Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 856

Welcome back to the game. Today is a guest spot on David Perel's podcast, How I Write. And so this is a super deep dive on writing, and I would say probably about 30 to 40% of it's on copywriting. And so the book and the books that I've written, the process, how I think through it. If you write for a living in any way, so you write emails, you write blogs, you write books, you write webinars, you write video sales letters, you write Slack messages. If you write words, then you might get value from this. I, Weirdly, I'm not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world. And I actually got a full scholarship to college for writing. I decided not to take the scholarship and go to Vanderbilt instead. But writing has been a part of my life for as long as I've had a brain and hands. I don't get to talk about it often, and I think you might find some value from it. Enjoy.

Alex Hormozi has written two killer business books. That together have sold more than 1 million copies. And all that obsessive writing has gotten him to 9 million followers across social media platforms. And this is the first interview he's ever done that's all about the writing process. One of the things that super distinguishes you is you just like go into a hermosi cave every morning and you just write, write, write. So tell me about how you do that.

I wake up and then I caffeinate and then I put earplugs and headphones on. I close all the windows and I really only write on days that I know have at least like 6 hours or more uninterrupted. Sometimes 8, like I definitely suffer from like Zeigarnik effect, which is open loop, right? The idea of like, if you have something later on in the day, like it, it messes with me a little bit because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then like come up for air whenever I want to come up for air rather than think like I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing. And so I almost exclusively write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar. And so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy writing season around not having anything at all on my, on called it.

And then when you sit down to write and say it's 6 AM, are you like, I want to write for 6 hours, these are the things I want to get done, I'm gonna get to-do list? How do you think about that, man?

I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just like violent effort, but that's about it. Like, I, I write what I write. Um, I never had writer's block in my life. I usually have a game plan of what I'm going to write. So like, I would say from a writing process perspective, I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. I think we were talking about that before this started, like the table of contents, the hardest thing that I spend my time on. Once I have that, that's like basically the game plan. And so each of the chapters, I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read. And so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to what I'm talking about. I also write obviously nonfiction, and so this just gives color to that. I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm going to be talking about. And then usually plentiful examples. And then I will basically put all of my Alex notes basically as the end. And I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written. And I think that that setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books. Because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format. But the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell in each chapter that best embodies whatever the principle is or whatever the core message of the chapter is and what visual framework I can tie to that, that kind of like melts everything together. Or like ties it all together in a really clear way. That's what I spend, like, I, and I usually do words first and I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say like a picture that looks like this. And then I'll move on. So I basically do words first, then I'll go back through, I'll keep cleaning words and then I'll put rough doodles in. And then only at the very end will I come in and put the final doodles. Cause sometimes like my orders change and I'll put numbers in a doodle that I'll, if I move the paragraph around and like have to redo it. Um, but that's been my, my overall process for writing, but I just, I just write and I write as much as I can until I can't write anymore, where I feel like my words per unit of time starts to like drop pretty precipitously.

Tell me about those notes. Where do they come from? Is that like a note on your phone? Is that stuff that you've written in emails?

I have so many books to write. Like right now I have like 20 more books that I have outlined. My books are limited by my ability to promote and launch them more than they are limited by my ability to write them.

Hmm.

Uh, cause I have what I know what my other books would be like. I already know what my next 2 books are going to be.

Yeah.

Um, and I write a lot of stuff down because I don't want to forget it. Like I have this, this Excel sheet that has like 600 stories of my life. And when I go back through them, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot what that happened. And it's like, it's, it's in some ways it's kind of scary because I'm like, man, this was my life and I barely remember. And I have to like retrace the synapses to like go back into the experience. And I think that, um, a great, a great fear of mine is forgetting. Um, and so I write to crystallize, um, the memory, but also whatever the finding was. Because I feel like if you can't remember the lesson, you might as well not have lived it and learned it. And so I spend a lot of time trying to crystallize the knowledge into like artifacts that, and I refer to my own stuff. Like I use my own books for reference. I think there's an Indiana Jones quote that I like a lot. It's a, it's Sean Connery. It says, I think it's Indiana Jones 3. Um, and he says, uh, he says, I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember it. And, uh, because he was like, you don't remember it? And he's like, that's why I wrote it down. But it's funny because people write things to remember things. But they also write them because they think they'll forget them. So it's just kind of this really interesting dichotomy, which like how, how writing serves people in different ways. Yeah.

So then when you're writing your books, it seems like you're really good at crystallizing ideas in your head. So when you sit down to write leads or offers, how much fidelity do you feel like you had before you started the writing project versus how much of writing is a process of discovery for you?

I'd say two-thirds discovery, one-third getting the stuff that I already have out.

Okay.

Yeah. Like as I'm writing it, I'm like, ooh, I didn't think about that. I'm going to have to clarify that. And that's kind of like, I feel like the most exciting part. That's the fun part is when I like encounter some apparent conflict between two ideas that I know are both true, but seem to be conflicting.

Yeah.

That's where like, all right, where's the nuance here? Under what context? Where, where's the through line for this that can create some framework that actually applies to everything? And so, um, the two modes that I use for the frameworks or even the writing that I have in general. Is utility and validity. So, is this true? And in how many situations is it true? And is it useful? And so, for example, if I say sometimes things happen and sometimes things don't, incredibly valid, not very useful. Now, on the flip side, a lot of like, at least in the nonfiction world, a lot of like sales and marketing lore, very useful, not valid. So I can prove a time when there's some sort of tip or trick that works maybe in this scenario, but not that scenario. And so trying to distill out like, what's the fundamental principle that applies to all scenarios is what makes that interesting for me. Like I have tons of anecdote and that's what creates some of the stories that are like in the books that I have. Um, but I, I call it like, how do I break this? So I'm like, how do I break this model? How do I break this truism? And if I can't break it and I can't think of a way that I'm like, It's done. Like, it's good.

Yeah. My challenge when I do that is I kind of fall in love with my ideas, especially after I've just written them. And so like, if I'm— 2 PM, I did a morning writing session. I mean, it's like, I mean, it's like my mom. Like, you can't say anything bad about her, you know what I mean? But like, it kind of takes time. And so I'm pretty dependent on other people to help me break ideas. It doesn't sound like you have that same challenge though.

I definitely— rely on my editor, but I feel pretty strongly in saying that like, I have very little loyalty to my ideas. Like I'm very willing to be like, oh yeah, this was probably not right. I'm absolutely married to the truth, zero about how we get there. And I think that's at least how I approach this.

So what do you do? You enter these intense writing seasons and is that like a season of no type thing where it's like an official thing?

So let everybody know I'm going to be writing and I I do say it's a season of no. So our EA team knows that basically like I'll probably cut my calendar down significantly and maximize for full free days. And typically during that season, I'll only have 2 days where I'll take meetings. And so I have 5 days a week that are completely empty. And one of those days will probably get hijacked, but I would say I'm pretty good about keeping that schedule. Cause I also really like writing. Writing has definitely been a, um, a guilty pleasure. Um, I love writing and it doesn't, it doesn't make the most monetary sense for me, but I really enjoy it. Like I was the, um, VP of the school paper. I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine when I was in high school. I got a full scholarship to Tufts for writing. Um, when I was in high school, I ended up going to Vanderbilt, but like, that's So like, I, I really love writing. And I think that a big part of it is I love learning. And I feel like if I really want to understand something, I write a book about it. And that's been the process. And so I love business. And so I love the components of business and I come in with like my preconceived ideas of these are these anecdotal frameworks that I, when I have 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 frameworks that all of a sudden start to have like a through line that I see, I'm like, ooh, there's a book here. But then when I dive in, it's sometimes, sometimes it goes great. And I'm like, wow, I was right. And then sometimes I'm like, oh my God, I was wrong. That's when it's like really going through the muck. Sometimes not as fun, but I want to like get to the other side. I don't know the value of getting to the other side. Cause that's where I feel like you get the most fulfillment where you're like, this is true. Like you either talk to people one-on-one or you talk to people one-to-many. They're either people who know you, they're people who are not. Fight me. You know what I mean? It is valid and it's useful.

I love the idea when you're writing and you feel like you've just gotten x-ray vision on how reality works. It's like, I've looked at 100 sales letters and I just saw like the core component that just went in all those. That for me, the line that people say sometimes is, I don't like writing, I love having written. That's how I feel about the craft. It sounds like you enjoy the process a lot more though.

I like both. I really do think I like both. I really enjoy writing. I do enjoy writing and I enjoy having written those moments where you have those like little mini breakthroughs, wherever we call them, or at least my editor and I, we call them like fight me, fight me statements where it's just like, we say this thing. It's like, fight me. Like that is true. Like there's nothing you can say about that, you know? And, um, when it's also useful, that's when it's like, we create these, at least these little monikers to live by.

Tell me about usefulness. You've mentioned this a lot, usefulness, utility. How do you think through that?

When someone uses this thing, because I write nonfiction, right? And so when someone uses this framework, this tool, this tactic, do they get to the desire? Do they get the desired outcome? And so if it is valid, um, then it is true. But if it's not useful to anyone, there's no context under which they would actually use it and it would materially change the decision-making process or their behaviors in a way that would ameliorate or make their lives better. And so I like the best frame, like the value equation was, is probably the core framework of the Offers book, right? That's the, like, that was the meat that actually took like multiple years before I actually, you know, crystallized that. But that framework is useful all the time, everywhere. Like it's useful for ads. It's useful for sales letters. It's useful for making offers because fundamentally it's what do people want? They want things that are fast. They want things that are easy and they want things that are risk-free. And if you try to find another component, that's not one of those variables. It's like, it probably is one of those variables. I have yet to see, and maybe we'll see it later. But I've seen many people republish the value equation either as their own or they like change the icons, but like no one has changed the 4. Like they are the 4. And so I see that as like, it is valid. Now, when I see, like, I think bad frameworks, you can make a framework of anything. You put a triangle, you put 3 things on it, it's a framework, right? But that's not a good framework because I can break it pretty easily. If I see lots of people starting to morph things around, then it means that it's not correct. Right. Whereas the, the value, like the value equation has like stood the test of time, at least for now. I mean, it's only a few years, but you know, the concept of MECI.

So this is, they use this a lot at McKinsey and different companies like that. So it's mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. So an example would be, ah, we're struggling with our content strategy for the business. All right, well, we got 3 options. We can do more. We can do better. We can do different. But actually there's no kind of content improvement plan that isn't part of those things. And every single thing would slot into one of those buckets. So when they teach people to to break down problems and stuff, they'll use the word MECI and then that's how they think about it. So it can hit all the options, but also all the options are different from each other.

Wholeheartedly agree. And that's the, that's 100% how I think about it. I can't think of something, that's where I say breaking the model. Like if I can think of an example that doesn't fit in this, the model's wrong. And I just keep doing it until I get those. I mean, more better news or more better different, whatever. Is a great moniker that I use a lot just in business too. Um, but it's like, are there, are there other of those in different subsegments or subcategories that don't exist or that, that people aren't using? And that's, that's what I enjoy trying to discover.

Let's do this. Take $100 million leads. And I want to walk through how you think about book marketing. So let's just focus on the COVID and then just show it to the camera. And what I want to hear is, as you talk through it, How did you think about leads, the icon, the subtitle? And then we'll talk about the back of the book after.

Okay. So the COVID I basically had to make the decision. So this is the first book. I was like, am I going to do something totally different or am I going to just basically make this into a series?

So immediately what we see is $100 million, the same. You took out the testimonial.

Yeah.

That's what I see.

Yeah. And so I just went with another color. There was really no rhyme or reason for blue. I was like, blue sounds fine.

Yeah.

Um, in terms of, uh, the, the icon, I'm pretty sure I wanted to do a magnet. I just kind of was like, you want to attract leads and I couldn't think of, it was either going to be fishing or a magnet.

I think I saw somewhere that you A/B tested the heck out of those.

Yes. So I A/B tested the heck out of this. I. A/B tested probably like 3 or 4 of the image of different, basically different, um, different back variations. Um, but the word leads I tested the hell out of. And so I had $100 million promotion, $100 million advertising, $100 million leads, $100 million marketing, and leads was the one that won. Uh, and so I was like, okay, if leads is— and kind of interesting though, because leads is the output of advertising. And so no one wants to advertise. People want leads. I mean, that's, that's Alex's conclusion. I could be wrong. I haven't tested it, but like, but if I, if someone said, why do you think that? That would have been my, that would have been my answer. And so, um, I tested it because what's really interesting, I mean, and to be fair, it's like kind of the contents of the book is, um, people do judge a book by its cover. Of course. And if you're going to go through all the, all the work of writing the book, which is significantly harder than testing the COVID and the title. Um, like do that, right? You know what I mean? And I think the first time I heard about this was I think Tim Ferriss, uh, tested 4 Hour Workweek for his book and he hated the title, but it, it crushed, uh, all the other titles. And so he, cause he's like, I don't even really believe in like just only working 4 hours a week, but it just, it murdered. And so that's what the book became and obviously became bestseller. And I read this, um, there was this, uh, like white paper that was released by this publishing company or that helps self-publishers. And they talk about this, uh, dating help book that sold like no copies. And then, okay. Yeah. And then all they did was they changed the COVID and they changed the headline or the, you know, the title of the book and they became like an international bestseller. And when I saw that, I was like, all right, this is important. I should take the time to actually like make sure now, but big picture, that was basically how I picked the headline and then the image. And then the subhead, I also tested a ton. 2, which is how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff.

And how do you test that? When you say this, what I would assume is I go to Google and Facebook and I see what drives the most traffic, but how do you test the subtitle?

I can tell you. I have the actual tests here. So it's like, okay, I had the realistic versus the cartoon version. So I tested that out. And so the real one did better. It also was aligned with the real image out of the first one. So I was like, okay, that's good. Um, advertising crushed promotions. I was like, okay, advertising's the winner. And then I did, um, advertising versus leads, then leads was the winner. Then I did leads versus marketing. Now that one was really close, but leads still won. So that's why I ended up doing leads. Uh, in terms of subheads, I only showed 2 of the tests here, but I ended up doing like probably 5 or 6. How to get more people to want to buy your stuff. How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. So strangers narrowly beat out more people. Now, this is the one that I thought was the most interesting test of the whole thing. So how to get more strangers to want to buy your stuff. How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. 71% to 29%. Like just one word. And so when I saw it, it's like, it's so sensitive. And I just, I just come in with like no ego about what I think it's going to be. And even because some people are also like, hey, you should do a shorter version. So just get strangers to want to buy your stuff versus how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. 70 to 30 with how to in front. Right. And so even word concision wasn't necessarily, um, the thing that people kind of like optimize for. And so anyways, yeah, I tested that, that the how to the, the title, the image, and the subhead, because fundamentally anybody who's in my audience who has read the first book, they have a high likelihood of buying the second book if they got value from the first one. I'm not making that for them. I could just call this book 2 and they probably would have been willing to at least take a shot on it. I have to make this for all the people who don't know who I am. And I have to optimize for that one split-second decision where they're like, uh, it's like, you know, actually it sounds pretty good. Like, it's clear. Like, what does this book do? Get strangers to want to buy your stuff. Okay. What's the output of that? Leads. Okay. This makes sense. I need leads. So I will buy this book on how to get strangers to want to buy my stuff.

Back cover. Talk to me about that.

So this is like my little mini sales letter. So I just wrote this as like kind of like blind bullets, um, of the stuff inside of the book. And so I basically just took the chapters and tried to translated into a bullet that doesn't say what it is, but gives kind of like the benefit of it.

But hold on, when you say this is my mini sales letter, that is like uber Hermosi brain going to that. So what matters in a sales letter?

So you can get, uh, 2x, 10x, or 100x more leads than you currently are without changing anything about what you sell. That I think is fair. Like it's a fairly compelling promise. And so then it's like, okay, I want to learn more about that. Now the next kind of like bigger font is I wrote this book to solve your leads problem. And if you talk to small business owners, the largest reason that people will say, if you look at like the small business surveys, why they go out of business, they say lack of, lack of lead flow, lack of marketing, lack of new business, whatever.

Second is running out of money, but I see that as lack of leads, right?

Chicken, chicken and egg. And so then I put a little bit of proof. So it's like today our companies generate 20,000 new leads per day across 16 different companies or start 16 different industries. And they do it using 8 Never Grow Hungry playbooks inside. Once you see them, you can't unsee them. They're so powerful. They work without your permission. Right? So like once you, once you use it, like you don't, you don't have to believe it's going to work. It just works better. Period. And so, you know, the easiest way to get another 5 customers tomorrow. So that's warm outreach. That's the first, the first of the core 4. So what's the benefit of the core 4? That's warm outreach. It's the how you get your first 5 customers. Uh, the hook, retain, reward system. So that's content. So that's the second chapter. Um, and so I just talk about the media as part of it. For that, you know, 6-part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell. That's going to be the paid ads chapter. And so I just took the chapters and turned them into the benefits of the chapter.

Those are super specific. That's what strikes me.

The bullets?

Yeah, right? Because if I look at these bullets, right? The 6-part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell. How to get people to want what you sell would be like, ah, but you're like, there's actually a lot of things going on. 6-part ad framework. The specificity leads to credibility there. More people, especially strangers, to me that nuance is like, yo, I've thought about this, I know how you think well, and these are just very concrete.

Yeah, so that's how I thought about the front and the back cover of the book.

I like it. How is your writing different for when you're writing for books like that versus video? And what comes first? The books lead to the videos, the videos lead to the books? How do you think about that?

Totally different process. Yeah. So, um, namely because of the volume, um, that has to go out. If I'm on camera, I'm not very scripted. Um, it's more like these are bullets that, you know, we'll probably make sure that we nail the introduction because that's very important. Um, so nailing the introduction, nailing what the roadmap is for the, for the, say the movie, for the video. And then like, it's almost like, I'd say this, the, the YouTube videos are far closer to what my writing outlines look like than my final product. Cause if I were to write the YouTube videos as though I were writing the book, it would take me probably a week of sure, of 5 days, 5 full days to, to write just the video to make it, to air, you know, airtight air seal, uh, all the words, but we can do, uh, you know, uh, a writing outline in like 30 minutes, uh, or an hour, you know, for, for a video. And that's much more manageable given like I actually do other stuff for a living.

How do you think about those hooks?

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So what's an example of that?

Uh, there's this one where this girl said like, my, my memory, like my Systems so that you can, uh, outlearn anyone or something like that. And I think we made a version of that. It was like how you can outwork anyone. Uh, and I think that's what we ended up doing for the video.

So then as you think about the interactions, the hooks, the frame for the videos, what matters? Because it's interesting, you basically said I'm pretty unscripted except for the very beginning, which a lot of work goes into.

Kind of like the book. Well, except the book is very scripted all the way through. But like, but like the amount, like 80/20 on the effort of like where's the biggest, the biggest bang for the buck is always going to be It's, you know, hook, packaging, title, thumbnail, first, you know, 30, 60 seconds is going to be where you have probably the biggest leverage on performance for a video. And this is just something we learned. Um, obviously average view duration long-term is going to be something that lifts a video, but right out the gate, um, it's hard, not impossible to overcome a video that's just tanky. Yeah. We want to make stuff that people want to consume. And so I think that like solving for making sure they want to consume it is the title and the packaging and the introduction. And we have to just solve for congruence. Like, is the thing they clicked on the thing that they're going to get? And making sure that they feel like they're going to get it, like that, that promise is going to get delivered on.

And how do you think about when you're delivering a story, how that is different in video versus writing?

I actually feel like my stories in video are pretty, are pretty comparable to my stories in writing. Yeah, because I think I have a pretty colloquial kind of tone that I use in the stories and writing. I, my writing more mirrors how I talk. When it comes to stories. Right. Yeah. So here I am in the middle of nowhere, right? Like, you know, like, and a guy pulls a gun, like Stephen King. Like, if you're not sure what to do with the story, just bring in a guy with a gun. Yeah. Um, same, same kind of idea. Uh, but I just, I tell it like I would be telling it to a friend. There's probably different styles of writing. I assume you would know this better than I do, but, um, I tend to try and get everything out as fast as I can. Yeah. And then I kind of look at it as like coats of paint and that's the description I like. It's just like, yeah, I let it breathe, then I come back to it and then I do another coat and then another coat, another coat. And for me, most of the kind of coats of paint, I'd say the vast majority of my editing that's not socialized is me crunching. It's crunching things down, crunching things down, crunching things down. How can I use fewer words? How can I use simpler words? How can I use fewer words? How can I use simpler words? And I keep doing that until I feel like anything else that I would remove would materially detract from the substance of the book. Once I do that, and the, that process right there is usually like 10 drafts. So I do a lot, a lot of drafts.

You did 19 for Leeds.

Leeds was unbelievably hard. And I basically started from scratch at about halfway through those. So like at like, I think it was, I think it was draft 12. If like I remember it, it was like draft 12 was like, I was like, I'm done. Like, this is it, this book's awesome. And then that's when I socialized with like 10 or so readers and was like, okay, let me know what you guys think. And the feedback that I got, I was like, I have to rewrite the book. And so I rewrote the book. But most of the time, the editing from the socialized post, is I actually use Stephen King's kind of like method there, which is if people have like little tidbits, I'll usually clarify those pieces, add those in. That's easy. If I have many people who have different comments about one section, their comments usually don't matter. It's more that there's something wrong with the section. And so, um, in the third book that's coming out, there was, there were like two chapters that were short that I put at the beginning. Which is, you know, prime territory in terms of, you know, people falling off. What is— I'm super sensitive to front-end feedback. And there was just like every reader had something to say about this chapter. And, um, I just cut the chapter entirely and then just like edited the book to not reference the material in that chapter. And I thought of the chapter as a pretty core chapter to the book. And so then I was like, okay, how can this book exist without this chapter? And I ended up being able to do it by literally just doing Ctrl+R, Ctrl+F for a word that I basically hardcore defined as this, as one of the core concepts. And it was like, I just will fully explain it every time I have it throughout the book. And as soon as I cut, uh, it was, it was actually, I think it was 3 chapters, 1 section. Um, it was like the book was just, it's like reading downhill. Yeah. I mean, it's just like, you just, you just keep rolling. Totally. And that's kind of how I see it. So little things, I'll just, if I agree with them, I'll quick fix. If I don't agree, I'll just ignore. But if many people come in one section, I'll strongly consider deleting it entirely. Or I have to just delete, well, I'll delete the whole thing and then rewrite it, or I'll just delete it entirely. Most times I'll just delete it if I can.

And then when you say the pain is the pitch, I mean, I understand what that means conceptually, but tactically when you're sitting down to write copy, You're working with a business and you're trying to get more leads or something like that. What do you do with that sentence?

So you fundamentally have two, two, two methods of persuasion, right? Um, you could go for, and I can go into that, but like you have more good stuff, less bad stuff, huh? Fundamentally. So you got promise, you got pain. These are your two weapons, right? Uh, and so my goal is to highlight both of those. Now, from a selling perspective, you make an offer at the point of greatest deprivation, not at the point of greatest satisfaction. And so, for example, let's say you're incredibly hungry and you come to my steakhouse and I say, do you want a steak? And you say, yeah. So you have a steak. And after you had the steak, I'm like, how was it? And you're like, oh my God, it was amazing. Thank you so much. And I say, awesome. Do you want another steak? And you'd be like, uh, no, I'm good. And I'd be like, what? You didn't like the steak? And you're like, no, I liked the steak. I'm, I'm, I'm good. And that's because I'm trying to sell at the point of greatest satisfaction, not at the greatest point of pain. Whereas if you walk in the second time a week later and you're starving and you walk in, I say, hey, you're really hungry. And you're like, yeah. And you're like, you want two steaks? You might be like, yeah, I'm two steaks hungry. Right? And then you bought, you buy more. And so we sell at the point of greatest pain, not the point of greatest satisfaction. Now, the caveat to this is people are like, wait, you should sell when you provide value. Only when the value that you deliver creates a new problem that you can then solve. And so, for example, if you are a marketing agency, whatever, and you help a customer get a whole bunch of leads, all right, you, once you solve their leads problem, if you say, hey, do you want even more leads? They're like, no, I can't even handle them. So at that point, you solve the first problem, but now they need somebody to help them work the leads. They're now hungry for dessert, right? Right. Or whatever. So they have a new deprivation that we can then sell the next thing. And so I see that as a big mistake from a copywriting perspective is actually the timing of when the copy is being delivered in the, in the larger context rather than the subcontext of the prospect. And so when I'm thinking about the pain is the pitch to bring this full circle is I want to think about as many very concrete examples that someone would experience pain. And so I remember when I was, uh, so when Layla and I were really poor, And I just lost everything and we decided that we weren't going to actually do the gym business anymore. So there's this like, you know, 30-day period where we decided we're not going to do the gym thing. And so, uh, I said, okay, she had lost 100 pounds and done a fitness competition and all that stuff. And I was like, all right, I'm going to write a sales page of your story because my story isn't compelling. I've had a six-pack my whole life. No one cares. And so, but her, she had all this weight loss, whatever. And so I wrote her life story and she was like, This is more compelling and I'm the one who lived it and I didn't live any of it, but I just thought about like how she would wear a coverall when she would go to the beach and she would get chafing between her thighs when she was walking all day. She was overweight. Back to that specificity and not wanting to be in pictures and just be always in the second row or to the side because she didn't like having her picture taken. And I'm like, how many of these moments, right? And so like pain happens in moments. And so it's, I want to capture the moment because Anyone who's had that pain is like, I never want to live that. I would never, never want to have that happen again. I think that if you can accurately describe a prospect's pain in their own language, in their own experiences, you can persuade them to buy whatever your product is based on how well and how knowledgeable they believe you to be as a function of how specific you were about the pain they're experiencing. And so if I, If I'm talking to a business owner that's doing $10 million a year and I'm like, this is what's going wrong in IT, right? And this is what's going wrong in sales. And this is what's going wrong in your marketing. And this is what's going on. And they're like, okay, I get it. I get it. You know where I'm at. I'm like, right. Do you want my help? I don't have to make a promise. If I can describe the pain so acutely and they're like, he can't know that pain this well and not be able to deliver.

Sure.

And so that's where the pain is the pitch comes from. And so oftentimes, um, when people are trying to write sales pages or even they're trying to do a sales pitch, um, they, I think many people will overemphasize promise and there's nothing wrong with having promise, you know, private compliance, all that stuff. Um, but the thing is pain is what motivates a lot of people to take action.

It's cool to hear you speak because what really stands out is how much of an engineer you are and you have this almost mathematical formulaic way of speaking, but you are in search of formulas in the way that engineers are in basically trying to break down reality into formulas to basically say, yo, I'm trying to figure out how things work, simplify it, get it to a place where it's super clear, concrete stories, examples, and then I'm going to share it for you so that any problem that you have, here's an answer. I feel like that's a lot of what you're going for in your writing.

It's 100% what I'm going for. It's actually very well described. When I get like in my deep emotional places, I'm like, I just feel like I want to understand the world better. And a lot of times I feel like I don't understand it well at all. And so a lot of my writing is an attempt to just understand one tiny quarter of it. And that's just happens to be the quarter that I spent a lot of my time at. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about business. And so a lot of my frameworks, a lot of my writing, a lot of my content is in search of simplified formulas of seeing the world accurately. And so Fundamentally, if you can predict, you can control.

What do you mean?

If you know all the variables that you can influence to create an outcome, right? Which means that if you have a perfect predictive model, so this would be like from a science perspective, like if you have all the variables that predict an outcome, then if you reverse that, it means you can also control the outcome. Okay. If you can manipulate the variables. If the weather is one of the variables, fine, if I can't control the weather, but if I can put someone indoors and mimic the weather, then I can in a very way, in a real way, uh, control the outcome.

So what you're saying is that businesses have these similar equations and you can say, I'm struggling with this. I can pull the lever on leads and then I know what's going to happen here or there.

Yeah. We don't have enough demand. Okay. Well, demand is straightforward. Are we going to talk to people one-on-one? Are we going to talk to them one-to-many? Well, what, how many customers are we going after? Fortune 100? So it's probably going to be a one-to-one approach. Are we going after mass market weight loss? It's probably one-to-many. Okay, cool. If we're doing one-to-many. Like, are we going to do paid ads or are we going to be making content? Okay. Well, we could use one-on-one to get affiliates who then are doing paid ads or doing content on our behalf. Well, then we can use that strategy. But fundamentally, the only 4 things that you can do as the entrepreneur or whatever is cold outreach, warm outreach, paid ads, content. That's it. It's the only thing you can do. But what about affiliates? Well, you do one of those 4 to get the affiliate. You reach out to them, you make content saying, hey, I'm looking for affiliates, or you run ads saying, hey, I've got an influencer program. You're going to still have to do that first core 4 to get other people to come do the other stuff on your behalf.

Uh, here's the other— very Alex. There's the— dude, there's 2 lines that I feel like I've really— that, that I think you really nailed.

Okay.

The first is, we'll talk about this one first, that if you put in 10 times more work into a book, because the quality is better, you end up with 100 or 1,000x the word of mouth. Talk to me about that.

It's kind of the difference between, you know, gold medal and fourth place. The real difference is small. The practical difference is enormous. So what's the difference in terms of someone's life when they're the gold medalist of something? They get endorsement deals. They're forever the gold champion, like all that stuff. Fourth, it's like you get nothing.

Right.

And so I think a lot of people don't even get fourth to be real, you know, like they're like number 100 and they, but the thing is they still try pretty hard. Yeah. It's just that all of the best returns come at the end of work. It's like those— it's the, it's the 16th coat of paint that really just makes it that little bit better. And I think in an increasingly connected world, more things are winner-take-all.

Well, the way that I put it is that the curse of the internet is global competition.

Yeah.

The gift of the internet is global reach.

Yeah.

And because of that, your stuff has to be way better in order to stand out, but then the rewards on the other side are way bigger.

Yeah, I think Naval has a good quote on this. He says, um, technology, uh, democratizes consumption and consolidates production. And so it means that if you're the best in the world, you get to do it for everyone.

Yeah.

And so then it's like, if you get to do it for everyone, then it's like, then try and become the best in the world. And the best in the world, definitely not going to do it on 40 hours a week. It's higher leverage to work more, which sounds ironic or counterintuitive, right? Because then that's kind of the point of what, like, I think why you like that statement. It's like, How are you telling me that this unscalable effort where I'm putting in n equals whatever, many more repetitions, like I'm getting diminishing returns here, right? How can it, how can that be more efficient than doing half the work or having a ghostwriter? It's like, well, if I have a ghostwriter, no one's going to tell it, talk about my book, right? Like I'm just going to have a marketing campaign. I'm going to sell whatever it is before people read the book. And that's it. But the long tail on time is huge. And so the fact that like Rich Dad Poor Dad still sells 100,000 copies a month, 40 years, I don't even know, 50 years later than when he originally wrote it. I'm like, I want to build assets, not magazines with hardcovers. And that's also why I spent a long time on all the books to try and make them, to make them evergreen. Like think about writing a book on advertising without talking about any single platform. Facebook is not in there. Instagram is not in there.

So as you were thinking about these, you were like, in 2080, I want this book to be as useful as it was when I wrote this.

And the easiest way I do it is I backtest it. What does that mean? Does this make sense 2,000 years ago? People still want things to be risk-free. They still want them to be fast. They still want them to be easy. You can reach out to people one-on-one that you know, that you don't know. Reach out one-to-many, uh, that you know, that you don't know. Mm-hmm. Like reaching out one-to-many is standing on the corner, corner of a street and shouting. That's what it is.

Right.

Right. You can put a billboard up. You can have a sign. Like this works 2,000 years ago. And so that's, so rather than trying to predict the future, I just look at the past and say, does this still work? This one's good too.

It's from Michelangelo. If people saw how much work I put into my art, they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is.

I love this, this visual, which is that If you look at a marathon, right? If you've ever like gone with somebody to some marathon that they're running and you wanted to support them, 95% of people are in two places at the beginning, at the end, but the marathon is everything in between. And so we, as a society, the highlight reel is only these two places. And so what happens is most people in their mind assume that that is the race starting and then finishing, but the 26.2 miles that happens in between, like the mundane middle, Right? Master the middle is the part where the champions made. And so I think that to the same degree, like if people saw that I wrote 19 drafts of this book, they wouldn't think it was that special.

Can we do this? Can we open up to that table of contents? And once again, I just want to remind you, take as much time as you need to find. So it's the second sticky note here. So if you go right here, should be opened up right to it, but take as much time as you need to go through. The table of contents, and I think it'd be really cool to walk us through how some of these ideas changed. And also, I just want to emphasize before you start here, this table of contents, it's not like, oh, Alex made a table of contents.

No, no, no.

This, the table of contents is the outline for your book.

Yeah.

And so it does a lot more than a standard table of contents.

And I feel like that's how— Alex's opinion— I feel like that's how books should write. Like, if you want to If you want to figure out if you want to read a book, I feel like you should read the table of contents and be able to make a good decision. Sure. And that's kind of, and I try to make my, my titles and chapter headings like pretty descriptive. Like this is about Ormont Reach.

So what's going on here? So when you start, what am I looking at?

So believe it or not, this book was, was the original through line was going to be about leverage. And I ended up cutting all of the leverage concepts from the book for the most part, except for one chapter right before lead getters. Um, because I just, it was so difficult to try and weave it in that it felt forced. I still believe it to be like the actual essence of that, but because it's like, how can I as one man get 20,000, 30,000 leads a day? Like how? Well, I can't do it. I do it through leverage. And so that was kind of like the, the catalyst for wanting to even like begin writing about this. Um, but anyways, so, uh, this was kind of like my rough ideas. Like, okay. You know, I have to define some terms, right? I have to define media, lead gen, leads, content promotion, uh, the 3 contact types, which is not even a thing. Uh, I thought it was going to be a thing. It wasn't a thing. Promotions, I ended up just cutting entirely from the book and using somewhere else. I'll just leave that there. Um, you know, and, you know, I was going to take this very like, like everything we used to talk about marketing is wrong. Right. And, um, I do believe that. To a great degree, that is, that is somewhat true. But it's like, okay, now you gotta define the target. So there's like the market, you know, deeper, up, down, adjacent, um, different market types. I ended up cutting that from the book.

So, but what I see you doing here is you're kind of trying to do a full pass, give yourself enough fidelity to see where you're going. Yeah, but you're not married to this. I mean, we did 19 drafts here and we completely rewrote it after number 12, but you're not married to this. But it's crucial that you're actually putting enough on that you're like, I can at least start walking now.

And so I would say that one of the biggest filters that I use for utility is whether it can be operationalized. And so the fact that it's unsurprising to me now, because this was however many years ago that I wrote that, the activity box is what I called this. I didn't even have the name of the core 4 yet, but the idea that like, what can I tell someone to do? If I can't change their behavior, they cannot learn, which means that there's no point in writing about it unless it changes their, what they do. right? And so that has pretty much been the, the biggest lens that I use from a cutting perspective when I'm making the book. And so I think the reason a lot of people are like, man, the books are, from what I understand, people say that it's, they're, they're really digestible. They're really easy to use, really easy to understand. It's because I talk almost zero about theory. Yes. I only talk about what you do.

Yeah.

And by talking that way, it demystifies a lot of it. I will eventually write a book on branding, but I looked up all the, all the definitions of branding on the internet from different marketers. And I was like, I don't know what any of this means.

They're all fluffy.

Yeah. It's all like the feelings, impressions, experiences that a prospect has and associates. And I was like, I don't know what any of this is. Right. I was like, well, if I want to brand, I have to figure out what I do, what would I do to brand? Right. And answering that question has pretty much been how I try and answer everything within businesses, which is like, okay, how, like, what is sales? Sales is just having a conversation that increases the likelihood that someone purchases. Right. It's like, okay, cool. So then everything that increases the likelihood that someone purchases within the context of conversation is sales. Right. And so then like, okay, now I can start working through this. Right. Okay. So this is the first version. And what I will say that often happens is like, I'll write all these ideas that I want to have in the book. And I'll probably end up being able to make the book like 10% of it. So like, if I look at all of this, I cut out, like I cut out so many people, like I have this, the who, just this one line was the second half of the book. Just this one line, um, like operational drag, reliability, method, platform, all of that was cut. Uh, more new, better. I actually put at the end of section 1 around the activities, like anyway, so I moved.

So actually, this is really interesting that you don't actually have a very good sense of what ideas are going to be the best ones. Like you love more new, better. You absolutely love that idea, but look where it is. It's section 6, bottom line, almost looks like an afterthought. So that, this idea right here, that's like an embryo that then really grew through the process of writing this book.

Oh yeah. So like once I get tired enough of something, I'm like, all right, I'm going to rewrite it from the top again. And so this is me rewriting it, uh, the sections, right? And so I'm like, okay, now it's actually just define the target, where, when, give, ask, evaluate, scale. So I thought it was going to be this like incremental process that I'm leading someone, because again, leverage was like this through line that I wanted to have. Um, Uh, through the book. And so then I got to like, okay, maybe I can try and visualize this a little bit better. And so, you know, marketing, like, where do people actually come from? Right? Because people exist. How do I get them to find me? Like, I would have forced them to find me, which fundamentally is what I think advertising is. You force people to find out about you.

It's also just striking that you're doing a lot of drawings to basically work out the high-level thing. This isn't you're writing and then you're drawing. It's like you're drawing and that's how you kind of get the conceptual map of where you're going to go.

Yeah, I do almost all doodles. In the beginning. Yeah. So doodles are at the beginning, at the end.

And this is an iPad thing? Yeah.

Yeah. Just like, just, you know, just notes or whatever. I mean, there's a huge amount of time that I was like, you know, media different. You know, this is a book on advertising. So I'm like, okay, well, media is a huge thing. Platform's a huge thing. Audience selection's a huge thing. And so the whole time I'm thinking like, okay, maybe that's media section 1, platform section 2, audience section 3. And I'm like, that's not, that's going to be so boring. Like, it's going to be a terrible book. Um, and then I was like, okay, what about the process? Like, how do people buy? Now, real quick, when you get there, you're like, oh, it's be so boring.

It's going to be a terrible book. Are you down on yourself? Are you at this point like, you know what, I'm going to work through this.

I need to find another way. So right here, this right here, these 4 little lines end up being the second half of the book. Wow. Right? So like, it, it totally, like, it just keeps. And a lot of times it's like this cutting away process, right? This is actually just continued from the, the one before because I went— this is all leverage. All this stuff was leverage. So I'm like, okay, this is the first time I'm like, really, I've got this attract attention, interrupt attention. So I was like, maybe that's going to be like an angle. Yeah.

Cause I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, but see, this is the Mosey method, which is like, you're always trying to find either mutually exclusive, collective, collectively exhaustive, or these contrasts where you're either on this side or you're this side, which I think is how you can make the Mises.

Yeah. Like if you draw, like if you draw one line, it's going to be valid. If you draw two lines, it's much harder.

Right.

Not be valid. Right. Are they all true mutually exclusive?

Right.

Um, yeah. So this is me trying to put sentences in place of all the different ways you can get customers. Okay. Um, God, this is so like, and then I tried to make it this like leverage equation of like you times promotion times offer times the medium times the platform. Like that's all the variables that exist. This whole thing ended up being one paragraph.

Wow.

In, um, in the second half of the book.

That's absolutely striking to me is how you just don't actually have a very good intuition for which one of the ideas are going to be good. And that's not, I think that that's We're all writers. We just kind of have to wait and see.

And I was like, I'm supposedly good at marketing. So that was a little humiliating. Um, this has been my big filter is like, what, what do I just do? What do I, yeah. What does someone do as a result? And if I can't clearly define that, then I probably either just need to break it down more or I just need to cut it. It's just not a thing. Yeah. That's been probably my number one filter for everything. Like, what does it change about someone's behavior? And that's why defining learning was so important for me. Like, if I want this book to educate, educate's about changing behavior. Fundamentally, if you don't change your behavior, you didn't learn. Just like in the simplest, like that is how you define learning. And the speed of the rate of learning is intelligence. So if I have to show you the same stimuli multiple times before you change your behavior, then you are dumber than somebody who can change it immediately. Sure. Right. So growing it, you got to do more, pay more, new platforms, more frequency, more uniques, more impressive. Like I kept like working through this. And so this was actually just continued there. From that same, that same page. And then I'm like, okay, scrap all of that. Let's start with just like, what about the basic questions of like, okay, maybe it's just who, what, where, when, how, how much, how long.

And what's crucial is you don't get here unless you have all these pages.

And so that I, for a minute, I thought this was going to become the table of contents. And then what it really became is this became the action at the end of every chapter for, uh, yeah, go for it. Yeah. So that's the final result of me being like, oh, this isn't the table of contents. This is what I need to show for every way of advertising. So when you're posting content and you make your action checklist, you just have to say, okay, who's my customer? You know, what, what am I like, what am I going to do? Where am I going to do it? What medium or platform? When am I going to make this post? So this is basically how you make your list of this is what I'm going to do.

Nice. I love how messy all this stuff is. I don't know. I find that to be so gratifying. You know, cause it's so clean in the output and it's just that this is a train wreck.

Thanks, man. Yeah. 3 ways. I mean, I could keep going on this, but it'd be—

do this. Go to the very last one or the table of contents in here.

Yeah.

Let's go to the final.

Yeah. And so I got to here and then I thought, and this, this is what was so painful. I thought this was going to be a thing forever. Like I thought that I had this like friction framework thing, like filters. Cause I thought I was like, maybe it's like a distillation process. Like. You distill, like, raw attention is the input and then leads is the distilled output of that. And so I kept doing that lead distiller, I'm like lead distillation process. And so then I was like, maybe I can make an acronym around this. Um, and then I'm coming back to this method medium thing that took forever to try and work through. Um, and then I was like, can I do P's? Like, I don't know if I can find an acronym, I'll use it. And I kept going. I don't even know where the end of this thing is. Right.

So right here, I see start here. Get understanding, get leads, get lead getters, get started.

Yeah. And then this became the final. So this was like a couple versions before the final, and then that was the final. Nice. That very messy process got me to here. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, this is the work, man. It's all— it's draft after draft after draft.

So we look at how much stuff is here, right? The amount that actually made it to here is like this, this line, this became one chapter, and that's it. Everything else I more or less threw out. So that's how I came up with the table of contents. And then I was like, all I gotta do now is just write the book, right?

So then once you did that, then it was basically game time.

Yeah, then it was easy.

Tell me about this. How do you think about who you're writing for? Because One of the things I learned from you is there's this difference between being known and being respected. And it's really easy to look at the analytics and say, number go up, therefore good. But no, you're trying to reach a specific kind of person. So how do you think about that?

I think it's the validity utility piece. Like, is this useful? And I think that people will consume things that are useful for them. Like, does it make their life easier? Does it make things happen faster? Does it make things less risky? Depending on who you talk to. Like if I talk about food, then that applies to everyone. If I talk about leads, it's only applied to people who are advertising, which is usually business owners. And so I think about this in context of deep and wide, deep versus wide. And so wide I define as something that is only useful for a beginner. And deep I define as something that is useful for anyone, like in a, in a vertical. And so how to get your first 5 clients is useful really only for a beginner because anybody who already has customers is like, I know how to get my first 5 clients. But if I talk about strategy, that's useful for somebody who's starting out and somebody who's got a billion-dollar company because I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I can have something that's deep and wide. And those, that's, that's kind of our sweet spot for what we try to do. Now we don't always succeed, but like, that's our, that is the intention. Is I'd like to have something that a beginner can get value from and somebody who's super advanced can also get value from independent of their context.

And how do you think about the general strategy of what you're doing? Like, what was the genesis moment of we're gonna make rockin' business content and then that'll be the first domino that then makes all these other ones fall?

Tim Ferriss has his concept of like the big domino, so you kind of like, I don't know if you're purposely referencing it, but basically like, is there one thing that is so important that I can do that if I do that, it makes the rest of my to-do list irrelevant? And so it's like, if you have 100 things on the to-do list, it's like, there's probably not one that's important enough because if it were important enough, it would make the other ones disappear, either shrink into irrelevance or accomplish by consequence. Right. And so we're investors, right? And we have capital. And so what does every investor want? They want a proprietary deal flow. And you want to shift the supply demand in your favor. And so if I can have unlimited people coming towards me who have good businesses that want to do deals only with me, then I can decrease the likelihood that basically I can decrease my skill at picking and negotiating and still probably do well. I saw the ultimate way of maximizing my luck surface area as building, you know, our hope is the most valuable business brand out there to business owners. And if we can build that, then I don't need to worry about all the negotiation tactics. I don't need to worry about having the most capital. I don't need to worry about having the best term sheets. I don't need to worry about any of these things if I just have more people who want to do business with me than I can possibly do business with. And then after, after you, you, you match the supply demand of like, okay, there's more people who want to do business with me. Then it's how, what quality of person, like basically then you can just consistently continue and that's kind of an unlimited, I think, continue to raise the bar of the quality of company and entrepreneur that you work with. And so like the companies that we, that we invest in now don't even look close to the companies that I invested in 4 years ago.

Talking about this, the number 1 creator mistake is building new products for their audience rather than building more audience for their product.

Okay. I'm going to tell you this little side story and then I'll ask the question. So I'm really a pretty big stickler with written word. And so it's been very difficult for me to have anyone write for me at all. And so as a result, basically the only thing that's fair game that my team can use to put captions on stuff is stuff that I have said in a video and they can just transcribe it or tweets. That's it. Anything else that you've seen that's written is me. Okay. And so like, just put context on like, if all the words that are out there, like I have written all of them or I've said them, that's it. And so, um, to your question, it's, it's more of a business mistake than I think it's just creators fall in the same traps. And so let's say they, they spend this time growing their audience and they get to call it, you know, 100,000 followers, whatever. And then they come out with a product and then they sell the product and they make money. And then they're like, huh, I should come out with another product. To make more money. But what it did was it reinforced the wrong activity because it was late. So the activity that made the money was building the audience, not coming with the product. And so what happens is you find these creators who have like 6 businesses essentially, which is really just like 6 different products that each of the businesses in and of themselves could be $100 million plus businesses, but they don't have enough audience. And so they do the short-term fix, which is come up with another thing, But long-term, you end up drowning in the fact that you have 6 businesses and your attention split. And so there's 2 components to this. So one is that if you just launch a product on its own and there's no repurchase rate, or it's not consumable and there's nothing recurring about it, then you're going to have to keep coming up with products, which means that's kind of a strategic mistake, right? We should have just thought of something that like, if we launched it, people were going to buy it quickly, but then keep buying it. Now you have a regular stream of income and you can take that income and keep doubling down on the audience to grow it. Or pay for other people's audiences or pay for ads or like all the other strategies that are in the book of like expanding, expanding your reach. But fundamentally, that's the trap is that rather than saying, cause like you just think about a long enough time horizon, do you just keep starting new products? And then you, in 20 years, you have 30 products that you're doing. Or when I say products, a lot of times it's businesses because the products are actually not, they are too differentiated to be like a second product in the same line. I use them, I have two different t-shirts. I don't see that as a different product. If someone goes from t-shirts, uh, to selling consulting, that's a different product, right? Versus the alternative, which is like, I just make t-shirts and I keep advertising. And all I do is I keep getting more and more people to find out about my t-shirts and my brand. And that's how I grow my sales. And it's going to be more steady, less pops, but that's how you can build a really big company. Whereas if you have 7 businesses, which like the most common thing that I see, you end up just going to be split thin and all the products are going to be crap. Yeah. And I see it all the time.

So when you say, hey, I'm a real stickler about words, how does that show up?

We have by and large solved this problem by me having lots of video content and the team being able to take any snippet from anywhere if it's appropriate to use it as, you know, like a caption or something like that. Like LinkedIn is the only thing that I don't write, write. Uh, so captions in LinkedIn are the basically things that I don't manually write, but they are taken from either tweets or they are taken from videos. And so that's— but emails I write, books I write, copy I write. Um, not ad copy, that's one that I don't write as much, but that's a problem, so I'm fixing it.

So tell me, what is the business model of these books? Break it down for me, because it's— you sell them for cheap, they're You spend a bunch of time on it. I mean, the, this sort of naive person could be like, what are you doing?

Yeah. It makes no sense. Uh, so that's part of it is that it does make no sense. Um, but the other part is that long-term, like I think that I'll die and I, my hope is that these will still be around, but, but I don't think that's true.

Isn't this the thing that sort of initiates everything else kind of gets you the domain expertise?

Yeah. I'll, yeah. So from the asset perspective. I write these because I really want them to be assets. I want them to help a lot of people. And that, like, I think that anybody who reads my books can feel my intention behind what I'm trying to do. Like, if it were just a lead magnet, which is why I think it would cheapen it to describe it that way, they wouldn't be bestselling books, right? I think they would just be lead magnets and suck. And so I think the ultimate lead magnet should be timeless assets. And I think that's where a lot of people mess up when they do what it like. 99% of people will never buy anything from you. And, but 99% of people are what create your reputation. And so I want them to consume something that is still exceptionally valuable because they are ultimately the ones who will create the reputation you have. Now, of course, you're like, well, you don't know him or you've never done this with him. It's like, yeah, but the internet doesn't really deal in nuance. And so yes, this is the gateway drug, but really before this, the gateway drug is the content. And so the content's really the first thing that Samuel consumes. And we want to make that really, really good. And then if they got enough value from the content, they're like, maybe I'll give one of his books a shot. And if they read the book and then they get way more value, then, you know, maybe they come into my world and they show up at our headquarters and come to, you know, come to one of our, you know, advisory events.

And when you speak to people who come to the advisory events and whatnot, what kinds of people, what kinds of businesses do you recommend that the founders be writing like you do? And then if, if they do that, what do you tell them so that they can be successful?

And honestly, I basically try to dissuade most people from writing a book. And I think that's because it's people who aren't writers, who don't love writing, see my book and think, oh, I'll do that. And it just like, it's the Michelangelo quote. You don't understand how much work it is. And you, I could already tell you if you've never written before, you aren't willing to do it. Like I've been writing for a long time. I haven't been writing as publicly from a book's perspective, but I have 4 books. Like, it's not like I'm— and before that, I loved writing, you know, in my— I've loved writing since I was a kid. And so it's something that I can do and can immerse myself in and really lose myself to the craft. And a lot of people can't do that. The amount of people who are entrepreneurs who I know who are like, hey man, I wrote my book in 12 weeks. And I'm like, that's amazing. Um, but it's, it's probably not that good. Uh, and I try to like not say that in a mean way, but it's like, yeah, I'm like, first draft. They're like, yep, just knocked it out. I'm like, that's okay. You know, sure. Good luck. How you launch a book determines how good you are at marketing. How well the book is selling 2 years later determines how good the book is.

Is there a tactical way? That you get more Amazon reviews, or is that just one of those things, or, you know, if the book is good, people are going to review it, but you really can't influence it that much?

I'm always scared to make a review ask because my own insecurity is like, well, what if it sucks and they remember to leave a bad review, right? Um, but I think that in some ways it's almost a litmus test of how confident you are about the quality of the product. Like, if you're willing to ask everyone to leave a review, then you're really confident that people will like it. And so I have a review ask in the middle of both of the books. Um, and I figured I put it in the middle. So it's like, if someone got to the middle, then they probably liked the book enough to get to the middle, right?

Not on page 5.

Yeah, exactly. Not, not exactly. Oh, by the way, you know, like, it's like, I haven't given you any value yet. So like, no, I've put it after they hopefully have gotten a significant amount of value. I do think that making an ask increases the likelihood that they leave a review. Um, but I think if you have a crap book, then people are like, No, or they'll give you a bad one, which is, you know, arguably worse.

Okay. I don't know anything about your love for writing as a kid. And I want to hear about that.

Yeah, I wrote short stories, I wrote poems. Um, and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that stuff, the free, that's why the literary magazine was probably where I spent, like, that's where I wrote more of my stuff. So it was all the student submissions for short stories, poems. Um, and so I managed to and art and art too, like kids who put art. So like the COVID art, you know, we'd get a bunch of paintings and we'd be like, okay, which of these can be the COVID And then between stories and between columns, we'd put other art from, you know, the art department from the kids who are, you know, making painting or whatever they're doing, you know, pictures of statues, sculptures and things like that. And so we, you know, we do a review every week. And so that, that helped me get better at writing, just being able to like look at other people's writing. And so I just, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that writing significantly more than everything that was assigned to me. I didn't enjoy that writing. And that was actually a really interesting breakthrough for me is that like, I didn't like reading that much. And that's not common. Usually writers like reading, I think. Um, I didn't even know that nonfiction was really a genre until like, like after I graduated high school. Because everything you read in high school, just about everything you read in high school is fiction or a textbook, right? Textbooks suck. And fiction I felt was useless. And so I enjoyed making my own fiction, but like, think about like from a learning perspective, what does this change about my life? Nothing. I'm like, okay, some person, some random land just did some thing and whatever. It doesn't affect me. And so I never really understood the point. As soon as I became an adult or whatever, uh, I got introduced to nonfiction and I was like, oh my God, this is useful. And so then I got more into reading for specific purposes, but I'd still almost separate that as like, I was trying to learn a specific thing, not analyze the writing. Right. Um, and so, yeah, I just, I really liked writing and I just, it was one of the few things I feel like I can get the flow really easily with writing, like writing and drawing, which is why all my books have lots of drawing, lots of writing. And I like doing my brainstorming with a pen because I don't know, it feels more tactile. I, I lose myself in it more easily. That, that was pretty much my experience. And I did take a bit of a break from writing when I got into the business world and it was only like, Gosh, it was probably—

was this like the Gym Launch days?

Yeah. Well, I wrote the Gym Launch book, but getting— I think I wrote that book in 2018. So writing the Gym Launch book was the first like real writing that I had done that wasn't like copy or things like, you know, like writing, writing that I'd done. And I think as soon as that happened, I was like, oh, I missed this. It was like, I've forgotten how much I liked it. And so then I've, I pretty much haven't stopped writing since.

Last question. So you get a call from UNLV. They're like, hey Alex, we want you to teach a writing class. How do you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you want to teach people?

I'll bet you the first day I would probably define terms or first week. I mean, that would be, I could break this into sections rather than the sessions, but like the first section would be the definition of terms. The next one would be clarifying the objective of why, why are we writing? What are we writing for? How does writing serve us? Why is it even, why is there, why does it matter? And then I would probably transition from there to the rules of writing.

Hmm. What are the rules of writing?

So there's, at least as I see it, and I would probably be parroting a lot of Stephen King's On Writing if I were to say it, but like, I think that's one of the best books on writing out there. As few words as possible. Like if you can use a simpler word, use that word. You know, very sentence structure. So there's a rhythm to it, you know, short, short, long, you know, And then from a stylistic perspective, I purposely try to use, uh, lower grade language because I want more people to understand it. I don't think there's, I don't have, um, any ego to people thinking that I'm smart. I also have no, nothing against people who use bigger words. It is like ultimate word concision uses more complex words, right? But I want maximum comprehension rather than maximum word concision. So I use concision only as a tool to increase comprehension. Uh, at large. Yep. Uh, so short words, short sentences, big promises. Uh, this is—

so you have rules of writing. Anything else?

Um, that would be— yeah, that'd probably be the next section. And I would probably practice super constrained writing for people if I was trying. So if the objective of the course was to teach people to write, yeah, then it would be like, I want you to write an entire paper on this thing in one page and really force people, because I think like Twitter, I think is, or X, I think is a wonderful platform for learning how to write because it just, you have, you have to force the idea, you have to keep crunching them down. And I think that's honestly, I think X is one of the best tools for learning to write because you get fast feedback. Um, the other one is I would probably use, um, like Hemingway App as, um, because that also gives you real-time feedback. And so typing into there, is so helpful because it, you know, Stephen King pretty much says this. It's like, just don't use adverbs by and large. Just don't use them. Like there's a better verb that you're not using. X in Hemingway would probably be the vast majority of the remainder of the time that I had. It would be repetition of them getting fast feedback on the writing that they're doing under specific constraints. And I would probably have a lot more Uh, free, like freedom in terms of topic and far less in terms of rules. Like you have to obey these rules, but you can write whatever you want. You have to do it in page or you have to do it in half a page and you can write whatever topic you want, but you have to obey these 27 rules. Now, right. Because fundamentally when I'm writing for the most part, I, now they're like a lot more or less ingrained in how I write. Um, but if like a section still doesn't seem good, I'll paste it into Hemingway and be like, ooh, that's why. Like, and like, I, you know, long sentences, like there's just, there's things that you just learn that you're like, oh, this might've sounded good in my head, but no one can read this. And so not to get super writing tactical, but that's, that's why we do this. How I Write, mate. It's called How I Write. Yeah. That's probably how I'd lay it out. So definition of terms, uh, why this matters and how it's useful for you. And I basically sell them on why they should even do this. Rules of the game and then practice. And that would probably be everything. The rest would just be practice.

Rock on. Well, I just want to thank you because I've read a lot of your stuff, consumed many, many, many of your videos, had a lot of questions, and, uh, I feel like you answered them well, but also you've been a big inspiration. So thank you.

Oh, I appreciate it. I'm glad they— I'm— hopefully they were useful.