Get Rich in the New Economy

Conor McGregor came out with Proper 12. Boom. It was a $600 million deal. The Rock had Teremana Tequila, which is now worth like, 4 billion. Kylie made the front of Forbes as a billionaire, and she was 20. Mr. Beast, he will be a sensibillionaire. Right now, the entire economy has shifted. The last century was a century about power. And when I say power, I mean like energy. The wealthiest individuals of the last century were built on oil. The biggest companies were all energy companies. Fast forward. Today, the four out of the top five biggest companies in the world are not built on the old oil, but the new oil. And the oil of today is attention. Rise in teens on TikTok. The thing that is being pumped and drilled every day is the attention of the masses. You have 24 hours a day that your ears are open. You have 24 hours a day that your eyes are open. And so the idea is, how can we capture as many of those hours from as many people as possible? And the war for our minds. For me, the stuff is all about, like, helping people connect. The total amount of attention that exists is every human's eyes and ears collectively, 24 hours a day. That is the pie. And they're fighting for it. People who are creating the platforms that other companies can come and drill. They're basically the digital landscape. They've enveloped the world. They're literally buying up the real estate of the collective attention that exists. The oil tycoons had to go and buy a state and negotiate, haggle with the farmer to get his things. The new world today, they don't need to haggle with anyone. They just take it. Scarce resources are the things that are the most valuable. And so oil was the scarce resource, and now attention is the scarce resource. And so that's why attention is the new oil. A friend of mine, Ryan Fisher, just showed me a clip on his phone of a podcast that I did with him. This is when I wasn't really. Actually, I didn't do any podcasts. I was that wasn't doing any speaking stuff. Like, all I was doing is building Jim Mulch and Prestige Labs. I was like, screw content. Just run ads. I don't want to be known. I want to be rich and unknown. It's funny because he was like, and now you're not doing that. I was very against it. And then what happened? Kylie made the front of Forbes as a billionaire and she was 20. And at the time I was 27. And I think I had taken home 17 million in income the year before. I was on Pace to do like 13 to 15 that next year in terms of take home. And I thought like, I was hot shit. And then this girl is 7 years old, younger than me, fucking crushes me in net worth. And I was like, wow. And so it was just this huge belief shift for me where I was like, what am I doing wrong? My ego felt hurt, so I started protecting myself. And I was like, oh, no. Kris Jenner's her mom. She's an absolute gangster. She was born into this royalty. It's not that she did it, it was someone else. And blah, blah, blah. Ego protected. I feel okay now. And then Huda Beauty sold a percentage of her thing for 600 million. At the time, it's worth over a billion today. Conor McGregor came out with Proper 12. And 12 months later, boom, it was a 600 million doll, robots, whale. And then the Rock had Teremana Tequila, which is now worth like 4 billion. Kept seeing this again and again and again to the point where I was like, I believe something that's not true. And so I talk about how skills, beliefs, character traits are the three things that hold back entrepreneurs. And this one for me, was something that I believed about the world, and I was functioning as though, and it was not. I always try and find those things because they construct our reality. And we make our decisions based on the things that we believe to be true. And so I basically was walking through a reality that was not real. I then read a book by Naval Ravikant, which is his almanac, which is really good, really quick read. And he talked about the four types of leverage in the book. Leverage is the difference in what you put in and what you get out. The people who make the most money are the ones who have the most leverage, because everybody has the same amount of time. It's just who gets the most back for their time. And compounding is that now that you've made that trade with your leverage, is it going to compound unto itself and get you even more back? Because compounding is a form of leverage. You've got labor, you get other people to do stuff for you, which means you get more of your time back and you get output above that. You've got capital, so people give you money. You invest the money that other people give you, and you get leverage. By extension, the last two levels are code. So you got software and media. So if you think about this, you make a piece of code and then 10 million people can use it. That's leverage. You put one time investment, you get infinite on the other Side with media. It's the same way. If I take however much time it takes me to make this video, one person, a million people, 100 million people can see this video, which is what gives it leverage. When I saw that, that was what made everything click for me as to why these people were getting these crazy, crazy numbers when they had, like, I had heard Kylie had a team of seven and she was doing 200 million a year. I was like, team of seven. And was. Because she had a compounding leverage vehicle built within her business. And that was when I looked at my own businesses at the time and realized I had nothing that compounded nothing. I almost became dissatisfied with the business that I had because I realized that whatever I wanted to do next, I wanted to have a compounding vehicle, something that multiplies unto itself over and over again. So Warren Buffett could build Berkshire Hathaway. Because the money itself compounds and compounds and compounds. And on a long enough time horizon, when you keep rolling the snowball, after you do that for 40, 50 years, you have a big fucking snowball. You have to unlock one of those four types of leverage. And so when I looked at that pyramid, I was like, well, I understand the leverage of labor, so I've got that. I'm now in a position where I have capital that I can deploy now. I don't have other people's capital, because that's not what I want to do with my life right now. But when I looked at software and media, I was like, given my skills, et cetera, I could be better at the media side than I could at the corporate code side. But I still wasn't there yet. I looked at these people that are ultra famous. I was like, huh? Well, I'd still rather be anonymous because they've got all these stalkers and weirdos. Hey, good morning, Kanye. Shut the up. When you get exposed to 10 million people, if you figure 1% of people are crazy, you got a hundred thousand weirdos. Anyways, I go to have dinner with a friend of mine, Dean Graciosi, who's. He gets, like, weirdos that come to his house and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, how do you deal with this? I was like, why do you think this? Like, how is this worth it? He sat me down. He was like, dude, if a couple weird letters, you know, every day or every week is the price I have to pay for the impact I want to have, he's like, I pay that price any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And there was just like this pause when he said it, between when he said it and he looked at me. And I just felt like it hit me because I was like, God, I'm being such a pansy. I want to make real business education available to everyone. If I say that that's what I actually want to do, then I need to match my actions to that. Otherwise they're just empty words. I hate doing something that I don't get credit for later. And so the idea of making a short that is going to float today and then disappear into the ether tomorrow, right? Or make a post on Instagram that's going to be gone in a week, like no one's ever going to see it again. To me, taking the scarce resources of my time and then having it vanish, I couldn't make that work. For me, it was a huge belief that I realized the content is not the output is the input, the output is the audience. And the audience is what compounds. The audience is what sticks. You're gathering the scarce resource and the audience is the thing that pumps attention over and over again. You've got Mr. Beast. I think he opened up a restaurant in a local area and had 10,000 people show up at a local restaurant. I don't think people realize that he's 24. And media compounds. I will make a prediction that he will be a sensibillionaire. Not just a billionaire, but a sensibillionaire. And so becoming a master of media is a huge way of creating leverage. Because if Kylie can just point or Mr. Beast can just point, and then you have 100 million people who buy anything, you have a billion dollar plus company. But once that shifted in me, I'd stop seeing it as a waste because I thought if I got one more person who's going to see this short or see this long or see this post or see this tweet or see this whatever, that was the point, the reason. Huda the rock, Conor McGregor. Kylie were able to translate their attention into money. One, they spent a long time building it, right? And amassing that attention because they knew that the moment they did decide to monetize it, it was right there. Think about how long the Rock has been building the brand of the Rock. Before he signed his deal with Under Armour, before he made Termina, before he made Zoa. Twenty years he'd been building this brand. People piss and moan about the fact that, you know, they posted content for four weeks and they're not famous yet. One is they waited a really, really, really long time and they didn't ask, they just. They gave, they give to their particular audience. The longer you can wait, the bigger the ask can be at the end. The longer the Runway, the bigger the plane that can take off from it. The next thing is that the thing they chose to monetize from was on brand. This is something that their audience already dug. The rock. Signing the deal with Under Armour makes complete sense because fitness is a core part of his brand. It's about drive, it's about power. We stay hungry, we devour. Like all of that is something that Under Armour wanted to tap into to associate their brand with. The biggest brands that exist come from the endorsements of celebrities. We can't be Kim Kardashian. A girl can't be Kim. So Kim is the ultimate status. Then Dolce and Gabbana signs Kim and says, where our shit? People then see the status that Kim has and associate it with Dolce and Gabbana. And then little lady who's got money and doesn't have status trades her money for the bag that she can associate with Kim to get the status. Status. That's the game. Let's look at LeBron and Nike. They wanted to sign him because they figure he is going to be iconic. He is iconic, right? And they wanted to associate Nike victory with somebody who's victorious because the brand can't be victorious in and of itself. It's not a person. And so they got to find the people who embody the spirit and the values of their brand. They make the endorsement people, make the association in their mind, and then they buy the brand to get the association of the thing they could never do but always aspire to, the people who are the most famous. You look at Rogan, right? He's got ufc. He's also a really amazing comedian and loves the comedy community, fitness and biohacking and supplements and all. And like brain stuff. He loves all that stuff. Aliens and UFOs, and these are all totally different. But the more dimensions that someone can go deep on, the more they'll get an audience from comedy. And then they'll cross pollinate them with fighting. It's this total pollination which ultimately compounds the audience even faster. And so these megastars go deep on many things and capture bigger and bigger audiences that compound on themselves. And they wait because they stay loyal to their brand and. And then they appeal to a segment of their audience or they try to cut across the one that appeals to the most of them. It took me way too long to realize that the game had changed fundamentally. If the Rockefellers were built on oil, the new generation of people are going to be built on attention. Media will only become more expensive over time. Advertising becomes more expensive, Content creation becomes more expensive. It becomes increasingly fragmented, so it costs more to do it across different platforms. The audience becomes more valuable. The cost of getting the audience becomes more valuable. Which means the best time to start is now. The people who will become the new sense of billionaires, etc. Is going to be people who can do three things. They have to be able to capture, they have to be able to hold, they have to be able to multiply attention.