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Welcome to another episode of Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu! Today, we are thrilled to have entrepreneurial powerhouse Alex Hormozi returning to the show. Get ready for an insightful conversation packed with actionable wisdom on navigating the complex landscape of modern business.
In this episode, Alex and Tom dive deep into the concept of the Pendulum Effect, exploring the societal shift towards and away from extreme political correctness. Alex shares his bold perspective on work ethic, advocating for a rigorous work schedule to achieve success, especially for young men. They also unpack the realities of entrepreneurship and resilience, with Alex offering a realistic view of what it takes to build and sustain a successful business, likened to the enduring effort required in a marathon.
We’ll hear Alex’s take on developing a fallback Plan B that allows entrepreneurs the freedom to pursue their dreams without succumbing to past failures. Our conversation covers the fundamental importance of focusing on one major project to ensure business success and scalability, drawing on Alex’s own experiences and lessons from industry giants like Elon Musk.
Alex will discuss the critical role of resilience and continuous improvement in achieving long-term success, and how recognizing and employing top-tier talent can transform a business. Plus, we delve into the strategic implications of AI in business, problem-solving philosophies, and navigating personal expectations against societal norms.
Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or just looking to sharpen your business acumen, this episode is a treasure trove of practical advice and motivational insights. Join us as we explore the mindset shifts and strategic decisions that have defined Alex’s journey—and could redefine yours.
So tune in, get inspired, and as always, be legendary.
00:00 Why Most Smart People Are Poor
14:37 12-week plans vs long-term forecasting
30:28 Benefits of a solution-oriented mindset
35:14 Elon Musk As an Entrepreneur
51:26 Focus on solving problems as opportunities, leading to better outcomes.
56:09 How To Win in A World Where Other People Are Better
01:07:44 The importance of A Team
01:23:18 AI in Your Business
01:34:00 Focus on one idea at a time; prioritize the one you believe in most.
01:37:56 Growth is governed by the theory of constraints
01:46:24 Metrics are crucial for assessing recruiting roles
01:57:45 Create a company for ambitious people
Pendulum Effect, extreme political correctness, societal shift, balanced reality, work ethic for young men, 12-hour workday, entrepreneurship realities, realistic expectations, resilience, Plan B strategy, personal dreams vs. parental expectations, reality focus, focusing on one project, diversifying too early, trade-offs in life, building dreams in 20s, pattern recognition, scaling businesses, experience in entrepreneurship, learning from past ventures, tax strategies, uncontrollable circumstances, business growth, solving problems, strategic prioritization, one big thing strategy, declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, wealth creation, business culture, exceptional talent acquisition
2025-01-14 14:01:01
Transcript
Alex Hormozy, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be here. Truly a pleasure.
Mutual. Let me ask, why do smart people stay poor? They don’t do the things that makes people rich. And I think they probably convince themselves that they’re smarter than they are.
And so if you were smart, then you would be rich. And so then it follows that there’s probably a series of traits of behavior that you don’t do, either because you think you’re above them, or you don’t know about them. So either it’s a declarative knowledge deficit, meaning you don’t know about the thing, which has nothing to do with the intelligence.
Like if somebody eats an apple, sorry, a banana, and they’re from a different country, and they just eat it through the skin, it doesn’t mean that they’re stupid. It means they’re ignorant, which is very different. That’s a declarative deficit. Then there’s procedural deficits, which is knowing how to.
And I think one of the big difficulties with smart people is they have tremendous amounts of declarative knowledge and very little procedural knowledge. And so it’s like saying you read a book on how to do a private equity deal, and you know everything that has to happen, but you’ve never done a private equity deal.
It’s probably unlikely that you know how to do a private equity deal. And so delineating those things has been helpful for me. And since the procedural knowledge has significantly more utility on a daily basis from a money-making perspective, I have reduced, or at least this is transiting to me, but I have reduced the amount of time that I spend on declarative knowledge.
And I try to get to the procedural part of it as fast as I possibly can, because I know that I’ll learn significantly more by failing and doing it than reading 100 books on sales versus doing 100 phone calls. You’ll learn a lot more in the first 100 calls. Yeah, it’s interesting.
This to me is, I’m always trying to get entrepreneurs to one, think from first principles, which most people don’t even know what that means, so you start by defining it. But this feels like that, getting to understand the essence of what it is so that you understand it the way that somebody understands a combustion engine.
So you can get in and be like, well, I know what has to happen for this car to go. And if I know what has to happen, you can break it, you can pull it.
But apart and I’ll be able to put it back together because I actually understand how this works So, how does wealth creation work? You have to have a mechanism for letting people know about your stuff and So that can happen on a variety of channels that typically happens either one-on-one or one-to-many And so one-on-one would be you knock on doors you reach out to people via DM you send emails you send direct mail you You make phone calls you send text messages any of those are one-on-one Outreach is one way of letting people know you could do one-to-many To people who already know who you are, which is basically today’s equivalent of a billboard, which is social media You make posts you make content The third way would be that you run paid advertisements So on those same platforms you just pay to get the exposure rather than doing it by earning it through quality content and then the kind of like the door door door for Would be using those three methods to then get someone who already has The type of person that you want to advertise to and doing structuring some sort of deal with them But you’d still need to reach out to them one-on-one You’d have to make content to attract them or you have to run an ad to get to that person So these are the core things that someone must do To promote whatever they have because if we think about it from what must occur in order for a transaction to happen Well people have to know that you exist or that your product exists No one can buy something without knowing it exists.
And so we have to start with promotion The second component is that they have some sort of voluntary exchange and so That means you have goods and services that are exchanged for money And so I think the idea of like money being created really only happens with the government But for everybody else we exchange for it And so there are people all around us like one of my really fun exercises is looking at whatever room you’re in and Knowing that everything that was there.
There’s a business behind it So like the walls you have there’s there’s the person who manufactured the raw materials There’s a person who sourced the materials that the labor that went to installing it There’s an architect who designed it and then you look at this mic and you’re like, okay Well, there’s there’s this foam thing, which you probably got from a third party Then there’s the in the the mechanism is inside which is another business There’s the distributor that you bought this from like there’s all these pieces when people are like man
I don’t know what opportunities there are. I’m like, you can literally open your eyes and everything that you see has a business behind it. And so from the value component, for people who are, I’ll just tie this into people who are starting out. I recommend most people start with services because it requires no capital and you require time.
And when you start out, you use what you have. And so if you have no money and you only have time, then you trade the time for money. And so either you’re gonna do something that other people don’t wanna do, that they know how to do. So like taking someone’s trash out, doing lawn care, washing things, like cleaning.
Those are all things that people know how to do but don’t want. Then the second level of that is doing things that people don’t wanna do or know how to do. And obviously that’s knowledge work, which you get the amount that you can get paid is predicated on the value that whatever that skill deficiency is to the other person.
And so I think about it like that. The person has to know you exist. So you have to do one of those advertising activities I referenced. And then the thing that you give them is you’re going to give them some amount of time back, either the time to learn the skill or the time to do the skill.
And then once that exchange is made, then both people say thank you because they didn’t wanna do the work and you wanted the money. And so everyone wins. And then around and around we go. Okay, so the around and around we go.
You and I both know that even though you just laid out a lot of things that are very, very true, do you think about the gap as to why the vast majority of humanity will not be able to translate that into actual money? Um, I think a lot of people spend a lot of time on everything that isn’t revenue generating.
And so everything that’s not what we just outlined, like if you’re not reaching out to people one-on-one, you’re not posting content or you’re not running ads or getting in touch with someone who already has an audience of the people you wanna reach, if you’re not doing that right now, then nothing else you do matters.
It doesn’t matter. You have to have something to sell, which, like I said, you can start with your time. Very easy. And my recommendation is to go and get money from a stranger.
It doesn’t matter.
What you sell just get a dollar from a stranger to actually walk through the process. That’s the procedural knowledge Like it’s one thing. Okay. Oh, shoot How do I take a credit card?
Oh, that’s a whole nother thing. Oh, I have to get a payment process Oh to get a payment process. I need a bank account. Oh to get a bank count.
I need lc, right? So like you walked in you’re like, oh, here we go Now now I can get my first dollar across once you get the first dollar across the second one comes very fast and so, um, why don’t people Uh, why don’t people do the stuff that it takes to make money?
Because they’re doing everything else that doesn’t make money I’ve got so I am now teaching a business scaling course. Oh cool. Yes. It actually is a lot of fun Uh, where can people find it?
Oh sure. It’s so funny because the answer of course is school your company But I promise we did not talk about that set that up. Uh, but yeah on school and the It’s got me asking a lot like okay I really want these people to be successful for no other reason than to be a glowing testimonial And so what’s going to be the place that they fall down?
um, there is a concept in sailing that I am beginning to think other than intellect which Unfortunately matters i’m beginning to think is like the thing it’s called velocity made good vmg And the whole idea is that you can have a lot of wind But if your sails aren’t angled in the right direction you could be moving fast But not going in the direction that you want to go You could be not moving at all because your sails just aren’t able to capture it um, or you could actually be moving fast in the direction that you want to go and That to me like pulling that apart as to what are the things that people don’t understand What are like if we were going to make angling the sails not a metaphor but like a reality um What is it like as somebody who’s now scaled a business?
Tremendously, what is it in all of those things that allows you to capture the post?
of your intellect to understand that making, just making content doesn’t do it. The content has to be aimed in a direction. It has to have a goal in mind. How would you teach entrepreneurs how to quote unquote angle the sales?
So the process that I follow is common factors analysis for basically a retroactive look back window. Now that sounds like a whole bunch of fancy words, but basically I look back at stuff I did and see what worked better than other stuff. And then I say, okay, well the top 10%, what things did they have in common?
And then the bottom 10% or the bottom half, what things did those lack compared to the top 10%? Then I try and do a next batch of activities, whether it’s phone calls, whether it’s content, whether it’s product iterations, that then do more of the thing that worked. And so that process has been, I think the fastest feedback loop that I’ve had.
So rather than trying to find a specific course around something super niche, which it gets really difficult the more niche it is, I rely on the universe for feedback, which is like we have to try 100 repetitions of whatever the thing is, look at the top 10 or 20%, look at the common factors, and then do a whole next batch of 100 with those common factors.
If performance goes up, then the variables that we isolated were the correct ones. And then within that next batch, there will be another top 10 or 20% that by variation of repetition, which will always happen, there will be other mutations like in DNA that occurred in that subset that I can then replicate again.
And that process is how I got good at sales, it’s how I started making content. But I think the first piece that people stop, that they prevent themselves from doing is doing the 100 repetitions because they think that they’re, it’s the fallacy of the perfect pick. Like they’re going to get it all right so that they don’t have to fail the first time.
One of my favorite scenes in The Matrix is when Neo tries to jump across both buildings and then he.
balls and cipher. Everyone’s like, What does it mean? And he’s like, everybody falls the first time. So even the one falls the first time, obviously wasn’t the one that whatever we can get into that.
But I just like that as a failure as an assumption, rather than something to avoid. Like Elon was able to get the rockets up because he failed five times faster than people were able to do one. So he got five failed rockets out before he got a sixth.
And everybody was looking at the five failures. But he’s like, well, look at how much further we got with each one. And I think that most. So one of the difficulties with skill is that masters have more milestones along the way.
And so they’re able to mark progress with more nuance, a beginner only sees kind of a binary outcome between it worked or it didn’t work. But for me, if I’m going to go into a new advertising channel, for example, if I want to say I want to start doing cold outbound, well, actually have a great story about this.
When we started doing cold outbound for gym launch, my executive team, so you know, not like experienced people about three or four months in, basically did like an intervention with me. And they said, you’re putting all of your time and attention to this. We think this is a shiny object using my words against me, right?
This is a woman in the red dress. And we think you should stop and let’s double down on what works, which for us at the time was paid ads and some content. And the thing is, is that they were too far away to know the progress we were making.
And so they just saw that we basically hadn’t made any sales. We need one sale in like three months. But I knew that the first problem we had is we didn’t know where to get the data from. Where do we get these lists from?
So then we finally got the list and we’re like, okay, but no one’s picking out we have to enrich the data. Okay, then we reach the data, then no one is still picking up. So then we’re like, Oh, well, we have to find out how to get people to pick up.
So we have to do local call wrapping on our phone. So that increases the pickup frequency. So then people start picking up, but then no one wanted to book a call because our script was off. So we fixed the hook.
And then people would listen to us, but they didn’t like the offers and we fixed the offer, then people would came to the second call, but then they weren’t showing up to the second call. And then we’re like, okay, we have to create a follow up sequence. Now, at this point, they’re like, hey, you need to get you need to stop.
It was just we have a hundred steps that we have to take and we’re 33% of the way there But if you’re a beginner, you don’t know you’re 33% of the way there And so I think it’s one of the difficult things as a beginner is that there is there is a leap of faith Like when you do your first week at the gym, you’re not going to get results But it doesn’t mean that working out is wrong It just means you’re measuring on the wrong time horizon And I think one of the things that has thrown a ton of beginners off is the understanding of volatility and volume So basically when you when you have a new business or a new endeavor What appears inconsistent or volatile is typically a function of doing too little Volume and so it’s like if I it’s like yeah, you know one sale comes in every you know a couple weeks It’s I’m still you know, but if we look at the activities that generate that sale It’s like you might have done a hundred reach-outs over 30 days and then one of them becomes a sale So it appears volatile But really it’s just you got 1% and you’re doing far too little and so if we did a hundred a day Then all of a sudden we might make one sale a day and all of a sudden it seemed very consistent and so the volatility is only a function of two or of Insufficient volume and so I think that that Misconception is why many people who start out fail quickly or choose not to start Because they are measuring their feedback loop on too short of a time horizon All right.
So if 90% of businesses fail outright sure 96% Failed to break a million and only 4% go over that What is it that those have in common the ones that make it? Do they share something in common? And if so, what? Well, I think to cross a million you need a consistent acquisition process.
I think that’s about a customer acquisition. Yeah, sorry Yeah customer acquisition process like in the beginning you have to do something period zero to one you have to do something and then you have to make your first dollar and then Your advertising is inconsistent because you’re inconsistent when you once you become Consistent than your sales becoming consistent because you don’t have a process so then you have to deal dial in the sales process
So basically, advertising and sales have to become a consistent process with predictive metrics. We know that if we do 100 primary actions, whether that’s 100 posts, $100 in ad spend, 100 reach outs, that that will generate this many leads, which generates this many calls, which generates this many sales. And it could be on e-commerce, or it could be in a service environment like I’m describing with calls.
But fundamentally, you just have to get to that equation. And once you get there, then it’s just inputs and outputs. And then you’re just pouring as much in and then figuring out what the constraints are from you putting more in. At least that’s how I think about it.
Do you force yourself to predict the outcome of initiative before you do it? Not as much as I used to, to be really honest with you. This is actually a huge change for me in terms of how we grow our portfolio now. I’m actually really curious what you think on this.
But I heard Jensen Huang say it, and so I feel like a little bit better. But basically, they did away with all long term planning. And I always felt like long term planning, I think it’s a good thing. Because when I got a year later, I was like, half these things that we were talking about a year ago, the variables of the environment, talent, many of the major movers have changed what the priorities are in the business.
And so I focus almost exclusively now on what are we going to do in the next 12 weeks? Now, we obviously have long term objectives, but I don’t want to plan out forecasts and basically obsess and get everything down to the decimal when I can’t even estimate the big forces that are going to be at play.
That is a good thing. And that’s our number one priority. Then great, then I can reverse that. But I’m reversing it only into the present for the next 12 weeks because things will change.
Very interesting. So I’m thinking a slightly different angle. So here’s what I always tell entrepreneurs to do. So you describe a very similar thing to the way that I try to go about scaling, which I call the physics of progress.
So to me, progress has a nature. There’s just a way that it works. So you try a thing, and it either works or it doesn’t. But to know if it worked, you had to say, this is where I’m trying to end up.
Yeah. This is what I think is.
my obstacle, this is the thing I think I need to do to overcome my obstacle, now I’m gonna do that, but what I find is entrepreneurs will lie to themselves when they get the result, and they’ll be like, yeah, that’s roughly what I expected. Now the problem is that that will break their ability to do things as a thought exercise, and so now they have to actually test everything, not realizing they don’t know how to predict the outcome.
So what I tell them to do is look, and this is what I do myself, I’m gonna do this thing, whether it’s build a piece of content and put it out, whatever, and I think this is gonna get a million views, 1.5, whatever, so when it does 75,000 views, I’m like, whoa, there is something I did not understand, and so when it comes to content, I’ll even predict at the idea level, and I, okay, this is what I think it’s gonna get, then we’ll execute, and I’ll say, actually, now seeing the execution, I don’t think it’s quite as good, and so now I think it’s gonna be this, and then you put it out, and that way, if you can really come to understand why something works or doesn’t work, now you’ve got a better shot, but because I know, I’m prone to lie to myself, that yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s roughly what I was expecting, because people want to look cool, but you’re saying in that scenario, you guys just sort of art by the pound, you get a lot more things out.
Are you looking to build intuition, or? Yeah, I mean, I think, I’m so aligned with what you said, you know, what are the causal factors? And I mean, the whole common factors analysis concept is basically trying to do that, like how can we identify, like we’re gonna do everything with these variables in addition to the last time, and if those variables don’t meaningfully change, then they are not the correct variables, but it’s so funny you said that, because I thought you were gonna go in a different direction, so I’ve been putting together this $100 million scaling roadmap, it’s probably the biggest project that I’ve done in a long time, it actually releases on Black Friday, it’s free, it’s free for everybody.
I’m so shocked, Alex Hormozy, with the free stuff. But the first thing I spent a long time on was like, is there a micro framework that fits into this larger framework, which is like, how does anything scale?
And then I try to make an acronym out of it, and I think I have a decent one. So S is start. You got to start. You have to do something.
C is compound. You have to do more. So first you start, then you do more. A is augment.
So then you do better. So it’s like, okay, I’ve done a lot. That’s the common factors part. So I’m going to try and do something better.
L is leverage. So how can I get it to be consistent? How can I do, how can I automate it? Both sides of that.
And then E is expand. You do it again. So that’s the loop. So the scaling loop exists on content at all levels, organizational structure, because that one, first we start, then we do more, then we do better, then we try and make it consistent and automate it, and then we expand to the next thing.
That works for markets. It works all the way across. So that fundamental unit became how I thought through scaling all eight departments, which is what I divide everything into. So it was customer service, product, sales, marketing, IT, HR, recruiting, and finance.
I don’t put legal in there, because I didn’t think it was, most people outsource their legal anyways for a while. And so those are the eight functions that I had of the business, going from zero to 500 people headcount. I did zero to 100 million, because no one would know what zero to 500 people would be.
But most businesses at 500 headcount are usually over 100 million. And it was easier to draw parallels on organizational structure rather than by revenue, because like a software company like Skool can do $100 million with 25 people, whereas a restaurant might do $1 million with 25 people. And so doing it by revenue felt too, it wouldn’t be valid or useful.
And so instead, I went by headcount, which had far more similarities. And so in thinking about that scaling, I broke it into first, there was functions, like what must occur in order for us to move to the next level. And then you have the people who do those functions.
And then the third element is the operations that connects the people to the functions. And so that would be like training, meeting cadence, communication structures. That’s all the operation side. And then the people is what is the hierarchical?
How does the hierarchy look? Who do you need to hire? At what point?
And so that’s basically the three sides of the pyramid in terms of thinking about scale. The scaling roadmap that I have, that I came out as just the function spark because it was already a monster. Basically it’s like an hour plus long video going through each of the functions of each of the departments at each level.
And then I vetted it with a few of my friends who have multi-billion dollar companies and they’re like, dude, this is so accurate, it’s freaky. And so I was like, I felt really good about that. And they helped me with a couple of them. Like I would raise it like this and maybe this is, you know, move this instead of here.
But that micro framework of, we have to start, then we have to do more, then we have to do better, then we have to automate it or create some sort of leverage around it. And then we expand to the next thing was the micro concept that I then applied across all departments to tease out the functions that happen at each level.
Sorry, that’s a long one to say. Makes a lot of sense. Now, so again, I’m always trying to figure out where are people gonna fall down because you can give this stuff to people and they’re still going to struggle. So you said something earlier that is profoundly insightful that I wanna know if you have a method for that or if you just have a brain for it.
But you said, we need to get local call wrapping as people are more likely to pick up a local number. So you’re sitting in a room, you’re not getting the results that you want and you start thinking to yourself, what is stopping this from happening? Does it just bubble up into your conscious mind or do you have a method?
So I would think, so if I were to have to solve this problem out loud in front of everyone, I would think, okay, what we’re doing is not working. What is it that increases the likelihood that I pick up my phone when a phone number calls? If I know the person and like them, that would be the highest likelihood person that I’d pick up.
Okay, so Layla, that’s the highest likelihood pickup. The second highest likely would be somebody that I know. So their number is saved. Okay, got it.
Now, what numbers that I don’t know would I be more likely to pick up the numbers, other numbers that I don’t know? Well, a local number that would either be local from my hometown or local to my regional area. Those would be the two categories that I would probably pick.
Now the call wrapping feature that we were able to do could only do one of those because it didn’t know where they were But it did know what what area code they had so we could call from that But if there was another software for example that could do both and that would have been even cooler But that’s how I would reason through it.
And then obviously the the lowest probability would be like a four-digit number That’s calling from you know, Zimbabwe or a private call or something like that I probably wouldn’t pick up and so I just walk through it from from that perspective that I probably also ask other people What are the calls that you’d be most likely to pick up?
What are the call you know then and walk through it and then I’ll try and tease it out that way if I had Let me tell you about an AI tool that is changing how content creators work. If you’re creating content, you know how Time-consuming it is to find the perfect moments in your long form videos clip anything by opus clip However is designed to solve that problem clip anything uses every element in your video people actions emotions themes Everything just tell it what you’re looking for Like find all the motivational moments or clip the part about financial advice at impact theory We’ve integrated it into our workflow and it’s making a difference whether you’re running a podcast creating reaction videos or making non talking content like ASMR clip anything can help streamline your workflow It’s like having a social media team in your pocket letting you maximize your contents reach without hiring expensive video editors Save yourself hours of editing time go to opus dot pro Slash clip anything to try it out for yourself again.
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So that is one of my favorite things to do is to go to a conference, stand up on stage with a microphone and say, okay, ask me your hardest question. I have nowhere to go, there’s nowhere for me to hide. What is that biggest problem that you have in your business?
I’ve had people ask me stuff like, I am a farmer in South America and I’m going up against the cartel, what do I do? I mean, like really crazy stuff. But if you can do what you just did in a formal fashion, which I’ll round to thinking from first principles, like if you just start, so I’ll tell entrepreneurs, you need to start at literal physics.
Like what do we know about physics? Start from there. So this was the thing at Quest where we go to make the bar, everyone says the bar can’t be made and we’re like, hold on, this does not violate the laws of physics. You then realize the thing that’s actually stopping us is that for the last 70 years, corn has been subsidized by the government so everybody uses high fructose corn syrup.
So all the equipment that’s being engineered is being engineered thinking you’re going to use high fructose corn syrup, which has a certain viscosity. And so now you go, oh, wait a second. So all we’d have to do is engineer our own equipment. Got it.
Now maybe we’re not willing to do it, but at least now I know what that sequence going back to a combustion engine, if you understand how the engine works, you can walk through and be like, it’s broken right there. And now you can go, okay, how would I fix that?
What is the level of physics that’s gonna carry across? Now, what you did, which is the shortcut that most people will take is, look, I’m trying to sell.
thing to a guy. And so now I’m just leaping to the physics of the human mind. So what do I know to be true about people? And the way that you just walked through that, it’s so brilliant.
How do you get people to do that? Like, do you have magic words? Do you have a training thing that you do for people that come on? So first off, I think it’s a practice.
I think it’s a skill. I think you practice doing it over and over and over again and you get better at doing it. But I would say the thing that I try to practice by modeling that other people can model is thinking about things only in the observable universe.
And so eliminating a lot of the fanfare of motivation, energy, frequency, manifestation, all of these things, I see all of those as noises that we make with our faces that may or may not increase the likelihood that we take certain actions. Those actions have either a higher or low correlate or are higher or low correlates for the outcome that we want.
And so in trying to break apart a system or a department that’s not working, I think about a lot in terms of approximations. What increases or decreases the likelihood that what we want to have happen happens? And that creates a really easy razor. Black and white, does this increase the likelihood?
So if our team is incentivized on performance, we’ll have a higher likelihood that they do the stuff that performs. If they’re incentivized on hierarchy, that increases the likelihood that they will perform in terms of hierarchy and politics. So it’s like, OK, well, then I can bet then I should do that.
Then we have to get into the execution of it. But just from an ideological perspective, getting those what would make it more likely to occur has been my first razor for this. And then in terms of the creative problem solving, which I love that you just went through with the bar thing, there was an implied question that you asked, the two most frequently asked questions are the one I just said, which is what?
Does this increase or decrease the likelihood?
And the second is what would it take? And I love that question because it it it presumes or it assumes success Or it assumes reality that we can make a bar that would do that. Okay, then what would it take for that to happen? Well, I guess we’d have to like have our own facilities Okay, well, we’d have to have our own machine like we’d have to have a different supplier that what’s okay great Now that we know what that is Do we have the resources today or do we need to use resourcefulness?
it’s one of the two either we have the resources or we have to go get them and Is the trade-off for though for the outcome worth? Assembling those resources and what I found and this is really fun stuff This is like probably the most fun thing that I do in my life, which is Asking the question of like, okay What would it take what else would have to be true for impact theory to get ten times the views in 12 months?
It’s not physically impossible. There’s no reason for it to be like somebody else’s there’s another youtuber right now who’s gonna do it this year So What would it take for us to get that now that might mean we’d have to we’d have to get the smartest people Okay.
Well, what does it take to get the smartest people? Well, probably more money or maybe some chunk of the upside and maybe I have like and I might not get that guy But there’s probably ten of those guys or 20 of those guys And if I go to all of them, is it reasonable to believe that all 20 will turn me down?
Probably not. Okay, what offer would I need to give them to make it worth it for them? And that is what I give them worth less than what I get on the larger umbrella And if the answer is no, then we make the trade, but I think a lot of people think in terms of I’m here How do I how do I do more of what I’m doing rather than what would have to be true for this to be ten times?
bigger and Are the resources required to have that happen? Within my control and Oftentimes they are but it’s a move that’s off the board It’s not in the in the immediate do more and I’m all about do more do better like to be clear But every once in a while the order of magnitude changes to the business happen when you do something different and it’s usually
And to me that is strategy is that you’ve limited resources against unlimited potential moves There’s a million things you can do, but you only have this much time this much money this many people and so the best strategists in my opinion have the most visibility into the most potential moves and Allocate the asset or the resources to the thing that gets the highest return and I think the thought process of thinking What would it take for this reality to be true?
And then working backwards has been one of the most fruitful and productive thought processes that I go through from a strategic perspective Dude violent agreement. So Lisa and I call it no bullshit. What would it take? Okay, so of everything you’re trying to do in your business no bullshit What would it take again?
You might not be willing to do it totally you shift out a problem Mindset into solution oriented mindset. This is one of the things that I find the hardest to instill in people especially if just by nature their Problem finder where they can tell you all the reasons why something isn’t gonna work But Peter Thiel has a really cool way to frame this which is to ask How do I make my 10-year plan happen in six months?
Because he said everybody gets locked into this incremental ism Like how do I make this 10% better 30% better and he’s like you have to throw everything that you know away when you have to make something 10x or a hundred times better now all of a sudden you’re gonna be reaching for What I call a frame of reference that is so radically different than the way that you look at the world now And I’m always trying to get entrepreneurs to understand you are trapped inside of a frame of reference right now You don’t even realize it.
It’s shit that your parents said to you when you were a kid It’s the girl that you asked out and it didn’t go. Well, it’s the first sales calls you did and they failed It’s that business that went under it’s a thing of BC said to you one time in a meeting that just kicked you in the nuts yeah, and Once you understand, okay, wait a second I have to get out this is the box that people are telling me to think outside of and I have to find a way out of this and That Peter Thiel Angle of I have to make something that I thought would take me 10 years I have to make it happen in six months and I refuse to let myself believe that it’s impossible
Yeah. So now it’s like, like you said, what would have to be true? Yeah. I love that.
And the, for the, for the beginner who’s at zero. So we went, we went sky and now we’re going to go back down to dirt. The way that you’d frame that is what would I have to do that would make it unreasonable that I didn’t get a sale?
Like how much action would you be like, there’s no way there’s no possible way that if I ask a thousand people to buy something, one doesn’t buy it. It’s just, there’s no way. And so then you take that and he’s like, okay, well just in case I multiply by 10, if I ask 10,000 people, and the thing is is that 10,000 is not that hard to do.
Like you hear that, you’re like 10,000. But like right now, if you think about that, you’re like, well, I mean, yeah, obviously if I asked 10,000 people, okay. A hundred people a day, a hundred days, it’s a quarter. And if right now you’ve been stuck in years of not making that first dollar of years of wanting to start a business, then a quarter is nothing.
And so again, we have this, well, it’d be unreasonable that if you make, uh, you know, 10,000 asks of different people. And the thing is is that you’ll also have a feedback loop, which is that you’ll look at the first hundred. Well, which one’s got closer to saying yes.
Cause you didn’t get a yes yet. Maybe, maybe you do get a yes on the first one. It happens a lot. People are like, they commit mentally to doing 10,000.
And then by day four, they’re like, oh my God, I got a sale. But the idea, and maybe this is, maybe I should teach this differently. Cause maybe I should just say, do a hundred today, but I want people to stick with it. Uh, but when, when, when people do that, um, the feedback loop of which ones went well, which ones didn’t go well, what did I do in the beginning?
This one’s I made a joke at the beginning. Okay. I’m gonna make a joke on all of them next time. Great.
Now I made a joke. Okay. I got further in the sale with these guys. This guy even asked me about price.
Okay. What happened in that one? Okay. This one I asked him about what he was struggling with earlier on.
Okay. I’m gonna start asking that question too. So I’m gonna make my joke and I’m asking what he’s struggling with. And I’m gonna do that a hundred times.
And so that’s the, that’s the process of iteration that, that can get you to that first, that first w and then you just do it as many times as you can. Yeah. Iteration iteration.
Funny, people are so terrified of failure that they don’t even stop to think that, oh, if I could just not worry about embarrassing myself, then I could get in the game, throw the punches, look foolish, but I will get better and better. I’ve often joked, it’s definitely not a joke, but I’ve often said that part of what is my superpower is that I can be embarrassed longer than the next person.
And also, let me know what you think about this. I think you have, whatever, 8.4 billion chances to make a first impression. Probably more than that, because most people are gonna forget that they ever encountered you in the first place. And so getting out, ultimately, I think what people care about is can you, they have a screaming problem that you make go away, and they’ll forgive everything that they’ve encountered up to that point if you can.
And anybody, somebody that they respect told them no for real, this works. I think you bother, you have 100% chance of bothering somebody on earth by existing. And so if every action you take has somebody who will hate it, then it kind of cancels everything out, and you might as well just do whatever you’re gonna do anyways.
Very fair. Speaking of somebody that clearly winds people up, you mentioned Elon earlier. Yeah. What is it that makes him special?
I, I’m, I, so many things. You know, I mean, how many guys have $6 billion companies, and run all of them? So nuts. And have time to go all in on political campaigns in the meantime, notwithstanding what side or any of that, but just, just the, like, the big question that I feel like is the unspoken one right now, at least my, in the zeitgeist of the entrepreneur world, is how does he do it?
And I love the impossible nature of the feats that he takes on, literally pushing the realm of physics, obviously, with, with SpaceX, but he reinvented the car industry. He’s creating brain, you know, brain chips. He’s, he’s aggressively attacking AI. I’m sure you saw the, the Jensen Huang interview where he’s like, he did in 19 days, what everyone else takes three.
years to do. And so we’re talking multiple orders of magnitude in terms of improvement compared to the basics, because he starts at physics and works his way up. But he truly does it because he’s also like a physicist. He really knows it.
Like I get to pretend to sound that, you know, intellectually, you know, whatever, he really does. And so I, that that’s his his material achievements. But I think the thing that I admire the most is the bulls. The man is not a coward.
And I think that in thinking about him, I think about what are the things that he does? What are the things that I do? He is more successful than me? How can I do more of those actions that he does in order to approximate his success?
And so I think modeling is one of the most effective ways for people to learn. It’s how children learns how monkeys learn its cross species. And I think that he functions as a model for many people. Now, again, he only became political in the last three years.
So if you all of a sudden now hate him, like maybe question that if you didn’t hate him three years ago. But you cannot question that he is the best. Like right now, people say he’s the best entrepreneur of our generation. I think he’s the best entrepreneur of all time.
It seems like it to me. It’s it’s not even to me. It’s not even close. Like he’s Yeah, I mean, I could I could get on an Elon parade, but he has forced me to think significantly bigger about the problems that I want to take on, and who I want to become, and what to do with the small platform that I have, that best serves humanity.
And so that’s what, and I think at least from my point of view, that he really genuinely wants to do the best thing for humanity. So people disagree with that. I don’t, I don’t agree with them. I think if there was ever somebody who would have, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
He’s probably the guy you’d want. Agreed. Why balls? Why is that the thing that catches your eye?
He had the most to lose. Like literally financially, he had the most to lose. So I’m
But like he had the most to lose and went the most polar On the bets that he took and I think that again There’s a really great like master class in winning here that he did with this whole election thing Because if you think about how Elon tried to solve the election, he absolutely treated it like any business problem And so he looked at the whole map and then it was whoever wins, Pennsylvania wins the election and then zooming into Pennsylvania It’s there are 28 counties or whatever the amount of counties that we have to win And so then he flies to Pennsylvania Himself and then sends three weeks campaigning gives a million dollars away a day just to get people to register to vote Holds town halls every day.
So it’s like he finds the greatest point of leverage and then just bombs the hell out of it with unbelievable amounts of action in war at that one crucial spot and I see that as that that’s how he Violently solves problems. It’s like how do I like how do you build a rock?
How do you build a super supercomputer for AI in 19 days? like you looked at the whole supply chain and he found the point of greatest leverage and it was like we’re gonna dump as much Into this as we possibly can There are two options before people in life So option one is lay your balls out on the table like Elon did and you give people a chance to smash them with a Big fucking hammer, right or you can hide and you can go a long way hiding Why do you admire people that slap them up on the table?
I think courage is the quintessential trait that leads to everything else like You have to first have courage You have to have courage to quit your job. You have to have courage to get rejected you have to have courage to ask the girl out to shoot the shot to run the ad and If you don’t first have courage nothing else follows and so I see it as again.
It’s not are you courageous or not? It’s how courageous are you? It’s not a binary. And so I just like I think that based on my History I have courage because I have done things that have required it, but I think Elon
has more courage than I do. And so I see that as how can I move more in that direction if this is a trait that leads me into the better version of myself? How do you model yourself after somebody from afar? So we live in the age of the internet where people want to get to know somebody.
I’m old enough to look at the internet and be like, you do not understand what a glorious time this is to be alive. I mean, it’s unimaginably cool. So people will look at you and say, well, you can get access to anybody. But somebody like Elon, who you say is worthy of modeling, how would you run something that all of them now can do?
Yeah. So this actually comes down to, and I wasn’t sure if you were gonna press me on this, but like courage, for example. I try to, the single most effective decision that I’ve made about how to run my life across all functions has been only thinking about behavior and erasing everything else, because it’s the only thing you can observe.
And I’ll tell you a little micro story about this. So there was a guy on my team who, we were getting complaints that he was acting like a dick. And so he had talked to three of the leaders in my company who had had one-on-ones with him and said, hey man, stop being a dick.
He continued to be a dick. And so they said, Alex, can you talk to him? And I said, sure. And so when I sat down with him, I said, hey, to be clear, I don’t really care what you do.
I care about the fact that you have now taken my time. And so this is now the most costly thing that you could have done for me personally. And getting complaints from other people detracts on their ability to get things done within the company, which now also costs me.
And so my goal here is to decrease the likelihood that people complain about you. And so they keep saying that you’re acting like a dick. And so he’s like, yeah, I know, I’m working. And I was like, no, it’s fine.
I don’t care about whether.
I was like, internally, you can be a dick for as much as you want. I don’t care. I don’t care about intention What are the actions that you take that increase the likelihood they call you a dick? And so number one is that you interrupt them on meetings Number two is that you say that you know their department better than them and number whatever I had my list of things and I was like, so don’t do those four things and Do this instead so when this circumstance occurs do this action instead of this action And in the next week everyone’s like, oh my god It was like night and day and the thing is is that we give each other feedback all the time and this happens in marriages And whatever it’s like hey, don’t be a dick that doesn’t help people you have to tell them granularly what to do instead and Focusing on the observable.
And so this is my weaved in answer to how does someone model Elon? Well, it’s not like I need to get Elon’s mindset. It’s like no Look at what he does Just with your eyes. What does he do?
Because it’s the only thing that you can you can measure it was funny because when you said earlier about What I want to have happen What am I gonna do that? I think is gonna have to happen and so your planning process is identical to ours because it’s the scientific method Like mankind has figured this one out.
Like we know how to make a guess of like this what we want to have happen This is our hypothesis. We’re gonna test the hypothesis We say did we do the thing or not? And then and did what we think was going to happen happen four steps scientific method And so don’t try and reinvent that one.
Like that one works The same can be true But it has to be observable for the scientific method to occur It has to be something that you can see saying like I need to be more motivated well, if you want to be anything and this is this one trips, I think a lot of people out but Have you ever heard like be do have yes.
Okay. I think it’s complete crock of shit Mainly because if We want to have something we must do it. I think if people are okay, you have to do stuff to get stuff Okay, we’re good with that. But if we just have to do stuff in the having occurred
and we don’t need to talk about have. So now we just have be-do. All right, then how do we describe how someone is? We describe them by what they do.
I mean even in the olden days people used to be Carpenter, John Carpenter, John Butler, John Taylor, right? We literally described people’s beingness who they were by what they did. And so if you want to be a certain way then you need to act in accordance with the behaviors that people describe as that trait.
And so then I This is how I make sense of the world because the world doesn’t make a lot of sense to me in a lot of ways and so this is the only way that I’ve been able to navigate and this has given me so much peace because I actually think everyone’s wrong and It drove me nuts for a long time because I didn’t know how to do what I wanted to do I was like, I want I want to be I want people to think I’m smart I want people to to think I’m hard-working.
That doesn’t mean anything Be charismatic it means nothing. You can’t look at someone and say don’t be a dick be charismatic. No, how do I do that? So they give you beings rather than doings.
And so if you break it into the the corresponding chunks, which may be 20 or 30 Skill sets which are in under this condition you act in this way then all of a sudden when you do all 20 or 30 of those things then people describe you as charismatic and I find this interesting because We talk about culture or values in a business These values that we choose are Bundled terms that are meant to approximate many behaviors because there’s no like when you get into a business or a company You have to like figure out the culture But the culture is just the rules that govern reinforcement in a business, which is what are the things that are rewarded?
What are the things that are extinguished and what are the things that are punished? That’s it. And so the culture is just what are those rules? And so people have to basically either watch other people get punished rewarded or extinguished for the actions they take or they have it themselves But either way, it’s just a series of if this than that if this than that and it’s a
Monster list and so to speed up the process we create a couple of phrases that are meant to approximate the largest percentage of those list of rules as we can and so in thinking about my if you were to microcosm into a person What are the traits we want then we just have to get really granular and I think that this is how we solve problems in A business which is it’s convenient for communication to use these amorphous terms Confidence, you know loyalty like these things, but no one can be more loyal.
We have many activities that under conditions people describe in retrospect that this person has loyalty loyalty has occurred and so that single framework of thinking through the world has been the most viable thing that Has finally made the world make sense to me And so that’s in fundamentally how I model people or if I want to be more like this person be more like this person I try and do more of what they do What are the behaviors that you on does that you think are worthy for somebody of your level of already absurd success?
appreciated I Will one is he makes big concentrated bets and so that’s a behavior he does that I can observe that I’ve seen him make big bets He’s willing to give up equity in companies For lots of capital in order to make things happen faster. That’s something that he does he ties Every company he has to saving humanity.
That’s something that he does He this is me just parroting what he has said But his approach to solving systems is one that I have adopted which is question all requirements of the system Delete everything that doesn’t that doesn’t matter optimize the rest pull up Feedback loops and timelines and then automate and that process I’ve applied to sales.
I’ve applied to marketing content whatever and Those are things that he does and so there’s
I mean, a lot of things that Elon does, but those are just some of the ones off the top of my head that I think are the greatest impact, at least the ones that I’m specifically trying to model. Hmm. There’s one that really had a big impact on me, which is the idea.
So I had Mark Andreessen on the show. Shout out to my boy, Mark Andreessen. Yeah. I love that guy.
Love that guy. I’m such a fan. Mark, if you hear this. He is amazing.
And I asked him, what is it that you think makes Elon so efficient? And he said, making a long story short, he goes down to the level of engineering and he understands the engineering. And so he figures out what the bottleneck is and talks directly to the engineer that can make that problem go away and just makes that problem go away and eliminates the bureaucracy and all the BS of it all.
And I was like, that is utterly brilliant. And even though, except on the gaming side of impact theory, we’re not an engineering company, there still is that same concept. Like if you’ve got a problem, let’s say with a piece of content, hey, our retention at 60 seconds is not where we want it to be.
Okay. Well, who are the engineers that can solve that problem? Whether it’s the editor or me myself, you go and you solve the problem at that level. I think so many people get sucked into the vortex of, well, this is their boss and I need to go talk to them and oh, God, I want to get around the chain of command.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. We try to encourage people to kick through any chain of command. Go over, go under, go around, build coalitions.
I tell people literally, if you don’t like an answer I give you, by all means, build a coalition and come back and try to convince me. I know that I am blind to some answers. What was that? I said, but you’ll be wrong.
Oh, yeah, exactly. Save you some time, guys. Yeah, no, I’m so paranoid that there’s something I don’t see. And my primary analogy of what life is, truth exists inside of a black bag and we’re all wearing mittens.
We get to reach inside the black bag and be like, oh, I think it’s like this.
And then if I can get other smart friends to reach in and grope around and tell me what they think. So yeah, I’m on a campaign to get people to distrust themselves. People that drive me the most fucking crazy are people that are utterly convinced they’re right. And yeah, that really drives me nuts because one, if you’re right and you’re already right, it’s a pretty short detour to be like, hey, anybody see a problem that I don’t see?
And the number of times that someone will give you like an oblique angle to look at something like, oh my God, that is incredibly useful. I, first off, so wholeheartedly agree with the jumping into the dirt of like, how do I get as close to the problem as humanly possible?
The biggest mistakes I’ve made in my entrepreneurial career is, and I heard this from a mentor, I like this ism, but you have to know where the bodies are buried. So it’s like if I, and it’s been a great limits test for me to understand when I’m getting too far away from a department, when if I don’t know what’s going wrong in a department, because there’s always things going wrong.
If you don’t know what’s going wrong, you’re too far away. Interesting. And so that’s been a really good, like just an easy black or white test for me. Oh, I need to get a little closer to this.
Because they say, oh, marketing’s great. I’m like, there’s no way, there’s always things. Like there’s gotta be things that are wrong or missed opportunities. The, that’s actually a totally separate entrepreneur thing that I think you might dig a lot.
Layla taught me this this year, and it’s been a huge entrepreneurial unlock for me. And it was a huge source of anxiety for me for my life, which was, I did not differentiate the difference between missed opportunities and problems. And so basically, if we were not capitalizing on an opportunity, I treated it as though it was a problem with the same level of urgency and moving things out of the way.
But I would say that where I’m at right now, and maybe I’ll, you know, maybe I’ll be different in the future, but right now, the thing that has been rewarding me again and again, which has been counter to my nature, is looking at the problems in front of me as the opportunities.
Which is like fundamentally, like if we made these things exceptional, then maybe.
be the opportunity set that I’d have as a result of that would be fundamentally bigger different than the one that I’m having today. And whenever I in the past allocated resources away from solving problems towards missed opportunities, I ended up just scaling my problems. And so allowing the bigger by better path and really leaning into that and doing fewer things at a higher level has been I think the reason that in the last two years, Acquisition.com has done exceptionally well from a returns perspective on all of our portfolio and then obviously what we do on the content side and things like that.
That’s interesting. It makes a lot of sense to me. Two years ago, I had to put a policy, no new things because I’m king red dress. So that has been really advantageous.
And if I’m completely honest, we still do too many things. And so, yeah, narrowing your focus, knowing they have a finite amount of time and energy, especially now where so many companies have a face. It’s like every department or every company, depending on how you think about it, wants to use me, my face.
And so it just becomes a real time drain if I’m not careful. And so, yeah, really narrowing scope I think is super important. Yeah. It’s really wild.
I heard someone say this offhand remark and it hit me. He was like, Zuckerberg didn’t have a side hustle. And it’s so true. And you think about your face, right?
There’s one of the three divisions that you have underneath impact theory that has a higher return on your face than the other two. Now, it might be on different timelines or towards whatever mission you have, but one of them has a higher return. And the thing that makes me sick is thinking like, do I need to kill my other children?
Because if I believe what I say I believe, then I should act in accordance with that belief. I think about this every day.
And I think it’s, I had a mentor tell me, he was like, so I was like, this is what we’re going to do this year. And I was like, these are the, you know, the priorities and this is the biggest, the missed opportunities versus problems has been a massive improvement for me as an entrepreneur.
The other one was a deeper understanding of focus. And a lot of part of that was from Elon and people like, well, how does he run six companies? I’m like, he’s an alien, but for everyone else, like we need to run one, honestly. But basically, if you don’t know what the number one priority is, then how can you expect everyone on your team to know it?
And for years, I came in with five annual objectives. And I think then it went down to three. And now I’m just trying to say, if we just did one of these things, and it made the biggest difference. Yeah, I mean, I’ve done away with a lot of the long term planning components because of the dynamic nature of the environment.
And the other one is, if we’re not sure that this one thing is the one thing, then there’s another one thing that exists that will be clear. And if I can’t do it, then I’m not doing my job. Because if I’m chief strategist, which I define as prioritization, right, you prioritize limited against unlimited resources and limited options.
If I can’t clearly articulate that, then I am not doing my job. I’m not allocating the resources in the best way possible. And I say that everyone in the company is a strategist, it’s just that the resources that you have dominion over is smaller or narrower in scope.
And so it’s like, I have the entire portfolio of all the companies, of the different places that I could allocate whatever resources I have. And then if you’re the CEO of one of those companies, then you have everything in that company. If you’re the head of marketing, then you have the 10 people that are in marketing.
But every person has to ask the question, these are the resources I have, this is the objective I have, what is the best mix of this to get that thing? And is there one thing that I can do that would give me an outsized return compared to all of the other things?
And I mean, I think one of the
better decisions that I made in 2020, I think, was when we started getting into this investing thing, I was like, I don’t think I’m gonna beat Warren Buffett at picking, and I don’t know if I’d beat him at negotiating. I was like, so how do you win in a world where everyone’s better than you at most of that stuff?
And I was like, well, I’m pretty good at marketing. And I was like, but how do you tie that to like private equity? And so then it was like, well, if I had more companies walking towards me than anyone else, then I could be pretty terrible at picking and still do like, I could hit the broad side of a barn.
You know, like I could get the really easy ones right. And if I’m negotiating, but I’m negotiating only with people who wanna do a deal with me, then I don’t have to be the best negotiator. And if the companies are good and I’m okay at negotiating, but they’re good companies, then it’s not gonna matter whether I got 29% or 54%, because if the thing becomes 100 times bigger, who cares?
And so that one big thing was, you need to build a big business brand. And so if I just do that one thing, none of these other things matter. And so originally you’d think, okay, I have to get a broker network. You know what I mean?
I might have to raise capital. Like these, the normal activities that most people would do, but that was one of those kind of like high order of magnitude changes of like, what would have to be true for me to be able to out-compete people who are significantly smarter and better capitalized?
Yeah, the ability to see the problem from a different angle, man, is so clutch. That is definitely, you’re so good at systems. You’re so good at taking a view askew. This is why I really encourage people, anybody, if you can hear the sound of my voice right now, I’m telling you, and I’ll take the conversation somewhere political for a second.
Feel free to dodge as much as you need to. But my thing is the center is the destination. And what I mean by that is, I want the friction between the left and the right to help me find an actually intelligent path forward. I want people to help me see the problem from different angles.
I don’t.
Want to get a hard-on from hearing somebody say what I already believe which is like the big temptation and I get it dude It juices me up as much as it does anybody But i’m just like that that is not going to help me see the problem from a more clear perspective So I think of myself as i’m a terrible debater.
Let me be very clear I’m a deep thinker but a slow thinker so debate’s never going to be my thing But I want to know as if I were going to have to debate this I want to know the best arguments from both sides because if if I really Understand the smartest people who think that my angle is just idiotic.
Yeah, if I can say, okay, i’m gonna steal men’s argument I know their argument as well as they do and then here’s why I believe which my whole thing is predictive engine To getting you where you want to go, right? So I know my goal and then what has the most predictive validity cool So I want the collision of those ideas, but there is something In the human brain just the very architecture where people are so hungry to be told what they already think Yeah that that one makes me sad for them because If you can do what you just did which is go, okay I have a problem, but I need to see this from a totally different angle and then I need to formalize what I see If you can do that and then you’re willing to iterate iterate iterate and go actually I need to update this uh this breakdown that I have and while I haven’t seen you do it, I absolutely will bet my Entire net worth that if you found a better system, you would update your thinking you’d tell the world Yeah, i’m doing something differently now, which I think is Incredibly powerful.
Oh, thanks. Well, I think um, I think zuckerberg said that he’s a well He said he’s a truth teller But I think before you can be a truth teller you have to be a truth seeker And basis also talks about this which is that their goal is truth.
So when we’re making decisions, he said The goal shouldn’t be to compromise like if you say it’s 10 feet tall for the ceiling and I say it’s 11 feet tall We shouldn’t meet in the middle. We should find a way to know who’s right We should get a tape measure out and we should measure it.
Yes, and so um from that from that truth-seeking perspective
I probably like you, I just want to win. And winning doesn’t care whether it was your idea or not or whether it was your original idea. It just cares whether you did it. And like we recently, cause we talked about this before the show started, but like a quarter or two ago, we had a hypothesis, which was, hey, we’re going to make wider content because if, you know, Mr.
Beast, cause my theory was, okay, taking the natural extreme, Mr. Beast, everybody knows who Mr. Beast is, or many people do. And so he has by default all business owners in his audience or many business owners.
And so then I will go the, how do I go wider and general fame? And we then ran that pretty hard for about 16 weeks. And when I saw the data that came back, which was all of the vanity metrics, the views, the subscribers, things like that were all way up.
But the metrics that I cared about, which was how many people were going to acquisition.com, how many people were applying to be portfolio companies, how many people were buying books, all of those metrics were down. And I thought that was so, it was counter to my hypothesis.
But at that point I had to look at the team and be like, yeah, so that experiment was wrong and that’s on me, but we’re going to go what we called back to business. And so everything is going to be business related, which means that we all need to accept now that all of our views are going to be lower.
Our subscribers are going to be lower, but we’re going to attract business owners. And I had one anecdotal experience that really like cemented this. I had a guy who came out who’s a business owner who does probably 10 million bucks a year. And he was like, yeah, I listened to your podcast for years.
And I just, I guess I’m not really in your audience. I’m not your core audience anymore. And so I stopped listening to it probably the last six months. And I was like, you are 100% my core audience.
And that was like this kick to my stomach. But I mean, like you probably being right has zero value. Like why I just want, I want to win. And so that’s, I mean, my, my.
My little ism for my team is just win. And that’s all I care about, just win. And if it’s your idea, it’s my idea, it’s the janitor’s idea, test it, see if it works. And so that’s been really, really big for me.
How do you get people to buy into that? I find that I run into frames of reference, natural ego, evolutionarily placed algorithms. By default, most people just really wanna be right. Yeah, I don’t tolerate that much.
We let the data talk. We let the data decide, data’s king. And so, I mean, sure, we can try your way, do it your way, we’ll do it my way, and we’ll see which one works. And if yours works, I’m all in.
And so I think that’s like, there’s no arbiter of truth that’s arbitrary. Well, right, that just says, you are now right. We can know this. Now, I think where it gets difficult is on the ones that you don’t know, or let’s say you have limited shots on goal.
Which shot do we take? That’s where it gets harder. And then we try and assemble as much data to support an argument. But I think fundamentally, at the base level of entrepreneurship is you make approximated bets.
By the time you have complete information to make a decision, the opportunity is gone. Yeah, for sure. And so we have to, and this also goes for beginners, especially for beginners, is there’s this fallacy that you’re going to know everything before you can begin, and you simply cannot.
And so you have to get over the discomfort of the unknown, and you have to get comfortable making bets. Of saying, okay, is this reversible? Yes. And to what degree is it reversible?
Okay, if you lose all your money, is money replenishable? Yes. Okay. Now, how long will that take, given my skill set?
And that’ll give you a degree of how big of a bet this is. Now, is there a way that I can make an approximated bet? Can I get a directional bet on this that would, you know,
a much better clue as to whether this bigger bet that I’m gonna make afterwards is correct. And so I’ll try and make smaller bets that give me a little bit more information that are a little bit more reversible before making a big one. But like that was a big bet that we made with all the resources that I had and all my time for 16 weeks making all that.
Now you could make the argument, okay, we gained audience that’s not really core and then that might hurt my later videos. And I’ve got, you know, 50 more years. So, okay, we lost a quarter, big deal. Yeah, no, the willingness to try things I think is incredibly important.
You said earlier about courage. I wanna go back to that. So what is the most courageous thing you’ve done? I actually think it’s quitting my job.
I think that’s the hardest thing. Back in the early days. Yeah, actually weirdly I think about this a lot. Like what are the hardest things that I’ve done?
A hard thing number one was quitting my job. This is the decision of quitting my job and then leaving Baltimore. To give you everybody an idea, like you see me now, but I was so afraid of my father’s judgment and the few people that I knew from back home that I was gonna like quit my white collar job to go start a gym and be a personal trainer that I actually drove across the country and called them when I was already there.
Because I basically left in the dark of night, like no one knew. It basically was a stowaway to my own fear. And so I had to just, I just drove there and I called my dad, I think when I was going through Texas and Texas is like forever when you’re driving across it.
Yes, it is. And I called him and I was like, hey, I’m gonna do the gym thing. And he was like, yeah, no worries. He’s like, just come over.
We’ll talk about it at lunch. Cause he would always talk me off the ledge. He’d be like, hey, you did Vanderbilt. You did in three years.
You got the good consulting job. He’s like, you aced the GMAT. He’s like, you’re gonna go to Harvard. You’re gonna get your MBA there or Stanford.
You’ll pick one of them. He’s like, and you’re set. Like, you’re good. Just follow the plan.
And I was like, I, I don’t, I don’t want to do that. And, uh, when I was like, I’m already gone, then like the flip, you know, then the thing that I was most afraid of was that he was freaked out, which is exactly what he did. And the thing is, is that a lot of people would expect the story to be like, Oh, my dad understood.
And he was super supportive. Um, but he wasn’t, we didn’t talk for a few years after that, because I was the prodigal son and I did everything to his plan. And I was living the most successful version of his life, not mine. And it was one of those realizations where you’re like, I’m winning at a game that I didn’t design.
Yeah. And so I’m actually by default, the loser. And so, um, me quitting my job to then pursue fitness was the hardest thing I’ve done. The second hardest thing I’ve done was actually getting my gym to work.
Um, because I didn’t, I, I had so little understanding of how anything worked. I, I had $50,000 saved up, uh, when I was 23, um, from the consulting job I lived on basically nothing and almost banked all my pay. And I basically bet it all on the gym. I had $5,000 left after paying for all the equipment and everything else.
And I had $5,000 a month in rent and I had never sold anything to anyone. And so the idea of making $5,000, having never really sold anything to anyone in a local business, which I’d never had in a, in California, which I was from Baltimore, I knew no one. So it wasn’t like I could just get on my immediate friend group to come and at least pay the rent.
I had no one. And so I think when I was like sleeping on the actual floor of the gym, cause I couldn’t afford to rents, um, was when it like really hit me that no one was coming to save me. And like, if I failed, I would have to go back and tell my daddy was right.
And that felt like worse than death for me. And so that was incredibly hard. Um, I remember that I was, I have, I have a pretty decent work ethic. Um, but at that time I was, my first session would start at four 30.
So I’d wake up at four and then my, my last morning session ended at 10 and then I would do the marketing.
I would clean the gym, I would set up the next thing, I would get the workouts, I would get the music prepped, and then my four o’clock would start showing up, and then four until 7.30 or so, people were at the gym. And then after that, I would run the billing and make sure the contracts were right and then reset up for the morning and do it all over again, but I had zero employees.
And so I didn’t know you could hire employees. It was only when a member of mine who was an entrepreneur came up to me, and I’d been short with the class that morning, and she was like, you can’t treat people like that. And I was like, what do you, but I knew that if she was saying it, I was really off base.
And I think I was sleeping right around four-ish hours a night, and people say that, but I did it for, I wanna say, I wanna say close to six months. Oh, God. Yeah, I was delirious. I’d fall asleep leaning on things.
Yeah, I was very, very tired. And I used to tell people that it was the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep couldn’t fix. I needed a lot of time. But that was probably the second hardest thing that I did.
A lot of it was just because I made up for a tremendous lack of knowledge with just, I just have to make rent, and then everything else is mine. So I didn’t have any understanding of like, I just, I spent money on nothing. My first gym had sandbags that I wrapped in duct tape as the equipment that I started with.
Wow. Yeah, it was crazy. And when I opened the gym, I was selling people into a gym that had no equipment because I thought that you should open as fast as possible to start making money. Now, if I knew now, I would have said I would have three months of pre-sales, only collect money and have no classes.
That’s what I would have done, but I didn’t know any better. And so I was trying to get open as fast as I could, which then meant that eight hours a day at baseline is me with a microphone in front of customers, training, doing all of that before I could work on the business.
And so like, it was very real 16, 18 hours a day. And I think setting that standard for people who are new is useful because when you start, you don’t have enough money to pay other people.
You either have to raise money, which you can do, I wouldn’t recommend, especially if it’s your first shot, or you have to work three jobs and basically throw out all of the opinions of everyone who has no idea how business works. Because the only people you probably know when you’re starting out don’t have businesses.
And so they will tell you all these things you should be doing, and you should take more time off, and you should have more balance, and this isn’t healthy, and they will tell you all these things, but they are not where you want to be, so don’t listen to what they say.
Completely ignore them. And instead, like I like this little ism, but it’s listen to the opinions of people, don’t listen to the opinions of people who are closest to you, listen to the opinions of the people who are closest to your goals. And a great approximation of that is, if I had known that when I was doing the decision to quit, that I would have known that this is where I want to go eventually, I want to start a business, and if it’s hard for me now, it’s never going to get easier.
As I have more responsibilities, kids, wife, whatever, that’s only going to get harder. And the people that I looked up to the most were the most aspiring entrepreneurs, and they would have said, go for it. But everybody I knew was saying, don’t go for it, don’t throw away what you have.
But I think sometimes you have to trade good for great. And there’s always going to be a J curve, there’s going to be a dip where instead of being immediately rewarded for the decision, you’re immediately punished. And you think that you’re making the wrong move because of what immediately happens after, which is how humans learn, which is why it’s so tough.
But it’s like the first week of the gym, just because you haven’t seen results doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong stuff, you’re probably measuring on the wrong time horizon. And so quitting the job, starting the gym was the second hardest thing that I’ve that I’ve done. I would say that the third hardest that I’ve worked has been now, the season that I’m in right now, this is probably close to the hardest I’ve worked.
But it’s different. There is nothing urgent, everything’s important. And
I am taking fewer days off than I ever have and basically working at all hours that I can physically. And so the times that I’m not working is active rest so that I can increase my total output over a longer period of time. There’s a long-winded answer, but those are the two things that I feel like those were hard, hard calls for me to make.
And those were real struggles for me. But those were the times when I feel like I’m very proud of who I was then to do it. Now I heard you talk recently about you can feel a shift in culture, people moving away from the soft stuff, getting a little bit harder.
What do you think is going on in culture? Oh, I think the pendulum has swung back and I’m so excited. I do think that it’s going to swing back too hard. That people are going to go way too hard into like hustle porn and all that stuff?
Oh, hustle porn? Oh, that, I don’t mind about hustle porn. So what do you mind about? From the political realm and stuff, I think that the pendulum definitely reached its pinnacle on the other side and then is going to swing back.
And the thing is that the way pendulums work is that we start swinging back and everyone agrees it’s, or not everyone, but more people than not agree that it’s better coming back to the middle. Then it’s better and then it’s better. And then all of a sudden, but hey, more of that was good, but then at some point it stops being better.
Right. And so, and this is, I think cycles is why humanity lives in cycles. And so I think it’s likely that we will overcrack, but it might take 10 years for that to happen. So I think right now we’re going in the right direction, which is basically pushing away from the political correctness and leaning more into reality, which I am.
I am a heart staunch proponent of reality. You and I both. Now you’ve said that you want to normalize guys, young men working 12 hours a day, six days a week. Yeah.
Why? Because I think that’s what’s required to get where you want to go on the timeline that they want. Why men? Why not men and women?
I have a 88% male audience or something like that.
And so I feel like it’s my place to speak to them There are obviously women who follow my stuff and if that’s you then you can assume that when I say men I mean men and women, but I think that if a message is going to hit people If I say men I will have a stronger reaction and a higher likelihood that it changes someone’s behavior than if I said people or men and women hmm, and so if I if I look at my effect size of my message if 88% of the people who hear my message are men Then I’d rather make it as potent as possible.
That’s why I do it though makes sense so What should young men be doing like what they’re if they’re working their ass off 12 hours a day How do they make use of that 12 hours? I? Think being really clear on trade-offs So I and I think you I think I’m speaking for you here.
I Gave up my 20s. I Would say I sold my yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I sold my 20s.
I’ll say that well I actually ended up losing everything And so I did have to start over at zero again, but hey with way more knowledge. Yes a day long So I traded my 20s. How about that? so and that and that perfectly mixes with the trade-offs is that you can have The Knights out the finish football league the rec dodgeball team that you want to go to beers on Tuesdays You can do that You just can’t also Build your dream unless that is your dream and I think that’s the big part is like Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone and I as much as I I talked about entrepreneurship a lot.
I Think there are plenty of people who don’t want that in which case great like you’ve already won. Congratulations, right? It’s simply the complaining about reality. That’s my problem.
And so I think that most young men Could accomplish all of their goals if they extended how long? They were be willing to give themselves to accomplish it now not to anti Peter Thiel here because I’m a huge Teal fan as well but I think that when you
you are a novice, you have no approximation of reality. And so one of the difficult parts with how we observe success, a lot of it’s social media driven and this is the best analogy I have. If you were to look at an Olympic marathon, look at where the people in the stands are situated.
They’re situated at the beginning of the race and they’re situated at the end of the race. But watching someone start a race and watching someone finish a race has almost nothing to do with running a marathon. And so that is the closest approximation that people think. That’s why everyone’s really excited to start a business and they’re really excited to sell a business.
But everything in between, the mundane middle, as I like to call it, they’re just, okay, if I’m four miles in, it’s this times six, okay, I’m five miles in, it’s this times five plus one. Like you just keep playing these mental games with yourself to learn to endure.
And I think that that endurance is if I had to pick one trait for a young man to have, it would be resilience. And I define resilience as the amount of time after an aversive experience that you return to baseline function. And so if you have a series of behaviors that you do under certain conditions and then something bad happens, how quickly you return back to the original behavior set.
And so in doing that, like if someone can not give up and learn, then on a long enough time horizon, you guarantee victory. Like if you only had those things, you don’t stop and you get better. That’s it. And I think that if those are the two hypothetical extremes, that’s what I would want young men to have.
And if you know that, then I know for me, because I’ve been asked before, like, did you always know you’re going to be successful? I don’t really like the question because I only knew, and I, to my core, believe this, I knew I would never stop.
That was the only thing I could commit to. I just knew I would never stop. And I knew that I wouldn’t go home to Baltimore if the gym failed, for whatever reason. And so my plan B, and this is super tactical for anybody, is that I think you should look at your plan B in excruciating detail.
Now Arnold has this whole thing of don’t have a plan B, make plan A work. And I understand both sides of this. But me knowing my plan B allowed me to pursue plan A. It allowed me to take the jump.
But I think the day that I decided to live for me was the day that I allowed my father’s dream to die. And so I think that you either live out your own dream or you live someone else’s. And one of them has to die for the other to live.
Yeah, that’s heavy. It’s interesting. I never loved my parents, but I never felt in any way, shape, or form beholden to what they wanted for me. Now I will say though, this is sort of a bizarre similarity.
I was trying to write. I wanted to break into the film industry. And I thought, okay, I need a screenplay. That’s gonna be my calling card because this is all before YouTube.
And my mom once calls me in the middle of the day and I’m sleeping. She’s like, why are you asleep in the middle of the day? And I’m like, I got a new job. Doing what?
Driving. Driving what? Driving models. Driving models, that’s escorts.
And I was like, oh God. And so my mom was like, you have to call them right now and turn this down, there’s no way. And so that is the one time where I let my mother’s superior judgment, I think in this case. But yeah, so that I could write, I took a job driving lingerie models to their appointments.
Someone has to. Someone has to. And the funny thing is in the interview, they’re like, first of all, the guy, he’s sitting there playing guitar while interviewing me. And he goes, I have to ask, why are you interviewing for this job?
And I was like, I need something that’ll let me write during the day. He’s like, okay, well, here’s how it’s gonna work. The girl’s gonna have a page, or you’re gonna have a page, or if they page you, whatever, seven. They’re like, you go in there with a gun, you kick the door down.
And I was like, okay.
God, oh god, but I actually took the job. I can’t believe I did. Yeah, very stupid I’m very grateful to my mom for ensuring that that did not happen But I was actually going to go on a job where they’re like you kick that fucking door down you get in if she sends You a yeah or whatever the number was I was like, okay cool if that’s what it takes to write man Yeah, then we’ll go for it.
But thankfully not I think it’s worth For those of you who are young men or young women. There you go who are listening? I Think planning out what B looks like and not being ashamed of it Because the thing is is people will judge you based on the career path that you’re making But you’re not making that as your career path You’re making that as the launchpad for what you really want to do And I think that if you can if you can reconcile that reality Which is that you will have people like for me It was super tough because everybody at Vanderbilt was that all the guys I knew were pretty successful And so a lot of people were like, oh back home now high school friends sure different but like my college friends I went to a good school like almost all of them are investment bankers management consultants private equity Like they all make good money, you know, they’re like head in some software thing Like they all are successful.
And so when I went to do this personal training gym thing It was like Oh her mozzie gave up. He’s out of the race. You know, he’s not he’s not playing the game anymore and I would have these almost like these fan these shame fantasies of What they were saying about me While I was sleeping on the gym floor not being successful Having literally kids above my roof because it was I was in a garage So kids would like party at night while I was trying to sleep.
It’s really tough But like literally in front of me demonstrating the life that I could be having while I actively was on the floor But they weren’t thinking about me to begin with and nor do they really care and they’re going to all die Eventually and so if if they were to die before me then their opinions wouldn’t matter and if I’m going to eventually die Then what happened to me won’t matter either.
And so then it’s like wow, I’m gonna change my entire
present existence to satisfy the fictitious idea of what other people are saying behind my back when they aren’t thinking about me. That seems silly. But it’s hard, but people don’t do it. And so I’m saying don’t be ashamed of the lingerie job or the Uber or whatever it is that you’re doing as long as you’re using it to build towards the thing.
Now, if you’re driving Uber all day long and you’re making $70,000 a year and you spend 100% of it, then what are you doing? You’re using all your time up and using all your money. You have to be banking something, either to be banking time so you can work or to be banking money so that you can invest in something.
When I say invest, I mean invest in skills, invest in opportunity, not trying to play the crypto market or become a day trader because you will lose. Yes, you will. Speaking of things that people may lose out and that might be giving them existential dread, what do you think about AI for entrepreneurs?
Oh, it’s a great question. I’m not worried about it at all from a, what will it change about what I do? I basically see the history of humanity as humans, then humans plus tools, and then tools beat all humans. AI, for now, is a tool, just like the internet, just like computers.
We will use the tools. I, as an entrepreneur, will use all the tools available to win. AI will come online and we’ll do that stuff until AI can do everything better than everyone. At that point, it doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters. Again, me dreading that changes nothing about what I do today. What I will do today is what I’ve always done, which is do the best I can with the resources at my fingertips, what’s available to me. I absolutely, across all portfolio companies, are pushing how do we incorporate AI into this?
How do we put it into a streamlined process? How can we incorporate it in sales and marketing, whatever? We will continue to do that until an AI is starting and running businesses without us. At that point, we will try and do that.
If AI’s own AI businesses and they’re just out competing.
humans at everything, then the world is different and I have no ability to predict that. And so I’ll just keep playing the game until I can’t play anymore. What’s the most jaw-dropping use of AI that you guys are doing in a portfolio company? We’re getting really close to being able to have it take calls.
Whoa. Yeah, specifically. Inbound, I assume. No, AppOn works too.
Whoa. Sales? Setting. I think it will get sales.
Wow. Yeah, I think end of next year it’ll be able to do sales. Whoa. Setting, I think we’re basically like three months off.
So main thing, the only issue right now is lag. So the actual responses are perfect, they’re on script, they all reasoned, all that stuff works. The only issue is the lag time between someone saying something and the response. Or if someone says something, the person starts, the AI starts responding and then they say something else, it can kind of like jumpstart it.
And so the next big iteration that’s gonna happen is voice-to-voice. So right now what happens is prospect says something, it goes to a satellite, which then goes down to a database, which then transcribes it. AI takes that as a text prompt, responds in a text prompt, beams it up, translates it to voice, and then beams it up to the satellite to then say it to the other side.
That takes like a second and a half. As soon as it’s voice-to-voice, it eliminates like three steps. And so it’ll probably be like a half second. And at that point, that’s just human latency.
And so that’s close. Like I think that’s three months off, four months off. Like that’ll be end of Q1 next year. Wow.
Now, are you guys doing any of the training or are these companies that are building these models up? These are tools that we, I’m not an AI company. And so like we were talking earlier about the platform of like, are we a dev company? Acquisition.com as a holding company is not an AI company.
We want to utilize the tools that are available to us. And most of the AI companies that we’ve started vendor relationships with, et cetera, there’s usually a training period that you wanna train your specific model agent, whatever. And so we’ve been going through that process. Yeah, that’s where I wanna get my hands in the mix.
We want to do the reinforcement learning so that it will do the things we want to do. But yeah, I don’t want to have to build the AI out itself. AI is the one that, man, this really gets me excited. When I think about how much it’s already sped us up and we’re, you know, what are we, just under two years from when it launched?
It’s absolute insanity how far it’s already come. If you could push a button and get it to work in one area of your company, that would just have a huge impact. Where would you want it? It’s tough.
I’ll give you three. I’ll take them. So, I mean, marketing sales. So marketing is like, how can we get the content stuff to be like truly top 1%?
The thing that’s tough is that whatever, the thing that I hate and like about it is that whatever skill AI can do for you, it can do for everyone. And so it has a massive equalization. So like the ability to execute is going to be not nearly as much of a competitive advantage, which I’ll just say transparently I’m bummed about because I’m pretty good at it.
But I’d say marketing and sales, both of those. And then the one that people might not expect is decision-making. Like if it can get better at prediction than me for outsized returns, then of the three, that would be the highest return thing that we could do. And so I think that, again, but if it can do that for me, it can do it for everyone.
Again, this is where I struggle with it. So I just think of like, what can I do today? And then I don’t spend any time on what might happen in the future with it because when it changes, I’ll be there. Yeah, no, that’s I think the right way to think about it.
With that kind of stuff, the nice thing now is AI doesn’t have taste. And so what I have found is that because the output of the prompt matters so much in terms of what I give it, that that still feels like it matters a lot. To your point about you have infinite or limited resources.
and it’s infinite possibilities. The same is true with AI. So you can have it go a thousand different directions, 10,000, a million, whatever. And that matters.
So understanding the end target person that you’re creating this piece for, but it taking all of the manual work off of my plate so that now I can iterate faster. So I just have to think about, okay, I need to understand my customer, I need to understand what it is that I’m trying to communicate, the angle that I wanna do it, knowing which piece to say yes to, which to say no to, where to push it, and then to be able to edit it.
It’s taken so much time off of so many of my different workflows. It’s really incredible. And for us, because game development is such a big part of what we do, if it can do 3D characters, oh my God. All of the cost is in the creation and the rigging of the 3D characters.
How far is that away now? I’m gonna guess, so I just saw a very compelling 2D to 3D stuff. It’s static, so you can’t rig it yet. So I’m gonna guess 2D to 3D over the next year is gonna be extraordinarily compelling.
Give it another 18 months, so 18 months to 24 months, and I think that the financial structure of a gaming company changes overnight. Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty crazy. So you were saying that you’re bummed about it replacing certain aspects of marketing because you’re really good at it.
What is the thing? Because we can all look at you and go, yeah, there’s something here that you were unusually good at. What is that thing? I think it’s rhetoric.
Say more. How you structure statements to make them more interesting or compelling for an audience. So you’re doing it intuitively, or do you have a method? The single greatest training grounds for this is Twitter, or X.
I started tweeting, I can’t remember. You probably.
Look at my profile probably three, three ish years ago. Um, and I think Twitter is one of the best writing tools that exists because it gives you real time feedback immediately for how good the quality of your writing and thinking is. And so there are basically sentence structures that resonate better with people.
And so that would be like having three things in a row where you have, uh, they all start with the same letter. Um, if, if you have basically like a reverse sentence, like it’s not about, um, it’s not about listening to people who are closest to you. It’s about listening to people closest to your goals.
And so it’s like, there’s a, there’s repetition there. Um, and you change one variable, uh, you know, if, if you can’t do it in a decade or if you, if you wouldn’t do it for a decade, don’t do it for a day. So there’s alliteration. Um, and so there’s, there’s, and I would say some of that, some of this has been probably subconsciously intuitive because I’ve, I’ve tweeted probably 6,000 times over the last three years.
And so I’ve had a lot of reinforcement loops and it’s, and this is where like AI will do better than I will eventually. But like right now I can look at, I want to record this cause there was this time where Layla and I were driving and she wanted to like tweet while I was driving.
And so she would read me what she wanted to say, and then I would tweet it back to her and they ended up like, they just banged it. And then you kind of get in the flow. I was like driving on the road. I could just like, kind of like zone out and think about it.
And like that, that’s something that I’m, I’ve gotten significantly better at over the years and making more content. So it’s like I have verbal practice and feedback loops, which are more delayed. So I don’t think it’s as strong as the Twitter feedback loop. And that’s probably been, I think that’s, that’s the, from, from a, from a copy and content perspective, that’s where I think, um, I’ve put more emphasis.
I love it. Cause what, this is really interesting for persuasion is that if you make the statement more memorable, people have a higher likelihood of remembering it. If people have a higher likelihood of remembering it, then they will think it was their idea. If they think it was their idea, they’re more likely to do it.
And so.
The best persuasion is when someone doesn’t feel persuaded, they just think it’s their own idea and then they do it. And so if you make things memorable in a very real way, you will influence and change more people’s behavior. And so if we look at the best orators of our time, the last hundred years, they were very skilled rhetoricians or whatever, and they use specific sentence structures that people tend to like.
It’s like probably chords in music. I think it’s the same thing happens with words. That’s interesting. All right.
What’s some of the worst business advice you see people give out all the time? Do a bunch of things and see which one works. Why is that terrible? God, so many reasons.
Well, first off, trying to do many things at once, you already have such limited resources. The easiest analogy I can think of is, imagine you’ve got one cup of water and you need to overflow another cup to get it to be an effective dose, enough volume for you to see an outcome.
The visual I can give is, okay, let’s line up seven shot glasses because millionaires have seven streams of income apparently. And so now we’re going to pour that water into all of those glasses and then hope that it somehow overflows, but it’s not going to. And so what ends up happening is you just have insufficient volume of action on seven things and then you accomplish none.
And the fallacy is thinking that you’ll see which one will work, which assumes that the environment, the circumstance is going to be the thing that makes it work rather than you. And so better stated is that you can make any of them work, but none of them will work unless you focus on one of them.
That’s all rhetoric, right? That’s the idea. And so I think that is a very insidious piece of advice. I think that you can try many things if you want.
If you are going to do that, do it in sequence, do one at a time. But I say that knowing that if you actually try hard at the first one, you’ll probably make that work. So try the first one that you think is the best one first, in which case, why do you even have six through, you know, six through two or seven through two.
And so that, and I think there’s this big idea. This is one that I remember talking to a portfolio company about, he was like, I’m not really sure if I’m passionate about this anymore. Like about like this, this, this product or the company, whatever. And so he was like, I think I want to consider starting something else.
And I said, what do you think the natural extreme of this looks like at the top? Because in my opinion, all businesses at the top look the same, which is you’re going to have a head of marketing, you’re going to have IT, you’re going to have a sales head of product, head of customer success, whatever.
And so if you win, and you win all the way, it looks the same. And so where, where your entrance point to the mazes doesn’t really matter if that’s what the hypothetical extreme is. And so I have this story about a friend of mine who started a cookie store actually here in California.
So he started this cookie and he was in fitness, right? So it was kind of hilarious. Like it’s the really fit guy starts cookie store. And I remember I asked him, I was like, Are you passionate about cookies?
And he was like, No. And I was like, Huh, weird. He’s like, Well, I looked at the market, there’s there’s a lot of people and this is before cookie for crumble. So he had a he had a good inclination that like high end cookies were going to be a thing.
So he did his he did his homework. But what he was passionate about was being excellent. And he did amazingly well. And so I think that you can be passionate about ideals and translate that to anything.
And so I had a conversation with Ben Francis from Gymshark this year, probably the most the best, the best day that I had from a business owner perspective was hanging out with him. And we just had a really good conversation. And there’s not a ton of people you can talk to about like revenue levels and problems that come at that.
And we had a great discussion.
And what was interesting, he was like, I can’t believe that you’re doing all these different things. Because he saw each of the portfolio companies as a different thing. He’s like, I can’t imagine doing anything besides Gymshark, this is all I want to do. And I thought about it for a second.
I was like, Acquisition.com is the only thing that I’m doing. These are just like fundamentally, like you have different types of clothing. I can’t believe you have all these different types of clothing, all these different types of apparel. So it’s really chunking up and chunking down.
And so if anyone hears that and thinks, wait a second, I thought you told me that I should focus on one thing. How are you doing all of these different things? There’s a very big misconception when you’re starting out that CEO and owner are the same thing. And they are not.
And that’s because in the beginning, they are the same because you’re the only guy. But if you look at Berkshire Hathaway, for example, Warren Buffett is not CEO of Coca-Cola. He’s not CEO of Geico. He has operators who are in charge of each of those companies.
Now, those guys couldn’t run three companies. They can only run the one they’re at. And he can only run Berkshire Hathaway. And so it’s really chunking up or chunking down a level to understand how do you have multiple things?
Because you can always go down and say, okay, well, if you have an agency, then you have 10 clients. How can you have 10 clients? You should only have one. Well, the logic doesn’t carry.
But it’s really just that one person has limited resources. And so by limiting the scope of the problems that we have to solve, we get more leverage, as in we get more for what we put in, in my opinion. And so that was how I reconcile those two kind of styles of doing business is that I’m not CEO of any of them.
And I’m not even really CEO of acquisition.com, if at all. And so that’s been, that was how I made sense of that because that’s the only one thing that I think about. All right, so what is the difference between what life is like when you’re running a million dollar company versus a hundred million dollar company?
Oh. I was gonna give the obvious answer, which was scale. That’s like the first. Well, what’s the knock on?
Yeah.
You have only one theory of how we grow everything. And so that’s kind of been our unifying principle, which is the theory of constraints. So a system will grow until it is constrained and then will grow no further. And until you relieve the constraint, whatever the bottleneck is, it will stay there.
And so the difference between a million dollar business and a hundred million dollar business is typically if you’re a million dollar business, you’re still, you’re doing a lot of everything still. At a hundred million, you’re predominantly making decisions and SWOT teaming in on high leverage problems that need to get solved.
So kind of like the Elon, like we jump in and Layla and I both kind of championed this methodology of close CEOing, which is rather than having somebody who’s kind of like running the, basically driving. So driving objectives on a regular basis, we see as like traditional operations and management versus kind of like CEO as saying, okay, the single most important thing that we need to solve right now is this product ascension piece, or we need to solve this sales constraint, or we need to solve this CS issue, whatever it is.
And then basically CEO goes in, is now on every huddle for that because the operators who are running each of the divisions or functions are continuing to drive the ball forward. And so the TLDR is in the very beginning, you’re doing everything. At the end, you’re doing one thing very well and your understanding of talent will dramatically shift over that time period.
And so right now you can’t imagine having anyone else do anything because everyone who works for you probably isn’t that good. And that’s because you don’t know how to recognize talent and or you can’t compensate them well enough. And unless you’re giving away big chunks of equity to people, which is a strategy, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But either you’re building a dream team or you’re bootstrapping it. If you’re bootstrapping it, you’re gonna be doing a hell of a lot of work. If you build the dream team, then you’re gonna have to give slices of the pie away. Again, cool either way, expecting a different outcome from a different decisions where the problem comes in.
And so that’s kind of obviously like at a very high level,
Doing a lot of stuff with no help, to you’re doing a few things with tons of help, so that all of the normal day-to-day activities continue, and you’re just thinking, what’s the highest leverage move we can make? How do you recognize talent? So this is probably, so if I had to say like the three things that have changed in terms of me as an entrepreneur for the year, or like last two years, like big moves, one is my understanding of brand, so probably four.
So understanding of brand has deepened, my understanding of focus has deepened, my understanding of talent has deepened. So it’s not like, oh, I learned about talent, it’s just my understanding of it has grown more nuanced. And the arbitrage that exists between B and A plus. And so I still think that one of the greatest returns that you can make as an entrepreneur is paying someone who’s exceptional, exceptionally well.
And Steve Jobs gives this, so I’m not gonna claim credit for it, but he says, if you look at the best cab driver in New York compared to the worst cab driver, it’s probably a three X difference between, and that’s the best and the worst. But the best marketer and the worst marketer, it’s not a three X, it’s probably a hundred X difference.
Same thing for the best engineer. And now that’s the best and worst, but what about good and best, or good and top 0.1%? Well, the difference between those guys is probably still like 25 X, it’s huge, huge, highly leveraged. And so the arbitrage is that you don’t typically have to pay the best guy 25 times more than the good guy.
You can just pay him three times more. And then all the increase in throughput goes to the company. And that has been my shift and moving away from, so basically headhunting happens in level. In the beginning, you start running ads to get, first you talk to friends and family, right?
And then you start running like Indeed ads and Craigslist ads to get people, and maybe you post in communities you own, you make public posts, whatever. That’s how you get your next level of talent. And then from there, you start.
or networking, maybe you hire headhunters and recruiters to help you out. Maybe you get an internal resource who starts doing outbound, looking for specific types of candidates. And this also follows with the functions of the organization. If you’re finding a low-level role, you can still do the lower leverage ways.
The higher the role, the more individualized the approach, just like a whale would be if you’re trying to go after a big client, a high-value client. Like, okay, I wanna sign Amazon for my warehouse services. Like, okay, we’re gonna have a really tailored approach. You’re not gonna run an ad to get Amazon.
You’re gonna have to know somebody, you’re gonna have to work your way in, and it’s gonna take a while. And so I would say that now my thinking has rather been like, let’s go find a unicorn. Two, I need John from this company to work for me. And I don’t know John, but I know he’s really good.
And I need him. How do I, what would it take for me to get him to be here? And so I’d say that that has been the shift, and I am more okay with getting, I’m basically being involved in some of the highest-level recruiting. And those roles take six, 12, 18 months to actually come to fruition, because it’s like a courting process.
It’s more like a marriage. Like, they don’t need your company. And like, they have a career. You’re not giving them an opportunity.
Like, they’re giving you a company, because they can drive an entire division of growth. They can take you international, because that’s what their Rolodex is, or they can take you public if that’s what their specialty, whatever the thing is. And so that’s kind of how I see as a very high-leverage use of my time, despite the fact that it’s a very slow process that has very delayed reinforcement.
Yeah, talent is a whole beast. How do you go in when you’ve got a role that you don’t necessarily know? How do you make sure that you can’t be bamboozled? So Layla, so I’m stealing this from Layla.
Her frame is talk to as many really smart, basically reach out to people who you would want to hire, ask them if they know anybody, hop on calls with them. And she uses the interview process as her learning process.
And so from there, if you only talk to one customer success person, you have no idea if they’re good or bad. If you talk to 20, you have a really good idea. And so, because then by the 17th, you’re like, but what about this? And what about this other thing?
And the way that I think through this is a couple of razors. So razor number one is the quality and quantity of metrics they track and how they influence those metrics. So if I talk to, let’s say I wanted to find a sales manager, I might say something like, okay, so how do you think about running sales and improving sales performance?
Now, if the guy says, gotta get in there, get the team riled up, make sure the culture’s good, drive outcomes, I’d be like, okay, how do you measure that? Now, if the guy’s like, make sure the close rates are good, and yeah, and I’d be like, okay, how do you make that go up?
Now, the best guys would say, well, they would have every metric all the way down. So it’s like, what’s our contact rate? What’s our offer percentage? What’s our close rate?
What’s our cash collected? What’s our back out rate by rep? What’s LTV to rep? So because some reps will have higher LTV because they’ll have lower return because of how they were sold and what expectations were set.
And so, if these are the metrics that I’m doing, they would then say, well, which metrics do you want me to improve? I’d be like, okay, if let’s say that offer rate’s low, what do you do? Like, okay, well, then that’s probably gonna be a lead nurture issue, which is we’re not qualifying people on the front end, we probably need to fix the headlines that we have in the ads and maybe the offer that we’re doing for whatever giveaway we have that’s generating these leads.
And then I would probably add in some sort of disqualification process earlier. So if the guys can look at the stats, I could remove them from the calendar so they can open up a slot and then increase throughput. Now, if someone said that, then I’d be like, okay, that’s clear.
I zoomed in on a metric because he had many and he had quality metrics and he knows how he can influence them. And so, if you have a very good idea, because I remember the first really good HR person that we brought on, they introduced all these new metrics to me that I had no idea about.
And I was like, this is great. She was like, well, what’s the cost to acquire talent here? And I was like.
I haven’t thought about it. She’s like, oh yeah, well we need to know we can spend this much to acquire talent and this is our average cost to acquire role at each level. And then what’s our two-way fit percentage? And I was like, what do you mean?
I was like, well at 90 days, what percentage of people are saying it’s a 10 out of 10 from the manager to the person and the person to the manager? So it’s a two-way fit. Both people say that this is a good thing. And then what’s her average time to fill?
And I was like, I don’t know, right? And so all of a sudden, she had all these different metrics. I was like, this makes complete sense to me and I’ve never measured this. And then all of a sudden from that point going forward for every single head of people or director about whatever it is that we’re doing, if they’re in charge of some sort of recruiting function, then if they’re not bringing up those metrics, then I know that they’re already not at that caliber.
And so again, it’s like the, and this is where I think like entrepreneurial pattern recognition is so valuable is like every entrepreneur that I know who has had something successful and then started something else with the assumption that the first thing wasn’t because of luck. Because we have probably both seen some guys that got richer than they should have.
I’ll just put it that way. Because I remember I had a dinner with somebody once who was like, and I’ll loop back. But he said, isn’t it crazy that like gym launch could be the biggest thing you ever built? And I was just like, that is not true.
I just like, I wholeheartedly reject your premise. I was like, I know exactly what we did to build gym launch. I know all the reasons that it was not as big as I want it to be. And I know what I’m gonna do next and I know how to win.
And that guy never ended up building something bigger than the exit that he had. And it might’ve been because of his view of the world or because he got lucky or whatever. But that pattern recognition for most entrepreneurs that truly are self-made that forced their will into existence, their ability to get it again after losing it all, or just when they take their second or their third or their fourth swing, they almost start, like for me, every company I’ve built has gotten to each revenue level faster than the company before.
And it’s because it’s like, oh, I already beat the boss at this level. I know what has to happen here. Oh, I know what has to happen here. And then you finally get into virgin territory.
You’re like, I don’t know what’s going on. And then your rate of progress slows again. And so it’s like, you wanna crystallize.
the artifacts of the knowledge of beating the game at every level so that when you when you get to that level again you’re like oh there’s another one of those I know good sales managers look like this they know these metrics they say these things they interview this way this is the best source for them and then all of a sudden when it takes someone 18 months to find a sales manager because they hire wrong the first time and then it takes them a year to figure that out and then they go back into the process and then they have to do salesman to themselves and then they finally on their third try and that was the constraint they can’t fix it and so they stay stagnant that whole time whereas if you think about how much faster it goes when you’re like all the rules are right and then it’s like boom you just go to the next level that’s order of magnitude I think that’s the that is the those are the scars and the lessons that we collect as entrepreneurs so that we have our cheat codes for when we get to that level next time all right as you scale up and you are just really entering a whole new echelon how do you think about or do you think about political environment does the government matter to you at all do you know about tax or anything like that so I’ll start with tax I don’t think much about it I have always been of the belief I should just make more money and that’s more under my control now we’ll be you know we’ll be sensible if we buy a building would appreciate it you know you know we’ll donate a certain amount to charity because we can you know write off 30% of adjusted gross income it’s like okay well that takes me from 37 to 29 you know you know we work our way down but we still pay taxes right and I’m still waiting for this this I’m like what is what is this no taxes that billionaires are paying I’m still trying to find this this loophole that all these politicians are talking about but the big realization that I had around taxes was realizing and this was when Elon still lived in California that all the richest people in America lived in California or many of them did and in New York and I was like if they’re the richest people and they’re in the highest tax state what do they understand that I don’t understand about making money and so the big
or the misconception that I had, is that my understanding of making a billion dollars, which was a goal that I had for a very long time, was, and to be clear for anybody who has that goal, it wasn’t always a billion, it was first a million, and then it kind of moved its way up.
But the first way I thought of making a billion dollars is that I had to make $2 billion in net income, and then after taxes, I would have a billion. And then the second version was, oh, I just need to make enough, and then I’ll invest that money, and then if I make maybe 400 million over 10 years, with appreciation of the stock market, and things like that, I could get to a billion.
Okay, that was my 2.0 version. And then the 3.0 version was, oh, the asset itself has inherent value, and so I only need to get to 100 million in EBITDA with a conservative 10x multiple to have a billion dollar asset, which I can then take loans against, or I could sell portions of it, or whatever I wanna do there.
And so that’s how my evolution of getting to a billion kind of changed over time. I know you know this is obvious, but for me, I didn’t even understand how it worked. So that’s the tax component, and some of the enterprise value component. What was the other part of it?
You had two questions. Well, so do you care about who’s in government? Oh, yeah. No, that’s my simple answer.
Who is in government, the regulations that they put in place, I will only be affected by those regulations or changes in tax code, like we just said. If it was something that affected me disproportionately, maybe like Elon, then it might make sense for me to change my behavior in a way to try and influence the outcome of the election.
Because then it’s like, I think we all try to have high agency, like what can I do about it? But as a rule, I try not to think at all about things that I cannot control.
And so, so we’re like, sure, you can vote. Okay. But you know, the one vote I have in the, in the one state of the county, that’s already whatever color you’re in, whatever. Um, but if I really wanted to get into it, it’s not your vote that matters.
It’s how many votes can you influence? Like that’s the game. Um, and so the, the easiest litmus test I had for this, I remember this was like a formative experience for me is that when we went through COVID, I was in the gym space, which right. A hundred percent of my customers were not allowed to do business legally in 24 hours.
And so that year we went from 37 million in revenue to 31 million in revenue. Okay. So we did 31 million in sales in an industry that was not legally allowed to do business. And I think is one of the biggest entrepreneurial successes I’ve had, despite the fact that we shrunk that year.
And I remember managing the team during 2020 saying, if we cannot control it, we do not talk about it. Period. Only talk about the things that we can control. And whenever there’s a disadvantage, it means all of our competitors are screwed.
And so that means there’ll be more for us because we’ll work harder while they get disheartened. And so they’re going to be talking about all the things that it’s not fair and blah, blah, blah. But we’re going to advertise our asses off. We’re going to sell our asses off.
We’re going to deliver like crazy. And we’re going to find a way to make it through this because everyone was like, gyms will not stop existing. So if we believe that to be true, then we need to find a bridge for them to get from here to there.
And so we can build that bridge. And the nice thing is we have more resources than our competitors, which means we can build a better bridge than anyone else can. What was the bridge? So we came up with something in seven days called the hybrid gym.
And so basically what we would do is you could meet with people one-on-one in person. That was loud. You couldn’t do workouts. And so what we did was I got all the gyms together to teach
different classes in different variations, the whole gym launch community, so that we had 12 hours a day of sessions that were being streamed by different gym owners. And so everyone was able to maintain their membership and have way more classes than they did before and do them at home.
And so we- So you pooled the resources. Yeah. Very smart. And so we cobbled together the streaming thing, so that, because we paid for all of the baseline tech that was required to do that.
They supplied the talent to lead those sessions. And then from a marketing and sales perspective, they either sold over the phone, which we had more ramped up sales scripts, which was more reasonable at the time because people understood it, or you’d meet in person one-on-one to do it.
And some people were able to meet one-on-one, just do one-on-one training, things like that. And we leaned really heavily on supplement sales because we still have Prestige Labs. And so Prestige Labs, a lot of gym owners were able to get more people to take supplements during COVID because they were shipped straight to their door and not have to come to the gym.
And so the combination of those two things allowed the majority of gym owners to get through. Now, what was really interesting, now, I think you’ll dig this. So about, I can’t remember the exact number, I want to say between eight and 10% of all gyms went out of business in 30 days.
Oh my God. Yeah. And my theory around this- Whoa. Yeah, my theory around this was that they were waiting for a good enough reason to give up.
Interesting. And so they were waiting for a reason that they could look at their friends, that they’re like, COVID, what are you going to do? Oh my God, of course. They were looking for a socially acceptable reason.
People had owned a gym for eight years, 10 years. And then when the second wave of shutdowns happened, like nine months later, whatever it is, when they were like, maybe we’ll open it up and shut it down. That was when the guys who really wanted to, but who literally couldn’t pay the bills anymore went out of business.
So it happened in two waves. The first ones gave up. The second ones had no, of course you always have a choice, but those guys ran out of resources.
we were able to make it through. Wow, what an awesome example of no bullshit what would it take? What are you like off camera? Like are you, do you have a super hard edge?
Like you have a really playful vibe but you’ve said a couple of things here that if we can’t control it, we don’t talk about it. Like things like that, I can see. I think people are always surprised when they come to work for me if they’ve seen me on camera.
Now I have the world’s most angry face so that helps at least a little bit but I’m very, look, this is me on camera but I am very intense for sure. Yeah, what’s your, what’s the off camera like not for play, I don’t fuck around or? I think the number one thing that I get from the people who work with slash for me is that I have a much, a lighter sense of humor when they see me kind of day to day.
I do like to poke fun and make illicit jokes and things like that, that people are like, is that HR compliant? I’m like, definitely not, for sure. You should talk to them but they work for me so I guess it doesn’t really matter. So that side but I think it depends on the stakes and how far in a deficit people are.
So like high performers, I think like me in general. Like I’m super encouraging, I’m very rewarding, telling great job, et cetera. I want to create an environment where people can win and if you win, you will love me and if you don’t win, you will be very uncomfortable.
And so I see the job of the manager is to create the best possible environment for the best performers and a terrible environment for low performers. And a lot of people don’t like the second half of that. Are you flirting with me? That is, I’m in for that.
And so I want, and I think a problem that has happened in a lot of management, I think some of this is in the woke-ism stuff, is like the idea that we should accommodate everyone. And I heard this from, I can’t remember where I heard it, but it was like.
This company is a dangerous place to work. And I just love that saying. Now, I don’t think, like Layla would probably be like, you know, shiver, would be not happy with me saying this, but I want a place where winners want to win. And I want to build a company where ambitious people can build world-class products.
And whether your product is consistently delivering a sales script, or it’s making amazing content, or it’s just the actual companies themselves, if you’re an entrepreneur, like, I want to create an environment where ambitious people can build world-class companies. And if I believe that, which I do, then my actions need to be aligned with that, which means that if you don’t like metrics, if you don’t like being held accountable to your performance, if you would rather have a political environment where people jockey and backstab and gossip, this is not the place for you, because I will root that out quickly and ruthlessly.
I prefer, in my opinion, the perfect organization has zero managers. Hypothetical ideal. Of course, you need to align people’s, I mean, in that hypothetical ideal, everyone works, period. That’s all they do, is they produce.
And so if that’s the hypothetical ideal, then every layer of management fundamentally acts as waste. Now, we have to orient that behavior so that it’s aligned within whatever the objectives of the department or the company are, but that should be the only real role. And rewarding people who do well and providing feedback for people to improve.
And so I see fundamentally that as the role of the manager. And that means that the manager, most of the times, also should probably work on stuff besides, like, I do all this stuff, and if we see a good manager, then they should increase the overall output of the team.
Now, if I add a manager and performance stays flat, then I don’t need you. I could not have a manager and performance stay flat, right? Like, and if performance goes down, even worse. And where I hate is the outside cause, you know, pointing outside to external circumstances.
I tell the story of COVID to my company as well, which is, hey, if we have a company that relies on financing, let’s say you’re in home remodeling, whatever. So financing is a big part of our car sales. Hey, credit, you know, you know, interest rates are higher, it’s harder for us to do sales, can we control that?
No, why are you talking about it? It’s just a very easy razor to drive. But what can we control? Well, good more for us, because other guys are all like they all have all these disadvantages.
We don’t live with it. They do, because they’ll talk about it, we won’t. And I think the world needs a little hardcore. And I’m okay being that.
I love that. As always, my friend, it is wonderful to have you where can people follow along for the hardcore? Um, if you listen to podcasts, then I have a podcast called the game. You can check that out.
I have I think it’s like 580 something, you’ll probably find it I have two books that I give away for free on my podcast $100 million offers $100 million lead. So it’s dollar sign 100 M and then offers dollar sign 100 M leads. Those are the book titles. They’re on Amazon, too, if you like like physical copies, but they’re free if you if you like consuming them.
And if you still can’t find it, just Google it and you’ll find it on my podcast. That’s probably the best thing you can do. And if you’re on YouTube, then you can you can check out the videos on YouTube. I love it.
I have encouraged people to do so. And speaking of things I encourage you to do if you have not already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends be legendary. Take care of peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more.