The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
20 Jul 2026 · 2h 26m · Steven Bartlett, Alex Hormozi · 20 quoted facts
Alex Hormozi argues that in a world of cheap AI, durable advantage comes from things AI cannot fake: real stakes, a real track record and a reputation. He says founders should use AI inside ordinary businesses rather than build AI companies, keep their hardest thinking for themselves, and think on longer time horizons. Reality, trust and customer retention are the moats.
The conversation moves from business mechanics (retention, pricing, hiring, unscalable starts) to the personal costs behind them. Hormozi describes fear of other people's judgment, his father's immigrant story and his wife's role. He also describes early 2025, when lawsuits, his wife's injury and his mother's death hit just after a record launch. The tension is that his tools can be sold, but happiness cannot.
Hormozi says a stranger quoting Warren Buffett word for word still won't match Buffett's audience, because Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway. As AI floods the market with content, proof of real results and real stakes becomes the scarce thing.
Hormozi says AI models will agree to almost anything and gave different answers when he asked three of them the same question. He also says delegating hard decisions makes you weaker, so he keeps that work for himself.
Hormozi compares two businesses that each sell 100 new units a year. The one that keeps its customers compounds, while the one that loses them must sell more every year just to stand still. He says solving retention first is what lets a business scale.
Hormozi says founders price from their own wallet, assuming what is easy for them is easy for everyone. Undercharging leaves no margin to hire, which is why he tells beginners to add a zero to the price and start with premium, unscalable work.
Hormozi says fear is the main barrier, and that it usually comes down to one or two specific people whose approval you want. He nearly turned down the $46 million Gym Launch sale because of one acquaintance's opinion.
Hormozi says no for most people, because the big AI models tend to swallow whatever simple tools startups build. He advises using AI inside a normal business, and asks one test question: are you actually making more money?
He argues people want real stakes. A video where the $5 million or the Lamborghini isn't real has no tension, and humans still watch other humans play chess even though robots can beat them.
Hormozi says a business whose customers stay only has to add new ones on top of the old ones, so it grows steadily. A business that loses everyone each year has to keep selling more just to stand still, and its costs rise.
It is a method from the 1970s that Hormozi uses to set prices. You ask customers four questions: what price is too expensive, too cheap to trust, getting expensive but still considered, and a bargain. You plot the answers to find the best price range.
He says he kept his routines (content, helping businesses, working out) and focused on what he could control. He also mapped how much hardship he could take, how far he fell, how fast he recovered and whether he came out better.
Stated by the speakers. Each quote matches the transcript, which shows what was said, not that it is true.
Alex Hormozi said a business he reviewed paid about $11,000 a month for eleven virtual assistants, then spent $350,000 on an AI system to replace them.
“And they then spent 350,000 to try and create an AI system that would replace what these eleven virtual assistants were doing.”
Alex Hormozi said that when starting out he shared a bedroom in a six-person house for $400 a month and slept on a mattress on the floor.
“I split one of the bedrooms with another guy, paid 400 bucks a month, and I had a mattress on the floor”
Alex Hormozi said he nearly did not sell Gym Launch, an exit he put at $46 million, because he worried an acquaintance would not think the amount was legitimate.
“I thought that they didn't think that $46 million was enough money, that they wouldn't think it was legit.”
Alex Hormozi said he decided against business school after he could not answer how a Booth MBA would help his short- and long-term goals.
“it was because of a question on the business school test was how will a Booth MBA help your short and long-term goals?”
Alex Hormozi said his father fled the Iranian revolution and went to France to become a doctor without speaking French.
“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.”
Alex Hormozi said his father avoided a $250,000 construction cost by building a code-compliant surgery center himself with materials from Home Depot.
“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.”
Alex Hormozi described his value equation as having four parts: the outcome, the perceived likelihood of achieving it, the time delay, and the effort and sacrifice required.
“So we have outcome, and then we have perceived likelihood of achievement”
Alex Hormozi recounted Jeff Bezos saying Amazon bets on things that will not change, such as customers preferring lower prices, more selection and faster delivery.
“We believe that customers will prefer cheaper prices 10 years from now just as much as they do now.”
Steven Bartlett said he posted about a thousand times on Instagram to reach a thousand followers, then gained 300,000 followers in three carousel posts.
“I did a thousand posts on Instagram and reached a thousand followers. And then in my last three, when I had 7,000 followers, I gained 300,000 followers in three posts”
Steven Bartlett said he started The Diary of a CEO in his bedroom with a $100 microphone and GarageBand.
“I'd go went to Apple, bought this microphone for $100, p- plugged it into Garageband, tried to edit it myself, uploaded it.”
Alex Hormozi said his mentor, who ran a 22-location chain, tested flyers in batches of 5,000 and sent about 150,000 a month, while Hormozi had only put out 300.
“Then we do 3,000 a day after that, and so he was doing 150,000 flyers a month, and I'd put out 300.”
Alex Hormozi said the Van Westendorp pricing analysis dates from the 1970s and uses four price-perception questions to find a pricing range.
“something called the Van Westendorp pricing analysis. You might have heard of it. It's from the 1970s.”
Alex Hormozi estimated roughly 70% of the small businesses that come to Acquisition.com are demand constrained rather than supply constrained.
“I'd say 70 of businesses. This is rough estimates that come through our doors are demand constrained.”
Alex Hormozi told of a business owner who raised the agent referral bonus from $500 to $25,000 and grew his company from about $10 million to $400 million.
“So he took his incentive from $500 for a referral to 25,000, and he took his company from 10 million to 400 million.”
Steven Bartlett said during the interview that Alex Hormozi's wife Leila was pregnant, and Hormozi answered that the baby was about four months away.
“Leila's pregnant. How how long till the baby arrives?”
Alex Hormozi said the first quarter of 2025 was his hardest personally in eight years.
“The first quarter of twenty-five was the hardest quarter that I've had personally in eight years.”
Alex Hormozi said that in early 2025 his businesses were making plenty of money while he had about nine open lawsuits.
“I would say we were making plenty of money, um, but I had I think I had nine lawsuits that were open at that”
Alex Hormozi said his wife Leila tore her colon and faced about an eighteen-month recovery.
“She like tore her colon, and so that's been it's like it's like an eighteen-month recovery.”
Alex Hormozi said his mother saw his $100M book launch and died about four weeks afterward.
“I do 106 million dollar launch, my mom got to see it, which is really cool. She dies four weeks later.”
Steven Bartlett said Alex Hormozi's $100M series books have each sold more than 5 million copies.
“have all sold more than 5 million copies since inception.”
Hormozi says people build AI products or automate the wrong tasks instead of asking whether AI makes them more money.
“using AI to do a lot of dumb things really fast”
Hormozi explains why someone must still own decisions and risk, even when AI supplies the recommendations.
“AI can give all of the recommendations in the world, but someone has to own the decision”
The block-tower exercise shows why a longer time horizon changes how you build a company.
“the foundation completely changes based on the height of the building because of the time horizon you're thinking in”
He argues that keeping customers matters more than selling faster, and shows it with a comparison of two companies.
“if every time you get a customer, they never left, then the business will do nothing but grow”
Advice to a younger self: care more about your own future than other people's opinions, and take only the steps you can see.
“you have to decide whether you care more about your future than what other people think about your future”
Hormozi gives the background behind his father's cautious advice and his own need to prove himself.
“he went to Home Depot and built a surgery center that met all the specs”
In a flood of AI content, credibility and a real track record decide who gets listened to.
“when reality is the mode, it means that your brand is the mode”
A practical method for finding a price from customer survey answers.
“at what price would this be so expensive that you wouldn't even consider it”
Hormozi credits his wife with belief, operating skill and keeping him going through low-motivation stretches.
“It's probably the single best financial decision that I ever made was marrying Leila.”
He describes his mother's death weeks after his record launch and the framework he wrote to decide how to show up.
“I do 106 million dollar launch, my mom got to see it, which is really cool.”
As a founder building a business when I was in my early 20s, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at, and that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses, and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances.
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Thank you to Zero, thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that quite frankly has never loved finances that much. 106 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 write 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 will 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 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 fourteen years of business advice, 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 10 million dollar business is not the fastest way to build 100 million dollar business. 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 a 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 Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better.
And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. 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 Adara, 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 that is 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 are the normal functions of the business at a way better, way faster, et cetera? What I'm seeing a lot, especially with founders or people who are starting out, is 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 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, 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, virtual ass uh assistants. So low skilled labor overseas that was doing work, and I think it was something in the neighborhood of like, 11,000 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 350,000 to try and create an AI system that would replace what these eleven virtual assistants 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 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, and 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 they, and they kind of explained to me what it is. And from a very simplif- simplified perspective, this machine that has these neural nets in it, which have lots of parameters, basically connections like the human brain does. And when they train it, the parameters become reinforced.
The the ones that made the right decision, and the ones that made the wrong decision are, like, basically cut out. Like, 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 AI 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. To liability, Yeah, and upside on on, on the flip side, and to take this into different domains from the media perspective, imagine Jimmy so MrBeast has a video and they're like, MrBeast is getting replaced by AI.
He's not getting replaced by AI. Because if he had a video that said $5 million and the $5 million wasn't real and the Lamborghini wasn't real, there'd be no stakes. 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, but no one cares.
I think about the F1 as well. You'd still want Lewis Hamilton in the car. You take him out the car, you stop watching F1.
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 tokens, somebody owns the LLC, 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 fictional, 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 Claude or Gemini 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 tackle this from two different angles. So 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 like, let's open all 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. Now, there's all this research, I'm sure you've had people on 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? 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 So foundations?
we do this exercise in personal entrepreneurship, 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, you're, you're right here, right? And that's that's all you got. And you're like, Oh, it's t 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? And Yeah,
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 10 million dollar business is not the fastest way to build 100 million dollar business. Even and the fastest way to build a million dollar business, not the fastest way to build 10 million dollar business.
Like, you could probably build a one person agency to $1 million a year pretty quick,
one client.
right? Yeah, it's just like, it's just you could 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 mind to me. I it it's funny cause when I started thinking about, do you know what 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 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 times harder.
Hm, hm, 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, You know, I could have bought the batteries from Ford, but I'm gonna make a completely new battery from scratch. You know?
Um, I could have used other people's electricity charges, 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, that becomes the value of the business, and actually, it was all a byproduct of just thinking over a longer time horizon. Entrepreneurs and startup founders, as you know, we like rush to, like, get the exit, raise as much money as we can, and it looks like you're you're in s an unstable building there.
It looks like that, yeah,
strong wind, right, 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 everything, stay fine, no one leave, you know what I mean? Like, no big accounts go away. Like, you're just like holding your breath for six months and being like, please just come through. And then if it goes down to this for like, uh, a a week or two and they're like, Hey, why are the billables down?
You're like, Uh, no, it's a, it's a, it's a momentary blip. It was expected, it was actually in our Did I not send you the updated forecast? Like, it's a whole thing. Um, and I'll do it with the drawings, it might be it might be a little bit easier. But, like, if you were to build 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, they wanna have it all. And so say, I wanna 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 ten 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 hiring. like Bezos, like Yeah,
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 logistics company be my competitive moat. He's a 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. That's what we're gonna do with our online internet business. Like, Ju- but like, who can unseat Amazon right now?
Really tough.
What's interesting as well is that at that particular moment there, where the entrepreneur has this, they they come to people like me and you in the street and they say, that they are, uh, can't get past here, a bottleneck. What what is it that they should have done? So many entrepreneurs come up to me, they might hit, I don't know, 500,000 in revenue, a million in 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? 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 fit 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, uh, 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 w- the difficulty of get the the the $1 million entrepreneur is that getting to $1 million you can do really quickly, or ten, and I know that the the the world is like, Oh, I can't believe that. I promise you, you can do it if you just learn enough skills. Um, 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 $1 billion, or whatever, I haven't gotten to a billion yet, but I I feel confident I know what we need to do.
The million dollar entrepreneur is trying to fit $1 billion of new sales in in one year. And that's the problem is that at the at the end of next year, because all the customers they signed up to make their $1 million are gone because they aren't good enough. They have to go back to the market, market and sell and get another $1 million of customers. So they think, Oh, if if I, if I wanna get to $2 million this 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 have company A and company 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 wanna double because it's an entrepreneur, he's like, I gotta grow. And so he sells 200 people year two. Well, then let's say he's got $2 million in revenue and he's got $1 million in revenue here.
And let's say year three, uh, he sells 300 units, but he lost all 200 again because he has no stickiness, and so he makes $3 million. Okay, cool. Now let's say this company A sells a hundred year one, they make $1 million, they keep all hundred customers, okay. But let's say that that company keeps the same number of people they're selling to, so a hundred new customers come in this year, but they keep their old hundred.
So now they ha- also have 200 customers and do $2 million. And then year three, they keep their same hundred and then the hundred from year two, so now they have 300 total customers because they got a hundred new and they have 3 million. So both of these businesses, on paper, your entrepreneur friend comes to you and says, Hey, I've got 3 million dollar business and I've got 3 million dollar business.
Which one do you invest in? 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 gotta go and sell 600 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 a hundred new customers. And having 200 customers that are existing and still paying you.
And 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 hundred 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 a year 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 grow revenue. But you get to a point where you you have a certain velocity of sales. I can only sell a hundred people or 200 people, or 500, 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 sales stop, the business cratered. 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.
yeah, 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 their offer is incorrect in that what they're offering, the price and the terms of their delivery are 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 Yeah,
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 equation. I think it's all about what the customer's 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?
And 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 a 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 cause I don't wanna 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.
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 come in, they don't wanna 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 or 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 70% margins, 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 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. I think we wanna 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. The business's job is to serve the customers. 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 the time because you know all the mistakes that you made and the right things that actually ended up working.
So it's like, great, instead of taking ten 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 are 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 that 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. Or here we go. So we've got our all right, here we go. We'll 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? Cause it's a unicorn special. Okay, it's got a little donk there, but they're trying to replace themselves with the 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 cause they can't find a unicorn. But if you're like, how do I find an animal that's got a horn? Well, you 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. Well, 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?
Right? Yeah, demanding your your partner, uh, be all things to you, your coach, your, uh, therapists. 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 paying 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 now it's terrifying. So a good way to justify my fear to myself is by saying, Look, 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, eh, you know, in the in the coming future, there already are. I think it's a it's a gold question. It's Do you what do you want?
what mistakes did you make when you started hiring?
Oh, my bar wasn't high enough. 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. 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 S you than I do, they should run, and not me.
w- 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, I don't think Really, what yeah.
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? And I'm like, it doesn't matter what I think. Like, I'm like, and so I'll just ask the next question, which is like, Well, what have you done so far? Why did you And
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 wanna 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 most people start because one starting feels like this very amorphous thing.
When you when y- I I like, I was about to say, like, have you 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 do, 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, 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, you're a business owner. You've already beaten, like, 95% of people who and you've also changed your title from wantrepreneur 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 gotta 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 the s at the starting blocks?
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.
But what 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, 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 who 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 a 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 are uncomfortable with that, entrepreneurship might not be for you. 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,
what do you mean?
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 cringiness. 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 paths in front of you is that you stay on the current path. That you will not get what you want. 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 100% 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, 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 illusionary 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 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 a hundred people and 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 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? Eat 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 wanna save up some capital so that I can ha- 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 it might be ten friends going together. And and like cause I split a bedroom, so I had a house with six people in it, um, and I split one of the bedrooms with another guy, paid 400 bucks a month, and I had a mattress on the floor, and I was never there. But it was just like I tried to keep my living expenses as low as possible.
And I think one of the big ones especially is that, 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 to their lifestyle. And so you'd be astonished at how little you can actually live on if you try to live on little.
This gets 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.
y- one of the things you said was really interesting. And I I it's dawned on me that most people might not realize this about people like you, which is that you said there's uncertainty all the way up. Now, I imagine, imagine an eighteen-year-old entrepreneur listening to Alex Hormozi. 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, the 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. And they all have you go through one. do And you're like, 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. Shoot, you took a L, 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 realize. But actually, as you were saying it, I was thinking, Fuck, this is exactly what I'm going through now. Like, I s 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 in 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 you're listening to that is not yours, that you are afraid of disappointing, or afraid of their judgment. And if you can identify that voice, cause and you actually put a name on it, it's not like, Oh, p- what are people gonna think? It's not people, it's probably like two people. And if you name them, you're like, Oh, it's just James and Betty.
So this is really real. So one, when I was about to sell Gym Launch, I really, uh, I, it was actually a very hard decision for me. It was super hard. Um, 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 $46 million was enough money, that they wouldn't think it was legit.
I'm dead serious. No, it was it was like, that was my, that was my legit, it was my it's like
it's just funny to hear.
he's not gonna think, he's not gonna think I'm 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 my coworker 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. I wanna say say this in more detail, cause 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 precan answer when people were like, Oh, so, what are you doing with your career? I was like, Oh, you know, I'm consulting, like, doing 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, uh, good business school. And then I thought to myself, Well, it costs 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 fifty, $60,000 a year. And so I was like, So it's $240,000 is my call it my opportunity cost of that in two years. Do I think that I can take the money that I had saved up and in two years get to $10,000 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 your short and long-term goals? And I just sat there for three days trying to answer it, and I realized I was like, I don't know if it will help my long so term goals. So, I mean, it's good that they have those questions, cause 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 that I look back on my life and realize 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 gonna start a business. And I had this I had this, this IKEA carpet that I bought that was a a cowhide carpet, and the spot where I'd walk back and forth was, like, worn out on the cowhide.
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. 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, you got, you were gonna do two years here.
Then you go to one of the top Ivy, you know, MBA schools, like, you're good, don't like, 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 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. We've got some photos. I mean,
uh, that's right, DOG.
and I think that there's context in his own story, which 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 was fresh out of medical school, and there was 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 join 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 cost 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 surgery 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 his practice is starting to work, my parents got divorced, they changed the the locks on the door, cause 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, I didn't even think about it. 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. He's like, When you're my age, 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 wanna 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 $1 billion or something. I was like, let's do it for fun, whatever. And I pro and I remember having this this moment right before the the number was gonna get called of sheer terror of what if I win? Because I was like, 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 that now if someone was to give me $1 billion, I'm happy to use it. Because, to be fair, though, because I already have this, I already have the status and the track record that I that I built this. And that'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 wanted 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. 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 sh- 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 before my kitchen table has 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, he said it quickly. 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're having, and then I went, Do you want would you like my life? He goes, No. And he was like, and and he was like laughing. He 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 subjectivity of of 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 I'll give a couple of frames cause 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.
But then 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. And 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, what does that change about my actual daily life?
on this first point, funnily enough, I said to you, freedom, and then I immediately realized that the least free person I knew was actually finished.
dude, this gets okay, this is great. So I think about this. It's the freedom to choose, but I think people stop at freedom. There's this almost fetishization of independence and m keeping your options open and ma 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 c and g 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, it 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 th- when I see people get stuck, it's almost always unmade decisions, cause unmade decisions can last forever. 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 seeing this sort of new generation that have grown up with all the tools to start their own business? They were 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, 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, you know, 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 stats 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 got more people across the line.
But why aren't why isn't everyone going across the line? I think there's a couple 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. They have too many carrots, so good things keeping them in their current position, 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.
And I think that 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 are in that slice, there's pain, and so you will change the moment it is more painful to stay the same.
I spent the last decade building and investing in companies, and so often the conversation around marketing budgets follows the exact same pattern. The budget gets approved, but then the results don't come back. And most of the time, the creative pitch and the offer is fine. The problem lies with the audience. Ads reach people who will never buy or refer, nor do they have the power to sign off anything at all. And this is why so much budget gets wasted.
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Just by going to LinkedIn dot com slash diary. Keep this to yourself, terms and conditions apply. For the last couple of years, I've been working on something that I realized every podcaster listening to this, but actually, probably every creator listening to this, might just need Podcasting is difficult for many reasons, and one of them is that these hosting platforms don't give you much information. And also because they're so fragmented, you kind of have to go through every single platform, uploading it to YouTube and then taking the same big old video file and uploading it to Spotify's platform.
It takes huge amounts of time, and that friction means most of us don't do it. That is the problem we set out to solve, and so we built something called Flightcast, which you can find at flightcast dot com. And today, Flightcast is also one of our show sponsors. And some of the world's biggest podcasters are now using our platform to run their shows because it gives you an edge, it saves you time, it gives you analytics most people won't typically get.
It allows you to use AI to be more informed on your show, and it has growth tools that other hosting platforms don't have. So podcasters that are using Flightcast have this unfair advantage. So go to flightcast dot com slash DOAC now. 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 hard 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 LLMs, uh, AI. They can produce videos theoretically. S if you imagine any rate of improvement, they're gonna be able to make videos, photos, churn 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 and 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 2022 s for younger generations. For older generations, it's still sort of like going up or or flat, but for Gen Zs, it's like starting to come down a little bit. So s stagnant demand, tsunami slop coming in of AI content, 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 10 million followers can get 2,000 likes. Back in my day, fifteen years ago, when I started on social media, if you had a million followers, you got a million, a million likes, or 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 moat? Um, reality is the moat.
Reality is the moat.
I'd say the number one biggest business influencer, I think, on the planet, is Elon Musk, and he happens to own the biggest business on the planet, 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 gonna 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. 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 3 million, 5 million, 10 million a year, 500 k a year. Most people don't have that. And so I can demonstrate expertise in a live and interactive fashion in a way that other people can't do.
I think that live is something that, I mean, AI maybe in the future will 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 Scalable 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, all right, let's make 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. It's the only objective of entertainment. The point of education is to change behavior, right? So that's our, that's our split. Now, entertainers will get hit harder than educators will. The entertainers that have stakes involved will be able to maintain that moat 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 credit? So the credibility in beauty is beauty. The credibility in personal finance is, 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 ca- he calls himself this, but I think he's a billionaire, and he's got a massive, I think he's public, $300 million 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, Erika Kolberg 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. Now we s 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, or 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, is I heard scarce, hard and scarce. And I still thought a lot about these two words as, uh, sort of the pillars of my own content strategy, which is with an LLM, yeah, a kid in Mumbai could churn 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 Hormozi here. It is hard to get Alex Hormozi to say yes to doing this. It is hard to get Michelle Obama or Jaden Vance to say yes to doing this. So there's it's hard from a production perspective, but also from like, to accomplish this it's just money. Yeah, is hard. And then what you described, I heard a lot of the like, I heard hard and scarce. 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 46 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 250 plus schools, 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 s I still do business. You know what I mean, we have chains of brick and mortar, that that we're involved in.
I just don't talk about it cause 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 scarce or of of this approach is. What types of content, uh, should we all kinda 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 are good at this thing, and again, this is on the education side, then there's a big I call it the big Vegas, uh, whispie. Why should I listen to you? Right? Why should I listen to you?
And if you can't answer that question for, I'll 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 who's an 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. Now, 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 what 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. It's 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 22 calls today.
Let me tell you the best moment I did a tw- I did a twelve-hour day in 3 minutes. I'll give you the best moments. It's like people want a deal, and so I think about that as a compression of time. And the re As a founder building a business when I was in my early 20s, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at, and that thing One was finances.
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We say, Hey, you could try and figure this out on your own, but if I can compress 14 years of business advice into 37 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 competitions, social media competitions, and I used to have this mental framework for the perfect competition. And I I. I remember the day that I 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 was 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 to be a billionaire versus perfect shape, billionaire's worth more, right?
So we have outcome, and then we have perceived likelihood of achievement,
Perceived likelihood of achievement. Okay, so this is the okay. Interesting, yeah, seems it's the inverse about of risk, Yeah,
how likely do I think it is? 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 is and sacrifice.
this is this effort and sacrifice?
No, different. Yeah. So effort is all the things that you have to begin to do as a result of a decision that you don't wanna do. Sacrifice is 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 3 minutes versus getting in shape in 3 months or 3 years, 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 $3,000 for a personal trainer to train me in person 3 times a week, my perceived likelihood of achievement of buying the PDF versus personal trainer is much higher.
Now, the effort and sacrifice is actually gonna be relatively fixed, but this is the part that goes up. Now, the time delay, if done, right, should also be fixed there. But this is what explains the difference in value on a product level, but the value equation works for everything, just like it just like consuming content. 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 gonna watch a 4 hour video, fewer people do it than a 3 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 20 minutes, which is a sacrifice I could be making on Netflix.
yeah, that's true. I think if we're using consumption of media as the thing, the effort and the time delay, basically, are we are talking time delay to outcome? I'm gonna be rich, um, or am I talking? Yeah, cause the the time's always gonna be 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 slept on is this one.
how quickly they can accomplish x outcome
If you wanna 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, cause there will always be someone who's willing to pay a premium for that.
goes back to what, um, Jeff Bezos said about betting on things that won't change.
Yeah, that that, like the his whole mantra around that, has been one of my like, I would 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.
So he I think I saw it as an 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 spend 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 2 hours, they will value that more than if it takes them 2 days. We believe in that, and we can bet on 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 1 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 5,000 reviews, it's pretty high. If it's got a 1.5 and it's got 2 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 component because it'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 to zero if it is long enough in the future, even if it's guaranteed. You can guarantee that you will be rich if you invest, you know, $100 a week or $200 a week, whatever, into into an index fund, right? Pretty much. And if you do that for 30, 40 years, you you will be fine.
Because it's 30 or 40 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, and 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 4: 00 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 consi- like, even if I did a time lapse that takes 10 seconds of me doing it, 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 is patience. Also, to be to fair focus, because, um, Sharan, my partner says this, he says, um, people only see the choices you made, not the options you had. And so you can't really witness focus, you just see winning. And so to the same degree with patience, again, you only see the win. Like, if you look at a marathon, people are there at the beginning and they're there at the end.
No one's here in the middle, 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, yay. And then maybe a couple 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 patience unless you've literally followed it from the beginning, which, of course, you'll have your OG people who are with you the beginning of Dirvacy, yo, and they've s they've seen the patience start to play out.
But it's one of the things that, like, one of the the the ultimate gifts that I would hope, and the equal opposite of this is Steve Wynn. I think talked about how his the best thing in the world is that someone comes their 1st 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 1st time they come, they lose their money, cause then they never gamble again.
And so it's like they w- he wants that big reinforcing event up front because then you can become a a gambling addict, right? And so to the same degree, m my my hope for, like, my kid in the future or or anyone who's trying to start out is that they have something that happens in their life where they are rewarded for delaying the outcome and having a big jackpot as a result of the consistent effort where they they delayed the reward.
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, y- me it I. I only needed to look at that graph, the compounding returns graph, once. Actually, looking at my own audience growth and seeing that I did a thousand posts on Instagram and reached a thousand followers. And then in my last three, when I had 7,000 followers, I gained 300,000 followers in three posts because Carousels had dropped in Instagram was M re 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 A CEO, and for three years, nobody fucking listened. And then all of a sudden, it was like it was just fucking crazy. It just went vertical line up and go, Oh, it's the same Instagram graph I saw all those years ago. 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 dumb, but you now 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.
Hm, how would you how'd 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? Like, how much risk do I take on? Like, should should I consume or invest? Well, you don't know when you die, right? And so with the push and pivot one, the best answer that I have to this cause 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 like, Oh, we can do reusable rockets now, we get it. But being being the first guy or the first woman, um, I think, is the really the essence of a founder. They go earlier than 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 even a t tiny group of people scarce value? So when I started the Diary Of A CEO, I was making Facebook videos with people like Jay Shetty. We, we, we could get tens of millions of views on Facebook Watch. Back then, no one was mentioning it. So I remember that I made this video about relationships that did 33 million views.
I d no one would mention it, no one like no one. And then I started this podcast called The Diary Of A CEO in my bedroom. I'd go went to Apple, bought this microphone for $100, p- plugged it into Garageband, 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. 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, you're broke, it's okay. You can you cannot be sca- you can just make money, that's okay. But it also assumes that your future self, with more skills and more resources, won't have the ability to figure out how to scale it.
And most things are s 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 wanna 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 help 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, it's not scalable, it's like, we only need five.
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 were doing for them. 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 one is you get that. The second is that you are able to practice the unscalable thing, 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 gonna 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, cause 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 hatty, but from a branding perspective, saying, Hey, I have a handful of clients that pay me $2,000 a month to do this premium thing. For those of you who 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 to forensically an a 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, uh, 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 I was just thinking about, uh, even the Diarosea 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 con conversation's done, we're gonna test your name 300 times using ads to see how to introduce you. I know Alex Hormozi's gonna win cause you're a big, you're a big name now.
But you think about when we started the podcast, imagine me there with on GarageBand, with with with a hundred dollar mic,
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. It's a fallacy. It's ridiculous. Well, you don't have the money, you 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's a stranger. 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 just have to not stop. As long as you get feedback and you take the feedback and you improve, and you do that long enough time horizon, 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. I mean, if you wanna 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 doggy skateboard business.
Yes, but you shouldn't quit business. Okay, yeah, the 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, packaging? oh my god, You forgot to turn the the mic on and did the whole thing? I'm sure
yeah. Like someone came in, stole the fucking hard drive with the audio on it. It's like
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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That's pro dot fiverr dot com. One of the great fascinations I have, and almost one of the unteachables, is self I think it's self-awareness.
Yeah, I'll say judgment. Cause Yeah, yeah.
judgment again, yeah, cause I h- have you ever had someone come up to you and say something grandiose? They wanna go to the moon, let's say, hypothetical, and you look at them and you go, You, you're not a spaceman, do you know what I mean? And how do you how do you what? 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 at is a an understanding, a more accurate understanding of base reality. And the people who are achieving the things that you want to achieve, and you haven't 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 I'm What 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. 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 wanna 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 grandpa the the pill, and he says, It tastes like shit, I don't wanna have it. He just brushes her away. She comes back, she's throws her hands up, and she's like, You can 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 chessboard or a backgammon board, and I'm gonna sit in front of him.
I'm gonna set it all up and say, Hey, I know you said you wanted to play backgammon. I said, No, the last three weeks, here's the lemonade. Do you wanna play? If you finish the lemonade, we can play. How likely is it that grandpa now drinks the lemonade? 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 wanted. What people miss is that the the amount of attack vectors that people who succeed approach a problem with 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 cause 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, 22 locations, and I was like, All right, I'll put some flyers out. I put 300 out, um, and then nothing happened.
Uh, well, one person called and they said I dinged his car, and then I was like, Thank God, he 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 was like, Oh, how'd the you know, how'd the flyers go? And I was like, I was ready to, I was like, 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 it. He was like, Well, what was your test size? I was like, Hm? I was like, I put out 300 flyers, and he was like, Yeah, it's tough to know if anything works at 300. He's like, we usually put out 5,000, um, per test batch until we know what works. He said. Then we do 3,000 a day after that, and so he was doing 150,000 flyers a month, and I'd put out 300.
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 cause you're looking at the top of the hill and it's like, 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 of 300 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, cause no one even knows it works as well as it does. And then all of a sudden, you have 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. But, uh, you even said yourself, once upon a time, you were doing a lot of listening books, you were reading, and there wasn't much doing. Some people just do the doing and no listening, and and 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 is through f- painful, sometimes feedback. data, And then the other thing I heard was you talking just about, like, just believing in human incentives. And and this, like, it, it sounds like a. It took me ten years to just sim settle on the 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, like, 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 did what was? And you could, it could be a seesaw, like, kinda like your value trading. What did I offer them? Um, what did it cost them? And was that net positive?
so I have this. So I write all my persuasion like this. This is this is how I do it. So we say, uh, plus, plus, plus, minus, uh, minus, plus, minus, minus, all right. This is the easiest way to write copy, the easiest way to to think about marketing. If you do the thing, you get more good stuff. If you, uh, don't do the thing, you get more bad stuff. 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 so this and this are our persuasion elements that we say to do the thing. But we also have to, I 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. Well, 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. 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, big 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 like,
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 are going to change people. And I think one of my favorite market I think Gary Halpert's, it is a copywriter. Um, he said, we don't want to create demand, he said, we wanna channel it. 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. The 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, 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?
hm. 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, at least in the US, it's 78 of all businesses is service-based. Typically, it starts with accepting all money from everyone, cause you're like, Oh, I do podcast agency stuff too.
Oh, you have a oh, you want a startup? Yeah, I could 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? And so you you take what you can get, right? But you quickly realize that it becomes very difficult to scale that, and that's okay, because you had to do what you needed to do to survive and get started, and that's fine.
But usually, between 1 and 3 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 templating and start systematizing what our delivery is. And on the front end, if we're advertising people, instead of saying we do adverti- 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? 15 years ago? For me, it was starting an agency. I think that opportunity is a little bit saturated now, if I dare say,
I think that the nature of agencies has changed. I think you like, if you wanna 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, 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 that, 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, not 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, would connote, right?
Would would would make sense for. Like, on the flip side, I say, like, if I see somebody who's who's doing $20,000, 000 a year as a restaurateur, I'm like, Bro, you could probably do $200,000, 000 a year in a different business. Um, I had a conversation with a gym owner that was doing $10,000, 000 a year, and it was a service-based gym, not a facility leasing gym, which is different. Like a Crunch Fitness is just like you 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 take your exact skill set, cause you've got 100 employees and you're trying to deliver an amazing experience, but with low skilled labor, you have to maintain culture. There's all of this stuff that you have to do. I was 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 all that to say, I think wealth is a big bucket. Um, wealth related services are still crushing insurance. Risk is still going to exist in the future, so there's going to need to be insurance. People are gonna to 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 kinda like trash, like no one wants to be like, Oh, so what do you do? He's like, I I'm in trash, you know? 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 wanna say at parties. There's usually big opportunities there if there's obviously money where I said old people. Cause 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 it got like 300,000 views.
But like, but what I did was really interesting is that I took wealth in the United States and I had a hun- I had it represent $100, 100% of wealth's $100. If you looked at it right and you had a circle for all, you know, a hundred people at different percentiles, right? There's, like, two in the bottom 50th percentile
the bottom 50 of people has roughly two in in wealth of the 100.
the 100 in wealth. It's crazy. And then you've got your next 40, and I think that was like 27, something like that. Then you have your next nine, which has like 36, and then the top one has 31. 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 who are starting out are here, and the only people they see are here.
And so their view of the world is 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 anybody that's ran 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, right?
And they were watching me, they were ke- 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 n- it's not easy to move up because to get that meeting with Coca-Cola, to be able to
to earn it.
present to them, you've gotta earn it somehow. So it's all well and 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 noth- there's nothing wrong with starting to sell to 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, and this is specifically for service businesses, 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 wanna do all of your social media management for $2,000 a month, I'm like, Dude, you can't even handle me, like you could, 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, $15,000 a month for a vendor, like the minimum I could really possibly.
And it'd be probably a smaller shop. And I know the founder's probably still integrally involved, and I'm fine with that cause I'm okay with some founders, like being good and basically me seeing them as a fractional employee that I'm 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 would be less headache, and four, because it's a signal of how good you are at what you do.
And the best businesses and business owners will know, Oh, this is for me. You signal to them that you, like, you wanna go up market, but you have low market prices. There's, um, there's something called the Van Westendorp pricing analysis. You might have heard of it. It's from the 1970s. 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?
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 bargain, a good deal? And so when you actually take a scatter plot to this, and now and I have to, I used to have to do these manually.
Now you can literally just take the data, put it into an AI and say, Hey, run a Van Westendorp analysis on this, which is amazing, so you can get it in six minutes. Um, and so you get these. There's four points on the graph 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 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 wanna launch a shampoo, this is how they do it, and so we can price it precisely.
is it a bell curve, or is it so? Is it 100%, like a
yeah, but it's sometimes it's so interestingly, sometimes you have double Gaussians, that'll happen.
hm? Cause it's different customer Yeah, so segments, okay?
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 found to be most compelling to people?
Almost all the core concepts in this book come down to figuring out who you wanna 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 they want to 50 millionnot always, um, but I'd say 70 of businesses. This is rough estimates that come through our doors are demand constrained. They could use more customers than they than they have.
30 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 taken in aggregate, is that every problem is a marketing 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 lead gen right as activity number one, we've got nurture as number two, we'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 them to buy more shit. 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, you, 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. And
what does that mean? then What does that mean? Application nurture?
basically, we're working these leads, 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 ascension is they're gr- 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 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 it's would you think this would
so funny.
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 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 it tells us the whole business? So every person who comes to Acquisition.com watches a VSL for me, and it's a 13 minute thing of just 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? Pre-canvased 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 1 10 out of ten talent person than just one customer?
Yeah, on the onboarding, are we just do we have any process? Do we have 30, 60, 90 of what what's gonna happen over the next 30, 60, 90 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 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 would it take? Just tell me what it take. I can say no, just tell me what it 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. I was like, what would it take for us to be your your sole provider forever? Especially this cause 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.
And I'll never work with Yeah, these three competitors, that's cute. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. And so 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. Which also means that you probably have ongoing marketing to your customers. You 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 referrals?
There's a great story. A friend of a friend had a had a, uh, 10 million-ish dollar a year business. He talked to somebody in the exact same space as him, uh, who was way further ahead, and he, uh, he was in business that had, like, agents, uh, that worked for him, like, kinda like a brokerage. And the mentor told him, So, what's the incentive that you have for your agents to bring more agents? He's like, Oh, I, you know, I pay them 500 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? And it was 250,000 a year, productive agent gross profit. He's like, So you're only willing to spend $500 to make 250,000? He's like, What would you spend for 250,000? He was like, I mean, I don't know, 50 grand. He's like, Yeah, so why don't you make your incentive 25 to start? So he took his incentive from $500 for a referral to 25,000, and he took his company from 10 million to 400 million.
yeah, it's crazy. I Yeah,
think about this a lot, even with, like, so recruiting, like people are like, Oh, headhunters cost a lot of money. I'm
of course.
like, fucking hell, for really exceptional talent, it's almost it's
It's always a deal.
hm, 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 are lower.
I think probably all the entrepreneurs I've ever interviewed would say that exact thing. I remember one particular e- e- entrepreneur who's built a $100 billion dollar business publicly listed. He said, At 20, I thought hiring mattered, at 30, I thought it was kind of important, at 40, I've realized it's the single most important thing. And this is a guy that's built a $100 billion dollar publicly traded company. And I was like, the the but it's funny, cause that's what all of them say.
But I this is a broader relationship advice lesson, which is just the best and worst decisions you'll make in your life are people. And I mean, I look at I look at some of these things here and I go, I mean, it's true for you.
yeah, I know, right.
This is a photo of your lovely wife.
Nugget zone.
So you think about the variance of your outcome if you'd 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 marrying Leila. Because, and this is, this is no shade to any, any, any relationship that exists of mine or anyone's. F- 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 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, 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, and I was gonna go meet with the whole team, and 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.
And 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 who are starting out, it's 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, cause that's not true. But like, I have doubts of like, I don't know if I'm gonna be 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 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, and so the foe is bigger, 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 to 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 Leila was willing to go all in.
And I would say that, like, if anything, kinda like a jockey bet, um, for VCs, like you bet on the horse, not the jockey, or sorry, the jockey, not the horse. When she saw me, I had, you know, a handful of gyms, and it wasn't like I'm Alex Hormozi, the, you know, whatever I am now. I was just a gym owner, and I was 26, 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're married is either going to increase the likelihood that you hit your goals or decrease, and you just need to decide whether that's important to you. If you were single, Yeah,
do you think you would be as successful as you are now?
I wouldn't be as successful because number one, there've 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? Leila, 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 kinda like last year for me, which is weird because I always like, people are always like, when is enough enough?
and it's kinda like working out. Um, I got to a point where I was like, almost 250 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 Leila 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 taken my foot off the gas earlier if it hadn't been for Leila. I think I would have struggled more operationally, uh, because Leila is Leila will never get the credit that she deserves. Um, but Leila is Leila is the is the pure is a pure operator, like unbelievable leader, that talent that I probably wouldn't have been able to either get or keep stay because of her. Like, I think that if there was like a a divorce in the business, I think the vast majority of people would go with Leila.
I'm serious, like, I I know I like self-awareness. I people know what I'm good at, and I know people are loyal to Leila because she's just there for people. Um, and so for those reasons, I don't think I would have, I I don't think I would have kept my foot on the gas. Um, I don't think I would have been 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 to themselves, 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 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 what? 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 I've 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 pers 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, satisfies so many things, like, you will not find the perfect person cause 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 extracurriculars, 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 99% 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, No, 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 because there's all these near-term temptations. There's this external noise, there's Instagram telling you that you want this, now you need this. 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 of all paths without the costs of each. 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, you know what? I'm probably speaking from experience here, cause when I was what twenty years old, was it twenty or nineteen? I, uh, Mark Knorr, friend of mine, mentor of mine, gave me this diary. And I remember the first page I wrote in it, what I wanted and what I wrote was before the age of twenty five. Range Rover sports being my first car, $1 million, six pack, girlfriend.
I'll throw up a picture of it on the screen. And I actually took a photo of it in my Range Rover at twenty four years old as like a um, but did was that actually what I should have written down?
well, I think it's probably what you wanted, and then you updated your wants because you got it, and then you found out that you wanted different things.
fortunately, though, my time horizon was quite small, so I could figure out three or four years without any, without any s 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 mom now, she doesn't answer, or 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.
than 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 are single wanna get married, people who are married, m, you know, reminisce about 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 beha- 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, rewards 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 remember she was crazy, like, 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 that just, like, fades away. And then you're like, You know what I want? Another baby. speaking of babies, Alex, Yeah,
there you go, you gave me a jump off point. Leila's pregnant. 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 on your face.
Um, I'm stoked, you know? Uh, I'm stoked. Uh, I'd say I have elements of fear, mostly that I I wanna do a good job, you know, being a father. Um, I can see, and
Alex, that you're scared. I can tell because I know you're you've. I've sat here probably for ten hours over the last, I don't know how many years.
yeah, I'll tell you what the issue that I've been struggling the most with, which is how do I define a good parent? And how do I define a good child or a successful child? 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 parent 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? Do we now call their parents good parents?
Can I, can I posit something? And this is, 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 wanna say it's impossible for me
Because you control, you like to be able to control your output.
I wanna know what I'm doing, I wanna know where, like, I want. I ask, what do I want to have happen, so that I can align all of my life to try and make that happen? And so if it's, uh, like, and even even the question of, like, what is a successful child is, is it a child who's happy? Many people would say, I just want my kid to be happy, and that's fine. Is it my child is the maximum makes the maximum impact on society?
Different upbringing 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, you've got this, me, the youngest, this crazy like entrepreneur. I 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 like 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 him number one in the world in Runescape at one point, people would watch him online play. R super genius, um, decided he doesn't want to go into the 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 cons 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. Cause you, you know, some of the questions you're saying there are like, what do I want them to accomplish?
Are they happy? These are all outputs.
yeah, no, for sure.
Um, that you cut you. The other thing that I noticed 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. We've got this one who 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'll.
You'll almost probably be guaranteed to miss expectations and be let down if you get involved in the output.
yeah, so, uh, obviously there's nature and 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, I had three older there's, yeah, there's, siblings.
yeah, all of those are are variables, and so in some way, it's a bit of a 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 it. But if I, ha, if I'm f- 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 on the output's 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 now, to be fair, I can now figure it out, and the kids can come either way. It's 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, um,
you know what's interesting? The car analogy, I think, might not be apt because I I, you know what? I was trying to find another analogy, and the one that I stumbled upon was a 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, you know, you. All you can do is water it and give it sunlight, and it's gonna be what it's gonna be.
I mean, you can say, I 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 well, it's. It's sunlight.
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, fine, 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 I so that it would grow taller. Like, these are all things 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 will laugh in the comments, for sure. Um, but yeah, I like I to to ask me, like, what? We were talking about Leila earlier, I would say, like, one of the the foremost things that I love the most about Leila is that Leila has never tried to change me. She's like, That's Alex, like, you can want him to be a peach tree or an apple tree, 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 fume inchew, he's gonna do that. Like, I'm going to try and optimize to the degree that I can to equip 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 wanna 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, and there's two quotes you tweeted that I was very curious about. The first one, which t caught me off guard, I think I actually texted you when I saw this was this one. Do you wanna read this one out? So this was February 2025.
at your funeral, friends and family will argue over who gets your belongings. People will talk about the food and 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 their lives, and it's a smile graph, which I think is ultimately hilarious.
But kids are really happy, and then they just beca- 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 earning, 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, right?
They're stressed, really thin. And then as they kinda 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 ha- like, they, they rely on other people, they're mostly just like they play games. They're 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 go out with, like, a tutu 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, uh, obsessed with is 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 than I will when 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 because
what?
I I write a lot about death, because it's I like, these tweets are notes to self. They're like, they are not. It is not a it is not up 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 Febru- oh yeah, February twenty-fifth, so February twenty-fifth. 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'd 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, um, but I had I think I had nine lawsuits that were open at that
really?
at that point. It was a lot, it was nine, nine open lawsuits. Um, and they all like, it was like, and they were 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 and stuff. And then it's like, Are we gonna get pulled? It? It was just all this just stuff, um, just a lot, um, and and then Leila, uh, had a h- like, sh- I think I told you she, um, she had a really horrible.
She like tore her 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, $1 billion. He was getting divorced, and there was like, one other thing.
I think there was lawsuits because of the $1 billion, 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 gonna 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. 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?
And 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, I made some progress. And he's like, he just focused on making progress and chipping away at the problem. And I think that was more or less the approach I had, which is kind of 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 wrote. 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 kind of like the the the thought process I had, and so I basically here, I'll look at this. So I saw it 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 let'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, perfectly mentally tough person, would be able to have an unlimited amount of things happen to them, and then their behavior would remain the same. From 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 bat how badly do you fall? And then the next piece is how long does it take 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 So so I happiness? Or
I basically have term one, term two, term three, and then t this w- I did 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 that's a fortitude, 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 to baseline, and then you have tolerance, which is how how low 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 106 million dollar launch, my mom got to see it, which is really cool. She dies four weeks later. I realized the goal we talk about long term, right? 100 million dollar, 100 million dollar, 100 million dollar. The goal of the book was to have $100 million at the end.
The offer's book was an offer so good, people felt stupid saying no. 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 leads. 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 $100 million in a 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 do? 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 work on content. I'm still, I'm still gonna help businesses, cause I feel good when I help 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, and 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 or why is there a right or wrong way to mourn?
she must have been so proud of you.
She was, she was.
We talk a lot about your dad, but we've never really spoken much about your mom.
No, I don't. She's a sweet lady. Yeah, she always, she always believed. And so I think this last one, right, adaptability, which is 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 trauma, 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 of honoring her and 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 I, 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 would want me to bend in that path. And so I just, you keep fighting.
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?
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, mostly because I just I don't really even know what it means. Um, because, like, there's some people that used to, 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. Uh, 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 of 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 half. And so, and to be clear, like, I'm, I'm super blessed. I have a lot of good things that have come for me. My mother's 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 just like, I don't know, because, like, we don't, you know, I 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, 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, great, 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.
One of the remarkable things I learned 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 can't.
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, 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 well, they probably haven't even defined what happiness is, and they just wanted to give an easy answer. Like, that's like, that's what I immediately think, but, like, I, 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 a an emotion?
I don't know. Uh, how how does one experience pride as an emotion? Is that like a if you, if Feel very it was,
full. 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? Hm, no,
no, not for me. I mean, I'm just it's v- 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 who I am.
Should people come to you for happiness advice?
No, go go find somebody who's really happy. Um, the it it here's actually here's what's really tough, though, right? Is that no one knows base what someone's base level is, and that's what's so tough.
I think I ask that because one, I think a lot of people assume that 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 100 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?
What's this? Then? Why do I need to do this if this is not gonna make me? Do you see what I'm saying?
oh, I totally see what Cause I, you're saying, which is why bother pursuing this to begin with?
yeah, if it's 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 are stupid saying no, they won't say no, and they'll say yes.
but you make no promise or guarantees where that would lead you in your life, do you?
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 I I started with when you asked about the Tony thing was I. It's at least my, it is my worldview, which could be wrong. That human beings, our internal feelings are like the weather. 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 even if things get better, our baseline adjusts so that yet again. Cause, like, if we think about a year, I actually give this example of my sales team. So if 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 10% day three times, cause you have thirty six days per year that are gonna be b- bottom 10% days for no reason, purely because law of large numbers.
And you're also gonna have three days per month, which is almost one a week, that's gonna be a top 10% day of the whole year. Pretty impressive, but it's 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 them, I have, I have them all the time. Um, and I just think this is probably just the bottom 10% day. And like, and I think the the one of the one of the lessons that I've learned from an entrepreneurship perspective 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, maybe give it a day, right? And so I think, again, I come from the entrepreneur 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, what this fledgling 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 10% 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 quest 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? What would you do?
on the business side, I would build as much real world proof as I possibly could, and as much track record with as 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 super intelligence, 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'm it's not out of the equation. Um, I mean, Leila's Leila's super gung-ho 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 wanna learn more from you, you've got your YouTube channel, where you 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 kind of like, uh, Dragons' Den Shark Tank Y format, where you're bringing entrepreneurs, they're competing for $100,000, 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 100 million dollar series, have all sold more than 5 million copies since inception.
You've actually broke the world record for selling so many copies of this book, this one, um, in the short sort of a twenty four hour period or something crazy yeah, two like that.
point, nine and twenty four, Staggering. I'll okay,
link all of these books below. They are essential reading for anybody that wants a cheat code, um, probably a decade worth of, uh, 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 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, tune out? No,
just grab the books. They'll all great, be
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 f- 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 in my own business. So thank you as always, I really appreciate it. There you go,
thank you. brother. This episode is sponsored by Asana.
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