Interviewing a Billionaire + Revealing My Workout Routine [Ep 005]

If you had advice that you could give 40 year old Dave, what would you tell him? Hey, guys, on this episode of Formosis, I'm going to be flying down to Nashville to record a full podcast with Dave Ramsey. I'm going to be breaking down a viral clip we posted that went crazy everywhere. We're going to be doing a full workout together and we'll wrap it up with a photo shoot. Enjoy. What flavor is that? No idea. You never know. Could be a secret. There's no chocolate chips. Prom with white chocolate. Not for me. Travel interrupts my productivity more than Layla's. For me, like having my stuff and my setup, I tend to be more effective when I'm at home and so it feels like a bigger cost for me. So I try and do it as little as I can. Going out to see Dave was something that, like, I've always been a big fan of his stuff. And so it made a ton of sense for me to take a day to fly out, see him. To everyone who doesn't fly private, I'll give you a little bit of insight, but it's not always as cracked up as you might think because the WI fi is slow as. Yeah, we're cheap private jet flyers. We have limits. I just like, can't, you know, is the plane going to get me there faster? And they just pay obscene amounts for the plane. I'm like, it's just like, I don't want to pay triple the price just to have like a nice plane. Like for us, the big thing, speed. That's what we like about it. I'm still not loaded. Waste of time. All right. Make some goddamn content. What I want to hear about Solomon's Paradox. Yeah. Solomon was an ancient king in the Bible that he was considered one of the wisest men of all time. It's his particular paradox because he made lots of bad decisions repeatedly, had uncontrolled passion for money and women, and neglected to instruct his only son who went on to ruin his kingdom. People give significantly better advice about their own scenarios if they don't know it's about themselves. If you only just followed your own advice, you'd be way better than you currently are. A practice that I started doing, which is I have a coaching session with myself. Weird. I have a conversation with my future self who's 85, and I ask him for advice on what I should do now. And so 85 year old me explains to me what I already know in my deep self, but my emotional self that's, you know, running the Ship forgets. But instead of, like, meditating to myself, I actually write it down. You actually, like, do this in a Google adopt? Yes. We'll wait for the WI fi. Solomon projects my line and then their line and then my line again as I'm going through it. So it's like I'm like, chatting, but I'm filling out both sides of the chat, but I'm putting different hats on. That's like me talking to me. Like, I deal with this shit too. I talk about thinking long and being patient because every day I'm impatient as fuck. I'm like, why is this happening faster? Like, this should have happened two quarters ago. Like, the same things that you guys feel as entrepreneurs. Like, I feel them too. The Internet sucks. Oh, wow. I don't know what that's like. I'm big on, like, what can I control? What can I not control? I hoped that there was going to be WI fi and there wasn't good WI fi. I knew I was going to basically have three hours of my life taken from me. We ended up turning it into a recording session, which ended up doing really well from the stuff that we recorded in that time period. So it ended up being a net positive that I didn't have WI fi. If I had had WI fi, the Avante moment might not have ever been captured. Do you want to hear about Avante? Layla and I walk a lot and so we get stopped fairly frequently, but this particular guy came up to me, didn't say hi, and immediately started telling me about his life. And he didn't take a breath. He was like, shaking. He', like, dude. He's like, I'm just so sick of being poor, man. He's like, I've got a one year old, I'm working two jobs. She's like, so I just. I don't know how to get ahead. This is a video I'm making for Avante. The young man who was working two jobs with a one year old who's struggling and said he was sick and tired of being poor and didn't know how to get out. There are far more people who are struggling than there are people who are succeeding. And so having content that speaks tactically to what to do when you're in that situation appeals to a much broader audience. It wasn't surprising me that it got the response that it did, but I'm happy that I think it served a lot more people than just Avante. All right, where's the right button here? There's like six buttons here. Someone Definitely has hit that button before. I think a lot of people beat up on Dave because of his stances on debt.

I live 100% debt free.

But also his argument, succinctly put, is debt introduces risk. Risk, when compounded over a lifetime, is bound to come due. If you plan on playing the game for a very long time, you're betting on the fact that you're never going to have a bad season, and that's a hard bet to make. Have fun. We'll see you guys on your back. Wish me luck. If your plan requires luck to succeed, it's a bad plan. Oh, my God. People travel all over the country, come here just to say, you know, they're debt free. That's what worked it out. So I think you're going to be right here. Dave's going to be in that seat, so. Oh, good. That's my good side. Yeah. Is that your good side? No, this is usually my better side, but thank you for having me.

Honored to have you, sir. Thanks for coming.

Honors mine. You did a podcast with Graham Stephan and he showed you his investment portfolio. You said something to him that massively changed the direction of how we invested.

Just so you know, rich people always enamored me. Like, I thought they had some kind of special sauce or something. There aren't any secrets. Find something that they like and that they understand and that they're good at, and they do it a lot. Your giftings are much more in the real estate world than they are in analyzing stocks. If we were going to put a portfolio together of your knowledge base, it would be 80% real estate, 20% stocks, maybe. Probably it's okay if your portfolio is real estate heavy.

The reason that that little piece of advice that you gave to Graham was so meaningful for me was because everybody told me what they did and what had worked for them. I talked to probably every guy that I know who was richer than me and was like, what should I do with all this? And the answers that I got were as different as there are people under the sun.

Yep.

Left me more confused than anything. And I looked at that pie and thought, okay, well, what's my knowledge base? It's all business. I showed that clip to Layla, my wife, and I was like, I think this is what we should do. I think we should just stick to business and just buy businesses and grow them. That's what we did with acquisition.com is.

That we're put money in stuff, you understand? And you love don't put money in stuff because it sounds fancy.

I'll bring us home because I had a. And I could talk to you all day. If you had advice that you could give 40 year old Dave, would you tell him you know now that you didn't know then?

Play incremental long ball. Don't look for the home run. I keep waiting for somebody to call me and for this to get easy. One phone call and it's all over. Oh, now I don't have to think about it anymore. Someone else is going to do it for me. It's all automatic. Never going to be automatic. It's never going to be easy. It's a hustle and grind. It's a claw. You're going to make a bazillion mistakes, make mistakes that are experiments that you survive. You put out a hypothesis, you survive the experiment. To live another day, to have another experiment, put out another hypothesis, another product that fails, another idea that fails. Our failures at Ramsey in number and in money are way greater than our successes. The only thing is we survived them. A, we didn't have debt and B, we never bet the farm on one horse. And so we're not looking for the singular home run. We're looking to survive and fight another day and keep iterating. The accumulated value of those iterations are what we call the gleaming mountain of success, which turns out as a pile of garbage and mistakes that you're just standing on rather than laying under it.

I didn't understand brand. I didn't get it. Like with Jim Launch, it was just all quantitative. Like it was all clicks conversions. Like that was all I kind of cared about. Going to the content world was kind of an experiment. I'd done affiliates, I'd done referral programs, I'd done paid ads, I'd done cold outbound, but I'd never done content. I'd never made it. And then in making content, you learn about brand. I'm not saying I understand brand, but I know more than I did. It feels like once you start doing that, you realize that what you were doing all before was wrong. What's going on, dudes? I was like thinking like, let me see if I can download any lessons. If someone's making more money than me, there's always something to learn. I would say having the conversation with Dave, like, it's just showing up. He does three hours a day every single day for 30 plus years. Three hours a day of showing up and making content. He's 62. Once you have the right strategy, it's volume. Like you just need to do more But I think just seeing that level of consistency over 30 years, like I'm grateful that I passed my 10 year mark, but I'm. I'm excited for what the next 20 looks like. That's very cool. I like, am talking or presenting. I think I burn more calories. Your brain is 25% of your calorie intake and it consumes like most of your sugar, but Coca Cola will kill you. Except Warren Buffett still murdering it. Drinking regular cherry Coke. I'd like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company. Wait for it. Wait for it. And we're not dead. One more flight in the books of not dying. You excited for the photo shoot? Is it Saturday? Saturday. Oh, good. I gotta get a good pump on before I go. Just don't zoom in on those. All right, good. All right, so we're gonna do probably a super set of calves and hamstrings with Blum, owner of Raw Fitness. I will train way harder if I'm training with a training partner. I'll train longer, I'll do more reps, I'll do more sets. Just someone else holding me accountable. And one of the nice things, if you ever get the opportunity, is to train with someone stronger than you. Just like you have limiting beliefs in business, you also have limiting beliefs in lifting. And so when you see someone warm up with your one rep max, it really shifts the way you see the weight. Got to start with calves. Start with the most important body part. Calves were actually my weakest body part for a very long time. And I actually had a girlfriend say, why don't you train your calves? And I'd been training them for like three years. So Blum and I have known each other for 11 years, 12 years. Blum was, was the gym owner who had a gym. I did not have a gym. He lived in one. Yeah, I would just basically harass everyone. Have them let me just come around with my little clipboard and just take notes on everything they were doing. I'm like, alex is the same Alex. He would always be there asking questions that I had no answers to. What's your turn? What's your this? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm 29 years old and I run a gym. I don't know what you're even talking about. What's your onboarding process? He's like, they sign up and then they work. So I like to go easy, hard, easy, hard. By your legs, hard. Then I'll do shoulders, then I'll do back, hard. Then I'll do arms science. All right, all done? Yeah, done. So I train full body every day because I want to grow everything every day. And I also have a irregular schedule, so I don't want to be like, Monday's back day, Wednesday's leg day, you know, Friday, shoulder, tricep, bicep. And then like, I miss two Fridays in a row and I haven't trained shoulders, biceps, tricep in like three weeks. So I train everything every day. Bodybuilding and business are actually really similar in that you will have uneven inputs to create an even output. Because perfect business would have amazing marketing, amazing sales, amazing product, amazing customer success. But the individual might be like, I'm really good at marketing and that's all I do and that's fine. But the business needs to be balanced. And so I kind of think of the exercises in the same way of like I'm only going to select exercises and I'm going to order them and do the most volume on the ones that I need to work on the most so that my physique overall is more balanced. You know, I think splitting your muscles. Typical bro shit you do in the gym if you just compare biceps. All right, so that was our workout. So we are heading to a photo shoot. Main reason, if you've ever seen any of my other random images that have been taken, the reason I'm not wearing a hat is because when we did the photo shoot last time, we were in transition on the logos and I didn't want to take a bunch of pictures of the old logo hat. Now we'll have photos once again with the right logo in the hat and the. The logo beater and the logo beater. Essential detail Cookies. Ordered some cookies. Is that because no one skips dessert on the thing? Yeah, Nowhere. Never, Never ever comparable offense. Honestly. It's a great value. We saw you take the brownie and slide it into the trash can after you were done. Your lunch didn't take the extra bite. What's the deal here? I'm not accusing. I just want to understand why you never know when you're going to need one.

Sugar.

Little sugar. Little up. Oh, he's up. I haven't washed my head since the gym. It's good for your immune system. People will do is we'll run through all the different facial expressions that we use for the thumbnails in all the different flannels. So we'll just batch those out. Should I get a brush? Oh, no, you. Yeah, do a quick brush. Yeah, do a quick brush. I do that for you guys, because I know a lot of you guys are like, man, you know what made me really, like, mosey better? The Cleveland Brushed. It's a bit of a girl pose. You want to listen to feedback from the audience, but you don't want the feedback from the audience to change your brand, because brands is your identity. It's your reputation, what makes you you. And if you get funneled into, like, the algo hole of looking like exactly every other person who funnels for the algorithm, then you lose the uniqueness of what makes you you, and then you get the views. But then the moment that your type of content no longer is in vogue and something else is, like, your entire brand disappears overnight. I'm going to steal this from Garrick. I think it's really good. You are your own niche. Everyone has multiple facets. They just. Just don't express them. Like, I like eating dessert. I also look kind of Jack. I also am into business. I also work with my wife. It's just like people who with any of those things will with my stuff. But if it was like, challenges are really important. That's all we should make. Yeah. Then I would be catering to something that's not me. Don't let me get too far. Don't let me get my shoes.