Alex Hormozi's Playbook for Building Billion-Dollar Businesses

Grab that seat, sit down for us. Do you still own a Hummer EV?

Uh, yeah, we do actually.

You do? Give us your review. We were just talking about the Fiat Topolino. I don't think you're going to be in the market for that. Neck and neck. It's 1,000 pounds.

So I think what we could do is like if you just lined up like 10 of the Fiat, like kind of like chariot. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that could be my chariot.

I think the Hummers—

imagine, imagine if the Hummers literally— 9 of these The Hummer is kind of the front of the train, and then you have like, you see the Hummer coming at you, and then a bunch of the Topolinos kind of pull out in like a V-shape.

Fast and Furious style?

That would be badass.

Take over the whole hot smog.

How is life these days?

Good.

Is there a new book coming?

There is another book coming. OK. Yeah.

Do you have a strategy for book launch cadence? Is it an annual thing?

It's more like every— 18 months to 2 years.

But do you imagine that continuing for your entire career?

Every book I write, I say is the last book I'm going to write. And then I have a 6-month refractory period. And I'm like, yeah, I could write a book about something. And then I just start writing again.

What's the process like?

I have a bunch of notes on my phone of a topic. Because right now, I have probably 10 books that are at different stages of— so I just mind dump wherever. And then once there's enough stuff that I think this is interesting, I'll then start the book writing process. But I'm a big believer in surface area of thought. Like, if you were to sit down and say, like, I'm going to write a book about this, and then you have 2 weeks, it's like you don't have enough experiences that are diverse in a 2-week period while you're writing to let the paint dry. So I kind of want to be in a totally different state, talk to somebody, and be like, I didn't think about that. And then I add it to the book. And so then all of a sudden, it's like the density of thought and ideas per word is much higher. But I think you just have to do it by spreading out the time. So the time I'm thinking about a book is much longer than the time I'm writing the book.

Is it purely thinking, and you want a lot of thought to go into the different sections of the book? Or over the course of 18 months, is there actually a benefit to going out and having real-world experience?

Oh, that's— I mean, that's—

And anecdotes, right?

It's 100% that. Because I'll have a working theory of, like, I think this is how— I think people are missing this part of it. And then I'll kind of start battle testing it functionally. And then when I realize that I'm using the same framework over and over again and successfully overcoming some issue, I'm like, this is it. And then that's what the book becomes.

How narrow do you want to stay? How narrow have you been in the surface area of thought around mainly the last 3 books?

It's a really good question. Problem definition for the book, I think, is the hardest part of any book. Like, the Leads book, which is the second book, was the hardest book I've ever written. I'll never write a book that hard. Because I was like, I'm going to write a book on advertising. It's like, Jesus Christ. There's so many ways to get leads. And I put it all in one book. It took 19 versions to get there. The Money Models book was the fastest book because it was really just about wrappers for promotions. Super valuable, but really easy to consume and use. And so I was like, OK, this is the lesson for me. And offers, super narrow. Super narrow. And that book too was— all three of those books started as one kind of gigantic thing. And I gave it to somebody, and they're like, dude, you cannot. It was like this. And they're like— because I was like, I'm going to have a tome. And then I decided to— I want people to actually read it.

Itch in the back of your mind where you want to do sort of the Tim Ferriss thing where you go from 4-Hour Workweek, a business book, to chef, body, lifestyle, money management, personal finance? Like, there's so many topics that you talk about and people are interested, and I'm sure you could sell those books, and they might be edifying at a certain point because you're like, I've I've scratched this itch 3 times, 4 times, 10 times. But is there a level of focus that you have to discipline yourself, or does it come naturally?

I only write about stuff that I feel like I have some unique take on. I think rewriting a book that already exists, other people already know, there's no point. Especially if you're in the thick of it and you're thinking, oh, this has already been written before, it doesn't really motivate you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to write something that only exists because I made it.

Same thing with businesses. I've had the experience of building a company or just starting to work on a company and being like, I can stop working on this and it will not matter at all.

Yeah, the world will be fine. The world will be fine.

There's a bunch of alternatives. And you can make that case for most businesses. But there are some where you're like, if I don't build this, no one's going to build it, at least in the right way.

Yeah. No, I have 100% that perspective when it comes to book writing.

Yeah.

It's funny. As we talk about this, Jeremy Giffen, I know, is a good friend of yours, good friend of ours. Every time he talks, people just listen. And he's somebody who I would love to write a book almost because I just want him to go on another podcast, proper podcast tour. He just kind of pops up, does Invest Like the Best, and then just goes dark for like 18 months. But like, it's somewhat of a tragedy that he'll probably write a book someday, but it'll be in like 40 years. So in the meantime, it'd be great to like— in the meantime, you have to just like, you know, take notes and try to pick stuff up from the podcast. But there's so many people that like so many people that should be writing books just don't have the time and they'll eventually come and take like a victory lap at the end of their career. Yeah, but I think it's like you could just do a lot of stuff other than write books, but it's, but it's, it's, it's very valuable to be like writing in real time versus like saving up a bunch of lessons and then kind of summarizing it at the end.

I think you miss out on the wrinkles, like the tiny little details that like if you, if you think about like the story of how you met your wife and you go back like you've told it a bunch of times, but if you told it the day after you did it, you'd have so much richer memory memory of all the tiny little things that happened. And so I'm a big believer of while it's wet, paint it, and then let it dry over time. But that's why I always want documentation to be as real-time as possible.

Yeah, it's funny. The final book will actually be the easiest to write because you have all the books, and you're like, OK, what was actually worth kind of—

It's greatest hits in that book. Yeah.

Greatest hits.

We had Mark Pincus on the show, founder of Zynga. He wrote a book, and he said that he thinks everyone should write a book in their life. But he also said everyone should build a house. Do you have any aspirations to build real estate physically?

Like me do it?

You do it?

No, no, not by hand.

Not by hand, but just take a piece of dirt and turn it into—

You're working with an architect and a team. But is that something that— a lot of people, that's on their bucket list. I don't know where you've been in your real estate journey, but how do you think about that as a bucket list item?

It's not.

Why not?

I mean, we buy big multifamily that are already existing, and we do that. But if there were an an investment opportunity that made sense, I would—

You're not interested because it's not productive.

It's just not on my list.

Purely for like, you know, the satisfaction.

If you're like, have you listened to, like, thought about listening to Beyoncé today? I'd be like, not really. But I mean, like, if it was on, sure. You know, I'm not against it.

Yeah. I think some people just have the itch to like customize their own living environment. And I'm curious about how you see your living environment because I mean, from those first YouTube videos, like the monastic Were you closet?

You were in the closet?

Yeah, this is my closet. Like that was—

My business closet.

I don't know if that was intentional, but it was somewhat deliberate. You picked that space over a big living room, right? Yeah. And I'm wondering how you think about your living space, your workspace, your office space today.

So I would say all of the time that I— when I work, I'm very intentional about that space. When I'm not working, it's whatever Layla wants. I don't care. Like if she's 10% happier, I have like a percent-to-percent correlation to my happiness. And me being more comfortable has no correlation back. So like whatever she's good with, I'm good with. But in terms of like where I work, it's almost all how do I eliminate every sense of distraction for me personally. And so it's like I don't have windows. Some people like having windows. I don't think anything wrong with that. For me, it's like I need no stimulation because I'm— I'm very distractible. And so I have to have like earplugs in, no light, all artificial. I have like soundproof, like, you know, like I want nothing.

Yeah.

And then I can finally focus on what I'm trying to work on.

Yeah. Can we go back to the early YouTube days on the latest channel? I think 2020 in that closet, we both launched YouTube channels around the same time and we were talking about this. You completely smoked me.

It was insane. Yeah. John is obviously pretty good at media. And his channel was just following his interests, like Silicon Valley history. The execution was, by all means, amazing. Got to half a million subscribers.

But I treated it like a blog. And you treated it like a business.

Yeah. But it was a much smaller TAM. And when you compare the two channels and your strategy, the execution difference was like—

It was so bad. It was just me and I had one remote editor for years. And I was like— not monetizing, not really thinking about it as a business. But I'm interested to know, uh, on day one of, of that YouTube channel, because I know you've done media stuff before, but like the, the, the, the current media business, uh, what was the team like? What was the strategy? How much time were you putting into it? Because I know you had exited some businesses, you had some space to breathe, but how serious were— and then what was the evolution of that?

I'll walk you through as fast as I can. So Uh, the first thing was I found any media editor, uh, like an agency. And they were like, uh, 3 YouTube videos a week is what we do. And I was like, all right, then that's what I'll do. And so I just webcamed, like, and I had a little suitcase that would open up so I could travel. Cause Leila and I were traveling for the year of the sale. Um, and so that's what I did wherever we were. I was like, open up. And then, cause at that time I didn't have really any work. So I had all these thoughts and I was like, I'm just going to get them. I'm going to dump them all out. And so that's basically what YouTube Strategy 1.0 was. Um, I had somebody cold reach out, like legit, uh, to when right as Shorts started, they were like, I'll do everything. You already have YouTube stuff. I'm just going to clip it. Just give me permission. And I was like, oh cool. And so that was accidentally started clipping 100%. And so that was like, we were really early on Shorts.

So good.

And then as soon as he did a pretty good job, uh, he was like, you know, if I actually recorded you doing these, they'd do even better. And I was like, fine, but I only want to do one day a quarter. And he was like, fine. So he'd fly out for one day and we'd do 100 Shorts in one sitting. 100%. I would just do 100. And that, that kind of style of, of filming and recording is pretty much how I still kind of rock that way, which is like, I want, I prefer a marathon day. Like I'd rather just start at, you know, 6 and then just rock until every ounce of juice is gone. And then it's like, great.

Yeah.

We'll do it again in a week or whatever.

Yeah. We're sort of like that marathon every day.

Yeah.

Yeah. One of my questions is like, what goes into a 2-hour YouTube video?

Cause you'll do these like masterclasses, 2 hours. And I'm like, that is insane. And then I'm like, I do 3 hours every day. So like now it's become more possible, but I imagine that there's lots of—

But the 3 hours was kind of like just going until we got tired. Yeah. Like by 3 hours, we're usually like, OK, like probably need to go to the bathroom.

Yeah.

Probably want to eat some food.

Yeah. And this show is much less structured. But when you're thinking about like the portfolio, like the volume is just incredibly important to everything in media these days. You agree with that?

Oh, 100%. Volume negates luck all day. Volume negates luck.

Volume negates luck.

Violence is the answer. Yeah.

Got it.

That's like on our wall at HQ.

What formats are you most excited about for 2026, 2027?

Live interactive.

Okay.

Separate and together. Okay. So just going live, like with the audience, Twitch style, YouTube Live style.

And that was the book launch strategy, right? Was that your first taste? You've done live.

No, I've done lives before, but that was obviously much more intentional. And then, and then interactive, which is not like, sure, there's chat interactive, but like, how do I bring the audience in so that we can talk? That's why you see the first— it was Cash Cows, now it's Scale or Fail, which is a show we just launched. And we're doing— we're doubling down really hard on that because if you think in a world of AI, it's like, what are the things that can't be faked. Yeah, it's people, you know, like I want stakes. So for example, like if MrBeast's store videos, if it was not a real $5 million or not a real Lamborghini, the stakes disappear. Now, to be fair, there's for sure other like a fictional story. The whole thing we know is fake and we're fine with it. And the story is the story and I'll crush that. Yeah, but people still want stakes. Like right now chess is more popular than it's ever been, but like humans haven't been able to beat computers for a long time. And so there are definitely some areas where we want the drama, we want the stakes. And so I don't think that's going to change at all.

I love the series that you've been doing with entrepreneurs that attend the conference. They stand up, they give you the— it's so, so good. I just love all those.

Live interactive.

Live interactive.

100%.

I'm interested to know how you think legacy media will fit into your media strategy going forward. Is it about prestige? Is there actually an audience there still? Because You're part of the new guard, and yet you signed with CAA. I'm sure you have the ability to walk into a large media company and get a TV show. Does that make sense? Is that something that's interesting to you? What would the value be?

I think it's distribution that I don't have access to.

Okay.

So like, I think one of the biggest, like, unspoken advantages that exists right now in media is Dave Ramsey has been murdering for 30, 40 years. He has 600 radio stations syndicated. Everyone's like, radio's dead. It's like, He's murdering it. And it's because no one's looking. So like, I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to attention. And so even if it's less or more, if it's something that's completely in this other bubble over here that I have zero, I have no access to.

And the beauty is like, there's still like closer to, like there's no monopoly online, right? The feed is like, you can just get, anybody can log on and it's beautiful because anyone can log on. You don't have to have an audience. You can suddenly have an audience. Maybe it's one video, maybe it's a 5-minute video. Flash in the pan, but TV still, like, if you can figure out the right lane, you have this sort of like differentiated access to attention. So it's like a different group of people and it's differentiated access that's not just like log on, immediately have access.

And when something super pops, like you look at all the real estate shows that have come out, you've got Selling Sunset, Sirhan has his show, like there's a huge distribution base that they gain access to as a result of that. All you have to do is look at those stars, look at their social media, and I would say this is, I say this lovingly, it's pretty weak in terms of what they're doing. Doing, but their following is still really strong because it's carried over. And so I'm like, if those people actually tried on this side and had someone— and it's like, how do we get it all? And that's kind of the—

I think this is just underrated broadly for mostly tech people. They see the trend of the internet growing exponentially or e-commerce, and they think, oh, well, in a couple of years, like, 100% of everything will be bought online. It's like, no, retail still exists. For certain categories, you probably need to be in retail as well. And the same thing with the aging audiences on radio or TV, they're still there. They still watch. And so interesting. What about the level of production polish? I imagine that there's a trade-off there if you go with something more produced that's not just you opening your laptop and yapping, right? You can get stuck in like the production quagmire if you're trying to build the Mona Lisa or some incredible show. At the same time, there's prestige that comes with that. There's a new level of authority. How do you think about that trade-off?

I think it's barbell. So it's either like, make it the Mona Lisa and like play to win that game, or you're in the volume game. And the volume is just value per second and just trying to get as many of those seconds out as you possibly can. Sure. And like, I just think it's, it's, it's both. And I think they serve, they serve different objectives to your point of like you gain authority in different ways. It's definitely— there's an element that it shifts the brand. There is access to new distribution and eyeballs. All of that happens over here. Yeah. But over here, I think, is where you get a lot of the closer to buying behavior, believe it or not. And so I see this as more top of funnel, and this is closer to middle and bottom. Obviously, you can get discoverability. Like I said, this is full stack, but you get way closer to purchases on the site.

Yeah. Is there— can we offer you a Diet Coke?

Can we offer you anything?

We have a variety of beverages if you'd like.

What's a category of business that you haven't built or invested in that you're excited to at some point?

I'm still looking for the, the magical med spa. Um, I think med spas are super— I love pseudo-medical. Um, because that's maxing. Yeah, all of it. Well, think about it, like, there's this aging population that has more money than anyone else. They don't want to age. They see the Brian Johnsons. Like, it is the zeitgeist of right now, of like, I want to live forever, I want to look beautiful and young forever. And they have all the money. And so if you look at the demand side of that It's huge. You look at the supply, med spas are, are, they're still wildly understaffed. And I know this because I see business owners every single week. And so I have like, there's a handful of categories right now that I'll meet business owners and they're doing better than they should be. Like, there's some business owners I meet.

I met a med spa owner when I first moved to LA. They had started their business and within a year they were doing like $1.2 million of like, like straight free cash flow off of like $400,000 invested. Yeah, it was like actually unbelievable. Yes.

The entrepreneur in this case was like very talented because he watches this and he's like, oh yeah, he's great.

No, but this was, this was, you know, years ago. But yeah, I'm surprised that also like differentiated shots at that category because if you look at like, I would expect Bryan Johnson to do something like this, right? Because there's a lot of people that follow him and he has, you know, as many, maybe he probably has like 10 times as many like critics as he does people that are like, I'm going to do exactly what he's going to do. But that group of people that will just copy what he's doing is actually pretty meaningful, right? And so MedSpa, as you go into these high-ticket procedures, treatments, things like that, to me, that's where I think he could really start to print.

He had 1,200 people apply for his million-dollar-per-year thing. 1,200. Do that math real fast.

That's a lot of money.

And then there was a $60,000-per-year thing that was underneath, and multiply that by just probably an order of magnitude greater. Yeah, wildly underestimated. So you take that and then you have these 10,000 or 15,000 med spas that exist. It's like it's nothing. And it's super fragmented because still no one's really like gobbled that up. Well, not that I've seen. And to your point of like when I ask them like, hey, so what are you doing right now to get your $6 million a year top line and, you know, 40% margins? And they're like, kind of just, you know, we just opened up and put the sign up and you just did a good job. And, and, you know, you know, people— customers tell customers like, you know, that's not how it fucking works.

Yeah. And it's not how it's going to work forever. No.

They're just in a completely supply-constrained environment. They just don't know it because when you're on the inside, you don't know.

You're like, "Oh, I'm doing a good job." Is part of the problem that a lot of the med spa founders get a little bit too sucked into the biohacker nature of these things and it feels a little bit too scientific?

I don't think it's that at all. I think it's so short-term. A lot of the med spas I think are very short-term cosmetic-driven. They're like, "How do we make you look good for the next 3 to 6 months?"— which is not necessarily what makes you look good over the next 3 to 6 years or over the next few decades. So that's at least generally—

There's a slice for Johnson to attack, which he obviously— he's a very smart dude. Yeah.

How would you attack the problem? Roll up, find a bunch of operators, put them together, start something from scratch?

I mean, yeah, I mean, the roll-up model would make the most sense. But the thing is, is like, de novo is not that expensive. And if you are a good operator, you can go in and just smash. Yeah, yeah. Because when people are coming in, when your CAC is zero and your gross margins on these services are absurd, the actual difficulty in that model right now is getting the talent for the technicians because it's supply constrained at the business level. It's also supply constrained at the talent level.

And it's so easy for them to open up a door.

Exactly. They hang their own shingle, they take the customers, and that's the issue that those companies have. The key to really winning that game is having a really good talent strategy for how do I make their lifestyles, how do I compensate them as directly as possible on what they're generating, and get it to the point where— my godfather is in wealth management, and he's a really cool model. He's managed several billion dollars, but he started at nothing and built it all himself. And his big thing was— hey, yo. And his big thing was basically letting the other person have a little more. And so it's like, he's like, I'll give you 51 so that you don't ever want to leave, but then you do all the work.

Yeah, it probably looks more like a law firm. Yeah, 100%. It's more of a partner.

And to be fair, if you've been to any of these, I would say it's a high-touch service. They're, they're not loyal to the business. They're loyal to the girl who does her injections or does their lasers or whatever. Yeah. And so it's like we just got to tie those people in like a partner firm.

Yeah. Speaking of Bryan Johnson, do you care at all about living forever?

I don't even think about it. I expect to die. Um, I would prefer not to, but like, I'm good, I'm good either way. Like, I, I think Marcus Aurelius said, um, the, the old and the young lose the same thing when they die, which is the present. That's all we got.

So yeah, I'm a similar way. I want to have a full life, but I never at any point in my life have I thought, oh, it would just be the best thing ever if I never die.

Yeah. Going back to sort of core audience, I think of like the sweet spot is like mid-market owner-operator founder types. Is that roughly accurate? Yeah, $1 to $50 million. $1 to $50 million. What is the expansion opportunity? Is there a business for you where you're giving keynotes at Fortune 500 companies, motivational speaking for like middle managers at huge companies? No interest. Or is it getting people on the founder journey who are leaving companies, breaking out into their own, and going from 0 to 1 million?

What do you think? Well, from an expansion opportunity, I think there's still plenty of people in the 150 million who don't know who I am and haven't consumed my stuff or whatever. So plenty there. But if I just focus there, I get the 0 to 1 million anyways. Yeah, yeah. Because if you're helping people go from 1 to 10, people are like, he can probably help me go from 0 to 1. Yeah, yeah. I'm super broadly zooming out. I'm a big fan of capitalism. And I think as many people as possible participating in a free market is a good thing for the country and for that person and for everyone else that they serve. And so I would like as many people to taste that forbidden fruit as humanly possible. And so I try and make it as simple and as easy as possible for people to get started.

Yeah. What mistakes do you see entrepreneurs making around AI? Because I'll give you one. The small business owners that I know that get too into AI, and maybe they're listening to podcasts and they're on X and we're—

Orange glasses ready to go.

They'll like, they won't just apply AI to their business. They'll like start a new company that's like AI-oriented. And I just think that's like the worst possible mistake because they end up doing something that like the model just does well. And it's like, okay, so you're going to compete just directly with all the biggest companies in the world on something that you don't even know as well as the biggest companies in the world.

I have no advantage. When you could just like—

and so there's this grass is greener thing happening where instead of seeing, oh, I can just make these parts of my business, even if it's just 10% more efficient, I can keep compounding.

But what are you seeing? All right. One, they're using AI to do dumb things really fast., so they're doing the wrong stuff with AI. So even like they were like a small business owner that wasn't making money now still doesn't make money but has a lot more token costs than they did before.

Number 2, they're— Meeting summaries. Like I've never been successful. Like I've never—

That was my bottleneck. I just need a summary.

Yeah, yeah. No, but it's one of those things like I think it's cool that these apps exist. I've never, I've never needed to take notes to achieve my goals in business. Like I'm just like, okay, what's the next most important thing to do? I'm gonna do that thing. OK, what's the next most important thing to do? Or like note on your phone. I'm going to do that thing. I've never been like, OK, what did we say? I mean, and I've worked in small companies, right? I've only been a founder. But that's just such an example of like, yeah, my meeting note system is so dialed. I'm like, OK, how much money have you made?

Yeah. OK. So I'll say to counter-answer, the two things that I think are the right way to use it, which is number one, how do we take every function of the business take it from org chart-based thinking to workflow-based thinking, and then saying, okay, this editor used to be involved in these 6 workflows. We actually only need him to be now involved in 3 of those workflows, and the other 3 we can have AI do the vast majority of the work. And so all of a sudden we can 3, 5x output. And so revenue per headcount on service-based businesses should decrease, which means margins should go up. Now there's this great opportunity window right now where prices aren't really going to adjust for a minute, which means that your margins get absolutely stupid. And so like, you should do that. So there's two flavors of that. One is the, the— like, I'm an advocate of like, don't tell people you're using AI. Like, go, go have a service business that people think is all humans in the background and then charge human prices and then have costs of tech and have the scale and operational— the lack of operational drag of tech. That's the good game, right? Or take it department by department so that you can just become more efficient at it, right? So those are, I think, the two good ways of doing it. To your point of like, Well, being distracted is still a terrible idea as a founder. And so this has just made it so much easier for people to get distracted because like, I could start a business on this or that or that. And then it's like, yeah, but you still have your dry cleaning store, dude. Like, what are we going to like? And to be fair, if you have— if you want to be a trillionaire, you are going to need to get into bleeding edge tech and AI. Sure. But you probably should get rid of your dry cleaning store and go all in. And so they're trying to juggle two plates and not really succeeding at either.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. The dry cleaning example is like use AI to constantly be monitoring every possible new space that you could expand into within your area or in the county over, et cetera, and just do that, do that, do that. But it's like grass is greener. Like, oh, what if I made the operating system, the agent operating system for dry cleaners? It's like, no, just do the thing.

Just win at dry cleaning because it's also so much easier to compete against other dry cleaning owners because you for sure know that they're not adopting it the right way because they're doing the same thing with orange glasses and banging out their replicated software. You know, like, fine. Yeah.

There's also like a fair amount of AI that a lot of small businesses are probably getting for free, just in the sense of like, if you have a CRM that's sending emails, like that company has probably adopted AI and is doing somewhat smarter targeting. And so you might not need to go and build your own CRM that sends emails that are customized for every customer because like you get it for free out of the box.

There's also this tendency to rebuild the existing software that you're using. So it's like, oh, I've got— I don't need to pay Calendly $9 a month. It's just like, oh, so instead you're going to use 200 hours to try and recode what they just did. And it breaks all the time.

If there's an error, then you lose $9,000.

But that is what I'm saying all the time.

Yeah, we did have Ben on our team here was having— he does a lot of the automation that we do around captioning videos. He had reached a point where all the existing software didn't do the thing that he needed to do, that he built something yesterday that now works, and it's saving him a bunch of time. So there is the— there are the edge cases.

Very narrow point solutions for us.

I think specifically Tam equals one. Flip. Yeah.

Live streams very quickly with captions, with our ads added on at the end, and it saved a bunch of time in Premiere.

In media, it's huge, right? Yeah. Like, we're using it— like, I'll give you two examples we're using on the ad side. What we did was we built this gigantic data repository, which by the way, I think that's what the big— the huge gap that small business owners are missing is they don't have a data layer. And so it's like if you want to have anything that's unique, it starts with the data. If you want to build any kind of AI, right, that's actually useful. And so one is like, how do we build a repository of all the data that we have in terms of sales copy, testimonials, videos, collateral, all of that in one place, and then have that get piecemealed out into ads in real time and then also match those to dynamic landing pages. So we have that live right now at acquisition.com in terms of how we're doing it. So we have several hundred landing pages that are getting pushed against several hundred different, uh, ads that are going out, all being done programmatically with AI, which is really like— we're, we're not a— we're not an AI company, um, but we use the shit out of it. And so I think that those are like— those are the, the, the— on the paid side where it's really, really exciting. Yeah. And then on the, on the organic side, it's like right now we started More Mosey, which is like the highlight channel. Yeah. Um, and I've got one, one, one cracked out teenager who's putting out 20 clips a day on his own. No, no, he's doing 5 mids. So like we call 'em mids, it's like call it like 3 to 10 minutes clips. And then he's putting out, I think 15 or something like that shorts per day on his own. And so he just takes all the time. If I'm talking to business owners, takes it, runs it through, it highlights the points from there. He just basically just makes sure that it's good. Inserts automatically the CTAs that we want and then boom, it's all on.

What's your philosophy on bringing the cracked-out teenager in-house, remote, in-person versus agency versus platform where clipping can happen? A Discord that just— you hear about these Discords with like 200 clippers and they all get paid on a CPM basis randomly. It feels deeply chaotic, but if you can harness that, maybe it's powerful. But what's your philosophy? Uh, yes.

Okay. That's 100% my philosophy. Okay. Um, but like, are you an agency fan or in-house? It's like, I want 3 agencies working for me and an in-house team. Like, it's all— all the impressions are out there. Like, gotta catch them all. Like, go get them, you know what I mean? And same thing with, um, like, if I— I pay a lot of attention, especially on the paid side, to e-commerce. I think they're almost always the most cutting edge when it— well, actually, porn's the most paid, right? Right before that is— I'm being real, right? Uh, e-commerce is second most cutting edge. Um, and those guys are all completely the ones who are crushing it, going to 0 to 100 million plus in, call it like 12 to 24 months. Like all the companies that are running the same playbook. Yeah. Is decentralized UGC with kind of like AI backend for screening for control and then just letting it fucking rip. Yeah. And there's obviously some considerations for brand. Sure. Right. Which is like, how do we make sure? But yeah, but if the raw footage is and you only put money behind the things that are—

yeah, it's probably pretty safe. Do you expect to integrate parenting content into your universe?

I don't think— everything that's not business has not been like super deliberate. I just don't hold back. So if someone asks a question about it, I'll just answer honestly. But everything— I try to think like the middle spoke is still— I'll use this. There we go. The middle spoke is still business. And then it's, you know, how am I seeing parenting through the lens of business as a business owner? How do I— You got it over there. Like, how do I see like my relationship with Layla, but it's We're business partners, but we're also married. So it's always— I try to keep that at the middle. Yeah. But some people are like, I just want to talk business.

I just think, again, with Taylor and Travis pairing up, hopefully they have children, you guys having children, I think we could see a real baby boom. Yeah. But we need to get it out there.

That's what we're doing, the Lord's work.

There you go. Can you walk me through how to sort of evolve a brand through what I expected to be more difficult, but you executed it very well. The headline was, I have nothing to sell you. Now you sell books. People want to buy stuff from you. Obviously sold a ton of books. But there's probably like a, oh, I wasn't expecting this. How did you work through that? Because I think there's a lot of companies where the business model evolves and they need to change their communication strategy and they need to deliver like a business model.

Yeah, like an AI lab is like, we're not going to compete with you. What? That's crazy.

Asking for a friend here.

I'm such an— I think the absolute simplest media strategy for any kind of change is the whole truth. Yeah. Not half truth. And I think if you just manage that. So it's like I didn't have anything to sell. Yeah. And I was like, now I do.

It's so simple. I love it. That's amazing.

Wow. And if you don't want to buy it, here's the great thing about capitalism. It's voluntary exchange. So you can just keep getting the free shit. Yep. Yeah. All good.

There's tons of it. There's tons of free stuff.

Tons of free stuff. And we still continue to do that. If you choose to want more help with stuff in person where we're limited, spend money and we'd love to have you.

Yeah, yeah. It's fascinating. What is the term for like the economic ladder that you help build, help companies build? I feel like the first time I was exposed to this with Jocko Willink, you, you get to the end of the show and it's like, if you want to spend a dollar with me, I got something for you. If you want to spend $100 with me, I got something for you. If you want to spend $1,000, you can come to my conference. $10,000, I'll hang out with you for a week weekend, $100,000. And that ladder of price discrimination is hard for a lot of businesses where it's not token-based pricing, where it's just consumption-based usage of the product, but actually getting the place where, look, if you have a billionaire in your audience who loves what you're doing, how do you actually get an offer to them that's the right size?

So customers are super fractal, right? And so you can absolutely make— the same amount from 1% of your customers as you can from the other 99% and have half your revenue from one. And typically, at each level, you have another double. So it's like if you're at, let's say, $100 a month price point, there's going to be another double of revenue at a $500 a month price point, another double of revenue at $2,500 a month, another double at whatever 5 or 10 times that is going to be. And so I think making offers available to people, that is where business owners struggle. They feel weird about it, and they sell out of their own wallet. Yeah. Just make them available and state the facts and tell the truth. So it's like if we had one big plaque in our marketing team, it's state the facts and tell the truth, but it's the whole truth, which is, hey, we're going to do this thing. It's absurdly expensive and it's only for somebody who, if you're reading this and you're like, oh, that's not absurdly expensive for me, it's for you. And if you read that and you're like, oh my God, I'm offended by that. Good news. We have less offensive prices that are lower. And for that, we do all these other things that you're going to get way more people who are going to be doing it with you. But if you're a special snowflake, we have special snowflake prices. I just don't think— and to be fair, you're not going to make everyone happy. Like, there's always going to be trolls, there's always going to be people who are like— I think you have to make the decision of like, do I care more about the people I help or the people who are angry at me for trying to help? What's your international strategy?

I imagine the content goes everywhere. Yeah. At the same time, you can't be flying around the world constantly. How do you think about different countries?

I struggle a lot with international, um, because The business side of me is like, I don't want them to clog up our funnels. Oh, yeah. And have people who can't speak English that well talk to the team. And it's like, we don't have Italian versions of whatever. Yeah. Yet.

That makes sense. Right.

So I struggle with that part. On the other hand, we're taking steps now to have something to serve that audience. That being said, I don't think I'm going to be traveling internationally anytime soon. But having called services and offerings for that audience, I'm I'm more inclined to be able to. Yeah.

How are you thinking about scaling Acquisition.com, the investing side of the business, raising outside capital, scaling up the fund? We talk to VCs all day who are just bigger and bigger mega funds.

Yeah. We're like 30 days away from closing a gigantic deal. So— Come back. Yeah. That'd be great. But I would say that what Acquisition.com was when we started was, a cash flow-based family office that Laila and I ran. And that was honestly the chillest my life has ever been. I was also bored to tears, but like a good life and probably might have been better for the season I'm about to get into. Sure. But it became apparent after we did something like 24 deals in 24 months, and these were not like VC-style deals, they were like real purchases, that portfolio theory rules. And of the 24, like, you know, 3-ish were like the really good companies. And then On top of that, there was like our brand blew up in this time period. And so we had to basically have this recalculation of like, okay, well, these are all the resources we have at our disposal. We have cash, but like this brand is getting really big, even almost greater than the cash that we have access to, just our own money. And so then it was like, okay, well, we started the advisory practice in January of '24, and I think we did $36 million in EBITDA year one just on that one unit. And so it was like, okay, founder, no. And so And then obviously, the book launch last year, we did 105. And we still have the advisory practice, which grew the next year. And so we stopped doing deals that we were just investors in. And now it's brand plus capital plus work. And I'd rather have fewer eggs that we're going to get huge outsized returns on. Like, school was junior of '24 as well. But Skool has, you know, we have 30 million users now. Yeah. And, you know, we have a billion-plus GMV. Like, it's a very big platform. And so, like, you know, Zuckerberg didn't have Airbnbs as a side hustle. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so it's just like, if you have a stallion, like, run it. And so I think that's where we're at, where it's like, we're being really, really specific. I'm willing to put more capital at risk now because I'm going to put my brand behind it and make sure the product's exceptional. And that's— I mean, the bar is the product has to be fucking insane. Yeah. And then we bring distribution and cash. And like, that's when it's like the Holy Trinity.

Yeah. Jeremy, our friend Jeremy has this idea that everyone is like pre or post-fall.

Where are you? You familiar with this concept?

No. So, yeah, he says you can instantly tell if someone has had their downfall, had their darkest moment. You know, they've been through the wringer. They got chewed up and spit out by Silicon Valley or private equity or whatever industry they were in. And you can tell that this person is now— they've been humbled. And so, they're ready to build back appropriately, not get over their skis. And then you can also see the founders— It becomes a massive advantage. It becomes a massive advantage. And then you also see the founders that are sort of pre-fall and they're doing a lot of things that you're like—

Yeah, this is like this— You better get lucky. —24-year-old who's like on a crazy tear, has raised— Money showing up for free. They're spending it. And then suddenly, like— like, you know, the business stops growing, like, execs are leaving, things like that. But I'm wondering if there was like this like crucible moment for you before this latest run that you've been on.

Two answers. One is I'll reject the premise, but, um, well, just because I don't like to say it's super binary, right? Like, people are either before or after the hard thing in their life. It's like, I think people have lots of hardship that happens at different seasons in their life. Like, I've lost everything two times. —like, you fall twice. But like, then it's like, okay, am I now post-fall? It's like, well, I mean, I hope that nothing bad ever happens to me again, but I'm pretty sure, betcha, it's going to happen to me again. And so I just commit to not stopping. Yeah. Controlling the controllable. And that's basically all I can do.

Do you have a good answer to pithy advice for young people? We got asked this on a podcast recently and it was like the closing question. It was like, you got 1 minute. And I was like, I could— you could talk for hours. Like, where do you even start? How do you think about packaging information like that? And I actually want your advice for young people if you have one thing.

It's so hard too. It's so hard. Like, work hard is like good general advice. But then I've been in points in my life, and I know people that are like working hard on like the dumbest thing ever. And like that ends up being the worst thing that they can do.

What you accomplish is a direct output of the volume of activity that you do multiplied by the leverage of the activity itself. And so you have to pick the right boat. You have to pick the right opportunity based on your goals. Some people only want to make $1 million and you want to make tens of millions, hundreds of millions, make a trillion. Like everyone has different— so like the leverage that— what's interesting about that is that you just get to pick and it's going to be hard no matter what. I think Naval said this thing where it was like it's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful.. It's also really hard to build a billion-dollar unicorn. They both can be 80-hour weeks. And Stuart Schwarzman from Blackstone said, you might as well play big because level 10 talent is only attracted to level 10 opportunities. It's harder to attract good people for bad opportunity because then you've got to do it all yourself, which is why I have so much respect for some of the guys like Peggy and Andrew Cherng, who are Mr. and Mrs. Panda, Panda Express. Dude, deca-billionaires selling chicken. Passive royalty. Dude, like, but like, like so much respect for that level of grit. 45 years selling orange chicken, right? Um, all that to say, you will pick based on the level of awareness that you have at that time. Where it gets more difficult is that you learn more shit as you go and you realize that there are higher leverage opportunities. The difficulty is that if you're 4 years into one thing, year 5 of an existing thing that you have 4 years of reps on, versus year 1 of even a slightly better opportunity, you have to compare year 1 versus year 5 of the other one, not year 1 versus year 1, because time you can't get back. And so that's where the compounding of getting better at something at some point does have outsized returns, even if it's an inferior vehicle. Yeah.

Talk about that idea of you're an A+ operator, but you're going after a C+ opportunity. How do you assess your opportunity? Because I feel like I run into people who are working on A+ opportunities, and everyone will say, that's the dumbest idea ever. You're going to put couches. It's going to be called Airbnb. That makes no sense, right? And then it's a boom, and it's huge. And then simultaneously, you can be working on a terrible idea, but if you went and got a puff piece in Business Insider and Forbes, it's like your parents are like, oh, it's amazing. Good job. Even if you're grinding and it's not going anywhere.

Yeah, the way I look at it is like, in every single category, there's an amazing— business. And the funny thing, the funny thing with everyone thinks about like Airbnb is like the dumb idea when it's like it wasn't a dumb idea, it just seemed ridiculous. Yeah. And that's very different than like somebody that like chooses apparel as a category, which everyone knows is like structurally really, really, really challenging, really, really competitive. Yes. There's like 100 companies in the world that absolutely print. And if you're one of those companies, then you're then you're great. But some people choose apparel, and then 3 years in, then they understand the competitive dynamics, and they're like, "I'm in a shitty business." I think that's very different than choosing the thing that seems silly, even though Airbnb, at this point, is now the best business, right? Sure, sure, sure. Massive scale, network effect, a great product, all these things.

Yeah. I think if you look at the marketplace that you're trying to get into, there's usually gonna be a bolus of businesses at some part, and that gives you some idea of where the difficulty in that business is. And so like, for example, if you're going to get into— I want to start a social media marketing agency— it's like, well, there's a bolus at the bottom and then very few who ascend to the top. And it's because it's really, really difficult, uh, operationally. Because if you're really good at marketing, then you can usually make enough money to not work at one of those types of businesses. And so you're constantly, uh, you have to be so good at ops and so good at marketing and branding and sales in order to just slowly get these bigger and bigger accounts and you kind of level up the types of customers that you can go after because all those businesses go after SMBs and SMBs are inherently volatile. And so even if you do a great job, they'll still cancel. And so it's just a churn number.

Yeah. Not to mention your flagship client will eventually say like, hey, we're spending $100,000 on this service. We could hire 5 people that are the best in the world at what they do and they'll just focus on us. Let's do that instead.

Yeah. Like there are, there are impediments to that business scaling. Can you do it? Absolutely. But I'm just a huge advocate of just like, just look at what the biggest version of that that business looks like, because this is obviously a more tech-forward show, but like the vast majority of businesses are not tech businesses, right? There's like HVAC businesses all over the place. There's pool cleaners. There's a lot of shit you can do for money. And so I like, unless you want to be a trillionaire, like you can be a billionaire in just about any boring business. You look at, you look at, what's his name? Is it Brad Jacobs? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

6 times over. Yeah, yeah.

Make a few billion. Yeah, a few.

And then he has a sequel, A Few More Billion.

You guys are kind of, you guys are very—

I never, I never Uh, home building materials.

Yeah, there's just a lot of businesses out there, and so it just depends on like what the goal is. But any business done for like— zooming all the way out, if you do one thing for 40 years and you get better every year, you're gonna fucking dominate. And so on some level, going after the tech opportunity, though there, there for sure are the big mega winners, it's easier to compete against the people who are going after the pool cleaners. There's just— there's like, there's less sophisticated players, there's less capital. Um, and so having a little bit of street smarts and a lot of work ethic can get you pretty far there. And you look at that compared to like, you know, you look at the guy who's doing $7 million a year top line, $2.5 million in bottom line, doesn't really work that much, has a crew of guys. Is that the life you want? Yeah, because there's nothing like— there's nothing wrong with that. And so I think it's deciding first, to the younger guy, like, what do I want, or what is an acceptable outcome? And then what of many, many paths that are ahead of me have the highest likelihood of me getting there. And then once you pick that path, know that if you stick with that path for 20 years, the likelihood that you fail is basically zero, as long as you have some feedback loop for improvement. Yeah, that's basically it. Figure out where you want to go, find the highest likely path of getting there, and then do not let the opinions of strangers or people who do not have what you want dissuade you from getting there.

Yeah, what do you think about, uh, There's this odd trend of entrepreneurship, like, I don't know, like mindset stuff where you got to be doing sauna, cold plunge, meditation. And I feel like that only makes sense once you're successful. And then you look at the successful people and you're like, "Well, yeah, the rich guy has a sauna, but what was he doing when he was broke? He was waking up and getting on his laptop." But how do you react?

Rich people fly private, so I should fly private in order to get rich, right? It's conflation. Okay, so at the most basic level, you have to do work. Yeah. And if it is not the work, then you have to have a very strong argument that is going to increase your output per unit of time, period. And so if you have a 3-hour morning routine and that's the first 3 hours a day when you're probably the cognitive, like the freshest, have the most energy, you would have to have an incredible— do you curse on the show? We don't. Okay. A credible darn argument. You're welcome.

Our kids are watching, but by all means.

You have to have an incredible argument for why that's going to improve improve your output. And so like the morning routine that I'm a big advocate of is you wake up and then you caffeinate. Sure. You shut off your, your distractions and then you begin the work. And how, how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning work. Sure. Is the ideal. And you are the freshest whenever you are post-sleep. Yep. And so I like, if you want to do that stuff, I'm like, by all means, go for it. But like, just understand, like, you can— plenty of people have hobbies. You can have hobbies. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just Is this actually— and you also didn't need to work 16 hours a day in order to get what you want. I have plenty of friends who are super successful and don't work that much. Now, did they work 16 hours a day to get there? Probably. And so this is the modeling the rise, not the plateau. And what's difficult is the plateau is what's more visible. Sure. What do you think about— and then you can make the content, right? No one's making this part. No, no.

What do you think about, uh, people sort of like staging out their your sort of career as an entrepreneur. I was talking to a friend of mine who has something like an agency business in fashion. He's gonna do about $1 million this year of profit. It's a fantastic business. He eventually wants to have his own brand. My advice to him is fashion is such a bad business until it's a great business, until you have a flagship brand that takes 20 years to make. I was like, get your business to a couple million a year, get it established, a couple million a year profit at least, get it established, get 10, 20 flagship clients that are on sort of long-term contracts, and then basically use that cash flow to invest in your brand. And a lot of people would be like, give them the advice now of just go all in on the brand. Why are you wasting time with this other thing? And I feel like that's very— that works super well if you have a trust fund. But for somebody who's like 27, let's assume they want to have a family in a few years. I was pushing him to say, make this thing great even though you know it's not the thing that you want to be doing for that 40-year chunk of your career. But how would you talk to somebody in that sort of space?

So, I don't think there's a right answer because it's all dependent on risk, which is entirely personal. And so if you want to go balls on the line— that's not cursing— then do it. Go all in. But just understand the risk that you're taking on. And so I would say that that's not a risk that I would take.

I would say that I'm relatively— There's risk to being all in and then not having the capital to actually fuel the opportunity, right? My point of view is like, you're going to be way, way, way higher likelihood of success if you sort of build slow and you can put— half a million a year of like outside capital into the business versus like trying to build this brand when you don't have a capital source?

Depends on goal, depends on risk tolerance. Like, I want to be a trillionaire and then, and I'm willing to take the risk, then it's like, yeah, I mean, you should have started yesterday, you know what I mean? Um, but my perspective is I would like to get my oxygen mask on personally, and I was able to make— I've been able to take significantly bigger and bigger bets in my career because I don't they're free swings. Yeah. If I lose, my life changes zero. And so in thinking about big life changes, what's been really helpful for me is what is my— what tactically changes about my life? Do I change what I eat? Do I change what I wear? Do I change where I live? Do I change the car I drive? And, and do these things matter, right? Does it change who I'm married to? If none of these things change, then almost none of these decisions are going to actually have a huge impact on my life, which then makes the argument for like maybe I should take a higher risk-adjusted return move. But I would say that from the emotional side rather than logical side, um, it was— I have tried— I very quickly tried to have a nest egg to be like, I'm good. Yeah. And that's what's allowed me to take really big bets, like things like school. School's a platform.

The likelihood that oxygen mask is a great way to—

yeah, put that on if you're going to be— if you want. And if you have responsibilities too, if you're, if you're a parent and you've got kids and you've got mortgage and you want a certain lifestyle for them and certain schools that they, you know, that cost money, then you're also risking their futures to a degree. And so again, it's your decision, but just know what you're putting at risk. And how much is my life going to change if I lose? Keith Cunningham has a great frame on this, which is just what's my upside, what's my downside, and can I live with my downside? If you can't live with the downside, don't take the bet.

You mentioned that, you know, the success and the habits are visible at the plateau, but not on the rise. Is at this— and I agree with you. Like, you're not actually seeing the accurate picture of the up-and-coming entrepreneur, the future trillionaire, as it's happening. But at the same time, a lot of businesses increasingly need to do some form of social media on their way up. And the risk there is like sometimes companies just get sucked into just being full media companies, or the brand value and the cash flow from the media business outgrows whatever they were doing originally. What is the right balance? How should entrepreneurs think in the modern era? Like if you're starting a company, consumer product in 2026, what's the right level of social media and actual owned content without it becoming like fake work?

What do you mean by fake work?

Fake work would be like you're growing your following account, but you're not growing your cash flow or your actual revenue.

Yeah, there's a generation of entrepreneurs and like you're probably a huge driver of this that are like, I need to work, I need to like, I need to build my personal brand. Yeah. And they don't realize that like if they just make an amazing product that millions of people benefit from. They just default get the personal brand and they could just— if you care about like attention and being on camera, then you could just do that later, but maybe just make something amazing.

And also your personal brand is an actual media company that has cash flow and is like a successful business. Yeah, you wouldn't be—

I don't think you'd be like on camera if you weren't making money.

No, I wouldn't. I hated it. It was like, it was very hard for me to decide to do this.

Yeah, but there's a lot of people that are basically doing the media for the cloud, and they think it's fake work because they're justifying the cloud chasing by saying, oh, it's marketing for my business.

If what you do does not translate into the money that you make, and money that you make is the goal, then you are doing work that is not effective.

Yeah.

To the example you gave earlier, if you start a business and you get better at media, and the media is making more money than your existing business, then maybe you're better at media than you were at your business. And maybe that should be your business. And so I think constantly being flexible about reassessing what the market wants versus what you have. I think Bezos says this, but determined on goal and flexible on path, or whatever way he says that. And he's also a great example of— what's Bezos's personal brand? Well, everyone knows who he is. Does he make a lot of content? No. Why? He just happens to own Amazon, right? And so I think it depends on what sphere you want to get into. This is kind of interesting. If you were to say, I want to be a big B2B influencer, You cannot be a big B2B influencer without evidence that you are good at business, period. You could take— and there's plenty of people who take word for word the stuff that I say. Aren't there?

There's probably some good counterexamples to that. We don't need it. We don't need to name that.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's tough. It's tough. Like, there's people that— I would say the biggest, the big—

I think the biggest B2B influencer right now is Elon. Oh, sure, sure. And he also has the biggest business and is the richest man. Yeah, right. And so, and I think that just cascades all the way down. The only reason that— so like I was, I had a podcast that started in July of 2017. That's when I started, it was called Gym Secrets and I rebranded it as just The Game. Um, but the, as I continued to make it, uh, we went from like, you know, 2,000 downloads a month to millions when I sold my company for $46.2 million. And then people were like, oh, this guy actually knows what he's talking about. And then the brand took off because I had evidence. Legitimacy. And so I think that the amount of legitimacy that you need to be an influencer depends on the risk that the consumer has in taking action on the nature of the content that you're making. And so if I'm a beauty influencer, if I buy lipstick or I do a, you know, a lash technique, I'm getting in waters I'm not familiar with here. You paint your face in some way, right? The risk is relatively low. Sure. Right? Now you move a little bit over here and you got like personal finance. Well, it's like, well, who's the biggest there? Dave. And then there's some of the new age ones, Erika Colbert. She's got her, but she was also, and there's Vivian too, I think. But like they have some credibility behind and like there's tons— like if a teacher is in, in her basement talking about how you should invest in the S&P 500 and says exactly what Warren Buffett says, and maybe they even say it a little bit more compelling than the way that Warren Buffett says, they won't be Warren Buffett because they just forgot to build Berkshire Hathaway. Sure, sure. And so it's like the proof is the pudding. I think at least my perspective on media is the proof is the pudding. But it varies in terms of how much proof you need. Now, if you're ugly as shit, very hard to be a beauty influencer. Yeah. But if you can use— but if you are ugly and then you paint your face so well that you become hot, then you absolutely— yeah, because you have evidence. Yeah, right. And you have a more dramatic point. No, 100%. This is how it works. Yeah, I like that.

Talk about status seeking. All right. It seems like in Silicon Valley, there's often, you know, Naval talks about this, like there's value in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, well, that's what I want to know.

In Silicon Valley, there's a lot of trend chasing, there's a lot of status seeking, and there's value in like doing low-status activities. And I'm wondering, in mid-market entrepreneurship, small businesses, like what is the shape of that? Is it different than Silicon Valley? Is it less pronounced, more pronounced? Like what is the version of, look, you just need to run a series of golf courses and be happy with that, that type of thing or whatever the equivalent is?

I think it depends on who they compare themselves to. I think it just comes down to that. I think tech guys compare themselves to other tech guys and they want to prove approve from tech guys, and so they do the activities that tech guys approve of. Yeah. If you're an HVAC guy, then it's going to be— you're going to do the activities that HVAC people think are cool if they're the peer group that you actually compare yourself to. Sure. Which they might not be. Yeah.

And to be fair, I love the tech guys that sell their business for 9 figures and then are like, I need a cash-flowing lifestyle business ASAP.

Yeah, I know a lot of them. Yeah, a lot. Like a crazy amount. Like buying gas stations. Like, it's a lot.

How bad is that? Bad? What do you mean? Like, because I imagine it's a grass is greener on the other side thing where they enjoyed building their business, they sold it, they have all this cash, but they want cash flow, they want the stability of the cash flow. And so they want the idea of running a small business.

Check every month. And they don't—

exactly. But they don't think about what it means to like at 2:00 AM your gas station got robbed and you got to go down there and sort it out with the cops or something like that. And so I'm wondering about like What is the actual lesson there for someone who's like about to get over their skis?

Yeah, I think humans are inherently dissatisfied. Okay. And I think whatever you have, you want what you don't have. And so if you're married, you're like, ah, life would be different if I was single. If you're a parent, you're like, ah, can you remember when we didn't have kids? And when you don't have kids, you're like, I wish I had kids. Yeah. If you're an employee, you're like, man, I wish I had an entrepreneur. And somebody entrepreneur, you're like, man, it would be so nice to just show up and clock out at 5 and have to think about and get a check. Like we just always, we want to make, we want the benefits of a trade-off without the negatives of the trade-off. Sure. Yeah. And so when guys are in the cash flow business, because I'll— because I— that's who I talk to the majority of the time, is like what they're thinking about all the time is like, it's hard to sell this business. Um, I'm not really building my net worth. The multiples that I'm gonna get on this aren't gonna necessarily be that high. Um, I'm dealing with people all day. I've dealt with low-skilled labor, and I've got, you know, churn issues or finding techs that aren't gonna show up drunk on the job. Like, there's like my— one of my favorite quotes of all time. I'm gonna try not to cuss on this one, but, um My CFO was deep South Texas when we were in Texas, when we were building Jim Launch. Suzanne Shifflett. Shout out to Suzanne. She was the reason we were able to sell Jim Launch. She had been a CFO for 4 companies from $1 to $100 million plus, had done a $5 billion exit. And I think she'd been either buy side or sell side over 20 times. Wow. She was just like, she was like just so weathered in a good way, right?, and she said, you know what, Alex? She's like, it's all shit. She's like, it's all shit. Every business is shit. It's all shit. And I— and it was— but it was like she said it with so much sincerity because I was like, at the time I was like, man, be cool, we got this kind of multiple, blah blah blah. And she's like, it just doesn't— it's— it all sucks. And it's just different type of suck, but it all sucks.

Yeah. Uh, we're at time, but give us a pitch for Scale or Fail.

If you like seeing entrepreneurs try their absolute hardest and have a completely new paradigm shift in 90 days to scale their business the most, then watch the show. I meet with them for an hour, give them a whole blueprint of what I would do if I bought the business 100% today, and then they execute and they compete.

I love it. Amazing. So reminds me of PMF or Die. Yeah. We experimented with the show last year. PMF or Die. Talk about a niche audience. Yeah, it was like we put this team in an apartment in New York. They were not allowed to leave for 90 days until, or until they build a million-dollar AR business. It descended into chaos.

And it was Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Flies situation for sure.

It was totally crazy. And we were like, we don't have time to do this and this.

But it had like hundreds of people watching at all times. It was actually gripping.

And it was just a livestream of them in the apartment just like cooking.

Yeah. But one of them got really good at talking to chat. It was a whole thing.

It sort of opened us up to live audiences.

Well, that was a good example because like like one of them clearly was like a gifted content creator and the other one was like, why am I on camera? This is terrible. This is terrible.

Did he become a content creator? Uh, we gotta check in.

Yeah, we gotta check in with him. He took vacation, traveled a little bit.

Yeah, they both needed to like disconnect.

It was—

but, uh, yeah, so don't do the show live, then people will actually go crazy.

Yeah, the edit is, uh, is a good—

uh, this was awesome. Yeah, dude.

Hey, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.