The Man Who Made $100M Before 32: The Secret Was To Stop Letting Them Control Me | Alex Hormozi

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/9b18bb1fafa83dab

I do a hundred and six million dollar launch. My mom got to see it, which is really cool.
She dies four weeks later.
It was just like how am I supposed to show up right now?
So I rate these tweets as notes to self.
I had never heard you talk like that publicly before.
Yeah.
I'm like, what do I need to hear right now?
And I was like, I I'll write that, which is like I just have to keep fighting. And people will judge how much you love someone by how much you choose to suffer.
I don't think the person that you lost
Probably wants you to suffer.
One of the lessons that I've learned from an entrepreneurship perspective that's translated into life is we will get these moments of dissatisfaction or discomfort and be like, I'm life sucks.
I need to change something, but my emotional discomfort is not an adequate reason to change what I'm doing.
And so there's all these other skills that are still required to be successful in business. But if I can compress 14 years of business advice, then the first thing I would say is you have to decide whether you care more about your future than what other people think about your future. Like someone's version of you has to die because everything in the very beginning of entrepreneurship comes down to one thing, which is fear. And it makes sense to be afraid. It's because we want certainty. But the only way to know.
is to start. The second thing I've learned is that the fastest way to build a$10 million business is not the fastest way to build a hundred million dollars.
Because focus and patience are the two enduring competitive advantages because they're so anti human. And so this is where entrepreneurs will skyrocket and I'll unpack that concept. So how are you thinking about your business in the world of AI? I'm a big AI
advocate. But people are using AI in the wrong places. Like outsourcing thinking and decision making to AI is a really bad decision. Because you will just get dumber. This is the best asset I've got for now. So I want to keep it as sharp as I can. Finally this is like the the absolute raw truth I could possibly give, which is the single best financial decision that I ever made. And that is
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Alex.
I I feel like we have to start with
AI.
Because
It is front of mind for both I think my audience, but also for
entrepreneurs that I speak to at every step in the journey, whether they are I was with Dara, who's the CEO of Uber the other day, um in New York, and he that's what the conversation was about, AI. But then I speak to startup founders who are trying to build a software company and can't find a moat.
Yeah, it's defensible. Those conversations are about AI. What is your
How are you approaching this as an entrepreneur?
How can we use AI to do the things that are the art the normal functions of the business at a
way better, way faster, et cetera. Aaron Powell What I'm seeing a lot, especially with founders or people starting out is that
They're using AI to do a lot of dumb things really fast.
And they're trying to build companies that the models are going to swallow up pretty much immediately, anyways, or already have for super users and it's just gonna like
become easier. And the question that I would ask for the entrepreneurs who are
you know, AI maxing right now. And it's again.
I think it's very good to adopt new technology is are you making more money?
Just the very simple Are you making more money now?
And
Even though you're token maxing and spending all this money on tokens, but like are you making more money? And I had a business I looked at the other day, they had eleven VAs that were doing I can't remember, some sort of like data cleaning work. VAs. Yeah of virtual uh assistants. So low skilled labor overseas that was doing work. And I think it was something in the neighborhood of like
Eleven thousand dollars a month is what they were paying for these eleven VAs. And they were doing a good job and it all worked.
And they then spent three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
To try and
create an AI system that would replace what these eleven virtual systems were doing.
But that means they spent three plus years of costs.
on what these eleven virtual assistants were doing.
And
It wasn't even the constraint of the business.
It was just a process they could automate.
Not that they should automate it, because it's not the thing that's limiting their growth. And so they still need more customers. And that wasn't the thing. This was like part of their quote process or something, but that wasn't the limitation. They had didn't have enough demand.
People are using AI in the wrong places.
They're trying to start AI businesses when they shouldn't start AI businesses. They should use AI in their business. They're trying to advertise as AI businesses when you should just advertise the thing that your customer cares about, which is the solution to their problem, the outcome. None of that's changed, but because you got really excited about it, you think.
Your customers are gonna be excited about it, but most people are a lot of people are afraid of AI. Um so it's not necessarily even a positive.
It's not making you more money, which is the final question. When you listen to someone like Elon Musk, he says that work will become optional in in the in the future.
And I sat here with a couple of experts on AI. They and they kind of explained to me what it is. And from a very simple simplified perspective.
This machine that has these neural nets in it, which b have lots of parameters, basically connections like the human brain does. And when they
train it, the parameters become reinforced to the the ones that made the right decision and the ones that made the wrong decision are like basically cut out. Sim again, I'm simplifying this. These
Brains, these digital brains are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, it's it's like almost inconceivable to me, based on what they've said to me, these area experts, that at some point.
It isn't able to do a lot of the cognitive work.
That people are currently doing.
My question really here is like where does the value remain in a world where intelligence
Is
Cheap.
And abundant and um higher, one could say.
And also in a world where robotics are coming over the horizon too, like where is the value?
I think stakes.
For example, AI can give all of the recommendations in the world, but someone has to own the decision. And so as of right now,
Maybe it will in the future. AI isn't
isn't a citizen of any you know any country, it doesn't pay taxes. And so somebody has to be responsible. Yeah. Yeah.
And upside. On on the on the flip side.
And to take this into different domains from the media perspective, imagine Jimmy, said Mr. Beast, has a video and are like
Mr. Beast is getting replaced by AI. He's not getting replaced by AI.
If he had a video that said five million dollars and the five million dollars wasn't real
And the Lamborghini wasn't real.
There be mistakes.
Yeah.
Like chess, right, has become more popular now.
than it's ever like than it's been in recent history.
But robots can beat humans at chess.
Mm-hmm.
But no one cares. I think about the F one as well, you you'd still want Liz Hamilton in the car, you take him out of the car, you stop watching F one. Right.
So humans want stakes.
And so there's the compensation side of it, which is that somebody's gonna be responsible, someone has to risk the money, somebody paid for the token, somebody owns the LC, someone is is owns this. And so there is value in the judgment and the assumption of risk and upside.
Which can be money or just the responsibility.
From a media perspective, we still have to introduce stakes into the into the show. Now, of course, there's gonna be the fiction world, they're gonna be much harder hit. But if you're trying to do a reality TV show,
The real part has to be there. One of the um things that I find really interesting about you is you spend a lot of time thinking, and in a world of artificial intelligence, a lot of people are now deferring their thinking to these frontier models like ChatGPT or Claudogeman or whatever. And um
We've spoken about this before, but one of the things we both agree is that knowing the right questions to ask, clarity of thought, critical thinking, making the decision is gonna be one of the things in a world of AI that's critically important. So my question to you is like, how are you having
good ideas, cultivating good ideas and giving your space your sort of mental space
To be able to think about problems. What's your practice?
I'll I'll take this from two different angles. So the first is
I think outsourcing thinking to AI
As of right now is still a really bad decision.
If you
It's like I think anybody who's used AI for any period of time knows that you can get it to agree to anything.
And that's frightening.
when it comes to making decisions. And so every time I'm like, you know what, I think it has gotten a little better. I'll just give it a like a really obvious decision to make. I'll go, okay, let's open up uh Claude, let's open up OpenAI, let's look like let's open all of them up and I'll ask the same question to all three.
And
They're just all over the place.
And so I'm like, Okay.
This is still back to my judgment, right? Number two is that
If you do delegate your decision making to it, you get dumber.
And then there's all this research, I'm sure you've had people in the podcast who talked about it. And it's like I for sure like this is the best asset I've got for now. So I want to keep it as sharp as I can. Do not
Delegate the hardest work you have. The hardest thinking work you have because you will just get so weak so fast. A new idea that's sprung into my mind over the last, I'd say, three to four months that I've kind of been chewing with is this idea of what happens when you go
Long.
So long term thinking and how you build differently today.
If you just extend the time horizon and then how you can like beat competition just by th like instead of thinking in terms of okay, you know founders, they always think in terms of five years and then exit. But what happens if you think in terms of like fifty years? What are the different decisions you make in terms of
The foundational blocks. Yeah. And this is why I have these blocks. Because I saw you do something on YouTube with some blocks before. Could you explain this idea of sort of long term thinking in terms of foundations?
We do this exercise in person with entrepreneurs because I think it's so powerful, which is if I were to say, Hey, build me the tallest tower using a series of blocks.
If I say
You have five seconds.
You're gonna you're gonna you're you're right here, right? And that's that's all you got. And you're like, Oh time. Hands off.
If I said, Okay, now let's assume we had a little bit more blocks than I could build in in five seconds. And I said, Okay, what if I said you had five minutes?
Would you build it differently?
What if I said you had five days?
What if I said you had five years? And you have unlimited blocks. Right.
Yeah. And so what happens is the foundation completely changes based on the height of the building because of the time horizon you're thinking in. I had a mentor tell me this.
um a long time ago and it like really stuck with me, which is
The fastest way to build a ten million dollar business is not the fastest way to build a hundred million dollar business.
Even in the fastest way to build a million dollar business, not the fastest way to build a ten million dollar business. Like you could probably build a one person agency to a million dollars a year.
pretty quick. Right. Yeah. It's just like it's just you can do it really quickly. Getting to a hundred though
you you think about it differently. You would and so I think um
To your point.
One of the
still outstanding competitive advantages that you can have as an entrepreneur from a thinking perspective is just thinking longer.
Yeah.
It's really been front of mine to me. I it's funny'cause when I started thinking about
Do you know why it is? It's because I told myself in this season of life
that I was going to do the business that I'm running now, which is our holding company called Steven dot com forever.
And I immediately noticed that I made a different set of decisions. I started thinking about
The factory I called it. Which is you know Elon's example of it's
Building a prototype is easy, building the factory that builds the cars is fifty X harder. I start obsessing over the factory, which in in part in this analogy could also be seen as the foundations that we lay to make this durable over the long term. And then speaking of Elon, I look at the decisions he made with both SpaceX, which I'm an investor in, and Tesla.
Where he was like, Do you know, I could have bought the batteries from Ford, but
I'm gonna make a completely new battery from scratch, do you know? Um I could have used other people's electricity chargers, but I'm gonna build the entire charging network across the United States from scratch.
And this is someone who's thinking long term, and what happens then is they have the most durable moat seven years from now.
And and that's so this is y that becomes the value of the business. And actually it was all a byproduct of just thinking over a longer time horizon.
Entrepreneurs and start up founders, as you know, we like rush to like get the exit, raise as much money as we can. Yeah and it looks like you're you're in st an unstable building there. Yeah.
It looks like that. Strong wind, right? I could blow that over.
Even during the exit process, if it's a fast, you know, company, it's like you're kinda like
Just please stay just never everything stay fine. No one leave. You know like no big accounts go away. You're just like holding your breath for six months and being like please just go through.
And then if it goes down to this for like a uh a week or two and they're like, Hey, why are the billables down you're like uh it's uh it's a it's a momentary blill. It was expected. It was actually in our did I not send you the updated forecast? Like it's a whole thing. Um I'll do it with the drawing because it might be it might be a little bit easier, but like
If you were to build a
A hundred story building.
You'd have to dig way deeper. You'd have to have a much you'd have you build diff with different materials going up. And so there's a hundred decisions that get made that if you're doing a hundred stories versus one, you would you choose differently. And so where it gets really
Tough is that people will they want to have it all. And so say I want to have the speed of building a one story building, but then they get to one story and say, Well, actually I I wanna get I wanna have a 10 story building. But the foundation wasn't right. And so this is where entrepreneurs will they'll do this. They'll
They'll skyrocket here and then they and then they plateau. And then sometimes, unfortunately, the correct step is that you have to take two steps back, rebuild the foundation, and then it goes up again. And so I think
To your point, focus and patience.
Are the two
Enduring competitive advantages because they're so anti human.
Yeah, so anti human, so anti Instagram. I've got no announcement to make th this month.
Because I'm doing boring shit.
Like
Like basis.
The the decision I still think about this, like the decision that he made that he was just like
I'm going to have a legitimate

Like he started as a bookstore online. And to go from there to like
No, we're gonna
own the trucks and the warehouses and be better at warehouse and delivery than anyone else. Mm.
That's what we're gonna do with our online internet business. Like just but like
Who can unseat Amazon right now?
Really tough.
What's interesting as well is that at that particular moment there when the entrepreneur gets this they they come to people like me and you in the street and they say that they are they can't get past here and bottleneck. Yeah.
What what is it that they should have done? Female entrepreneurs come up to me, they might hit, I don't know, five hundred K revenue, million revenue, and they come up to me and they go, I don't know what to do, how do I get to 10 million from here?
Yeah. And I think in part what you're saying is they they should have made a decision earlier on to build a slightly different type of
Company.
From zero?
I'll say what the million dollar business owner is missing when they're trying to get to ten
is what they would have done differently is they would have stayed longer in the product market phase or trying to make sure that the customers who come in
keep wanting to spend money with them, which they either do periodically. So like if you buy a soda that you like, you keep buying it. It's not like you're on a subscription, but you just buy it regularly. On the other hand, there's subscription revenue, which is truly recurring, uh like a your Netflix subscription, whatever.
But they know that.
When that customer comes in contact with the business, they're going to stay and that money's going to keep going, which is what allows it to stack. And so if we think at the most basic level, if every time you get a customer they never left,
Then the business will do nothing but grow.
It will either stay the same or it will grow whenever you get a new customer, it just keeps growing. And
The difficulty of g the the the one million dollar is that getting to a million dollars you can do really quickly, or 10. And I know that the the the world is like, Hi, I can't believe that. I promise you you can do it if you just learn enough skills. But that can happen really quickly because it just doesn't take a lot of moving parts to make it happen. Getting to a hundred or getting to a billion dollars in everyone, I haven't gone to a billion yet, but I I feel confident I know what we need to do.
The million dollar entrepreneur is trying to fit a billion dollars of new sales in in one year.
Mm-hmm.
And that's the problem is that at the at the end of next year, because all the customers they send up to make their million dollars are gone because
they aren't good enough. They have to go back to the market, market and sell, and get another million dollars to customers. So they think, oh if if I t if I want to get to two million dollars a year.
I have to go sell twice as many customers, which is true. But if we had to compare two companies, let's say we have company A and company B.
All right, we got B. They both are selling a hundred, you know, new
Widgets a year.
Okay.
Let's say company B
loses all of the hundred, but they want to double because it's an entrepreneur. It's like I gotta grow.
And so he sells two hundred people.
Well then let's say he's got
$2 million in revenue, and he's got one million dollars revenue here. And let's say year three, uh he sells three hundred units, he lost all two hundred again because he has no stickiness. And so he makes three million dollars.
Okay, cool.
Now let's say this company A.
Sells a hundred year one, they make a million dollars. They keep all hundred customers.
Okay.
But let's say that
That company keeps the same number of
people they're selling new. So a hundred new customers come in this year, but they keep their old hundred.
So now they ha also have
Two hundred customers and do two million dollars. And then year three.
They keep their same hundred and then the hundred from year two. So now they're three hundred total customers'cause they got a hundred new.
And they have three million. So both of these businesses on paper.
Your entrepreneur friend comes to you and says, Hey, I've got a three million dollar business.
And I've got a three million dollar business. Which one do you invest in?
Mm-hmm.
Now, you and I do this every day and we're like, All day we do this one.
Not this one because next year he's got to go and sell six hundred new customers. Now, where this gets, you can start seeing this in the financials because
I can tell you that the cost of getting 300 new customers costs significantly more than the cost of getting 100 new customers. And having 200 customers that are existing and still paying you. And so you're gonna see that.
in the bottom line getting compressed. And this is where ex you know, growth at all costs becomes a problem. But
For this entrepreneur, he spent the time to figure out how to
Get all 100 customers to stay. Now, if he encounters your distribution or my distribution, and then all of a sudden we say, Great, now I know that I can bring this thing 10,000 new customers, then this thing becomes a billion dollar business.
Because we solved the most important part first, which is that the revenue stays. And so when people build in a rush, they don't build a good enough thing. And so as a result, you scale really quickly. And this is where knowing marketing and sales can be dangerous because the better you are at marketing and sales, the faster you can go revenue. But you get to a point where you
You have a certain velocity of sales. I can only sell a hundred people or two hundred people or five hundred or a thousand people a month, whatever it is.
And at that point, you either have to always be seeking more distribution because you have a hole in the back of your bus, but the moment the sale stops.
The business craters. And I would say that that is more common than the alternative, which is that you actually have a sticky business. The other thing people talk to me about when they come up to me in the street when they hit that moment where they're doing about a million in revenue is they say, You know, my customers love me, they keep coming back, but I've run out of time, basically.
This is an interesting one because a lot of times if I have the same response where someone says, Hey, I'm running out of time
The first question I'll ask is what's your margin?
If they have really thin margins.
They can't afford to get help.
That's the symptom, but not the root cause. The root cause
Is either that they are
Offer is incorrect and the
What they're offering the price and the terms of their delivery.
Or
too low compared to each other, you're offering too much for too little.
Or you don't have a marketing or sales motion that allows that value to be demonstrated to someone so they'd be willing to pay a premium. On pricing then. How do you think about pricing? Is it a subjective thing or is it an objective thing? I do I go look at the market and see what everyone else is charging and then decide that? Or is it what I feel like I deserve?
I think what we feel we deserve matters the least in that in that I think it's all about what the customer is willing to pay.
And so one of the hardest parts for for newer entrepreneurs is they sell out of their own wallet.
What do you mean? So it's like if I have somebody who's really good at fixing cars, they're like, Well, it's not that hard. You just, you know, do little screws here. Like I wouldn't I wouldn't pay anybody for that. Like I do it for free. It's like, Yeah, but I don't wanna do it. And I would pay you a lot to do it because I don't want to fix my car.
And so because it's been easy for you
You think it's easy for everyone and because you think it's easy for everyone, you're not willing to charge a lot for it.
Mm-hmm. And so they get into this vicious cycle of undercharging and having not enough margin. And then as a result having to do more of the work. And then if they get more work coming, they don't want to say no. And so then they basically fill up their entire plate so they have no excess capacity.
But then they can't they don't have the time to train anyone, they don't have the time to interview, they don't have the time or or the more the cash, right, to to for the next person. And so usually
When someone's like I'm overwhelmed, if I say do you have a lot of margin, then either
Yeah, you're running seventy percent margin, dude. Like hire some help.
If they don't, then it's two or three steps earlier where
The offer's wrong, the sales motion's wrong, which typically they're they're mispriced.
Do you get it all the time when people say to you, um, you know, Alex, I tried to hire someone and they fucked up and so I can't I can't trust anybody to do it as well as I can and the clients love me.
I think it's ego.
Yeah.
I think we want to be special.
And I think we like to be needed.
And I think that
It is not the business's job to solve your emotional needs.
Mm-hmm. The business's job is serve the customers. Mm-hmm. And so
We are not as unique as we think.
If you could go back in time, you could teach yourself in a tenth of time because you knew all the mistakes that you made and the right things that actually ended up working. So it's like great, instead of taking 10 times as long as you did to learn it the first time.
Go back as though you were teaching it the right way.
to somebody else. And so you can collapse the time it takes to to teach someone how to do the job. And most times
What founders are looking for is a unicorn.
Right. They're like, okay.
Uh I have
Two employees and I do everything. And so I need to hire someone who's just gonna be like me and just do everything else. It's like it's not gonna work the way. And so I use this little analogy that I like, which is So we have our our horn of the unicorn. This is gonna be so bad. Here we go So we've got our
All right. Here we go.
We give a little hoof, maybe a little some tail. Here we go. And here we go. And we need to have some
Some sparkle, right? Because it's unicorn special. Okay. It's got a little donk there. But they're trying to replace themselves with unicorn, but there are no unicorns, and we know this. And so they go through interview and interview interview and then they never find anybody because they can't find a unicorn. But if you're like, How do I find an animal that's got a horn?
Well, you can go find a rhino.
Okay, I've got a rhino, they've got the horn. It's like okay, and then I need a horse.
I can go find a horse.
And then I gotta find the sparkle. So I'll get some fireflies for the sparkle, and then I'll get a horse for the horse. And so just like that, instead of saying, Oh
I someone has to live my exact life and have gone through the exact exact same trial and tribulations to figure out all the unique things that I know. It's like no.
They try to find in one person what they can more easily find in three. This is relationship advice as well, isn't it? Demanding your your partner uh be all things to you.
Your coach, your uh you know, your your guru, your therapist, your your biggest cheerleader.
Yeah.
It's exactly that. It's it's just and I think in some ways there's an ego element that I think is very reinforcing, which is that I'm so special, no one can do what I can do. And I think that's a very attractive lie that we like to believe. I guess there's also inherent in that
Um
Insecurity and fear.
That you see in these early entrepreneurs.
That if I hire another person, I now have the responsibility of pay them. Right now it's me, it's safe, I can control this.
Um but if I bring on other people, they've got mortgages and families. So now it now it's terrifying. So a good way to justify my fear to myself is by saying I tried I can't trust anybody, I couldn't find anybody good
I guess it's just gonna have to be me, myself, and I.
And I think
If that's what you want.
Like go for it. Yeah, I just like I I think I think there's I think there's gonna be a lot more solopreneurs in you know in the in the coming future. There already are
I think it's a it's a goal question.
What you want?
What mistakes did you make when you start hiring?
Oh.
My bar wasn't high enough.
Okay. I think at the most basic level, like what is the job? Like if you remove everything else, what survives? And I think holding the standard.
Survives.
Because if you're the one responsible, then you have to be the one who determines what is good enough.
Mm-hmm. It's my view that
In every given department.
The person who's highest up should have the highest standard.
And if somebody ever gets to a point where they have a higher standard for H U than I do, they should run it, not me. Well have you seen a change in the types of questions that you're being asked?
Because because the world has changed, people are more interested in personal branding or business or whatever else. Are people asking you new questions?
No, actually. What are the questions that you get asked?
I get asked a lot of like
Hey I'm thinking about doing this this thing, what do you think?
I'm thinking about starting this kind of business. I'm thinking about starting a podcast agency. What do you think?
Well it doesn't matter, I think.


The next question which is like, Well, what have you done so far?
Why don't you ask that?
Well because the answer nine times out of ten is
Well, I mean I haven't I was just thinking about it. I'm like okay, well then
Nothing's happened. What's going on there with those people that come up to you and they say they're thinking about something, but they haven't done anything about it? I'm guessing that they want to talk to me about business stuff.
And so this is the only business related thing that they can talk about. And so that's probably why they talk about it. Or they bring it up. Um
Or they wanna feel like in some ways it's kinda like progressive.
productive procrastination, or that I'm gonna somehow give them one answer.
That's going to like
finally get them over the hump of starting.
But

Starting feels like this very amorphous thing.
Like,
I was about to say, like, have has there ever been something that you don't know how to do? Well, whenever I approach something that I don't know how to do, it always feels
Amorphous. It's like this big thing and I don't know where to start. Like how to like how do I grab onto a piece of it? And so
Having gone and attacked like these amorphous things like start a business, which actually means nothing, you have to break things down to much smaller steps of action. That's why the for me the most basic thing to start a business is like
Get an LLC.
Mm-hmm.
Open a bank account.
Have the ability to process money.
And then ask a stranger if you can do something for them in exchange for money. As soon as you do those four things, congratulations, your business owner.
You've already beaten like ninety five percent of people who and you've also changed your title from entrepreneur.
To entrepreneur.
And I think that is one of the most just like um when you when a customer buys from you versus just consuming your free stuff, their identity completely changes. They're now a customer, which means they're far more likely to purchase uh future things from you than somebody who's not bought something. That's why you know ascensions and renewals are much easier than getting somebody to buy the first time, right? And so I think to the same degree for us as entrepreneurs or people who aspire to be an entrepreneur, it's like go make the first dollar.
And then as soon as you have that taste of like, Oh, this isn't
I I actually grabbed the corner of this thing. I I I understand. I just got it.
get them to give me money to do something. Or I can build something and then have them buy it from me and then I have to figure out how to build more of them, right? If it's a thing. But like that's it at the most basic level. And everything else is just is is confusion. If you could go back to the starting blocks and whisper something in Alex's ear when he was starting up.
Advice that would have made the journey easier, more profitable, whatever. What is what are the sort of layers of advice you would have given him at this a starting box?

So I've actually thought about this a lot.
If I went back in time and I saw an older version of myself, if he appeared in this room right now, let's say twenty years from now, is is looking at me.
My hope is that he would say nothing.
Because it would mean that it worked.
Now, if I if I was going back and let's say that I I I hadn't taken the step and I hadn't been able to to make the jump, what would I say in that instance? Um
is you have to decide whether you care more about your future than what other people think about your future.
Someone's version of you has to die.
It's either your
Desired version of you?
Or someone else's desired version of you. And the thing is you're gonna be with you a lot longer than they are.
I think everything in the very beginning of entrepreneurship comes down to one thing, which is fear.
And justified.
It's it makes sense to be afraid.
Like there's a lot of risk, there's a ton of unknown. There's so much stuff that you don't know.
But
The only thing I can also say is that it also puts you in the exact same position as every other person started an entrepreneurship.
They didn't know.
And the only way to know is to start.
And to have faith.
That
You will not know the way up the mountain.
But
As you walk up the mountain, the fog starts to clear.
And the fog will always be there, but you'll always be able to see the couple steps in front of you. And so your responsibility is to only take the steps that you can see in front of you. That is it.
And then once you take those steps, the next steps will become clear.
And I think that's where there's an obsession with knowing the entirety.
And and it's because we want certainty.
We wanna know that if we do all of these things it's going to work. And you don't. You want certainty from a world that will give you none.
And if you were uncomfortable with that.
Entrepreneurship might not be real. Yeah. But I I even say that and I almost I almost
I almost regret saying that because
I was so risk averse when I started. Like people see the content now or they see you now and you're so confident and and great on podcasts. And like, but I'm sure the first podcast you did, you like look at it and you just absolutely cringe, right? I had a video that I put out that was like the first content that I made that I was like reacting to my own first content, and it's horrendous. It's horrible.
But the thing is is that you have to be willing to be cringe.
You must embrace cringness. You will not be cool. It will not look good.
You will suck.
And everyone will know you suck, and you will know you suck.
But
Again, it's do I care more about their version of me or my version of me? And am I willing to be a work in progress or am I unwilling to do it because I want to s keep my current station in life?
But the thing is is that you're at a local maximum.
And there's a desire in you, probably, if I'm talking to my younger self, to be at a higher maximum than I am right now. I feel like I'm capable of doing more.
But I'm so afraid of risking this tiny little bit that I've built for myself.
But the the the reality is that
the only guarantee that you have in of all the past in front of you is that you stay on the current path. You will not get what you want.
Mm-hmm. So there is a chance.
That you get what you want if you move.
But there is zero chance if you stay.
And I think those were some of the thought processes that actually got me to take action was knowing that I for sure, guaranteed one hundred percent would be dissatisfied with my life if I had not taken the shot.
And then playing out plan B with excruciating detail. And I think that's also one of the big ones for fear is that like fear only exists in the vague and never in the specific. Also, so does confusion.
Right. So
The fear is
I'm going to do this thing and I'm going to fail. Fail's not specific. And I'm and then everyone's gonna hate me.
And then eventually I'm gonna get ostracized and die.
Like we catastrophize everything because we're evolutionary beings, right? We're we're we're we're mammals.
But if you really think what is failure like
What does failure even mean? I
I I'd ask someone to buy and they say, No, is that failure? What if I ask another person? What if I ask a hundred people?
Okay, well what if I ask hundred people when all hundred people say no?
Am I allowed to change what I'm what I'm offering?
Yes. Okay. So you get another hundred people and maybe one of them says yes. Okay, but even in that period of time where you had the hundred people who all said no to you, and let's say you quit your job and so you have no income, okay.
What are the what are the options available to you? Can you talk can you go and sleep on a friend's couch? Can you go back home with your tail between your legs? Well, it's only tail between your legs if you stop trying. If you go home and say, Mom and Dad, I want to save up some capital so that I can have I can extend my runway so that I can go after this big goal.
Mom and dad might be cool. It might be friends. It might be or maybe 10 friends going together and and'cause I split a bedroof. So I had a house with six people in it.
Um, and I split one of the bedrooms with another guy, I pay four hundred bucks a month, and I had a mattress on the floor, and I was never there.
But it was just like I try to keep my living expense as low as possible and I think

Um people are unwilling to sacrifice their short term lifestyle.
And appearances.
In order to achieve their long term goal. And so they're handcuffed their lifestyle. And so you'd be astonished at how little you can actually live on if you try to live on little. This goes to back to the long term thinking argument as well, which is like if you
Think about your status in ten years versus today. Yes.
And I'm I'm willing to take this dip.
Ye one of the things you said was really interesting, and I I it dawned on me that most people might not realise this about people like you, which is that
You said there's uncertainty all the way up.
No, I imagine imagine an eighteen year old entrepreneur listening to Alex Emosy, they're gonna be thinking, Oh, he's got everything figured out all the way up. And he's no longer living with uncertainty, fear, confusion, ambiguity. He's no longer having to think hard about how to solve a problem because he's got all the answers. But actually th as you described it, in my head I I imagined all of these
This sequence of n almost never ending doors that all just have.
a cryptic message on on them. And you imagine you go through one door and there's ten more. Okay, this was the right one. And then there's ten new ones that all have a vague language on them. And you've got to pick which one to go through next. You go through okay, you bounced off that one. Shit.
You took it out. Lost some money. You go through another one. Okay, this was the right one. And then there's twenty. Actually your optionality's increasing with the more success you have. So there's more doors and more decisions to make, more uncertainty. Which most people don't realise, but actually as you were saying it, I was thinking, fuck, this is exactly what I'm going through now. I was up
Till the early hours of the morning with one of my colleagues yesterday night and we're just figuring out which door to walk through.
So this is really interesting because the earlier you are on your journey, the more specific the advice is.
Because if you do not have a business.
The first step is the same for everyone, which is you must start an entity and then you have to have a bank account so that you can exchange money and you have to have a a way or manner of collecting that cash. Now, of course, you could have cash business, but I would say most people use credit cards now. So you have a processor, a bank account, and an entity.
It doesn't matter what business you start, that is the first step. Now as the business grows.
You have more resources.
the the nature of the business is different. And so the number of doors that are ahead of you are actually multiplied by a huge factor. And so right now it's actually never easier to know what to do than when you start.
And so it has nothing to do with you not knowing. Of course you know, I just we just said it.
It's everything to figure out why you're not doing it.
And
More specifically
Whose voice is
you're listening to that is not yours.
that you are afraid of disappointing.
Or afraid of their judgment.
If you can identify that voice'cause
And you actually put a name on it, it's not like oh pe what are people gonna think? It's not people, it's probably like two people. And if you name you like oh it's just James and
Betty?
Yeah. So this is really real. So one, when I was about to sell Jim Lawrence, I really I I it was actually a very hard decision for me, super hard.
And when I exited
One of the reasons I almost didn't exit was because there was somebody that I knew in my circle, not even like a super close friend, that I realized when I got really clear on whose voice.
I cared about.
I thought that they didn't think that forty six million dollars was enough money.
That they wouldn't think it was legitimate.
I'm dead too it was like that was my that was my legitimate legit.
It was only when I was like, Am I gonna s not do this and let him control me?'Cause that's what it is. They control you.
And I think when you say it in those terms, it feels like much heavier, like I'm letting my mom or my uncle or my brother or the like co worker, John, control me.
Because I that's how much I care about this guy's approval.
I care I have to care about my approval more.
Mm-hmm.
I wanna say say this in more detail because I think it's it's important.
The person that you see in front of you is not the person who who took the leap to start the business.
I belabored.
That decision
For six months.
I had almost like a pre-canned answer and people were like, Oh, so what do you do in your career? I'm like, Oh, you know, I'm consulting like do a business school and then someday start my own business. It was like I I could say it in my sleep, but the Someday Start My Own Business
When I tried to think a little bit more first principles, I was like, Okay, well in what way is this business school going to help me
start a business. And when I looked at the starting salaries of business school, it was like$120,000 a year after you went to a good business school. And then I thought to myself, well, it cost me$60,000 a year and I can't make money during that period. So I'm gonna lose$120 for sure. And at the time I was making$50,$60,000 a year. And so I was like, so it's$240,000 is my call my opportunity cost to the in two years.
Do I think that I can take the money that I had saved up and in two years get to ten thousand dollars a month? I was like, I think I can do it.
And so that was part of the reason.
that I ended up not going to business school and it was because of a question on the business school test was how will a booth MBA help a short long term goals?
And I just sat there for three day to answer it and I realized I was like, I don't know if it will help my long term. Interesting. So I mean it's good that they have this question because it actually forced me to answer it. Now
Back to the the the six months.
I read
I g I was probably reading
No joke, a book every two days.
'Cause I the job that I had had high seasons and low seasons, and during low seasons I basically just read books. And they were almost all self help books.
And I got to this point after reading however many of them, then I look back on my life and realized it was exactly the same.
And I thought
Oh, if I don't do anything, my life's not gonna change.
And so I had this idea that if I just keep
reading these books, somehow my life was just gonna change. And that was like one of the realizations that I had. I had the friend who was also in a white collar, you know, job like I was, and every night we'd probably get on the phone for two to three hours and talk about how we were going to start a business. And I had this I had this this IKEA carpet that I bought that was a uh a cow hide carpet. And the spot where I'd
walk back and forth was like worn out.
On the cow hide because of how much I would just pace in my small uh flat, just going back and forth, just talking about the ideas that I had to start a business.
Yeah.
Every time I wanted to start it, I would tell my dad I want to start the business and he he would be like
Let's let's not be unreasonable here. He's like, You've got a good job. He's like you're following the plan. You did Vanderbilt in three years, you had good grades, we got we're gonna do two years here. Then you go to one of the top Ivy, you know, MBA schools, like
You're good.
This is part of it. This is part of it, right?
I acted with such cowardice that I had to
I had to drive
halfway across the country.
Before I could call my dad to tell him.
That I w that I had quit my job and that I was going to start a business.
Because I knew that if I had done it while he was there, he would talk me out of it.
Because he had already talked me out of it a bunch of times. Why was he doing that?
I I learned a little bit about his background over the last couple of days.
That's right. DOG.
And
I think th there's context in his own story which
Yeah.
Completes the picture.
So
Whatever people see of my success, I think in a lot of ways what my dad accomplished
The more I think about it.
Is bigger.
My dad
Fled during the Iranian uh revolution.
Right. And then he went to go to uh France to become a doctor.
But he didn't speak French.
And so he had to go try to go into medical school and take Orgo in a language that he didn't understand. And so he failed two years in a row. And his brother was like,
Go to Belgium, start fresh, go to a new place. And so he ended up uh getting all the way through medical school, and then he met my mother in medical school, and then they came back to the US. Now his medical degree didn't transfer to the US. And so he had to get a US fellowship in order a residency or whatever, but no one would take
A Middle Eastern guy who had a super thick accent.
who is fresh out of medical school and there's all these US based people here. And so for two years he ran X ray slides. He finally gets a residency. And then he decides when he comes back to Baltimore, which is where my where where I'm from, that he's going to
Instead of joining
The practice that my mother had with her father.
He was gonna go out on his own.
Which is pretty ballsy, right? He didn't have a foreigner didn't have anything. And so he asked
To find out how much a construction costs for building your own surgery center. And it was like$250,000 then. So it's a lot of money.
He didn't have that.
And so he looked at all the legal requirements for what what it entails to be a server center.
And then he went to Home Depot and built.
A surgery center that met all the specs and got it inspected so that he could have his own surgery center in his practice.
Then right as this practice is starting to work, my parents got divorced. They changed the the locks on the door because he had like a separate thing.
His patients show up?
And they didn't know where to go. It was an ugly divorce. And
So then he's he's starting his own. And this is when he was talking to me then.
So fast forward now. He's like, I've been in practice for, you know, twenty, thirty years, whatever. He's like
Those years.
Time to think about.
I think I was like, I feel like I'm not moving fast enough. I feel like I need to need to do these things and he's like
Dude a year, two years now? He's like it's nothing.
It's like when your mind you're not even gonna think you're not even remember it.
The the honest truth of the matter is that I
really desperately wanted to prove that I could do it on my own.
Who did you want to prove that to?
I don't know. Everyone.
Me, him, the world.
I remember being terrified about the idea
Of winning the lottery.
Sounds really weird. When I was in college, I bought a Super Bowl ticket'cause it was like a billion dollars or something. It was like let's do it for fun. And I remember and I remember having this this moment right before the the number was gonna get called of sheer terror of what if I win?

I will never be able to prove that I I have the medal.
That I can do it.
And so and of course people would say but now if someone wants to give me a billion dollars, I'm happy to use it because to be fair though, because I already have this I already have the status in the track record that I that I built this.
And it's also the reason that like when I started my my business, like
I didn't take a loan. Like I used my own money that I had saved because
I I want it to be mine, and I knew I would know.
And I think yeah, my dad had absolutely perfect intentions. He gave me what I believe to be
For vast majority of people, probably pretty good advice.
Mm-hmm.
It just wasn't the advice that I needed.
for the goals that I had.
There's an interesting thing because people like me and you make business content and we talk about entrepreneurship a lot.
Um, I I often wonder if we're leading some people astray in the context of some people actually should take that advice, some people shouldn't become entrepreneurs. Um and how does one know if entrepreneurship in its broad definition is for them or not? Or like working in a company, having you know having a great job is for them. It's funny, we we were
I was doing this show once and I said to the producer who was just off camera
I said um
Do you think I'm happy?
So this is this is someone who gets to see has seen me for six or seven years behind the scenes every day since we're on my kitchen table. He's been there with me, every corner of the world, the the best and the worst of times. I went, Do you think I'm happy? He went
Yes.
And then he and then I said.
Would you want my life? And he he couldn't have said no more violently. So much so that it was almost offensive. He was like, You have it And then I went, Do you want my would you like my life? He goes No And he was like And and he was like laughing. He would not want my life, but at the same time
thinks and believes, having seen me behind the scenes for seven years, that I'm happy and in there I think you have something, which is the the sort of n subjectivity of
Of j of journey. Like is this your journey?
How does one know listening to this now if they should be an entrepreneur or not?
So I'll give a couple of frames because decision making is what probably we both do with a lot of our time. So one is what's the goal what do I want to happen?
Everyone says the same things here. They say, you know, I want freedom to make my decisions. I want you know financial freedom. We have to be specific. And so just like fear only exists in the specific.
Goals have to exist in the specific in order for them to be real.
And for you to make accurate decisions. Mm-hmm.
This is why I'm so obsessive about language and like observables and things like that. So what is one is what do I what do I actually want to have happen. And then number two, I think that's a good thing.
What does that change about my actual daily life?
On this first point, funnily enough, I said she freedom, mm-hmm.
And then I immediately realized that the least free person should have me.
Okay, this is great. So I think about this.
It's the freedom to choose.
Mm. But I think people stop at Freedom.
There's this almost fetishization of independents and keeping your options open and map and options maxing, right for your life. But all of the best parts of life come on the other side of exercising an option and walking through a door, but in so doing, leaving the other doors that you could have walked through behind.
And so the secret to getting a life you want is making a commitment.
But you will not get all lives you want.
And so at some point you have to sit at the precipice and you have to make a trade.
And if you say, I want this more than something else.
That means I know I'm not gonna get this and I choose to say that I want this more.
And I think this is where people just sit at the crossroads and that is what takes the majority of time, not just getting into business, but also when you're in business. People sit at the crossroads of like what type of company do I want to build? What type of product? And what type what what type of business do I want? And we sit there and I when I see people get stuck.
It's almost always unmade decisions.
'Cause unmade decisions can last forever. Mm-hmm. Whereas
If you're in if you're in a trial loop of feedback, feedback, feedback, like you'll figure it out. Like you'll move.
But if you're in an unmade decision, it could sit there forever.
And that's that's
Like the freedom.
To choose. We have to choose.
Are you saying that you're not going to be able
This sort of new generation that I've grown up with
all the tools to start their own business. There we're in this personal brand era where everybody can make content and build a brand and then do like panel talks for a living or sell like ads on LinkedIn. Um
W what what is going on here?
This sort of younger generation, under thirty now.
Keeping their options open, wanting freedom.
If you compare that to say maybe my dad, who
You know.
One job.
Did that career for twenty, thirty years of his love, forty years of his life.
It's a very different world we're living in.
There are more people starting businesses than ever before. I know since Covid there's there's at least in the US, the stuff that I looked at recently, it's like there's been more new businesses
per quarter. It's been growing really aggressively, at least in the US. And so more people are starting businesses. And so I think that lowering the cost of entry has got more people across the line. I think having more access to information has gotten more people across the line. But why aren't
Well isn't everyone going across the line? I think there's a couple of things. One is
To your point earlier.
I don't think it is for everyone.
And so I think the issue there is one of motivation.

Carrots.
So good things. Keeping them
Mm.
And not enough sticks.
Or bad things.
Getting them out of their current position.
And I think um I think it's a it's a Tony quote, Tony Robbins quote, which is uh
The pain of staying the same has to be greater than the pain of change.
Mm-hmm.
When that happens, and it could be the pleasure of change could be has to be greater than the pleasure of staying the same, e equal opposite, but I think most people who are in that slice.
There's pain.
And so
You will change the moment it is more painful to stay the same.
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Do you think life rewards you
Somewhat proportional to the
hardness of the problem that you solve.
So I think um
A hard problem doesn't necessarily guarantee that it is a valuable problem.
Like if you run a marathon very hard doesn't necessarily make you more money.
So like there's lots of hard things that are out there that will not
turn into monetization. The second thing is I think it depends on the size of your goals.
And so if you want to be a millionaire, you do not need to solve a heart problem.
You just need to do a little bit better than other businesses that are wildly underserving their customers, which I promise you.
There are plenty. You can just have a pool cleaning business that just cleans better than the other guy and like shows up on time and all you gotta do is knock on doors and ask if they wanna switch because their current company probably doesn't pay attention to them. One of the things that you know a lot of f founders, entrepreneurs are thinking about at the moment is
producing content. We're living in in in an interesting time where a kid in Mumbai or a kid in Manhattan can both produce
content using L M's uh AI.
They can produce videos theoretically. If you imagine any rate of improvement, they're gonna be able to make videos, photos.
Turn out your quotes. They could use your quotes, change them a little bit and p have an agent post them for them.
Where is the moat in content?
Where you think about if you think about supply demand dynamics, there's fixed demand. The Financial Times did a report saying that time spent on social media is
Sl starting to dip a little bit since twenty twenty two for younger generations. Interesting. For older generations it's still sort of like going up or or flat, but for Gen Z it's like starting to come down a little bit.
So it's stagnant demand.
Tsunami slot coming in.
Of AI content. Yeah.
Huge supply shock.
Every unit of content itself is gonna become
Less valuable, therefore.
Um and the algorithms are getting more violent, or I should say are becoming more um someone with ten million followers can get two thousand likes.
Back in my day, fifteen years ago when I started on social media, if you had a million followers, you've got a million
A million likes. A million views, shall I say. What's the game of content in such a world? Everyone's everyone's making content now.
To your point, what's the mode?
Um, reality is the mode.
Reality is the moat.
I'd say the number one biggest business influencer, I think, on the planet.
Elon Musk.
And he happens to own the biggest business.
On the plan to be the richest man.
Uh Jeff Bezos.
Huge business influencer.
'Cause he has Amazon. Warren Buffett.
probably the number one investing influencer. Like people fly around the world and when he when he talks
Everyone listens.
And so even if
A teacher in Des Moines, Iowa.
Word for word quotes Warren Buffett. And let's do one better. Let's say makes even
Better advice than Warren Buffett does.
It's still not gonna get the same views because they just forgot to build Berkshire Hathaway.
And have
A hundred years of of track record. And so
What I'm saying there is that
When reality is the mode, it means that your brand is the mode. It means your reputation is the mode, which can only happen in reality. Now that said, I do think it's going to affect different types of content differently.
If you're in the world of making fictional whatever stuff, then yeah, I think it's gonna hit I think AI is gonna hit you much harder. But even then there's still gonna be the
The standard holder.
Somebody has to determine that this slop is too sloppy and that you still have to work
Really hard.
To make the AI.
make exactly what you want and have it at the caliber that you want it to be at.
Have you made any changes to your content because of
Everything that's going on with algorithms and AI.
Yeah.

I'm focused on only doing things that only I can do.
Mm.
Most people can't get
hundreds of business owners to fly out in person every month that are all million dollar plus business owners.
To
Seek advice on real business problems at three million, five million, ten million a year.
Five hundred K a year.
Most people don't have that.
And so I can demonstrate expertise.
in a live and interactive fashion, a way that other people can't do.
I think that
Live is something that
I mean AI maybe in the future we'll have some AI avatars that can go live.
But
at least in the short to medium term, I think live is good.
I think IRL.
As in
Like
It's actually real people talking, which is we talked about the scalar fail show that we just launched. It's real entrepreneurs and there's stakes involved. I think that is something that is not going to be replaced. But if we think about
Content on this continuum.
Risk.
When I say risk, it's the risk that a consumer has in consuming the content and executing on it. And so if we differentiate entertainment and education, is entertainment the point of the content is to be consumed.

The point of education is to change behavior. Right. So that's our that's our split. Now
Entertainers will get hit harder.
that educators will
the entertainers that have stakes involved will be able to maintain that mode by still focusing on IRL, real stakes, real stories.
Now in the education world of risk
Let's put something that's really low stakes.
There we go.
So we've got beauty.
On this side, if I have an AI influencer,
Who does a makeup tutorial?
I don't think the risk is super high that if you know, if the tutorial's good that a girl's like gonna not
Use the tip that they made in the thing.
I think that's pretty likely.

If you go maybe a little bit riskier.
Let's say I have some personal finance stuff.
Well, what's the cred so the credibility and beauty is
Beauty.

The credibility in personal finances
Do you have personal finances?
Right. So who's the number one uh influencer in personal finance? My opinion, I think it's Dave Ramsey.
He also happens to be I don't think he c he calls himself this, but I think he's a billionaire. And he's got a massive I think he's public, three hundred million dollars a year of revenue that he's done. And I think there's some other newer, newer age people
Uh I think Vivian Two is is she's a personal finance person. I think um
Erica Klberg touches in this, she's the legal legal gal. Um
Anyways, all this to say
All of them have
More credibility.
Like if you just start giving out tips on how to save money.
There's no credibility.
Reality.
There's no reality. You have nothing to back it up. Mm-hmm. Now we keep moving further.
Let's say business.
Where if you make a wrong call, you could lose your business. Here you lose some money.
Here you lose a bad day of makeup.
So the risk goes up.
the riskier the higher the consequences of being wrong, the more people are going to, I think
Double down on credibility of source.
What's interesting is I also heard as you were describing flying these.
hundred business owners out to Vegas. Yeah. Is I heard
Scarce. Hard and scarce. And I still thought a lot about these two words as sort of the pillars of my own content strategy, which is
With an LM yeah, Kid in Mumbai could channel out a video. Um but the reason why we have
you know, somewhat of a moat here still is because
It is hard to shoot.
on nine cameras. It is hard to bring Alex Hamosie here. It is hard to get Alex Hamosie to say yes to doing this.
It is hard to get Michelle Obama or JD Vance to say yes to doing this. So there's it's hard from a production perspective, but also from like to accomplish this is hard. And then what you described, I heard a lot of the like I heard hard answer.
Who can bring a hundred entrepreneurs to Vegas who are all successful in their own right and and have them ask you questions? So that's great content for us to watch. It's like really impossible to to Very hard.
If I had only had a forty six million dollar exit, I don't know if I would attract the number of entrepreneurs that
that we do now. But now that we do two hundred fifty plus school's a billion dollar plus company, it's like I have credibility that
The
The the YouTube, the content, right, is not
Like I s we I still do business. You know what I mean? We have chains of brick and mortar that that that were involved that I just still talk about because it doesn't it's not relevant for most people. Let's look at the opposite then as well, just to show people what the opposite of hard and scars or of of this approach is. What types of content should we all kind of stay away from now?
So I think commoditized tips and tricks.
Um when you have no again.
Like proof is in the pudding. Reality is the mode. It's basically the opposite of that. So if you are posing, if you are pretending, if you have no proof, um that you were good at this thing, and again, this is on the education side, then
There's a big I call the big Vegas uh whispy. Why should I listen to you?
Right. Why should I listen to you?
And if you can't answer that question.
for oh say a prospect, you know, prospective customer within the first like couple of seconds
They'll just listen to somebody else because the reason that credibility matters so much is that it's actually lower effort to consume information from somebody's in authority.
And so if I'm if I'm listening to somebody who doesn't have proof and I'm listening to investing advice, I have to really think like is this true? Does this make sense? If I'm listening to Warren Buffett, I don't have to think that. I'm like, I'm sure he's right. And when someone's like, How do I get into this?
You do what no one else can do. Well, if you are getting in, then document like
Document the proof of effort.
So you can do pro you can have proof of outcome.
Just like
Well we do?
Right?
What you do?
But then there's when you're starting, there's proof of effort. Jimmy's first viral video is him counting to like a million.
Proof of effort.
When you have nothing else, you have time, you have work. If you wanna make if you wanna say, Hey, I wanna I wanna get into s into sales stuff, it's like
Record your entire day.
Of you selling.
And then when you overcome something that's really good.
That's real life with real stakes. Clip the moment.
Right, and show yourself it's like I took twenty two calls today.
Let me tell you the best moment I did it tw I did a twelve hour day.
In three minutes I'll give you the best moments.
It's like
People want to deal.
And so I think about that as a compression of time. And the reason that people listen to the people who are further ahead who've done all these things is'cause we can compress time.
Mm. You can say, Hey, you could try and figure this out on your own.
But if I can compress
Fourteen years of business advice into thirty seven minutes.
That's a good deal. Do you know what it reminds me of? Seven or eight years ago, when I used to have, you know, big clients, Uber, Coca-Cola, whatever, around the world.
Um, we used to do a lot of like social competition, social media competitions. And I used to have this mental framework for the perfect competition. And I I I remember the day that I f when I first heard of you and you were coming on my show and I was looking through some of your writings and you almost had an identical framework. Yeah. So the
The core so each of the books has one core
concept and then it breaks down how to use it, et cetera.
But the value equation.
Comes down to what's the outcome?
And some outcomes are worth more than others. If I can help you cut your hair versus I can get you to be in perfect shape.
Perfect shape is worth more. If I can get you be uh billionaire versus perfect shape, billionaire is worth more.
So you have to do it.
Oh.
And then we have to do it.
Perceived likely of achievement.
Perceived likelihood of achievement.


And then we have on the downside of this
We have um time delay.

How long is it gonna take me to get the thing?
And then we have
Effort.
Is this effort and sacrifice? No. Yeah.
So effort is all the things that you have to begin to do.
as a result of a decision that you don't want to do.
Sacrifice all the good things that you have to stop doing as a result.
of a decision. So if I get into fitness, I have to stop
eating the stuff I like and I have to start eating stuff I don't like. I have to start waking up earlier. I can't sleep in as much. Uh I have to be sore.
where I wasn't before. Um and so that's my effort and sacrifice piece. The time delay is okay, if I can get in shape in three minutes versus getting in shape in three months or three years.
Okay.
The outcome is Am I getting in shape or am I being a billionaire?
And then how likely is this to happen?
Because on some level, like if I buy a PDF of a fitness program for$19, or I pay three thousand dollars for a personal trainer to train me in person three times a week.
My perceived likelihood of achievement of buying the PDF versus personal trainer is much higher. Now
The F and sacrifice is actually gonna be relatively fixed.
But this is the part that goes up.
Now the time delay, if done rot, should also be fixed there. But this is what explained the difference in value.
on a product level, but the value equation works for everything, just like it, just like consuming content. Yeah. What's my outcome? I think I'm gonna learn some shit about investing. How likely is it that I think he can provide value or if I consume this, pretty high.
What's my time commitment of consuming this? If I'm going to watch a four hour video, fewer people do it than a three minute video. Right? And then um you don't really actually have to do any work when you're just purely consuming content. But if I wanted to take action as a result, then that's that's another part of it. But it's still gonna cost me twenty minutes, which is a sacrifice I can do to Netflix. That's true. I think if we're using consumption of media as the thing.
The effort and the time delay.
Basically, are we talking time delay to outcome? I'm gonna be rich. Yeah,'cause the the time's always gonna be a component.
What's interesting is that having looked at a zillion different offers over my life and thinking about value, um
The one that I think is
Most left on.
Is this one. How quickly they can accomplish exactly. If you want to get into a business and just completely disrupt it, do look at what everyone else is doing and do it half the time.
You can do that in just about any business.
Because there will always be someone who's willing to pay a premium for that.

Yeah. I'd say one of my true pillars of like how do I plan for the future. Give people context on that, for those that have never heard Jeff talk about that and what that means.
I think I saw it as a interview that he did and they said so
Given X, Y, and Z, what do you think about the future? And he said, You know, I don't really think that much about
What's going to change. He said, I spent a lot more time trying to think what's not going to change.
And then we bet really heavily on those things. We believe that customers will prefer cheaper prices
10 years from now, just as much as they do now. We believe that customers will prefer more selection to less selection.
10 years from now as much as they do now. We believe that if customers can get something in two hours, they will value that more than if it takes them two days. We believe in that and we can bet in that. And so he just thinks about these elements. And if we're thinking about the like the value equation,
How easy did they make buying? It's one click. How fast does it come? It's almost immediate.
You have a history of buying from them. So you and this is also where the reviews come in. How likely is it? Well if it's a five star with five thousand reviews, it's pretty high. If it's got a one and a half and it's got two reviews
I'm probably not gonna buy it. Even if it's the same product, just because of our perception of it.
Right. And then the outcome is what I'm willing to do for the price, right? I think about this time delay for a moment because of s one thing that kind of loops over the whole conversation at this point is that
People will
Abstract the value of a positive future outcome.
two zero if it is long enough in the future.
True. Even if it's guaranteed. You can guarantee that you will be rich.
If you invest.
you know, a hundred dollars a week or two hundred dollars a week, whatever into
into an index fund.
Right. Pretty much.
And if you do that for thirty, forty years, you you will be fine.
Mm.
Because it's thirty or forty years and because the latte is today.
The discount basically takes it to zero.
There's two lessons that I think that are really, really hard to learn. Um I think um Williamson talks about this with like unlearnable or unteachable lessons, things like that. Lessons that are difficult to observe unless you go through them. One of my one of the guys who worked for me, he said, You know, I consumed your content for, you know, years. He said, But
Seeing you.
At the office at four AM every day.
When you don't need to do this at all.
The consistency of it.
He's like I I don't see that in the content. I mean I I see the output of that.
And one of the things with consistency is that you need to be consistent in order to witness consistency.
Like you can't even you can't even
Observe con Like even if I did a time lapse that takes ten seconds of me doing you still don't
Perceive it.
So there's there's the consistency piece and I think the other one with it with regards to the long term component.
His patience.
Yeah. Also to be to fair focus because um Sharon, my partner says this. He says, um
People only see the choices you made, not the options you had.
Hm.
And so you can't really witness focus, you just see winning.
Mm-hmm.
And so to the same degree with patients.
Again, you only see the win. Like if you look at a marathon, people are there at the beginning, they're there at the end. No one's here in the middle.
Yeah.'Cause it's the only fun part.
The content of a marathon would be the the intro and the exit. Like you'd literally make it into a clip that's 30 seconds and be like, ha ha ha yay, and then maybe a couple of mile markers, and it's like, wait, we compressed this. What a what a bargain. Great, great return on time. You can't really witness patients unless you've literally followed it from the beginning, which of course you'll have your OG people who are with you in the beginning of Divis CEO, and they've they've seen the patients start to play out.
But it's one of the things that like
One of the the the ultimate gifts that I would hope
Equal opposite of this is Steve Wynn I think talked about how his the best thing in the world is that someone comes their first time to one of his casinos, bets big and wins.
It's the best thing ever.
the worst thing that can happen is that the first time they come, they lose their money. Cause then they never gamble again.
And so it's like they w he want that big reinforcing event up front because then you can become a gambling, right? And so to the same degree, my my hope for like My Kid in the Future or or anyone who's trying to start out is that
They have some thing that happens in their life where they're rewarded
for delaying the outcome and having a big jackpot as a result of the consistent effort where they they delayed the reward.
Mm because as soon as you do learn that lesson, you see how big the big can be when you wait.
Yeah.
It goes back to what we were saying about long
Like long termism as a strategy.
But also, yeah, like it I I only needed to look at that graph, the compounding returns graph, once actually looking at my own audience growth and saying that I did a thousand posts on Instagram and reached a thousand followers. And then in my last three
when I had seven thousand followers, I gained three hundred thousand followers in three posts because carousels had dropped an Instagram was rewarding everybody for carousels back then. And me seeing that graph and then going, Oh, it's slow, then it's fast in success. And then starting the diary of C and for three years nobody fucking listening. And then all of a sudden it was like it was just fucking crazy. It just went a vertical line up and going, Oh, it's the same Instagram
So actually, you know.
It's slow then it's fast.
But most people if you've never experienced slow you think oh I'm inadequate, I fucked up.
I'm done.
But you know you have that religion.
Yeah. There are mistakes of picking the wrong path.
But I think there are more mistakes of abandoning the right path.
Mm. How would you how would you know though?
So there's a handful of I think entrepreneur questions that are eternally unanswerable, which is when do you push and when do you pivot?
Mm-hmm.
Like how much risk do I take on? Like should should I consume or invest? Well
You don't know when you die.
True.
Right. And so with the push and pivot one
the best answer that I have to I I get this one a lot, like, hey, it's really hard. Should I should I pivot the business, change it, or should I try and like push through?
My actual answer is if you had a fundamental assumption that you based the business on that has been proven untrue from your business activities, I think it makes sense to pivot.
If none of your original theses are incorrect, it's just not happening as fast as you want or as easily as you want.
Then you push.
What's interesting is like the nature of being a founder as well on that.
is going earlier than the world. Like when you think about outside success. Like everyone understands space now and they're, oh, we can do reusable rockets now. We get it.
But being being the first guy or the first woman.
Um, I think is really the essence of a founder, they go earlier than

The world's current available evidence, and thus there needs to be some kind of framework.
That you have.
One of my frameworks which I've never articulated before.
And I don't even know if this is gonna sound correct, but it's just always guided me.
Is um
Do I believe that I'm offering it?
Even a t tiny group of people
Scarce value.
So when I start the dive as CO
I was making Facebook videos with people like Jay Shay. We we we could get tens of millions of views on Facebook Watch back then. No one was mentioning it.
So I remember this made this video about relationships that did 33 million views. I'd got no one would mention it. No one like no one. And then I started this podcast called The Diary of a Seo of My Bedroom. I'd go went to Apple, bought this microphone for$100, pugged it into Garage Band, tried to edit it myself, uploaded it. And like my two best friends, the look on their faces in the office, Ash and Oliver, when they listened to it.
They had never reacted to me like that ever before for the Facebook videos I'd made. And then when I didn't upload the next week, Oliver Yonchev came to me and said, When's the episode coming out?
For me
That that was it.
Yeah. For me, I was like I I've done something here that's delivered scarce value to the world so much so that one of my best friends who's very honest with me is asking me when the next one is. And so now I follow that. So when I'm thinking about the bets we make on the future, I'm obsessed about finding things that are delivering scarce value, even if they're unscalable.
I think you bring up a really good point about the unscalable part.
Because
So t two two parts of this. So one is
People will not do things I see I see beginning entrepreneurs. They're like, Well, that's not scalable. And I'm like
You're broke.
Yeah.
Okay.
You can you can not be skilled. You can just make money. That's okay.
Yeah.
But it also assumes that your future soft with more skills and more resources won't have the ability to figure out how to scale it. Yeah.
And most things are like
We're building cities in the middle of the fucking ocean.

If you're starting a business
And this is where you have to not sell out of your own wallet is and that's the the nature of the offers book is start with the most absurdly valuable thing you possibly can. So whatever price you want to charge, add one or two zeros to it.
Okay, and it's like that's crazy. I agree. Crazy.
What would you have to do?
In order for that to be worth it.
And then you list out all the things you do. Well, I mean, well, if I was gonna get somebody in shape, I'd I'd probably go to their house, I would I would cup them grocery shop, I would I would drive them to the gym and back from the gym to make sure that they actually did it. For a hundred grand, is it worth it? And they're like
Well so it's scalable. It's like we only need five.
Mm. And I think when you're starting out, there's huge value in having unscalable services.
Because one, you'll get better customers because you're gonna be charging much more for something that's a little bit more premium. And
the value of talking to people richer than you.
Will do more for you than what you are doing for them.
Mm-hmm.
So like they will shift your worldview, which is why like a lot of people like caddies who talk to all these millionaires when they're when they're playing golf, it's like they learn so much from the people. Like how do you make your money? Like they learn so much worldview of oh, I shouldn't be thinking this way, I should be thinking like this. So once you get that.
The second is that
You are able to practice.
The unscalable thing. Yeah.
And then you can figure out how do I how do I take
The scarce value. Okay, this is
Not scalable. Fine. We can s let's just say it's not scalable.
Okay, are there elements of this?
that are scalable that I now know because I've done it rather than because I thought about it. Because
Your thought experiments, and I'd say for myself too, are pretty terrible.
Like our ability to predict the future is
Pretty god awful. And so we think we know what it's going to be like, and we usually have no idea. And so and so it's like go do it. You'll collect way richer data that no one else has done because it was unscalable. And then you can actually create something that's more scalable that is unique because you actually went through it. And from a
This is getting a little bit more business haty, but from a branding perspective, saying, Hey, I have a handful of clients that pay me.
two thousand dollars a month to do this premium thing. For those of you can't afford that.
I now have this thing.
You've already anchored high.
They see you as the person on the hill because you deal with these unscalable my private clients. And then you can have like you look at the Tesla model of start with the roadster, and then you have the model S, and then you work your way down to the masses.
And so I'm a big believer in
Price as high as you can.
Make the very premium thing first. Let that be high cash flow, high margin, low scalability, so that you can then have the money to start working your way down to more people.
Well if I was too much.
Forensically analyze your business now.
And then I brought in Alex, who started that business on day one, and I go, look at how unscalable all this stuff is that he's accomplished. I actually would aren't make the case from what you were just saying that actually the essence of value creation in business is solving problems that didn't look scalable.
I was just thinking about even the Director process here from the minute you leave, like so right now the team in there that are doing the testing, they're actually making you a book as as we speak. They take they took photos of us while we were sat here. And when this interview ends, they're gonna walk in and hand me the book. I'm gonna sign it and pass it to you.
That book is gonna contain quotes from fans that loved our last conversation. They're currently printing them off on Polaroids, they're writing in it. When this c conversation's done, we're gonna test your name three hundred times, using ads to see how to introduce you. I know Alex Hamosi's gonna win because you're a b your big name now. But
You think about when we started the podcast, imagine me there with on garage ban. That's not scalable. It's not scalable. I use this this this frame a lot, which is that
You are trying to solve tomorrow's problems with today's resources.
Mm-hmm. It's a fallacy.
It's ridiculous. You don't have the money, don't have the skill, you don't have the connections, you don't have the resources, you don't have the experience and the track record.
But future you will. But the hard part is future is a stranger.
Mm-hmm. And so I think we make a lot of this content to try and approximate as closely as possible to just pull the first step for someone to take to say, Believe like you will figure it out.
Like as long as you do not quit.
You'll win.
Like you just have to not stop.
That's basically it. You should have to not stop. As long as you get feedback and you take the feedback and you improve and you do that a long enough time, Rise, then you win. Let's be so just to be clear that you're not saying pursue a bad idea.
All the way. And just never be stubborn about the pursuit of a bad idea. You're saying
Iterate your way.
Yeah, we have to get feedback. Yeah.
I mean if you want to have a doggy skateboard and you pitch a hundred dog owners on the doggy skateboard and then none of them want it and you're like, Well, I really believe in this doggy skateboard idea and then you bring them the doggy skateboard and then they really still don't want it.
You probably shouldn't sell doggy skateboards.
So you should quit the W skateboard business. But you shouldn't quit business.
Okay, the other thing. I think it's local versus global. Even if you just reframe failure in that way, it makes it way more palatable.
Like you figuring it out.
Is a lot of failures. I mean how many failed episodes, failed headlines, packages. Oh my gosh. You forgot to turn the the mic on and did the whole from show. There's there's gonna be a hundred of those. But as long as it it doesn't become a global failure of I'm no longer doing this.
Then you're good.
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One of the great fascinations I have and almost one of the unteachables is self I think it's self awareness. Yeah.
Judgment again. Yeah.
Have you ever had someone come up to you and say something grandi they want to go to the moon, let's say hypothetical. And you look at them and you go, You're not a spaceman. Do you know what I mean? And how do you how do you what adv how do you then give them that advice, which is like raise one's self awareness, know what you're good at and what you're bad at?
I think what people are are trying to get
Yeah.
Is a
an understanding a more accurate understanding of base reality.
Mm-hmm. And the people who are achieving the things that you want to achieve
And you have been able to
Fundamentally if you're doing stuff and what you want to have happen is not happening.
Your model of the world is either incorrect or the variables you have are incorrect. How did you cultivate a more accurate
Vision of
Reality.
So I'm well practice. I'm a big believer in behaviorism.
What's that?
Operant conditioning.
Which is basically
How you train machines, how they figured out how to train AI, which is reinforcement training, is the exact same way you train humans.
Okay. And so when you see yourself as the subject that is being
Trained.
then we can make better predictions of will people buy
Will people take this offer? Let's say I've got
A grandpa.
And he doesn't want to take
his medicine and the medicine the doctor said was gonna extend his life by ten years.
Okay.
The nurse is at home with me.
And she's going to try and give
Crunch pot.
the the pill and he says, Tastes like shit. I don't want to have it, just burshes her away.

She comes back, she's throws her hands up and she's like, You you lead a horse to water, you can't make it drink, right?
The operationalist or the behaviorist would say.
No, you've made many other options the more likely option than taking the pill.
And so what we need to do is make the pill the nicest and easiest option available to him.
And so the first thing you would do is you'd crush the pill up.
And then I would say okay, let's put it in some lemonade. Put it in the in the fridge, make it ice cold. All right, I'm gonna bring out some peanuts that are salty and I'm gonna put it in front of the grandpa.
Right. And then
I'm gonna come out with a you know a chess board or a backgammon board. And I'm gonna sit in front of him and set it all up and say, Hey, I know you said you wanted to play backgammon. I've said no the last three weeks.
Here's the lemonade.
Do you want to play? If you finish the lemonade, we can play.
How likely is it that Grandpa now
Drink the lemonade.
Mm-hmm. Super high.
But at the end of the day
We just
We didn't
Persuade.
We arranged the conditions to maximize the likelihood of the outcome that we want.
What people miss is that the
The amount of
Attack vectors.
That
People who succeed.
Approach a problem with the
Is orders of magnitude greater than someone who is starting out?
is they're like I talked to three people and that was it and they said they didn't want it.
And I I tell this this story because it was it was one of those big moments for me, which is I I had a mentor, he said
You should put some flyers out. That's how he advertised. He had a big chain at twenty two locations. And I was like, All right, I'll put some flyers out. I put three hundred out.
Um and then nothing happened.
Uh well one person called and they said I digg his car and then I was like


Thank God I didn't I didn't have any money. Um so he called me up or I called him like a week or two later and he's like, Oh, how'd the you know, how'd the flowers go? And I was like
I was ready I was I'm gonna show you. Yeah, I'm gonna show you. Dude, nothing happened, man.
And he didn't even like I was like I was waiting for him to try and fight me on his side.
Well what was your test size?
I was like,
Mm.

I was like, I put out three hundred flyers.
He was like
Yeah, it's tough to know if anything works at three hundred. He's like, We usually put out five thousand um per test batch until we know it works. He said, Then we do three thousand a day.
After that.
And so he was doing a hundred fifty thousand flyers a month.
And I'd put out three hundred.
And so
As much as people don't think that
Like it's like work harder.
It's the the volume of activity and output that people who are
A hundred steps ahead of you really is oftentimes a hundred times more. Now it seems unfathomable because you're looking at the top of the hill and saying, How do I get there? But you start by making one.
And then you learn through how painful the inefficiency is. Like when you're editing that you're doing the split test for the headlines at three hundred of them at a time. You learn because you're like, this is so painful. It works, but my God, is it painful?
that that is what motivates you because you want the payoff, but you don't want the pain to figure out ways to make it more efficient. And then when it becomes efficient, you did the scarce work that no one else wants to do because no one even knows it works as well as it does. And then all of a sudden you had that
Um
You have
A scarce competitive advantage over everyone else.
At the very top of that, I heard this idea of like doing and listening at the same time. And this sounds very simple. You're talking about reinforcement learning being the way that you tune yourself to reality. Yeah. But
You even said yourself, once upon a time you were doing a lot of listening.
Yeah.
You were reading. There wasn't much doing. Some people just do the doing and no listening.
And then so they don't tune, but this sort of like doing and then r sort of reinforcement learning based on the outcomes.
Is how one
cultivates their self awareness. That's actually the most accurate definition I've ever heard of like that's actually how you get more in tune with the world.
It's three.
Painful sometimes feedback.
Data.
And then the other thing I heard was you talking just about like
Just believing in human incentives. Yes. And and this like it it sounds like a it took me ten years to just
Sim settle on this simple idea.
That humans don't really behave outside of their incentives unless they're psychopaths.
And that's like why they go to jail.
Because they acted outside of social incentives. They like killed someone or something. Actually, when you think about team building or customers, the first question should be why aren't they it's like what are the what are the incentives in which they are making their decision? And you talked about that example there of giving someone the the gammon board and some You're changing his incentives.
Yeah.
We just need to move the levers around. And so it's like if you're not selling well to get to a business situation, it's like you haven't made buying from you the most convenient, nicest option.
It's such an important way to think.
You offer someone a job and they say, No, I don't want the job.
You can think lots of things, but actually if you just reason it down to the f the first principle incentives.
What what was And you could it could be a C saw, like kinda like your value trade here.
What did I offer them?
Um what did it cost them?
Yeah. And was that net positive?
So I have this so I write all my persuasion like this.
This is this is how we do it. So we say
Uh
Plus plus.
Plus minus.
Uh minus plus.
Minus minus.
Alright.
This is the easiest way to write copy, the easiest way to w to think about marketing.
If you do the thing
You get more
Good stuff.
Mm-hmm.
If you uh don't do the thing, you get more
Bad stuff.
Mm-hmm.
If you do the thing I want, or so you don't do the thing
You get less good stuff.
And if you do what I want.
You get less.
Bad stuff.
And this
are our persuasion elements that we say to do the thing, but we also have to I c call playing the don't.
Which is like hey also
We have
These situations of let's say that you don't sign up for my fitness program.
Yeah.
That means that you're not gonna have these times with your kids in the future.
Right.
More good less good stuff.
Right. You're gonna have more health issues, more bad stuff.
Mm-hmm.
And
The people who you care about who you want approval from.
aren't gonna give you that approval that you so desperately yearn for.
And so we just ping pong between
These
Persuasive elements, but all they are is saying.
More good, less bad.
If you do
The stuff I want. And as a as someone who employs hundreds of people now, this is kinda how I think about behavioral change in a group bigger group of people. You can you can stand in front of the team and say, Hey everybody, adopt AI, by the way, please.
Please adopt AI. But their incentive structure is to
Do their job.
And have you read The Innovator's Dilemma? It's one of my favorite books of all time on the subject of No but I'm familiar with it. Talks to the same thing as well, which is just humans just act inside their incentive structure. Wanna change humans, change their incentive structure.
A lot of people who are delusional when they start out
think that they're going to change people.
Yeah. And I think one of my favorite market I think Gary Halpert said this, he's a copywriter. Um
He said we don't want to
Create demand.
He said we want to channel it.
Mm. It was just it just is such an interesting nuance. He's like that demand like the demand needs to be there.
We just need to just carve a little bit of that river and point it towards us.
And I think when you're thinking about for you with the show
The attention is there.
Th the attention is being spent every second of every day from every human. And so we're not gonna create attention.
We're going to channel it.
Yeah.
And we're gonna make our option the nicest, most most convenient option compared to alternatives. And then it's really just getting into the very gritty details of who I need to make this for. Then you get into avatars and sub segments and markets because what makes it attractive to one person might not make it attractive to another. And that is why.
probably one of the highest leverage decisions that you make with the business is who do I serve?
Mm.
Do you have to be intentional about that when you're starting a business or offering any product to anyone, whether it's content? You have to at the start decide who it's for.
Yes and no, which is a terrible answer. But to start, you just need to get anybody to give you money.
You have then met the the requisites for being an entrepreneur. You've accepted money from a stranger, congratulations, you have a business.
most businesses that I encounter, especially in services,'cause it's
80% of the at least in the US to 78% of all businesses are service based. Typically it starts with accepting all money from everyone. Because you're like, oh, I do podcast agency stuff too. Oh, you have a oh you want to start up. Yeah, I can help you too. Like because they have a pulse and a credit card, and one of those was the requirement for being a customer, right? So you you take what you can get, right?
But you quickly that it becomes very difficult to scale that.
And that's okay because you had to do what you need to do to survive and get started, and that's fine. But usually between one and three million, you have to make a decision where you say, Hey, in order for me to scale this, now that I have the resources and the experience and the skill, I can say these customers are easier to deal with and pay us more than these customers. And if I didn't have to serve 10 different
types of customers and I only had to serve one type of customer, it would make the operations in the back way easier because I could start templatizing and start systematizing what our delivery is.
And on the front end, if we're advertising people, instead of saying we do advertise you know podcast agency for everyone, we say
We help doctors generate patients using
Podcasts.
It's like, oh, all of a sudden the correct customer knows that this is for them. Right. And so now we're attracting the right people. And then those people are the ones that we already figured out through trial and error and feedback are worth the most. And then we have a more scalable product because we don't have to make 10 things for 10 people. We make one thing for 10 people.
Right. Cut once, sell twice. Right, sell twice. That's the idea.
Not cut once, sell once.
I almost hate this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway.
Um are there any
obvious businesses that have emerged in your point of view because of what's going on in the world that a young person that wants to cut their teeth should probably be aiming at. Fifteen years ago for me it was starting an agency. I think that opportunity is a little bit saturated now, dare I say.
I think that the nature of agencies has changed. I think you like if you want to do like a Reddit
reputation management now that's kind of a more emerging offer because Reddit's become a bigger and bigger platform and people look there. Like the I think the the old school meta ad agency might be harder to crack into than some of the more newer opportunities that exist. And clipping agencies, things like those things are still opportunities right now, I think. So
If we have beginner opportunities and then we have what I think are great opportunities that are let's just say non just AI,'cause there's the obvious answer of like start an AI thing and automate for small businesses and yes, you should absolutely do that and there's lots of money to be made there.
Great. Okay.
Outside of that, what's not going to change? What can you bet on?
I'm gonna bet that humans are going to want to still want to look beautiful.
In the future?
as they do now. I think people are gonna wanna stay young.
Looking?
And so I think the longevity med spa
Look a certain way, peptide, all of that world is going to crush and is already crushing right now. There's a huge supply-demand issue. Believe it or not, I think uh wealth.
um advisors. I can'cause I see so many businesses and the ones I pay attention to are the people who are making more money than I think their skill level
Um
Wood Kanote.
Right, would would would make sense for. Like on the flip, I say like if I see somebody who's who's doing twenty million dollars a year as a restaurateur, I'm like, bro, you could probably do two hundred million a year in a different business. Um I had a conversation with a gym owner that was doing ten million dollars a year.
And it was a service based gym, not uh a facility leasage gym, which is different. Like a crunch fitness is just like use the equipment, whatever, but a true service based gym, which is either personal training or semi-private training, really hard business to scale. Easy to start, hard to scale. And he was like, What do I think? You know, what do you think the the opportunity is for me? I was like, honestly, dude, you could dig your exact skill set because you've got a hundred employees and you're trying to
Deliver an amazing experience, but with low skill labor, you have to maintain culture. There's all of this stuff that you have to do. It's like if you took that same skill set and just applied it to a superior vehicle, you'd make more. Now
You might not want that and you might be happy with your existing business, which
Keep on just know that it's a harder it's a harder business.
So
Well that's to say, I think wealth is a big bucket.
Um well
related services are still crushing insurance risk is still going to exist in the future.
Mm-hmm.
So there's going to need to be insurance people going to to f to fractionalize risk?
Which is what insurance functionally does. The longevity looking nice is one. And then anything that's not cool.
Has like a discount applied to it.
is always something that's very interesting to look at.
It's going trash.
Like no one wants to be like, Oh so what do you do? It's like I I'm in trash. Yeah, like it just it doesn't have the same gravitas as I'm a doctor, except that guy could be a billionaire. Right. And so
If I look at like oh I I do you know I do waste management for old people.
Like, you know, human fecal matter. It's like there someone's gotta you know, like someone's gotta figure something out, right? And so those are the types of businesses where it's like look where no one wants to look. Look at look for things that people would not want to say at parties.
There's usually big opportunities there if there's obviously money where I said oh people because right now it's so wealth is so concentrated on the I did my favorite video of the year.
I I did this breakdown.
And because it was my favorite video, I think I got like three hundred thousand views. But like But what I did was really interesting is that I took wealth in the United States and I had a hundred I had it represent a hundred dollars. A hundred percent of wealth is hundred dollars. If you looked at it.
Right.
And you had a circle.
For all you know, hundred people at different percentiles.
Right.
There's like two dollars.
In the bottom fiftieth percentile.
The bottom fifty percent of people has roughly two dollars the hundred. Wow. It's crazy. And then you've got your next forty
And I think that was like
Twenty seven dollars, something like that.
Then you have your next nine percent.
Which has like thirty six dollars.
And then the top one percent.
That's thirty one.
Hopefully the math math, but it's it's somewhere somewhere in the neighborhood.
And so when you look at that division.
And then you're like, Who should I serve?
Many people
We're starting out.
Or here.

We're here.
And so their view of the world
It's not accurate.
And this is why they stay broke.
Because they try to sell to other people who have no money.
And then assume that no one has money.
The interesting thing I I noticed and I think an anybody that's run a service business will be able to relate.
Is when I started out
I was selling to startup founders who had an app idea whose marketing budget was approximately$10,000. And I was asking for$10,000. Per year. And they were watching me. They were co counting every download they got on their apps. And slowly we managed to move up. And the remarkable thing is this is a crazy thing to say.
But it was easier from a client management or a client account management perspective to deal with Coca Cola than it was Dave with his dating app idea.
Coca-Cola, who would give you potentially six figures in budgets, um would r would be a little bit more casual than
Dave with his a dating app idea where he'd put his mortgage on the line.
But it's it's not easy to move up because to get that meeting with Coca Cola to be able to present to them. You gotta earn it somehow.
So it's all well good saying it, but the reality of getting up there is
They they think more about credibility track record. They'll they'll work with people who are highly credible and who who they can see a reality behind.
And so it's not there's nothing wrong with starting to sell all the friends and family, but the
The goal again, that's if your goal is to make more money with the business.
should be to move up market and if you look so this is kind of interesting, something I've noticed.
If you look at the price of a service
This is specifically for service businesses. Mm-hmm.
The price of the service almost has a one to one correlation with
how advanced the business and business owner are.
Just as a forcing function. Because
In order to go up in price.
Like a service business done well means you did a good job. You have more demand than you have supply. And so what do you do when supply and demand
Crisscross, you go up in price.
And so you continue this loop, and as long as you continue to deliver more value than you're charging for, you continue to have more demand and you just keep laddering up. And this is why price is such a strong signal for value, which why when you're starting out, it's hard to hear us say, hey, add a zero to your price tag, add two zeros to your price tag. Because if someone comes to me and says, Hey, I want to do all of your
social media management for two thousand dollars a month. I'm like, dude, you can't even handle me.
Like you c like even if I said yes, you can't.
It d the math doesn't math. There's no way you can do it. And so if someone comes to me like the minimum I'm probably gonna be willing to spend is I don't know, fifteen thousand a month for a vendor. Like the minimum I could really possibly and it'd be probably a a smaller shop.
And I know the founder's probably still integrally involved and I'm fine with that, because I'm okay with some founders like being good and basically me seeing them as a fractional employee that are paying less, and that works fine. All that to say, like
You want to have your price go up.
One,'cause you serve better customers. Two,'cause you have better margins. Three, because it'll be aesthetic, and four, because it's a signal of how good you are at what you do.
Mm-hmm. And the best businesses and business owners will know, Oh, this is for me.
You signal to them that you like
You want to go at market, but you have low market prices. There's um there's something called the Van Westen Dorp pricing analysis. You might have heard of it. It's from the nineteen seventies. I do this most times when I launch a new offering. And so there's four questions you ask. Number one, at what price would this be so expensive that you wouldn't even consider it?
Mm-hmm.
Number two.
At what price would this be so cheap?
that it would be impossible that it would be able to be valuable. It it'd be too cheap. At what price would it be right at the edge, you'd have to really consider it, but you'd end up buying it. And then at what price would it be a a bargain, a good deal?
And so when you actually take a scatter plot to this, and now I have to I used to have to do these manually. Now you can literally just take the data and put it right into AI and say, hey, run a van western drop analysis on this, which is amazing. So you can get it in six minutes. And so you get these, there's four points.
On the graph.
Yeah.
If you have the scattered dots. And so you have the point of marginal cheapness.
Which is basically beyond this point, the majority more people will think it's too cheap to be believable.
Okay.
And above this price, it's too expensive to be considerable.
And so what you can find is you can do area under the curve to see at what price would I make the most money if I had a higher friction sales process.
And if I wanted people to simply purchase it, so if I wanted to have an automated sales process, where my range is. And so there's a range in there.
Where it says, Okay, right here is the point where you'll make the most number of sales. Now you'd have to factor in margin.
Like gross margins of the product. But you can guess, like this is how when you want to launch a shampoo.
This is how they do it.
And so we can price it.
Precisely.
Is it a bell curve?
Or is it
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Interestingly, sometimes you have double Gaussians that'll happen.
Mm because it's different customer stats. Yeah. So when so when I run these, I ask those four questions, but I also ask for the customer stats.
So then I can slice it by saying, What do the rich customers think?
What's the pricing curve for them? What's the pricing curve for poor customers? What's the pricing curve for home services? What's the pricing curve for and so then you can get
really, really accurate with initial pricing.
Of all the
ideas that you've put out into the world. What are the the sort of headline ideas or questions that you've found to be most compelling to people?
Almost all the core concepts in this book
come down to figuring out who you want to sell.
What you wanna sell them.
And
How to get them to buy.
And
Most of my content focus is more on acquisition since
The vast majority of small businesses, say one to fifty million. Not always. Um
But I'd say seventy percent of businesses, this is rough estimates, that come through our doors are demand constrained. They could use more customers than they than they have. Thirty percent are
Supply constrained.
The phone's ringing, but they just don't have enough account reps, they don't have enough technicians, whatever it is.
And so what's really interesting about this all of these books when taking in aggregate.
Is that
Every problem.
is a marking problem.
And I'll and I'll sell you on this idea.
So if we were to think
about a business as okay, we've got Lee Gen, right?
As activity number one.
We've got nurture.
As number two.
You've got sales.
Uh we've got uh onboarding.
And then we've got retention.
Slash ascension.
Right. Getting them to keep paying and getting to buy more ship.
Now this is the demand side for customers, right? Everyone hopefully everyone's kind of aligned with that.
Now if you're supply constrained
Which means which means that you
Uh have more customers than you can handle, more people are interested in your stuff. Let's say you're the solopreneur and you're like
How do I like there's only one of me. What do I do? Like you're supply constrained.
If you had unlimited view, you could make more money.
Right.
So
What's the equivalent version of this?
On the supply side, you have application generation.
And then you have application nurture.
What does that mean? Application Natural Mm.
We're working these leads. Yeah. We have these applicants. We need to get them scheduled. We need to get them booked. We need to make sure that they're not getting lost in the process. You know, like how how quickly can we line these interviews up? All that, right? We have the interviews themselves, which is the sale.
Right.
And then we have onboarding, like you do for a new employee.
And then you have retention.
And then the essential is
They're gro they're going up, right? Are they are they are they are they moving up? Which means that you just treat humans the way you treat humans in a pipeline in a business.
And so if you
Have a demand problem.
But you know how to get
Employees.
Then do the stuff that you get to get employees to get more customers. If you know how to get
Customers.
But you don't know how to get employees, use the exact same process, which means
Who's writing the copy?
For your
Your ads and your promotions and your outreach temps.
Well, somebody probably should take a look at it. If you haven't looked at this, by the way, and you're a slightly bigger business owner you will be horrified by the outbound messages that are getting sent on your behalf to people. You'll be horrified by the job postings that your company is putting and you're like, No one would respond to this. How would you think this would work?
From a nurture perspective
The leads aren't getting worked.
No one's following up.
We're not giving them any materials to sell them on our bus
Just like you would with a prospect, like why don't we have case studies? Why don't we have a video sales letter that tells the tells the whole business? So every person who comes in acquisition to home watches a VSL for me.
And it's a
thirteen minute thing of just be like, here's how the business works and it's this is our real estate arm. This is like and it shows everything. And like I'm giving proof and this is John and John's an employee and John loves it here. You know, whatever. And so then
In the interview itself, it's like do you have a script?
Well you have a sales script, why would you not have an interview script?
Mm-hmm.

Precan questions. Do we role play this?
Well we role play this.
Isn't this just as important, if not more important? Is there more leverage on getting one ten out of ten
talent person than just one customer? Yeah.
On the onboarding, are we just do we have any process? Do we have thirty, sixty, ninety of what what's gonna happen over the next thirty, sixty, ninety days and what is required for them and what information they need to consume so they can become proficient?
And then once they are onboarded.
What's their what's their career path look like? How do they I like one of my favorite questions is when I have somebody I really like.
Um I say, what would it take for you to work here forever?
What'd it take?
Just tell me what it takes. I can say no.
Just tell me what it would take. And then I can start moving the pieces around to figure out how I can get this person to stay forever. But
The same thing happens. If I have a a customer that I like a lot of like what would it take for us to be your your sole provider forever?
Especially this because I know you have more enterprise experience. Sometimes saying, Hey, let me be the sole provider. Let's get let's go exclusive.
Let's lock in a three year contract and I'll give you these other things for free if we lock in it.
I'll never work with
Yeah.
Three three competitors.
Almost all problems in business can be solved by more people finding out about your stuff, either to work for you or to buy from you.
Hm.
Which also means that you probably have ongoing marketing to your customers.
Think there shouldn't be ongoing marketing to your team and employees?
Do we want our customers to give us referrals? Yeah. Do we want our employees to give us referrals?
Do we have a incentive?
For people to bring a froze. There's a great story.

A friend of a friend.
Had a had a uh
Ten million ish dollar a year business. You talked to somebody in the exact same space as him.
Uh who's way further ahead.
And he uh he was in business that had like agents.
Uh that work from like kinda like a brokerage. And the mentor told them. So what's the incentive that you have for your agents to bring more agents?
He's like, Oh I you know, I pay him five hundred bucks.
If they bring a new agent on. And he was like, Okay.
What do you make on a productive agent per year in gross profit?
It was two hundred fifty thousand a year.
Productive agent.
Gross profit.
He's like, So you're only willing to spend five hundred dollars to make two hundred and fifty thousand?
Hm.
He's like, What would you spend for two hundred fifty thousand? He was like
I mean, I don't know, fifty grand? He's like, Yeah.
So why don't you make your incentive
Twenty five to start.
So he took his incentive from five hundred dollars for referral to twenty five thousand.
And he took his company from
Ten million to four hundred million. Yeah, it's crazy. I think about this a lot, even with like recruiting, like people are like, Oh, Headhunters cost a lot of money. I'm like fucking hell. For really exceptional talent, it's almost
It's always a deal. It's always a great deal.
going back in time, if I were to give the the like what has changed about
Uh me then versus me now.
is that my standards for talent are significantly higher, and my tolerance for letting someone be mediocre and stay.
Or lower.
I think probably all the entrepreneurs I've ever interviewed would say that exact thing. I remember one particular entrepreneur who's built a hundred billion dollar business publicly listed. He said at twenty I thought mattered. Thirty I thought it was kind of important. At forty I've realized it's the single most important thing.
And this is a guy that's built a hundred billion dollar publicly traded company. And I was like th the but it's funny'cause that's what all of them say.
Yeah.
But I like this is a broader relationship advice lesson, which is just the best and worst decisions you'll make in your life for people. And I mean I look at
I look at some of these.

I mean it's true for you.
Yeah.
I know right.
This is a photo of your lovely wife. Nuggets on.
Can you think about the variance of your outcome if you've chosen someone else?
I do think about that.
I do think about that.
It's
Probably the single best financial decision that I ever made.
was Mary Layla.
Because
And this is this is no shade to any any
Any relationship that exists of mine or anyone's you know
People optimize for different things. And I'm not saying I optimize for finances, I'm saying but within that lens.
She was just down.
And
She believed in me.
And a lot of times more than I believed in myself.
And I think
I think that's all.
anyone really wants, or at least it for me that I that I wanted.
Was
And the thing is that hasn't stopped.
As the stakes have gotten higher.
I remember there was this business that I was that I was working with, I was gonna go meet with the whole team.
I was like, this is like a really tough problem that they're
asking me to help with and I was like um and she just like cut me off and she's like Good thing you're the best at it.
And that you're gonna give them more help than anyone else could.
It's just like
Whether that's true or not.
It was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. And so I I also say this to people were starting out is just like
I I do not have perfect
Um self security.
You know what I mean? Like
I wouldn't say it's imposter syndrome because that's not true, but like
I have doubts of like I don't know if I'm able to solve this.
I mean I hope I am and I keep working on it, but like I don't know. And as the
the problems become more complex and have higher stakes. It's like this is harder and will cost more if I fail.
Um
The pressure feels the same. I would say the only difference is that we have more resources to
to to to handle them. And so
In a lot of ways, when you're starting out, it's kinda like
Fighting a bear with your bare hands.
But when you're further down, it's like trying to slay a dragon, but at least you have an army.
Mm-hmm.
The foe is big, but your resources are bigger too. And in some ways it's almost easier later than it is when you start.
But you only earn the right

Face those foes by going through
the earlier stages when you didn't have the resources because you learn the grit, you learn the scrappiness. And I think that like
It's a it's a rite of passage.
And
Layla.
was willing to go all in. And I would say that like, if anything, kind of like a jockey bet
Um for VCs like you bet on the horse not the jocke or sorry the jockey not the horse.
When she saw me, I had, you know, a handful of gems.
And it wasn't like I'm Alex Hormosy, the w you know, whatever I am now.
I was just a gym owner and I was twenty six and I worked really hard and she was like
I don't know where we're gonna go, but
I know Alex is gonna work.
tirelessly to get there.
And
She just always believed. And I think that if like I think the person that you were married is either going to increase the likelihood that you hit your goals or decrease
And
you need to decide whether that's
Important to you.
Do you think you would be
As successful as you are now.
I wouldn't be as successful.
Because number one, there have been plenty of moments'cause I don't struggle with anxiety. I struggle with apathy.
Um, not caring.
Why do I even bother doing this? We already have enough money. Who cares? Layla in a lot of ways has bigger dreams than I do.
Um
I've always had big goals for finances, but at a certain point
Um, and I think I hit this kind of like last year for me, which is weird because I always like people were always like, When is enough enough?
And
It's kinda like working out. Um, I got to a point where I was like almost two fifty and
Lean. And I was like
This is more than enough. I I'm gonna come back down. And so I've had bigger goals than most people for my fitness or muscles or whatever. Um, I've had bigger goals than most people for money, but I also was like at that point when I hit it, I was like
I think this is enough for me.
And Lila was like, It was never about the money for me.
It never was. And I think that's why our dynamic worked really well. But she's
Always cared about the team.
Um, more than anything. And she's like I her dream when she and I met was to build a place
That people love to come to work.
And if you do that.
And it also has a good business model behind it, marketing and sales and pricing and all this other stuff. It's like you end up making a lot of money. But I would have probably
Taking my foot off the gas.
Earlier.
If it hadn't been for Layla.
I think I would have struggled more operationally.
Uh because Layla is
Layla will never get the credit that she deserves.
Um
But Layla is Layla is the is the pure is a pure operator, like unbelievable leader.
Yeah.
Talent that I probably wouldn't have been able to either get or keep.
Stay because of her.
Like I think that the if there was like a a a a divorce in the business
I think the vast majority of people go I'm serious. Like I I know I like self awareness. Yeah.
People know what I'm good at.
Mm-hmm.
I know.
People are loyal to Layla.
Because she is just there for people.
Um
And so for those reasons I don't think I would have had I I don't think I would have kept my foot on the gas.
Um, I don't think I would be able to operate nearly as complex of a business as we currently have.
And on the inevitable like troughs of my motivation.
She was the one who kinda carried me.
A lot of people will be listening now.
And they might be listening with their partner.
Maybe they're listening alone. And they're thinking, Do you know what my partner isn't all that supportive.
Of me.
And dare I say some people will be listening now and think their partner is actually against the
Their ambition.
What do you say to those people?
Figure out what you want.
Like we have to make trades.
How do you do you know it's it's tricky because
Some of those people might say, Right, fuck it, I'm gonna dump her or him.
And then they pursue the business for two, three years, they become successful and they're lonely as hell.
And they look back and go, Do you know what?
That was actually my insecurity and my shame that drove me to do this, but I've I've now got the mansion and I'm here alone.
I should have she was a good girl, he was a good guy.
I speak only from the per
Perspective of
How do you
align the conditions to maximize the
the business outcome. That's where I come from in terms of how I'm speaking about this.
In terms of maximizing subjective well being and your happiness
Um
Those factors are completely different. And so I think Arthur Brooks has this just
This amazing visual example that I love, which is
Imagine two scenarios. One of them is that you drive your brand new Ferrari to a three star Michelin restaurant.
Um, and you have the corner corner booth eating the best food in the world looking out of you alone.
Or
piling into your beat up, you know, Camry.
uh going to a Denny's with your five best friends.
Which one is the one you think you're going to enjoy more?
It's obvious.
It's obvious it's the second one.
But we live our life like the first.
And so I think
If
Again, it comes down to what you want. If you're like
This
Girl guy, whatever.
Like satisfy so many things.
Like
you will not find the perfect person because you're not perfect. And so it's just what on the stats of this person
Am I willing to make trades on?
Am I willing to have somebody who's
maybe not the most supportive of my career, but maybe they're supportive of my subjective well being. Maybe they're supportive of my of my extracular. Maybe they're supportive of my spiritual journey. Whatever. They might just be supportive in different ways. And so again, it's what do you want?
And I think people I had a my my first boss
Um
or last boss rather, said this thing to me and it's really stuck with me. She said

Uh
Figuring out what you want.
is ninety nine percent of the work.
She said the easy part is getting it.
And I thought about that a lot because I was like, No, the hard part is getting it and it's just like nope it's like
It's
How many layers deep did you figure out what you really want?
And I think that's'cause when you're when you really know what you want, then it's
then you just align the world to go get it.
It's very hard to know what you want.
Yeah.
Because there's all these
Near term temptations, there's this external noise, there's Instagram telling you that you want this. Yeah. No, you need this.
Yeah.
So being able to drown out all of that noise and get to some kind of signal.
And also to your point about sacrificing everything you could have had.
You know, two, three, four, five. We want the upsides.
And so it it I just
This is the why I still believe that decision making, which is this the least sexy topic of all time, but still the most important. Decision making is the highest leverage thing that you can do in life.
Making good decisions.
And is there I mean, we've talked about frameworks, is there any framework for making a better decision?
As it relates to what we're talking about here.
I think it's answering the first part, which is what do I want to have happen?
What do I want to have happen?
Yeah, that's um.
Even that that's uh do you know what I I'm probably speaking from experience here, because when I was what, twenty years old, was it twenty or nineteen, I ha Mark Nor, friend of mine, mentor of mine, gave me this diary.
I remember the first page I wrote in it when I wanted.
And when I write.
Was before the age of twenty five.
Rangeover sports be my first car, million dollars six pack girlfriend.
I'll throw up there's a picture of it on the screen. And I actually took a photo of it in my Range Rover at twenty four years old. That's like a
Um
But did was that actually what I should have written down?
Well, I think it's probably what you wanted.
Yeah. And then you updated your wants because you got it.
And you found out that you wanted different things.
Sh fortunately there my time horizon was quite small, so I could figure out three or four years without any
Without any like damage.
that that was not the right thing to write down. But some people orientate their lives to like, I need to become a
Let's say billionaire. And the sacrifice to use one of your words.
Along the way is family, friends, mental health, health.
And then you get there.
And you go, Gosh.
I can't turn back time, I can't rebuild relationships, I can't call my mum now, she doesn't answer it, she's gone.
So that's kind of why I always pause on this question of what do you want?'Cause I think we're actually like
As you say, like terrible at knowing.
And I don't know a better way of knowing.
Then getting in and deciding whether you want it or not.
I think um
One of the one of the interesting things with wanting is that
We only want what we don't have.
You know, uh people who don't have kids wanna have kids, people who have kids remember the times they didn't have kids, people who were single want to get married, people who were married, you know, reminiscent by the times they get single, but I see that as inherently human, which is that
We
Only
Remember
Good and not bad.
And that's a beh so that's a behavior thing. That's not a so like the reason that when you get drunk and then you're hungover the next day and you say, I'm never gonna drink again, and then seven days later you drink again is because punishment fades for word sticks, which is why you go back to the old girlfriend and you still long for them, even though when you get back, you're like, Oh my God, I've heard she was crazy. What was I thinking? Right. But it's because we only remember the good, which is
Good to know and I think evolutionary'cause like you remember you got berries there, but you don't remember the sacrifice. Like also the same degree from like pregnancy.
horrible experience for many women. Not all, but many women it's a horrible experience.
But then you get this reward at the end, which is this baby.
And then that just like
Fades away. And then you're like, You know what I want? Another baby.
Speaking of babies, I'm not sure.
There you go, you give me a jump off point.
Lila's pregnant. Yeah.
How how long till the baby arrives? Four months. Four months.
Yeah.
Exciting.
What are all the feelings I can see some a mixture of feelings in your face?
I'm stoked.
You know, uh
I'm stoked.
Uh I'd say I've
Elements of
Fear.
Mostly that I
I want to do a good job.
You know, being a father.
Um
I can see Alex that you're scared.
Yeah, I can tell because I know you're re you've I've sat here probably for ten hours over the last I don't know how many years.
I'll tell you what the issue that I've been struggling the most with.
Which is
How do I define
A good parent.
Mm-hmm. How do I define
A good child.
Or successful trial.
Which then just gets into
sort of a meaning of life question, which is why I think it's so difficult. But like
I'll take the parent one for example.
If
If we define
A good parrot.
As
A successful outcome for a child.
One, in what domains.
Right. Is it a billionaire who's lonely and sad.
Is that a successful outcome? I don't know.
Um
But let's just assume.
the world's version of success and I won't enumerate it.
How many people who have all that success?
had bad childhoods.
Mm-hmm. Do we now call their parents good parents?
Can I uh can I posit something and it's I've not had I've not had kids either. But what would happen if you removed both questions?
Oh just like I'll just take it as it is. Well I I'll say it's very I it would I I almost want to say it's impossible for me. Because of control. You like to be able to control your out. I wanna know what I'm doing. I wanna know where like
I want
I ask what I want to happen.
So that I can align all of my life to try and make that happen.
And so if it's like and even even the question of like what is a successful child is is it a child who's happy?
Mm-hmm.
Many people would say, I just want my kid to be happy.
Yeah. That's fine.

Is it
My child is the maximum makes the maximum impact on society.
Different upbringing.
Mm.
And like the trades that we make at the beginning, I probably won't be able to have a kid who has both.
Or at least the degree to which I can steer.
So I have um three other siblings. I'm the youngest of four. And one could theoretically say my parents were a constant, the environment to some degree was a constant. There were slight changes.
Us four.
Mm-hmm. You've got this me the youngest, this crazy like entrepreneur that didn't go to university, blah, blah, blah. Got Jason, super genius at school, rewrote the textbooks to make them smarter smarter. Works in this business, now my business, mathly, rewrote the on the front of the newspapers. Kevin, smarter than all of us.
Savant level genius could said to me when he was younger that he could learn any language in four four weeks, fluently. If you gave number one in the world in RuneScape at one point, people would watch him online play super genius.
Um
Decided he doesn't want to go into world of work.
And then my sister who, you know, I think she qualified as a lawyer
Um and
She's worked in hospitality and stuff.
All of us extremely different.
My parents were a constant, the environment was a constant constant. I say all this to say that maybe just like running experiments as we do in business, maybe like the job and you know, Jeff Bezos talks a lot about this, is to like stay out of the business of the output.
And focus purely on the input. Because you you know, some of the questions you were saying there were like what do I want them to accomplish? Are they happy? These are all outputs. No, for sure. The other thing that I notice when I interview executives, I always ask them, Tell me about your kids. And they tell me about the kids. And I go, Are any of them the same? I always ask the same question. And they go, No.
Yeah. We've got this one, he won't stop bouncing off the walls. This one that's an empath and is like super shy.
Did you do anything different? No. So like I you know, I think you're you're almost probably be guaranteed to miss expectations and be
Let down if you get involved in the output. Yeah.
So I obviously there's nature nurture. There's kids who are gonna have genetic predispositions for different things. So let's say that's half. And then the other half is the nurture or environment. Now
That is still something that I'm not going to be able to control 100% anyways because you guys did have different environments. You grew up in different grades, talking to different people, having different teachers, went to different universities, like the older siblings. Yeah, there's yeah, all of those are are variables. And so in some way it's a bit of uh chaos of
You can't.
You can't control. But if we if we eliminate all control, then what's the point?
And so I I still come I I come back to the like, Well I'm gonna try and control the controllables. Yeah inputs. And
Right.
If I ha if I'm
So it's like I need to know where I'm going.
The output.
In order to direct my car.
But
What I'm focusing on a day to day is I need to
shift gears, I need to drive the car, I need to fill it up with gas. Me focusing the output is not gonna get us there any faster. But I have to know where I'm going.
And so this is again what I've struggled with. I can not figure it out and the kids can come either way. He's not gonna wait for me to to f figure this out, and I'm sure maybe someday he'll look at this podcast and be like, My God, dad, Jesus. The car analogy, I think, might not be apt because
I I was trying to find another analogy. The one that I stumbled upon was
Yeah.
A plant growing a plant in your house. You put the seed in the in the the soil.
And you might think, I really want this to be six foot.
And I really want a hundred leaves. But you all you can do is water it and give it sunlight. Yeah. And it's gonna be what it's gonna be. Yeah.
You can say please be six foot, please be a football player or whatever. But you can control the input, which is the water and the the the sunlight. It's funny'cause like my my immediate situation goes back to the grandpa story.
Which is like, well, I could put it in front of the I could put it in front of the sun, or I could put it in a shady room. I could like I could determine how much I'm going to water it, what kind of soil it's gonna get. Um like there are other variables that like and so again I would be like, Do I want to grow the tallest plant? Do I want to grow the plant that has the most fruit? Well I would either prune the plant or uh so that it would grow taller. Like
These are all th now, can I change whether it's gonna be a peach tree or an apple tree? No, that's gonna be based on the seed that I plant. And that I don't have any control over. But
There are some things that I can control.
And of those things that I control.
I would like to know what I'm optimizing towards.
And I'm sure that this will just be a wonderful lesson in humility for myself. And it'll be great and people laugh in the comments be sure. Um
Yeah.
Like what we we talked about Layla earlier. I would say like one of the
The foremost things that I love the most about Layla is that Layla has never tried to change me.
She's like, That's Alex.
Like
You can want him to be a peach tree or an F True, but like he's gonna be Alex. He's gonna dress that way. He's gonna and if tomorrow he feels like shaving his face and having a fumin shoe, he's gonna do that. Like
I'm going to try and optimize to the degree that I can
Do a cook.
The you know, my son
And hopefully future kids.
Um
With as many skills as possible to get what they want out of life.
And I think that's that's what I would say that I that's w where where I have settled on.
Is
I'm going to use all the resources I have.
to give them as many skills as I can.
to handle life.
And if I can do that, then if they want to go to London or they want to go to
LA?
At least they'll have the skills to get there.
Um
That's as far as I've gotten.
Hm.
I can't wait to see.
I saw this quote that you you tweeted.
Oh. And there's two quotes you tweeted that I was
Very curious about the first one, which caught me off guard. I think actually text you where I saw this was this one. Do you want to read this one out? Yeah.
So this was February twenty twenty five.
At your funeral, friends and family will argue over who gets your belongings.
People will talk about the food in the venue.
Your life will be summarized in two to three paragraphs. Conversations will shift from your life to their lives.
Your friends will drive away thinking about what's next on their to do list.
Some people won't be able to make it because something came up.
And most of the people you know today.
Won't even be there.
You're gonna die.
People move on.
In weeks, not years.
Do what you want.
Why is that so important to hear?
I think about death.
Probably multiple times a day. Um
And I think that
That's actually been positively correlated with subjective well being?
I mean older people are
incredibly aware of the fact that they're going to die. And I think that's what allows them like I look at so there's a I'm sure you've seen this, but there's this graph that shows how people rate their subjective well being over the lives.
And it's a smile graph, which I think is ultimately hilarious. But
Kids are really happy.
And then they just become they get more and more responsibility. And then your peak unhappiness is like forty five
to like fifty five somewhere in there is like
It's the crunch. You're taking care of kids, you're taking care of parents, you have a career.
And to be fair, in some ways it's good because you're at your peak earnings, so you're making your your
Most people are making their most money in this window and
But they also need to do it. But there's
They're very stressed.
They're stressed really thin. And then as they kind of get into sixty, sixty five, seventy, and when I think about each of these two extremes on the child side and the elderly side, and elders are often a lot like kids if we think about what happened like
They
They rely on other people. They're mostly just like they play games. Like in each of these situations, they have very little responsibility and they don't care about what other people think.
If you have if you see a toddler guy with like a two two and cowboy cowboy boots, it's'cause like they don't care what other people think. And when you're at the end of your life, you're like, I'm gonna die, dude.
And one of the things that I've been very
obsessed with this is borderline but probably accurate. Is I'm trying to think
How am I gonna see the world when I'm eighty?
And how how fast can I can I get to there now?'Cause I care
More
Now about what other people think, then I will what I'm eighty.
And I just wanna pull as much of that forward as I can because when I see those eighty year olds, I'm like that guy does not give a fuck.
And I'm like, I really want that.
And so
I I write a lot about death because it's
I like these tweets are does to self.
They're like they're not it is not a it is not uh from a pulpit that I say those. These are
um as a self-help to to Alex when I write these things. Cause it's like I probably when I was writing that in February. Oh yeah, February twenty five. So February twenty five
The first quarter of twenty five was the hardest.
quarter that I've had personally.
In eight years.
You tweeted this.
At the same time.
Yeah.
I haven't felt this miserable in years. Shit's just hard sometimes. You have tough seasons, bad losses, and what makes it harder is you don't know when it'll end, but know it will end. So for anyone going through it right now, you do the only thing you can do. Keep fighting.
I text you when you
tweeted that because I had never heard you talk like that publicly before.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean it was it was a really tough quarter for me.
I mean, mind you, I don't have kids, so that variable wasn't there, but every other variable
That probably could have
Gone quote wrong.
was outs actually ironically outside of business. Business was fine.
Uh, but it was just everything else.
Um
And what do you mean by that?
So I would say we were making plenty of money. Yeah. Um, but I had I think I had nine lawsuits that were open at that at that point. There's a lot.
N nine open lawsuits.
Um and they all like it was like
And they're all different. Like
Uh ex employee investment that two or two or two or three were investments that we had made that like one of them got caught in stuff and then it's like are we gonna get pulled? It was just all this just d stuff. Um
Just a lot.
Um
And
And then Layla uh had a like sh I think I told you she um she had a really horrible she like tore colon and so that's been it's like it's like an eighteen month recovery.
And so she was in the thick of like going through the pain of that before about to get the surgery.
And so it was just like
Everything sucked. And
Bill Ackman had this really great interview where there's a snippet that I ended up seeing which was
He was he had just lost like a billion dollars.
He was getting divorced.
And there was like one other thing. Yeah, I think if there was lawsuits because of the billion dollars, whatever and and he said
When you're going through that that those rough patches.
He said he focused on the only thing he could do. When it's like you can't, you're not going to solve this in a day. Like it you can't finish it. And I think that's what that's what's so painful about it is you have this open loop that whenever it
Whenever something reminds you of it, it's like you get into this loop again of like rumination and just like oh what if it goes wrong catastrophizing.
And he's like,
You just have to
Take one bite at a time.
And then every you know month or two months you can look back and be like
Made some progress.
He's like he just focused on making progress and chipping away.
And I think
that was more or less the approach I had, which is kinda like the the two feet in front of you, like what are the things that I can actually do right now?
I will do those. And sometimes and I remember in that season a lot of what I was thinking about was
So I wro so when my mother passed, uh this year I wrote an article for myself. Yeah.
Um, I wrote an article for myself about mental toughness and it was because I wanted to of course it's not like be mentally tough when your mother dies, that's not the point. It was just like how am I supposed to show up right now?
That was kinda like the th the thought process I had. And so
Basically
Yeah, like this.
A stuff like this, which is
Bad thing happens.
Right.
There's
These
Vectors.
Of what happens as a result.
So you have
How long
Or how many bad things have to happen before you change your behavior. So s imagine this line is how we're acting.
How many bad things have to happen in order for us to change how we act? Are we shorter with our spouse? Do we not pay attention at work?
Like what
How many bad things? If somebody the perfect m perfectly mentally tough person would be able to have an unlimited amount of things happen to them, then then their behavior would remain the same.
F from purely from that perspective. The next issue is okay, well, let's say that you're not a perfectly mentally tough person and something crosses your tolerance threshold, and then your behavior changes.
And so we have this next measurement. So we have how long and how much can you handle.
We have how deep do you go?
When you fall.
How how badly do you change your behavior? Do you just are you short with your staff or do you get into heroin?
No, like how bad how badly do you fall?
The next piece is
How long does it take to you to recover?
Return back to original function.
And then the part that I added to this is
And then when I return back to original function, am I better than I was before?
Do I
Am I the same as I was before?
Or am I permanently worse?
In what dimension?
Resilience or healthiness? So I I basically have term one, term two, term three, and then this was I term this is adaptability.
Which is
How
How do you respond after
A bad thing happens, do you get better the same or worse?
You have tolerance.
Oh sorry I think it was four to two.
Um
Which is how much bad stuff
Can you handle before
It hits you.
You have resilience here.
Which is how long does it take you to return a baseline?
And then you have tolerance.
Which is how
Hello do you go?
And so
Through mapping these four
vectors of behavior I was able to look at myself during this harder season. And this was such a mind fuck because think about this.
I do a hundred and six million dollar launch. My mom got to see it, which is really cool.
She dies four weeks later.
I realized the goal if we talk about long term, right? A hundred million dollar, hundred million dollar, hundred million dollar. The goal of the books was to have a hundred million dollar to the end.
The offers book was an offer so good. People sell stupid, say I gave it away for free, made it ninety nine cents, gave a course with it, no one had done that. Um and there was an offer so good.
We I did a huge gigantic launch, but I didn't monetize.
'Cause I just wanted to show what having crazy advertising for something would do and I used all the stuff in the book to advertise the book.
This book's about monetization. And so I had an amazing offer and crazy advertising and a money model behind it, which is why I made a hundred million dollars on the weekend. So this is a multi year project. And so I I get to have this this moment of like all these things come to fruition.
And then my mother dies.
Three weeks it was the nineteenth, right? So it was yeah, literally a month later.
And so
A freak accident. Yeah.
And so I'm
I'm just like
What how am I supposed to like what am I how do I think through this?
And so I wrote this for myself to think, okay, how am I supposed to show up?
And also one of the things that I found really interesting was that
People will judge how much you love someone by how much you choose to suffer.
And why does how much I suffer have anything to do with how much I love someone?
And I don't think that the person if you did lose somebody, I'm sorry. Um
I don't think the person that you lost
Probably wants you to suffer.
And so we have this
This idea that we need to suffer to prove our love.
Which I was like, Well
That's an assumption I'm coming in with.
Do I reject that? I was like, Yeah, I think I reject that.
And so
Bad thing happens. That crossed my threshold.
How low am I gonna go? I was probably not like the most thrilled about life during that period, but I thought, well, what can I do? What are my controllables?
Well, I'm still gonna record content.
I'm still
I'm still gonna help businesses.
'Cause I feel good when I have businesses. Why would I stop doing that?
Well I'm still gonna work out'cause I feel good when I work out. Why do I why would I stop doing that? Did you have motivation though?
Were you motivated in the sort of cliche sense of the word? Did you feel like it? I would say yes, but not for the reason that people think.
I was motivated for two reasons. One, because I don't think she would want me to stop.
Number two.
Because
Those things.
Made me feel better and I felt bad.
And so I wanted to feel better.
I tried to change as little about my life as possible.
And that is what got me through that.
And now some people say Oh, you need to take time to mourn it's just like why does the way I mourn have to look the way you mourn?
And why do you or why is is there a right or wrong way to mourn?
She must have been so proud of you.
She was.
Sure. We talk a lot about your dad, but we've never really spoken much about your mum.
No, I don't.
She's a sweet lady.
Yeah, she was.
Show is believed.
And so I think
This last one.
Right, adaptability.
In what world
Can this make me better?
Like how can how can this loss
Make me better.
And
Also, by the way, like
This is the
Troma.
Bad thing happens.
You're permanently worse.
Right.
And so
It's like what would that look like?
What would me
growing from this look like and I think part of that was
Proving that
I can continue.
As my way.
Uh
Honoring her.
In her memory.
And
I'm going to
Continue to try and
Pursue the
The path that she knew I started pursuing.
When I left home.
When I talked to her when uh when I left.
You know?
Um
And so like what's changed between then and now?
I'm just closer to where I was trying to go.
And I don't think she'd want me to abandon that path.
And so I just
Key Faring.
You had that conversation with Tony Robbins, which I found to be amazing. It's a fantastic conversation. I spoke to him about it, actually.
Um, I wondered if it had changed you in any way. You talked to him about happiness. You'd you'd said that you know, you'd said some similar things to me that happiness had never been a high priority for you.
Did that conversation change your perspective at all on happiness?
Yeah.
I would I would love to say that it did.
Um because I think it would be like a
Better.
Sound bite. Yeah.
Um
Not really.
So where are you now on the subject of happiness? Are you are you happy?
I have a tough time with that.
Most because I just I don't really even know.
What it means.
Um because like there's some people that you say like, Do I feel joy, of course, but you can feel joy at a at a funeral.
Are you excited by your life?
Are you excited about life on a daily basis? Yes. I'm
I'm intensely interested in my life.
I'm very fascinated by the things that I work on. Does it feel good to be you?
Sometimes.
I think
I think
More days than not.
Probably.
One of the things that Arthur Brooks has been really helpful and you you know his stuff, um, and he talks specifically to strivers and I'm like Stop talking to me.
So strivers he defines as people who like you know are strivers, they're they're high achievers. And what's really interesting is he describes what the childhood of a striver is. He's like almost to a T, this is what it is. He's like it's typically an immigrant parent.
Or something like that, where they're trying to do a good job and they basically withhold approval only when the kid does a a good thing. And then what happens is the kid learns that love is earned. And then you learn that loop, you're reinforced for that loop, and then you do win more and you earn more love. And then
you get into the big wide world and then you're like, How do I get more of this drug, this love drug, which means I need to earn as much as possible. I need to earn as much as possible. So you just get addicted to the loop of working. And so I find this really fascinating. But the other part of
O of his work that
has been actually in some ways very like grounding for me is about half of your subjective well being is genetic.
Hm.
Yeah.
And so
And to be clear, like I'm I'm super blessed. I have a lot of good things that have gone for me. My mother side of the family tree has a lot of tough
Mental stuff.
Uh very bad stuff.
But they're also really brilliant.
In some ways I think to myself like
Maybe I'm just maxed out on my fifty.
And I'm crushing it. But the thing is it's like I don't know because like we don't you know, if if you're if you're born seven feet tall, everyone can see it. But some people are born probably one foot tall in terms of happiness and they learn to play basketball really, really well at one foot. And people are still like, Oh, he's only one foot tall.
So I don't I don't know how to judge how well I'm doing. I would say that I have been way worse than I am now. I aggressively want to keep living.
And to me that's a that's a really
Strong
Indicator for me.
Um
And
To answer like Albert Camus is one of my favorite philosophers, um and he has this quote that I I love, which is
What is the meaning of your life?
And his answer to that is the reason you don't kill yourself.
And it's it sounds dark, but a lot of very dark things can be flipped into very light things, which is that when you ask someone that question
They'll typically answer like, Well, I mean my my kids, my wife, the people that rely on me and it's like right, that's why you're alive.
And that thing can also change. Because like if you asked me ten years ago, I'd have a different answer than I do this this time, and maybe in twenty years it'll be different.

From doing this podcast is a real appreciation for people's predisposition as it relates to mental health and the way that their mind is with them. I g growing up, I thought everyone's mind was like mine as you do.
And then for you know, you stumble across this thing called podcasting, you start interviewing people and going, What's going on in your brain? And then they they play it to you and you go that that c they can't possibly be telling me the truth. It can't possibly be the case that there's other people and I remember sitting here with
Um a comedian who told me that
Inside his brain there's a voice that literally
roots for his failure. That literally tells him he's he's pathetic, he's gonna fail, he's terrible, this was terrible, you've embarrassed yourself. And I thought, gosh, isn't that crazy that there is like a
mental health mindset privilege, which most of us don't don't even acknowledge acknowledge the privilege of.
And when you speak I
It's fascinating to me.
In the same in the same way that I might assume that it's fascinating when you hear someone answer the question, Are you happy? and they just go, Yes, of course. Like is that really curious to you when you hear people say, Yes, I'm I'm amazingly happy? Yeah.
Is that curious to you?
Um, sort of. I think when when I hear someone say that, like probably my immediate gut response before I even like think about my response, um is
They probably haven't even defined what happiness is and they just wanted to give an easy answer.
But like I
It's like
This is like the the absolute as as raw truth as I could possibly give to anyone, which is that like
I
I am very proud of the things that I've done up to this point in my life. Like I I can look back and be like, I'm proud that I did that and I and I feel that sense of accomplishment and I and I
What is the emotion attached to proud?
I don't know, is is pride itself an an emotion? I don't know.
Wha how does one experience pride as an emotion? Is that like a
I'm like very happy that I did these things. Like the books that you have in front of you, I'm incredibly proud of. If it was a facial expression, how would pride look?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
No, not for me. I mean I'm just ver it's it's very soulful for me. Like I'm I'm very filled.
by this work. And that's why
That's why I keep doing it. And I know that when I die, I think the thing that will actually
The the only thing that I think has a chance of living on past me, past when people even know who I am is these books.
My YouTube videos are gonna disappear.
Like all that stuff will go away, but I think I think these books will survive. And I write them that way.
Like I write them.
Kind of thinking that like
The people who read this will not know why I am.
Should people come to you for happiness advice?
No. Um the th here's what's really tough though, right?
No one knows base what someone's base level is. And that's so tough. I think I asked that because one I think a lot of people assume
Yeah.
This work.
Learning how to be financially free and to build a business.
is in service of this North Star which we all agree upon, which is happiness.
So one would think, Okay, what's the point building a business and getting a hundred million dollar deal or whatever if it doesn't then lead to the happiness payoff?
And if you're telling me that you're not the person to come to for happiness advice, I go, Well then what's what's this then? Why do I need to do this if this is not gonna make me
Do you're saying it's a good idea. Oh I totally see what you're saying, which is why bother pursuing this to begin with.
If you're not promising me happiness as the North Star. Yeah, I won't do that.
Many people will sell you happiness. I will not be one of them.
Um
I try to sell quantitative things.
Like I know that if more people find out about your stuff
You will make more.
If you have a
Better way of monetizing and a faster way to bring cash forward, your business will grow more. If you have an offer that's so good people still be saying no, they won't say no and they'll say yes. But you make no promise or guarantee as where that would lead you in your life. No. That's to me like that's beyond my scope. Fine. Like I know
Yeah.
And so
I I enjoy the topic of
Of the happiness stuff because I I love amorphous topics. Um
But
The the conclusion that I said uh I started with when you ask about the Tony thing was
I at least my it is my worldview. Which could be wrong.
That human beings
Our internal feelings are like the weather.
Mm-hmm.
There's sunny days and there's rainy days and there's rainy seasons and there's sunny seasons.
And we go through them all.
And

our baseline adjusts so that yet again.
'Cause like
If we think about a year, I actually give this example to my sales team.
So we think about this as a year.
And we have all the days of the year.
Half the days are gonna be above average.
And half the days are gonna be below average.
And
Every month.
You're gonna have a bottom ten percent day.
Three times.
Because thirty six days.
Per year.
that are gonna be bl bottom ten percent is for no reason purely because
Law of large numbers.
You're also gonna have to do it.
Three days per month. Which is almost one a week. That's me a top ten percent day of the whole year.
Pretty impressive.
Best one a week, almost.
Right. And so I think about this variability a lot.
Because when I'm having a quote bad day'cause I have'em.
I have I have'em all the time.
Um
And I just think
This is probably just the bottom ten percent of day.
Mm-hmm. And like and I think the the one of the one of the lessons that I've learned from an entrepreneurship perspective that's translated into life is
My emotional discomfort is not an adequate reason to change what I'm doing.
And so we will get these moments of dissatisfaction or discomfort and be like I'm
Life sucks.
I need to change something.
And if you don't like your life in general.
Change something.
But if you don't like your life today.
Maybe don't break up with your wife.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe give it a day.
Right.
And so I think again, I come from the entrepreneurial perspective, which is that people will have a bad day and then basically take it out on their business.
And then change a bunch of things and then destroy what they're with the spledgling business that's getting going because they had an emotional need that they could not tolerate.
And so that's why this graph
Has been so valuable to me, which is is my bottom ten percent day a big enough thing for me to change my behavior?
If I determine that I can have a bad day and still do good work.
That is a good day.
Alex, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. Funny question. What would you do if you believed that super intelligent AI?
Better, faster, cheaper, et cetera, than the best humans at everything.
was just a few years away.
Mm-hmm.
What would you do?
On the business side, I would build as much real world proof as I possibly could.
And as much tracker with his track record with as many
customers as I could so that I could reinforce a brand that would give me some differentiation in that future marketplace. So you'd focus on building a stronger brand?
From a business perspective. Why?
Because I think in a world where everyone has access to a superintelligence
Um
What are the things that are gonna like, will people still care about reputations in the future? Probably.
And so I see that as something that won't change.
Distribution will still cost money.
Like.
Those things. I think those things will be true.
Might be less, but it'll still cost.
And typically if again,'cause there's there's still marketplace dynamics.
Not to get into the the weeds on this, but
From an entrepreneurship perspective, I would continue to build trust and distribution.
From a personal perspective
I would think really hard about
What it means to be human.
And
Why?
I'm here to begin with.
You gonna buy a farm one day?
I it's not out of the equation. Um I mean Layla's
Way was Supergungo on that. So on a ranch.
Yeah. We almost did we almost bought one actually the first time we sold.
Where do I direct So if people want to learn more from you, you've got your YouTube channel where you've just started this brand new series, which is in really interesting. I'll link that below as well for people that um wanna watch it. It's kinda like a
Dragon's Den Shark Tanky
format where you're bringing entrepreneurs they're competing for a hundred thousand dollars.
um through this knockout series of episodes. Very interesting.
These four books in front of me. There's another one over there, but these four here that from the hundred million dollar series have all sold more than five million copies.
since inception, you've actually broke the world record for selling so many copies of
This book? This one? Yeah. Um
In the short sort of a twenty four hour period or something created like that. Two point nine and twenty four.
Staggering.
I'll link all of these books below. They are essential reading for anybody that's wants a cheat code. Um probably a decade worth of
a decade head start into the world of business, um explained in a f phenomenally accessible way, with lit literally your drawings inside them. Um and the thing that I think has made these books so successful and become the Bible for many entrepreneurs, startup entrepreneurs, but also entrepreneurs that are looking to scale through different f seasons of business.
Is is just it's so
Um actionable.
A lot of books are like highly philosophical and there's lots of jargon and stuff. These are like this is what to do.
This is what to do.
And I th I think ultimately that's the most valuable thing.
So thank you for writing these incredible books. Is there anything else that people should know about that you're working on or thinking about?
Before we tune up, channel.
Yeah. Just grab the books.
Okay.
I'll link all of them below. Alex, thank you as always.
Um, I love talking to you not just for'cause it makes great content,'cause I I can learn so much and I've written so many notes down here from just bouncing off you that I'm gonna go apply my own business. So thank you as always, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.