The Iced Coffee Hour - “How To Go From $0 to Millionaire” Leila Hormozi’s Guide To NOT Being Broke

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

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Within less than a two-year period, I got arrested six times. And I just, honestly, it was a deadbeat. Like, I ruined my life. And I realized that I just don't want to be this person anymore. You are an entrepreneur, CEO of Acquisition.com, co-founder of Jim Launch, which sold for $50 million. Most things in life actually require much less effort than we think. How do you recommend people change their own lives? They have to change their relationship with their thoughts and feelings.

Honestly, fitness and diet is actually worse than anything I've ever seen. How defensive somebody is over their diet, I correlate with their intelligence. But what if they're right? I think you've said this before that your goal was a billion dollars. Is that true? Yes. Why do you say yes as though there's a little stipulation? I think a billion's way too small.

Layla Hormosey, you are an entrepreneur, CEO of Acquisition.com, co-founder of Jim Launch, which sold for $50 million. Co-founder of Prestige Labs and Alan, thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to see what we talk about. today. So one of my favorite things about your story is how inspirational it is because you were not always the person that you are today. You have gone on the record and said that you were arrested one time six times in one year. What were those arrests for and how did that compel you to change to become

the person you are today? When I got arrested, it was between the age of, I was like almost 18 and between that and like almost 20. So it was like within less than a two year period, I got arrested six times. And what kind of led up to that, I think it's kind of misleading because the few years leading up to that, I actually was like a pretty decent kit. Like I got decent grades. I went to school. I was not like a fuck off in anyway. But it was, I think, what happened prior to that and like what had built up over time

that then was unleashed when I left the house. You know, prior to being a teenager, I would say at the age of, I think I was 14. and I had been living with my mother who was an alcoholic and drug addict. And up to that point, I'd keep it in a secret. And so I hadn't told my dad because my parents got divorced. And she started getting into all that when they got divorced. And I've been very close to her when I was little. And so I didn't want to tell anybody.

I don't want to have to go live with my dad because I hadn't even known my dad that well. And I was just always a very introverted kid. And so I kept it to myself. And I kind of just took care of her and took care of myself. You know, she didn't really, she didn't have a job. She had different boyfriends. Like, it was just kind of a mess. And so at the age of 14, it got to a point where it couldn't really get kept a secret anymore because, you know, I came home one day.

She was threatening to kill her off. She took a bunch of people. And so I had to call 911. And when I called 911, they called my dad. My dad showed up. He's like, what have you been hiding? Is this been going on? And I was like, I mean, yeah, I just haven't wanted to tell anybody because I just didn't want to hurt my mother, right?

Because in some way, I thought that that would do that. And so I ended up leaving that house and then going to live with my dad who also had at that point now was living and remarried and I had three step siblings that were in the house. And so finally when I got out of the house, it was like, thank God freedom. You know what I mean? Like I already know how to take care of myself. Like I don't need this. But it was also a lot of anger because I don't think that I had a lot of coping mechanisms that I have now. And so what I defaulted to was, you know, unfortunately the same thing that my mother had, which was just alcohol, right?

I'm at college. I moved out. I'm in the dorms. Everyone's drinking. And so any night and every night that there was available, which is pretty much, you know, five nights a week when you're in college, I decided to go out and party. And I made friends with people who were dealers. And then the rest of my friends were drinking every night. And so I just, at first it started as something that was fun.

And then it turned into really just trying to. mask a lot of this anger and anxiety that I felt. And I think I'd had most of my life, but I had been able to stuff it down for a long enough time. And I think when I got out of the house, it just felt like a lot was unleashed, including that. And so I just went on like essentially a bender for two years. Like I just was drinking all the time.

I gained a bunch of weight. I already wasn't like the most in shape. But like then gaining on top of that, I was almost 100 pounds heavier than I am now. and I just honestly was a deadbeat like I ruined my life and for that period of time and it wasn't until my sixth arrest when I was just completely humiliated because I had gone out the night before and then I woke up and I was just in my parents house and I was like because like I hadn't woken up any other time my parents else I'd been at you know my own house I had a ticket in my purse or whatever I went to the jail for a second and then I got out And so I woke up. I didn't remember what had happened and I just saw a ticket next to the bed and I'm at my parents' house.

And I was like, oh my God. And I just remember being filled with dread. And I walked downstairs because there's nowhere else to go in the house. And it's a very small house. And I remember my dad was sitting there with my stepmom and I was ready for him to just rail into me and just be like, what are you doing with your life? What's wrong with you? All these things. Like stuff I already freaking knew.

And instead of doing any of that, I sat down and he looked at me and I remember his eyes were like welled up with tears and he was just like, I'm not going to yell at you. I'm not going to tell you what to do. It's like, I just want to say that I think if you keep going down this route, I just think you're going to kill. And he said it in a way that was so matter of fact that it's like, I think when you're young, you think you're invincible and you think that nothing can hurt you. You know, I would drive drunk. I would, you know, do all sorts of drugs and mix with alcohol. Like, there was a lot of stuff I did. That was very reckless.

And I think it all stemmed from thinking I was invincible. And in that moment, the way he looked at me, it was like all of a sudden I realized I wasn't. And I realized that all of this looked very similar to somebody who I didn't want to be, which was my mother. And I just remember feeling a deep sense of shame. And so I didn't say much because I was like, it doesn't really matter. I've said things before. and I went upstairs and I remember I took a shower and I got out and I was like I just don't want to be this person anymore. You know, like it's been long enough.

It's been two years. I'm going down a route that I watched my mother go down that ruined her whole life. And I thought it was really fun in games at first, but it turned into something that was no longer fun. And I was like, I just, I don't want to do this. And I think I was so fed up with myself. Like looking at myself in the mirror, I was disgusted with how much I weighed. I was disgusted with the fact that I knew I was. smart and I wasn't doing anything about it. I knew I was hard working and I wasn't working hard.

I was just fucking off. And honestly, it's really weird because a lot of people like, what did you do to change? And I was like, I just hated myself so much that in that moment, it was like the pain of remaining who I was was much greater than the pain of changing and the pain of what it could possibly be like to change. That at that point, there was no choice. It was like, you have to. You have to change yourself. And that was the moment. that I decided that I needed to make my life worth living. And that was a promise I had made to myself when I was very little when I was dealing and living in the house with my mom

is I said, I have to make it worth it. And I was like, you know, you're not keeping that promise to yourself right now and you don't look anything like the person that you said you were going to be. And so either feel bad for yourself like you have been and keep kicking the can down the road and what does your life look like in five years, probably really shit. Like, what if you gain another? hundred pounds what does that look like like when does it end when is enough enough seven arrests eight

arrests 10 arrests you're at prison like what does it look like and so i just said like now is my enough i'm done what was the first arrest for oh minor in possession got it yeah and what do they what was it like being arrested were you scared at the time because i imagine your first time it's got to be terrifying how old were you when you were first arrested i think it was 17 17 and what is what is it like like the cop comes up to you you have this dread in your body you feel weak and he's like, okay, and he cuffs you or something like that. What was that experience like? I felt ashamed because actually they were trying to make an example of me.

And so they normally went to minor possession. They don't even like do much, but because they were trying to make an example because of whatever, there was like a whole, it was a whole thing. They cuffed me in front of everybody and then walked me all the way across the parking lot into the car, took me into the station, did the whole spiel like taking your fingerprints, pictures, all that kind of stuff. and then called my parents because I was 17th time.

And so honestly, it's just complete shame and humiliation is what it is because you think you're doing something cool and you think you're fitting in with people and then all of a sudden someone snaps you out of it and then just makes you look like a complete bad word. Yeah.

What made you different though? Because I feel like a lot of people go down that path and they can never get out. They can never escape that. The odds are not in your favor, for sure. Like if you are going down that path, You've been arrested a few times. You're drinking a lot.

You're not in the gym. You're leading, you know, I would say a nonproductive life. People just usually spiral. And I don't think it was necessarily what your dad said to you in the way that he said it that actually snapped you out of it. It was something that you did because you decided to make that change at the end of the day. I think at the end of the day, when I look at people who change and people who don't, it's what do you fear more?

And I think a lot of people are so afraid of their feelings of the fear of what if, of the fear of the unknown, of the fear of not drinking and not doing this and losing all these things. But they're not able to weigh the pain that they currently have. And so I think for me, something that I've always prided myself on is not being afraid of pain, like emotional pain. Because I remember anchoring myself in that moment, I was like, nothing can be worse than what I dealt with in that house. And so if I got through that when I was a kid with less coping mechanisms, skills, less resources than I have now, there's no way that I can't get myself out of this. I am more capable.

I'm smarter. I know more. I have more capabilities. I'm not a hopeless child. And so that is what I've always had to anchor to because I don't think I've had anything in my life be harder than that was. Not because it wasn't harder, but because of relative skill at the time when I was a child that had to learn how to take care of herself and her mother who would disappear for weeks

on end. like that there's a big skill gap there and so it's just like terrifying and so i remember in those moments i was i anchored to that it was like that was probably the most painful thing i could have gone through this can't be as bad as that although you know what before we go on to that we got to do some quick math because the less money your business spends the more money you get to keep but with higher expenses on materials labor distribution and borrowing everything is costing more so to reduce these costs and headaches smart businesses are upgrading to our sponsor NetSuite by Oracle.

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And now let's get back to the podcast. So if you think fear is like the pinnacle of all motivators, Do you think people can reprogram their fears or do you think that they're unable to do that? I think a lot of people what they do is they spend their life avoiding fear, running the opposite direction. And then the first time that you're able to just grit your teeth and bear through it and jump into it, right, then what happens is you then create a positive association with facing fear. But a lot of people aren't willing to just take that first step.

Now, I think that I was forced to in many ways in the beginning of my life. life. And so I was forced to confront fear of like being home alone, taking care of myself, like not knowing what to do with the dogs and the cats. I'm like, how do I do this? How do I get closed for myself? Like all these things that were unknowns and they felt scary when you're a kid. But I was forced to do it because in my mind there was no other alternative. I cannot tell anybody about my mother because I love her too much and I will not expose her to the world for what she is and what she's been doing. And so I think that a lot of people, when they don't have a situation that puts their back against the wall where they're forced to face the fear, they have to learn

to manufacture it. Because, for example, if I go, you know, there's lots of people watching this who have something they're scared of, and they're like, I just can't get over it. I'm like, do you think the mom that has two children to feed can't get over her fear of whatever it is to feed them? But she has responsibility. And I think a lot of people are unwilling to take on responsibility. But what responsibility does is it gives you a reason to face the fear.

And I think a lot of us, we need a reason bigger than ourselves to face that fear. And for me, what I was able to anchor to after that first time of basically being forced in my mind was I want to be that example for everybody else who doesn't have this. Like, I haven't had an example. Right. I didn't have a great mother example ground. I didn't have all these things. And so for me, when I was a kid, I was, there was a, there was a night where my mom hadn't come home. And I would always call her because I was like, I just want her to answer.

So I know she's not dead. Like, that was all it was. And I'd called her probably 15 times. And I was sitting there in my guest. bedroom staring out the window it was like 3 a.m. And I remember very vividly it was I was using one of those phones it's like a cord phone with like little twisty it was so ugly. And she didn't pick up and I left a message. I was like I just want you to let me know like are you okay? Like are you like do I need to call the cops? And before I could finish the message I remember

hanging up and I hung up because this like voice in my head was like it's not going to work. Like just just stop calling her. Like it's not going to change. And when I had that, moment, I remember looking out the window and the first thought that popped in my head was like, you need to be the woman that you do not have. You need to make it worth it. And that was the phrase that stuck with me, which was like, make this worth it. Make this pain that you have today worth something in the future. And so when I deterred myself from that path and I was arrested and I was gained all that weight and I was going through that period of time, I anchored back and I remembered that and I was like, I need to be that person because what else, like, what other reason do I have to

live? Like, truly, though, like a lot of people, you know, everyone has their own reason for why they are on earth. I think that I've created my own reason, but in my mind, my reason has always been to make that pain worth something. Like, you have to make the rest of your life better to justify the amount of pain that you went throughout that age. How's the relationship with your mom today? I don't speak to her. How, how did that happen? Did you, did you, did you? Did you, did you just to Did you just decide at one point to cut her off? No, I tried to have a relationship for a very long time. I loved my mother very much.

And she was very intelligent. She was beautiful. She was very sweet to me when I was a kid. But the alcohol and the drugs truly just changed her as a person. You know, I think probably damaged her brain from a lot of what happened. And for a long time, I would say from the age of probably, 16 to 26. I tried to have a relationship.

I set boundaries. I said, I will see you on these holidays. We will talk every two weeks. We'll do all these things. And I would show up for the holiday and she'd be drunk off her ass and pin me in a room and try smacking me in the face. I would, you know, show up for Christmas

and she's passed out drunk. And so it was just like time after time, I was like, you know, I can take it. And like, I could deal with the pain of watching her like this. Like I've gotten used to at this point, right? And I'm at this point, I'm a teenager. I'm like developing.

I'm like, I'm not getting upset by watching these things happen. But it was actually when she started blaming me for her life that I realized it was really distracting me from living my own. The last time I spoke to her, I was running gym launch, and I said I would give it a shot. Basically, the last time I had seen her, she had, it was a holiday and this whole thing had happened drunk, whatever, all this stuff is drama. I was just like, every time I see you, it's a negative experience. Like, why must it be this way? Like, do you realize what you do? Like, why do you do this?

And she's like, I, you know, and it would be like, it would be good, good, good. And then like something awful, right? And so I said, you know, let's try talking every couple weeks. And then I will, you know, talk to you once every two weeks, essentially. And in between the two weeks, there was time where she called me. And I was on this charity trip, actually. And I was busy, like, legitimately 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. with all these charity things we were doing.

when we were associated with very large charity years ago. And I texted her and I was like, I can't talk. And also it hasn't been two weeks. It's been like a few days and I'm not in the place where I can talk right now and have a conversation. And I'll be honest, the conversations weren't very pleasant because she didn't really ask me any questions. She just won't talk about her own life, which I thought was very odd.

And so what ended up happening was she didn't respond to my text. And then I got back from the trip and I got a text from my stepdad who I'm not close with and it was like your mom's in the psych ward and I was like I'm like running a meeting and I'm like Jesus Christ and so after I finished I called him and I was like okay so what happened because my mother has gone to the hospital multiple times she's gone to rehab multiple times she's gone everywhere and he was like well you know your mom she like lost it and it was saying and trying I was like I don't even know what that means you failed every time and so I mean seriously like It's like if you really wanted to, you would do it.

And so I don't consider this to be like you want to die. Consider it you want attention. And so I was like, okay. And he was like, it would have been nice if you just picked up the phone when she called. And I was like, what does that have to do with this? And I remember he was like, I think you know what it has to do with this. And I was like, no, I don't. I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Are you blaming me? And he was like, yeah. He's like, you're the reason your mother's like this. And in that moment, I was just so blown away. I remember the thing I said to him. I said, honestly, I feel like I'm talking to some with the IQ of a kindergartner. So I'm going to hang up now. And I will communicate with my mother.

And so I hung up and I wrote my mother an email. And I said, I want to understand if you agree with this. Do you believe that you are the way you are? Because I do not want to associate with you. And because I moved out of the house and did all these things. And I remember her response, which was she wouldn't say, No. I was like, she called me. She's like, I got your email. And I was like, so what's the answer? And she was like, well, she's like, it's just, it's horrible.

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It's horrible that you've distanced yourself. You know what it's like to lose a child? And I was like, you know, do you know what it's like to lose a mother? Like, I didn't say anything. I'm just listening. And then by the end, she basically said, yes, I agree with what he said. And I do think a lot of it's your fault. and I still like my heart rate goes up because I remember what I said to her I said

I just want you to know that if you care yourself and succeed I will not feel bad and I will not think it's my fault because it is not I'm an adult you are an adult your life is not my responsibility this entire situation you took me when I was nine years old and made me take care of you a 47 year old woman I was like what you did made no sense and so I want you to know I accept zero responsibility over your life or your life you choose to to end. I do not want to talk anymore. I wish you the best. I, I, like, want the best for you as a person, but I can't do it. And honestly, saying that was the most freeing thing I think I've ever said in my life because it's like this thing that was hanging over me of, like, her life is in my hands.

I mean, when I was a kid, it was like, if I don't come home on time or if this, it was a very weird opposite, right? of alcoholics do this where essentially they make the person who's taking care of them feel bad and feel like things are their fault she would blame me you're why i'm miserable you're why i drink you know just always drunk saying things about like how i am the source of her misery and then i realized that that sense of victimhood and never went away it only stayed there she didn't learn she didn't learn anything from all the years all the rehab all the therapy you still think it's me and my fault yet you want me to be in your life and i was like i can't think of anything where worse that an enemy would do to me, let alone a family member.

And I remember I hung up the phone and I told Alex, I just said, my life is worse with her in it. And as much as I deeply would love to have a mother and I would deeply love for her to resolve everything, I cannot subject myself to this. I'm tired. It's been a decade. I can't keep doing this. And if she succeeds, I accept the gift. guilt and the sadness I will feel that day and for many days thereafter.

But the pain that she is inflicting on me as I am a lie and the things that she believes that I am the source of, I can't have somebody like this in my life and do everything I want to do and be who I want to be. And that was last time I spoke to her. One thing that's really interesting about that is you seem to be able to talk about it in a very matter-of-fact way. This might be a little bit of a blunt question, but how healed would you say you are from that? Theory. And how were you able to do that?

A lot of people have something a little bit traumatic that happens to them early in their life. And it's actually interesting. Alex says trauma is just very fast learning. Yeah. How were you able to cross that bridge and finally be able to, you know, heal from that? I think a lot of it has been one.

I'm not afraid to talk about it. Like I talk about it here. I'll talk about it to anyone who wants to listen or wants to ask me about it because I think that we normalize keeping people in our life who make our lives worse because they are called family or because they've been our friends for years. And I firsthand am somebody who I don't want to say that I don't talk to my mother. It's embarrassing to a degree, and it makes me sound like I'm a bad daughter.

But I would rather be considered a bad daughter than have somebody in my life who blames me for their entire existence or miserable. part of their existence, right? Whether it be consciously or subconsciously whenever, whatever's happening at the time. And so I think I went through a long period of time of realizing that my mother is a human just like anybody else. She happens to be the person that gave birth to me.

Would I choose to have a relationship with this person if she was not my mother? The absolute answer was just no. And the other piece of it was, you know, looking at what do I gain from, I've tried to help her for 10 years and nothing has worked. Everything I have done, the only things that have worked have been when I have left, have been when I have said, I'm going to stop enabling your behavior. And I think a lot of it was just being able to say, I won't stand to be treated this way, whether you're my mother or not. And if I look back at all the things that happened, I think that I gave her a lot of grace for even trying for the 10 years I did. Because

it was a really tough 10 years. And, you know, I think the reason that we give people chances because it's not like it's all negative, right? There's a positive in there as well. But when over time the negative continues to get worse, not better, that's when I'm like, if this continues this way, it's only going to get worse. And what would happen every time is I would, something would get better for a minute, and then I would hold on and it would get worse, worse.

And all of a sudden it's 80% bad. be 20% glimpse of good. And it was just all-consuming, honestly. It was very all-consuming. And I think I've just accepted that I'm okay with how people will judge me for it. Because I think, one, a lot of it is people don't want to talk about this stuff because they're afraid of getting judged and I'm okay with it. You know, people always say the same thing.

What are you going to do when she dots? Probably feel really fucking sad. I still, I mean, I would be lying if I said I don't sometimes question like, do I want to try and reach out at some point? Do I want to do this? Of course my brain goes there because there was that person I had for nine years who was really great. But I've also made peace with the fact that the person that I knew for those nine years that were really good, that person has died. And so the person I know now does not exhibit love in a way that I wish to receive it.

What's interesting is you seem to be able to rationalize your healing with logic. But a lot of people, even if logic goes against what they're doing, that's not enough to rationalize. changing. Like, how are you able to use logic to say, I have road A, road B. Road A is what might feel good, and it might be a little bit of like an emotional journey, but road B is logical. And I think over time, I'll be better off there. A lot of the times people pick Road A. Yeah. The emotional part is so much more powerful, too. I mean, that's probably 10x what logic could do. Yeah. Why are you able to take the logical route, which if most people just follow the logic, they would be better off. I mean, I would say virtually everybody, if they just followed logic, they'd be better off.

But they don't. Honestly, I think it's because of her. You know, I watched her ruin her own life because she gave into her emotions. My mother could probably have accomplished and still accomplished very similar things to what I do. She was smart. She was beautiful. She was kind. She was hilarious.

Like, she's a very dynamic person. And she let some of the same things that I have, like the, you know, I have a tendency to they get like very stressed and anxious and have like really, really. weird thoughts and things. She didn't, I don't think, I don't think she had the skills to manage those things. And so when I watched her growing up give in to a lot of her emotions, I watched it ruin a marriage. I watched it ruin her relationship with my sister. I watched it ruin her relationship with her friends. I watched it then ruin her relationship with herself and her health. And then I watched it ruin her relationship with me, the only person who never heard her. And all of it

stemmed down to avoiding her emotions. And if anything, succumbing to fear. You know, she was, everything, if you tie it back, somebody that's, you know, an alcoholic and in drugs and, like, it's all fear-based. They're just trying to cope with the things that we all feel in life, and they don't know how. And I think a lot of it had been, especially in the beginning, like, I want to be the opposite of that. And so a lot of what I've inspired, like, what I was at first, motivated to do is be the complete opposite of her. What I'm now motivated to do is be the version of myself that I see in the future. So it has changed.

But I think a lot of it stemmed from seeing that that didn't work. It didn't work for her. It didn't work for her family that also had their own issues. And it just doesn't. And I think I'm lucky because when I was young, you know, my dad put me in children of alcoholics anonymous. and the one concept that I learned there that I think was what gave me a lot of strength when I finally left was they talk about enabling and that when somebody acts in an adverse way, say like they're drinking, and you don't let them feel the impact of that, which was I would throw out her booze. I would hide them. I would call my dad and say everything's okay.

I would take care of the animals because she wasn't feeding them. I would let the dogs out. I would clean the house. I would do all these things, right? She'd night out, all this stuff would breaks everywhere. I'd clean it all up before she woke up. And I realized when I was understanding that is that if you don't allow someone to experience the consequences, right, if they touch a hot stove and don't get burned, they'll touch it again.

And a lot of what I was doing without knowing when I was a child was I was enabling her because I loved her and I didn't want her to be in pain. I saw she was in pain, clearly, a lot of emotional pain. And so I wanted her to get out of it. And so I would try to buffer all the things around. And that's how I grew up quickly because I try to. to take care of her, but then I realized that was just allowing her to remain in this place. And instead, I needed to let her feel the consequences for herself.

And so, you know, when I finally ended up calling the police that day when she was like, I'm kidding myself and then knowing what would happen thereafter, I was like, I won't go back because she needs to feel the consequences. Because if there's any like glimmer of hope that she changes, then she has to be able to to feel the consequences of this. How do you recommend people change their own lives? If they feel unfulfilled, if they feel like they're in a situation where they're stuck or they can't get ahead, what is your advice to those people?

I think a lot of people, when they're at a point where they want to change their lives, they have to change their relationship with their thoughts and feelings. I think that's where it all stems from. Because a lot of the times, the reason that somebody can't change their life is because they have a really shitty relationship with their thoughts and feelings. I mean, I know I did when I was at the point where I was at the point where I'm not. wasn't changing my life, which was, you know, thinking that all thoughts are true. That's an example of one. Also, like, believing that my feelings are directives. And so we think when I'm nervous, I should not do something. You know, if I have a thought that I could fail, I shouldn't try, right?

And it's almost this weird process of unlearning some of the old sayings that people say, like trusting your gut and doing all this thing. That hasn't worked for me very well. If I trusted my gut, I wouldn't be doing half the I do right now. So I think a lot of it is understanding and educating yourself on the realities of how the brain works, how feelings works, how all those things, because that's honestly what I've done. Like, I've studied more behavioral psychology than I have business because that's how I've helped myself be in a position where I can actually even lead people confidently because I can manage my own thoughts and feelings.

And I think a lot of people can't change their lives because they, what's standing in the way is not some force of freaking nature or a person standing there. It's their thoughts. It's their feelings that they're afraid of. They're afraid it might come true. They're afraid that they're going to feel really, really bad and that it might never go away. It's all these irrational fears. It's never logic.

And so the only way to overcome something that is not logical is to understand that, in my opinion, how it actually works. How do thoughts actually work? How do feelings actually work? When I educated myself on those things, I finally was like, oh, my God, it's normal. These things that are happening to me, these feelings I'm experiencing, they're normal. My reaction is what the problem is. is not the thoughts of the feelings themselves. My reaction to run and hide from them is actually what's causing my entire life of problems.

It's the reason why I'm not achieving my dreams. Not the actual thoughts or feelings themselves. It's not like successful people and unsuccessful people have different thoughts and feelings. It's that they respond to them differently. Does that make sense? One of my favorite things that I've ever heard on a podcast, I don't know if it was you or Alex, but it was a story about you, how you guys were walking together,

someone bumped you and said, watch out skinny bitch. And you laughed me like, oh, you think I'm skinny. You think I'm skinny. And then people, whenever I talk to somebody about thoughts and feelings and how you only allow something to impact you based off of what you label it as good or bad, I always bring up that example because I think it's like, it's perfect. It's perfect. On that note, I want to know because it's unbelievable to think that you've studied behavioral

psychology more than you've studied business, especially when we walk into this headquarters and we see just like how expansive your business truly is. What have you learned in behavioral psychology that's helped you mostly with running a business? Ironic process theory, which is it can apply to a lot of things in life. For example, if you want a thought to get bigger, run away from it. If you want a feeling to get bigger, run away from it. If you want something to get smaller, you run towards it. If you want to relax, don't try to relax.

if you want like basically most things in life actually require much less effort than we think and so a lot of the times what you see is like people are very confused as to like why am i feeling anxious and they believe that the reason that they're feeling anxious is because they have these thoughts it's not because they have the thoughts it's because they then do something once they have the thought because they teach themselves the thought is bad by saying oh don't think that thought and i'm going to go do something else instead i'm going to go drink right and then what they do is they train themselves to be scared of a thought. Same goes for feelings, right?

Someone feels anxious. They feel stressed. They feel mad. They go and they go out. And this is actually one that is probably more common. It's more like socialized. But like some people go and they're like, I'm going for a run. Right.

And then why do people get hooked on running? Because they've taught themselves that in order to avoid feeling anxious, they must run. And you see people get hooked on exercise. And it's like normalized. Like, oh, yeah, I only work on five hours a day. But I'm a fitness trainer, right? It's like, actually you're, okay. Anyways, I've done that one.

And so it's really, things require a lot less effort than you think. It's just that the effort it requires is that split second of feeling terrified at first. And so I have this phrase I tell myself very frequently, which is do the opposite. It's like, I need to do the opposite of what my natural inclination is because my natural inclination is always to survive, which means run and hide from scary things. And what do we label as scary is thoughts and feelings that we don't like. And so I always just have trained myself, do the opposite. it. And the reason that this has helped me so much, I think, in business is because I understand

how other people's brains work. I know when I tell them something, when they have a certain thought or have a certain feeling, I can help coach them through it because I'm constantly coaching myself through it. You know what I mean? And I think there's different tactics that I use to help myself and help others to get over that stuff. But a lot of the times, I think in terms of understanding what you need to do, I think once you understand that running away from something actually makes it worse, right, and bigger, and avoiding a fear also makes it bigger. Then the next question is, well, how do you change it? Right. And I think the first step that I would just give as advice to a lot of people and what I try with people on my team is just get space from it. A lot of times

you get a thought, you get a feeling, and then you have an automatic urge to do something. It could be bingey. It could be go on a run. It could be drink. It could be do a drug, right? Instead, just sit for five minutes. And guess what happens if you fucking sit for five minutes? That shit goes away. You're like, oh, I'm hungry. I want a snack. Oh, wait, wait. I was thinking about something scary, you know? But eventually, it moves on. And so I think what I've learned is, one, thoughts and feelings pass whether you want them to or not and whether you do something about it or not. A lot of people think you have to do something to get rid of a negative. No, that shit's going to go away no matter what you do. but like you train yourself to think you have to do something to get rid of something.

And then I think the second piece to it is just taking a small step in the direction of the negative thought or the negative emotion because what you will soon happen is it will actually turn to a positive association. So I'll give you an example, right, which is a lot of people are scared of going in the gym, right? They get super scared of going the gym. They're like, I'm so nervous. I haven't been to the gym. I look fat and my thing.

I work out. They get all nervous and sweaty, right? This was me when I was overweight. And so what happens is you go to the gym, the first few times you're really nervous. What happens after just like five days? After five days, I like going to the gym. That is how quickly we can change fear. Like that is how quickly.

Think about how many people are terrified of speaking on stage. And they speak on stage once and then twice. And then by the third time, they're like, I can't get enough of this. Right. And so the same thing goes if you look at people with like phobias of animals and spiders, they end up like getting a fucking tarantial for a pet. Because all of a sudden, you feel the sense of euphoria that you realize this thing that you've been terrified of is nothing at all. And then suddenly you're like, I actually want more of it.

But before we go into that, this section is sponsored by Range Rover Sport, because as I'm sure you guys are aware, I'm an absolute fanatic when it comes to cars. I even have one on display in my office. And if you're looking for a sporting luxury car that's powerful on the road, dynamic by design, and truly embodies the essence of automotive excellence, then let me introduce you to something special, the Range Rover Sport. The third generation Rangerover Sports is the most desirable, advanced, and dynamically capable yet. It leads by example, with powerful on-road performance and commanding all-terrain capability.

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And now let's get back to the episode. This thing that you've been terrified of is nothing at all. And then suddenly you're like, I actually want more of it. And what do you see to the people who overthink things, who get in that, like, negative thought spiral? They have something they're worried about and they start thinking about it

and ruminating on it and trying to work through it and it just consumes them. The number one thing for people who are overthinkers is that more thinking isn't going to solve the problem. I'm like the queen of overthinking. Like when Alex met me, bless his soul, I mean, like, I'm very good at what I do because I care a lot, but I also overthink the crap out of everything, or at least I did. I actually don't think I do so much anymore. And so what I realize is that there's one thing, which is I can distract myself from the overthinking

in the short term. In the short term, I will distract myself by forcing myself to do something else. So for example, whenever I like would have a really scary thought come up about something, but it was irrational. It's like maybe it's, you know, when I first started doing speaking and I was going to speak on stage, I would get terrified. I have these like wash over me of anxiety, my heart would go up, all these things. And instead I was like, okay, I'm going to tackle this big project right now because I have this fear that keeps popping up.

I'm going to make myself focus on that instead. That's an example of something that I would do to make sure I'm not overthinking because the thinking is leading nowhere, right? It's just me worrying now and later rather than just later when I would rather save myself from doing it now, right? And I think the second thing with overthinking is a lot of people have this bias for thinking rather than a bias for action. And so when you're overthinking something, the best thing that you can do, again, is take a small step in direction of uncertainty. Because a lot of times the reason we overthink things is we think that we have to be certain in order to do something.

And so we keep overthinking thinking, I'm going to solve it. I'm going to get a sense of certainty before I move forward. But the reality is certainty doesn't even exist. It's just almost like a concept we make up in our brains. Like there's no certainty. We don't even know if we're going to be here tomorrow. I could get hit by a car. And so when I realized that a lot of overthinking is actually seeking certainty and there is no certainty, then I was like, well, then I should just try it out.

Like test the theory. And so we have like a saying in the company, which is like, let's test it. And I do that with a lot of things in life. I'm like, fuck it, I'll just try it. Right. If it's terrible and awful, I will feel pain in the moment and then I will just not do it again. Right. And that's a way that I'm able to kind of trick myself into doing something rather than.

than continue to think about something because I think a lot of people waste their lives overthinking rather than getting into action. Now, you mentioned before six life cheat codes to get ahead. Do you remember what those are? Yeah. This is a compilation of a few different behavioral science books that I read. And so I actually presented the concept to my team and then thought it would make a good YouTube video because I felt like it was worth sharing.

I'm going to go hard on one concept because I think it's the most important, which is, or actually two probably. thought diffusion. So if you look at somebody who is compulsive, what does compulsive mean? It means that typically when a thought pops up, they take action immediately. For a lot of people, people can get this to work in their favor. And for a lot of other people, it doesn't work in their favor. They have a moment where a thought pops up, I'm kind of hungry. And then they eat an entire bag of chips. So people get overweight. They have a thought pop up. Like, I'm really stressed. I want to drink. They just go take a drink. It's not that other people don't.

don't have those thoughts pop up, but it's that we don't act on them. And so when you look at somebody who's gotten themselves into a place in their life that is not productive, you know, say they're overweight, they're drinking a lot, they're doing drugs, whatever it is that they're doing, right? Their life is not going the way they want to go because of a behavior they are exhibiting. The first place that you can start is from diffusing a thought from an action. And so what that means is this person is usually compulsive. If you look at a binge eater, for example, it's like the moment they feel stressed a lot of times. I've been jade at some point in my life. It's like they it's like they can't help but keep eating, right? It's like this compulsion. The thought,

I want to keep eating. I want to keep eating. It tastes good. I feel so full, but I want to keep eating and they keep doing it. The only difference between that person and you is that you might have that thought, but you just don't keep eating. And so thought diffusion is just literally separating your thought from an action. And so for a lot of people, again, that have issues in life, they're not able to separate a thought from an action. They take. They take a lot of thoughts as directives. If I think I'm hungry, I should eat. If I want to drink, I should have a drink. If I think about this thing, then I should do this other thing. It's almost like you've trained yourself, just like a dog when it hears sit. It sits. You've trained yourself that when you have

this thought, you take this action. And so to diffuse a thought, the first step is to create space from the thought, to recognize that it is just a sentence in your mind. It is not control over you. It's not the all saying power over your life. It is just a sentence in your mind. It doesn't even need to be true. In fact, most of the time, they're very false. And so for me, thought diffusion is recognizing when I have a thought in my mind, usually it's one that immediately promotes some kind of like cortisol, right?

I'm like, oh, the moment I have that thought, I'm like, oh, shit, I'm like, oh, shit, okay, let's not avoid that thought. Let's not do anything about it. Let's look at it. Do you think this thought is true? I'm like, I don't know. It could be. And then I go through the process of essentially weighing out the evidence.

How certain are you that this thought is true? Like, are you 100% certain? 110% certain? Is it absolutely true in every scenario? It's like, and you basically have to start arguing with yourself against the thought to realize that most thoughts can be disproved. And then you start to build up a case for evidence where it's like, essentially, I start then saying, what are all the reasons this thought isn't true?

What are all the things that I've experienced my life that would tell me this thought that I'm having is not true. And the reason you do that is not to give yourself this crazy reassurance to feel better. It's to then contextualize a thought and see it for what it is. It could be true. It could be not true. It is just a thought that I have in my mind. And if you go through this process of essentially being like both sides of the court against

this thought, what happens by the end of this like couple minutes of doing this is you suddenly see the thought separate from yourself. You recognize it as a sentence in your mind, not a part of who you are. And then what that allows you to do is to get space to say, what's the best course of action to take based on this thought? What's going to, like, is this going to make my life better or worse tomorrow if I eat that bag of chips right now? Is this going to make my life better or worse tomorrow if I act on this thought? If I do anything about it? Because what do we also know is that if you act on a thought, whether it's a good or a bad thing, you reinforce the thought to happen again.

So a lot of people are like, I don't know why I can't stop thinking about this thing. because you've reinforced it in some way, whether it's trying to avoid it or it's trying to do something about it. Lots of thoughts just need to be left the fuck alone. That's a crazy thought. You know what I mean? I have that all the time.

I mean, literally today I was like this morning was like the first morning in like months where I was like, damn, I've got a lot of fucked up thoughts going on. I was just like I had the urge to do something, anything, to not to like escape. What were some of the thoughts? Could you give us an example of like what's going through your head? I'll give you an example of something it could be.

It could be like, I'm so nervous about this test I have coming up. I don't even know like how I'm going to get through it. I'm going to fail and all these things. And then it's like, what are you going to do about that thought? Right. And I think a lot of times what I've just realized is that once you get space from it and you've diffused it, the next question is, what do you do about it?

And a lot of the times the answer is nothing. And we live in this society where we think that we have to do something about our thoughts. And a lot of times we just need to leave them the fuck alone and let them be what they are. And they will pass and new ones will come. And what about for the people who have the opposite problem of procrastination? They just can't get themselves to take action or do anything. How do you tackle that problem?

I would say that for somebody who's procrastinating, you actually want to do the opposite, which is you want to fuse a thought with an action. And so for somebody who constantly procrastinates, first off I'll say a lot of the times they say it's laziness. I don't think that's true. I think that procrastination, there's usually three things. you're trying to either avoid anxiety, boredom, or you're rebelling.

Okay, so when somebody needs to do something, say your boss says this project at work, there's usually three reasons why you avoid it. Either one, it makes you feel anxious. So doing it would cause anxiety. So you avoid doing it because you don't want to feel anxious. Second is that it bores you, right? Like it's not stimulating and it's not exciting, and so you don't want to engage with it. And so you procrastinate it because there's more stimulating things you could do with your time.

Right? It's like if you have a project or something for work, but you have this way more exciting thing, it's like, ah, fuck it, I'll put that one off because I don't really actually like it. And then the last one is rebelliousness, which is somebody else in an authority, authority manner, has like said, this is what I would like you to do, whether it be a boss, whether it be a partner, whether it be a spouse, and you don't want to do it. And so what do people do when they rebel is they just put something off as long as possible to punish the person until like the last possible moment when they could do it.

And so I do think, for the most part, procrastination is actually just, it's the same thing if you break it down. Like, we don't not do something because of zero thoughts or feelings. Like there are thoughts or feelings. They're just usually, in my opinion, procrastination is usually avoidance of some. And so it's like, by doing this thing, I will experience one of these negative emotions. Therefore, I would like to put off doing it because I would not like to experience those thoughts or emotions. And what would you do if you were starting over today with zero dollars and you wanted to make a million?

How would you do that? Only, I'm kidding. I saw that one. I said something on something everyone's like, I was like, Jesus Christ. I don't even show my fucking shoulders. You know, I mean, you're not wrong, though.

I think for a lot of... Only fans would be probably one of the faster ways to do it. Absolutely. If you want to make a ton of money. Absolutely. It's not a line. Go into like a niche.

Like, find an unserved category within Only fans. You should do that, Graham. It might make a lot of money. I bet you there's some people that like shirts that look like towels. I love this shirt. I do too.

It's actually really cool shirt. You know, I have nothing against it. Like, people do what they want to do. It's just like, not for me. So I don't even think I could do feet. I think I'm, I have Alex even knows, like, so's my team. Like, I've even had our time on social media just, like wearing what I like to wear because you show a fucking shoulder. Yeah, feet, but for the right price, because there's always an argument to be had about that.

People come to me, they say, Jack, you know, I'll pay you so-and-so amount for feet picks. I've gotten anywhere from. Are you for real? Yeah. Oh, this is having multiple times. Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah, someone wanted to even buy Jack's shoes.

Uh-huh. And he was a grand. Yeah, because I posted on my Instagram. $100. Why do you feel like your feet? They said they would buy me a new pair of shoes. Yeah. Yeah.

Why do they like your feet so much? I don't know. I have weird feet too because I got like hairy legs but I have a tree line. So you know how like in mountains how like it goes above a certain elevation and there's no trees? Okay. That's what I have where it's like hairy legs and then no hair on my feet. Maybe some people like that, but that's besides the point. I've had many offers for feet picks for buying my shoes and stuff like that.

It's a thing. People like it. And for the right price I probably would. Sorry. Yeah. Selling shoes. I mean, you could donate. He was, I know, he was trying to give me to sell.

I was trying to make sure the guy was, like, legit, actually going to pay. You know, it's like a real customer. And isn't, like, that weird. Interesting. You know, it's weird, but you want to make sure there's, like, a line drawn. It's like. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I think it's just like, for me, it's just like, I don't know.

So the, I don't know. Is there a, it's got to be a price. A price? It's got to be a price. Yeah, I mean, there's just to me on. I'll tell you with a real talk, which I told Alex, I said, the only time I'll show my body is a sports illustrator. says they want me on the cover. That's a pretty good, yeah.

And so, like, I work out. I have a good body. I just not going to show it for fucking Instagram. Okay, what do you think about this? Because this was controversial recently, and I know we're getting a little bit off topic here. Sports Illustrated had a model that took the cover of their magazine that was a little bit on the bigger side.

And for a long time on the cover of Sports Illustrated, it was always like very, very fit people with the idealistic, which has been really accepted, you know, attractive body. What do you think about something like that? Well, I'll say this. I'm an advocate of showing healthy bodies. I'm not an advocate of normalizing obesity, which is one of the, like, number one ways that you can actually. Like, there's not much more that's worse for your health than being obese.

And as somebody who was considered actually technically obese, I feel like I can talk about that. 100 pounds have ridden this? Yeah, that's obese. And so I think for me, it's like towing the line. Like, do women always look like rails who have no fat and all ripped and no? And that's probably not healthy for them to look like that all the time. And I think, you know, if she gains 15 pounds, like how much, she's still very attractive, right? But I think when you're towing the line of like, let's say that, let's contort reality and say that unhealthy is healthy.

I'm not okay with that because I do know that that actually takes a toll on your body and your lifespan and your quality of life. And so I don't really think promoting that is ideal. I don't think that's something I wouldn't promote to my children. I would not promote to the younger society. I don't know why you would want to promote anything. I don't care that it's being fat. Just like, why would you want to promote anything that is unhealthy for people to other people? That's a good point.

I see, I don't know if you've seen these, but people will go on planes and they'll ask for like, if you go to this airline, you can actually get two seats for the price of one. If you say that you're like above a certain weight or that you need it because of your obesity. And people are like, oh, you're so beautiful just the way you are. But if you need two seats on an airplane, you're probably morbidly obese. and that, you know, obviously a lot of people contend that. Well, I just think coming as somebody who was very overweight, like it's not a disease, but we treat it like one. We treat it like something that people can't do anything about.

And that keeps them stuck. That's not helping them. Like when I was overweight, like people treating me like I was a victim of my weight didn't help me get healthy. That helped me stay stuck. And so, like, I'm an advocate of helping people make their lives better and get healthier. And so like normalizing that, I am viscerally opposed to because that does not help anybody. And I do not think it empowers people to actually change their lives for the better.

Do I expect women to look perfect? Absolutely not. I don't look perfect. And so I think there's a very, there's a difference. And people go to like one extreme or the other. It's like just because I'm saying that I don't want to normalize obesity does not mean I'm saying everyone should look like a Victoria's secret model. You know, like I also have seen. That's arguably unhealthy.

Right. It's like either end can be. Right. And so I think, again, I'm an advocate of healthy. I don't know what the person on the cover looked like. I just don't really understand why we're, I don't know what the whole deal is with like normalizing things that are not actually good for you. See, I've seen like from my perspective,

I've seen like the men's health magazine covers like growing up. And to me that just seemed like inspirational. It seemed like the pinnacle of... Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Tauce. Capable and confident. the Volkswagen Taos is fit for everyday life, nimble in traffic, agile and tight spots,

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When people tell you that you being overweight is not your fault and that it's genetic and that it's you're predisposed and that you have a disease, it's not fair that somebody else looks that way. I think it toes the line. I think there can be, like, thyroid issues and things that are beyond your control. There's so few things. Yeah, I think that's a, like, that's a pretty small. I guess you try to, yeah. Like, if everyone's been telling you your entire life that you are a product of your environment and there's nothing you can do about it, it's an immutable thing, then the only rational next step is acceptance, which is really interesting.

So you can't necessarily blame those people of everyone around them. Like you said, you post a video about needing two seatbelts on a plane and getting two seats for free. And everyone's like, oh, this is so amazing or whatever. Like, you just see that. And you're like, okay, well, this is good. I can accept the fact that I can't change this. Yeah. I mean, I trained, I was a personal trainer for, I don't even know how many years before.

gym launch. And so, like, I worked with many people who were clinically obese. And, you know, there's a lot of other stuff that goes into it in terms of like, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I know in the fitness industry. And then they're like, this person is telling me they're following a meal plan. I'm like, no, no, no. Ask them what they eat when nobody's looking. Okay? Because that's what they do. I did it as well. So I know. And again, I say this because it's like, I have had my first hand experience, which is like, people lie to themselves, you know? And of course there are the edge cases where somebody does have a medical issue. I am not speaking to that.

But like a lot of people lie to themselves. And that's what gets you stuck in those situations. And it keeps you there. And so me lying to you doesn't help you, get out of it. How much of that do you think is mental versus physical output? If someone's overweight and they're trying to lose weight and trying to get in shape. Explain mental versus physical output. Mental could be having a mental issue or having mental roadblocks that prevent them from achieving their goals.

I think that most of the time it's behavioral issue with eating. Like you don't get obese from not working out. You get really big from eating compulsively. And so in my opinion, a lot of it is compulsive eating. It's just every time you have a negative thought, every time this thing occurs, every time you're at this party, you overeat. Right. And then you normalize the sense or the feeling of feeling overly full. And so a lot of it comes down to just, I wouldn't even say it's mental.

I would say it's behavioral because a lot of people think, oh, it's. I have to resolve this unresolved trauma for when I was a child and my father said I was fat. Guess what? Everyone told me I was fucking fat when I was a kid. I need to go back and redo my fucking life to lose weight.

I just needed to stop putting shit in my mouth. Like for real, though. It's like, I don't need to go resolve my trauma with my mother. I just need to now, as an adult, what happens is like maybe something that when we were younger created this maladaptive behavior when we were 15.

But we've taken that behavior. We've done it for 10 years. do we need to change a situation or do we need to change the behavior that we adapted to from the situation? We need to take the behavior. We don't need to worry about the situation or why it happened.

We just need to change the behavior that resulted from that situation. We cannot change the past. So here's an interesting thought. It seems like people are gaining more weight now than they did 20 or 30 years ago. How much of that is purely the food that we eat is so bad, is so processed.

There's so much sugar injected into everything. In my opinion, it's actually just the quantity of food. Because you can eat processed food. I'm not saying you're going to feel the same. And I'm not saying your gut is going to feel good and all that stuff. But you're not going to necessarily gain weight. You will be inflamed. So I think a lot of people conflate these.

They say, oh, I eat these processed foods and I immediately gain weight. You gained water weight because you are inflamed because you are more likely to be allergic and have sensitivities to process food. And so, like, if I go out and eat McDonald's tonight, I'm probably going to blow up five pounds because of the sodium and the processed food and the fact that you're that bothers my stomach, but I'm not going to actually have gained five pounds. If I ate an entire head of broccoli that's 1,000 calories, it's going to do the same thing to my body as 1,000 calories of McDonald's in terms of weight, not in terms of all the other things.

And so for me, I think it's just the quantity of the food that we're eating. And actually, I think a lot of the diet culture has actually, it works against us in a way because a lot of people, what they've done is they, if you look at the volume of food that we eat compared to like 30 years ago, like look at someone's like how much food's on their plate, what even happens now with diet culture is that they're teaching you how to eat things that look like more calories than they are. So for example, there's like a lot of recipes online where they create these ice creams that have like 200 calories, but it's huge because you put Xanthum gum in it, however you say it. One, that hurts your stomach like a motherfucker, but two, you're teaching yourself to be insanely full. It's like this sense where you're very full, but you're not satiated.

And so then those same people, what if you go and you eat actual real ice cream in that quantity? And I've seen that happen a lot for people too. And at the end of the day, I think it's just better to learn portion control. And like, you don't necessarily need to feel full to stop eating. And I think a lot of people don't understand that that not feeling full is not unhealthy. And feeling hungry is also not unhealthy. In fact, most people who are at a healthy body weight feel hungry a lot more of the time. And so, you know, when I was overweight, it was like I never actually felt truly hungry.

But like when I'm at a healthy weight, like a very healthy BMI, I feel hungry, I don't know, two-thirds of the day. And so, especially because, like, I lift weights pretty hard. So, like, that kind of increases your desire to eat. And so I think a lot of it comes down to just, like, what we think an actual portion of food is and how much we're eating volume-wise. One thing I want to talk about about that specifically is Graham and I, I don't think we could relate any more than with what you just said. It's like, we both have talked about this before. Our love for the feeling of being full. Oh, man. It is my absolute favorite. That's why we go to all you can eat sushi.

That's why I love waddling out of that restaurant. You feel so bad. And you feel horrible, but so happy. And I don't know why there could be such a dissonance between how your brain feels and how your body feels in that moment. So it's something I've been working on lately. And I've been cutting down, like you said, the volume of food that I've eaten. So it's kind of a coincidence we're talking about this now. And I'm hungry right now.

And I'll probably be hungry for another couple of hours. And I'll have a meal and I'll get a little bit hungry later at night. But to a lot of people, they kind of recoil at that idea. Because also there's a fine line between, you know, teaching standard dieting practices and good dieting practices and then taking that to the extreme where people start to develop eating disorders and stuff of that nature. How do you balance like the two? Like if people have a naturally like a bad gut reaction to that, what would you tell them? I've been to both ends of the spectrum. You know, when I was in high school for a period of time, like I did not eat.

I ate 300 calories a day and I ran eight miles. I then like would make myself throw up when I was in college. I mean, like I've gone through the whole gambit. and I was also really fat. And so, like, I've gone through the entire thing, and I think where I've come to now is a place that I really like, which is, like, I don't think about food that much. I eat to fuel my body, and I accept that it's okay to feel hungry. And I think a lot of it came from realizing that people use food for a lot of things. And very seldom is it to just nourish their body.

and I also don't really care a ton if I under eat one day or if I over-eat one day. I think it'll balance out over a week or a month. And so I think I just try to pay less attention to it because like I'll actually just put like this. I looked at it and I was just like after being in the fitness industry for a fitness industry for a while and I was like, dude, I don't want to spend my life thinking about fucking calories and food. Like not that I don't want to be healthy. Like I now could calculate a calorie like I counted on my fitness pot for 12 years straight.

Alex saw the streak, 12 freaking years on my fitness bell. I know enough now, but like I don't want to spend my life overthinking food. And I think we have this weird culture now. We're like, people make entire livings off of overthinking about food. They're like, what's in that orange? Oh, did you know what's in this? Oh, my God. There's saturated oils.

Did you hear about the stuff? It's like, oh my God, I don't give a fuck. What if I don't care if I live two years less? What if I don't? Because I don't think about that stuff. I think the time that I would waste thinking about all of it, I'd rather just lose those years at the end of my life because I don't want to waste them being this weirdo who's like completely obsessed with fucking organic toilet paper um which is like where I see people going nowadays and so

not to say it's weird but like it's just like is that what you want to spend your time on with all these issues and all these things on earth and all these things you can do with your freaking time and you want to talk about fucking calories you know what I mean like and like to a degree that's not like oh let's help you lose weight but like nitpicking about them and I think that's that's where I got to is I just got fed up with it I was like I I just don't want to to think about this at all. I'm just going to do what I want to do. I'm going to eat what I want to eat. Might vary a little bit each day, but I'm just not going to think about it. And I think for a lot of people in terms of there's like the side of the industry, which is, you know,

seems unhealthy, like, oh, you know, you're under eating or OZempic or all these things. At the other side where it's like normalizing too much. I think, I mean, I encourage people to try everything with open mind. I mean, that's what I'll say, is like, try all of it if you want. find what works for you. At the end of the day, calorie deficit can be doing keto. It can be vegetarian. It can be, you know,

eating fucking candy. You can be in a calorie deficit. And so just find what works for you and what aligns with your goals in life. I honestly hate the industry. And I even, we're talking about it and there's going to be clips. I'm like, because people are so dogmatic.

They're like, well, you're wrong. It's like, how am I wrong about this if it aligns with what I want in life? And so I think for people, they have to figure out what they want, what's important to them. Not everyone wants to be jacked. Not everyone wants to be super skinny. Not everyone wants to, you know, cares if they live an extra 10 years because they would

rather enjoy cake. And so at the end of the day, you know, even what I said about like normalizing obesity, if somebody came to me and they were like, I'm fine with the fact that I'm going to die 20 years earlier because my weight, I'd be like, all right, fuck it. I ain't got nothing to say. Like, you know, I assume that you want to live longer. But like, if you don't, okay. You know, I don't know.

I just like, people can do whatever they want. And I don't care if anyone listens to my advice. Although really quick, before we go into that, as I'm sure you could tell over these last few months, we've spent a lot of money bringing you these episodes. We've traveled across the country multiple times. We've even gone international, and these costs add up. However, it doesn't need to be this expensive to do something similar to us.

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It looked amazing. It was very simple to use, and we loved it. One of my favorite things about Streamyard is their multi-stream feature, which is incredibly valuable. It can film yourself on Streamyard, and they distribute that footage to all of these other platforms like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, more. Hands down, Streamyard is the best way. to begin creating high quality content for absolutely free because they have a free package if you want to get started down below in the description. This means it costs you absolutely no money upfront whatsoever to get started. Once again, guys, I just recommend you try it out.

If you're looking to get into content, it literally costs you nothing. It is completely free. Try them out with the link down below in the description. Thank you so much, Schroenhard, and back to the episode. You know, I don't know. I just like, people can do whatever they want. And I don't care if anyone listens to my advice. That's really interesting. I appreciate the how you contend with the dogma because i think that's really a problematic thing for a lot of people that have a voice online is just telling people that this is the right way this is the wrong way you have to follow me i know and it's honestly fitness and diet is actually worse than anything i've ever seen i mean even business like it's like people can generally agree on certain things

diet i mean honestly how defensive somebody is over their diet i correlate with their intelligence i don't what if you're defensive what if they're so right that they're so right that That's why they're defensive. Maybe they're right for themselves, but they might not be right for everybody. I mean, I don't know many incredibly smart people who spend their day trolling online,

arguing with people. So, like, I think they would be doing something else at their time. And so, for me, it's just like, I, the more defensive somebody is over something, the more it's just like, because there's so many things that I know or I know people in the diet industry know,

and they know, like, the source of truth and everything. And then it's just like, they're like, what's the fucking point? Because it's like, a lot of people just are swayed, by the things that they're reading and the articles that they think are legit and the studies they think are correct but half the fucking studies aren't even conducted correctly half of them the

variables aren't even controlled you can't even trust studies anymore yeah so it's just like i don't know uh it just feels like a giant um waste of potential of a lot of really smart people to be arguing about if i eat eggs or fish so if you were starting over would not i would not go into fitness a little bit of a tangent yeah If you're starting over with nothing, $0, $0,000, how would you become successful step by step? $0. Do I have my skills? Yeah, I would say so.

Or do you think for the, okay, well, let's make it more, like, well, let's make it more, like, well, the average viewer. So if they want to do something. You have the average skills of the average person. Yeah. I would get into sales. I think I would first go, and I would go somewhere that had the highest ability to earn commission, and I would learn sales. I mean, like, I think at the end of the day, like, if you have no skills and you're starting from scratch, whether you want to build a business, whether you want to have a job, whether you want to make, and if you, especially if you want to make a million dollars, like the fundamental skill that you want to learn is how to sell something, in my opinion.

And so I would, I would find a job in sales, and then I would probably figure out if I could just sell it myself eventually. I don't know what it would be. I mean, like, car sales is like what my default was if, like, it didn't work out with Jim launch. I was like, I can just sell cars, you know, like something. But I think it's like it's the highest leverage skill I think you can learn when you are that young. Like I've seen so many people, I'll tell you right now, like in terms of people that are within our portfolio team, like within all the companies, everything, the highest performing closer or like salesperson, whatever you want to call them, right? 18 years old. 18.

Highest performing. What makes them so good? His character. He just does the work. It's like he shows up early. He stays late. He makes extra calls. He takes the calls nobody else wants to take.

He just takes the leftovers. And so I think that's what makes him so good. And I think for me, the reason I would go into sales if I was starting again from scratch and just learn that skill is because I don't really, I feel like it teaches you so many fundamentals about business. Like, it's not like I've ever stopped selling. I sell now, you know, employees on the vision of the company. I sell partners on the vision of working together. I'm just not like selling customers. And so I think it teaches influence.

It teaches hard work. It teaches capacity, like expand someone's work capacity. And notice I didn't say that I would start over from scratch building something on my own because I actually think like a way to leapfrog yourself is to learn from others. Like working for other people prior to having my own business, if I hadn't done that, I do not think I would have been able to succeed as I had because I had models of what good looked like. Like, I watched them fail. I got to learn from their experiences.

Like, I got to watch them make mistakes and then not make those for myself. And so, like, it's funny because somebody asked me, it was like two days ago. They were like, oh, something you always want to be an entrepreneur. I was like, I want to be part of something big. I want to be part of a team. And like, I've actually accepted that maybe to get to my goals of where I really want to go. I'm going to have to take on more partners. And I'm going to have to have less of a stake in what I own.

And like, that means, like, again, it goes to a different, it's almost like losing freedom in order to gain your goal. and I'm never afraid to do that. And I think in the beginning when you're first starting out, I think the goal should be to learn not to have the ultimate amount of freedom, if that makes sense. Yeah. Do you think anybody could make it in sales? I think that you need to have a capacity to accept rejection.

So for me, I think the reason that, like a lot of, I think, for example, the reason there's a lot more men in sales than women is because women have been socialized that in a way that they get less rejection than men. men. More men experience rejection. Just think about in the dating world, right? You've probably been said no too many times because you go approach women. No, I'm kidding. No, absolutely. But what do women do? They don't even go half the time approach men. They just wait for men to come to them and they don't have to be rejected. And so I think that's why fundamentally there's a lot more male salespeople than women. But I think that the women that I do know that are in sales,

I mean, they kill it. And a lot of them, they're very thick-skinned. They don't care if somebody says no. And they're very driven. And so I just think a lot of it has to do around how you're socialized. You know, for me, it was more just like I didn't have a fear of what was going to happen if somebody said no, which is why I felt like it was okay. I did watch a lot of people who failed and they were just terrified of the no. And again, I think it's like you have to aim for the no because the more knows you get, the closer you get to a yes.

And so for people who are constantly trying to avoid getting said no to, they also avoid success. What's one of the biggest mistakes people make in sales? thinking that sales tactics and hacks and tricks will mask lack of conviction. At the end of the day, if you look at the best salespeople, the best salespeople are often people who own the fucking company. Why is that? Because they have the most conviction about it. They truly believe in what they're doing, because you hope so, right?

And I think a lot of what I see out there about sales, like I actually don't talk about it much because I think, I think, I think the reason I was good at sales is I always believed in what I was selling. I was selling in the very beginning for many years weight loss and I knew how to help people lose weight. And I was passionate about it because I had been there and I realized how horrible it feels to not want to look at yourself in the mirror, to literally run away from mirrors, to never turn the lights on when you're naked. Like, I experienced all that pain myself. And so I truly wanted to help people and I was convicted like this is the way you've got to do it. And so what I see nowadays, though, is like a lot of tactics and tricks meant to manufacture conviction, manufacture urgent

manufacture scarcity because the product actually sucks and because you don't actually believe in what you're doing. And so I think the worst mistake you can make is to sell something that sucks, to sell something you don't believe in, and to work at a company where you don't actually feel passionate about what they're doing. Because it shows. And all of those things absolutely affect the lifetime value of the customer. Like it's like people think I'm saying that they're like, oh, well, I'm going to lose sales if I do that. Okay, well, you're going to lose them eventually anyways. because customers that are sold in ways that are on false premise, those customers don't stay for life.

They're not loyal to your brand. They realize what you've done once they get in there and later on and notice that things aren't quite exactly how you said. And so it doesn't benefit anybody in the long run. Do you worry about AI ever taking over sales? I definitely think that there's a lot of ways in which it's going to change the industry of sales. I think that for like enterprise sales, I don't see it taking over anytime soon. so people who sell very expensive stuff.

I don't see that happening because the sale's not straightforward. It's not like you have like one conversation you're going from there. And usually there's a lot of industries. Trust me, we're like they still fly out for everything. It's like got to fly on site. You got to fly here. And it's just like that's just how the industry is. So there's a lot more like that that people aren't talking about.

I think lower ticket high transaction sales, those definitely are more at risk in terms of you don't need to build a relationship. you're probably not going to talk to this person again. It's not a high-priced item. I definitely think that there's a likelihood that AI can take over there. But it's not something I'm worried about. I've definitely looked into it. I've talked to a few founders of different softwares that do that. I've listened.

They're not at a point where I feel comfortable using any of those things yet in any of my companies. But, I mean, the moment that they are, I'll definitely try them. Yeah. I could see there being some really convincing AI chatbots. So if you have a product on a website for sale and you want to ask questions about it, that AI chatbot could sell you. well. Just imagine prompts. Like if you put in this, it spits out this. This objection, you say this. Yeah. I mean, really good. It would be really interesting. I think we're going to enter a time where

there's going to be a lot of one person businesses. Once we get to that point where this kind of software is fleshed out because I know people who already have it, for example, I'm invested in one where they have one person. And he's been able to build everything else to be automated and coded and have artificial intelligence. And so I think that's going to become more popular because if you also look at like the trend of like what people want, a lot of people are wanting to work alone remotely by themselves. They're wanting less interaction.

It's the opposite of everything I like. 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. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. But I do think that that's appealing to a lot of people, and this will enable that. What's that business? Could you give us some details

about what it is? Yeah, so it's a business that trades appointments online. So basically, you know how you like stub hub you sell tickets yeah they they trade appointments it could be a dmv appointment it could be a restaurant reservation it could be a hair appointment as salon like basically it's a it's arbitrage on scarce appointments is there like a market for it so for example people pay for a different appointment time yeah i saw an article on cnbc that said that there was like some 17 year old kid who was working like a desk job who was making 55 000 a year a year

buying appointments or reservations or restaurants in New York City and they're reselling them. That's insane. Yeah. And there's someone else who's making like $70 grand a year part time. So they're like at their desk job just like, oh, I'm going to make this appointment like a few months in advance. They could just sell it. Yeah. That's it.

I heard they're cracking down on it. I thought it was a genius idea. But then I thought how you crack down besides just like making maybe like a non-refundable deposit. Like making a different like a money transaction where you have to like. charge $100 to the card, and then that gets off the bill. It's a government level that's trying to crack down on it. But this is what they do with any new market. It's like Uber.

It's like Airbnb. It's like ticket master. Like all of them had to fight the government trying to say that you cannot resell this thing. And it's funny because people like, oh my God, people would buy a reservation. Yeah. Well, people didn't think that you could resell tickets either. And guess what? Now there's an entire market for it.

A bunch of people making money. And so at the end of the day, like, it's going to be. be really hard to stop when you're making more money for the people, you're making more money for the restaurants, and you're fulfilling a need that some customers have. Now, what do you say to the people who really dislike the idea because they say, I'm trying to get a reservation, but someone else has already reserved all the spots and is trying to resell them for a profit? What do you say to those people? Well, I would say this is how the economy works. Yeah, supply demand and the economy. And it's not like we're selling reservations, Applebee's,

Okay, we're selling reservations like Carbone and Delilah. Like if you're going there in general and you can't pay $50 for reservation, then you probably shouldn't go there in general. You know what's interesting is there's a lady that provides a service here in Vegas because the DMV here is horrible. So many people are moving to the city of Vegas. Yeah. So it's usually like you show up for walk-ins. So if it's something with regard to a car, I have the lady for you.

So this lady, she runs an office with several employees. It's a big operation. And I paid her. I think it was like 100 or 100. $150 because she books out a DMV appointment every single day. And then she gets people because you can do it two months in advance, but you need to be first in line. So she knows how to do that. She knows what time to log on, what time to book the appointments for.

She does that every single day. And she has, let's say, 15 people. She sends you all the documents. You sign the documents. You give it back to her. She goes in and just goes boom, boom, boom, boom. And she has someone at the DMV that, like, she knows how to do it quick. So she's also not taking up that much time.

Totally like the same amount of time as someone else in line. She gets it all done. and then she'll mail you your license plate she'll do anything like that and it's crazy because otherwise graham and i when we first moved here we had to go to the dmv and we it's yeah so didn't we go at like like we woke up at 6 a.m because they 8 7 and they had a line that we thought was for a concert because it was so big it was like 2 000 people in line no joke it probably was a mile long and we asked the people what time they got there they said 9 p.m. the night before those were the people at the front of line this is for the Las Vegas DMV and one of them yeah no and

fairness, this was like 20-20, so everyone was moved to Vegas, everything was shut down, they only allowed a certain amount of people inside. Yeah. But come, like when they opened at 8 a.m. Last night. A guy would walk up to the line and like give someone a yellow card and they're like, you're the last one. Everyone else goes home. Even if you've been waiting there since like, three o'clock in the morning, you go home and you try again. And we had woke at like six o'clock a.m. to be there at 6.30 minutes early. And we're going to be totally fine. And we drive up and It's just whine all the way down the street, wrapping around like buildings.

It was insane. I might get that number from you when we're done with that. But speaking of that, we actually used a similar sort of service. This guy that we knew for Disneyland had this AI software that would automatically scrape reservations for certain restaurants within Disneyland, and as soon as someone canceled, it would pick it up.

So if you say, I want to go to this restaurant, this day, Disneyland, just throughout the day, someone's going to cancel and it picks it up first. That's really interesting. Instantly. I mean, I think that stuff is going to become more and more common because people are more cognizant of where they spend their time. And so people are more willing, we have this generation at least is more willing to spend money

to save their time on things like that. It's convenient. That business of reservations, how did you go about working or finding out about this business? Did they reach out to you? Did you reach out to like, I'm just... No, no, I'm a neighbor. That was a neighbor? Yes, we met him in the elevator.

It was truly an elevator pitch. Really? Yeah. And he recognized you and it was like, hey. No, no, this was years ago when the company was like barely, it didn't even have revenue at the point. It was literally like an idea. And we met the guy and his wife in the elevator of our building. And we just like immediately, me and Alex, whenever we move somewhere, like when we're trying to meet people, the first thing we do is like the elevator is a great spot.

So we'll be like, oh, if we see people that are around our age and they're married, we'll be like, hey, we should like exchange numbers. We go to the dinner or something. And so we're like, oh, hi, like you guys. and we said hi and they seemed like super friendly and cool. And so we're talking. We get to the downstairs lobby. We're like, we should like do dinner sometime or something. He's like, oh, I have to tell him about my company.

And then he starts talking about the company. And me and Alex's like, this sounds very interesting. And so then we end up going to dinner. And then we went to another dinner. And then we like started becoming friends. And then he said that he was like raising money. And we were like, well, let's, I mean, I feel like it. I don't know.

Like it doesn't have any revenue. We have no idea. But like, let's just buy. X percent and we'll see what happens. Then we have something to talk about it dinner because now we're invested. And we did that and that was maybe three and a half years ago. And now the company is obviously much bigger because it's all over the news. And so that was all that happened.

Really fascinating. And we've just stayed in touch as friends. They used to live here in Las Vegas. And now they live in Miami. That's so cool. So I think you've said this before that your goal was a billion dollars. Is that true? Yes.

Why do you say yes as though there's a little stipulation? I think a billion is way too small. That's all. A billion is, so what would be more appropriate? 10 billion. 10 billion. What is 10 billion? What can you do with 10 billion that you can't do with one?

Well, here's the other thing is that it's not like anyone when the goal is a billion. It's like I want a billion dollars in cash in my bank account. It's like I want to be worth a billion dollars, right? And so that's a combination of equity, cash, all these other things. And so I think I've just realized, like, the more information I've gotten and the more investments we've made and the more success I've seen come to fruition, that a billion on its own is probably not as far away as I thought. And it doesn't feel challenging enough.

And so I think if I think in terms of 10 billion or 20 billion, that's really challenging, for my skill right now at least. Like a billion, if you have two companies that, like, hit it out of the problem. park, I mean, that's all I would need at acquisition for it to be, for to eventually like have my net worth be worth a billion. If I own, you know, 50% of each company and like each one becomes a couple billion. And it's like, and like that stuff just, it's a numbers game in terms of like you take on a certain amount of companies, you watch and see like a handful of them, maybe a quarter of them or a fifth of them. They end up being like the unicorns that like really

grow. And then you just kind of weed out the others over time. And, uh, I, I think I understand that now. And so because of that, I think to myself, like, well, what would be even more challenging? Because I think we'll get there sooner than we think. Based on how the next 18 months play out, I think it could be pretty soon. And so I want, like, what's the next thing? What are we going to do after that? Okay.

But I imagine you don't want the billion dollars of $10 or $20 billion just for the sake of having $10,20 billion. It's like, what is the motivating factor behind that goal? It's always the same thing, which is like, you know, one of our core values is competitive greatness. It's wanting to be great for the journey, not because of the outcome of the journey. And I think with anything in life, like when I first lost weight and I did a fitness competition, when I moved out to California, like all these things, it's like, of course I could not do those things. And of course, there's benefit to these things. But at the same time, that's not why I've ever done anything. It's because of who do I have to become to do those things and do them in a way.

that I'm proud. Like, there's a lot of ways to make money that I'm sure you guys know of a million ways. And it's not ethical, right? Or at least it's not aligned with my ethics. For me, it's like, it's about showing that it's possible to do it in a way where I maintain and if not maintain, deepen my integrity to my values. And so for me, that's always what I anchor to is like I would love to be that person for myself and who I was when I was younger.

Like, really, that's it. Like, a billion dollars. Like, I mean, the cool part about having billions of dollars is just the things you can do with it. Like, at that point, like, you can build hospitals. You can build schools. You can have, like, a real impact on the community. You know, like, yes, we make free content and all that right now, but, like, I want to, like, build stuff. And you need resources to do that.

And resources come from money. You trade money for a resource. And so, for me, that's what's exciting about when we get there and have that. is just being able to make a bigger impact on like the greater community. But it's honestly just about the journey to get there. It's like I want to show myself that it's possible. And I think that for me, what I've just found is that to have a life worth living, I always have to have a really big goal that I'm going after.

It aligns everything in my life. And it's always just made me a lot happier. One thing that I've always emphasized in success is the importance of having a good mentor. For example, Graham and I, we both had plenty of different really good mentors in our lives that have definitely pushed us forward and provided is with inspiration or information that can help us. Yeah. Who have been your biggest mentors thus far and who are your mentors right now? Like as you climb this economical and financial ladder, I'm imagining your mentors just start

changing. I don't have any. None. No. So who do you look for for guidance? Do you do model other people that you see? I don't even look at what anybody does. Honestly, we have each other.

like a lot of why we're able to do what we do is I think me and Alex work so well together and in many ways learn so much from each other and I would say that we have a lot of friends who are ahead of us now I don't take advantage of a friendship and ask for help on like X, Y and Z but I would say that a combination of I know a lot of people who are ahead and what they've done I hire people who know what to do to get to the next level so I can and learn from the people that I hire and put on my team. And I think at the next piece is, you know, it's just so fucking weird. As I say it to you guys, I'm just like, man, this sounds like so egotistical to be like, no, we just know what to do. But I think we thought a very long time about what we were going to build. You know, we had two years. And it's working and it's all going in the right direction.

So it's like, I don't know. I mean, it's a tough question because I don't, I mean, it'd be nice to have a mentor. There's definitely times, but I think right now, honestly, I should have a very strong team. That's interesting. But you would say in the beginning of like your journey, you think it's important? I'm assuming to find mentors. I do think so. Because in the beginning, you don't know what good looks like and you don't have any clarity.

And so I think it's important to surround yourself with people who do have clarity. You know, like if somebody's starting an e-commerce business, I might go find someone who's building an economist business. Like there's a billion people out there saying I'll teach you how to go from blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right because in the beginning going from zero to one million in my opinion the problem is that you don't know what you're doing and so find somebody who does know what they're doing or find free information that tells you what to do there's lots of different ways you can fill that gap it doesn't need to be a mentor it can just be a friend it can be a book it can be whatever

I think it depends on your level of intelligence because I would say level of intelligence is how vague of a direction you can take and run with it so the more intelligent somebody is the more vague direction they can take and still carry out the task. I think in the beginning, you have to be able to assess for yourself. Am I somebody, am I intelligent enough to figure this out with very vague direction or do I need very explicit instruction to figure this out for myself? And that's just a question you've got to be able to answer for yourself. How do you feel like a billionaire thinks and acts differently than the average person? Well, I can tell you, because I had a conversation with my friend who told me that if I want to be a billionaire, I need to be more ruthless with my time.

Because he's like me, he's a founder and a CEO. And so we get to talk a lot about the things that, like, we each go through. He exited his company for multiple billion and then now has started a different one. So he's back in the grind. And so it's cool to, like, relay that stop-up of each other. But I remember, like, there was a time where I said, like, I'm annoyed. Like, this partner called me and this is going on this. And he's like, yeah, Layla, that's a billionaire, doesn't even take that phone call.

And I was like, hmm. Yeah, that hurt. It didn't actually hurt. I don't get a fuck. But I was like, all right, yeah, I'm not taking that pump off anymore then. I think a lot of it is just, I've realized that my time is like the most precious resource that exists in the company. It's not the money. And so as I want to continue to level up, I look at leveling up my time, which is, you know, it's just more and more getting yourself out of any and everything that possibly isn't the one thing that's going to drive everything forward.

You know, in the beginning, it's like I need customers. service. I need finance. I need this. I need that. Now it's like I have a driver. I have security. I have somebody who buys fucking Q-tips and makeup for me. I have people who get my wardrobe. I have, you know what I'm saying? Like it just continues to level up because I've just learned like if this even takes 10 minutes of my day today, it's not worth it because I could have to spend 10 minutes thinking about how we're going to get here. And so for me, I think the biggest difference is what they spend their time on. Like time precedes money. How you manage your time dictates how much money you make, in my opinion. And so if any

wants to master money they have to first manage their time do you ever worry about getting out of touch by having everything kind of done for you and you not like being in the weeds it's seeing like what's going on with all the little things I do not worry about that because I care too much like I I care so much about people that work for me I am I mean that's why I love if I could just hire a CEO like and just be the founder and have like I know how to delegate and how people do think but I love investing in people and teaching people and making people's lives better by creating a great place to work. That is truly what fulfills me and why I do what I do every day. That's why I make content. That's why that's what I love doing. And so for me, I'm not worried about getting out of

touch because I'm not out of touch with myself. And I think at the end of the day, you can be out of touch with what it's like to go to the grocery store or what it's like to do this, but I'm not out of touch with my values and who I want to be and how I treat people. And I treat, you know, the person that is, you know, cleaning the building the same way that I'm going to treat an executive. And that's just because of who I am and what values I want to uphold, not because of anything else. And so, no. And at the same time, I think it'd be selfish of me to stay in touch with those things. Because if I am responsible, if I have the capability to provide thousands of jobs to people and jobs that make their better, then if you actually think about it, it would be selfish of me to keep things because I

feel judged for giving them away because that time could have been spent creating a hundred more jobs for people. And that's how I have to convince myself to look at it to feel okay with it. That's fair. Because I do think it's true. How are you able to work like 14 hours a day without getting tired or overdosing on like caffeine? Well, I think actually if you drink a lot of caffeine, it makes it worse. Notice this, I drink decal. I noticed that and that kind of shocked me. It's like, wow. No, no. What's the point to drink a coffee then?

There's like 15 milligrams of caffeine in it. It's like a little bit. I do get tired. I think I've learned how to load balance myself better, though, which is, for example, like I know that I can gas it on meetings. If then the next day I have all deep work day. And I'm like, I'm working on a project. I'm not talking to people.

And then the day after that, I have a content day. And then, so I try to theme my days, which helps a lot in terms of stamina of getting through the day. Because if you look at people who really love their jobs, for example, they have a lot of variability in their jobs. And I like variability in my week, not in my days. Because I can get a lot of one thing done in a day if it's like this is what today is dedicated to. But if I have to go, like yesterday, for example, I did work and then I did content, and then I did five hours of meetings, and then I did a two-hour dinner. and I was, I felt hung over today. And I knew yesterday, I was like, oh, this is not a good idea.

I don't normally do this, but I'd been sick, so I was trying to catch up. And so I was like, oh, I'm going to just try and do a bunch of one day. And what happened was what I know happens if I do that, which is like I feel hung over the next day. Makes no sense. I got plenty of sleep, water, food, it just like feel like you hit by a boss. But at the same time, I think I've engineered an environment where, one, I try to theme my days so that I don't run into that. because I think if you focus on like one thing each day, it makes it, you feel like you have much more stamina to get through the day. I do break up my days a lot of times with exercise or with like a break to see Alex or to do something that just like changes my gears.

But then I think the next piece to it is it's really hard to work hard on something if you don't really like it. Like if you really don't like it. Like when I, for example, have a day full of one-on-ones, I'm lit up by the end of the day. I love talking to my team. I love developing them. I love, like, thinking about them in my free time. I love watching them grow as people. You know how many people would say, like, I had one almost a day, and they're like,

I'm fucking exhausted because they don't like it, right? And so, like, when I tell people, I'm like, it's not like I'm forced to work this much. Like, I could probably do my job in half the time, but I put all my discretionary effort towards it because I like it, you know? And so I think if you engineer a business where what you do is what you want to do, then you want to do more of it. and, you know, I have a business where I get to work with a person I love the most in life. And when he makes the business better, it makes my life better.

When I make the business better, it makes his life better. When he gets better, I get better. When I get better, he gets better. You know, so it's great for my marriage. It's great for, like, in terms of having this office and having the people in the building, like, we've fostered so many friendships and relationships, like, we've fostered so many friendships and watching people, like, stay here until 8 p.m. And get here at 5 a.m. together and work out together and, like, build these relationships. it's all very fulfilling to me. And so those things give me energy.

It doesn't take energy away from me. Do I feel like if I were to stop, right, and just be like, do I feel tired? Like, yes, I can feel tired, but I'm too excited about what I'm working on most of the time that, like, I'm just not thinking about the fact that I'm tired. It's kind of like a kid that's like, you know a kid that, you know what it is? It's like when you're a kid and you want to stay up all night because you're just like so excited to be hanging out with your friend. And you're tired and you're like this, but you're like, I just love hanging out with my friend.

I want to keep hanging out. That's how I feel. And I think a lot of people don't get that because, you know, probably also when I first started making content, I was just terrified of being on camera and so I'm like, work 14 hours a day. But I do it because I like really love it, you know, and I'm grateful for that because it's taken me a long time. Like eight years ago, I didn't know what I really liked about running a business when

I didn't. I was trying everything. So I was doing everything. And so there's a lot of stuff I didn't like doing. And there's a lot of stuff I don't like doing now. But I've at least found that there's. There's a lot of things I can gain from doing things I don't like. I get to be honest about it, tell my team, show them, hey, this is an example for you guys.

Like, I'm going to do this. I don't like doing it, but I'm going to figure it out. We're going to figure it out anyways. I'm going to get really good at it and I'm going to pass it off somebody. So I don't know. I feel just very grateful for what I get to do every day because there's been a lot of times in my life where I really wished for what I had now. What's your schedule like today from beginning to end?

Today was a weird day because we're kind of in this. weird transition where so today would have been why this is scheduled a content day quote but i'm moving away from that and i'm moving into more of a we filmed the moment i've written something because it it does better it performs better it's more fun for me and so now we're kind of changing to like we're just every day deciding like we're you film someday or not film saying today um so it's like filming one video out of time versus like i would have normally before this filmed for three or four hours done this but i just hated that too because i was freaking exhausted did. Because, like, as you know, like, if anything is hard to do for 14 hours a day, it's

make content. And, like, I did it in the beginning, but I also think that's actually why I would say I can, I tend to come off very, like, I would say, professional, robotic, whatever people interpret it as. It gets worse if I'm tired. And so I would watch my content be like, oh, that's tough. And so I was like, I don't want that anymore. I don't want people to perceive me that way. And so I realized I was like, well, I can do that, but it doesn't work well. And so I've gone away from that and we've gone into this new way of doing things. So instead of it. Anyways, so yesterday, for example, woke up, worked for three hours, went on a walk for 45 minutes, filmed a video with Jason, did five hours of meetings, then had a 30 minute break, kind of

collected myself, then went to a dinner with somebody who's new on the team and their boss. And then today I woke up. I worked and did all my end of week reporting. So like I go through all the reports for the end of the week. Reports for the different businesses. for different businesses and different employees. So all the people that report to me send in reports, and then I get reports for businesses. I go through all the reporting and stuff on Fridays in the mornings.

And then I came into the office. I did hair and makeup. I took one-on-ones while I did hair and makeup. And so, like, I'll get my hair and makeup done and have people doing meetings with me. And then I held a team training for my managers. So it was basically on how to spot potential leaders in the company. And do you need to hire?

Do you need to develop people? Because we're at a point right now where we're growing really fast. And so I'm trying to educate them on what it looks like to expand. And then I went and talked to Alex about a deal that we're mid-doing and then a fire that I'm trying to put out. And then I came in here. How do you think the economy's doing? I mean, you have a bunch of businesses. Really?

Yeah. Most of our businesses is doing really well. So it's what I see happening and what I'm experiencing myself are different. and I don't know why that is, but I'll say this. I think a great business can still do well in a bad economy. It makes it harder, but they can still do well. I also think that how you market, how you position your business during the times when the economy is bad, how you price, how you package. If you do all those things well, then you can take advantage of it.

And we've done that with a decent amount of our companies. But what I'm seeing in terms of like all the stores closing, all the restaurants closing, all of those things. Yeah, it doesn't look great. I'll be honest. Like, I try not to dive into it too much because, like, enough that I know what's going on, but not enough that it's consuming all my time and energy because then it takes me away from doing things that could help. What are the biggest differences having a office like this? Wow. Such a change. How many square feet is this? 10,000, I believe. 40,000. Oh, this is 40. Why don't I think 10? I don't know. It's three stories. So you probably saw one.

It's been a very large life change. The beginning was weird because it was so different. It's like you drive somewhere now. You know, now I'm not in the same house as Alex. We're like completely separate offices. He's there here. I don't know what he's doing. You know, we don't see each other as much.

We don't go on our walks. Like there's a lot of stuff at first that I was like, whoa, this is weird. And very quickly as soon as people started coming here, and now we've had a lot of people move here. And now we're hiring a lot of people here and have hired. It's so much better. Really? I mean, I think because our culture is really great,

and that's like the centerpiece of everything for me is like leadership, culture, developing people. Like the number one thing we offered at Acquisition.com is growth. And I can say that very confidently. Like everyone grows so much here because we put such an emphasis on teaching. And so because of that, there's just, it's a positive place to be. I don't feel like I walk in a room and that people like, I don't want to see Layla. Like actually people try to find me and they want to talk to me, which is a good feeling.

And I want to talk to them. And when I run into somebody, I love having a conversation with them about like, how are you going to grow? How are you going to develop? Like, what are we going to do next? What are your goals? Like I love that stuff. And so it's actually been this sense of community that I don't think I have felt for a long time. And I really now understand why people said, you know, people who had great cultures say that in person is better than remote.

Now, here's the thing. I don't require anybody who doesn't need to be here. Like, obviously, if you manage the building and you're the building manager, you have to be in the building. But everybody else, we do not have any hours that you have to be here. We do not have that you have to be here certain amount of days a week. Nothing. We just said if you want to live in Vegas and come to the office, then do it. And voluntarily, people are here from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m.

It's not because I tell them to. It's not because, like, if people are at home, we're like, great. Like, nobody judges them. it's literally just because they like being here. You know, we have the whole bottom floor is a gym. You know, a lot of younger people here all working out together, trying to get healthy, trying to put on muscle. Like, people are socializing in their free time.

And so because of that, they spend more time here, I think. And so I love it. I think at first it was hard to get used to. But now I love having the separation from my house. I had no idea how it would feel. That was actually the biggest one is like, I want to go home at the end of the day. And it feels like home is separate from work. which I didn't know what that would feel like until it happened.

It's like I don't have the inclination to work when I'm at home anymore. It's like I have the inclination to like be a wife and Alex be a husband. And we kind of like take our hats off and it changes. And so there's just a lot of benefits that I just was not expecting. Do you find that people are more creative in person? Because I feel like that's the only thing that from our experience is kind of lacking with remote work is that you don't have that same sort of spark as you do when you're face-to-face with somebody. Collaboration is much more difficult remotely.

I will say for a lot of, I would say for a decent amount of roles. It's harder to read facial expressions. People don't know how to communicate as well on Zoom calls or on phone calls. And so the ability to read somebody is just a lot more in person. And I think it's a more relaxed. Like when you're on Zoom, it's like this meeting. And it's like, you know, you have to unmute and mute and you're talking over. And it's like, there's a lot of other dynamics you have to manage versus when you're in person.

And you're like, we got a whiteboard and two hours and then a Red Bull. Let's go. It's way more fun, you know. And I think that the experience of collaborating, like, for example, if we're going to do a day, it's like we might order a bunch of cookies or donuts and like go in the break room and we're like, we're going to whiteboard this out. It's like, yeah, I think it's more fun. And when you're having fun, you're more creative.

To help people understand what Acquisition.com is, is it's essentially like a family office where you guys invest in companies and take stake in them and then provide them with tools. and advice and guidance to build up their company, right? Correct. If Shark Tank offered you guys a seat, because we just had Kevin O'Leary on, he loves what he does on Shark Tank, would you go and sit on Shark Tank?

I would need to see the fine print of the deal. If it was as assumed, you know? I don't know what to assume, actually. I've heard different things. So I would say I would be open to it for sure. But I'll tell you, like we've turned down multiple. TV contracts because I don't like right now I want to focus on building this and I don't need Shark Tank to build it. Does that make sense? Yeah, but they could help, right? They could be a mentor.

They could be a great mentor. Yeah. There's other ways to get that. And so it's like going on TV, the amount of time it takes, the amount it takes me for my team. I'm not in Vegas from my offices. Like, listen, if you had asked me a year ago, I would have said yes. But I think right now, just like with the season we're in, I would have to be flying back here like every week. I don't know where they do it or any of that kind of crap, but like emotionally, yeah, I would love to do it. That sounds fun. I just don't know if that would be something that would be a smart decision based on the season I'm in right now. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, so the last thing that we wanted to discuss here was we had you and Alex on at the same time and we talked about relationships and stuff like that. One thing that

Graham and I were considering is do you ever feel with like traditional gender roles the pressure of something like that? Because you, I feel like traditionally speaking, go counter tradition. Counter tradition in the way that we work together. I wouldn't say counter traditional in the home. Like Alex doesn't touch the house cleaning food, none of that. Like I make sure he is water and his fed. I even still bring him snacks. I'll be like on a meeting. and bringing him food. Like, and I don't,

I like doing it. It's not because I feel obligated to. We have people that we can pay, but I still like to if I can. So in a lot of ways we are, I am actually still pretty traditional, which I think is probably like not what people see, but like I don't show my like cute wife self on media

because like I'm married to Ho Joe Schmo over here. You know what I mean? So I would say that is the first. It's like I actually do think that we, have fairly traditional gender roles when it comes to like how we interact within our marriage but how we interact as business partners I think we have a really good business partnership and I think that we have a lot of respect for one another and so I would say that I definitely felt the weight of external judgment in the beginning but we had a lot of conversations about

it you know I felt like I had to still cook dinner every night the way like because I actually went and did culinary school for a year, I thought that I had to keep cooking dinner from scratch every night, even though I'm the CEO of a company that at the time gym launch was doing 50 million a year. And I'm on meetings, literally running a meeting and I'm like baking these beans over here. Like I was just trying to do everything. I felt that. I felt like people always were judging me, especially when I was around 25 of like, why don't you have kids? Why you have kids? And I was like, I don't know. I don't want them right now. Like I just was like, I don't know. I don't have a desire. Like what's wrong with me? You know? And so,

I've definitely felt like there's judgment cast on me for not maybe fitting into the other 50% of the role that I don't. Like I'm not at home with children. I don't have children like taking care of the house. It's not that I think poorly of any of those things. It's just it's just not something that I've had a desire for. And so I just had to have conversations with Alex about it of like, you know, I'm in my head about this now that, you know, people are starting to ask me and people are

saying these things like what do you think and you know we both agreed on that we didn't want that for ourselves and for our marriage and if people want to judge us for it then that's okay what does that internal debate look like for you when you're debating whether or not having kids i remember we had when we had alex on he says he is scared of having kids because he's worried he would hate his kids yeah i mean i worry he would dislike his yeah i don't think he used the word hate no sorry he wouldn't dislike he wouldn't like the person they grew up to be and he has no control over that yeah That's fair. Yeah.

You never said hate. He didn't say hate. Yep. He did not say hate. Maybe just like. Oh, you're good. For me, it's more, you know, so I'll tell you when I finally realized why I didn't have a desire for kids, which, because I always pictured myself being a mom. And then as I got further along, we started the business and all this stuff.

I was like, I don't, I don't even want them. Why don't I want them? And I talked to actually Tony Robbins. And it was in this private, like, little event that he had. we got invited to and a woman brought up, or he brought up women that don't want to have kids. And he's like, the reason a lot of women have kids is there's a lack of something. They're at a certain age. They don't have a purpose.

They haven't figured out something that's fulfilling them. And so they have this lack that they want to fill. And so a lot of women fill it with kids. He's like, now a lot of women now have filled that lack with a purpose, with a career, with a mission they're on. He's like, and so those women don't really want to have kids. I just remember the moment when he said it, I was like, that's exactly it. Like I have people that I mentor. I have people I develop.

I have people I feel like I take care of and I think about in my free time. I have a sense of community or you could say family within the workplace. And so it feels like in many ways I have created a lot of things that I've wanted that you would get a lot of those benefits from having children, but I get them from other places. And then I think, you know, it goes into losing freedom and autonomy. you know, I'll go like this, right? So if I had kids and I wanted to keep doing what I'm doing, I would have to have a lot of help. And then I go back to, okay, well, if I'm going to see my kid for 16 minutes a day and they're getting raised by somebody who's not their parent, why am I having kids? And then I go to, okay, well, I could just stop everything and I could just raise them myself.

And then I go to like, oh, yeah, I would be depressed. Not because of just having kids, but I want to work. And I have this thing that I'm doing it. I wanted to see it out. And so I would say that's probably the main conundrum for me is, you know, who would take care of them? What would that look like? Yes, you can do both.

But I would prefer if I do have kids, like, you have to ask yourself at some point. Like, if you're just going to have other people take care of them, then why are you having them to say that you have them to fulfill a societal, you know, whatever? I don't know. So that's kind of where I'm at with it, you know. And here's the truth. I think I'll be happy either way. Like, I think I'm going to have a great life, whether I have kids or not.

I'm not, like, scared of having or not having them. I think that's how everything in life works, though. You could always adopt Jack and me. You know, you know, take care of us. That's a good point. Actually, Graham, get out this paperwork over there that we put it for this. We made this really easy for you. I'm a great mom, but, uh, is not kidding.

All right. Well, thank you, Lela, for coming on the podcast. Thank you guys for watching. And until next time. And we'll show you the adoption paperwork. Jesus. No, we're serious, actually. We have it.