FEAR is keeping you POOR keys to $100M mindset | Alex Hormozi

Alex Hormozi, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. How are we feeling today?

Life-changing.

Life-changing. What an amazing word. So I'd like to give our audience a little bit of background context and also give you some context. In February of last year, I read your book, $100 Million Offers for the first time, and Book Thinkers was a much smaller business back then. We were doing about $10,000 a month in revenue, and I was looking for a way to remove myself as a bottleneck to increase average deal size, etc. And the book was recommended to me. So here we are about a year later and we're only 6 days into the month and we've already done $30,000 in revenue this month. And that growth is a result of reading your book a couple of times and implementing virtually everything in it. So I wanted to kick off with that context and just say thank you very much for changing our lives.

I don't know.

I don't know how often you get that kind of feedback. I'm sure you get it a lot. It's a very actionable book.

I appreciate it. And that, I mean, that's heartwarming. It's why I write them. I mean, at the end of the day, like, I'm not gonna be able to invest in every company under the sun. But, you know, I've already seen, I've always seen our platform as like, there are people who will cure cancer, there are people who will make the next, you know, green energy thing. And that's not me. But I can hopefully equip whoever that future person is with some of the tools to hopefully make that thing a reality. And so that's kind of how I see like my role in this ecosystem.

Sure. Well, talking a little bit about some of those other bigger projects that you just mentioned that people are undertaking, I'd like to kick off today's show with the subject of mortality. It's a subject that you've been talking about a lot. It's something that I've been focusing on for the last couple of years because it's helped me prioritize. So Could you just share everybody, like, when was the first time you realized we're mortal, we're all gonna die, and that you should prioritize your time justly?

I think I've thought about it a lot most of my life. For, I mean, I thought about it when I was in high school. I thought about it in college. And I would say that my worldviews continue, you know, continue to congeal, you know what I mean? They continue to solidify, crystallize. As I get older, maybe I'm less likely to change my ways. But at least for me, and I think I have a relatively contrarian viewpoint, but it's just like, I don't believe that anything has inherent meaning. But for me, that's freeing. And so that means that I get to ascribe meaning to things as I deem them. And I think that even though, you know, we're all human, it allows me to take a little bit less of a sting from like other people's opinions who I know will die eventually and be forgotten just like me. And so then if it's like, if they're all, if they're going to eventually be forgotten, then so will their opinion about me, which means that it's on a long enough time horizon irrelevant.

Well, you mentioned that you started thinking about death in high school. I mean, what prompted you to think about that? That's definitely not the average thought of a 15, 16-year-old kid.

I mean, I don't know. I think, I think, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make some statements. I think being happy is actually abnormal. And the reason that I would have evidence for that is that everybody wants it. So it's actually far more normal to be less than happy or at least neutral. And so I think that just even saying that out loud, a lot of people would have less concern about their current state because they see themselves as less than Or not normal when in fact it is far more common. And so a big part—I mean, I've had a lot of evolutions in terms of my thinking, and the the mortality thing goes hand in hand with like subjective well-being in terms of like how happy I—you know—I don't even like the word happiness. But when I was in college, I think I was 19 or 20 years old, I was obsessed with the concept of happiness. I studied positive psychology. I was reading all these books, going to you know TED Talks. And it was only when I said fuck happiness because I was so tired of trying to be happy and failing that I didn't actually think about the concept for years. It like completely went dormant. And I realized like 3, 4, or 5 years later that I actually kind of enjoyed my life a little bit. So not to say that I'm the happiest man under the sun, but I just didn't hate my life, which for me was at least a win, you know, as I define it. And so anyways, to wrap, wrap bring the wagon around. I think I have contrarian views, not because they are like abnormalities, but they're just observations of things that are apparent that most people don't think about. And I think that that makes my, it makes stress easier for me to handle. And I think that that feeds into the entrepreneurial journey because dealing with lots of founders and CEOs of our portfolio companies and obviously lots of people who consume the content, The biggest limiter of the business is always the entrepreneur. And a lot of times it's their ability to handle stress, their ability to handle anxiety, their ability to stay the course despite it being uncomfortable, handle change, all of these things. And it really happens between your ears. And so having a worldview or paradigm that is conducive to entrepreneurship and the stressors that come with it, I think is important for getting to where most people want to come.

Alright. I have one follow-up question to this before I kick it over to Luke. So, You mentioned that knowing you're going to die and the people that might hate on you, they're going to die, so therefore their opinions are meaningless. I think that's a great way to care less about what other people think of you. We get a lot of questions in our community like, hey, what's a good book recommendation to help people care less or help me care less about the opinions of others? Because that's making me mitigate risk in a strange way and it's funneling me into this lifestyle that I don't truly want. So, are there any other perspectives that you can offer a listener today? To help shed the beliefs of other people and live a life that's more unique to what they want to do?

Yeah. So I'll do, I'll ask a question and then I'll tell a story. So when I have major life decisions that I need to make, it like, it almost gets me choked up, but just to say, what would you do if you weren't afraid? And a lot of times the answer of what you would do if you had no fear, if you knew no fear, you couldn't experience it, you were immune to it. And a different way of asking the question is, because oftentimes nowadays fear comes from perceived negative judgments from people who we don't actually talk to, right? Like, like, that's where a lot of our fear comes from. What if everyone thought everything you did was awesome no matter what happened? Different way of saying it, same concept. And so for me, I had my fuck happiness thing. That was when I was in college. The hardest decision in my life still to date was when I quit my job. And when I quit my job, I had a good consulting job, you know, doing what I was supposed to do. I finished 3 years magna cum laude Vanderbilt, like I did all the stuff, right? And I remember I was talking to my dad, not talking to my dad, I was thinking about my dad because he wanted me to continue doing this thing. And I would always say, I wanna start a business. And he, and he'd always like, ah, yeah, yeah, let's talk about it. He would basically talk me off the ledge every time, just over and over and over again. And I knew that he would not approve of me quitting this job to like do what I wanted to do, which was like to get into fitness at the time. And I remember thinking at one point that I didn't want to wake up anymore. So every time I'd go to bed, I would just like, so there's like different levels of like being upset at life. I was at the point, it was a passive ideation, which is like, if you, you're like, you know, if the car just like went into the other lane and I died, like, you know, no one would know. Or if I just like, just died in my sleep and I just didn't wake up, I'd be more content with that outcome. And so when I started thinking that way, it actually gave me a lot of freedom because what ended up happening was I asked myself this question, which was, would I rather die to my father or die to myself? Because I can continue to live the life I have and not be alive because I don't want to be alive. And so I equated that for just living a dead life. And so I said that was— and so being able to face that question, which is I will die to him or I will die to me. Who do I choose? That was what gave me the courage to quit the job. And to be fair, my— in many cases, people's concerns are unwarranted because people are like, dude, if you were unhappy, I, of course, I would support you. That's not always the case. And it wasn't in mine. He did not support the decision of me, of me doing this. And, you know, I think retroactively he's kind of changed the way he, he imagines that story in that time. But he was not, and we didn't talk for a very long time. I mean, it was intermittent, you know, 2 minutes every month maybe. But I went against what he wanted me to do, went against his wishes. I did not comply. And I think that for me at least, there's a saying that every man becomes a man when his father dies. And so I think we can choose When we want to stop living for our parents' vision of what they want our lives to be. And so either it happens by force because they actually die in the real world and their vision no longer matters because they're no longer there to judge you, or at least your perception of their judgment. Or you can choose to actively kill their— your care about their perception of what they want you to be. And so for me, that was the moment, at least in my opinion, where I— if I had to mark a time where I feel like I became a man to myself, which is really just like, when do I get to be me? And that was that moment.

I'm getting kind of choked up listening to you, to be honest, over here. Uh, great, great story. And man, well, how old— how old were you when you just— when, when that switch flipped? Like, what was going on in your life at that point that, that that switch just was like, I'm done with what my dad thinks of me and what he wants for my life. What was going on at that time?

I was 22. Yeah, I was a management consultant. And I think that there are, there are different times when people experience things or, sorry, go through a change. And so this is kind of tangential, but I think it'll, it'll wrap around. If you look at churches or people who convert people into an ideology, the reason the military recruits people at 18, 19, you know, that is because people are at a pivot point. when they're basically forming their worldview, right? So it's in that 18, you know, 16, 17, 18, all the way to like 22, 23, you know, somewhere in there that people solidify their worldview. I heard a different stat that like after 27, it's very difficult to change someone's worldview with the exception of a traumatic event. Now, traumatic events are actually learning events. So PTSD means that you went through a traumatic experience. Your brain learned a lesson that was either right or wrong about how it saw the world. And then you carry that with you. So it changes your behavior. And so those are the 2 windows. And so I talked to a pastor at a Bay Area church and he's like, I either got to get them young or I have to get them like after divorce or after like come back from Afghanistan or like they, like some, something traumatic has to happen. And then what they thought about the world was wrong because some evidence disproved that. And then they have to go find a new way to see the world. And so I was, uh, 22 and I think that you can have rock top moments or rock bottom moments. So some people get there when they're like cracked out on the street or they're, you know, that's, I'm gonna get a bunch of like heinous examples, but whatever their rock bottom moment is, I had a different experience, which is what I would consider a rock top moment, which is, is this all there is? And so I had done everything that I was supposed to do. So I had, you know, I was good at school. I was, you know, president of the fraternity. I was vice president of the powerlifting team in high school. I was, president of the creative literary magazine and vice president of the newspaper. Like, I did the clubs, I got the awards, I got the, you know, the prestigious job. But then I just looked at my life. I just, you know, cast it out to 30 years and I was like, I don't want to do this. So I was looking out, out of my condo that I was in a high-rise on the, you know, in downtown Baltimore, like looking over everything and I was like very empty. And that was when I started thinking and it was about a 6-month window of time where Every day I would wake up and just not want to be alive. And so I think I was like, I— this is uncomfortable enough that I either should choose to stop living or change how I live.

Man, that's so good. I feel like so many people don't even, don't even get there, you know? Like, I'm, I'm about— I'm 29 years old, and it's taken me, it's taken me a lot longer than it took you to get to that point where I was like, I don't want, I don't want this, this life anymore is not, is not worth it to me. And I wish I got there sooner. But do you think, is there any like advice that you can give to people that are our listeners that can get them there a little bit sooner? Like, I mean, I know everything that you just said was fantastic and I'm just like, like I said, I got the goosebumps, got a little bit of tears coming out of my eyes and everything else. But is there any actions that a person could like take today, like just to change everything?

I think playing it out. So my 2 favorite questions to ask in business and in life are what problem are we solving? And let's play it out. And so it's like taking the next 3 to 5 moves, right? It's like, okay, I quit my job, then what happens? No, like, let's play it out. Like, what actually happens? Okay, I'm gonna have this amount of money. Well, I'm gonna probably— because people are like, I'm gonna be homeless. It's like, that's probably not realistic. Play it out. Well, you're not gonna spend the same amount of money if you don't have the income. Okay, well, what do you think you would actually live on? This. Okay. If I actually ran out of money, what would I do? Well, I'd probably call my parents up and I'd probably sleep on the couch.

Okay.

What pain would I experience in doing that? I'd probably have to be under their rules, which would blow, right? I probably might be difficult to have girls over, right? Like, you know, there, there are, there are pains. And then the question is, okay, if these are the costs that are short-term costs in order to avoid the long-term consequence of this continued zombie existence where I do not want to be here, is that a price I'm willing to pay? And I think when people, because what happens is they when you stay vague with your fears, the fear is always death. Like, if you extrapolate it out, it's death. Like, I'm gonna lose my job and then I'm gonna go homeless and then I'm gonna die. Like, it just, you just play it out enough. Like, that's what it is. But when you get specific with it, you realize that you, that's actually not going to be the thing. And so then you get to be very specific about what the real decision is. And so it's like, okay, I had a, there was a, there was a big bit. So when I was selling Gym Launch and Prestige Labs, So this may be hilarious to you guys, but $46.2 million, which was the purchase price, to me felt like a really small number. And I was embarrassed about the number. I thought it was like, I know, like context. This is what the thing is, is that to somebody in Ghana, the problems that you have are the same, right? Context. And for me, I realized that there was actually just one person whose opinion I thought about. And so then I rephrased the question and I was like, well, what this person thinks or what I think they think about me selling the business be the reason I don't choose to make this decision. And then when it was that simple, I was like, well, obviously not because why would I give that person so much power over my life? Because one of the things to wrap back to the, an earlier point, I know we're going non, you know, nonlinear. We're gonna dance with me. It's all good. Is, and I might have even lost my train of thought, but it was something about person. Anyways, all good. There's a good point, but I'll remember it again.

No, we love this subject. So yeah, for sure.

I mean, like, you can just keep, you can just keep going on and on. We don't care. You were just, you were talking about, you know, you sold your, you were gonna sell your business and did you want to give that person— Oh, the power.

Yeah. So when I was So a lot of people have difficulty, whether it's a brother, an aunt, an uncle, whatever. And so if you think about distortions of reality, right? So there's 3 primary distortions that happen. The first is that the universe is out to get me. Like, things aren't fair. Things should be this way. I make demands and the universe doesn't listen to my demands, right? That's when people point externally to the reason that their life isn't the way they want it to be, right? It's not fair. It's my race. It's my— and Mind you, I want to be very clear. There are absolutely things that are circumstantial that can hurt, prevent, decrease the likelihood that you achieve something, comma, doesn't affect your actions. You control the controllable, right? Everybody's dealt cards. You got to play the cards you're dealt. So that's not me saying that those things aren't real. It's saying that what are we going to do about it? So first layer of distortion is, is the universe, external circumstances. The next layer is other people. So it's like, I can't do it because my spouse, my mom, my partner, my, my brother, my uncle, my friends, my whatever, right? Next layer. And then the one after that is self, right? Which is either people avoid the decision, they delay the decision, they have fear around why they should take a next step. And so those are 3 layers of distortion of reality. And so the thing is, is that whatever you point your finger to, as the reason you can't do something is actually where the power is. So you just follow where you point. So if you are upset that your uncle touched you when you were a kid, you actually give your uncle the power over your life by saying that you are a victim of insert here. You get— it makes them the victor. And it means that— and I remember for me, the realization I had when I was younger was that I used to blame my parents For why I was unhappy, I was like it's their fault. They raised me this way. They gave me these unrealistic expectations. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then I realized that it didn't serve me because I actually ended up making the people that at the time—I'm not saying I feel this way now—but at the time that I hated, I made the people that I hate in charge of my life and them responsible for my outcomes. And so once I broke that frame and was like, well, I want to be the one in power. I want them to be the victims of my victory that I started to take control of my life and point the power, point the blame here. So wherever you point the blame is where the power is. And if I point the blame at me, then I also have the power because I have the responsibility to change it and the ability to.

Man, you're so good at articulating those things. I mean, like I've heard, I've heard, you know, that concept plenty of times. Like you got to take control of your life. Tom Bilyeu talks about, you know, he says if there's a meteor hurtling towards his house and his wife dies from that, then he's going to take the blame for that. But man, I like the, the whole pointing finger thing. That was like, that unlocked some stuff for me. So thanks for sharing that. I appreciate it. Nick, did you have, did you have something you want to ask? Because I could—

Oh no, I, Alex, do you study, I know you've read a lot, you've studied a lot of religions, philosophies. Have you studied Stoic philosophy with any particular interest?

So my closest friend and my editor, Dr. Kashey, is like a hardcore ancient text guy. And I would say that like, that is, I would say that 60% of our conversations revolve around the concepts of Stoicism. Like I would, like at a future point, I would like to write some sort of book that's a, I wouldn't use the word Stoicism because I think people box that into like weird dudes who don't say much and like are whatever. But yes, I would say that a lot of my philosophies are aligned with that.

Okay. So yeah, I was asking because I just, I love these concepts so much. We could spend the whole show here. We want to move on to the book in a minute, but you know, you started to talk about some of these. The first time I watched you was on the Iced Coffee Hour, maybe outside of some Instagram content. And when you got to how we determine value and how we assign it and a lot of these concepts, I was like, oh, Alex is one of us, man. Like he loves these subjects. But Luke, I'll kick it back to you. What were you gonna say?

No, I was just gonna say the, the final Hormozi book will just be Hormozi Philosophy or something like that. You know, it'd be great.

Well, I'll tell you, everyone would buy it. I'd read it. It'll probably be called Never Skip Dessert: A Philosophy on Life and Business.

Boom. Live forever by eating dessert every night.

Everything is planned. I, I love it. Well, man, I know, I know we want to kind of get towards the, a little bit of the meat of the book so we can start asking some questions. Sure. Money-making stuff. The money-making stuff. Um, there's a lot. I mean, I think you answered— I had some questions like around the, the beginning of your book because you've— I feel like you've kind of already answered this because I was going to ask about, you know, you had 2 like really major big losses, like, and somehow you kept going. And I like, I feel like so many people— I know personally of so many people that have losses that are less than that that just give up. So like, Yeah. And maybe you kind of touched on this, but what, what, like, what motivated you to keep going? Like, how did you just not like just like throw throw up your hands and be like, you know what, I can't do this. I can't do this business thing. Forget it all. I'm just gonna get people paid and then be done. Like, why did you keep going?

Well, also there are people who've had significantly greater losses and continued. And so just frame. Besides that, I think that, you know, most human behavior is, it just comes down to carrots and sticks. And we do things that we have been rewarded from in the past and we recognize a similar situation and we try to, and we extrapolate what happened or our behavior that worked for us then to that new situation that looks similar enough. And so for me, the whole not wanting to, I, for me it was like, it was hatred that fueled me for the beginning for sure. Like it was not like, it's so funny, like you hear the Silicon Valley like entrepreneurs or like, you know, these guys who fundraise and they're like, we just really wanted to make this impact and we want to change the world. Like I was trying to not be broke. Like, that was my world mission. It was like, don't be broke. Don't let my dad be right. And that was it. And I knew that no matter how much pain I was going through, it was less than the idea of having to go back and tell him he was right and then have to, in my opinion, because I had escaped. And I'm using that as strong language, but like, it took everything of my willpower. Yeah. Literally facing my own death in order to get me to, you know, die to him, which I very much did. The idea of having to go back to that situation in order to live the rest of my life there was just not acceptable. And one of my favorite frameworks for like getting through hard shit is it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have no choice. And so I remember when I was going through those times, especially in the earlier days, And I actually used to think of what I would think is like probably the worst, you know, living situation, which would be like, imagine I was a slave for the rest of my life. There are people who worked every hour of every day at the threat of whip and death for the entirety of their lives, and yet they were still able to do it. And so if they can do it, so can I.

True.

Right? And so, and I was like, well, then what were the conditions that they were able to do it? Well, their alternative was death. Right? And so they chose to live. And so for me, I think eliminating the choice— I had no choice because for me, the alternative was death because I just, I knew it's kind of like the scene in The Matrix where Trinity opens up the door and when Neo doesn't want to go with her and she's like, you've been down that road, you know where it goes. That's what it felt like. And I just didn't want that.

There are a lot of people in our audience who understand what you're saying conceptually, and maybe they're listening to a podcast. So they're in the logic side of their brain right now. And they go, I get it. Alex is successful. He's teaching us something that makes sense. But when they're faced with these situations, they end up on the emotional side of their brain and they have a hard time gaining control of themselves. So do you have any advice around centering yourself in a moment like that? Is it just asking the reframing questions or did you spend a lot of time meditating? So now you have more time between an input to your brain and your reaction.

I've like really never meditated. I would say like the only time I could say that I maybe meditate is like when I lift, it's like I can take my head off things. And so like a lot of, So all my tweets, if you ever see on Twitter, like 90% of them just come between sets. I've got one framed back here, by the way. It's one of your tweets. I'm so curious what it is.

This one is, I think this one's one of your more recent ones. It says, what's the one thing that if I stopped doing today would immediately destroy my business?

Yes. Now reverse side, a lot more of it.

Exactly. Exactly.

Like, so I think it, it, it, it come— the reason I think worldviews are so important is because it frames everything we do. And so like, if you change someone's worldview, you change their life. And so I think that if people got their worldview solid, or at least could articulate what they actually believe, then you work from, you work from the widest aperture down. Because if you believe that nothing happens after you die, at least as I do, and that nothing that we do has inherent meaning, then we're riding a ride that we just, we're playing a single-player game. And we get to choose the rules. And so, like, it's only a failure if you call it one.

Yeah.

Right? And so, people are like, well, I don't want to fail. It's like, why not? So, there's 2 ways you can frame it. One is you can say it's not a failure, or you can say failure isn't bad. Either one works.

Yeah, very true. You have me going back to that question you said earlier. I wrote it down, which is, what would you do if you had no fear? I think that we've all got to stop in those moments and just ask ourselves, and then you can become the boldest version of yourself in that moment. So I love this concept. All right, let's kick it to the book for a second. So you highlight in the beginning of $100 Million Offers that in 2016, you found yourself with $1,000 in your bank account. Things were not going well. Kick forward to 2023, we all know the success that you're currently having. You're documenting your way to $1 billion. What's the biggest difference between Alex 2016 and Alex 2023? Is it just as simple as a worldview change or was there a specific set of actions that you implemented that created this entire whirlwind?

So that's, so there's a big unpack there. So I'm gonna do the best I can to be concise.

Big question.

So if we just talk about the entrepreneur in general, Right? So you've got skills, traits, beliefs, right? As I define them, right? And I may tweak that definition over time, but for right now, that's my working model. So we have the skills that the things that we are able to do, right? We have the traits, which are the activities that we recurrently do. And then we have character traits, which more and more traits and skills I have, they're getting closer and closer to me that like, because patience in a way is a skill because it's a, how do you behave in this particular moment. And if you can train it, then how different is it? So like, this is why I think language is so interesting because if we can, if we can change traits which feel innate and harder to change into skills which we can learn, then all of a sudden a lot, the world becomes a lot more malleable because we—

Yeah. What traits aren't learnable? Right.

I know. So this is, so that was my kind of old model and I'm, I'm like in the, I'm in the in-between right now, uh, just to give context. Um, and so I just lacked a lot of skills. that I have now. That's the simple, the simple answer. I, I lacked a lot of personal skills. I lacked a lot of interpersonal skills and I lacked a lot of just knowledge, which is like, I just didn't understand how things worked. And a lot of like the biggest difference between me then and, and now, I'd say 2 greatest ones are my anxiety level then was through the roof and So that was number one. And then shoot, I had the other one. Oh, my focus. Follow up to that, which is a great one.

What is it?

Not a good, not a good example, right? No, but it was, it was, it was, it was the, my anxiety levels and my focus. And so, and I think it might have interplayed because I was like so stressed all the time that I felt like nothing was working. And so I wanted to change things all the time because I changed things all the time, nothing worked. And so it's just this vicious cycle because I never gave time time. I never allowed myself the ability to fail repeatedly so that I could learn the skill, right? And so that's where, like, defining the thing, it's like, well, if I think so, do I define failure as a requisite for success? Do I believe that success can happen without failure? No. So if I fail, then why? And it, like, this is why those definitions are so important, which is why, like, the beginning of the next book, which is Leads, first chapter is what's a lead?

Yeah, breaking it down.

Yeah, that was gonna be, that was, that was one. If I get an Instagram follower, I can message them. Is that a lead? What about a YouTube subscriber? I can't message them. Are they leads? What if I buy a list of names and I can call them but they don't know who I am? Are these leads, right? Like it becomes a little bit more interesting when you start thinking about it. Anyways, the book's, I'm very amped for it, but we'll, I'll, we can talk about the offers book. I don't know if we're gonna get there.

Next one too. Yeah, I know. And honestly, we're excited for the leads book too. I can't wait to, I don't know, I'm waiting to pre— I don't think, can we preorder it yet. I want it at my door whenever, whenever it comes out. I'm ready for it. We'll devour it in a couple hours. It's gonna be great.

We'll do a big launch. It'll be, it'll be cool. I'm gonna do some fun stuff this time because I wanna actually use all the concepts of lead generation in the book to promote the book just to show kind of like a meta of like, I'm gonna use all the strategies that I talk about in real time so people can see it.

That's what Robert Greene did with the 48 Laws. He, I asked him, he said I used all of them. For the book launch. Oh, okay. Which was really interesting.

Yeah. Yeah.

So real quick on that point that you just made about skills, skills, how do you consume knowledge? How do you implement knowledge? Where, where have most of your modern skills come from? Is it YouTube videos, books, people that you spend time with, mentors? Where does that come from?

Number one source of new information for me at this point is talking to people. Hmm. That might not be expected. I actually don't read nearly as much as people think I do. I've spent more time writing than I have reading. And I would say I learned really tactical skills from watching YouTube and stuff. But at this point, at least for me, and this is like context for everybody who's listening, like I might be in a different season than you are. More of the skills that I have have to be like perspective changes. And like big picture skills, like, okay, what does it look like to raise a debt fund? What does that like, what does that entail? Like, what are the, what are the, what are the deal structures I should look out for, right? What are like, like that's, there's not a lot of YouTube videos on it, right? Just, and so a lot of like the higher level type stuff, there's not a ton of info and it's, I seek out experts and I've always done that to learn any skill. So like even when I wanted to learn Facebook ads way back in the day, I went to a guy who was an agency owner and I said, hey, I want to learn how to run ads. And he was like, well, I don't sell my time. And I said, well, it's America, everyone sells their time. This is, you know, we just have to figure out a price. And so finally he said $750 an hour and I was like, cool. Alright. So once a week we'll hop on, $750 an hour and you don't have to do anything else. I was like, but I wanna control the computer. And I'll do the clicking and you tell me why I'm doing it. And it took me, I think, like 8 hours with him to like learn how to run Facebook ads. $6,000 made me millions and millions and millions of dollars, you know what I mean? And that's how I, I'm a big fan of one-on-one tutoring if you can. And most times people are afraid to spend like the money for the hour. And a lot of times the deliverer is also afraid of it. But you can learn a lot if you're actually paying attention because they're also gonna teach you in the most, well, if you have a good teacher, but like they're gonna teach you because they don't wanna spend a lot of time with you either. And so you'll learn as fast as you can and just do the homework, like be a good student. Like that's, that's, that is how I have learned the vast majority of my things is by other people and doing. Like I didn't buy anything related to sales until after I'd already closed like 4,000 deals. So like I never even, I didn't even know the term sales was what I was doing until later. I was just like, yeah, I'm signing people up. Like I didn't even think it was sales. I was like, I'm just talking about a thing to get them to eventually give me money.

What was your, what was your first sales job? Like how'd you get into, how'd you get into that?

Well, technically the first time I ever sold was I did like an apprenticeship internship with a gym owner. Learning from other people who've already been there. And he was like, oh, this person came in, go sign them up. That was it. That was my whole preface. And I went out there, told the girl, I just was like, oh yeah, it's $129 a month. And she was like, oh, okay, I left my card at home. And I was like, okay. And I walked back and I was like, yeah, she, she's, she's signing up. And he was like, you got the card? And I was like, oh no, she's just, she'll be back. And he was, and like, he was with like 7 dudes and they all laughed at me. And so I had very fast reinforcement that that was not how you sold. And still I never got taught how to sell, but they were like, you have to get the card. And so the next time I was like, okay, well, I can't leave. I can't let them leave without the card. So no one ever taught me how to sell. I just like kind of figured it out through reps.

Dang, that's awesome. I mean, I like, I feel like you have, you've had this ability just to learn things like really quickly because I know, I'm just thinking about my life and I wish, I wish I figured a lot of this out at a younger age. And it's like, I'm at the point now where I'm like, okay, I'm figuring out how to learn a little bit faster. I'm making mistakes, but I'm learning. I'm figuring it out. But man, and I honestly too, I feel like there's a lot of people that I know in my world that are kind of doing the same thing where they're just, it takes them, it's taken them a long time to get there. Do you think you were like born differently? Like than other people, or is it like how you were raised or?

No, I think it's the speed between when you want to start doing something and when you start doing something. A lot of people don't give themselves permission to actually start implementing until they feel like they have complete information, but you only get complete information after you start doing it. And so it's a logical fallacy. And so people just believe the fallacy because it's safer because you don't fail. You feel like you're being successful when you continue to learn and read.

Yeah, true. I remember—

A lot more about sales in your first 10 conversations about sales than all the books you read put together.

I agree 1000%. I ran a house painting business when I was in college for 2 summers and in my first hour of door-to-door sales, I learned more about selling in business than I did in the 2 years previously learning in class. So 1000%.

Now, here's an interesting one. Once you have done a certain amount of something, then if you read something, you'll have context because it's very difficult to learn something, you don't have a latticework to hang it on. Right? You don't have like bones and skeletons of experience that you can hang. Oh yeah, I did do that. Oh, I could have done that differently. But if you're doing it against an amorphous, like maybe someday I will, I don't even think you really learn it.

I wonder if there's a base, if there's a base set of experiences people should go out and have before they start trying to learn business in general, like, you know, some type of internship thing. That's really cool.

I think from a belief perspective, people think that it will be easier than it is. And if, if you have a fundamental belief that you will fail in order to succeed and that it will be hard, and that is why most people don't do it. Like, if you actually believe that, then what happens is expectations match reality, and then you don't have anxiety about your failure because it's not a failure because it's meeting reality. And so it's just that I think most people are deluded. Most people are just delusional. Like 52% of senior, of high school seniors in a survey said that they think they're gonna be millionaires by 25. They're delusional. That's all. They're just delusional.

Yeah. Like 80% of people think they're better looking than average type of thing.

Yeah. And 70% think they're better drivers. Like, you know, like, yes, all of those things. People are delusional and those delusions, which is why those distortions of reality affect how they see things. Like the people that, at least in my viewpoint of the world, the richest people in the world simply see reality more clearly with fewer distortions. And so like the reason somebody who is a billionaire can lose it all and then get the billion back is because they see things differently than everyone else. And people think that these billionaires are, quote, eccentric. And if we're defining eccentric as not normal, then yeah, duh. But it doesn't mean they're wrong. It just might mean everyone else is, which is why everyone else is normal.

Hmm. How can we, how can we get a better view of reality? Is it just through listening to guys like you?

No, no. I mean, I think Aristotle was the first one to do this, but just, I think he, I don't know if, or people have ascribed, you know, first principles thinking, which is what has to happen. And then you can, you can, you can run everything through that because honestly, like the amount of times I hear people say stuff that, and I, I've had a bunch of comments on YouTube video, but like they just make noise with their face. They don't say anything. They just like repeat words and they jumble them up and then they just like look at you and you're like, oh, I'm supposed to respond now, I guess. Like most people don't say anything. They can't communicate much. And so you can run what people are saying through that to see if it makes sense. And so whenever I'm trying to analyze advice, I think, can I break this? And the more scenarios I run the advice through where it applies, the more valid the advice is. And so when I have a thinking model, I want it to be 2 things: useful and valid. Useful is, does it help me achieve something? valid is in how many different settings. And so the value equation, for example, in the book, I hope based on the fact that many big people have republished it, and the reason that I feel like it is valid is that no one has changed it. So I've seen many people like, you know, spruce it up in terms of like the graphics and whatnot, but the same core 4 elements are there. And so to me, that means that I boiled it down to what I believe were the first principles of What makes something more valuable?

How long did that take you to come up with the value equation?

A long time because it's like, it looks simple now because it's like, well, yeah, there's those 4. But before that, I had all of these different things that were these amorphous ideas and there's like, do these go together? Do these go together? And you keep circling and reshuffling and then you distill them down and you repackage them and you try and break it. And because like all those examples I give in the book, it's like, well, The perceived likelihood of achievement was the last one I added because I was like, all right, well, if you have 2 surgeons and it's the same promise and the same time, right? Same effort. Why does one surgeon— how is— how are they able to charge more? People believe that they have a higher likelihood of getting what they want. Guarantees function under perceived likelihood of achievement. Something that has a guarantee is more valuable than something that doesn't. Because you increase the perceived likelihood of achievement. Something that has lots of reviews increases the perceived likelihood of achievement, right? Something that has reviews from people just like me, many of them getting to exactly where I want to go, increases it even further, right? A third-party accreditation is another thing that reverses risk. And so you can think about perceived likelihood of achievement in the positive or the negative. And so all of those attributes of value, you can flip them just for— from a thinking process. So it's like, One is time delay. The inverse of that is how fast can you do it? Effort and sacrifice is how easy can you make it, right? Perceived likelihood is risk. So you just like, just from a contextual perspective of like, how can I think about the elements of value in order to make the thing that I'm selling more valuable to the person I'm talking to?

Yeah, I'm digesting and thinking at the same time. How do we respond to this? Well, Alex, I'll tell you, In the book going through this equation, you know, I was looking for, because it, let me back up a little bit in pricing, in the book in pricing, when you're talking about commodity, you highlight 3 ways that businesses grow. They get more customers, they increase average deal size, or they get them to purchase more times, right? So I was looking for, okay, how do I increase average deal size 5x, decrease the number of people that we work with, or maybe even transfer some sort of like subscription thing into the background. But I'll tell you the thing that I've had the hardest time with and funny enough, it's the next book is how to get more customers. I wish you could share some stuff. Can you share some stuff from the next book, like some of the concepts that you'll be sharing in leads?

Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I'm gonna be talking about how to all the different ways you can get leads and how you can get what you really want. So I'll just break down, I alluded to it earlier, which is like, what is a lead? Right. Well, we have to define the term if we're gonna go get them. So a lead is just a person you can contact. That's it. That's all it is. But what you realize is when that's the definition, that's not actually what you want. You want engaged leads. You want people you can contact who've shown interest in the stuff you sell. That's what you want. And so once we have that definition clear, now I can't call the book $100 Million Engaged Leads because no one would know what it means, but I can define it in the book and explain it later. It's like, okay, well, now that I know what leads are, how do I engage them? Next chapter. Like, here's how you engage leads. It's like, great. Now they know how to engage leads. How do I communicate that to them? Next chapter, how to communicate it to them. Okay, great. Now they know how to communicate that. How do I deliver that to as many people as possible? Well, there's only 4 ways to do it. You can publicly and privately go one-to-one, one-to-many. That's it. Okay, great. That's my framework. What am I doing into these buckets? Okay, cool. Do I have to do it on my own? How to get other people to do it for you? And so that's kind of how I walk through in the book to help people get a lot more leads because, you know, fundamentally at this point, like I've used each of these methods, I've used affiliates. Like right now we've probably done about $75 million in revenue just from affiliates, just from companies that we, you know, had majority ownership in. We've done zillions through paid ads. We've got a huge cold call team for outbound. I now have, you know, content because I wanted to do that for acquisition.com. I thought that would be like a fun challenge for me because I'd never grown it that way, any company or brand that way. And so content's another way. So all of them are different ways to get leads and there's pros and cons to each of them. And I think that a good business can do them all.

Yeah, it makes total sense.

We, how many ways there are to get leads, you never worry about getting more customers. It shouldn't be the constraint of the business.

Yeah. Well, we've got plenty of constraints, but we can work through them in real time with you right now. You know what's cool is after reading the book, going through the value equation, we came up with our grand slam offer. We've since increased pricing on that multiple times because once you sell it, as the Dan Kennedy quote goes, then you don't really smile anymore once you pitch it again. So you kind of have to increase the pricing multiple times. So we're on our journey to doing $100,000 packages at this point, which is gonna be amazing. You know, just as a little call to action for readers to go pick up this book, $100 Million Offers, because it literally does that for your business, which is amazing.

And the nice thing too is that, and I would encourage anybody who has a business who's listening to this, it's good to have a, what I would consider like a whale offer, which is what are you gonna sell the most? Like what's the most expensive thing? Put something on the menu that's $100 grand. And even if you don't sell any of them, Everything else you sell will look really cheap. So you'll actually increase your conversion against everything else. And so like everybody should have a $100,000 offer and just think to yourself, well, what would I be happy to deliver on for $100,000? Probably a lot. And so if that's the case, then like write down the terms under which you would be willing to fulfill something for $100,000 and then do that.

Yeah, that, that's the single biggest takeaway that I had from your book. And your pricing videos on YouTube and stuff. And then, you know, from my experience being on a lot of sales calls, the minute that you present that, and we haven't had the $100K, I don't know why it's so stupid that we haven't, but once we present the highest price thing, the other ones are so easy to talk about. I mean, it's true, we've done this 1,000 times now. It's so easy to talk about what used to be your highest offer is now your lowest offer.

Yep.

And they sell, they sell.

And you look at the things that somebody might value or might not value, and you can start the trim and stack, right? You're like, all right. And the thing is, the hardest things for most businesses, this is like $0 to $3 million-ish a year, is product market fit. Is what do I sell, right? It's just getting the combination of the price and the offer itself and then ultimately the delivery because in the way I approach this is I get as many people as possible to say yes. So I just give away the farm and I'm not as concerned about profit in the beginning. Now, will I be like, will I be focused on it? Absolutely. But fundamentally, I will, I will probably charge a premium price, but I'll probably do more than I should for that price because I want everyone to say yes. And then I think, okay, of these things, one, which ones do they value? And 2, which of them cost me a lot of money? If you look at that cross-reference between the 2, there are some things that cost you a lot of time and effort that they don't value. first ones to go. And then the ones that you'll have a hard, harder time is like, what are the things they value a lot that cost me a lot? And then you're like, alright, is there another way I can repackage this? There's no way I can deliver it. Can I change the ratio of, of me to, me to person? Now, mind you, this sounds like it's from a service-based perspective. And some of the pricing strategies I have in the book do lend themselves more to cost. Like, so if you have a service-based business, like it applies there. just the pricing, all the value stuff applies to any business. But the pricing specifically, because like if you had zero cost, zero incremental cost to add a customer like a software business might, then it may make sense to try and optimize the entire strategy around having the lowest cost, getting the most market share, etc. But like the thing is, is that people may disagree with what I'm saying in the comments. But I try to be useful and valid, which is 99% of people who are actually starting businesses are not Silicon Valley blitzscaling, raising millions and billions of dollars in order to lose money the entire time only for an IPO later. And so like, does that work? Yes, in a very small minority of circumstances. But for the vast majority of people, charging more, delivering more value ultimately gets you better customers, gets them to buy more, gets them to stay longer, send more friends who are also like them. And then ultimately makes you more money.

Hmm. Go for it, Nick. I was just gonna say, I know, I know we're getting kind of a little bit tight on time, so I'm like, I have, I literally have pages of questions written up for you. Obviously we didn't get to them all, which is completely, which is completely fine.

You didn't get all of them? Oh, bummer.

Oh man. I guess the final question that I'd like to ask, and it's something that I like to ask a lot of our podcast guests, which is, You're dead. You know, we started with mortality. Maybe we can end it with mortality. I don't know. Do you want to, do you want to ask, do you have any questions, Nick, before I ask this question?

No, listen, mortality. I, Alex, I actually have memento mori, remember your own death tattooed on my chest. So I like this as a roundabout way to finish up the conversation.

And you know, I don't know where I got this from, so I can't get, I can't take credit for it. But basically you're dead. Everything you've left behind is forgotten. But you can leave one short piece of advice that will live on, what would it be? It's gonna happen anyway, right?

Yeah. You don't matter. Live accordingly.

Man, that one's a good one. That's— I feel like that's just mic drop, right? Dang.

Yeah, I think so too. Well, just like Luke, we teed up a lot of good questions from the book. We're not going to cover them today. I think we got a lot of really good life stuff. And honestly, Alex, it was really just an opportunity for us to connect with you and express gratitude for the changes that you've enabled us to make in our lives. So that was really the biggest thing for us. And to share with our audience that they have to go read this book and your next book. When do you expect $100 Million Leads to come out and where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or that book?

Well, they can follow me on the social medias. If they want to make sure they get like notifications, just go to acquisition.com and just opt in anywhere and you'll just get added to the email list. And I think I've to date since August sent 2 emails. So like I probably won't you know, harass you a little bit about stuff that I think is interesting or cool. But before the book launches, I'll definitely let everybody on that, on that list know because last time it sold out in like 10 minutes or something. And so I'm trying to not have that happen. But if to avoid that, if you wanna make sure that you're, that you get it, yeah, do that. Other thing is you asked about Oh, the launch date. So right now, like, I hope to finish the final draft by the end of this month. And then the big question mark is really just printers because printers can take forever if you're familiar with like printing, especially in like large quantities.

Your book's unique too. They're in a unique shape.

Yeah, yeah, it's a weird shape. For anybody who can't see this, it looks like a children's textbook. It's very large and has Big text and yeah, big book. Yeah. I wanted it to not be intimidating. So I wanted it to feel like I wanted someone to be able to pinch it between their fingers and be like, I can do this in an afternoon to hopefully make the information feel more accessible to everybody. So that was kind of the goal. That's why the, that's why the language, this one is actually even simpler language. I tried to get it below 3rd grade in terms of language patterns. I took out cuss words because I was the only The only 1-star reviews I got were just that I had cuss words in the other one. It's all right. The other 11,500, you know, were, but I took it out so that people could listen to it with their kids on the way to work and all that kind of stuff. So I just took feedback from the first book to try and make the second book better, added more doodles, more pictures in the second book than the first one because that was, people liked that. But yeah, it's just gonna be a question of how quickly I can get the books printed and I have to figure out I'm gonna guess how many books I'm gonna sell. I have no idea because right now it sells like 25,000 copies a month with like no ads or anything. And so there's a lot of people who've bought the book. We've got like 300,000 people who bought the first book in the last 18 months. And so I don't know, are they all gonna wanna buy the next book and will other people? I have no idea. So that's kind of where I'm at right now.

Yeah. Well, you've got a couple of, yeah, you've got a couple of automatic sales right here. Well, Alex, we'd love to have you on to talk about the next book once we've had a chance to read and implement it. And Thank you so much, man. It was, it was definitely our pleasure.

Yeah, the pleasure was mine. I appreciate you guys. Thank you for implementing. That is why I write it, you know, as much as, you know, it's great to hear people say like, oh, this book was awesome and then not do anything. For the, for everybody who's out there who's listening right now, who's like, no, I would do something, just be that person. I will say this, a lot of people, one of the, one of the most common things you see in internet marketing is like the secrets the rich don't want you to know. From everybody that I know who's wealthy, they shout from the rooftops all the things they did to actually become wealthy. It's just that poor people don't want to listen. And so just don't be that. So like, just don't believe that false narrative. Like you become wealthy by providing value to other people. And so even the idea that the rich people have some secret that you don't know, if you believe that, it's what is keeping you poor. Because again, you have a distorted view of reality.