How I Made Millions Without Being the Best - Part 2 (The Iced Coffee Hour Reshare) | Ep 871

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 from 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 if we, it depends on how we define manifestation. So if we define manifestation as like an electrical signal occurs in your brain, sure. But I don't think that's how most people describe it. So I would say be totally on board with manifestation if we define it as knowing that, like, I know that this is possible. Like I saw this or I have some perspective that has changed. To me, that's just knowledge. So if you have knowledge that you can start a bank, you have to have the knowledge that you can start a bank before you start a bank. That makes sense. So fine. But the bank doesn't occur until you take the action. But the idea of 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, you know, the logical proof that I use with this is just simply, you know, mindset plus no action, no outcome, you know, mindset plus action, outcome, no mindset, action, outcome. So the action's really going to be the only thing that's going to—

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 into manifestation. So it's, it's interesting to, for me, like to me, like the example of—

People get so upset by this, by the way, when I bring this up.

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 it, have other people nod and smile and agree with them. And those are all prosocial 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. Action you can define really easily. And so that's the, that's the part, right? So it's, it's really just this word that has all these positive connotations.

I just think it helps you with focus.

So like what would be—

It helps manifestation. Let's say the, let's just say the, 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.

So prioritization.

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

Manifesting the prioritization or the man— like you, we said prioritization and then manifestation.

I think the problem is that you're kind of using a derivative definition for of prioritization.

This is fundamentally why I have an issue with it.

And the, and the, 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 gonna apply that to their definition of manifesting.

People know what manifestation is.

No, they don't. That's, that's actually my point.

A lot of 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. But I don't think so.

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

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 going to be reinforced by that.

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

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

You have declarative knowledge, but also those are skills. And so, 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, that, 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 this.

The benefits of this podcast.

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

Sure.

I just knew that I was competent enough. And so maybe I manifested that. One could argue that.

So the big, the big zooming all the way out here just for, 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, you know, reinforcers or punishers for a set of behaviors and you repeat them in the future. And that's the only thing that I'll say about why someone does something. You've been rewarded in the past for reaching out to people for doing things. And it can be cross-domain. So it's like maybe you reached out to girls and they was able to jump into business and you were able to reach out to business owners. So it was cross-domain. Definitely girls though. Well, I know that, I know it's absolutely, I mean, it's not a hot subject, but like, 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 want to use a term, I will define the term.

So now I believe to shift belief starts with mindset.

Well, it's like, we're like, what's belief? What's mindset? What's manifesting? Manifesting. You're in one way. This is, this isn't not to poke. I actually just, I just want to help. Not, not you guys, everyone else. No, but I just, I don't think it serves people and that's why. And I just don't like, now some people are like, I mean, yes, you feel great about it. I'm glad that if you, if you had the option between making 100 phone calls and sitting there and manifesting, you will get further making 100 phone calls. And so I'm trying to decrease the amount of time it takes people to just do 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. Cause of relationships. We don't know.

You, you, you remove all of these words and every single podcast you're like, I've since removed this word. And now I guess it's just like you've. Gone to the meta of just reducing amorphous descriptions of things.

Just to the observable.

Just to the observable on this existence.

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

Tell us about the book on behavior.

I'm curious about this small work. 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, I know the, I know the book's title. Billion Dollar Offers.

Billion Dollar Beliefs. Billion Dollar Beliefs.

That's pretty good actually.

I like that.

No, I'd probably call it some, I know what I'd probably call it, but Billion Dollar Manifestations.

Yeah.

Right. Billion Dollar Mindset. Billion Dollar Mindset. $100 Million Mindset. Yeah. Billion Dollar Brain. I will, I'll, I'll give you an explanation of, of what I mean by this.

So, uh, it's definitely gotta be a billion dollar and then something that starts at the—

I don't know.

I think billion dollar would scare off a lot of people that are just looking for general, because if you want to market like masses, you kind of have to be 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?

Adaptation.

So it's, it's same condition, new behavior. That's fundamental. Like from a, from a behavioral science perspective, it's like if you were, so if you're, you know, person is condition A and then we teach them something, when they reenter condition A, they change their behavior. So it's observable. So same condition, new behavior. If you, the phone rings and you say XYZ and then I say, hey, don't say XYZ, say ZYW. The phone rings again. You say XYZ. You haven't learned. If you say ZYW, 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, as kind of like tenet number one, the next tenet is looking at what is intelligence. So intelligence is going to be rate of learning. So if I have to do that, you know, example, 10 times with, you know, Jack and 5 times with Graham, then Jack has less intelligence than Graham does in this context. This is a hypothetical Jack and a hypothetical Graham. These names are completely taken at, at random. But then it's like that, but the reason I think that's important is because then it allows people to have direct influence on their own intelligence. So if you learn faster, you change your behavior faster than somebody else, then you can in a very real way be more intelligent than them. And so when we asked originally, you know, do you have to have raw intelligence? I think it depends on what type of intelligence you're talking about when it comes to surrounding behaviors. This is how I define it. But beyond that, it's okay. Well then a lot of words have been like, so what's an excuse? So like an excuse is a statement to avoid punishment, which is very simple. It's okay. That's what it's a statement that someone says something like, what's an excuse? Show me when an excuse has occurred. And by, by looking at, you know, patience, I've defined this plenty of times, so I had to use it all the time, which is figuring out what to do in the meantime. So if you say to a young kid, be patient, they don't know what that means. It's a bundled term. It means nothing. Be patient. It means nothing. So how would I give some directions on how to be patient? Figure out something else to do. That's all you have to do. We are all being patient right now for our S&P 500 accounts. We're being paid. We're doing something else. That's all we have to do is just something else. And so it makes patience operationalized, right? Like, how can I do patience? Like support. What's support? Hey, why aren't you supporting me?

Billion Dollar Dictionary.

Yeah. That's what it could say. When a person you interact with deliberately lowers the probability of failure, that's when someone supports. So 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 with together. So it's, and so, and defining each of these terms has been really helpful for me because it helps me navigate the world. So it's like, what's, what's guilt? What's shame? Like these, these really amorphous terms that are trying to be like, show me guilt. It's what's when it's when you break your own rules and what's shame. It's when you break someone else's rules.

What about purpose?

Purpose. Let me see if I can find that one. I might have it. I have a good—

So you're really just kind of redefining all of these words or at least simplifying them.

The words that are important and, and by defining them, it's more putting them into a context that we're all talking on the same plane? Well, it's, it's, it's, it's, 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 what, where is there, is there a hard drive in your, like, where, what cell is this being? People just say things. And so it's just, it's a permanent change of behavior from something bad happening. Okay. Now, if you're a little baby and you touch a stove and it burns your hand and that's an aversive stimulus and you change your behavior, you don't touch hot stoves again. Was trauma bad?

I love that. I actually like, once you said that you're redefining everything into terms of the observable universe, I think that, that, like, I, I get it.

It'll be my most, I think it'll be my most successful.

I'm curious though, for something as I would say, like, what's courage?

What's courage, right? So the interval of time, a potentially bad thing affects whether you do it.

What about something that's so like purpose or meaning? Those I feel are really, I can't imagine how to define those.

I know. I think they're, 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 try to crack 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 it's 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 even obeying. It's just like, this is tip, like I have to define these terms in order to talk about them because they're also amorphous. 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 efficiently 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. It's being the most important one is to Like if I want to train, which happens a lot in the business setting, it's like, how do you train someone? And you're like, be more confident. What does that mean? Tell a 6-year-old, be confident. It means nothing. It means nothing. They might just say that means talk louder. I don't know what that means. Right? 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 that person as confident. So maybe they look at you in the eyes when they talk. Maybe they nod their head when they're listening. Maybe they repeat back the last thing that you said. Maybe when, when there's, 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, and so we talked to 3 or 4 of the leaders in the company and he was still a dick. And so I was like, what'd you tell him? We were like, oh, we told him to stop being a dick. I was like, okay, well, so I ended up meeting with him and I was like, I wanna 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, I want to, the purpose of this meeting is to decrease the likelihood that anyone talks to me about you again in a negative context.

Cool.

Great. So that was the, you know, agenda. It's like, all right, so in order for that to occur, let's talk about the things that when you do them, people don't like them. And they call you a dick. So it's like when you interrupt people during a meeting, they think you're a dick and they call you a dick later. When you tell someone how to do their job, they call you a dick and you try and force your agenda, whatever. It was 2 or 3 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, you know, I present this thing and then they don't execute on it? I was like, then that's not on you. That's on the manager. And I'll talk to the manager and make sure that they're executing, but 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 3 things that everyone, the 3 behaviors that people then laddered up to saying he's a dick. And then they stopped calling him a dick. And then everyone's, oh, he's like night and day, totally different. But it was just like, no one's specific with their language. And so no one knows what anyone's 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. And that's why they can't manage their relationship because they're like, both people get upset. No one knows how to communicate. And then that's it. They just, they want the other person to guess. What behavior they don't like. And so it's even if I said, oh, you know, John's lazy, you have to think, and this is why most people don't do this because it takes work. You have to think, okay, I think John's lazy. Why do I think John's lazy? What occurred? What did I observe that then made me think that? Now you might find out, you know what, he's actually just slow to respond. Okay. Is there anything else? There was one meeting he came ill-prepared. Is there anything else? No, I think that was actually it. Okay. So when I go to John, instead of being like, hey, you're lazy, I'm going to say, hey, I need you to speed up your responses to under 5 minutes. And when you come to a meeting, have your notes ahead of time, just send them to me. All of a sudden, John's not lazy anymore, but it's because it was this very micro thing that we then ladder up to this amorphous term that no one can understand. And so this is, this has been a huge area of interest for me in defining reality. And I think that honestly, it's helped me navigate reality really well and make higher quality decisions.

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 don't, I think this will be like a service to humanity type thing. I think fundamentally like 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, 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. So if someone reads—

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

If something, 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 and is—

that's what they heard.

They have to define the terms.

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

Right.

And we don't handle—

well, they're not, they're currently not communicating with that person. So like, how would they talk to somebody who hasn't read the book? The way they always do, which is nothing. Which the thing is, is the point that you hit on underpins the fact that most people can't communicate well at all.

Right.

And so if a lot of people want to be different than they are, and I am, you know, first in line on that, there are many things that I, 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, which will probably have something to do with your preferences. And so can you be truly authentic only in that subset of people who act with complete freedom, and when they act with complete freedom, act within the rules of the law. Anyone else who has any inclinations to do anything that's outside of society's preferences or the rules that govern how we interact with each other, uh, 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 is I should be?

I mean, realistically, probably not.

Right. And so again, but the thing is, is once we define the term, we actually can have a discussion about it because now we're all talking the same language and it's much more productive, but it's also way less charged from a, 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 100% of the time. It's like, 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, that what it does is it adds nuance. But B.F. Skinner, who's a famous 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? Like, 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, but just, it would be in a, it would be in a, oh, you don't have to blur. Jack says you don't have to blur. It would be a one-pot version. Something like that would be, tell them what's on your mind.

The raw dog. The raw experience.

No, I think, 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, what do you mean by that?

Yeah.

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? 5 years down the road?

Great question. So it's, 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 were, 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 like a recipe, like do this. How would you explain it to a child who doesn't know what the words mean? And I think that's what allows, well, I mean, it's, it's what allowed me, it's what has allowed me to exhibit more traits that I, 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? And it's 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 I've, 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.

More on patience, less on anger, but better.

And, and how does anger affect negatively maybe your business or your life? What have you noticed?

Okay. Well, I'll say that the negative effects of anger for me have probably just come in, 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? So 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, I'll give you a real example. So if Layla gets upset, and 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 reinforcing, I only, only figured that out later. And so it's a very reinforcing thing. So if I can, I, this gets Layla to stop crying. Right. And so to the same degree, so I've been rewarded in that setting, but obviously she's like long-term, it derodes, 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 show up 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 reports. And so we've been able to manage that within the business operationally. But in terms of me personally, like I want to be better about that. And so that's like an example of something that I'm working on.

What's interesting is I, 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 her. And it's one of my shortcomings.

Yeah.

Since you fixed that, how have you noticed?

Not fixed. Yeah. Well, sure.

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

Well, I mean, Layla has now also, because she understands how this stuff works too, because we talk about it all the time, like she has tried to reinforce whenever I'm not angry and she's upset. And so either in the moment or immediately afterward, she's like, thank you for not getting upset and thank you for being there for me and thank you for just hugging me and, you know, just waiting it out essentially. And so I just have to remember that when I'm in those settings and the more time she reinforces it, the less strong the other reinforcer is, the stronger the, the new one is. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all 8 functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success. So you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance, and we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 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. Um, And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D map, roadmap. Hmm.

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 as that's this belief, I have this.

If we can't quantify it, I don't understand it. And I think like 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, it's been the result of, of, of a lot of seeking and a lot of pain. And that's, so I don't, I don't see it as logical. I see this as just descriptive. This is, this is how it works.

But, but you're able to, to, to assign a new timeline in terms of when you learn something to, to, 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, okay, like this works. But then you're able to then see way deeper into the future and then make decisions based off of that.

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

Yeah.

Like, yeah, I'll get feedback. And I mean, to be fair, I'll get feedback immediately afterwards where you know, she might not be happy. Fair. Got it. 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, everyone's like, I'm done with this. Like this, this super amorphous language talk. Yeah. That's the stuff that I see.

I love it. I could go all day.

Is there anything we're missing?

Because I also want to get through the rest of the outline. Yeah.

We, we should get, continue on the, yeah, but, but this for me, like that was the most like focused I've been. Yeah.

There's nothing else on there?

No, no. Continue on the outro.

Okay.

We got, we got more stuff to get through.

Sure.

Moving on from that, in terms of acquisition.com, how has your criteria changed for businesses over the last 2 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 5 5xed actually every, every 18 months or so. It's almost 5xed.

So how does it work exactly? A company reaches out to you and they say, hey, we want to be—

they'll go through acquisition.com on the site and then—

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

Depends. What is it? So we have, we have, we basically have 3 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 $50,000 and $1 million, like check sizes. And so we do, you know, a lot of those deals. We do probably like a couple deals, 3, 4 deals a month sometimes. Like December did 4, I think we did 4 in January. Like we, 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, we can just deploy. We have the private equity side, which is kind of like the, the big, big, the big boy side. And those businesses, like if we're going to do a deal, they're all bespoke based on, you know, the valuation 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 3 years prior to January of last year, we, you know, we'd look at a business, we'd do 4, 5, 6, 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 or not a fit for us right now. Maybe change these 2 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 do the same basically assessment of a business and say, here's all the things that we would do. Here's how we change it. And so then we, you know, we, we, 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. Or meet my head of sales. If sales is constraint, these are, these are the things that we do. And people have really, really, really liked it. So it's been exceptional. And I think the reason that it works so well is that there's kind of what I was alluding to at the beginning is that there's just not a lot of help at that $1 to $100 million range. And I think we can provide that.

And so how do you make money from that? Are you taking distributions from the company or have you sold?

Some, no, no, they just, we sell it as an advisory service. It's just a service.

I mean, overall, frankly. Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, overall.

Well, no, we have distributions that come from the private equity side. Okay. The venture checks, obviously I'm not going to see anything for that for 10 years. And then services, just normal business.

Why don't you have a website or a place where, 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 $20 million. I promise you. And seeing how sensitive they were to kind of like key man risk around, you know, an acquisition. I was like, okay, if I do deals and I grow my brand, I don't want people to know what the companies are because I'm going to have to 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, Skool, 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 Skool for many, many years. And so my key man risk is something that I'm willing to basically deal with. Whereas if I buy a, you know, an HVAC business, I publicly associate with it. A potential 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 of something I'd gone back and think. Yeah. So I have gone back and forth.

Like their Shark Tank business where it's like, as seen on Shark Tank is pretty big. And you could argue that the business you bring to that will drive up the valuation to a point where even without you, it's still higher than if you were never involved.

And I'll tell you where, so 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 actually say, boy, I'm —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 was this much, and now look at you.

Here's the other thing, I think it would help you negotiate better terms saying that you're gonna be on this website where it's even 100 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, you know, 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, could you imagine 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're not, you don't even own it. You're like, I'm a promoter. I got paid to sponsor and give me a break. Right. And so if I have a, even if I wrote a venture check, to a business and then, and the company does something. I'm an owner and any, any, you know, reporter or, you know, clout-seeking YouTuber would then be like, Hermozi is saying, doing this. And it's just like, how is it different from Y Combinator where they're very public?

Yeah. A lot of these, like even some of these private equity funds are just like, that's their value prop though.

YC's value prop is Harvard's value prop is like the, the main thing they get is the—

Yeah. But there are plenty that go through Y Combinator that just turn out to be, you know, maybe not the best. Yeah.

But I think it's, well, Blackcomb Media 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 the law of large numbers. 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, it reflects on all the businesses. I think it goes both ways. I think the net benefit is like a 51 to a 49. Yeah.

49% downs and 51%. Like I have gone back and forth to the degree where I've been like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna 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 side.

What about school? What was your mindset behind that?

School is an interesting one. So, you know, for me to, again, this is, you know, using brand to promote something, right? You know, it'd been 4 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. You know, 9% of business, 9% of people, 9% of people own businesses and 91% don't. And so if we're at 30% or 33% people who are in my audience own businesses, we're 3 or 4 times represented on overrepresented by business owners because I make business content. Anyways, to the, to, 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 a way that would provide value to everybody. And so I, you know, I, I got approached by a gazillion companies, probably like you do over the years for, for the audience and the access and the distribution that we have. And Skool 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 who 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, it was well, well-timed and well-placed. And then beyond that, from a long-term strategic perspective, like it has network effects built in. And so even in an AI world, like I think it will, it'll do, it'll do great. And so for all those reasons, it was also something that would work for people who were just getting started. And so that's why I, I invested in Skool and then I promoted it. So I thought it, it would, 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, to house. I saw it as a 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 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. So like a school for school.

Yeah. And I think that's just going to, I think that's just going to happen no matter what. Like there's, there's YouTube channels about how to make YouTube channels. There's, 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 2, the MLM component. So I can break that in 2 parts. The MLM thing is just like we have a referral commission, which is like not a very uncommon strategy. And the internet affiliate. 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'd probably gimme 20%. So, you know, whatever. But yeah, that's just 'cause the internet doesn't deal with nuance. So that's the, the not MLM, the single SL, the single level marketing that exists there. In terms of what, what people do with their community, we are, we're pro free speech, anti-censorship. If it's legal, you can, you can have a community about it. You know, if you wanna have a community about painting, have a community about painting. You wanna have a community about Facebook ads, have a community about Facebook ads. You wanna have a community about finding a, the perfect cologne for you, you can have that. You wanna have one about painting model cars, you can do that. You wanna have about how making sick beats. I'm just naming all, just on the top of my head, 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 that? We have 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 the whole rules trap, or you just say, you can make a community about whatever you want as long as it's legal. And that's, that's how, that's where we decided to draw the line.

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

I'm sure it'd crush.

You think it would crush? Would it? Yeah.

I don't know. Graham and I, we've been thinking about making, making content, like talking about production equipment. Isn't it MLM? Researching.

A podcast about how to podcast?

Then you have to ask, is there anything wrong?

That's why Chad loves it.

Right. Exactly. This is a great question is what's, and, 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, nothing wrong with it. It's just an affiliate program.

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

I can, I've studied this so much. It's like, I can, I can say it very succinctly. Break it, break it down. The problem is that the promise doesn't match the deliverable. Okay. That's it. It's false expectations. That's it. Fundamentally, the vast majority of people who advertise, especially in the information space, do not advertise compliantly. And so as a result, they make promises they can't keep. And so people get false, false expectations. That being said, do I think there's anything inherently wrong about saying I learned how to do this? I put, 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, the question is, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with education or even profiting from education. Colleges do it. Why do, why can colleges do it and get, give people zero ROI? 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 fundamental. Like it just comes down to that. If you just don't promise anything, then you're kind of in the clear. If you're like, hey, I put together a course on how I, you know, how I succeeded as a, as a realtor. I make no promises to whether 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 would screw this guy. Now, some people will be because that's the internet, but like anybody, what 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'll have people who are just upset about you not sharing your stuff as people who are upset with you sharing it. And so might as well upset the people who don't pay you.

Vegas Matt also put it really well because he was involved in one before, you know who Vegas Matt is? So he's a YouTuber here in Las Vegas, massive YouTube channel on gambling. But, 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.

Oh yeah. They just take the, I mean, from a business model perspective, you take your advertising, you basically take your entire allowable cost to acquire a customer and say, instead of giving that to anything, I would just give that all to my sales team. And then I will incentivize them to recruit other salespeople so that we can have a continued distributed base. So that instead of having a sales manager who's getting paid a base salary and a small percentage of everyone'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? You know, come on. Like it's Illuminati. You know, like we just say things, but no, I don't think there's anything here. I think the, 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. It 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, 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. Like 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 from the position, like if it's legal, then, you know, do, if someone is willing to exchange money, like again, capitalism based on voluntary exchange between two parties and both parties make the exchange voluntarily because they both believe they'll be better off. Now the belief part is where deceptive components come into play, right? But inherently, I don't have an issue with someone making— I don't claim to have a moral superiority that my way of making money is better than someone else's way of making money. Now, my business might be perceived as more valuable to an investor, which is a different thing. So if you're like, are there business models that make cash flow but don't have inherent value? Yeah, there's tons of those. But do I see that as bad? No, I just see it as different.

And that's fine. So If someone were to take Skool 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— Start with the details.

Why doesn't someone just copy Facebook? It's like they could just copy it exactly. It's like, yeah, the people aren't there.

What if there's another influencer who's backing like skool2.0.com? Yeah.

Let's just say they would, it, 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, it's, and it's, it's, it's the product is so detail-driven. It's all the tiny things. It's not like you could copy the colors and the layout and there, there have already been plenty of people who've done that, but they don't go anywhere. And so, but we could say that about any business.

Yeah. What do you think is the best business right now? Because it seems like from my perspective, just on a high level, the subscription model. Is doing really well charging one price for the year or break it down monthly. That seems to be the new thing. So what's from your perspective, what changes? Is that in the digital creator space? Generally. Yeah. But, but every, every business has, has gone to now the subscription model. Like I'm paying more. I remember when I used to be able to buy Adobe Photoshop for $100 and now it's $30 a month or like $40 a month for the same thing.

Yeah. Is it a ripoff or if we're willing to pay for it, it's just inappropriately priced?

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. Why are you buying that?

Yeah, I think you should reach out to them. Really? You push this stuff hard. It's worth it.

Yeah.

And it's a great— You don't know. It's not expensive. It's incredibly great. You know, anyone with half a brain would want to buy. Link down below. Get $15 off.

But you know, before you go into that, I will say the biggest benefit or the best business that gets shit on all the time. YouTube Premium. Oh yeah. They hate 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 shit 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. Yeah. 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. Okay. We'll be upset a lot.

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.

Cause if they're paying $15 a month, then you just kind of have to, okay.

But then you just kind of have to do some simple math and they need to watch like a million videos in a month.

I don't know the breakdown on that.

So I will answer the question that you originally asked, which like doing, I, I'll just only answer specific to kind of creators, 'cause 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, you know, a $29 thing that they can try and see if the quality of the product is, or quality of the community, the quality of the subscription is what they 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, But 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 that converts into your kind of like low ticket. And then that ladders up into the, you know, 5% of those people or 10% or whatever percentage ascend into, you know, a higher level.

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

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

So 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, 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. You're gonna have some of that, that's sure. But like, by and large, I wanna 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 it all up.

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 reporting. 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, there's, there's only one exception to that. But LinkedIn, same thing. Facebook, same thing. It's, it's all tweets are actually my, we were talking 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 in 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, you know, business advice or brutally honest, you know, advice I wish I had had, things like that. It's just 20, 30 tweets put together with a little bit more anecdote. LinkedIn posts are multiple tweets along the same thing put together. Facebook, same thing. So like TikTok, same thing. Like everything actually, and my emails are high performing tweet concepts that then get repurposed into email. So everything stemmed from like that one stream of consciousness. And I think as a creator, you have to find whatever that, that lowest friction method is for you. I always used to email myself like ideas, quotes, lessons, thoughts, and I used to use that as my method for making podcasts. And then I just had this like, duh realization of 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, I think I had a, a LinkedIn post that got taken a little bit outta 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, 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 like 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, 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 outta 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. It's like different, different destinations. Like there's a, there's a guy who like is probably a lifestyle entrepreneur and likes to, 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 And all I can think of when I say is we have different goals, dude. Like we have different goals. 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 5 or 6 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 3 days a week. This guy is trying to give you bodybuilding porn. It's bro, 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, I have, my life is based on my preferences and their life is based on theirs. Duh. And so if you want to go to your friend's weddings, by all means, go to your friend's weddings. I don't care. You know what I mean? If you want to have a dog, have a dog. Like I, I share the things and like I, the one line that I repeat over and again is 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. 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 of 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. It's, I can't, if I had put all the disclosures in my tweets, I wouldn't have tweets. I would just have disclosures. Exposures. So it's one, I think, I think Naval said something about this, but basically it's like for a post to get reach, it will have to have some sort of level of polarity and to have a level of polarity, you have to remove context. And so it's basically like you can have complete context and no one can see it, or you can be willing to stand on one line of gray and say, no, for me, if, if more people were willing to delay gratification a little longer because they saw some of my stuff rather than take immediate reward, I can live with that. It's interesting.

Every time we talk to you, you're, you always say, oh yeah, I recently did this. I recently evolved this. I have since developed this. You always have something that you had just done. Yeah. Most of the time, oddly enough, it's not even adding things. It's eliminating things. It's usually words. So you're not doing, or yeah, strict, making your criteria more strict. What's something right now that you're currently working on? And maybe you don't have full clarity of it, but you're seeking clarity.

Well, I mean, how I'm going to launch my next book is something that I'm thinking about just from a timing perspective. So that's something I'm thinking about a lot. Honestly, a lot of my attention goes towards what I'm going to try not to do. And so it's an accurate observation because I mean, if you listen to, you listen to all the 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, the more juicy and tantalizing the opportunities become. Right. And it's, and you have to just be like, nope, we're just going to keep doing this, 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, 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 in 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 in the entrepreneur game for a minute. And that was, it was only like, I realized it in retrospect that I was like, that was an accomplishment. That was a huge win for me. Because I've always had that, like a buddy of mine, close friend of mine did like $50 million in net earnings in Q4, just from trading crypto. No employees, 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've been like, oh my God, teach me what you're like, I want to learn what you're like. And I would completely take my eye off the ball. And the thing is, is like I have, I've, I think I've gotten this a snowball that's finally started to roll. And I say this now, hopefully knock on wood, like it'll stay that way that I'll manifest it. Teaching. I'm, I hope that I can stick, I can stick with, stick with it. And because I've continued 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 that. Yeah. Why? She was amazing. She didn't tell you?

No, she told me all about it actually.

I think I'm— 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 out. 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.

Yeah. That sounded like some, that sounds like something that Graham and I need to hear exactly. Because we're so focused on making the content. And fortunately, like most of our revenue comes from the sponsors. And so we're able to travel around the world. We're able to spend money on the flights and the accommodations and the crazy production, the crazy $15 wagons.

Yeah, the G-Wagon.

We're able to do what we do because of, because of the sponsors. And, and, 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 I, at some point I always wonder if we just focus on making better content, then we 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, 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. If we don't take our eye off the prize, we don't, but if we take the eye off what we're good at now, are we just adding more onto the plate or we We don't need to, or 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, everyone's watching, then hopefully it's a pretty good product.

Well, I have so many thoughts on this. Do we have 5 minutes? Because I think I have a very specific answer for this. So, 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 on the, all the way on 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 lifetime. It's okay, cool. Adobe, hit them up. You have an affiliate relationship. The next is when it starts to get a little bit, you have, you have your, your, your, your, your dropship, right? Your white label. You find somebody who just puts, and you did this with the 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 a 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, you know, profit share or some royalty on top line or some sort of, some sort of cash flow still needs to come back because not all companies sell, actually the vast majority don't sell. And so I think it balances some of the risk for a creator, but that would be a minority deal, especially with a company or a product that you really like. And so if Adobe were smaller and would give you a percentage of, you know, the company, that would be one where it's— and ideally this is, I mean, this, 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 that's going to, that of that deal, but usually for minority stake and maybe some performance tranches that kick in based on, you know, 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, you know, what you're promoting. 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 this 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, school's gonna be successful either way. I just want to pull the future towards us faster. You need a partner who, who is as good as you are or better, ideally just amazing at that thing. And you're amazing at this thing. And then it's like the sum of the parts is what is where the magic happens. Happens. But those are basically, that's basically the continuum. But if you're going to do anything to the right of the right of center there, and you're not just, I'm either sponsoring or doing an affiliate deal, I think you can do, I think the best deals is kind of like the school deal where you put cash in, you 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. Right. That, that is basically my, and I, I would use that if I were you guys as my decision-making variable, which is you both accurately said it. We are 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 sponsorships 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, and that's the frame that you have to enter those conversations with, which is I'm 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.

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

That's a great idea. And also Adobe. And also, if you guys, 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 mentor, not, not a mentorship, uh, like a networking community. And I was shocked. We got thousands of people who reached out who said, I just wanna be a part of a network of like other entrepreneurs. We started— A community on school perhaps? Mm-hmm. No. 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. Yeah. I probably talked to 20 people. Mm-hmm. It's, it's 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 to go up against—

I see that focus in his eyes. Don't go up against that.

But so far we got a group of a dozen people who are doing over $10 million a year. And it's, it's just the coolest group of— it's something magic when you're, when you have a small community like that versus something that's too big. 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.

Yeah, it's really about subgroups. So if you look at, is it scalable at the current model? No, but are communities 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, sorry, not Vista, Vistage, which is a community model. If you look at YPO, if you're familiar with them, Young Professionals Organization, they run, they're, they're national and they have chapters. And, but they keep the forums to 8 people. And so that's, that's how they keep the, so like you have access to the whole network 'cause you're like, oh, I'm also a YPO person. I got, I got vetted. I, you know, I'm above a certain level. So you have that kind of cred, but like the, the actual super close-knit group is, is like 8 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. 'Cause people want, all successful people wanna be around other successful people 'cause it's really lonely.

That was the one thing I was surprised about when, when I was speaking with all of those people. Only one of them said that their goal was to make more money. 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. Things like this. But I was shocked how common everybody, all this, the commonalities between everybody.

Human problems have existed for human lifetimes. 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 that there are experiences that feel isolating where you're like, no one else is dealing with this, but usually isolation is kind of like, Shame, it only exists in the dark. 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. And I just thought that was actually like pretty profound. If you look at the headlines of the news, it's, you know, banks default, interest rates up, housing crisis. It's like, Like those headlines have existed for a very long time. We just change, it's just, we just change who's involved. And even, even the bad ones, like girl gets abducted, like you just change the names, but it's the same stuff. Humans doing human things. And so I think that context, but it's still, it's one thing to know that hypothetically, another when you meet somebody who's going through the exact same thing. And I think that makes people feel less isolated. But spending time alone for me personally is like one of the most, I like, I like being alone.

Are there different tiers to wealth that you've noticed? Yeah. Like for people that go from 0 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 Rich. 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. He's like, at that point, it's like you can really do whatever you want. I do think that the jumps are much smaller in the beginning in terms of what makes a really big difference. I think going from anything to about 6 figures a year is a material change. I think going from, you know, even $10,000 a month to $20,000 a month is a significant change. Going from there to about $40,000 or $50,000 is another change. And if we think of it 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, you know, 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. Like those are all, but almost all of those are affected mostly, I would say like up to kind of like that 1% earning level, which is about $500,000 a year. Now you can live a baller lifestyle, $500,000, 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, I, 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 am I willing 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 at 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. There's, you can't, at a certain point, you really can't consume any more of it. I will say this is that I do think that, and this is controversial, but I do think that money, because you know, they, they had a study, it's like up to $70,000 a year and now like inflation adjusted, it's probably closer to $100,000. I actually think it, it, it continues to go up beyond that. But I think the problem is that people have a skill deficiency in terms of how to spend money. I think most people know how to spend money effectively up to $100,000 a year in terms of how to make their life better, but they don't know how to spend it above that. In terms of like things that improve their lives. Like I think, but I think it's a learnable skill. I think you can get better at spending money 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, if you find something meaningful, you can actually devote real resources and make a change or an impact, which I think is, you know, you should see the updated study on that, that whole $75,000.

Yeah. Was it debunked? No, it was, That was done in a different country with— so great. They did one recently. Yeah. Well, within the last 10 years of the United States. Okay. And they found that I think it was about $150,000 was where you get peak dollar to value ratio. It continues up high. Just diminishing returns. But diminishing returns. And they found that it, the diminishing returns really stopped about $650,000. About the top 1%. They found that over $1 million a year, you actually have lower quality of life. And I'm guessing it's because you have more problems, stress, career issues, or maybe friends are not friends with you, or you have fake people around you.

Money, which is another, like a whole nother thing.

But it was really, yeah, $650,000, $700,000 grand, and then it just kind of tapers after that.

I found that, that seems super, super believable. But like after, you know, $5 or $10 million a year in income, like But 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 know. I don't have a need for a mega yacht. I think Layla wants one though. You should buy a hotel. Wow. Don't say too well.