see the companies that you've invested in? It's a good question. It's something that I've gone really back and forth on. The main reason is like when I sold gym launch, I sold Prestige Labs, which was a sister company that did supplements and sold through the distribution base. And I remember in the diligence meetings for that, it was like a huge point of contention that I had a 10,000

person Instagram following at the time. And they were like, are all the superiors? is coming from your Instagram and the business doing like 20 million a year just the just the supplement side and I was like no it's not coming they're like well this could be this could be an issue for us if like we can't have complete control of the Instagram and how do we know you're going to keep promoting it I was like my Instagram is not driving like 10,000 people does not make a 20 million like I promise you and seeing how sensitive they were to kind of like key man risk around you know an acquisition I was like okay if I do deals and I grow my brand I don't want people to know what the companies are because I'm going to have to have to go, like I'm going to write a check, but then if I publicly associate with it, then I'm going to have to go with the deal later. So like, for example, school, that was purposely, you know, like a brand association plus money, obviously that went into it. But I know that I'm in that, I'm in that for the long haul. You know what I mean? Like, I'm going to be with school for many, many years. And so my key man risk is something that I'm willing to basically deal with. Whereas if I buy a, you know, an HVAC business, I publicly associate with it, a potential

acquire will want me to sign some other non-competes. I'll have to have some provisions around promotion and I just didn't want to do that. I have gone back and forth on it, though, to be really, like I've gone back and forth. It seems to me like there would be a net benefit on that. It reminds me some of the- I've gone back and forth. I have gone back and forth on it, like a Shark Tank business, where it's like, as seen on Shark Tank is pretty big.

And you could argue that the business you bring to that will drive up the valuation to a point. Or even without you, it's still higher than if you were never involved. Agreed. So then the next thing that goes is if I have all of these different things that I'm like pseudo-promoting, then it almost feels like I'm shilling a lot of things. No. And so that's been, that's been where I've been.

I would just, as a viewer of you, not that anyone, like, not that I would question your credibility, but I think that it would bring a lot more clarity where I've actually seen back and forth on it. I mean, I've gone back and forth. And I think it would attract a lot more businesses where you could say, hey, when you started with Acquisition.com, you were valued it this much, your revenue was this much, and now look at you. Here's the other thing I think. It would help you negotiate better terms saying that you're going to be on this website where

it's even a hundred companies. And I think it's important you put them all in the same place so that it's not like you're promoting this or promoting that or you should never talk about these businesses unless in a podcast setting where you're giving an example. The other the other and yeah, I mean, I've been very, I've been torn on it. I was like, you know what I mean like I've been very like because of all the reason I just said. But the other one is kind of like the compliance thing that I just said, right? Like if a company, could you imagine like a company does something stupid and companies do stupid things. Even if I wrote a venture check to a business and then a company does something, I'm an owner. And any, any, you know, reporter or, you know, clout seeking YouTuber

would then be like, Hermosie is saying, doing this. And it's just like, how is it different from Y Combinator, where they're very public? Yeah. A lot of these, like, even some of these private equity funds are just like. That's their value prop, though. Why she's value prop is Harvard's value prop. It's like the main thing they get is. Yeah, but there are plenty that go through white. combinator that just turn out to be, you know, maybe not the best. Yeah. But I think it's, well, why common are kind of unique in that, like, I mean, to be fair, if a Harvard grad does something bad, Harvard takes a head. Um, but it is a law of luxury. It's, it's going to work both ways. Yeah. I think, I think it's going to hurt you if a business does something that reflects on you.

And if you do something, it reflects on all the businesses. I think it goes both ways. I think the net benefit is like a 51 to a 49. Yeah. Like, 40% down is a 51%. Like, I have, I have gone back in forth to the two-ry where I've been like, I'm going to make all of our stuff public. I think we are, I think the ACQ ventures, if I'm not mistaken, I think our ventures, things are public. So it's really just the private economy side. What about school? What was your mindset behind that? School was interesting one. So, you know, for me to, again, this is like, you know, using brand to promote something, right? You know, I'd been four years that have been making

content and really never promoted anything. And when I look at it, you know, I look at it. my audience, I make business content almost exclusively, but still like 60 something percent of my audience is people who want to start a business, not people who have a business. And I think that's just the nature of just humans. Like there's way more people who don't have businesses than people who do. You know, 9% of business, 9% of people own businesses and 91 don't. And so if we're at 30% or 33% people who are in my audience own businesses, we're three or four times represented on, like overrepresented by business owners because I make business content. Anyways, to answer the question, I was like, is there something that I can do with this larger audience that can help them get started in a scalable way that would provide value to everybody?

And so I, you know, I got approached by a gazillion companies probably like you do over the years for the audience and the access and the distribution that we have. And school was a company that I had been following since 2018. So I've known Sam for a long time. And I just kept watching it. And it just kept getting better and better and better. and the it's just like all I heard was good. It was just all good word of mouth because I'm so concerned with my reputation too that I'm like, if I promote anything and it's not awesome, you know what I mean?

Like I could take a hit. And so that company was just compounding month over month every month, just on word of mouth. It had zero marketing whatsoever. It had amazing customer retention in terms of people who started communities and also member retention. People were in community. So it's like people are in there getting good experience, people who are starting

communities are getting good experience. And I think that there's a big movement in general. like meta towards communities overall. And so I thought like from a macro perspective, I think it's a good, it was well, well timed and well placed. And then beyond that from a long term strategic perspective, like it has network effects built in. And so even in an AI world, like I think it will do, it'll do great. And so for all those reasons, it was also something that would work for people who were just getting started. And so that's why I invested in school and I promoted it. So I thought it would help the 60-something percent that didn't have businesses

get started. And also for the 30-something percent of people who had businesses who wanted to have a place that's not like an email list for all their people to house, I saw it as a much better option than like a Discord. Do you worry when it comes to school? The one thing that I've seen in terms of a bit of a complaint, seems to be that there is at some level this like MLM aspect to it where I've seen schools that people promote that teachers. you how to make money on school. Yeah. So like a school for school.

I think that's just gonna happen no matter what. Like, there's YouTube channels about how to make YouTube channels. There's like, if there's anything that someone has figured out to generate a living, then there's gonna be people who sell how to do that thing. And so I think if we chunk up a level, the question is, is there something wrong with that? Right. And then number two, the MLN component, so I can break that in two parts. The MLM thing is just like, we have a referral commission, which is like not a very uncommon strategy.

And the internet. Yeah, the internet doesn't really deal with nuance, but it's not like it's multi-level, and MLM has multiple levels. This has one. You refer a friend, you get a percentage. Like your credit. Like anything. Like if I refer you business, you probably give me 20%.

So like, you know, whatever. But yeah, that's just because the internet doesn't deal with nuance. So that's the not MLM, the single SLA, the single level of marketing that exists there. In terms of what people do with their community, we're pro free speech. anti-censorship, like, if it's legal, you can, you can have a community about it. You know, if you want to have a community about painting, have a community about Facebook ads. Have a community painting about Facebook ads. You want to be a community about Facebook ads. You want to be finding the perfect clone for you. You can have that. You want to have one about painting model cars. You can do that.

You want to have making sick beats. I'm just naming all the top of my head, all different communities. And if you want to have one on how to make a school community profitable, have, like, we're not going to say, like, you can't start a community about that. Like, how can we do it? We've with millions. We have tens of millions of users. Tens of millions. It's very big. It's much bigger people think it is. And so like either you have to start saying making this rule and that rule and then you get down the whole rule strap or you just say like you can make a community about whatever you want as long as it's legal. And that's how that's where we decided to draw the line. Should we create a community about how to podcast or just podcasting? You could. I'm sure

would crush. You think it would crush? What it? Yeah. I don't agree. I don't know. We've been thinking about making making content like talking about production equipment. Isn't that MLM? A podcast about how to podcast? Then you have to ask, is there anything wrong about that? That's why Jay loves it. Right. Exactly. And so what?

And so what? And what's wrong with that? I'm going to out myself right here. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with an MLM. However, they're used in really inappropriate ways a lot of the time. But inherently, it's just an affiliate program. I feel where it goes wrong is people are deceptive about maybe the practices or the buy-in. I've studied this.

It's so much. It's like I can say it very succinct. The problem is that the promise doesn't match the deliverable. Okay. That's it. It's false expectations. That's it. Fundamentally, the vast majority of people who advertise, especially in the information space, do not advertise compliantly.

And so as a result, they make promises they can't keep. And so people get false expectations. That being said, do I think there's anything inherently wrong about saying, like, I learned how to do this? I put tons of hours into compiling all this stuff. And if you like me and you like my style of teaching, you can buy it for me in this video course. And I know you used to have one. Like the, the question is, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with education or even profiting from education. Colleges do it. Why can colleges do it and give people zero ROI? And no one says college is a scam. But the vast majority people still

think college is not a scam. It's simply because they don't promise anything. That's it. That's fundamental. Like, it just comes down to that. If you just don't promise anything, then you're kind of in the clear. If you're like, hey, I put together a course on how I, you know, how I succeeded as a, as a realtor. I make no promises to whether I can follow it or it's going to be perfect for you. I just share the stuff that worked for me. If you want to go check it out, it's whatever. It's over here. You can go check it out and buy it. I don't think anyone's like, screw this guy. Now, some people will be because that's the internet. But like, anybody would I consider be reasonable? No. And I think to, you know, to a large degree,

like, we can't listen to everyone because you will have people who are just upset about you not sharing your stuff as people who are upset with you sharing it. And so might as well upset the people who don't pay you. Vegas Matt also put it really well because he was involved in one before, you know, who Vegas Matt is? So he's a YouTuber here in Las Vegas. He's a massive YouTube channel on gambling. But he said that MLMs are effectively better because the money actually goes to the people that are closing the sale rather than giving it to advertisers that are just going to in and date people. Oh, yeah.

They just take the, I mean, from a business model perspective, you take your advertising, you basically take your entire allowable cost to a car customer and say, instead of giving that to anything, I will just give that all to my sales team. And then I will incentivize them to recruit other salespeople so that we can have a continued distributed base. So that instead of having a sales manager who's getting paid a base salary and a small percentage of everyone sales, it's just like it's all performance. And having the multi-level structure allows you to recruit teams, just like you would in a business. Wait, all businesses are pyramids. Are all businesses pyramid schemes? Like, you know, come on. Like, it's Illuminati.

You know, like, we just say things. But no, I don't think there's anything here. I think where people get in trouble is making deceptive claims and making false promises. is or promises that they know to not be true. And the associations, so basically MLM has a bad brand. As a bad brand. It does. There's enough negative associations that people who might be otherwise really good MLMs still take the heat for the bad ones. People who sell information and education will take the heat for all the people who sell the bad ones. And so that's the, that's the rub. I don't think there's anything wrong with selling education. It is interesting how

deeply rooted that hatred is for a lot of people. It is like the most sensitive topic for a lot of people. I'm curious, are there any business models that you kind of secretly hate but they're highly profitable? Maybe because they're like intellectually lazy or like just morally lazy maybe too. No. You'd say anything. I very much stand from the position like if it's legal, then, you know, do if someone is willing to exchange money. Like again, capitalism based on voluntary exchange between two parties and both parties make the exchange voluntarily because they both believe they'll be better off. Now, the belief part is where deceptive components come into play, right? But inherently,

I don't have an issue with someone make, like, I don't claim to have a moral superiority that my way of making money is better than someone else's way of making money. Now, my business might be perceived as more valuable to an investor, which is a different thing. So if you're like, are there business models that make cash flow but don't have inherent value? Yeah, there's tons of those. But do I see that as bad? No. I just see this different. And that's fine. So if someone were to take school as an example and just copy it and do their own thing. Why do you think that business would fail? Network effects.

We already have tens of millions of users. It's very hard to do. And what if that person... It's also the details. Why doesn't someone just copy Facebook? It's like they could just copy it exactly. It's like, yeah, the people aren't there. What if there's another influencer who's backing like school 2.0.com, I want to say.

It's also easier said than done. You know, it's a copy. Like, there's a lot of details on how it's programmed and how it works and what content gets surfaced and what algorithms run. Like, there's a lot of details in the business that make it. And it's, the product is so detail-driven. It's all the tiny things. It's not like you can copy the colors and the layout.

And there have already been plenty of people moved on that. But they don't go anywhere. And so, but we could say that about any business. Yeah. What do you think is the best business right now? Because it seems like from my perspective, just on a high level, the subscription model is doing really well, charging one price for the year or like, break it down monthly.

That seems to be the new thing. So, like, what's from your perspective? What changes in the digital creator space? Generally. But every business has gone to now the subscription model. Like, I'm paying more. I remember when I used to be able to buy Adobe Photoshop for, like, a hundred bucks. And now it's like 30 bucks a month or like $40 a month for the same thing.

Yeah. Is it a ripoff or if we're willing to pay for it? I'm extremely willing to pay for it. Yeah. If anything, it's a good deal. I'm willing to pay for it. Shut up. We'll be an affiliate.

Yeah. I would love that, man. I would be shilling Adobe all the time. Well, you believe in it. Maybe you should reach out of them. I feel like you'd push it so hard. It's worth it. Yeah, and it's a great.

No, no, it's not expensive. It's incredibly worth it. You know what? Anyone that half a brain would want to buy. Link down below. Get 15 bucks off your first month. But you know, before you go on that, I will say the biggest benefit or the best business that gets shit on all the time.

YouTube premium. Oh, yeah. Hey, spending money for YouTube because it should be free. I love YouTube premium. Love it. I think it's worth every penny. People just think they just project their own shows. I'm like, why they should, I shouldn't, I'm like what you should, that YouTube should pay all the servers and all the compute that they have and all the workers that work at YouTube should just be free.

Like, it's just this demand of the universe that like everything has to be given to me or else or else I'll be upset. I think also we make more money if people watch the ads versus getting YouTube premium and watching the video without. the ads. I think the ads pay more all things considered. YouTube claims that the premium views are worth more. Which I would believe, because if they're paying $15 a month then you just kind of have to... Okay, but then you just kind of have to do some simple math

and they need to watch like a million videos in a month. I don't know the breakdown on that. So I will answer the question that you originally asked, which is why is the subscription economy like doing... I'll just only answer specific to kind of creators, because I have a ton of obviously with school and then I am being one myself. I actually

just think that there's never been more creators and at the same time there's never been less trust. And so people don't trust other people as much. And so people are consuming significantly more content prior to making a purchase and the purchase that they make in general, the first purchases are lower, lower ticket on average. So maybe 10 years ago, people would immediately like see one video, hop on the phone and pay $5,000 for something or $10,000 for something. And that's just, it's significantly less likely now. and they're far more likely to buy, grab a book or grab a, you know, a $29 thing that they can try and see if the quality of the product is or quality of the community, the quality of the subscription is what they, what they deem it's supposed to be worth. And then they're willing to, you know, pay them for more expensive things.

So I think that what is more publicly seen is the subscriptions. I still think many of these businesses that do bigger profit numbers tend to also still have backends that are more premiumly priced either in terms of services or products or whatever. whatever. But the thing that is advertised on the front and for the vast majority of people, kind of like, you have your top of funnel shorts and then you have your longs, and then that converts into your kind of like low ticket. And then that ladders up into the, you know, 5% of those people or 10% or whatever percentage ascend into, you know, a higher level. In terms of hiring people, how do you spot an A player? I will say that I have yet to have an A player that don't know as an A player within the first

week or two. So what are the signs? Hmm? What are the signs? They meet, so like support, right? They decrease the likelihood of failure. So they are taking things off my plate really quickly. And they're proactive in terms of their decision making and the actions that they take. A lot of it is really just a tremendous amount of activity. High activity, high alignment. If you have both those things, you have somebody who's moving a lot of things in the right direction. And ideally, you get a lot of attention back. And so, like, if my life gets worse when someone starts, that's a bad sign. And if my life doesn't change when they start, that's also not that good of a sign either. Now, of course, there's a little bit of onboarding. You're going to have some

of that, that's sure. But like, by and large, I want to see some dramatic changes in how my time is getting allocated from bringing somebody in, especially if they're taking things off my plate. But I think that works at all levels. And what's one of the things that you still insist on doing personally, even though you could outsource it? Well, all the books. I write all the books. I write all my emails. I write, I mean, I do all the rewarding. Um, tweets. All the tweets are mine. all the tweets are mine honestly every every piece of written word that comes out of acquisition.com is me and that is a huge amount of work and so it's either me because they took it as a transcription from a video that I talked or I wrote it there's there's there's only one exception to that

but LinkedIn same thing Facebook same thing it's it's all tweets are actually my we were talking with this earlier but tweets are my is my biggest secret weapon for how I create so much content it's everything it's the it's the wellspring so i the tweets are my stream of consciousness uh in real time and then those tweets become tweet reels they become shorts if they're high performing i'll just say them um many of those shorts put together become longs that'll be you know business advice or brutally honest you know advice i wish i had had things like that it's just 20 30 tweets put together um with a little bit more anecdote um LinkedIn posts are multiple tweets along the same thing put together. Facebook, same thing. So like TikTok, same thing. Like everything actually,

and my emails are high performing tweet concepts that then get repurposed into email. So everything stemmed from like that one stream of consciousness. And I think like as a creator, you have to find whatever that that lowest friction method is for you. I always used to email myself like ideas, quotes, lessons, thoughts. And I used to use that as my method for making podcasts. And then I just had this like, duh, realization of like instead of just like email, myself, I could just email the world via tweet. And I would just like tweet them. And it also made me a much better writer because you have to be so concise with your language that I think is actually improved my writing from the book's perspective. Have you said anything that's recently gotten

backlash? I think I had a LinkedIn post that got taken a little bit out of context. So I have somebody who writes my LinkedIn, but it's my words, but he took it from like a podcast like this and just took it there and then just took an image and put it together. Um, And it was basically like, hey, for 10 years, I didn't like go to football games. I didn't play fantasy. I didn't go out. And I like skipped friends' weddings, like do whatever it takes to get where you want to go. Right.

And the amount of people that were like, so two different big backlashes. So backlash one was just like, this guy's hustle porn. Like all he wants to do is tell people to sacrifice. And I'll address that in a second. And then the other was like, what kind of life would you, like I would never skip a friend's wedding like this guy's priorities are all out of whack or whatever. And so both of them come down, I think, kind of like the do you, do you have an issue with somebody's business? It's like, do I have an issue with how someone lives their life?

No. Like, different destinations. Like, there's a, there's a guy who, like, is probably a lifestyle entrepreneur and likes to, like, talk shit about my stuff. And, like, I make in, like, a week what he's made, makes in a year. and he's a big, you know, whatever. And all I can think of when I say is like, we have different goals, dude. Like, we have different goals. Like, I don't, like, of course.

Like, it's like looking at professional bodybuilder. Like, he's like, well, I train twice a day and I weigh all my food. And like, I get massages and I do stretching. And it takes me about five or six hours a day to do, you know, all the bodybuilding stuff that I do. And then some crossfitters, like, that's ridiculous. I only work out three days a week. guy is trying to give you bodybuilding porn. It's like, bro, he's way bigger than you. And he has different goals than you do. And so it's just this whole idea of like should idas, of like they

shouldn't do that. They should do it my way, which fundamentally just is like, I have my life is based on my preferences and their life is based on theirs. Duh. And so if you want to go to your friend's weddings, by all means go to your friends weddings. I don't care. You know what I mean? Like if you want to have a dog, have a dog. Like I share the things and like the one line that I repeat over and again is, is like, my life is a documentary, not a sermon. I'm not telling people to do things the way I do them. I just share what has worked for me. And if it works for you, great. And if it doesn't, I love you, I love you all the same. Where I see a lot of the backlash is just because it comes off as dogma for everybody. Sure. But if you added the stipulation of, like, to those that want to build a

successful business, but that's also not necessarily, like, you don't need to cater to the people that aren't going to listen. Your footlong disclosures at the end of every one of your posts. It's like, I can't, if I put all the disclosures in my tweets, I wouldn't have tweets. I just have disclosures. So it's when I think I think the ball said something about this But basically it's like For a post to get reach It will have to have some sort of level of polarity And to have a level of polarity

You have to remove context And so it's basically like you can have complete context And no one can see it Or you can be willing to stand on one line of gray And say no for me If if more people were willing to delay gratification A little longer Because they saw some of my stuff

Rather than take immediate reward I can live with that It's interesting. Every time we talk to you, you're, you always say, oh, yeah, I recently did this. I recently evolved this. I have since developed this. You always have something that you have just done. Most of the time, oddly enough, it's not even adding things.

It's eliminating things. Usually words, you're not doing it. Or, yeah, making your criteria more strict. What's something right now that you're currently working on and maybe you don't have full clarity of it, but you're seeking clarity? Well, I mean, how I'm going to launch my next book is something that I'm thinking about just from a timing perspective. So that's something I'm thinking about. Honestly, a lot of my attention goes towards what I'm going to try not to do. And so it's an accurate observation. Because, I mean, if you listen to, you listen to all the grades, you listen to jobs, you listen to Bezos, you listen to Elon. Entrepreneurial grades, it's like they all talk about focus because it's so hard to do. It's so hard.

because the bigger you get, the more juicy and tantalizing the opportunities become, right? And it's like, and you have to just be like, nope, we're just going to keep doing this thing that I know all the pains of and like, we're just going to confront the issues we have and we're going to work through them one at a time when it's like, oh, but there's this amazing thing that could be fast and easy and it's like, it's just fast and easy because I don't know enough about it. And I just have to, and like, I've just been burned enough times jumping over that bridge to know that like the grass is greener. I just don't know enough. And the fact that I think it's a track. means I don't know enough.

And so, 2024 was the first time in my life where I've not had FOMO, and that was a first, my whole career, where I didn't have a moment where I was like, I should be doing that instead of this.

And I've been doing this, you know, I've been the entrepreneur game for a minute. And that was, it was only like I realized it in retrospect. That was like,

that was an accomplishment. That was a huge win for me. Because I've always had that, like, a buddy of mine, close friend of mine, did like $50 million in net earnings in Q4 just from trading crypto. no employees.

Like just, just traded crypto. I made $50 million in profit. And I, I remember thinking, in that moment, I was like, good for you,

man. Like, no idea how you do it. Don't want to know. I'm going to keep doing my thing. But like, at so many other points in my career, I would have been like,

oh my God, teach me. You're like, I want to learn what you're, like, and I would complete taking my eye off the ball. And the thing is, is like,

I think I've gotten this, a snowball that's finally started to roll and I say this now. hopefully knock on wood like it'll stay that way that um i'll manifest it uh teaching i'm i hope that i can stick i can stick with stick with it and because i continue to get rewarded for sticking with it and it's been the hard like acquisiton.com by by duration is the hardest single business that i've the longest duration that i've only done one thing um so that's been pretty cool besides besides jack's mom okay we're cutting that yeah why she was

amazing. She didn't tell you? No, she told me all about it, actually. I think... Did she tell you to call me dad? I think you are. I think I'm entitled to some... Am I in the will? You took that like a champ. Once you hit a Billy in your laugh,

it's starting to do a Bezos laugh. Gosh, I completely threw me out. I had something. That's what she said, too. I had a miss one in the canon. That's also what she said. Snowball. Snowball. It's rolling up. I hope that I can stay focused

for an extended period of time. Yeah. That sounds like something that Graham and I need to here exactly. Because we're so focused on making the content. And fortunately, like,

most of our revenue comes from the sponsors. And so we're able to travel around the world. We're able to spend money on the flights and the accommodations and the crazy post production, pre-production, the crazy $15 carseos.

Yeah, the G-wagon. We're able to do what we do because of the sponsors. and right now it's enough, but we want to always be improving. And so now we're thinking, like, well, what if we created a product or a service? And we're always having discussions about how we can do that.

But at some point, I always wonder, like, if we just focus on making better content, then we get better, like higher-paying sponsors, same sponsors, we love the sponsor, higher-paying sponsors,

because we're getting more views, and it's like a cycle because of that. But part of me also wonders, like, should we focus our efforts and something else? My thought with that is that I am happy also doing what we're doing now. And I kind of worry that, like, we're good at this thing.

If we don't sell our eye off the prize. We don't, but if we take the eye off what we're good at, now are we just adding more onto the plate where we don't need to, where we have a really great balance and a great life and things are going well. And if we're just trying to create something for the sake of creating something,

then maybe it won't be perfectly terrific. Right now, if we're just focusing on making the best content for you guys, the one's watching, then hopefully it's a pretty good product. Well, I have so many thoughts on this. Do we have five minutes? Because I think I have a very indebted answer for this. So basically, I see this as a spectrum. So it's a continuum that exists for, and this is specific for creators in terms of how to monetize. And so it's basically a spectrum that has risk and capital and effort kind of on either side. So like low risk, low capital effort, high risk, high capital, high effort. So all the way on the left, you have spot. sponsorships, right? Which is what you're doing now. Cool. You make money from doing the same thing. One degree to the right of that would be like an affiliate relationship. Like Adobe says,

hey, we'll give you 20% of all of them lifetime. It's like, okay, cool, Adobe, hit them up. You have an affiliate relationship. The next is when it starts to get a little bit, you have your drop ship, right? Your white label. You find somebody who just puts, and you did this with a coffee, I think, back in the day, right? Like you have that kind of middle ground. So somebody else is going to manage everything. I'm just going to promote it, but I'm going to own the brand. And that's that's that. The next degree here is where you have, you find an existing business where you can negotiate some percentage of equity in the business and ideally distributions and or royalties, which I'm a big advocate for creators to do both because you have costs associated with running the business, running your side of the marketing, right? And the business makes money because

it's monetizing with whatever traffic you're sending, but you need to keep advertising. And so having some, either, you know, profit share or some royalty on top line. or some sort of cash flow still needs to come back because not all companies sell. Actually, the vast majority don't sell. And so I think it balances some of the risk for a creator. But that would be a minority deal, especially with a company or a product that you really like.

And so if Adobe were smaller and would give you a percentage of, you know, the company, that would be one where it's like, and ideally this is, I mean, this is me turning the tables and speaking to you as an investor. It's the best is when you can write a check too. Because then it's like, there's no expectations.

I'm going to promote this because I believe in it and because I want it to grow and I want to get a crazy return on the money that I put into it. And so you'll have some blend that's gonna of that deal but usually for minority stake and maybe some performance tranches

that kick in based on how well you do it. And then the final one, the final frontier is where you actually like do everything yourself. Like the whole thing souped to nuts is like you're starting a business. That's you know,

Jimmy with the feastables, right? Like he's really just, starting a chocolate thing and finding cocoa nibs in Africa and doing all the stuff, right? And so the upside is typically higher on this side, lower on this side in terms of the enterprise value of, you know, what you're promoting. But so is the risk and the difficulty. And the idea that I think a lot of people miss out on it's like, it's so much about the partners that you're bringing in on the side that they have to, like in my opinion, for a true partnership to work, they have to be able to be successful without you. And if they're already growing, they're

already successful. This is like school. School's school school school school school's going to be successful either way. I just want to pull the future towards us faster. You need a partner who who is as good as you are or better. Ideally just amazing at that thing and you're amazing at this thing and then it's like the sum of the parts is what is where the magic happens. But those are basically that's basically the continuum. But if you're going to do anything to the right of the right of center there and you're not just like I'm either sponsoring or doing an affiliate deal, I think you can do like I think the best deals is kind of like the school deal where you you put cash in.

you, you, you know, buy a big stake, you also promote. Like, those are deals where it's like, I think, again, in terms of behavior, what is this going to change about what I do? And I would like to do deals that change as little or nothing about what I do. If I'm always going to make content anyways, and I'm already getting two-thirds of people who want to start a business, then I don't need to change anything. Now, it's still high leverage because I just point them in a direction. I'm like, hey, I've vetted this. I think it's awesome. I think it's a really good product.

Check it out. And it's free trial. If you don't like it, cancel. Right. That is basically my, and I would use that if I were you guys as my decision-making variable, which is you both accurately set it. We're really good at this thing. And the more we do this thing, better we get at it.

We get more views. We get the sponsorship to continue to grow. Fine. We can do some of these other deals as long as it changes nothing about what we do. And so I think that's the frame that you have to enter those conversations with, which is like, I'm already sponsoring. So me slotting your product in, which I also happen to own a piece of and get. get some kickback on, it doesn't change anything about what we do. But then that gives you some

long-term upside and maybe a higher distribution. This would be really interesting. How about this? For anybody watching, if you have a business that you think would align with what we're doing and you want the distribution, I'd be really interested to see who reaches out from this. That's a great idea. And also Adobe. And also if you guys would be interested if we were to create because Graham and I have thought about this and we've helped a lot of people just in consulting with content, specifically podcasting. If you guys think that there would be demand for that, so that's something that you'd want to see

if we went all the way in depth, pre-production, production, post-production, research, et cetera, let me know. I'd be open to that too. Yeah, I tried something on my own. I'll just talk about it briefly. I put a little feeler out there for like a networking community.

And I was shocked. We got thousands of people who reached out who said, I just want to be a part of a network of like other entrepreneurs. A community, on school perhaps. No, so we started the very top of the list, people who made more than 10 million a year. And I just didn't even think of, I just wanted to go and talk to these people. I probably talked to like 20 people.

It's the least scalable thing I could possibly do because I'm like talking one-to-one with certain people. It's not. Okay. Not when people want. I see that focus of his eye. Don't go up against that. So far we got a group of like a dozen people. Who are doing over 10?

Who are doing over 10 million a year. And it's just the coolest. group of like it's something magic when you're when you have a small community like that versus something it's too big but i say it's it's not scalable in the sense that once you get it seems like from i've spoken with quite a few people on this once you get more than like 30 or 40 people you start to lose that one-on-one connection that made it special in the beginning it's really about subgroups so if you look at like is it scalable at the current model no but our community is scalable for sure so if you look at um well you look at whycombinator they have a much larger

community than that. It's really cool. If you look at Vista, Sita, Vistage, which is a community model. If you look at YPO, if you're familiar with them, young professionals organization, they run, they're national and they have chapters, but they keep the forums to like eight people. And so that's, that's how they keep the, to the, you have access to the whole network because you're like, oh, I'm also a YPO person. I got, I got vetted. I, you know, I'm above a certain level, so you have that kind of cred. But like the, the actual super close-knit group is, is like eight people and they meet in person. And so, And so that's why I think they're, like, I think for sure there's, there's demand for something like that. Because people want, all successful people want to be around other successful people because it's really lonely.

Mm-hmm. That was the one thing I was surprised about when, when I was speaking with all of those people, only one of them said that their goal was to make more money. Okay. Only one. And that meant that maybe 30 people said, I don't care about making more money. All I care about is meeting other people who share the similar problems that, that I've gone. Slowly, yeah. And most of it, most of the problems are pretty surface level, it seems like.

it's like tax planning, estate planning, raising a family. Random business issues that come up for friends. Things like this. But I was shocked how common everybody. All the commonalities between everyone. Human problems have existed for a human lifetime. So I thought that was interesting. Yeah.

What is your experience of loneliness? I really like being alone. So I don't get super lonely to be super, like, candid with you. I think that there are experiences that feel isolating where you're like no one else is dealing with this but usually isolation is kind of like shame it only exists in the dark. Like if you go out and say like,

hey, I'm dealing with this thing with my marriage, I'm dealing with this thing with my weight, I'm dealing with this thing in business. Like there's a zillion other people who were dealing with that. My mom used to say this thing that I really liked a lot. The news is always the same. It's just the names change. I thought that was actually like pretty profound.

It's like if you look at the headlines of the news It's just like, you know, banks default, interest rates up, housing crisis. Like, it's like those headlines have existed for a very long time. We just change. It's just, we just change who's involved. And even the bad ones, like, girl gets abducted. Like, it just change the names. But it's the same stuff.

Humans doing human things. And so I think that context, but it's still, it's one thing to know that hypothetically, another when you meet somebody who's going through the exact same thing. And I think that makes people feel less isolated. But spending time alone for me personally. is like one of the most I like I like being alone. Are there different tiers to wealth that you've noticed? Yeah.

Like for people that go from zero to a hundred, 100 to a million. Sure. What are those tears? And when do you see diminishing returns? I think Felix Dennis has a book called like, it's like how to be rich. I think it's how to be,

I'll teach you to be rich or how to be rich, something like that. Anyways, it's funny. But like the first chapter, he breaks down like 11 levels of wealth. And he says basically, after $400 million liquid, he's like, that's when you're truly wealthy. And he was, you know, he was worth that much money. He's like, at that point, it's like, you can really do whatever you want. I do think that the jumps are much smaller in the beginning in terms of what makes a really big difference.

I think going from anything to about six figures a year is a material change. I think going from like, you know, even 10,000 months to 20,000 a month is a significant change. Going from there at about 40 or 50s is another change. And if we think about like how we're defining the change, it's usually like, what are the variables that affect someone's daily living? So it's going to be where they live, you know, the school, you know, the school, that their kids can go to, the vacations they can take, where they can stay, the food they eat, the clothes they wear. Like, those are all, but almost all of those are affected mostly, I would say, like, up to kind of like that 1% earning level, which is about $500,000 a year. Now, you can live

a baller lifestyle 500, but not really save anything. And so if you're a responsible saver, it really depends on your saving. I'm actually a lot like Graham, believe it or not, even though I spend money because Layla spends money, but like by percentage of income, I spend a very small percent of my income. And so it really just depends on your appetite for saving versus spending. And I think that's entirely personal because it's really just a question of risk, like how much whiskey we're going to take on. But beyond that, there's, that's just a ratio. But after that, it's like, you know, you're, you have nicer and nicer houses. You go on nicer and nicer vacations. You travel private, you know, maybe that's at a couple million bucks a year. You start

traveling private. After that, again, it's like, it's just like you're buying boats and you're buying houses. Like there's, you can't, at a certain point, you really can't consume any more of it. I will say this is that I do think that, and this is controversial, but I do think that money, because you know they had a study, it's like up to $70,000 a year. And now like inflation adjust it probably closer to $100. I actually think it continues to go up beyond that. But I think the problem is that people have a skill deficiency in terms of how to spend money. I think most people know how to spend money effectively up to $100,000 a year in terms of how to make their life better. But they don't know.

how to spend it above that in terms of like things that improve their lives like I think but I think it's a learnable skill I think you can get better at spending money uh to make your life better and so for me things that make my life are going to be things that buy me time back um things that basically are all the annoyances and frustrations in my life if I can pay to make those go away those are things that net enhance um and then long term in terms of purpose it's like if you find something meaningful you can actually devote real resources and make a change or an impact which I think is you know you should see the updated study on that that whole 75,000 yeah is that's In debunk?

No, it was, that was done in a, in a different country. Okay. So, great. You would know. So, they did one recently. Yeah. Well, within the last 10 years of the United States. Okay.

And they found that I think it was about $150,000 was where you get peak dollar to value ratio. Okay. It continues up higher. Just diminishing returns. But diminishing returns. And they found that it, the diminishing returns really stopped about $650,000 a year. About top 1%. They found that over a million dollars a year,

you actually have lower quality of life, and I'm guessing it's because you have more problems, stress, career issues, or maybe friends or not friends with you, or you have fake people around. And you got to manage money, which is another, like a whole nother thing. Right, but it was really, yeah, $6,000, 700 grand,

and then it just kind of tapers after that. I found that interesting. Super believable. But like after, you know, five or $10 million a year in income, like, but the next strata is like, I don't know, 25, maybe 30, 40 million a year in income, like where you can do like even you know crazier things I guess but at a certain point when you can buy the hotels you stay at it's like like whatever I don't know I don't have a need for Omega Yacht I think Layla wants one though you should buy a hotel don't say too loud

Alex thank you again for coming on the podcast it's always great to see you yeah this is your fifth time on believe is it really it is yeah we've had no other guests that's come on podcast if we count that you and Layla the duo show. Okay, the duo show, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's cool. Maybe in a year, guys, see him back on once a year. And we'll see what he's eliminated from his life one year from him. I've eliminated happiness from my life, which I've just seen it as a distraction. Just don't eliminate podcasts. It does that, just for us. No. Stop doing podcasts. It don't do many, to be honest with you. No, you guys, you guys have good conversations. I appreciate it. I'm glad we got to where we did, and I only took it because your mom told me that it would mean a lot to. a little bit of debt.

Yeah, I have a big debt to be off there. Thank you so much for watching. Until next time. And thank you to the sponsors. Adobe. Thank you, sponsors. You know what to do. Until next time.

Yeah.