Alex Hormozi Was About to Lose Everything Until He Discovered This

28:48Looking at Ken's, during the pandemic, he had videos that would get a couple hundred thousand. And that's when you know you're doing pretty well with each video. Neil, same deal. He had a couple hundred thousand. Some videos would get a million views or so. And then same deal for me, a couple hundred. This is like four or five years ago. And my thesis here is that you have to be in the good graces of YouTube. And you have to be, you cannot stop, right? And because those guys, Neil stopped, Ken stopped, I stopped. We're in this box right now where I look at Neil's YouTube. I'm like, dude, your videos are the same shit from the last couple of years ago.

29:18but you're only getting like 5, 10K views, right? So I think there's this penalty box almost. I think it's, in my opinion, all social media has switched to the TikTokification of social media. You know, I actually think it's good because what it does is it, like subscribers mean nothing. Followers on Instagram mean nothing. They're literally just a vanity metric now. And so the only thing that matters is click, retain reward. That's it. like that like and it doesn't matter what the platform is they're all the same is like did you get them to click did you get them to watch and you get them to come back yeah that's it and so the algorithm like it also by doing that though it makes it there's never been a better time to start because in the earlier days when it was subscriber based it was basically an email list like you build a subscriber base and then they push out your stuff's subscribers but they don't do that anymore at all and now it's just like they do look like audiences based on what they predict someone will like your thing or not and so you could be a brand new account and have your first video do 10 million on the first upload ever which i think in some ways is like a great equalizer and it makes the content king yeah and so actually going to the shorts for a second your team of 16 people yeah what percent of your work with you and your team goes that you think into shorts versus the long-form stuff i mean my shorts for me is like almost not work um that's that's all the team okay that's all them so they're cutting up your long-form stuff yeah that's almost the majority We did direct-to-camera stuff early to kind of like kickstart things, but I can't remember the last direct-to-camera shoot we did.

30:52Dude, because direct-to-camera versus, it's a very, it's a different setup. Different experience. So like, no more direct-to-camera. Not that I'm against it. It's just that they've got enough other stuff. And I prefer the other stuff because I think it's more like organic. Usability per minute of footage is highest. Whereas if like we do a vlog day, they're going to get three or four shorts from a full day, but they got to go through like eight hours of content. Whereas if I do like two hours of direct camera, we have like 100 shorts. It's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And so what about from this? This you pull like what?

31:25Like 20, 15 shorts? You would know. Yeah, I would say like 10. 10, 20 shorts. Okay. Yeah, really 10-ish. So you go for two hours or something like that. Yeah. Got it. And your spend a year ago was like, I think like 120 grand a month. Like what do you think that looks like now? It's probably double. Okay. So 240. Yeah. And are you getting paid on AdSense, any of this? Yeah. Okay. I mean, not enough to make it bad. It doesn't equal it out. No, it doesn't equal it out. But it's okay to deal flows. Good. Yeah. No, yeah. Media is just like a loss leader, if you want to consider it from that perspective.

31:56We lose money on media. Which is funny because people are like, he makes money on his$2 book. Which, by the way, Amazon takes. You get paid like 30 cents on a book that's$2. But anyways, that just goes to fund the money-losing media team. And I say that with absolute love. You know what I mean? but that's but that's i mean all marketing loses money until it makes you money like you know it's long game and rewinding back to the deal stuff for a second so of the 24 lois that you do that comes from content by the way so it does make money um how many of those that actually go through about half okay got it so 12 go through okay pretty high conversion rate but it's also good qualification yeah but i think we've just continued to get near narrow and narrow and i like i wouldn't be surprised well our deal flow keeps going up so if we might actually have the same number of deals done on five times the amount of deal flow yeah um because we're just getting better and better at picking yeah well one more thing before we go back to content what is the craziest thing someone has offered you because here's the thing right like i do believe there is the brand equity that you have gets you good deal terms like there are the agencies that come to me oh yeah we do four or five million a year we'll give you 20 it's like what like great um so like what is the craziest thing someone's offered you like their newborn like anything like that Honestly, the people who make the craziest offers usually don't have anything of value to offer.

33:11You know what I mean? But I would say almost all the deals that we do have favorable terms. You know what I mean? In terms of both price and just terms in general. We try to keep our contracts as simple as humanly possible. I put this big emphasis on the legal team to make it plain English contracts. And my lawyer had a heart attack when I was like, I want a fifth grader to be able to read this contract. because the biggest issue that happens in the deal process for anyone who's ever done a deal is that their lawyer starts talking to your lawyer and then they just keep having these conversations and translating back and forth.

33:44And then you have all these miscommunications. And your bills keep going. Yeah, and the only person who wins there is the lawyer. And so we've taken a little bit of a different approach of like let's keep our conversation as primary and then we together tell the attorneys what we want them to do. And that way any negotiating happens between us. and that way because like i remember there was um a deal we were working on and their you know attorney who wasn't even an m &a attorney by the way if you are going to sell your company or have somebody invest like have an m &a attorney anyways um it's like no he's a family friend i'm like doesn't mean he knows anything so he was like we need this non-compete to be you know 24 months and a 50 mile radius around the brick and mortar locations they asked for this yeah and i was like so the lawyers are talking for like two weeks about this and i finally i call the founder up and i was like are you planning on starting another chain i was like you still own majority of this business do you plan on competing with your own business he was like no and i was like cool then as long as you own majority of the business you don't compete with your business and he was like yeah that's fine it's like great glad we had this talk you know what i mean like that was probably like ten thousand dollars in lawyer fees that went back and forth that was settled by two entrepreneurs in two minutes yep just obvious stuff you know but like that kind of thing is the stuff that like hangnails you know i mean like on deals yeah so now we rewind back to content sorry for jumping all over the place yeah um the so when you're thinking about the ideation piece right so is that like are you separating that into another day is that like on the same day and then how are you thinking about like the hooks the stories all that type of stuff um the team brings everything okay so the team brings everything from like because they'll watch this podcast and then they'll be like dude that story was interesting can we do a thing on that and that because like they basically the team is inherently curious people who like my content and so like to use some gary terms like they fuck with my content and so the stuff that they want to know more about we we go into more depth on yeah and so um i haven't been asked to come up with topics in a really long time um but i'll tell you how i would come up with topics because this is how I was doing it when it was just me starting out is that I just like to use time as my, as my like anchor for this.

35:57So I go far past, which is like, what are the, what are the life changing experiences or conversations that I've had that have shaped the way of my worldview. And so those are stories that I will tell because I think they're impactful and people get value from them. Um, then I have recent past, which is like, let me look at my calendar, uh, over the last week and just look at all the meetings I had. And I just like, I would have my phone up and be like okay so uh i was talking to one of our portfolio companies who's trying to make a change on pricing and so this is what we were considering you know i mean i'm just i just literally go through what my life was um i have present which is whenever something comes up in the moment i always have a way to like brain dump it and so for me twitter or x um is kind of my brain dump whenever i threads yeah or well they they repost stuff um but twitter is my is my home home base for that yeah and so they'll also come with the tweets that they thought were like interesting to make more content about um and then you've got like manufactured which is stuff that doesn't exist at all um what's an example uh like i lived on uh a hundred dollars in dirt for 30 days like here's what happened like as an example i that wouldn't be one that i would make but like because somebody else could make that yeah uh but stuff like that um and then uh and then like case studies and vlogs so those are kind of like the buckets that that uh that we think through but most of you'll notice it's just like real stuff so we don't have to come up with like what would people find interesting like well this is what i did and if they find it interesting awesome and what's like the micro there is it like one day at a time they just dump a bunch of topics on you well when we do recording because we record like twice a month okay um and this is what how how much in a day how many hours okay so it's it's two full days a month is when we do the recording once we get the headquarters it'll probably be smaller chunks more frequently but for right now it's just like one eight hour day twice a month got it um but they'll have like full uh like six page uh pre-productions for every video nice of like these are these are these are the themes either store these are the the four or five stories that we think are that we've pulled from your other pieces that we think would tie well together around this topic um i talked to the team uh to get stats on some of these companies for this case study so like the media team now will talk to our subject matter experts at Holdco to get like, hey, what was new this week?

38:15Did you guys do any implementations or whatever? And then they'll take that and then repackage it and then that'll become content. Dude, I mean, this is a sidebar here, but like I know even with Caleb and my just sense in general, like you like to be friends with your staff, right? And which I think is good. And that's how they really understand what you want and how you think as a person. How do you indoctrinate them into your way of thinking? Like a chief of staff would just be sitting and watching you and shadowing you for a couple months right yeah i think it's osmosis okay i think it's just proximity and exposure and that's why that's why i'm so excited for the headquarters it's funny because as a as a previously remote before it was cool um you know that's how we scaled gym watch everything we had was remote and this will be since my brick and mortar chain this will be the first in-person stuff i've done um but it's weird because i feel incredibly confident at how much of a game changer i think it's going to be dude i mean here's where i'm at right and and maybe my staff might crucify me for saying this if they find it but i i'm an introvert and i do i've been working remote at tech companies for the longest time and like we were doing hybrid even before the pandemic hit like a couple years three two but i'm just like dude you cannot replace like this right like this is a relationship and it goes much further and um i just think commercial i think commercial real estate's going to come back in the next five 10 years so it just seems to be moving that way because how are you supposed to if there's this how can you compete yeah right i think you know one of the is this is kind of interesting is like if i if we had like an sop on how to handle difficult conversations right or bad news whatever if i teach an sop around that people would be like okay got it these are the steps but it's incredibly different to see me get bad news and then watch what happens like it's a completely different experience and i think that is something that becomes memorable and that's what can change someone's behavior way faster yeah i mean dude that like that in itself is a story and people remember stories and so when it comes to your videos because you're pretty good at just your memory i think is really good i just forget stuff right but it's like you seem to weave into stories pretty well like how much is it just second nature to you now how much are you thinking about your stories when you're creating content?

40:25Yeah. So the storytelling component was something that I really worked hard on and I have continued to work hard on for almost probably six years. So when I started gym launch and I had to start teaching, basically when I had to start teaching, I realized that teaching was making connections between things that people understand and things that they don't. And so that's why metaphors and analogies are so strong because they're like, okay, so energies, so you're kind of like a car. And if you put your gas in, it's kind of like your body and the food you know i mean so it's like i understand this but i don't understand this but i can apply the same principles and so um when i realized that i used to just kind of like lecture people on like jargon yeah right their eyes would roll over and i just didn't get the desired result so i had to start learning like so then i started reading books on how to tell stories and um the the tldr on like how to tell a story is just uh you have a character you have an unmet desire you have an obstacle you have a guide who comes in with some sort of solution the person tries the new way it works and then there's an internal achievement and an external achievement meaning like who did they become in the process and what happened on the outside and so like I just pretty much just try and think through that process of like desire unmet desire obstacle guide plan execution result the fact that you can just roll that off your tongue means like it is burned into you right because I mean I just oh it's like sounds like the harman circle oh is it yeah i mean like the stories are the same yeah you know what i mean yeah it's uh i mean it's for me i just riff on it this i was kind of making fun of neil and myself when i look at both of our youtube channels i'm like you know we suck at youtube because we just lecture people right it's like but then we we do like we do like a live recording and then i'm just sharing the story about mr beast two million views on tiktok right or anyway point is so the story is huge do you think about your hooks a lot yeah the hooks everything and let me just rewind the stories real quick which books did you read to get better at storytelling um honestly i think reading fiction and then i'm a big articles guy like i don't i don't actually people would be amazed at how few books i read um i'm like really narrow i'll like binge consume a field of study and so i might read like nine books on so like when we when we started doing deals at acquisition.com I read nine books in one month on deal making.

42:45And I was like, okay, I feel like I have a better understanding of just the leverage, the tools that I have available in my tool belt that I didn't know existed. But then I haven't read one since. And then same thing with like, you know, storytelling in general was more reading all the different articles and stuff that were out there about storytelling so that I could understand. And there's a million different like story, you know, unmet desire, you know, whatever, but they all more or less follow that same trajectory. And so to answer the first thing you said, like how much do we work on the hook a lot?

43:15And if that sounds like it's in contrast to what I was saying earlier, it's not. Because if you have something that's amazing, it'll get shared no matter what. But if you have something that's mediocre, if you have an amazing hook, it'll also get shared. And so if you can create an unbelievable hook, you can still have content that just murders. And I'll tell you a story that isn't mine and how it related to one. So a buddy of mine was a big infomercial guy. He's a little older. And he did this book. He had a book that he was selling. And so he had Larry King fly out and record like a one hour book infomercial promo.

43:49And so it was like a big deal for him, you know, getting interviewed by Larry King. And so he had Larry King be like, and you're live with Larry, like the same intro he does for all the shows. And this guy was a very good marketer. And so he ran the ad and he was like this thing's gonna murder i'm gonna make so much money and it tanked and he was like what is going on and so then he he was like so he started studying game footage he looked at his all-time best ads he was like all right i'm watching this one he watched this one and he was like i messed up the hook he's like the hook's wrong and so he flew larry king back out reset up the entire fake setup of larry king live and re-recorded the first 30 seconds and then pushed out the new one with the new hook 100 million dollars in the next 12 months that's crazy and so we had like my story is not nearly as significant as that but we had a video recently that was like we all were like this is a good video and it got like 5 000 views or something which is pretty small for our account and so the guys just cut out the first three seconds and then it was it was basically saying like so i had this time when and then they just cut that out and just went to the when the thing happened yeah and it went from 5 000 to 900 000 is it because in analytics you just saw a big tank like drop off like like the they they hear the first the first three words or five words or phrase yeah and they're like not interested yeah and so you have five seconds but it's more like two yeah or like two milliseconds in a short yeah tiny but it makes all the difference in the world so going back to your team then like is most of your content team based here i'm gonna give a really good go for it sexy tactic yes so this is something that i haven't even shared with you guys, but I just had this realization.

45:24So, um, so I had a tweet that just crushed this morning. And I was thinking about this when I made it was I wanted to give a business example. And then I used a, the same principle in a marriage. And then, and then I did the generality of the principle, but then I was like, I should put the marriage one first because it's the way wider hook. And then I did the business one and then it had the philosophical principle and then it way outperformed. And so we would like, when we're thinking about our hooks, we'll probably go wide business principle uh rather than like any of the other versions of that so that we can get a you know wider demo but anyways this just like i enjoy the strategy yeah i just enjoy the game like i think i think it's fun to learn this stuff you fell in business love with leila first before you fell in love love what do you mean by that well i liked her mind first yeah um i mean i pitched her on working for me the first time we met and i was like hey this might not work out but like you should totally work for me and we can make a bunch of money together and um i said like plain black and white i'll pay you twice as much as you're currently making so but still look at the offer independent of me like it should make sense for you um and so obviously she said no for the first 30 days because i asked her every day um and she said no but then when i did the turnaround business launched three gyms came back with a big stack of money um she was like oh so this works i was like yeah and the i mean the first question she actually asked me after we process all the money because i did it together to a little bit of flex um we processed like 120 grand in like 45 minutes and she was like i mean i'm 27 she's 23 she's like whoa um she's like is this legal yeah your first couple of dates were you guys just like working at starbucks or something yeah just working together yeah i mean i didn't uh it was weird because like i just i just like liked hanging with her like i just liked her around and that was uh like whenever i had the choice of like me being alone and me being with Layla I just like always wanted to be with her and she kind of had the same thing and so but we didn't have like romance chemically love until much later um but I got her to quit her job and fly out with me within like six weeks and even when you guys got married you I think you like you weren't in love love yet right really like at what point did you say she's gonna be one but we're not in love love yet um I've said that we like really got into like love love in december of 19 okay so that was two years two and a half years after we got married okay and that was because we made a conscious decision um we were actually both pretty miserable um mostly because we and i was really up front about this and we both agreed i said listen here's here are the priorities i was like business and then us we got to feed the business and the business feeds us that's how this works and in december of 19 we were both like we had this like deep conversation where she's like I'm just like not happy with this and I was like me neither and so we're like I think we I think our premise was wrong and so we said well what if we just like made marriage the priority and then the business would flow from that yeah and so that's when we flipped everything and it's actually been great since then and again it was fine it wasn't like you know combative it was just it's just much better yeah and I think you said this before it's love is something that you decide to work on it's not it's like an active thing it's not passive i also think there's a lot of different versions of relationships like if you think about your friendships like like your friendships with like seven different dudes that you know yeah you probably have like the relationship is different with all of them and so i think like love is a really general word and we're just more limited by like our vocabulary than anything else like i think leila and i have a very different love than most people who are yeah married and together but i would say that it is absolutely founded in respect and um that to me was probably the most unique aspect of my relationship with her was that I just respected her and she respects me.

49:05And I would say until that point, I probably had the more traditional relationships that were just like more lovey-dovey, more chemically, more romance, et cetera. But the thing is, I'm a really extreme person. And so if someone doesn't like what I like, they're not going to see me very much. And if they do, and if they are that way, anytime I do something, it's going to feel like I'm doing them a favor. And that tally board of like, who's doing a favor is would get way out of whack really fast and then i start resenting them because i'm like i want to do this other thing it's not that i don't love you yeah i just want to work and that's what i want to do and so the fact that she just like the biggest thing that made me really love layla was just that she has never tried to change me yeah like she just it was pure acceptance on this is alex like i'm not going to get him to dress a certain way i'm not going to get him to behave a certain way talk like i'm not gonna ask him nothing she just is like you do you and i will do me next to you and as long as we agree on where we're going we'll get there and have a good time and that's who told me this um neil told me this actually it's like i was like so why did you decide that um his wife is the one right michelle yeah and um he's like she just let me be me yeah and and like he you know we've dated right i've seen you know people come and go but um and then And now, you know, he's hounding me about kids all the time, right?

50:26He's like, you got to get married to have kids, right? He's lecturing everyone. Last week at my thing, he was lecturing Syed, the WordPress king. And he's like, you need to have more kids, blah, blah, blah. But where I'm going with this is, do you think kids will be on the horizon for you? I mean, I think it's possible. If that will change things? I think it's possible. Yeah. I mean, Layla's still young. Like, I mean, we have time. I mean, you're still young. Yeah, I mean, right. But like, I'm not the limiter. You know what I mean? For youth in terms of appropriation. Um, but yeah, I mean, she's still young and if we were cool either way.

50:58So if it happened, like if she got pregnant tomorrow, like we'd have the kid. Yeah. I mean, this is like, this is all like conjecture at the end of the day because like you guys adapted your marriage a little and then it might adapt to the next level. It's all levels, right? Yeah. I'm not, I'm not worried about it. Um, I think I would, I would like to have kids at some point, kind of like when people who don't, who are employed and are like, I'd like to start a business someday. Yeah. It's, it's an easy thing to say, you know, like sounds great, but I'm sure it would be very different. All right, we're going to go back to content, and then I got a bunch of stuff to double down on here.

51:28So going back to the structure of your content team, like A, where are they based mostly? And then who are kind of the key players there? We're all US-based. Okay. And most of them are West Coast because we're on the West Coast. So I think right now 100%. Nope, we have one person on the East Coast. Everybody else is either Southern California or Vegas. Yeah. So what I found is, A, the reason I'm asking that is because when I see it as fail on content, it's because we've gone cheap and relied too much on offshore. And it's like, dude, where's the strategy? Like grammatical mistakes. They're picking the wrong areas for the hooks, right?

52:06So you're nodding your head over there. Like wrong areas for the hooks, just bad part. Like there is no story. And it's like, no wonder everything's falling flat. And you look at the metrics, right? And you're nodding your head. Seems like it's happened to you. oh i mean early yeah um but i think the big thing that everyone messes up with the content and even even the quote going cheap is that like they have to understand brand and that was i mean that's been my big epiphany after post gym launch was i didn't understand brand when i had gym launch like i understand i don't say i understand brand but i have a much better idea of it now um and like like my team right now has so much footage and they could clip a bunch of moments during the vlog days and make me look bad and get a zillion views like we could do that but that doesn't help me and so a lot of people will do anything for the algorithm they become algo whores is what we call it um which is just like this is really hot right now we should make that stuff but like i'm not gonna like if it's not if it's not on brand for me if it's not something i'm an expert in i'm not gonna talk about it right and that's i think That's my one piece of advice for anybody who's starting to get into the game of content.

53:13It's like, just talk about stuff you know about. Don't worry. Just don't pretend to be someone you're not. If you're only good at sewing, then just talk about sewing. Don't start making content about how people should invest their money. Just talk about sewing. Let me ask you this. When you produce content now, those full days now, are you very much looking forward to it? Are you enjoying it when you're creating your content? It really all depends on how much I've slept the night before. It's actually the biggest factor. is just like how much do I slept the night before? Like we had a recording day recently and I basically didn't sleep at all the two nights before.

53:46And so like that was like I had to use willpower. But most times I don't have to use willpower. I can just rock and roll. Yeah. And so you feel like for the most part, let's assume you had a good night of sleep, you feel like you're creating the content that you want to create? I think it's always an evolving process. I mean, I think it's more like a pendulum. I mean, I think like it's more a dichotomy to be managed than a problem to be solved. and so there's like stuff that i super super fuck with exclusively and then there's stuff that the audience absolutely loves and the algorithm loves and so we just try and find that middle ground um and if anything we're probably right of center of like if alex doesn't like it he's not gonna keep doing it uh so but like i'm looking at this on like a 20-year time horizon and so you know we had a video that uh that we that was ready for this week that we were supposed to post and then we i saw it and i was like i don't want to post it yeah and so we didn't have a youtube video got this week and I will survive.

54:39I like it. And so the, now I'm just trying to think from the team's perspective, like all the hard work on like the edits, the jump cuts, the thumbnails and all that. Um, how much effort are you putting into that now? Because like, I actually, that, that one talk that you did recently, I saw the, I saw the headline change like three times in the span of a couple hours. So what's going into all the testing right now? Yeah, it's right off the that. So our head of YouTube, I mean, we'll still do a good job. We'll still split tests like we would for an ad. You know, we'll try different headlines, try different thumbnails.

55:11Because at the end of the day, like the mission is to get real business education accessible to everyone. And that means that we have to meet people where they're at, which is why I have to tie in more stories. And I don't just like review Excel sheets on YouTube screen shares. You know what I mean? Because like, that's not going to help anyone. In fact, it'll help basically no one. And so we have to make it accessible, which is part of the reason the vlog is like that is a form of consumption that a lot of people can do and so we were going to be doing more of that because more people can consume it and benefit from it we will play the game just like anyone else does um but as but the thing is is like they will send me thumbnails and headlines and i'll be like that's not that's not true yeah or um i don't like how this makes the person that we're talking about in the video sound yeah um i think it was like i'll give you an example we had a we had an affiliate video that went out basically explaining how you can use affiliates to promote a business and i was talking about it within the context of the book that's like my next book that's coming out and i think one of the headlines with tests that was sent to me was something like how i got or how i convinced yeah i think it's how i convinced 12 000 people to promote my book and i was like you If I'm an affiliate and I see that headline, I was like that doesn't make me feel good.

56:22And so I was talking to someone like, we have to think about it from every angle. So there's the Alex brand angle. Does this reinforce or dilute the values that we have in the position that we want to associate ourselves with? Then we have the audience, like who's actually watching this? Does this make them feel more aligned with that ultimate mission? Does this leave them better than they started? it. And then it's also who's the subject of the content, right? Like I could make content that makes me look fine and the audience would enjoy, but it's me bashing somebody. That's not going to be, that's, I'm never going to do that because I would never, I would never do that.

56:59If we don't have a win, win, win, then it's not right. And we will keep doing it until we have a win, win, win. Got it. I love that. And that, that aligns with your values. Yeah. The unimpeachable character. Yeah. I'm never going to, I'm never going to throw shit. I'll criticize generally and I will pray specifically. Warren Buffett. Yep. So you have Mosey Media right now. You've got the vlog. You've got the new studio coming. And then this podcast, I mean, you've got two full days that you record already. I imagine this has to start getting annoying at some point before you're doing a ton of pods.

57:30But it makes sense because you're on the book tour right now. I only do podcasts with people that I feel like doing podcasts with. So this might be kind of interesting. um i will only do so this is for anybody who's trying to get me on a podcast i will do podcasts if i think the person who's doing the interviewing has good questions so i did one recently with somebody who had no like a very small audience yeah but i saw or the team had seen that he like did a ton of research on every person would watch like 50 hours of content to ask like really good in-depth questions not like so tell me your origin story it's danny right yeah danny was yeah yeah yeah and so uh yeah and he did a great job yeah um and so i'm like and he's doing it absolutely the right way which is like do the work and you can and you can bat outside of your outside of your league if you do the work but the flip side is like i've if somebody's got like they've been doing a podcast they've got 500 episodes they've never taken off and the first question that they ask in every video is like so tell me about yourself no thank you i'm just not interested.

58:32Like my audience already has 50 podcasts they can watch of me saying the exact same story. And so I would like to, there's an element of, of there's their audience and I can do the TLDR on that like in two minutes, which I can understand, but I'd prefer them just provide the context for me so we can actually like rip and roar. But that's the, um, I don't like, I, I enjoy the good conversations. The hard part is just how many do you have? Um, and which ones do you pick? Cause like right now I think we get like 10 requests a day for podcasts. Yeah, it's a lot. And I feel bad because I want to say yes, but mathematically I can't.

59:07It's not even like a reschedule. It's just like, it's just a no. And so it really comes down to the quality of the interview. And if we can do it in person, I feel like the in-person podcasts outperform the Zoom podcasts. It's literally just like all of the in-persons and then like all of the Zooms. So like the best Zoom podcast is probably like about as good as like the worst in-person podcast. Dude, I mean, I enjoy these, right? Because these are much longer. I think if we did this on Zoom, it'd probably be like an hour or so. And you get tired. I don't know why. I feel like I'm way more, I'm like way, I feel like I tire out faster.

59:42I'm like less interested. I don't know. Just staring on a screen. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I wanted to start to dovetail this into the book, but just, I'm curious. You started to compound on all the channels, right? Twitter, LinkedIn, everything. how are you compounding are you like you're a numbers guy too like you're tracking the month over month growth like how are you looking on those i see the compounding as a consequence of what we're doing rather than the goal um what do you mean by that yeah so like we're human and we love having things that we can measure and the more ways you measure the more we can win so i can appreciate that but like we're big on if we have a piece of content that we're like this is going to really help someone and even if it's not super wide and we know it's not going to get it's not going to perform, we'll push it for sure.

1:00:25And so I think it's really been all about the too good to fail. It's like, as long as we make sure that what we were putting out is high quality and that I am proud to have it out there, it's kind of like the rest will take care of itself. Like we will do our jobs. We will do a good job. We will do all of the basics and we will do it every time. And if we do that on a long enough time horizon, we will get the result we want yeah makes sense and as you're talking i just for whatever reason i just started thinking about your twitter workflow which i think is probably the most interesting to you because you're you're right the only one that i'm directly posting you take it to poop while you're doing it or like what are you no actually um where do these thoughts come from so there are two places one is i wake up with them yeah so i usually wake up with like three or four tweets in my head and i won't usually even get out of bed until i put them in that is nuts and so yeah so like you'll see all like a lot of my tweets are front-loaded for the day because they're super refined too i think twitter low-key is the single greatest tool for learning how to write yeah because it forces you to have word concision and you get immediate feedback and so you like me hits feel so good like just the feedback on the language you know what i mean you get to learn really quickly and it's based on your words so i think they're like there are two things that have improved my writing more than anything hemingway the app and twitter like the two things that have improved my writing the most use hemingway to tweet no no no but like when i wrote like when i write the book yeah that has helped me and and twitter got it um but you said so the so from the second place that i do it is when things come up naturally during the day and so i'll say something on a meeting and like literally like the team will be like that's a tweet and then i'll just i'll just fire it off yeah like but there's there's no um there's no cadence there's no ghostwriters there's no like you'll also see two days in a row where i won't tweet at all so like it's just whatever and some days i'll tweet like 11 times yeah like it's just if i'm in the zone makes sense um i think there's a lot of wisdom there i i just i think there's a lot of beauty in the written word and if you can articulate yourself that way then it's like your next level well dude i had a guy um a really a really successful uh tech entrepreneur so he had two unicorn exits so like really successful hit me up on twitter and we hopped on a zoom call and he was like dude so what's your twitter strategy uh are you like in one of these engagement groups and i was like no and he's like oh dude i won't tell anybody like just like what's the like what's the what's the playbook and i was like i tweet shit as i think of it yeah yeah he just like he asked like three or four times like he just wouldn't believe it i'm like yeah that's what it is and some and you'll notice because the tweets are usually like themed because it's just like top of mind so if i'm feeling because usually i'm tweeting to myself and that's what people don't get like my tweets are me trying to bang myself in the head and be like dude like be fucking patient or like relax yeah like you know whatever it is or like you don't need to care about this person's opinion and so like they're so violent because i'm in the moment of discomfort and i write that to myself to get over the moment and move on with my day dude that's so fast it's like what we'll talk about in in you your 80 year old self mentoring you but it's it's weird how we use it in our own like you use it to beat yourself beat yourself up or no no sorry i I use it to beat myself up sometimes.

1:03:34You're talking to yourself just to like, it's like reminders for yourself, right? And Gary is like to motivate people, right? So it's just interesting. But okay, so how does now, the first book that you released, $100 million offers, you sold what? How many copies? I think it's about 500 ,000. That's a lot, right? Like what? I saw like 12 ,000 positive five-star reviews. That's across 16. 16 ,000. Okay, that's crazy. I just saw it. That's why I saw it. No advertising, right? By the way, let me just rewind for a second. The guy that got on a Zoom call with you, he wouldn't believe it. It's like when your shit's so good, you don't need to game the system.

1:04:09That is already the game. Too good to fail. You know what I mean? That's the line. Too good to fail. I had a roommate of mine who said that. I was like, what? Because this is way back when I had my gyms. And I only had one gym, so like way back in the day. And he had an online business. So it was like way early, a decade ago, right? Yeah. And I was like, so what's your strategy? And he was doing like blogging SEO stuff back then. And he said that statement to me. And he's like, I don't do anything else. He's like, I just make sure that my articles are so exceptional that people share them. And he would spend two weeks on one article, but then they would crush and get shared all over the place.

1:04:44And now he has a business probably worth like 60, 70 million now. Wow. And we were just like roommates in a house, like just random. Great. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay. So back to the book. So you did the first one. What did you, I mean, it's a labor of love first. Anybody that's written a book before, you know, it's a labor of love. And plus use you like 10X, 20X just to make sure it's damn good. First book was amazing, right? What made you so quickly want to go to the next one? And what are you looking to get out of it?

1:05:13Man, writing books is like such not a good use of time. As much like it's like it's something, it's honestly like a guilty pleasure. Like it takes too much of my time and I enjoy it because a lot of people don't know this about my background, but like i was the vice as vice editor of the um of the newspaper i was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine i got a writing scholarship going into college like i've been writing a long time and i enjoy writing um and so this is the only thing that i get to marry my two loves where like i love writing and i love business yeah and so it's like it's my like chief form of expression that's why twitter is kind of like a microcosm of that um but the point of 100 million leads was to answer one question and uh the first one 100 million offers answered the question what do i sell leads answers the question who do i sell it to and so most people once they have something to sell they're like okay now what and this book pretty much walks you through how to get your i mean basically this book can get most people to a few million dollars a year um that i mean that's it and so i see this like the books are my absolute long game because the amount of guys that i see every single day that stop me like when we're walking who are like dude i'm 21 i've got my thing.

1:06:26I'm doing, you know, 70 grand a month and you're on my vision board. As soon as I cross a million dollars in profit, like I'm hitting you up. And so like, there are so many of those guys right now who are like incubating that I know in three years, five years, 10 years are going to hit that. And I just want to be the first person they call. Right. And that's it. And like, that's a long, it's my longest game. Like the books are my absolute, which is why I spend so much time on them because if they're not going to be good enough to still be referred to and sold in a decade, there's no point in me writing it today.

1:06:57Like the book launch money, like it cost me more money to put the event on that I'm probably going to make from the book. You know what I mean? And the media team, my losing money media team. No, you guys are awesome. Writing a book to make money off a book is possibly the worst monetization vehicle of all time. It's a physical product. You have a 16 week lead time. You have to manage inventory accounts. You make no money on it. You have to sell it on a platform that takes 80 % of the money, or you have to go to a publisher that also takes 80 % of the money. Like there's no winning from a money.

1:07:31Like the percentage of, like the offers is top, top 100 audible books still on Amazon two years later and top 1000 physical books. Wow. There's, there's like 60, there's I think 60 million titles. There's six or 60 million. That's a big difference obviously, but a lot of books on Amazon. And so it's a point 0.0001 % book and like it doesn't i mean it makes money but like it makes less than any of my portfolio companies to give like a reference of scale yeah i mean you're not retiring from right no i mean if i spent no money you know i mean like any of the companies we have makes more money in the book right yeah makes sense i mean but it's still it's like it lives on forever and that's cool and i think that's it that's like the like if i were to die tomorrow the thing i'd be most proud of is the books because i knew that that would be the thing that would outlive me the longest.

1:08:22Yeah. Which is interesting. We'll come back to the book in a second, but I think you talked about how you don't believe in the concept of legacy. Yeah. Right. Kind of is your legacy. In the formal sense. Yeah. I don't believe in individual legacy. Yeah. Can you expand? Yeah. Yeah. So like, I don't believe in your name being passed on for thousands of generations. I mean, like to prove the point, do you know what your great, great, great grandfather's name was? Probably not. Right. And so like, that's not even that many generations back. And so to have like the ego and the thinking that like your somehow like your progeny are and even if you somehow became king of the world and you did have that they wouldn't know who you were you would just be like another historical figure that they could then trace their bloodline back to and then if you do the math on how related you are to them like if you go you know 0.5 to the eighth i mean you're you're not related you're just another human and in that to that degree then it then relation generalizes to all of humanity and then you just become a humanitarian in which case i am uh pro legacy from that perspective.

1:09:18And I think that the ultimate legacy is education because all of us here are sitting here in a house full of inventions that other people that we don't know invented and made our lives better. And that I think is like the ultimate legacy for humanity is that we just fall and someone picks up the baton where we left off and carries it. But like, I think the ultimate wasted life is one where you learn lessons and pass it on to no one and force someone to quite truly reinvent the wheel. You know, Naval has, so the book he recommends the most is the, I think it's the beginning of infinity or something like that yeah david deutsch or whatever so this dude and it's like a super dense read um but like i haven't completed it but this guy's like you know what is wealth and wealth is knowledge to your point you just said it's education right like that is the thing that continues to compound beyond you and me it lasts beyond money yeah and like that is what should matter like how do we make people wealthy we educate them and if you about the reverse of that too.

1:10:14If you had a lot of money and you gave it to someone, how would you guarantee that they lose the money? You have them completely uneducated and completely ignorant. And so there's a, there's, I think it's Sanskrit. So it's a super old like ism, but it says, if you have a bad son, there's no point in saving money. If you have a good son, there's no point in saving money because if you have the good son, he'll take care of himself. If you have a bad son, he's going to squander everything you have, which basically means that at no point does it ever matter what you accumulate because either you passed on education in which case they never needed you to begin with or you pass on no education and they're going to lose everything you had that's so good but i this is the thing you look at all the the wealthy people they can't help themselves they have to give it to kids and we don't have kids yet right but i suspect if we have kids right it's just like you probably end up giving it to the kids right well i think um i really like thinking of like i mean and i'll probably be different when i have children but I don't know how different people would be surprised.

1:11:11If like, if I wanted to create a human that had certain character traits, I would then think, okay, what are the, what are the experiences someone has to go through to have that happen? And I would try and reverse engineer as many of those as I could. And like having Uber wealth throughout your entire life and having a guaranteed ease of, of eating and living and whatever is a great way to guarantee, not guarantee, is a great way to increase the likelihood that someone does not turn out good. And so I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life after they're 20 with a bunch of people I didn't like.

1:11:40And so I would rather have them suffer to become the types of people that I'd want to spend the rest of my life with. I'm with you, man. It's, I mean, let's rewind to our childhoods real quick, because for me, tiger mom, right? It's difficult. You're never good enough, right? And so I think similar kind of story for you. Do you want to talk about maybe how your childhood shaped you into who you are? Because I feel like there's part of you that's really compassionate, but then there's the other side that's really tough on yourself and sometimes tough on other people too yeah well as a quick side note on this um i think a lot because i've had this question in different forms on a couple podcasts about like the struggle growing up etc and how that creates success now but i really think it's people suffer during childhood some people are successful and some people aren't like there's just as many people are not even way more people who have terrible childhoods and then don't do anything out of it.

1:12:31And so I don't, to point back to a terrible childhood and say, not that I had a terrible childhood, but like to tough times and say that that is why I am here. The why is really difficult. And I don't think anyone can answer the question. I just know that I do these things because I've been reinforced for doing them. And so that's like the only rule or law of humanity that I see is that you're either rewarded or punished for doing the things that you've done. And you either avoid things you've been punished for in the past and you keep doing things you're rewarded for. And so I keep working harder and harder on things because my minimum standard continues to rise because the more I raise that minimum standard, the better the things that I have are and the more reinforced I am for working hard on the things that I work on.

1:13:07Which brings me to a quote over here. Most people keep fighting the same boss, but the boss is being able to stick with it. Yeah. And you had to learn that the hard way, right? Yeah. Yeah. Here, I'll give you another one over here. I'll give you your Mosey-isms. Is that a thing? Mosey-isms? To do something epic, you have to convince yourself to do the same thing for a long period of time without telling yourself that you're smarter than you are. This talk that you did, I think the talk, I'm paraphrasing here, was how this will change how you think about money or something like that, right? But this talk was really about focus at the end of the day.

1:13:39And you went to yogurt land and decided that you had to redo your talk and focus the talk on focus. What happened there? Yeah, I had all these guys who were coming up. So I was supposed to speak at this event and I'd already finished the presentation. And part of the reason that I don't speak very much is because on stages, one, I don't like how people use my face to promote because again, associations I don't want. But also because, I mean, to just give this to everybody else, like a lot of people will promote with my face and then people will buy whatever the person who's at the event is selling and I have no association or anything and I have no way to, I don't have the time to do the due diligence of figuring the person out.

1:14:17So like if I speak somewhere, it's not because I'm endorsing the person. But that being said, I went to the yogurt land and like eight or nine people were in the area for the next day. And they sat around us and I spent like 60 minutes talking to all these guys. And it became really clear that all of them were distracted. They were all doing multiple things, trying to, like they subscribe to the single fallacy that I think is number one in new entrepreneurs, which is the I'll see which one works fallacy. fallacy. And the reality is that any of them could work, but the only one that will work is the one that you work on.

1:14:53And so you have to commit to one of them because it's arrogant to think that you going 25 % in on four things is because you are competing in a real marketplace against somebody else that's in that space. And to think that you're 25 % is going to do anything against someone's hundred percent it's just arrogant and so um and one of the definitions commitment that i like a lot is the elimination of alternatives and so if you want to be committed to something then you have to eliminate alternatives and some people use uh you know dicodaria which is the latin root of decide which just means to kill off which is like what are we killing off and i think um it's kind of like pruning a tree uh and when i realized that it's like you there's only so much nutrients in the soil you only so many minutes in the day so much literal attention and focus that you can allocate.

1:15:37And if anyone's ever worked on one project for a long period of time, you realize that you start peeling back layers and getting a depth of understanding that you can never get when you're on the surface level, looking at multiple things, you're barely being reactive and setting out fires. You can never make progress and like drive. And I think that like, this is a Warren Buffett quote to give the goat his, his due. Um, he said the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. and I think that that's it's just taking me a very long time to learn that and I continue to repeat it in my tweets because it's still just as hard for me now as it was then it's because the thing is is that the opportunities I have to say no to now are things that I would have given my left nut for you know a decade ago uh and so it's it's just it's continued like the bar has continued to rise on what I have to say no to and it's hard the whole way through and one of the big unlocks for me has been judging myself based on my actions and not my feelings.

1:16:34Meaning I can feel impatient, but still do the patient thing. So I might still want this to go faster and be upset that it's not going faster. As long as they don't act on that impulse, I can still be a patient person. And so to the same degree with focus, I might be interested in love jamming with the guys. I'm like, what if we did this? What if we did that? What if we did that? But as long as I don't say, all right, buy the URL, let's get the bank got set up. Let's go. As long as I don't do that, then like we're still focused on the one thing that matters most. It must be tough because it's, you're trying to educate people on the pain that you've been through, right?

1:17:11Again, being punched in the gut, nine things, right? But still, like, I don't know about you, but in my early 20s, I remember like, yeah, focus, focus. And I would read, you know, Warren Buffett, Steve, not Steve Jets, Warren Buffett, you know, Bill Gates. Yeah, the one thing is focus, right? Like, you know, and but then it's like, no, no, no. But like, I'm better. I'm smarter than that, right? You have that quote in here. It's like thinking that you're smarter than you are. So I feel like it's as much as we try to teach people, sometimes it's like they just need to get punched themselves. I think there's a difference between knowing that and knowing how.

1:17:43So like going through an experience, unfortunately, teaches you in a different way than knowing that something happens. Or like I know that this works this way. But if I said like I know how a business works, but it's like you know what to do, but you've never done it. And so until you've actually done it, you think you know what to do until you go through it. And so I think that's like that experiential knowledge, which is honestly, I think the base of the content, what makes the difference between Ken McElroy's and hopefully our content, which is like people can see a depth of understanding that comes from experience.

1:18:14One of my favorite quotes from LH Hardwick is, no man within experience is ever at the mercy of a man with an opinion. And until someone's done it, all they have is an opinion. And if you have done it, they are irrelevant. Like someone's like, well, it doesn't work that way. I'm like, have you done it they're like no and i'm like your opinion does not matter dude i i just remember uh two three years ago one of the guys that um that was leading my marketing team he's like so we'd have this um engagement tool called 15.5 and you could just here's how the week went you know here's what i'm learning right now and every week it's like watching hormosi videos watching hormosi videos and this is when you had this is when you were just like maybe 20 000 subscribers or whatever right but it was because of the depth of the content that you have where it was just so good.

1:18:59And then I started watching it and it's like, then it's like all the thumbnails on YouTube started, the recommendations started becoming you. I was like, holy shit. And that's how you started to compound, right? Because it's good stuff. Yeah. I appreciate it. I think it's being really honest with yourself about, you know, we have the investor's circle of competence, right? I think there's a content circle of competence that you have to know if it's not in this circle, I shouldn't talk about it. And that's not because of brand. And that's not because of any of the fancy stuff. It's just because you don't know it.

1:19:29And like anything that you have to add that's outside of the circle of competence will often be a generalization that you heard from someone else. And if it's a generalization from someone else, then that's their opinion and not yours. And so we want first principles, first experience type content. And so N equals one, right? Or one of zero content, as we say. And that's the litmus test. It's like, is it something we know from experience? and i i had this video i think the the long that i had right before this was my explanation of how to get to 10 million plus a month um and i talked about i was like and i think this is how we get to 100 million a month um i don't know that because i haven't been there yet but i'm this is my current plan of how to get there and somebody commented something i can't remember what it was but it's something like uh well you have no idea i can i can coach you on it like whatever right um but the thing is is like it i will only talk about retrospect right like i will only talk about things that i have done because i can speak confidently on them and if someone says gym launch wasn't a company it doesn't bother me because it's it's like saying like you didn't have oatmeal for breakfast i'm like i mean i did so okay and that's that's what in my opinion has allowed me to not suffer from the the many inevitable con you know comments whatever you get from the masses of people who don't know you.

1:20:49Because if someone says, hey, Alex, you're short, I know that's not true. And so it doesn't hit me. The only ones that hurt are the ones that you feel like have an element of truth. And so if there's an element of truth, it means that I probably stepped out of my circle of competence. And I think getting stung outside of my circle has really taught me, at least for me to stay in my world of like, these are the few things that I know and that is what i'll talk about you know interestingly enough speaking of circle of competence i think there's also a circle of competence when it comes to content creation like you should stick to the format that you understand initially before expanding out right and so i really enjoy this but maybe i'm not the best at you know uh telling long-form stories or something like that right um so i think it's like it really do whatever works for you play your cards yeah yeah yeah um so going back to the book you got this big launch strategy happening right now it's like the super bowl like what what can you tell us about that what's going on how much you spend yeah let's go tons about it so um 100 million dollar offers the first book i'm the goal with every book was to be a meta book meaning i wanted to use the book to demonstrate the ideas in the book as proof that the ideas worked and so 100 million dollar offers how to make offers so good people feel stupid saying no was supposed to in and of itself be an offer so good people feel stupid saying no.

1:22:07And so I made the book$2 on Kindle. And I added in a course that most people would sell for$1 ,000 to$5 ,000 on top of it and made it for free on my site, not behind an opt-in wall, just made it for free for everyone with downloads and everything. And the idea was, if it is good enough, people will share it. And that's more or less what ended up happening. And so with$100 million leads, the meta concept is not about the offer. The meta concept within leads is advertising and how to get leads. And so the 24 months that I did post the offers book was all towards the leads book. And so the last 24 months was, well, if I'm going to talk about how to build an audience, then I have to build an audience.

1:22:51If I'm going to talk about how to run paid ads, I have to run paid ads. If I'm going to talk about having affiliates, I have to have affiliates. And so there's eight methods of advertising that I talk about in the book. And I use all eight specifically to promote the book to prove that all eight methods work. And so when we go live at the event, I will break down, here was our affiliate strategy. This is how many affiliates we had. This is how many of you are here from affiliates. This is our paid ad strategy. These are the scripts I use, which is directly from this page. This is the landing page I use, which is directly from this page.

1:23:25And it got this many of you guys here. I got this much content, which is how many we put out over this period of time This is the resulting impressions. This is how many of you hear from that And so I wanted to just give proof that these concepts worked 10 years ago And they work today and they'll work in 100 years because people won't change the platforms will but the principles remain the same Yeah, so I mean you're basically showing hate like i'm showing you this in the book and i'm meta This is how it works, right? By the way for the affiliates. What are they getting out of this? I mean, it's a two dollar book like well What's in it for them?

1:23:53Yeah, um, and actually the the kindle on this one is ten dollars because the point was not to be an offer. The point was to be a leads thing. And the next book will be a meta concept on that. So every book will have its own unique thing. Anyways. So with the affiliates, I think of affiliates in kind of two tiers. Now, when I make a true affiliate strategy for a business, there's usually three. There's usually first level, which is the base level that everybody starts at. There's the next level, which is an activation point level, which is whatever activation point is for you in your business. You make that the next kicker for their income or whatever the benefit is.

1:24:26And then you have your top producer level. And so those are usually the best three. And we paid a gazillion dollars to consultants who just only set up affiliate structures. And that's what they use. They're like, always three. These are the three. And there you go. There's a nugget for you. Let me save you 100 grand. That's how you set up affiliate setups. With this book, I have two levels. If you don't have a massive audience, bring 10 friends. That's it. So bring 10 people from your company, bring your family, bring your cousins, whatever it is, bring 10 people and I'll give you two chapters that I'm not releasing with the book.

1:24:58Okay. So that's the, that's the benefit for that level. For the top level, those are gonna be people who have audiences, right? Who have email lists, have subscribers, et cetera. And so for them, I wanted it to be more competitive. And so for them at the top 10, I'm going to do an AMA live with their audience with them and they can ask whatever they want. And the reason I've chose that specific benefit for them was that if I said, Hey, I'm giving a Lamborghini or I'm giving a car to the top 10 people, right? If they go to their audience and say, hey, attend this thing so I can win this car, that's them extracting goodwill from the audience.

1:25:31And I don't want them to do that for me. And so I was like, how can I also use the concepts that I preach for them? And so I made it an AMA so that their audience clicking their affiliate link benefits their audience. Because if I click Johnny's link and we win, then we get the time to do the AMA. And so he doesn't, Johnny or whoever the affiliate is, doesn't extract goodwill or withdraw goodwill from their audience by promoting my thing. And so that way I wanted it to be an easy thing for people to promote. So it would just be a net benefit. So it didn't have to like work into their promotion calendar or be like, what kind of split them?

1:26:11Because there's no financial incentive for this. And I also did that because operationally, you know, 12 ,000, 1099 is a pain. And so it was easier to do it that way. interesting and these people are willing to promote too because of all the goodwill that you've built up and i think that's really interesting important for people to understand and probably um brand association yeah like for sure like real time like that was the thing that i i'm still consistently learning and am impressed by how branding works yeah um but yeah i think that was also an element of it so and the amas that you're doing you're doing basically 10 separate amas 10 separate ones so it's totally like their audience yeah um and so yeah that's And I don't do a lot of these by percentage of requests.

1:26:54And so for many of them, this is like the only shot that they'll probably have to do that. And so I wanted to make it cool and awesome. Got it. How many hours do you think you put into this launch? How much do you think you've spent so far? I've spent a million bucks in cash on the event so far. Probably more, honestly. Yeah, it's been probably more. um and then so right now we have like 405 or 10 000 people registered okay for the event which is pretty nuts it's like seven nfl stadiums dude i imagine attendee attendance rate has to be pretty high too i hope so well you know i this is the first time you know that we've done anything like this big um so yeah we've spent spent that much money and then from a time perspective this has been if you include the writing of the book i mean it's i've got 2 000 hours yeah so if we don't include writing the book um the presentation that i'm giving um i've spent i probably put 200 hours into it wow okay so um i i will do the work and so i made the presentation and this and now i feel like i have the process down so i will share this with you so i'm a big fan of uh outworking your self-doubt right like you you're never nervous if you're fully prepared and so i don't want to be nervous for this thing.

1:28:14And if anything, I just want to be excited about it, which I am. But the way I approached it was I made the first version of the presentation and then I presented it and I recorded it. And then I watched the recording with the deck up and I pause it when every time there's a mess up and I fix the deck and I play, fix, play, fix, play, fix. And then once I have the new fixed one, I go top to bottom in my head and then I go top to bottom, Record it out loud. Pause, fix, pause, fix, pause, fix. And so right now, I do that. I do one full cycle of that every day. And I started preparing for that three weeks out.

1:28:51I don't know if people are, maybe they are seeing this, but from my observation here is you just mentioned, I will do the work. And I think one of your other quotes was like, the work needs doing, right? But then, and then you tie it in with really not even a 10X effort, but to me, it seems like a 100X effort. Just people aren't willing to go that far, right? But what's interesting is that like if you work 100 times harder, you can sometimes get like a million times the payoff. And so like the top end of work still has disproportionate payoffs. And so I don't even, I don't even, like there are diminishing returns, but there's a point where you actually get like outsized returns for the effort.

1:29:23Because like if you think about it from like an Olympic racing perspective, like if I work, you know, 10 times more than everybody else does, but I get gold and the next guy gets silver. The difference between gold and silver and running is everything, even though it's the 10th of a second. And so from an absolute perspective, there's diminishing returns. But from a relative perspective, I think you have exponential returns from being the best. The difference between number one and number two can be Uber and Lyft. The difference is 10x the size. And so I have now been reinforced enough times of how much more work is required to do something excellent that now I understand it.

1:29:58And I think the one thing that has continued to level up over time for me, and this is also for the audience, is that like you don't even know how much you can work. Like you think you know how much you can work until you like really, really work. And like with this presentation, I was like, I will not be the reason this is not good. What do you think changed your perspective, like flipped you into working 100x harder? I think just my standards have gone up. Like I looked at the first presentation I ever gave and it's like it's embarrassing. I mean, it's truly embarrassing. I think it has like 19 slides with like four bullets on each slide.

1:30:32And I remember thinking, man, I spend a lot of time on this. And a lot of time to me back then was like I spend a day on it. Like a full day, like eight hours. That's still me right now. Yeah. And I think that a little moniker that I have is just count in hundreds. It's like how many hundreds of hours did you spend on something? Because like when you start counting in hundreds, like the depth of understanding of something goes to such a large degree and it's like if I were to tell someone to edit a video right like a short clip and I said hey um edit this clip uh in 30 minutes right and give it back to me and I was like and they give it back to me I'm like okay I'm not gonna edit it yet if I give you another 30 minutes could you make it better and they're usually like I could make it better another 30 so I give it back to him like give it back to me another 30 he gives back to me another 30 and I say okay if I give you two more hours do you think you make it better there's a point to this yep he's like yeah I think I make it better comes back to me i say okay what if i gave you two weeks like well then i would totally approach it differently i'd probably restructure the whole thing like because the the amount of time sure work does expand to the amount of time that you allow it right but i deem work done when there's nothing else that i can do to make it better that there's nothing else that i know of that i can make this better right um and that was the point that i got back with the book like i did 19 drafts.

1:31:54I did four full rewrites. And the last version that has gone out, when I read it front to back so many times now, I was like, I can't take anything else out and I can't add anything to it. And I can't make anything clear. And I've written this whole thing in third grade reading level. And I added 106 hand-drawn images into this. There's nothing else I can do. And if it does not succeed, that's fine. But it will not be for lack of effort. Let me ask you this then. What would be considered success for this book launch? It'll be successful the moment I step on stage. I genuinely believe this. Like truly I'll have one by the time that it happens because I, I know what I feel like when I walk on stage and I have done everything in my power, everything, not some of the things or most of the things, but there is nothing else that I can conceive of to make this better.

1:32:41And then at that point, if any, like, then the chips will fall where they are and I will control the controllables. And so that's, that has, that has helped me get through like some of the anxieties and things like that that happened earlier on in my career around these types of things yeah but the whole like the reason i have the outwork yourself doubt like give yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are like if i say that i will i will do my job then i will not make i will make sure that i have done everything in my power which also means and this is the underlying thing is that means i can't do a lot of stuff and that's the that's the real cost of excellence is all the things that you want to try that you can't do because excellence has a huge price tag associated with it which is how much time you have to put into one thing totally and you actually gave this example when it comes to writing a world-class book there yeah i think the analogy you shared was like you know there's a difference between like a 7.5 star and a 9.5 star book or whatever it is it's like 100x more work yeah right what was the analogy yeah i mean it's it's exactly that like to go from a you know from a five to a seven is like twice the work to go from a seven to a nine is like a hundred times the work it's so much more work it's an asymptote when it comes to work and excellence it's a power loss but yeah but the difference like but the difference between a nine and a half book and a 9.9 book on amazon is the difference between you having one book that you can retire on for the rest of your life like the offers book in sales i think does around 300 000 a month which is crazy good as a book yeah as a book that's your take right huh that's your take no that's not my take that's sales that's revenue right then amazon has his has his way with it um and takes the vast majority of it but point being is like for the vast majority i think it is about a million bucks a year yeah great um but for the vast majority of people like that i think is actually kind of encouraging is like you can put an unbelievable amount of work into one thing and make it so good that it will pay you for the rest of your life like you don't like you could work a job you could have a career you could do all these things but like if you build one amazing product that people will consistently buy and tell their friends about you don't have to work yet and i think that like understanding that i've now applied and honestly the offers book was the first probably the biggest real life example i had where i could control every variable like in a business you can't control every variable but in and even in like a tech product i'm not the coder or whatever like i was like i can code every page of this i did the drawings i did the audible i wrote the words I designed the cover, like everything.

1:35:08And so I can make sure that it's excellent from my perspective. And then hopefully the audience will agree. I love it. And that acquisition.com slash leads, is that going to be an evergreen page or is it going to disappear at some point? Oh, I mean, it always reroute to probably something about the books. So yeah, acquisition.com forward slash leads. Got it. Let me ask you this. I think for a hundred million dollar offers, that book is very lengthy. And what I mean by that for the audience is that, how to win friends and influence people. It's been around for over 100 years. It's going to be around for another 100 years.

1:35:38I think your book is written that way for that one. I think leads might be a little more difficult because you might be talking about, no, you've written a Lindy. That's why it was so hard. There you go. To give context, leads has been probably 10 times the work of offers. It was because I had to rewrite it so many times. Thinking about what topics I was going to get into and what topics I wasn't going to get into. And then at what level do I chunk up or chunk down from tactics around advertising, right? So explaining the concepts, I call it the core four, but there's only four things you can do to let other people know about your stuff.

1:36:18You can message people one-on-one who you know, so it's warm reach outs. You can message people one-on-one who you don't know, that's cold reach outs. You can post one-to-many to people who know you, which is posting content. And you can post one-to-many to people who don't know you, which is running paid ads. That's it. That's all you can do. There's nothing else. And if you're not doing those things, then people won't find out about your stuff. And so the platforms change, the principles remain the same. And so that was the, but like I had to cover platforms, media formats, placements, targeting, cold emails, cold calls, DMs.

1:36:50Like there were so many things that I had to cover in one book. I will probably never bite off so much again in terms of narrowing the scope of the book. But now that I did for this, it really, the problem set that this book answers is literally just one step in the funnel, which is a lead is a person that you can contact. That is the definition as I define it. An engaged lead is a person you can contact who has shown interest in the stuff you sell. And the entire point of this book is to get someone from a person you can contact to get them engaged. That is it. That is the whole problem of the entire book and then like and that's it it self-destructs it's self-destructs you got offers you got leads can you talk about the next one it's i won't share the name yet yeah but uh it's green it's green all right you got it'll be a green book purple purple wait blue purple green purple blue purple okay got it got it um just for the audience to know it's typically when you write a book it's usually five to seven drafts right and when i my editor first told me that it's like oh come on i'll be done in one draft right no it's seven on my end you did 19 that's that's way more and it sounds like you rewrote a couple times too four four rewrites like end-to-end rewrites that's crazy i think i just give up but um it was very it was really hard but the work needs doing um and i'll tell you what my editor said when i would get to these points where i would just like throw out my hands and be like dude i don't i don't need to make the money like i don't like whatever you know you're close to giving up a couple times oh for sure i I mean, like, you know, everybody has bad days.

1:38:20And he said, he gave me this visual that like, just like seared into my mind. He was like, there's a 17-year-old kid in Pakistan who has a goat who's going to be sleeping with this book under his pillow. He's like, do it for him. Wow. And I was like, all right. That's good. So we get back and we, you know, I was like, dude, they can figure this part out. And he's like, no, they can't. Yeah. He's like, you'll sell the book no matter what. He's like, but they won't get it. And then I'll, so then it's like back to the drawing board. How can I rethink through this framework so that I can make it easy and then make the visual match the words and make it under third grade and all the way through was tough.

1:38:55I mean, that just goes to show you, too, because earlier you talked about your mission around the education piece. Right. And sometimes no matter how strong your mission is, you start to waver a little bit. Right. And you need heroes like your editor to come and recalibrate. Yeah. Yeah. This one's interesting. So the guy I had lunch with today, we had been in these masterminds before. And in our mid-20s or so, it's like, yeah, tactics. You need a dopamine hit. Oh, that feels good, right? Split test. Yeah, split test. There's this new channel over here. You got to talk to this person. But then as we get older, it's like, no, no, no.

1:39:24It's not about the tactics. It's just about hiring good people, right? Is there anything you want to – I mean, I thought it would be good to chat about with you here. Because after they read the book, sure, they'll pick up the strategies, the tactics. But really, once they get to a certain level, it's like, I mean, it's all about who. You know what I mean? There's that, the title, was that book, Who Not How? Yep. I mean, it kind of summarizes the entire concept in the title. I think you and I've had this discussion, but like you can sit in on a group of entrepreneurs, listen to the discussion for 60 seconds and know how much money they make within a rough estimate or what level of the business that they're working, if they're employees, like where they sit on the org chart because of what level of conversation they're having.

1:40:05And so at the highest level, you're talking about allocation of resources. That's all it is. It's just capital and human allocation. And one level maybe below that would be human capital, which is how are we going to attract talent? How are we going to train talent? How are we going to get compounding returns on talent? Because I like the saying, but you're just one great hire away from all of the money that you want. But the thing is that I think the catch of that ism is that you have to become the type of person that that person wants to work for. Totally. And that's the hard part. Yeah. that's like sure yeah yeah yeah of course uh what's his name tim cook right of apple he could he could probably grow your business but he wouldn't work for you and so like that has been always at the forefront of layla nice minus and that's part of what we do with the brand stuff which is we want the brand to stand for things that because we're we're just as aggressively advertising at a tactical level more aggressively advertising from a transactions perspective for the talent we put in portfolio companies.

1:41:09So we place talent, I mean, a few times a week. I mean, we have three, four leadership positions a week that we fill in our portfolio companies compared to how many deals we do at the portfolio level. And so, and that's the, that's the highest return on capital that we have is buy someone. And I say buy just in the capital term, buy talent for 200 ,000 a year, make 20 million a year. Yep. No brainer. Great trade, right? And one of the big, one of the big misnomers i think that one of the biggest mistake entrepreneurs like myself included when i was earlier on is that i didn't understand the difference between a and b talent you can pay a talent 30 above market and get 10x the output and like there's no sense in ever paying below market in my opinion because you just don't get you can get so much more for the for the extra premium that you pay that it's one of the best it's like the best best bet in vegas yeah i mean the best trade you can make is that premium to bring the right person in that's 10 times more effective you know have you heard of the the keith roboi um he has this expression about barrels versus bullets so the concept here this guy was um i think he was like a coo of of square or block whatever you want to call it he's high up at paypal but anyway so what he said was like look in an organization you need barrels these are going to be the ones that you give them a problem or like something and they'll just solve it right yeah and then the bullets like they will do what you tell them to do but you should always hire a barrel whenever you meet a barrel and that's kind of what you're saying here and to me like i i love playing poker right like i'm a gambler at heart but in in like in business it's like unfair it's like you make this hire it's like upside is unlimited well i mean it's kind of the point now where we will like we interview we basically have open interviews yeah so if we see someone who's incredibly talented we will hire them without really having a clear position for them yet and like i'm saying that's a bit that's if we have an incredibly talented person like we had someone recently um who is an exceptional sales director had huge experience was an ex ceo like all this great stuff great value fit um and one of our portfolio companies we're about to uh you know make the recommendation that you should take this person um and they were like we don't we don't think we want to do it um and so we hopped on the phone and we're like you're wrong um like we have a lot more context on this you should do it and it ended up somebody from like their outside it said you shouldn't do it and they had that person had no context and they were like we actually wanted to hire him but we didn't trust ourselves which by the way is huge part for entrepreneurs is like you make one bad hire and then you think i can't hire people like you're gonna make mistakes it's part of the game you get better and better at pattern recognition and so this person had talent it was clear and so we were like just so you know we're hiring him no matter what and so we're either gonna put him in your company or putting them with somebody else that they were like, okay, yeah, yeah, no, no, we want them.

1:43:56And so it's like, I think that's the level of talent is like, you should feel FOMO when you're talking to the person. And here's the other litmus test that I love. I got this from Layla. If you are not learning on the interview from the candidate about the thing that they're supposed to take over, you shouldn't hire them because it means that you know more than them, which means that you're required for them to be successful, which means that they need you and you don't get leverage. Yep. Dude, that's way better. So I used to use this Larry Page proxy so he would just get bored on all these interviews right you know one of the founders of google and he would be like yeah so like tell me about something you're passionate about okay great you're going to teach me for seven minutes so he can learn something yeah leila's is even better yeah yeah because if you think about from a from a chunked up example an organization grows if the not if the cumulative knowledge base of the company grows and so if you bring somebody in who you have the complete you have their entire complete knowledge set about whatever the subject matter is, then the organization doesn't grow.

1:44:55Just as simple as that. And if you are the smartest person in your business, then it means that the business will be capped by your brain. If you have four other people who have huge trench knowledge, then I see it as this, like, in my head, I see it as this Christmas tree where, like, if you have four like this, the peak goes way above because you have this wider top. So the peak is way, way higher. Whereas if you're the single brain at the top the peak is the top of your head yeah that's like how i visualize very small christmas tree yeah very small christmas tree exactly dude no presents that's that's good um so actually we have a couple minutes left here but the layla conversation is going to be really focused on talent acquisition because that that is the game so um anyway she's a savage i mean speaking of savages so so a yes both of you are savages um in a good way obviously but b when you find this talent right like i tell people i tell my staff it's like dude you know and if you have that feeling that little gut feeling you pull the trigger you don't you don't wait that long yeah because the next person to interview with will hire them yeah totally so you'll do it on the spot sometimes we don't do i mean we don't we still follow a process but we we do 24-hour turnarounds to move things forward there you go yeah but usually your turnarounds like we try and do we try and do everything one day apart if we like we always try to do that like we have really good metrics around hr like our cost to fill is way below industry average our time to fill roles um is like 22 days versus industry average is much higher yeah um our two-sided fit at 90 days uh which is one of our key metrics is that the the person above the person and the person both say that it was a perfect match 90 days later two-sided fit i like that you guys came up with that one too uh what director of hr did oh and that was because she came from odd x uh private equity firm and so she was director of people there yeah and so on the interview she was teaching she gave all these metrics that i didn't like time to fill and i was like i should why have i never tracked this like that's so smart and she's like what's the cost to fill and here i am thinking i was like oh yeah i'm this big metrics guy i know the cost of our customer cpm cpa all these things just and she's like oh you don't know what your cost to fill was and i was like wow like such an idiot myself yeah and so that's why like that's why you need really smart people around you because like i learned from from her all the time you should feel like an idiot when you're talking to high caliber prospects about their subject yeah yeah i love it cool you know so i'm going to go back to the story here because because um we have a guest question here but we were eating lunch one time and your order was give me four chicken breasts so tell us about the i've seen the the video you have with the ice cream and all that how how is your diet like what is the question here from my buddy is um what is alex's fitness routine aside from what he has said and diet as well yeah um like right now i haven't worked out in like three or four weeks um which is not as common for me but i go through seasons um i would say like i didn't i didn't miss uh more than a week of working out for like 16 years wow um and then i in my old age um you know i'm crossing 19 years of training now um so i've like for everyone who's like the entrepreneurs who like all of a sudden decide to like start getting into fitness and then they start lecturing people when they've only been working out for like two years.

1:48:06Like I read the book and the article and I know the guy who wrote it and I know how he makes his money and you're not seeing the whole truth, but that's okay. Which article are you referring to? Oh, I'm just saying like - In general. In general. Like whatever that thing is that you're like really obsessed about right now, it's because you understand it very, like I'm all keto, I'm intermittent fasting. I do high carb or I only do vegan or like whatever make-believe thing you have. Like there's a few things that matter and everything else is just preference. You know what I mean? And so I don't know if this is an evolalism, but like if you can't do it for a decade, don't do it for a day.

1:48:37And so there's definitely been seasons where I'll train harder. But overall, I do resistance training because it's the number one thing for, you know, longevity, maintaining bone mass, etc. And then from a health perspective, it just comes down to calorie intake from a body aesthetics and then making sure that you have the vitamins that you need and micronutrients. But like for most people in the developed world, we don't normally have vitamin deficiencies and we usually don't have mineral deficiencies. Again, that clinic that you go to where they do the blood work and they can have you chew on something and then spit it out and it does pink and then you take a supplement and then it's blue.

1:49:14Like you have to understand these are also businesses. Like I come from the health and fitness world. Like there's games behind these things. And so I try to keep things as simple as possible. I eat two pounds of meat a day. That's how I get my 200 grams of protein in. that is very easy for me to do. And then I have dessert in excess of my calories to hit my goal. If I want to lose weight, I eat less dessert. If I want to maintain weight, I eat the same amount. If I want to gain weight, I'll add other calories to my other meals that have meat in them. So rather than just meat, I'll have meat and pasta or meat and rice, whatever.

1:49:44But training has been progressive overload on resistance training, meaning weights and machines and plate loaded machines for almost two decades. Is there anything else? I think you probably, my guess here is that you started out and then you tried all the things and it's like no let's just simplify it to these and these work yeah do you do anything around anything else that's strange like preventative health care people like oh yeah the mri scans all this type of stuff i don't maybe i will later but right now i don't i've um i focused i mean all the things that i just mentioned so like i did kettlebell only training i did barefoot training i did exclusively swim sprint training um i've done high intensity interval training i've done um like all strongman style training i've i was a competitive powerlifter for five years.

1:50:28And now people would probably consider me more of like a bodybuilder-esque in terms of training style and aesthetics. And so like I have done a lot of different styles of training. And when it comes to diet, I did the warrior diet. When you ate one big meal at night, I've done intermittent fasting. I've done alternate day fasting. I've done keto. I've done the opposite of keto. So like high carbs, super low fat, high protein. I've done zone. I've like, I have done them. And it was because in my first decade of fitness, you hop on all of these trains because part of it is like, you want to experiment, you want to learn, you want to see how you react.

1:51:04And part of it is because you believe the magic, right? There's something different, but there's a few fundamental truths and they all come down to physics, which is just like law of thermodynamics. Like there's a certain amount of energy that you consume. And if you have less than that, you will lose fat period. It will get taken from energy stores. Like, well, what about a starvation mode and things like that? Like there was a Minnesota a starvation study where they starved people for like months, no food. And the biggest decrement they saw in basal metabolic rate was 30%. And so that means that when you're truly starving, your BMR goes to 70%, which I mean is significant, but it's also not like the women that I used to have at my gym, like I think I'm in starvation mode.

1:51:43I was like, I think you just snack. I was like, if you want to see starvation mode, go to Africa. Like none of them have cellulite because they are starving. Like, you know, we use these words, but like in order to truly get that level of decrement and decrease in your, you know, BMR, uh, you have to really be restricting for a very long period of time. And most people don't even track what they eat. And so like, if you don't track what you eat, it's kind of like the guy with the opinion. Like, I don't, I don't care. Like you don't even have data. So, and the thing with any of these, these, you know, diets or at least approaches is you have a certain calorie intake that you maintain your body weight at.

1:52:21The thing that fudges this is that people are very bad at measuring what they take in, like what they eat. But that's still easier than measuring what your output is because you have non-exercise activity that really... So like if I'm bobbing my foot or I'm chewing more gum or I'm taking the stairs more, I'm cleaning the house, like those few hundred calories a day over a week or over a month add up a lot. And so usually what happens is when you get older, your metabolism doesn't necessarily decrease nearly as much as people's activity decreases. And so they think that their metabolism is really slow, but it's like when you were 20, you were in two rec leagues and you had to walk cross campus in college and you were walking three miles a day and you didn't even notice it, right?

1:53:03With a backpack on that was like 25 pounds, right? Like it was rocking now, but like you just had a backpack as you were a student. And so it's just like we have these perspective shifts that have to happen, but there's a few things that happen. Progressive overload, meaning you lift more weight over time, works. That builds muscle, right? Protein increase builds and maintains muscle. Hormones build and maintain muscle. Calorie surpluses help maintain anabolic states. Calorie deficits, you lose tissue. You go into catabolic states, period. That's it. The rest of it is preference. Yeah. Look, I think this all wraps well together because it's the reason I bring this up to is because you've simplified it.

1:53:42And just like business, it's comes down to people, right? A lot of blocking and tackling. Same thing with this, the health stuff too. It's like, we're, there's a lot of distractions. Oh, there's this new diet over here. Oh, should we like cold plunge or should we like infrared sauna? Like, should we, I don't know, blue light blocking, whatever. Right. But it just comes down to the simple stuff. And I talk about this just for context. So this is for you guys, you can add it back in. is this is purely from the perspective of aesthetics. If you want to maintain a certain amount of body mass with a certain percentage of fat and a certain percentage of muscle, those are the only things that matter.

1:54:15The other stuff, it gets into magic and all the stuff that I don't partake in. And what's interesting is like, I don't talk about fitness much. And it's mostly because I am so, I mean, it's been 20 years. So like I've been knowing about fitness for longer than I've known about business for a context. And so I also did that professionally for a very long time. And a lot of like the YouTube world and like the influencer world or people that follow me don't know. Like they see that I'm quote jacked. But like I wrote the plans that 4 ,000 gyms use. Like you've probably used my stuff. And so, you know, people are like, oh, this guy has such great thinking.

1:54:55But then if I make a comment about food, then everyone feels entitled to an opinion because they have a body. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. So they, but like they, how many people have you helped change like their physiques? Probably not many. Um, and you probably can't even change your own. So like, it's kind of like in, in, in business where like no one wealthier than you will take shots at you. Yeah. No guy who's ever been more jacked than me has ever said anything negative to me about fitness stuff. It's only like laptop warriors and whatnot. And so like, again, my, my level of care is so much more passionate about helping people make money to like sustain their families and whatnot um and it's i don't have a lot of passion anymore around fitness maybe it's been two decades and maybe that's why um but yeah to me it's the the equation's been simplified and the thing is is that business i remember this there was a moment when i stopped reading t nation and mind you that's not where i got my source of content but i'm just saying t nation it was like back in i mean back in the like the early 2000s okay uh there's like all these articles for like lifting and nutrition and stuff.

1:55:54And I remember there was a day when I was like, I think I get it. Like I, I, human bodies haven't changed. And so I, I have a sufficient amount of knowledge to do all the things that I need to do and to help other people do what they need to do. And so my consumption of new stuff dropped dramatically because everything at this point is such a small increment in terms of changes in physique and performance and all that stuff that like sleeping well, eating your protein and working out are still so big compared to everything else that it just doesn't matter. And the reason I think I got into business and I've stayed, and I think I will continue to be interested in business, whereas my love of fitness started to wane is because business changes all the time.

1:56:36So like bodies haven't changed, but business and the market changes all the time. And I think that's why I love it. Best game ever. All right. Last question for you. Your coach is 80-year-old Alex, if I'm not mistaken. What are some things that 80-year-old Alex has told you recently? Sometimes you have to give time time. I mean, most of the themes of my 85 year old self, like if there was like a handful of themes that our conversations lead toward, um, one is like, this doesn't matter. Like it's going to work out either way. And since me, it's like basically just zoom out. So that's probably one.

1:57:13Um, a second theme is just around patience, which is like, I think you just need to stay busy. I don't think you need to do anything about this so that's the second one i think um redefining problems is not problems like my my undefeated heavyweight champion of the world solution is decide something isn't a problem okay i like that like like how do i solve this it's like what if i just decided it wasn't a problem to begin with and kept living my life and that a lot of times when you're 85 i feel like you have more of that perspective it's like that's just not i'm just not i'm gonna decide that's not a problem yeah no fucks given right um and so i would say those are three um but dude patience is by far the biggest one um and and and i'll give the fourth um embracing uncertainty because i and many of us want a guarantee from a world that doesn't give them it's like i want to know that this is going to work which is such a fallacious thought at the onset because if i actually knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that something would happen i would lose all interest because then it would be boring yeah it's like having the cheat codes and playing a video game It's good for like five seconds.

1:58:18And then you realize it's not a challenge at all. And so like I have this desire that if it actually were met would be the ultimate undoing of my desire. So it's just a complete smoke screen that I've made up in my head. And so my 85 year old self just, I would say like most of the time it just points. It doesn't have to say anything. He's just like, you know, like, but it's crazy though, how powerful it is because I don't have like, if I had a therapist or a coach or something, I'd have to spend 90 % of my time trying to give context to the problem that I know the answer to. And I'm just not doing it.

1:58:49Like we give significantly better advice to other people than we adhere to ourselves. That's the paradox you're talking about. Solomon's paradox. Yeah. And so if we can harness our own ability to give better advice with the absolute context that we have on our situation and the aligned incentives that we have that no one else can have as aligned incentives for us as we are, then I think it unlocks another level of quote coaching that's been tremendously helpful for me. And I would say that I haven't, like my sessions with Solomon, even though it's me, but I just call it Solomon, um, in my head.

1:59:19Um, sometimes they're really long and sometimes they're short because sometimes like things are working and I'm good. And so I kind of see it as like the, uh, the therapist or the performance coach that is on demand. Like if I need him, he's there and I have a blocked hour in my calendar every Monday. It's the first thing I do every Monday, um, is have my time with Solomon, but it's rare that I take the full hour. It's usually between five minutes and 30 minutes is usually what. Are you sitting around, you walk in? Oh, no, I'm at my computer. So I actually do a chat back and forth and I go from him to me, him to me, him to me.

1:59:52And I type out all the responses because I think even typing out what my question is, you even like many problems, if you can properly ask the right question, that's 90 % of the solution is asking the right question or precisely stating the problem you're trying to solve. And so that process helps me solve most of the issues that come up that aren't really issues to begin with. I love it. Well, I know we can go on forever, but we're going to end it right here. So what is the best way for people to find the book? And I mean, just Google Alex and Mosey, right? How do you find the book? Yeah, you can go to, I mean, you can go to Amazon, but if you want to go to acquisition.com forward slash leads, and we also have training and courses and other materials that are all free, no opt-in on the site at acquisition.com.

2:00:36And if you are a company and you have an EBIT of a million, two million, five million, eight million, hit us up. We're always looking for great founders who are looking for growth partners because that's what our day job is. All right. I love it. Alex, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks for having me.

2:00:55For more self - electronics, you actually go along with Unless。 Thank you very much.