How I Made Millions Without Being the Best - Part 2 (The Iced Coffee Hour Reshare) | Ep 904 | The Game with Alex Hormozi

High activity, high alignment. If you have both those things, you have somebody who's moving a lot of things in the right direction.

And ideally, you get a lot of attention back.

If my life gets worse when someone starts, that's a bad sign.

And if my life doesn't change when they start, that's also not that good of a sign either.

By and large, I want to see some dramatic changes in how my time is getting allocated for bringing somebody in, especially if they're taking things off my plate.

What's a small hill you're willing to die on that some people might just think is trivial?

That manifestation is bullshit, and action is the only thing that matters.

Wouldn't you say that manifestation is the first step before action?

So it depends on how we define manifestation.

So if we define manifestation as like, an electrical signal occurs in your brain?

Sure. But I don't think that's how most people describe it.

So I would say be totally on board with manifestation if we defined it as knowing that Like I know that this is possible.

Like I saw this or I have some perspective that has changed.

To me, that's just knowledge. So if you have knowledge that you can start a bank, you have to have the knowledge that you can start a bank before you start a bank.

That makes sense. So fine, but the bank doesn't occur until you take the action.

But the idea of the mindless ideation of I'm going to manifest my husband into existence is I think relatively bullshit.

Now that being said, there's some people who do that and then also take actions that then change their circumstances.

And then they get the husband and then they misattribute what was the thing that caused it.

And so For me, I think, I mean, fundamentally the position that I'm in is trying to identify causal relationship as accurately as possible.

And so, the logical proof that I use with this is just simply mindset plus no action no outcome, you know, mindset plus action outcome, no mindset action outcome.

So the action is really going to be the only thing that's going to, I would argue that you need mindset.

You need some sort of mindset to have the action.

Like I'm, I'm kind of big in a manifestation.

So it's, it's interesting to, for me, there you go.

Like to me, like the example of. People get so upset by this, by the way.

I find it really interesting. What's their main contention with it?

Well, they have a history of being reinforced for talking to other people about manifestation.

And so they want to talk about how other people nod and smile and agree with them.

And those are all pro-social behaviors. And so I think it makes sense that they would do that.

Again, it depends on how we define manifestation, which I've yet to find anyone who's been able to define it well.

Actually, you can find really easily. And so that's the part, right?

So it's really just this word that has all these positive connotations.

I just think it helps you with focus. So like what's the manifestation?

Let's say the let's just say the boyfriend girlfriend example where you manifest the perfect.

But what is manifestation? you thinking clearly about your wants, needs, goals, what to look for, who this person is.

Correct. Now, by manifesting that, you're going to be on the lookout for those sort of qualities.

The manifesting the prioritization or the minute, like you, we said prioritization and then man, it says, I think the problem is that you're kind of using a derivative definition of prioritization is,

Fundamentally why I have an issue. And because you're using manifestation to indicate some sort of data or information, a lot of people that have a different definition of manifestation are going to apply that to. their definition of manifestation.

People know what manifestation is. That's actually my point.

People think like you sit down and you manifest something and then they think it's gonna walk right through that door like they think that cosmically everything there's just like Somehow get bestowed.

That's doing better than nothing. I don't think so because there's data that shows that you can trigger the same dopamine receptors when you think about getting a billion dollars than when you get a billion dollars.

It's a similar thing. Obviously, it's going to be a lot less intense when you think about it, but when you daydream about all these amazing things that are happening, it doesn't actually change the reality of your existence.

It's only giving you small dopamines. When you could get yourself to have a firm belief that something is going to happen and that nothing is going to get in the way, your actions are gonna be reinforced by that.

Well, the action is the only thing that will matter.

I think there's got to be a belief in yourself to stick with those actions.

You have declarative knowledge, but also those are skills.

And so if someone tries 100 times versus 10 times, I would say the fact that they took more action is the reason they got to where they're trying to go.

Now, when we try to get to like, why did they do that?

I don't think anyone has the answer to that.

I think the reason for that is because no one knows why they do it.

I think they have a core belief in what they're doing.

So that dealing is going to have an outcome.

To defend Graham, when I first reached out to Graham to try to provide value to him.

Exactly. I mean, I sat in my room like- The benefits of this podcast.

I had no skills whatsoever. The only thing that I had was high confidence in my aptitude and confidence and competence.

Like I knew that I could provide value, But it was more of just like something that existed in my brain.

I don't know if I necessarily had evidence to support that.

I just knew that I was competent enough.

And so maybe I manifested that. One could argue that.

So zooming all the way out here just for context, I think the reason that people get really up in arms about it is because these are These are dogmas, right?

These are belief systems, which people operate at their very core, which really just means ways of being, which means ways of behaving and ways of talking is included in that in terms of behavior.

But People have a very hard time defining what the hell they're talking about when we ask some of these words that are amorphous.

And so I have, by and large, just removed them from my vocabulary so that I can describe the observable.

And it has been probably the single most productive thing that I have done in my career.

And so is it a small hill? It is probably the only hill and the main hill that I will die on, which is that behavior rules everything.

And you have a history of past reinforcers or punishers for a set of behaviors and you repeat them in the future.

And that's the only thing that I will say about why someone does something.

You've been rewarded in the past for reaching out to people for doing things.

And it can be cross-domain. So it's like maybe you reached out to girls and they was able to jump into business and you were able to reach out to business owners.

So it's cross-domain. Definitely. Well, I know that.

I know. But you get the idea if it's across, but those are just sets of skills.

Those are behaviors. And so focusing exclusively on behaviors, and unbundling terms that are amorphous has been, I think the key to my ability to communicate to people, train staff and kind of enlist people to where we're trying to go.

And I think that that has really been like when people are like, man, I feel like Alex is so good at making things clear.

It's because I just do not use amorphous language.

And if I'm going to use a term, I will define the term.

But I believe to shift belief starts with mindset.

Well, it's like, what's belief, what's mindset, what's manifesting?

This is not to poke. I actually just want to help.

Not you guys, everyone else. No, but I just...

I don't think it serves people. And that's why, and I just don't like, I mean, yes, you feel great about it.

I'm glad that if you had the option between making a hundred phone calls and sitting there and manifesting, you will get further making a hundred phone calls.

And so I'm trying to decrease the amount of time it takes people to just do the thing.

It's funny, the first podcast we had with you, you were mentioning that You had recently removed the word, I think it was... Should?

It was should. You had also removed because.

Yeah, causal relationships. We don't know.

You remove all of these words in every single podcast.

You're like, I've since removed this word.

Yeah. And now I guess it's just like you've gone to the meta of just reducing amorphous descriptions of things.

Just to the observable. Just to the observable on this existence.

It's been, it will be, I'll call this. I think that the book that I write on behavior, well, that's how all of my books put together.

Tell us about the book on behavior. I'm curious about it.

It's outlined. You're cooking though. Yeah, it's cooking.

But I have this belief and it's probably my own limitation, but I want to have a publicly verified billion dollar plus net worth. so that I can then, I think, have the pedestal, or at least the pedestal, not the right word.

Credentials. Yeah. Oh, I know the book's title, Billion Dollar Offers.

Billion Dollar Beliefs. Billion Dollar Believes.

That's pretty good, actually. I like that.

I know what I'd probably call it. Billion Dollar Manifestations.

Billion dollar mindset, billion dollar mindset, hundred million dollar mindset.

Yeah. Billion dollar brain. I will, I'll give you an explanation of what I mean by this.

So. It's definitely got to be a billion dollar and then something that starts with I don't know I think billion dollar it would scare off a lot of people that are just looking for general because if you want to market the masses you kind of have to be a billion dollars so it's so we have to define so it's like in the beginning we have to start defining terms of what's the what's the meta concept that i kind of operate off of and The biggest one is fundamentally that, like what is learning, right?

Like what is learning? Repetition. So it's, it's same condition, new behavior.

That's fundamentally like from a, from a behavioral science perspective, it's like if you were, so if you're a person who's condition A, and then we teach them something.

When they re-enter condition A, they change their behavior, so it's observable.

Same condition of behavior. If the phone rings and you say X, Y, Z, and then say, hey, don't say X, Y, Z, say Z, Y, W, the phone rings again, you say X, Y, Z, you haven't learned.

If you say Z, Y, W, you have learned. If you say something else, you've learned but the wrong thing, right?

But fundamentally, it's a change in behavior within the same condition.

And so it's okay. If we say that as kind of like tenet number one, the next tenet is looking at what is intelligence.

So intelligence is going to be a rate of learning.

So if I have to do that, you know, example 10 times with, you know, Jack and five times with Graham, then Jack has less intelligence than Graham does in this context.

This is a hypothetical Jack and Graham. These names are completely taken at.

Random but then it's like that but the reason I think that's important is because then it allows people to have direct influence on their own intelligence and So if you learn faster, you change your behavior faster than somebody else, then you can in a very real way be more intelligent than them.

And so when we asked originally, you know, do you have to have real intelligence?

I think it depends on what type of intelligence you're talking about when it comes to surrounding behaviors.

This is how I find it. But beyond that, it's okay.

Well, then a lot of words would be like, so what's an excuse?

So like an excuse is a statement to avoid punishment. statement that someone says something like what's an excuse show me when an excuse has occurred and by by looking at you know patients i've defined this plenty of times i had to use it all the time which is figuring out what to do in the meantime So if you say to a young kid, be patient, they don't know what that means.

It's a to do. We are all being patient right now for our S&P 500 accounts.

We're being paid. We're doing something else.

That's all we have to do is just something else.

And so it makes patients operationalized, right?

Like how can I do patients? Like support.

What's support? Hey, why aren't you supporting me?

Billion dollar dictionary. Yeah, sure. It's like when a person you interact with deliberately lowers the probability of failure.

That's when someone supports. It's like, hey, Like I've been supporting you.

It's like you make my life harder. You have not been decreasing the probability of failure.

Like your wife, your girlfriend, who's trying to take away from work.

It's no, you're actually not supporting me.

You're increasing the likelihood of failure.

So how are you defining support, right? And this is why I think definition of terms is so important because people just say words and they don't even understand the words they're saying.

And then they get upset about words they haven't even defined themselves because they get rewarded in the past for getting upset about it. with other people they get upset about live together.

And defining it to these terms has been really helpful for me because it helps me navigate the world.

So it's like, what's guilt? What's shame?

Like these really amorphous terms that are trying to be like, show me guilt.

It's when you break your own rules. And with shame, it's when you break someone else's rules.

What about purpose? Purpose. Let me see if I have to find that one.

I might have it. So you're really just kind of redefining all of these words, or at least simplifying them.

The words that are important, and by defining them, it's more putting them into a context that We're all talking on the same plane?

Well, it's defining them within the observable universe.

That way we can all agree. These are the things that we see when someone has exhibited resiliency.

It means that they've returned to a baseline of behavior.

And how resilient they are depends on how quickly they do that.

If someone's not very resilient, it means that they extend the change in behavior for a long period of time.

If they're permanently, quote, traumatized, it means they never change their behavior.

Right? So it's like, what's trauma? right?

Trauma is a permanent change of behavior based on an aversive stimulus, a negative stimulus, right?

But then the question is, okay, if we have this trauma, right?

And then people are like, I store trauma in my spine.

It's Where is there, is there a hard drive in your, like where, what cell is this being?

People just say things. And so it's just, it's a permanent change of behavior from something bad happening.

Okay. Now, if you're a little baby and you touch a stove and it burns your hand and that's an aversive stimulus and you change your behavior, you don't touch hot stoves again, was trauma bad?

I love that. Once you said that you're redefining everything into terms of the observable universe, I think that that... I think it'll be my most successful I'm curious though, for something as I would say, what's courage, what's courage, right?

So the interval of time, a potentially bad thing affects whether you do it.

What about something that's so like purpose or meaning?

Those I feel are really, I can't imagine how to define those.

I think they're definable. It just takes a long time to really think like, The question you have to answer is, what would someone do for me to say purpose has occurred?

I guess maybe you could track something.

That's why you have to, because you have to completely shift how you're seeing things and be able to observe them kind of like firsthand.

And so what's authenticity? It's how you behave when you have no risk of punishment.

And someone that obeys all of the terms that you've outlaid in that book.

It's not obeying, it's just like, I have to define these terms in order to talk about them because they're all so amorphous and if I never define them, then I would just be making face noise and other people would be perceiving my face noise in whatever way they think it means, which they haven't defined anyways.

And so then there'd be a lack of communication.

I think fundamentally like good communicators are able to transfer ideas inefficiently because they use language that everyone understands and ideally things that everyone can observe with their own two eyes and so that's i try and stick to everything being observable And so as a result, it's made persuasion way easier.

The most important one is that if I want to train, which happens a lot in a business setting, it's like, how do you train someone?

And you're like, be more confident. What does that mean?

Tell a six-year-old, be confident means nothing.

It means nothing. They might just say that means talk louder.

I don't know what that means, right? And so it's a bundled term.

So we have to break the term down and say, okay, well, this is actually a series of many behaviors underneath of confidence. that when taken in aggregate, we then describe the person as confident.

So maybe they look at you in the eyes when they talk.

Maybe they nod their head when they're listening.

Maybe they repeat back the last thing that you said.

Maybe when there's something that has potential risk or downside, they're willing to do it.

Like these are all things that we can observe and then say, okay, well, if you have these, these, you exhibit these traits, these skills in this setting, people describe you as confident.

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

So we're like, okay, let's see if we can save him.

You know, as we talked to three or four of the leaders in the company and he was still a dick.

And so I was like, well, what'd you tell him?

We're like, oh, we told him to stop being a dick.

I was like, okay, well, so I ended up meeting with him and I was like, I want to be clear.

I don't really care if you're a dick or not.

I do care if people describe you as a dick.

And the purpose of this meeting is to decrease the likelihood that everyone talks to me about you again in a negative context.

Cool. Great. So that was the agenda. It's like, all right, so in order for that to occur, Let's talk about the things that when you do them, people don't like them and they call you a dick.

So it's like when you interrupt people during a meeting, they, they think you're a dick and they call you a dick later.

When you tell someone how to do their job, they call you a dick and you try and force your agenda, whatever it is, two or three examples.

And, He was like, so that's all I have to do.

I was like, yep, that's all you have to do.

He said, but what if I present this thing and then they don't execute on it?

I was like, then that's not on you. That's on the manager and I'll talk to the manager and make sure that they're executing.

That's not on you. That's not your role.

And so once that got clear, all of a sudden he just stopped doing the three things that everyone, the three behaviors that people then laddered up to saying he's a dick.

And then they stopped calling him a dick.

And then everyone's like, oh, he's like night and day, totally different.

But it was just like, no one's specific with their language.

And so no one knows what he was talking about.

And I think the vast majority of people don't communicate well with one another because both people are saying words that neither person understands and no one's defined anything.

And that's why most people can't communicate at all.

And that's why most people are dissatisfied with their wife.

That's why they can't manage the relationship because they're like, both people get upset.

No one knows how to communicate. And then that's it.

They just They want the other person to guess what behavior they don't like.

And so even if I said, Oh, you know, John's lazy, you have to think, and this is why most people don't do is because it takes work.

You have to think, okay, I think John's lazy.

Why do I think John's lazy? What would occurred?

What did I observe that then made me think that now you might find out, you know, he's actually just slow to respond.

Okay. Is there anything else? There was one meeting he came ill prepared.

Is there anything else? No, I think that was actually it.

Okay. So when I go to John, instead of being like, hey, you're lazy, I'm going to say, hey, I need you to speed up your responses to under five minutes.

And when you come to a meeting, have your notes ahead of time.

Just send them to me. All of a sudden, John's not lazy anymore.

But it's because it was this very micro thing that we then ladder up to this amorphous term that no one can understand.

This has been a huge area of interest for me in defining reality.

And I think that, honestly, it's helped me navigate reality really well. and make higher quality decisions.

So how much of the book is for you and like a playbook for your entire company and team versus something that you could market with?

Market, what do you mean? In terms of using as, let's say, a sales funnel.

Oh, I think this will be like a service to humanity type thing.

I think fundamentally the reason that most people don't get what they want is because they don't see reality accurately.

And so they do things that they think will work and don't work.

And how do you assess whether or not someone sees reality accurately or not?

Is it just based off of their predictions of a certain output?

And then if the output is real? I think if you look at someone's life, you can see how good they are at predicting outcomes.

Do they have what they want? Is your book mostly then about redefining certain words and effective communication or what is the behavioral aspect of it?

Is it just about how that- It's about getting what you want.

And I think a lot of getting what you want is being able to define what in the hell you want.

And how to get it. But the hard part is that maybe that assumes that the other person also understands those words.

Well, that's why we have to define that.

If someone reads this book, how would it be actionable for them to get those ideas across with somebody else who hasn't read the book?

That's what it takes. to define the terms.

It's getting a complicated word and then simplifying it into the layman.

They're currently not communicating with that person. like how would they talk to somebody who hasn't read the book the way they always do which is nothing which the thing is is the point that you hit on underpins the fact that most people can't communicate well at all all right and so if a lot of people want to be different than they are.

And I am, you know, first in line on that.

There are many things that I've wanted to be different about myself for a very long period of time.

And this book and these ideas have been the culmination of trying to change these things about myself i would say i want to be more authentic i'm like well what's authenticity how do i be more authentic what do i do well, it's okay.

Well, authenticity is how you behave when there's no risk of punishment.

And so if there's no risk of punishment, how you behave, basically, if you're alone and no one can find out about what you do, that's you authentically.

Now, the problem is that in society, we also have rules that govern other people's behavior, right?

Which means that the only truly authentic person is someone who behaves the exact same way alone as they do in public. will probably have something to do with your preferences.

And so can you be truly authentic only in that subset of people who act with complete freedom?

And when they act with complete freedom, act within the rules of the law.

Anyone else who has any inclinations to do anything that's outside of society's preferences or the rules that govern how we interact with each other or the laws, right? has to, by the very definition, not be authentic or be less than 100% authentic.

And I see many of these traits as not binaries.

Are you authentic or not authentic? But how authentic are you?

And also in the setting. And if it's, man, this sounds like it's a little bit more complex, it's, yeah, welcome to reality.

So how have you been holding yourself back in terms of authenticity?

Well, it's also the question of, is being 100% authentic something that I should be?

I mean, realistically, probably not. Right.

And so again, but the thing is, is once we define the term, we actually can have a discussion about it because now we're all talking the same language. and it's much more productive, but it's also way less charged from a, if we had never defined the term, then you would have maybe been like,

What do you mean? You don't think you're authentic?

I'd be like, well, not a hundred percent of the time.

Wait, so you're lying to people, right? And so we don't define the term.

And then all of a sudden we're attacking each other rather than just saying, well, no, I

I act differently in private than I do in public to a certain degree.

I walk around naked. If I walk around naked in public, that would probably be, but I'm being a little bit inauthentic right now.

I'm wearing clothing. I normally wouldn't wear clothing, right?

You know what I'm saying? And so again, what it does is it adds nuance.

But BF Skinner, who's a famer behavioral scientist said, if many variables exist, many variables must be studied.

And so a lot of people want a very neat box with clean lines and say, this is the way it is.

And I don't think reality is that way. It's not, is this person honest or dishonest?

It's how honest are they? How loyal are they?

You know what a banger video would be, honestly?

You talking about authenticity or about the importance of authenticity?

Naked. But you blur it, obviously. Obviously.

It would be in a... Oh, you don't have to blur.

Jack says you don't have to. One bad version.

Something like that would be... The raw dog, the raw experience.

No, I think that is a good idea. You know, it's interesting what you're saying right now.

It reminds me exactly of Jordan Peterson.

Have you ever spoke to Jordan? No, I think we're actually trying to get something organized though.

Because you see him in interviews and then he'll get called something.

And he's like, what do you mean by that?

Like that is the most Jordan Petersonian thing ever.

And you're kind of doing essentially the exact same thing.

You're just creating a guide to it. You have to define terms.

I'm curious. You take a blank slate person.

They read and apply everything that you write in this book. what does their life look like a year down the road, five years down the road?

Great question. So The book will by no means be a here is how to live life because that assumes that I know and that I think they should do something.

I think it's more If you want these things, these are the recipes for achieving them.

So if you want to be perceived as patient, Figure out things to do in the meantime.

If you want to be perceived as authentic, behave more in a way that you do in private and public.

If you want to, you know, be perceived as more courageous, then decrease the time between when you perceive something as risky and when you take action on it.

Like, All of a sudden it's, oh, so I want these traits.

And so this would, in my opinion, be the first way that at least the first place I've seen where there's a recipe, like, do this.

How would you explain it to a child who doesn't know what the words mean?

And I think that's It's what has allowed me to exhibit more traits that I wanted to have versus traits that I didn't want to have.

And until I had that, I just was like, why do people describe me this way?

Just because I couldn't break down what I had to change about what I did. to change basically reality.

You're in a great position to talk about it too.

It's interesting because you've mentioned this years ago that you had an issue, I think it was with anger, and you also had the patience thing.

Yeah. But it does appear as though you've made pretty significant strides in applying corrective behavior to those traits.

More on patience, less on anger, but better.

And how does anger affect negatively maybe your business or your life?

What have you noticed? Okay, well, I'd say that the negative effects of anger for me have probably just come in almost entirely from the way that people treat me, not in terms of negative outcomes business-wise.

I think the reason that I still have anger is because it has served me.

So I think we repeat things that have served us in the past.

And so I think one of the reasons that people misunderstand why they do things is because people ask the question, what triggered that?

You ever heard that? Something triggered this behavior.

But it's not about what happened before.

It's about what happened after. The last time you did it.

So I'll give you a real example. So... If Layla gets upset, this is something that I've, I've really actively worked a lot on.

If Layla gets upset and she gets like, she cries if we're having some, you know, whatever.

I had a tendency to try and comfort, comfort for a short period.

And then if that didn't work, I would get angry.

When I would get angry, she would get scared.

When she would get scared, she would stop crying.

And so when I got angry, she stopped crying.

And so I learned that if I got angry, I got my wife to stop crying.

And so it was a very reinforced, I only figured that out later.

Mm-hmm. so it's a very reinforcing thing is if i can i this gets labeled to stop crying right and so to the same degree so that I've been rewarded in that setting.

But obviously she's like long-term, you know, so then I have to work on that, right?

If I value the relationship, which I do.

But the same context with my team, right?

If I am quick to anger or be cold or sharp with someone, and it doesn't even have to happen often, if you do it once or twice, or even if you do it in front of somebody, not directed towards them.

They're like, well, I never want, because modeling is a great way that people learn.

If someone shows up late and I yell at that person, then that everyone else is still afraid of me and doesn't want to shop late either.

Right. And so, What happens is the flow of communication from other people to me slows down because they're afraid of getting punished by me.

And so I see that as not positive for the business is me not having the information.

Now, how do I cover for that? Well, I have somebody like Layla who always gets all the information and that's why she's CEO and doesn't have direct or And so we've been able to manage that within the business operationally.

But in terms of me personally, I want to be better about that.

That's like an example of something that I'm working on.

What's interesting is I kind of have a similar thing in terms of if I...

If someone's emotional to me, I have very, very little patience, unfortunately, for it.

And it's one of my shortcomings. Yeah. Since you fixed that, how have you noticed?

Fixed. Well, definitely. Sure. Okay. Since you try to improve upon that, how have you noticed that change in real observable ways?

Well, I mean, Layla has now also, because she understands how this stuff works too, because we talk about all the time, like she has tried to reinforce whenever I'm not angry and she's upset.

And so either in the moment or immediately afterwards, she's like, thank you for not getting upset and thank you for being there for me and thank you for just hugging me and, you know, just waiting it out essentially.

And so I just have to remember that when I'm in those settings.

And the more times she reinforces it, the less strong the other reinforcer is, the stronger the new one is.

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Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow.

14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes.

And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap.

R-O-A-D map. Roadmap. Well, it seems pretty easy for you to dismiss, I would say.

Well, make everything very logical. Right.

Well, I like to quantify every little thing is that's this belief.

I have this. We can't quantify it. I don't understand it.

And I think like a lot of, a lot of the stuff, has come from suffering.

Like being like, why can't I be this way?

I want to be this way and I can't. Like, why can't I?

And it's because I don't know how. Why don't I know how?

Because I have no words that have described how to do it well.

So how do I change this in reality? And so it's been the result of a lot of seeking and a lot of pain.

And that's So I don't see it as logical.

I see this as just descriptive. This is how it works.

But you're able to assign a new timeline. in terms of when you learn something to a longer period of time rather than most people which assess things over a shorter period of time.

For example, you know, when you would get angry at Layla, like she would quiet and you're like, OK, like this works.

But then you're able to then see way deeper into the future and then make decisions and based off of that.

You mean that this isn't going to work long-term?

Yeah. Well, yeah, I'll get feedback. I mean, to be fair, I'll get feedback immediately afterwards where, you know, she might not be happy.

Fair, yes. You know what I mean? And so I think like, It comes down to what are the things that we want to change and then how do we change them?

And ideally we want to have some sort of reward cycle as fast as possible with that new behavior.

And that's, I think that's how fundamentally you can change.

What you do, which then ladders up to who you are.

Moving on from that, though, in terms of acquisition.com.

It was like, I'm done with this. I'm like this, this super amorphous language talk.

Yeah, that's just not the Isaac. I love it.

Is there anything we're missing? Yeah, we should continue on.

Yeah. But, but this for me, like that was the most like focused I've been.

Yeah. There's nothing else on it. No, no.

Continue on now. Okay. We got, we got more stuff through.

Sure. Moving on from that, in terms of acquisition.com, how has your criteria changed for businesses over the last two years?

It's just much bigger. It's just the businesses have to be a lot bigger.

They have to be billion dollar opportunities now.

When I first started, I think, honestly, when I first started, the goal was like $50 million opportunities.

And then it became like $250 million opportunities.

It's, it's almost like five X to actually every, every 18 months or so, it's almost five X. So how does it work exactly?

A company reaches out to you and they say, Hey, we want to go through acquisition.com on the site and And what do they do?

They submit their info? Do they want money or do they want to sell?

It depends. What is it? So we basically have three kind of places that someone can go.

So for... like seed capital, SaaS, you know, software type startups.

We have ACQ Ventures, which is our venture arm.

And so those are typically like smaller checks that are between like 50 and a million dollars like check sizes.

And so we do, you know, a lot of those deals.

We do probably like a couple deals, three, four deals a month sometimes.

Like several did four. I think we did four in January. we do a decent amount of deal volume there.

And those deals are much more like meet the founder, understand the idea, cool, we can just deploy.

We have the private equity side, which is kind of like the big boy side.

And those businesses, if we're going to do a deal, they're all bespoke based on the values of the business, where we think the business can go, what our value add is.

And typically in that side, it's right now we're 40% SaaS, 40% B2B services, and then 20% consumer services.

And we're shifting over time towards just a blend of SaaS and professional services that just tends to be where we just do really well.

And so that's on the private equity side.

And then we have the advisory division, which we started in January of last year, which is companies that are like not really portfolio ready.

And so that's kind of like that, you know, 1 million, 10 million, 30 million, sometimes a dollar per year business where it's like they need to change a couple of things.

And the reason that happened was for the three years prior to January of last year, We, you know, we'd look at a business, we do four or five, six, you know, diligence calls, get to understand the business.

And a lot of times, like 90 times out of 91, we'd be like, Not a fit for us.

You're not fit for us right now. Maybe change these two things.

Move this metric up. And when you do, call us back.

And what ended up happening is a lot of founders were like, this was more valuable than anything I've ever had to go through.

And thanks for doing it free. And for me, it was like, it was actually super expensive because I'm doing that 90 times, times, however many calls, lots of companies.

And I was like, I wonder if we could do this in a way that we could charge to the same basically assessment of a business and say, here's all the things that we would do.

Here's how we change it. And so then we wanted to see if people were interested in it.

So January, I was like, hey, if anyone wants to come out to headquarters, you can meet my portfolio team.

We'll kind of assess the business and be like, these are the blockages to either making it more valuable or scaling it.

And so it's like, you'll meet with my head of marketing.

He'll be like, okay, change this on your webpage, change this on your ads, change this, whatever.

I would meet my head of sales if sales is a constraint.

These are the things that we do. And people have really, really, really liked it.

So it's been exceptional. I think the reason that it works so well is that there's kind of what I was alluding to at the beginning is that there's just not a lot of help at that $100 million range.

And I think we can provide that. How do you make money from that?

Are you taking distributions from the company or have you sold?

No, no. We sell it as an advisory service.

It's just a service. Overall, right? equity?

Yeah. Oh, overall. We have distributions that come from the private equity side.

The venture checks, obviously, I'm not going to see anything for that for 10 years.

And then services, just normal business.

Why don't you have a website or a place where people could see the companies that you've invested in?

It's a good question. It's something that I've gone really back and forth on.

The main reason is like when I sold Gym Launch, I sold Prestige Labs, which was a sister company that did supplements and sold through the distribution base.

And I remember in the diligence meetings for that, it was like a huge point of contention that I had a 10,000 person Instagram following at the time.

And they were like, are all the sales coming from your Instagram?

And the business is doing like 20 million a year, just the supplement side.

And I was like, no, it's not coming. They're like, well, This could be an issue for us if we can't have complete control of the Instagram.

And how do we know you're going to keep promoting it?

I was like, my Instagram is not driving, like 10,000 people does not make a 20 million.

I promise you. And seeing how sensitive they were to kind of like key man risk around an acquisition, I was like, okay, if I do deals and I grow my brand, I don't want people to know what the companies are because I'm going to have to go, I'm going to write a check, but then if I publicly associate with it, then I'm going to have to go with the deal later.

So for example, school, That was purposely, you know, like a brand association plus money, obviously that went into it.

But I know that I'm in that, I'm in that for the long haul.

You know what I mean? I'm going to be with school for many, many years.

And so. My key man risk is something that I'm willing to basically deal with.

Whereas if I buy an HVAC business, I publicly associate with it. a potential acquirer will want me to sign some other non-competes.

I'll have to have some provisions around promotion.

And I just didn't want to do that. I have gone back and forth on it though, to be really honest.

Like I've gone back and forth. It seems to me like there would be a net benefit on that.

Reminds me. I'm going back and forth. I have gone back and forth.

Like Shark Tank business, where it's like as seen on Shark Tank is pretty big.

And you could argue that the business you bring to that drive up the valuation to a point.

Yeah. Or even without you, it's still higher than if you were never involved.

And I'll tell you where it says agreed. So then the next thing that goes is If I have all of these different things that I'm like pseudo promoting, then it almost feels like I'm shilling a lot of things.

No. And so that's been, that's been where I've been.

I would just, as a viewer of you, not that anyone, not that I would question your credibility, but I think that it would, it would bring a lot more clarity where I've actually.

I've gone. Yeah. And I think it would attract a lot more businesses where you could say, hey, when you started with acquisition.com, you were valued at this much.

Your revenue is this much. And now look at you.

Here's the other thing I think. it would help you negotiate better terms saying that you're going to be on this website where it's even a hundred companies.

And I think it's important you put them all in the same place so that it's not like you're promoting this or promoting that or you...

You should never talk about these businesses unless in a podcast setting where you're giving an example.

The other, the other, and yeah, I mean, I've been very, I've been torn on it.

I was like, I've been very like. because of all the reasons I just said, but the other one is kind of like the compliance thing that I just said, right?

If a company, like a company does something stupid and companies do stupid things, And then, I mean, you didn't even own FTX, right?

And you got hammered for it. You don't even own it.

You're like, I'm a promoter. I got paid to sponsor.

Give me a break, right? And so even if I wrote a venture check to a business and the company does something I'm an owner.

And any reporter or clout-seeking YouTuber would then be like, Hermosy is saying doing this instance like how is it different from Y Combinator where they're very public?

Yeah, a lot of these like even Some of these private equity funds are just like... It's their value prop though.

YC's value prop is Harvard's value prop.

It's like the... the main thing they get is yeah but there are plenty that go through Y Combinator that just turn out to be you know yeah maybe not the best yeah but I think it's well Black comedy is kind of unique in that.

I mean, to be fair, if a Harvard grad does something bad, Harvard takes a hit. but it is a law of law.

It's going to work both ways. I think it's going to hurt you if a business does something that reflects on you and if you do something that reflects on all the businesses.

I think it goes both ways. I think the net benefit is like a 51 to a 49.

49% down to 51%. I have gone back and forth to the theory where I've been like, I'm going to make all of our stuff public.

I think we are making, I think the ACQ Ventures, if I'm not mistaken, I think our Ventures things are public.

So it's really just the private equity stuff.

What about school? What was your mindset behind that?

School is interesting. So, you know, for me to, again, this is, you know, using brand to promote something, right? you know, it'd been four years that I've been making content and really never promoted anything.

And when I look at my audience, I make business content almost exclusively, but still like, 60 something percent of my audience is people who want to start a business, not people who have a business.

And I think that's just the nature of just humans.

There's way more people who don't have businesses than people who do.

9% of people in the business and 91 don't.

And so if we're at 30% or 33% of people who are in my audience, owned businesses were three or four times represented. on overrepresented by business owners because I make business content.

Anyways, to answer the question, I was like, is there something that I can do with this larger audience that can help them get started in a scalable way? that would provide value to everybody.

And so I got approached by a gazillion companies, probably like you do, over the years for the audience and the access and the distribution that we have.

And school was a company that I had been following since 2018.

So I've known Sam for a long time and I just kept watching it and it just kept getting better and better and better.

And the, it's just all I heard was good.

It was just all good word of mouth. Cause I'm so concerned with my reputation too, that I'm like, if I, if I promote anything and it's not awesome, you know what I mean?

Like I could take a hit. And so, That company was just compounding month over month over month, just on word of mouth.

It had zero marketing whatsoever. It had amazing customer retention in terms of people who started communities and also member retention people are in communities so it's like people are in there getting good experience people who are starting communities are getting good experience and i think that there's a big movement in general like meta towards communities overall And so I felt like from a macro perspective, I think it's a good, it was well-timed and well-placed.

And then beyond that, from a long-term strategic perspective, it has network effects built in.

And so even in an AI world, I think it will do great.

And so for all those reasons, it was also something that would work for people who were just getting started.

And so that's why I invested in school and I promoted it.

So I thought it would help the the 60 something percent that didn't have businesses get started.

And also for the 30 something percent of people who had businesses who wanted to start, you know, have a place that's not like an email list for all their people to, uh, house i saw it as a much better option than like a discord or do you worry when it comes to school the one thing that i've seen in terms of a bit of a complaint sure Seems to be that there is at some level this like MLM aspect to it where I've seen schools that people promote that teach you how to make money on school.

Yeah. So like a school for school. Yeah.

And I think that's just gonna, I think that's just gonna happen no matter what, like there's, there's YouTube channels about how to make YouTube channels.

If there's anything that someone has figured out to generate a living, then there's going to be people who sell how to do that thing.

And so I think if we chunk up a level, the question is, is there something wrong with that, right?

And then number two, the MLM component. So I can break that in two parts.

The MLM thing is just like, we have a referral. commission which is like not a very uncommon strategy and the internet yeah yeah the internet doesn't really deal with nuance but it's not like it's multi-level and mlm has multiple levels and this has one you refer a friend you get a percentage Like a credit.

Like anything. If I refer you business, you probably give me 20%.

So, you know, whatever. But yeah, that's just because the internet doesn't deal with nuance.

So that's the not MLM, the single SL, the single level of marketing that exists there.

In terms of what... what people do with their community we're we're pro free speech anti-censorship if it's legal you can have a community about it.

If you want to have a community about painting, have a community about painting.

If you want to have a community about Facebook ads, have a community about Facebook ads.

If you want a community about finding the perfect cologne for you, You can have that.

You want to have one about painting model cars?

You can do that. You want to have one about making sick beats?

I'm just naming all different communities.

And if you want to have one on how to make a school community profitable, have, we're not going to say you can't start a community about that.

Like, how can we do it with millions? We have tens of millions of users, tens of millions.

It's very big. It's much bigger than people think it is.

And so, either you have to start saying, making this rule and that rule, and then you get down to the whole rule strap, or you just say, you can make a meeting about whatever you want, as long as it's legal.

And that's where we decided to draw the line.

Should we create a community about how to podcast or just podcasting?

You could. I'm sure it'd crush. You think it would crush?

What it? I don't agree. Graham and I, we've been thinking about making content, like talking about production equipment, researching a podcast about how to podcast.

Then you have to ask, is there anything wrong?

That's why Janet loves it. Right. And this is a great question.

And so what? And what's wrong with it? I'm going to out myself right here.

I think there's nothing inherently wrong with an MLM.

However, they're used... in really inappropriate ways a lot of the time.

But inherently, it's just an affiliate program.

I feel where it goes wrong is people are deceptive about maybe the practices or the buy-in.

I can say it very succinctly. The problem is that the promise doesn't match the deliverable.

That's it. It's false expectations. That's it.

Fundamentally, the vast majority of people who advertise, especially in the information space, do not advertise compliantly.

And so as a result, they make promises they can't keep.

And so people get false, false expectations.

That being said, do I think there's anything inherently wrong about saying I learned how to do this I put tons of hours into compiling all this stuff.

And if you like me and you like my style of teaching, you can buy it from me in this video course.

And I know you used to have one. Like the question is, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with education or even profiting from education.

Colleges do it. can colleges do it and give people zero ROI and no one says college is a scam, well some people do, but the vast majority of people still think college is not a scam.

It's simply because they don't promise anything.

That's it. That's fundamentally, like, it just comes down to that.

If you just don't promise anything, then you're kind of in the clear.

If you're like, hey, I put together a course on how I, you know, how I succeeded as a realtor.

I make no promises to whether you're going to follow it or it's going to be perfect for you.

I just share the stuff that worked for me.

If you want to go check it out, it's whatever.

It's over here. You can go check it out and buy it.

I don't think anyone's screw this guy. Now, some people will be because that's the internet, but like anybody would, I would consider to be reasonable.

No. And I think to, you know, to a large degree, like, We can't listen to everyone because you will have people who are just upset about you not sharing your stuff as people who are upset with you sharing it.

Might as well upset the people who don't pay attention.

Vegas Matt also put it really well because he was involved in one.

You know who Vegas Matt is? He's a YouTuber here in Las Vegas.

Massive YouTube channel on gambling. But he said that MLMs are effectively better because the money actually goes to the people that are closing the sale rather than giving it to advertisers that are just going to inundate people.

They just take, I mean, from a business model perspective, you take your advertising, you basically take your entire allowable cost to acquire a customer. and say, instead of giving that to anything, I'll just give that all to my sales team.

And then I will incentivize some other salespeople so that we can have a continued distributed base.

So that instead of having a, Sales manager is getting paid a base salary and a small percentage of everyone's sales.

It's just, it's all performance and having the multi-level structure allows you to recruit teams just like you would in a business.

Wait. All businesses are pyramids. Are all businesses pyramid schemes?

We just say things, but no, I don't think there's anything here.

I think where people get in trouble is making deceptive claims and making false promises or promises that they know to not be true.

And the associations. So basically MLM has a bad brand.

Has a bad brand. It does. There's enough negative associations that people who might be otherwise really good MLMs still take the heat for the bad ones.

People who sell information and education will take the heat for all the people who sell the bad ones.

And so that's the rough. I don't think there's anything wrong with selling education.

It is interesting how deeply rooted that hatred is for a lot of people.

It is like the most sensitive topic for a lot of people.

I'm curious, are there any business models that you kind of secretly hate?

Because, but they're highly profitable, maybe because they're like intellectually lazy or like just morally lazy, maybe too.

No, you'd say anything. I, I, I very much stand for the position.

Like if it's legal, then, you know, do if someone is willing to exchange money, like again, Capitalism based on voluntary exchange between two parties and both parties make the exchange voluntarily because they both believe they'll be better off.

Now the belief part is where deceptive components come, come into play, right?

But inherently, I don't have an issue with someone... I don't claim to have a moral superiority that my way of making money is better than someone else's way of making money.

Now, my business might be perceived as more valuable to an investor, which is a different thing.

So if you're like, are there business models that make cashflow but don't have inherent value?

Yeah, there's tons of those. But do I see that as bad?

No. I just see it as different and that's fine.

So if someone were to take school as an example and just copy it and do their own thing, why do you think that business would fail?

Network effects. We already have tens of millions of users.

It's very hard to do. And what if that... What are the details?

Why doesn't someone just copy Facebook? It's like they could just copy it exactly.

So yeah, the people aren't there. What if there's another... influencer who's backing like school 2.0.com yeah just say they would it's it's also easier said than done you know to copy Like it's, there's a lot of details on how it's programmed and how it works and what content gets surfaced and what algorithms run.

There's a lot of details in the business that make it, and it's, it, It's the product is so detail driven.

It's all the tiny things. It's not like you can copy the colors and the layout and there, there have already been plenty to be moved on that, but they don't go anywhere.

And so we could say that about any business.

Yeah. What do you think is the best business right now?

Because it seems like from my perspective, just on a high level, the subscription model is doing really well, charging one price for the year or break it down monthly.

Sure. That seems to be the new thing. What's from your perspective?

What changes? Is that in the digital creator space?

Generally. But every business has gone to now the subscription model.

I'm paying more. I remember when I used to be able to buy Adobe Photoshop for 100 bucks.

Yeah. And now it's 30 bucks a month or like $40 a month for the same thing.

Yeah. Is it a rip off or if we're willing to pay for it? just inappropriately.

I'm extremely willing to pay for it. Yeah.

So if anything, it's a good deal. Shout out to Adobe.

If you want to sponsor like this. Yeah, we'll be an affiliate.

I would love that, man. I would be shilling Adobe all the time.

I think you should reach out, though. It's expensive, but it's worth it.

Yeah. And it's a great, you know, it's not expensive.

It's incredibly great. You know, anyone with half a brain would want to buy link down below.

We'll get 15 bucks off. You know, before you go into that, I will say the biggest benefit or the the best business that gets shit on all the time, YouTube premium.

Oh yeah. Hey, spending money for YouTube because it should be free.

I love YouTube premium. love it i think it's worth every penny people just think they just project their own shots of like why they should they should i shouldn't i'm like what you should that that youtube should pay all the servers and all the compute that they have and all the workers that work at YouTube should just be free.

And I say it's just this demand of the universe that like everything, everything has to be given to me or else or else I'll be upset.

Also, we make more money if people watch the ads versus getting YouTube premium and watching the video without the ads.

I think the ads pay more, all things considered.

YouTube claims that the premium views are worth more, which I would believe, because if they're paying 15 bucks a month, then you just kind of have to know okay but then you just kind of have to do some simple math and they need to watch like a million videos in a month i don't know the breakdown on that so i will answer the question that you originally asked which is why is the subscription economy like doing I'll just only answer specific to kind of creators because I have a ton of obviously with school and then I am being one myself.

I actually just think that There's never been more creators and at the same time, there's never been less trust.

And so people don't trust other people as much.

And so people are consuming significantly more content prior to making a purchase and the purchase that they make in general, the first purchases are lower, lower ticket on average.

So maybe 10 years ago, people would immediately see one video, hop on the phone and pay $5,000 for something or $10,000 for something.

And that's just, it's significantly less likely now.

And they're far more likely to grab a book or grab a $29 thing that they can try and see if the quality of the product is, or equality of the community, or equality of the description, is what they deem it's supposed to be worth.

And then they're willing to you know, pay them for more expensive things.

So I think that what is more publicly seen is the subscriptions.

I still think many of these businesses that do bigger profit numbers tend to also still have backends. that are more premiumly priced either in terms of services or products or whatever but the thing that is advertised on the front end for the vast majority of people kind of like you have your top of funnel shorts and then you have your longs and then it converts into your kind of like low ticket And then that ladders up into the, you know, 5% of those people or 10% or whatever percentage ascend into, you know, a higher level.

In terms of hiring people, how do you spot an A player?

I will say that I have yet to have an A player that I don't know is an A player within the first week or two.

What are the signs? Hmm? What are the signs?

They meet so support, right? They decrease the likelihood of failure.

So they are taking things off my plate really quickly and they're proactive. in terms of their decision-making and the actions that they take.

A lot of it is really just a tremendous amount of activity, high activity, high alignment, If you have both those things, you have somebody who's moving a lot of things in the right direction.

And ideally, you get a lot of attention back.

And so if my life gets worse when someone starts, that's a bad sign.

And if my life doesn't change when they start, that's also not that good of a sign either.

Now, of course, there's a little bit of onboarding here now, some of that, that's sure.

But like, by and large, I want to see some dramatic changes in how my time is getting allocated from bringing somebody in, especially if they're taking things off my plate.

But I think that works at all levels. And what's one of the things that you still insist on doing personally, even though you could outsource it?

Well, all the books. I write all the books.

I write all my emails. I write, I mean, I do all the rewarding.

Tweets. All the tweets are mine. All the tweets are mine.

Honestly, every piece of written word that comes out of acquisition.com is me and that is a huge amount of work.

And so it's either me because they took it as a transcription from a video that I talked or I wrote it.

There's only one exception. But LinkedIn, same thing, Facebook, same thing.

It's, it's all tweets are actually my, we were talking about this earlier, but tweets are my, is my biggest secret weapon for how I create so much content.

It's everything. It's the, it's the wellspring.

So I, the tweets are my stream of consciousness and real time.

And then those tweets become tweet reels.

They become shorts. If they're high-performing, I'll just say them.

Many of those shorts put together become longs.

That'll be business advice or brutally honest advice I wish I had had, things like that.

It's just 20, 30 tweets put together. with a little bit more anecdote, LinkedIn posts are multiple tweets along the same thing, but together Facebook, same thing.

So like TikTok, same thing. Like, everything actually, and even my emails are high performing tweet concepts that then get repurposed in the email.

So everything stems from like that one stream of consciousness.

And I think as a creator, you have to find whatever that that lowest friction method is for you.

I always used to email myself like ideas, quotes, lessons, thoughts.

And I used to use that as my method for making podcasts.

And then I just had this like, realization of instead of just like emailing myself, I could just email the world via tweet and I would just tweet them.

And it also made me a much better writer because you have to be so concise with your language.

That I think has actually improved my writing from the book's perspective.

Have you said anything that's recently gotten backlash?

I think I had a LinkedIn post that got taken. a little bit out of context.

So those, I have somebody who writes my LinkedIn, but it's my, it's my words, but he took it from a podcast like this and just took it there and then just took an image and put it together.

And it was basically like, hey, for 10 years, I didn't go to football games.

I didn't play fantasy. I didn't go out. And I skipped friends' weddings, do whatever it takes to get where you want to go, right?

And the amount of people that were like, so two different big backlashes.

So backlash one was just like, this guy's hustle porn.

Like all he wants to do is tell people to sacrifice and I'll, I'll address that in a second.

And then the other was like, what kind of life would you like?

I would never skip a friend's wedding. Like this guy's priorities are all out of whack or whatever.

And so, both of them come down, I think kind of like the, do you, do you have an issue with somebody's business is do I have an issue with how someone lives their life?

No, like different, different destinations.

Like there's a, There's a guy who like is probably a lifestyle entrepreneur and likes to like talk shit about my stuff.

I make in a week what he's made makes in a year.

And he's a big, you know, whatever. And all I can think of when I say is we have different goals, dude.

Like we have different goals. I, I don't, of course, like, it's like looking at professional bodybuilder, like he's well, I train twice a day and I weigh all my food and.

Like I get massages and I do stretching and it takes me about five or six hours a day to do, you know, all the bodybuilding stuff that I do.

And then some CrossFitters, that's ridiculous.

I only work out three days a week. This guy is trying to give you bodybuilding porn.

It's probably, he's way bigger than you and he has different goals than you do.

And so It's just this whole idea of should-itis, of they shouldn't do that.

They should do it my way, which fundamentally just is like, my life is based on my preferences and their life is based on theirs.

Duh. And so if you want to go to your friend's weddings, by all means, go to your friend's weddings.

I don't care. You know what I mean? If you want to have a dog, have a dog.

Like I share the things and like the one line that I repeat over and again is, My life is a documentary, not a sermon.

I'm not telling people to do things the way I do them.

I just share what has worked for me. And if it works for you, great.

And if it doesn't, I love you all the same.

Where I see a lot of the backlash is just because it comes off as dogma for everybody.

But if you added the stipulation to those that want to build a successful business, But that's also not necessarily, you don't need to cater to the people that aren't going to listen regardless.

You put long disclosures at the end of every one of your posts.

If I had put all the disclosures in my tweets, I wouldn't have tweets.

I'd just have disclosures. So it's one, I think, I think the ball said something about this, but basically it's like for opposed to get reach, it will have to have some sort of level of polarity.

And to have a level of polarity, you have to remove context.

And so it's basically like you can have complete context and no one could see it, or you can be willing to stand on one line of gray and say, no, for me, if.

If more people were willing to delay gratification a little longer because they saw some of my stuff rather than take immediate reward, I can live with that.

It's interesting. Every time we talk to you, You always say, oh yeah, I recently did this.

I recently evolved this. I have since developed this. you always have something that you had just done.

Most of the time, oddly enough, it's not even adding things, it's eliminating things.

And it usually words. So you're not doing it.

Or yeah, making your criteria more strict.

What's something right now that you're currently working on And maybe you don't have full clarity of it, but you're seeking clarity.

Well, I mean, how I'm going to launch my next book is something that I'm thinking about just from a timing perspective.

So that's something I'm I'm thinking about.

Honestly, a lot of my attention goes towards what I'm going to try not to do.

And so it's an accurate observation. Because, I mean, if you listen to all the greats, you listen to Jobs, you listen to Bezos, you listen to Elon, entrepreneurial greats, It's like they all talk about focus because it's so hard to do.

It's so hard because the bigger you get, the more juicy and tantalizing the opportunities become, right?

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

I just don't know enough. And the fact that I think it's attractive means I don't know enough.

And so 2024 was the first time in my life where I've not had FOMO.

And that was a first my whole career where I didn't have a moment where I was like, I should be doing that instead of this.

And I've been doing this, you know, I've been the entrepreneur game for a minute.

And that was, it was only like, I realized it in retrospect.

I was like, that was an accomplishment. That was a huge win for me.

Cause I've always had that. Like I, A buddy of mine, close friend of mine, did like $50 million in net earnings in Q4 just from trading crypto.

No employees, just traded crypto, made 50 million in profit.

And I remember thinking in that moment, I was like, Good for you, man.

No idea how you do it. Don't want to know.

I'm going to keep doing my thing. But at so many other points in my career, I would have been like, Oh my God, teach me what you're like.

I want to learn what you're like. And I would complete taking my eye off the ball.

And the thing is, is like, I have, I think I've gotten this, a snowball that's finally started to roll.

And I say this now, hopefully not. on with like it'll stay that way that uh i'll manifest it teaching i'm i hope that i can stick i can stick with stick with it and because i continue to get rewarded for sticking with it.

And it's been the hard, like acquisition.com by, by duration is the hardest single business that I've, the longest duration that I've only done one thing.

So that's been pretty cool. besides Jack's mom.

Okay, we're cutting now. Yeah. What? She was amazing.

She didn't tell you? No, she told me all about it, actually.

Did she tell you to call me dad? I think you are.

I think you... I think I'm entitled to some.

Am I in the will? You took that like a champ.

Once you hit a billion, your laugh starts turning into a Bezos laugh.

A Bezos laugh? Yeah. Gosh, that completely threw me off.

I had something. I had a missile in the cannon.

That's also what she said. All right, that was a good one.

Snowball. Snowball is rolling up. I hope that I can stay focused for an extended period of time.

That sounds like something... that Graham and I need to hear exactly because we're so focused on making the content.

And unfortunately, like most of our revenue comes from the sponsors.

Yeah. And so we're able to travel around the world.

We're able to spend money on the flights and the accommodations and the crazy.

The watches, the dripping. The crazy $15 wagon.

Yeah, the G-Wagon. We're able to do what we do because of the sponsors.

And right now it's enough. but we want to always be improving.

And so now we're thinking like, well, what if we created a product or a service and we're always having discussions. about how we can do that.

But at some point, I always wonder if we just focus on making better content, then we can get better, like higher paying sponsors, same sponsors, we love the sponsors, higher paying sponsors, because we're getting more views and it's like a cycle because of that.

But, but part of me also wonders, should we focus our efforts in something else?

My thought with that is that I am happy also doing what we're doing now.

And I kind of worry that we're good at this thing.

We don't sell our product on the surface.

We don't, but if we take the eye off what we're good at now, are we just adding more onto the plate where we don't need to, where we have a really great balance and a great life and things are going well.

And if we're just trying to create something for the sake of creating something, then maybe it won't be perfectly terrific.

But right now, if we're just focusing on making the best content for you guys, the ones watching, then hopefully it's a pretty good product.

Well, I have so many thoughts on this. Do we have five minutes?

Because I think I have a very significant answer for this.

Oh, yeah. So basically I see this as a spectrum.

So it's a continuum that exists for, and this is specific for creators in terms of how to monetize.

And so it's basically a spectrum that has risk and capital and effort kind of on either side.

So like low risk, low capital effort, high risk, high capital, high effort.

So all the way to the left, you have sponsorships, right?

Which is what you're doing now. Cool. You make money from doing the same thing.

One degree to the right of that would be like an affiliate relationship.

Adobe says, hey, we'll give you 20% of all of them lifetimes.

Okay, cool. Adobe, hit them up. You have an affiliate relationship.

The next is when it starts to get a little bit, you have your drop ship, right?

Your white label. You find somebody who just puts, and you did this with a coffee, I think back in the day, right?

You have that kind of middle ground. So somebody else is gonna manage everything.

I'm just gonna promote it, but I'm gonna own the brand.

And that's, that's that. The next degree here is where you have, you find an existing business where you can negotiate some percentage of equity in the business and ideally distributions and or royalties which I am big advocate for creators to do both because you have costs associated with running the business, running your business, your side of the marketing, right?

And the business makes money because it's monetizing with whatever traffic you're sending, but you need to keep advertising.

And so having some either profit share or some royalty on top line or some sort of cash flow still needs to come back because not all companies sell.

Actually, the vast majority don't sell. I think it balances some of the risk for a creator, but that would be a minority deal, especially with a company or a product that you really like.

And so if Adobe were smaller and would give you a percentage of the company, that would be one where it's, and ideally this is, I mean, this is me turning the tables and speaking to you as an investor.

It's the best is when you can write a check too, because then it's, there's no expectations.

I'm going to promote this because I believe in it and because I want it to grow and I want to get a good, a crazy return on the money that I put into it.

And so you'll have some blend of that deal, but usually for minority stake and maybe some performance tranches that kick in based on how well you do it.

And then the final one, the final frontier is where you actually do everything yourself.

Like the whole thing, soup to nuts, is like you're starting a business.

That's, you know, Jimmy with Feastables, right?

Like he's really just starting a chocolate thing and finding cocoa nibs in Africa and doing all this stuff, right?

And so the upside is Typically higher on this side, lower on this side in terms of the enterprise value of what you're promoting. but so is the risk and the difficulty.

And the idea that I think a lot of people miss out on is like, it's so much about the partners that you're bringing in on the side that they have to, in my opinion, for a true partnership to work, they have to be able to be successful without you.

And if they're already growing, they're already successful.

This is like school, like school's, Schools will be successful either way.

I just want to pull the future towards us faster.

You need a partner who is as good as you are or better.

Ideally just amazing at that thing and you're amazing at this thing and then it's like the sum of the parts is where the magic happens.

But that's basically the continuum. But if you're going to do anything to the right of center there, and you're not just either sponsoring or doing an affiliate deal, I think the best deals is kind of like the school deal where you put cash in.

You, you, you, you know, buy a big stake.

You also promote like those are deals where it's, I think again, in terms of behavior, what is this going to change about what I do?

And I would like to do deals that change as little or nothing about what I do.

If I'm always going to make content anyways, and I'm already getting two thirds of people who want to start a business, then I don't need to change anything.

Now it's still high leverage because I just point them in a direction.

I'm like, hey, I vetted this. I think it's awesome.

I think it's a really good product. Check it out.

And it's free trial. If you don't like it, cancel it. right that that is basically my and I would use that if I were you guys as my decision making variable which is You both accurately said it.

We were really good at this thing. And the more we do this thing, the better we get at it.

We get more views. We get the sponsorship continue to grow.

Fine. We can do some of these other deals as long as it changes nothing about what we do.

And so I think that's the frame that you have to enter those conversations with, which is I am already sponsoring, so me slotting your product in, which I also happen to own a piece of and get some kickback on,

It doesn't change anything about what we do, but then that gives you some long-term upside and maybe a higher distribution. be really interesting.

How about this for anybody watching? If you have a business that you think would align with what we're doing, and you want the distribution, I'd be really interested to see who reaches out for this.

That's a great idea. And also Adobe. And also...

If you guys would be interested if we were to create, because Graham and I have thought about this and we've helped a lot of people just in consulting. with content, specifically podcasting.

You guys think that there would be demand for that.

So that's something that you'd want to see if we went all the way in depth, pre-production, production, post-production, research, et cetera.

Let me know. I'd be open to that, too. Yeah, I tried something on my own.

I'll just talk about it briefly. I put a little feeler out there for a mention that not a mentorship, like a networking community.

And I was shocked. We got thousands of people who reached out who said, I just want to be a part of a network like other entrepreneurs.

A community on school perhaps. So we started at the very top of the list, people who made more than $10 million a year.

And I just Didn't even think of, I just wanted to go and talk to these people.

I probably talked to 20 people. It's the least scalable thing I could possibly do because I'm like talking one-to-one with certain people.

It's not. Okay. Not when people want... I see that focus in his eyes.

Don't go up against that. So far, we got a group of a dozen people.

Who are doing it over 10? Who are doing it over 10 million a year.

And it's just the coolest group of, it's something magic when you have a small community like that versus something that's too big.

I'm big on communities. But I say when it's, it's not scalable in the sense that once you get, it seems like from, I've spoken with quite a few people on this.

Once you get more than 30 or 40 people. You start to lose that one-on-one connection that made it special in the beginning.

It's really about subgroups. So if you look at, is it scalable at the current model?

No, but our community is scalable for sure.

So if you look at, well, you look at Y Combinator, they have a much larger community than that.

And it's really cool. If you look at Vista, not Vista, Vistage, which is a community model.

If you look at YPO, if you're familiar with them, you know, professional organization, they run their, their national, they have chapters and, but they keep the forums to eight people.

And so that's how they keep the... You have access to the whole network because you're like, oh, I'm also a YPO person.

I got vetted. I'm above a certain level.

So you have that kind of cred. But like the...

The actual super close-knit group is like eight people and they meet in person.

And so that's why I think they're like, I think for sure there's, there's demand for something like that because people want all successful people want to be around other successful people because it's really lonely.

Yeah. That was the one thing I was surprised about when I was speaking with all of those people.

Only one of them said that their goal was to make more money.

Only one. And that meant that maybe 30 people said, I don't care about making more money.

All I care about is meeting other people who share the similar problems that I have gone through.

And most of the problems are pretty surface level, it seems like.

And it's like tax planning, estate planning, raising a family, random business issues that come up.

Inheritance, whatever, yeah. things like this.

But, I was shocked how common everybody, all the commonalities between everyone.

Human problems have existed for a human lifetime.

So I thought that was interesting. Yeah.

What is your experience of loneliness? I really like being alone, so I don't get super lonely, to be super candid with you.

I think there are experiences that feel isolating where you're like, no one else is dealing with this.

But usually isolation is kind of like shame.

It only exists in the dark. If you go out and say, hey, I'm dealing with this thing with my marriage.

I'm dealing with this thing with my weight.

I'm dealing with this thing in business.

There's a zillion other people who are dealing with that.

My mom used to say this thing that I really liked a lot.

She said, the news is always the same. It's just the names change.

I thought that was actually pretty profound.

If you look at the headlines of the news, it's like, you know, banks... default, interest rates up, housing crisis.

It's like those headlines have existed for a very long time. who's involved.

And even, even the bad ones, like girl gets abducted, like it's just changed the names, but it's the same stuff.

Humans doing human things. And so, I think that context, but it's still, it's one thing to know that hypothetically another when you meet somebody who's going through the exact same thing.

And I think that makes people feel less isolated.

But spending time alone for me personally is like one of the most, I like being alone.

Are there different tiers to wealth that you've noticed, like for people that go from zero to 100, 100 to a million?

What are those tiers and when do you see diminishing returns?

I think Felix Dennis has a book called, it's like how to be rich.

I think it's how to be, I'll teach you to be rich or how to be rich, something like that.

Anyways. It's funny, but like the first chapter he breaks down like 11 levels of wealth and he says basically, After $400 million liquid, he's, that's when you're truly wealthy.

And he's, he was, you know, he was worth that much money.

At that point, it's like, you can really do whatever you want.

I do think that the jumps are much smaller in the beginning in terms of what makes a really big difference.

I think going from anything to about six figures a year is a material change.

I think going from, you know, even 10,000 to 20,000 a month is a significant change. go from there at about 40 or 50 is another change.

And if we think of like how we're defining the change, it's usually what are the variables that affect someone's daily living?

So it's going to be where they live, the schools that their kids can go to, the vacations they can take, where they can stay, the food they eat. the clothes they wear.

But almost all of those are affected mostly, I would say, up to that 1% earning level, which is about $500,000 a year.

Now you can live a baller lifestyle 500, but not really save anything.

And so if you're a responsible saver, it really depends on your saving I'm actually a lot like Graham, believe it or not, even though I spend money because Layla spends money, but like by percentage of income, I spend a very small percentage of my income.

And so it really just depends on your appetite for saving versus spending.

And I think that's entirely personal because it's really just a question of risk, like how much risk I'm really going to take on.

But beyond that, there's that's just a ratio.

But after that, it's, you know, you're, you have nicer and nicer houses.

You go on nicer and nicer vacations. You travel private, you know, maybe that's, add a couple million bucks a year, you start traveling private.

After that, again, it's just like you're buying boats and you're buying houses.

At a certain point, you really can't consume any more of it.

I will say this, is that I do think that, and this is controversial.

But I do think that money, because they had a study, it's like up to $70,000 a year.

And now like inflation adjusted probably closer to 100%.

I actually think it continues to go up beyond that.

But I think the problem is that people have a skill deficiency in terms of how to spend money.

I think most people know how to spend money effectively up to $100,000 a year. terms of how to make their life better but they don't know how to spend it above that in terms of things that improve their lives.

But I think it's a learnable skill. I think you can get better at spending money to make your life better.

And so for me, things that make my life better are going to be things that buy me time back, things that basically are all the annoyances and frustrations in my life.

If I can pay to make those go away, those are things that net enhance.

And then long-term in terms of purpose. So if you find something meaningful, you can actually devote real resources and make a change or an impact, which I think is, you know.

You should see the updated study on that, that whole $75 million debunked.

No, it was, That was done in a different country.

So they did one recently. Yeah. Well, within the last 10 years of the United States.

Okay. And they found that I think it was about $150,000 was where you get peak income. dollar-to-value ratio.

It continues up higher. Just diminishing returns.

But diminishing returns. And they found that the diminishing returns really stopped about $650,000.

They found that over a million dollars a year, you actually have lower quality of life.

I'm guessing it's because you have more problems, career issues. or maybe friends are not friends with you, or you have fake people around you.

Which is another, like a whole nother. Right.

But it was really, yeah, six 50, 700 grand.

And then it just kind of tapers after that. that seems super, super believable.

But like after, you know, five or $10 million a year in income, like the next strata is, I don't know, 25 maybe 30 40 million a year in income like where you can do like even you know crazier things i guess but at a certain point when you can buy the hotels you stay at it's okay whatever i don't I don't have a need for Omega Yacht.

I think Layla wants one though. You should buy a hotel.

Don't say too much.

[The Behavioral Science of Success: Defining Reality, Communication, and Performance]-[How I Made Millions Without Being the Best - Part 2 (The Iced Coffee Hour Reshare) | Ep 904]

📋 Summary

The Behavioral Science of Success: Defining Reality, Communication, and Performance

The Fallacy of Amorphous Language

Operationalizing "Soft" Concepts

The Role of Reinforcement

Scaling and Business Philosophy

Conclusion: The Path to Clarity

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript