E200: 21 Harsh Truths Nobody Will Ever Tell You - Alex Hormozi

In this episode of How I Invest, I’m joined by Alex Hormozi — entrepreneur, investor, and founder of Acquisition.com — to unpack the mindset and methods that have fueled his success across multiple industries. We dive deep into why entrepreneurship is more a “game of the heart” than the mind, the power of compounding skills, the dangers of “ignorance debt,” and how to strategically decide whether to build skills yourself or bring in outside talent. Alex shares candid stories from his career — from building gyms to scaling software companies — and offers sharp insights on persistence, focus, and eliminating distractions to win long-term. We also explore the nuances of goal setting, why tiny incremental improvements matter when scaled to millions, and the art of building high-value peer networks. Whether you’re an aspiring founder, seasoned operator, or investor, you’ll walk away with concrete frameworks to increase your odds of success — and the conviction to keep playing the game long enough to win.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  What is something that billionaires do that would surprise the majority of the population?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Is they would probably be surprised by the level of agency that billionaires will demonstrate. Like they're, they come up to their own conclusions on their own. And if everyone disagrees with them, then great, because they got there by disagreeing with the masses. And so like, you can't have an exceptional outcome and also do what everyone else does. Like, it's such an underappreciated, underestimated component of success to get outsized returns. If you only believe what you believe or act in the way that you act because of other people's approval, or it was because someone else's idea, it's very difficult to maintain conviction for an extended period of time. And so if you find yourself waffling, it's simply because the ideas that you're adhering to are not your own.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  If the whole world shouts at you that two plus two was five, and if you know that there's a big pile of money, then you're almost excited that most people don't agree with you because you're like, it's just gonna mean a bigger pot at the end.

• 1:00David Weisburd?

  Alex, welcome back.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:03David Weisburd?

  You say that entrepreneurship is a game of the heart, not the head. What do you mean by that?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  I suppose everything could be boiled down to skills, but the ability to continue to persist, some people would probably think of this as a spiritual battle, if you want to use, you know, that language. But fundamentally, just learning to have a long extinction curve on behaviors, which is like, you know, many people would never knock, and then a huge amount of people will knock maybe once. But then very few will knock 100 times in a row after a door not being opened. And I think that that's what it takes. Because if you think about two natural extremes, I think about this a lot, like, okay, let's just take this to the natural extreme. It's like, well, if you have somebody who's absolutely brilliant and another person who's absolutely 100% determined, I think, it might have been actually Andreessen, we were talking about this earlier.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  It's like, if you, actually, there's Horwitz, but like, you start taking points from determination, and very quickly, you've just got this philosopher who does nothing, right? On the other hand, you take a few points of intelligence and you can keep taking points away, and this guy's going to win. And so I think about that as like, if you only had two things, which is get better, don't stop. Winning becomes guaranteed. It's just expanding the time horizon long enough to allow the wind to occur. And so if we think about entrepreneurship as the infinite game, then the only goal is to not stop playing, which is why I think it's more of a game of the heart than the mind.

• 2:32David Weisburd?

  Why do you think human beings systematically underappreciate how long it takes for them to be successful?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  I think it's because time is actually really difficult to observe. So if you think about like, I've been thinking about this a lot with regards to like, why is it that when people come in person to work with Leila and I, the the speed of behavior change is so rapid and they're able to assimilate traits very quickly from us, whereas remotely it's more difficult. And I think it's like, like, for example, consistency is something that's incredibly important for most human endeavors. But you can't witness consistency unless you're with someone consistently. Right? Like, if you see someone practice, like, you can't do a montage of consistency. You can't really experience it in 10 seconds. It actually has to like, you have to experience consistency with time. And I think that's why it's so hard,

• 3:23Speaker 01

  because the parts where people take pictures are the beginning and the end. But the middle is where the race is won, and that's on your own. And I think that's why it's so hard for people to transfer, like, for that skill to transfer, which is why sometimes it's like, you know, I learned this from my dad. I just saw him every single day, just going in. Because like, that kind of proximity is, I think, the only thing that gives you kind of a window into the reality.

• 3:41David Weisburd?

  What other skills or advantages accrue to those that are around excellence?

• 3:50Speaker 01

  So Angela Duckworth wrote this book called Grit. You might have read it. What I thought was really like, one of the most interesting things I thought about the book was, if you want to win, join a winning team. Right? It's because there's so many, so many micro behaviors that exist on a team that just become standard practice. And there's already reinforcers in place for, you know, reward and punishment for all of these behaviors, which is why that team's a winning team, that you kind of by default learn to do 100 small skills in order to be successful overall.

• 4:19David Weisburd?

  How do you know what you don't know? This ignorance that that you talk about?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. I mean, I spent, I spent, I spend all the time and all the money that I have to try and solve ignorance debt. And so I don't, I don't know if there's a solution besides like trying to talk to people who are ahead of you, who can help you look around corners and being, it's, it's, I think, I think advice is one of the hardest things to even think about because so much advice is wrong because people lack context, right? Or they have misaligned incentives, which is huge. Either they like, like context, they lack competence or lack incentive. And if you have any of those three that are off, the advice is not necessarily good. And so, and that's, it's common to have at least one of those three off. And so it's like, advice is so tough. Because at some points, like you have to have a, a parallel kind of engine that's like, I have to be willing to take

• 5:12Speaker 01

  advice, but I have to run it through some sort of filter that I'm responsible for, which, you know, typically would be some sort of, you know, first principles reasoning of like, does this make sense, given the things that I absolutely know to be true? And a lot of people can't bridge that gap. And so there are some people actually do have maxed out execution, but the problem is they change direction so quickly because they will just listen to different people who give them different advice that's conflicting. And not because anybody has bad intentions, but just because they either aren't competent enough, or they don't have enough context, or both.

• 5:39David Weisburd?

  And human beings are wired, they learn from people with higher social status. They look, somebody achieves some kind of skill and they listen to that person. Tell me about that. And how does that act as a guide to contextualize information?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  So really interesting question. Because it's, so I think it's, it's like, what, so I think many people give advice. Some people's advice is listened to more than others, which we could ladder up to, like, some people have more influence than others. And then it's, then what, then what are the things that create influence that make your advice more likely to be followed than others? And so you have status, which is somebody who, who is controlling reinforcers. So if you have money, you have fame, you have something that other people want and you control that, and that gives you status in any, in any situation, right? Like if you're a bartender in the bar, you have status because you control scarce resource. As soon as you walk out of the bar, your status disappears. But right

• 6:37Speaker 01

  in the bar, you have power, or sorry, excuse me, status. You've got credibility, which is that you've said something that would occur and then it does occur. You have power, which is say do correspondence, which essentially like. If I say, hey, follow this recipe and this is gonna happen and it's a good thing. And then someone follows the recipe and then that happens. Then they're more likely to adhere to instruction later. And then finally of likeness, which is how similar are we? Like, I'll tell you a story. So I had, so we had a small event at our headquarters. And there's a logging company, like loggers, like lumberjacks. And the guy comes up to me, the guy who's running it. And he's like, dude, I've grown this thing from, you know, $2 million a year to 13.9 million in the last four years, just listening exclusively to your content.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And I was like, that's awesome. And he said, is there any way we can get a picture? And so I was, I was, before I like had a chance to answer. He said, just because you have a hardcore following in the logging community. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, we're all Mozy Nation. But it was like, it was like dead serious. And I remember thinking about that and I was like, well, that makes sense. I was like, I look and dress like this. I was like, I have such similar likeness. You're like, just like I had that as a baseline. And then that's like for the whole community. And then the other three above that, it's like, do I control some sort of, you know, reinforces they want, which might be fame or money? Sure, I've got that. And it's like, okay, have I done, did he do things that I told him to do? And good things happened?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yes. So I power that was checked off. And so it's like, you can look through that as your litmus test to how much, how much people or a specific person will adhere to your directives. Based on that criteria. And so that's kind of how I like reverse engineered that of like, okay, how much influence do I have in a given context?

• 8:24David Weisburd?

  And there's a fifth column, which is truly first principles thinkers, being able to take in information that you're giving.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:31David Weisburd?

  Apply kind of pattern matching to their own experience and saying, this guy knows what he's talking about.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see this as just like, this is the psychology side, the soft human side of human behavior. And then there's the physics, that's kind of like the art and the science. Like, and then there's the physics side of like, well, if we want to boil water and we want to boil water at 100 degrees, it's not gonna happen. So if that's what was required to get this water over there and has to be boiling, it's only 100, like, it's not gonna happen.

• 8:57David Weisburd?

  Because I found a really interesting and almost paradoxical. The your mozy nation in Silicon Valley is mostly the super successful entrepreneurs and the billionaire venture capitalists. And the reason, my theory for that, is they're able to appreciate your first principles thinking despite maybe a a pattern matching. That does not match the Evan Spiegel and the Mark Zuckerberg. It is something that we've seen me and my partner Curtis see it all the time. The smartest people are like, yeah, I love I love Hermosy. I listen to all this stuff. And the other people are inadvertently saying, well, I don't love the titles. I don't love the packaging. Like, it doesn't pattern match to what I think is a great first principles.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Well, that just made my day. So great. I'm glad the billionaires in the VC world like my stuff.

• 9:46David Weisburd?

  So we alluded to ignorance debt.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:49David Weisburd?

  What is ignorance debt?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Really good question. I haven't defined it, and I should have. I would say it's the delta between the behavior that maximizes your trajectory towards a goal compared to your current behavior set. And so the discrepancy between those two things is the amount of the debt. And so obviously, it's hypothetical because to some degree, like, no one knows besides God or whatever your creator being is of what the perfect move is. But that delta, I think, represents like where you're at now versus what you should be doing. And so I see ignorance as the difference between actual and should.

• 10:35David Weisburd?

  Another way that I look at it is the unknown unknown. And what tools or measures can you use to know how much ignorance debt you have in a specific domain?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Man, these are really good questions.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  My first initial thought response to that was how far away you are from the top. Honestly, like if somebody's like, I know everything about this and yet they don't have any proof that they have skills. They have no evidence, then it's tough to say like, like I, people will probably dislike this, but I, I do think that people who are wealthier of the subset of human beings who would like to make money, whatever subset of. So if that is the goal, the people who are poorer have a less accurate view of reality. And so that distortion impairs their ability to get what they want because they take actions that they believe wield the outcome

• 11:33Speaker 01

  that they want, and then it doesn't. And so I see, that's why I like entrepreneurship in general, because you have absolute objective feedback from the marketplace and it's also typically very quick. And so you have so many more feedback loops, which is tougher when you're starting out to not have this feedback loops unless you're just trying to start something for you, right? But all that to say, like, how do you, how do you know how big your industry is? It's just typically the earlier in your journey you are, the bigger it is. Typically, and the further away you are from the top of whatever endeavor you're going after, the bigger it is. The only caveat there is time because some people are on the right path. They just haven't given enough time.

• 12:09David Weisburd?

  Sometimes they're growing extremely fast. They may not be a billionaire, but they're making millions of dollars every month. And they're, they're on the same path. They might even be growing quicker in wealth than the billionaire who's accumulated it.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And this is where it's really nasty. So there's, have you heard of the pasta tower exercise?

• 12:26David Weisburd?

  No.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Okay. So basically it's like you, you take pasta, you have, you know, marshmallows, gum, whatever it is, right? You get a couple of things and you have to build a pasta tower as tall as you can in like 60 seconds. And when you, when you do it, if you stop the clock, there's a number of questions that happen afterwards, right? Which is like. If I give you 10 minutes, would you have built it differently? Okay, if we had to build it to as tall as this building, what would you have done differently? Right? And so there's a lot of like sub lessons that I think come from it. But basically, like, the fastest way to build a $10 million business is not the fastest way to build a billion dollar business. And so that's where it gets really, where it gets more and more nuanced, right? So it's like, okay, well, I'm 20 and I'm doing $10 million a year.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  That may mean that you have something that could become a billion dollars. Or it might mean that it's something that isn't really going to make more than $30 million a year because of the nature of how the business was set up. So it's like, what foundation do we have underneath the building?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  That were, that were, is it, is aligned with the, kind of like the footprint of what would then eventually become this ultimate thing? And so how do you recognize that when you don't know?

• 13:33David Weisburd?

  There's a concept in Silicon Valley called a zero million dollar business and a zero billion dollar business. It's that same foundation.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:40David Weisburd?

  And I think a lot of people think they're, they're going to make a million, then five million, then 10 million. But if you look at OpenAI, some would argue they're not making any money. But yet they're valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. And maybe they still will end up not making money. But that is the roadmap to making a trillion dollars versus just scaling kind of incrementally.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Totally. And I think the only tough part that I think, not only there's plenty of tough parts, but for, for newer entrepreneurs is, is the context of the advice that's being given, right? So like, if I'm, if you're talking software and billion dollar, trillion dollar companies, like, there's a whole set of advice that makes sense here. If you were trying to scale a lawn care service business, a lot of that advice will actually be disadvantageous to what your ultimate goal is. And so I think that, that's again, that's that filter where how do you, how do you know what advice to listen to? What advice not to listen to? And a lot of times, because of the nature of the internet, you can't give context because it kills the clip's reach. And so you, like, I think that that layer of being able to judge becomes increasingly important

• 14:44Speaker 01

  as the context is increasingly removed from most content that we consume, or at least that gets massive reach.

• 14:52David Weisburd?

  So the truly niche knowledge is not being shared and memed across the ecosystem. So you have to find in other ways. One way is that I look at ignorance debt. Is if you want to learn how to be a top YouTuber, you go and spend time with the top 10 YouTubers and they will tell you the unknown unknown.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 15:13David Weisburd?

  So you probably don't know ahead of time what you're not doing. But they basically being around people that have actually done it are the ones that'll that'll unchow. Otherwise, it's very difficult to know the unknown unknown.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Super hard. And, you know, so I was a management consultant before I entered this new life that I have. But one of the ways that whenever we'd enter a new field where, you know, I'm 20 something years old, trying to learn about space, cyber and intelligence in the military and make a recommendation to the military, which is absurd, right? As a 21 year old. Right. So it's like, how do you, how do you become competent at something really quickly? And so the method that we always use, I think the consulting method is, you know, we would, we'd ask the person who gave us the, the, the project, who are the five smartest people that you know about this particular issue? And then we'd ask every one of those five people, every question we could possibly think of, like, give us the understanding of the whole space, blah, blah, blah. We go all the way through it. And at the very end, we'd say, who are the five smartest people that you know about this? And so eventually we'd ask, we'd interview every single one of those people.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And by your 20th or 30th of these interviews, like, you have a pretty good feel for what's going on. And then when someone says something, you're like, but, you know, so and so said this. And how do you feel? And like, you can start kind of mapping the network. And eventually you ask for five friends until the names become the same. Like, it's the same names. I've already talked to him, I already talked to him. And so whenever I want to do research on like a new industry, that typically is how I do it. I still use the same exact method I did there. It's just faster now because I can just pick an Instagram story and people can reach out. But like, when I wanted to learn about like banking and payments and credit cards, because I was looking at investing in something there.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  I, I did exactly that method over two weeks. I had like 30 conversations with people that had exited between 30 and 3 billion. And I, I learned so much and I was like, oh, okay. I know I don't want to enter this space. This sounds more interesting than what I originally thought. But you don't know that going in because you're just, you have a blank slate. No context.

• 17:03David Weisburd?

  The only change to being around those people is you could always delete or add things based on your own personality and what you naturally want to do. People are kind of have this fear that they're going to become this person just because they learned whatever behaviors they're, they're using. And I think that's limiting. Let's talk about a topic we're both really obsessed with, compounding.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:26David Weisburd?

  So why is it so hard for people to compound their skills?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  So compounding skills, I'm trying to think about how to clearly define it for the audience. I would probably say it's when multiple skills, when used together, create an outsized outcome compared to either of the skills used independently, just so we have a basis for talking. But beyond that, I think, I think part of the difficulty is that you do not know what you're going to yield and, and the perspective change that's going to occur after you have a new skill that you don't have yet. And so it's like, if you understand accounting and then you learn e-commerce, it's like, oh, this makes like, you, you don't know what you were going to know. It's a very unknown unknown, right? Similar, similar context we were talking about earlier.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And so that's in terms of like, why do I think it's difficult people to imagine the upside potential of having multiple skills that stack together? I give this example all the time, but like, you think about like Jay-Z, right? Yeah. So in the beginning, he might've had a base level of like, call it rhythm. That was like his, what he, maybe he was naturally inclined that way. And then he started developing, you know, beats and that was a skill that he, you know, figured out. And then he started, you know, rapping and then that became a skill. And then from there, he learned how to promote. And it's like, okay, that's, that's a much more valuable, you know, he, if he only knew how to promote and didn't have rap, but like he, it wouldn't have been nearly as valuable of a skill, but having both makes him a super successful rapper.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  But then after that, it's like, okay, well then he had to learn how to recruit other artists and musicians. And so it's like, okay, well recruiting is a different skill than promoting, you know, publicly and doing deals is another skill. And so all of a sudden, it's like these skills when stacked together become a label, right? And then that becomes the next thing that he's able to do. But a lot of times, like you can only, you can only, and this is Steve Jobs, but you can only connect the dots in reverse. And I think the one thing that I would say is consistent among the people that I, that I frequent who are hyper successful is that they're just intensely curious about things in general. And so. I'll see somebody who's a billionaire have a conversation with somebody who makes, I'm just, I'm only using money here as a, you know, to, to show the stark contrast.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  But, you know, somebody makes 80,000 dollars a year, you know, fixing lights, whatever. And they'll find a way to extract information from this person and be like, so how does that work? So tell me more about that. And they'll still be able to, at the end of that conversation, be better off than they were prior. And I think they're kind of bloodhounds for, for knowledge. And I'd say that that is, that is probably like just something that I have witnessed. But like, why is it so difficult for people to, to do compounding? There's the obvious answer, which is patience. And the other is that they don't understand the upside.

• 20:19David Weisburd?

  How do you balance compounding of skills with becoming a master in one skill?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  It's really good. Well, you know, I would say that the difference between those two things is really just comes down to how narrowly we define the domain. So it's like, let's say you want to be a quote, master at business. It's like, well, there's so many skills there. It's like you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got recruiting, you've got finance. Like, there's so many things.

• 20:43David Weisburd?

  So compounding becomes part of the mastery.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, so which, yeah, so where, where, where's the, the skill versus going, you know, super deep on biotech? Right? Now, in the world of biotech and going deep on anything, it feels like you're still, like, the deeper you go in something, the more you feel like you don't know anything. And I certainly feel that way constantly.

• 21:05David Weisburd?

  Curse of ignorance, the curse of knowledge.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  I, I was like, I have this, we have this big marketing that's gonna, it's gonna, well, my, my next book's gonna come out and I have some, some big plans for it. And I think it's gonna do big stuff. And I was already like playing out like what I thought I'd be able to say afterwards, which is like, this is my letter to the internet. I still don't understand marketing that well. Like, I just feel like there's so much that I honestly have no idea about.

• 21:28David Weisburd?

  Is it because you don't understand the details or are you still missing some of the bigger picture areas?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  I think it's just like, there's so many things, it's just like, when I think about what has gotten me success with marketing has been like, there's probably maybe like 15 rules that I pretty much follow and the rest is just like, let's, like, the amount of times that have been like, this is gonna be a winner and it bombs. And something that we do in five seconds as like a last second thought ends up being the, the home run advertisement or, you know, an email that just crushes compared to another one. I just, I have, I, I've been, I've been wrong so many times that I have like zero ego when it comes to marketing.

• 22:07David Weisburd?

  It's interesting because a lot of people will discount and say that's just probabilistic, but it isn't. When you put out a new video,

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:15David Weisburd?

  hundreds of thousands of people are telling you this is a 5.2% click through versus 7.2. It, it is not probabilistic. It's just the wrong answer.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:23David Weisburd?

  Meaning there's some kind of ignorance debt there.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 22:27David Weisburd?

  How could, how could there be an ignorance debt after you've done something so many times?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That's what, drives me, drives me nuts. But like, so to this point though, it's like, so I see prediction and control as the same thing. Equals, equal opposites at the same point. Like if you can, if you could predict something with absolute certainty, provided you have influence over the variables, then you can control the outcome, right? And I see that as like intensely cool.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  But like first, let's say a sales conversation, right? If we have one person here, I do believe that there is something that could occur that would create a hundred percent closed rate process. The problem is it just might not be worth creating that process because some people might have to go back to their childhood and re-educate them on, you know, elementary math in order to get them to understand this concept or whatever it is, right? So there's a certain amount of education that has to occur in order to get someone to change their behavior, or at least the way that we want. I'm gonna loop this back to the, the marketing thing.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  But I see, like, sales is just increasing the likelihood that somebody purchases, right, within a conversation. And so, marketing serves more or less the same function, just done one to many. The amount of variables that exist in marketing. I don't think anyone has even come close. I mean, maybe AI will, but like, human beings, like, I don't think any humans have come close to quantifying every single variable that exists. And so, we can say, here's 15 things that I know always work. Like, fast will pretty much always beat slow.

• 23:53David Weisburd?

  So you can control like 70% of the variability, and then there's 30% variance.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, it's perfect. You got to exactly where I was going, which is like, if there's a thousand variables, it's like, maybe the 15 that we know that are the chunky ones, it's like, maybe that gets a 60% of the way, and then we still roll the dice, and it's just our downside's truncated. And I think it's just, over time, we just continue to move up the median. At least from a content, from an organic content marketing perspective. But the same thing, you know, same thing with paid ads, just different beast.

• 24:24David Weisburd?

  Said another way, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So you are the one-eyed man.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just willing to take.

• 24:31David Weisburd?

  Which is a high compliment.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm honored.

• 24:33David Weisburd?

  So, there's compounding of skills, there's also the compounding that accrues to somebody that sticks to a domain.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:41David Weisburd?

  Why do people systematically underestimate that? And why can't people stick with one thing for many years?

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Man. These are all hard hitters. So, I think that luck, surface area, is something that, it's a very, you know, kitschy term. Basically, if you have, if you have, if you think about,

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I'm gonna draw a little analogy, and I think it'll make sense. But like, if you think about intelligence as accuracy, and determination as the number of shots you take as you're shooting a target, then it's great to be intelligent. But if I had to pick between unlimited shots and perfect aim, I would rather have unlimited shots. Right? And so, the idea of the luck surface area there is like, if we're shooting at least in this direct, like, this general direction, eventually, one of my arrows is gonna hit the target, and on a long enough time horizon, one of them's gonna hit the bullseye. And so- The advantage of sticking with things is that you tip luck in your favor. You just are around for more things to occur.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  And by basically the same concept of this, there's a certain level of variability. That's going to always occur just within business, chance, whatever. But if we're there the whole time, it's like we give, we give luck time to happen. Rather than like, if you try to quote time things, it's like you're, you almost never get it. But if you're there the whole time, then luck occurs. And so, and those, those lucky breaks are the ones that typically like define people's careers. It's just, you just don't know when it happens. I mean, Ogilvy talked about this all the time where he said like, um, you know, I've wasted, uh, you know, 90% of my advertising dollars. He's like, I just don't know which ones, right? Like to say, it's like the vast majority of the things that we do in our careers are not going to actually make a meaningful difference. And then a very small percentage make all the difference in the world.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  You just don't know which one it's going to be, which means that you just want to maximize the likelihood that it occurs.

• 26:39David Weisburd?

  But in business, you internalize, once you get a hit, you internalize there. You're like, oh, I said this line in the sales script. Now I could scale it across all my salespeople.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 26:50David Weisburd?

  So you do know in this, in most cases of business, it just, you don't know when your next knowing is going to come.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the next big breakthrough. And I think that's like kind of that, that truncated downside risk. It's like, um, I used to say this a lot, but like the bottom floor of the building of your opportunities continues to get higher. So like when I, when I quit my job, when I was in my early twenties, my plan B, if my gym didn't work was going to be, I was going to drive Uber and strip. And so that's a pretty, you know, that's, that was kind of a baseline, you know, floor of the building. Once I learned how to sell, I was like, okay, well, the absolute worst case scenario here is I can keep my clothes on. And I don't have to work, you know, 18 hours or I probably still work 18 hours, but now I can sell cars, right? I can sell some that's like high, high velocity. I could, I could probably make $400, $500,000 a year just being top, top car salesman. Okay. So that's now my baseline.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  And then once I learned how to advertise and get leads, then it was like, oh, okay. Multiple millions of dollars a year is kind of like the baseline. It doesn't really matter what place I'm going. If you know how to market and you know how to sell. You can drive business, you're a rainmaker fundamentally. And so it's so like the bottom floor of that building. Because like when people are like, you know, if you lost all of your reputation and all these things and you had no money, like, what would you do? I'm like, I've had that happen twice and I'll tell you what I did. Like, I don't have to do it as a hypothetical, I'll tell you exactly what I did. Right, like, I went to a business owner and I said, hey, I'll bring you business. Let me keep whatever I kill. And then you get customers for free. And most business owners say, sure, zero CAC, sounds good. And then that's it. And I've done, I've done, that's what I did both times. And I was able to just restart and generate cash quickly. And that was a few years into my career.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  That was after I already had the marketing hat. So I didn't have to go back to, you know, doing car sales or something like that, so.

• 28:31David Weisburd?

  I've heard you use this analogy of levels. Once you learn how to pass and beat the level one boss and the level two boss, you could quickly get to that level three and then you start from there.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's tough because I think to circle back to the question you had earlier about why do people struggle with this? And I think it's because you get, it's, it feels good to win, right? And, and losing sucks. And so if you know how to beat level one, two, three, and you get stuck on level four, there's a big part of you that after a sustained period of time of not beating level four, you're like, you know what, I'm just gonna start a new character and I'm gonna play the game slightly differently this time. And you, and then the thing is, is you have a rapid feedback loop of things going well because you're probably better and you, you breeze through one, two and three again. But then you hit four, then you're still there. But now four is hard because you're still battling level four on the other one. Typically, because you usually, because most people don't completely stop doing one thing.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  They try to chase too many, too many rabbits. And then they catch none. And so I'd say the single, at least for me, the single hardest thing about entrepreneurship is, is focus. Which I kind of see as like the, the embodiment of commitment, which is the elimination of alternatives. Like, that's how I, like, how do you commit? You eliminate alternatives. Like, the most focused person in the world does nothing but that thing. Like, if we, if we had to like a map, the most focused person, most focused video game player, does nothing but play video games. And, and that would be, okay, well, the most focused person who plays video games would die. Right, so then how, how much extra stuff do we need to introduce just to make sure he doesn't die? So he has to eat, he's gotta sleep, he's gotta, he's gotta drink water.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  And then he's the most focused video game. If he has a girlfriend, he's not as focused. Somebody doesn't have a girlfriend. If he works out, it's not as focused, right? So it's like, how do we get it so that? So if we think about that as the pinnacle of focus, then the idea of all these productivity hacks is just like, in my opinion, we had a little chat, you know, joke this morning about it. It was like a complete and utter waste of time. Like, people are like, how do I want to focus more? It's like, but focusing more is about doing, is about removing everything that isn't the thing you want to focus on, not doing something else. Like, it's such an American idea to add something in order to try and get more of something.

• 30:44David Weisburd?

  And you say the number one productivity hack is to say no?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the cheapest one, too.

• 30:51David Weisburd?

  So going back to this video game analogy, you're on level four. You get tired of losing. You start level one, level two, level three.

• 31:01David Weisburd?

  Certainly in some skills like management or fundraising or leadership, you have to beat level four. But is there sometimes another game that you could play where there is no level four and you just go level five?

• 31:18Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. I think it's basically like, what is, you know, what's the constraint? What's the constraint of the system? For most entrepreneurs, they are the constraint of the system. But fundamentally, a business has to have these functions occur. And if you were the only entrepreneur in the business or only founder, sometimes there are for sure like key people who can come in and can help you out. But if these things must occur, then like, let's say you get to a point where you need to get more leads for your business. Just keep it simple, right? Okay, if I don't know how to advertise, advertising must occur. It has to happen in some way, in some form. And so if I never learned the skill, then the only option I have is to go recruit somebody who has the skill. But what if I don't have the skill of recruiting? Now, maybe the level four boss becomes a level 4.5 or a 4B, right?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Which is, okay, well, I can get over this bridge multiple ways.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Which is actually really interesting because this is something I've been thinking a lot about, which is, it's actually loops back to what we were talking about with advice.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  There for sure is bad advice, for sure. But I think there's also a lot of good advice that is half-heartedly executed, which then makes it into irrelevant advice because the execution nullifies the effect. And so I, as somebody who gets asked for advice, I have increasingly spent my time on how do I increase this person's conviction around the advice and less on the advice itself. Because if we use the analogy of a mountain, there typically are multiple ways up the mountain. Like you could make this thing a super viral product. You could also have a super heavy sales team and marketing. Obviously depends on the goal size, right? But like, let's say somebody has a modest goal of hitting a million dollars a year,

• 33:02Speaker 01

  or 10 million dollars a year, or whatever it is. Not a trillion dollar company. Sure, that'll have a more defined path. But if someone wants to make a 10 million dollar a year business, it's like, you could do that a lot of ways. But no matter what way you pick, you have to be committed to it. And so it's like, what are the few things that must be true, right? That you have to be committed to, you have to be focused on whatever that thing is. So you can get good enough at it, you can get deep enough into it that you can actually like break through level five of paid ads, of organic. But if you're, if someone were to say, how do I market this? Like, how do we market this podcast hypothetically, right? Well, we could run ads, right? We could go find affiliates who have audiences already and then see if there's a way that we could partner with them, have them promote it, or come on, whatever.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  We could, we could just get better at the organic game itself and get really into the nitty-gritty of like retention curves and packaging, click-through rates, all that stuff, right? And we could go on, right? These are all these different ways. And so could all of these things result in the views of this going up? Yes. And so if someone says, which one should I do? All of them would work. But they will only work if you do. So then, then the problem to solve is which one of these things does the person have the highest conviction on and the largest percent of existing skills. So it said in the inverse, the smallest skilled deficiency between proficiency and where they're currently at. And so that is typically what my follow up questions will be. Well, have you ever

• 34:27Speaker 01

  made videos before? Do you know a lot about this? Do you have you ever run media before? Have you ever done paid ads? Do you know anybody who's run paid ads? Like, are you a natural networker? It's like, oh, I'm a national networker. It's like, boom, this is going to be the highest likelihood path. All of these work. And so it's like two people ask Alex who both have podcasts, the same question, how to promote podcasts. And then there's different answers. It's like, well, because they're different entrepreneurs. And so I want to have the shortest gap between where they are and what would be proficient in order for them to get up the mountain. So that's

• 34:55David Weisburd?

  I also think there's like a consciously understanding that you can't pass this level and subconsciously going to the next shiny object. And to give you two counter examples to having to pass the level, the most extreme, Mark Zuckerberg. I don't know if you saw any clips with him and Theo, but he still sounds like a robot. He still has no personality. And yet he hasn't kept that from building a trillion dollar company. Sam Altman realizes he's a genius strategist, has all these skills, OpenAI. He realizes he sucks at hardware. He just paid six and a half billion dollars for Johnny I. That's not going to be a limit for him. So there is a power to knowing which levels to play and which characters you want to play in those levels as well.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it comes down to like, what functions must occur? And then it is my job to make sure that those functions happen. Now, the cheapest way, not the fastest, the cheapest way is to learn them yourself. Right? And so then you become increasingly stacked with all of these different skills so that you can solve them or your problems in the business. But if there's a gigantic skill that like, I will probably never be the person who's head of finance in terms of like, operational finance. Like, I'm not going to run the P and Ls and all that. Like, I'm just, I'm not going to do that. But somebody should, we have to have that. Right? And so but like, I could go learn how to do that. It's just but like, it's easier for me to go find somebody else. And so I think we're basically, it's buy or build, but don't on an equals one.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Am I going to buy this and bring Johnny Ivy in? Right? Or am I going to build this within myself? Or within, obviously, somebody else, if you want to train up the team. But if we're assuming we're trying to go fast, then no. Am I going to try and learn it? Or am I going to bring somebody else in?

• 36:34David Weisburd?

  You you just alluded to this, the smallest deficiency in skills.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:40David Weisburd?

  It's the one concept, I've talked to many people about this. You have a very controversial view that I haven't been able to square.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:47David Weisburd?

  And the idea that you could teach somebody culture and teach somebody personality, personality traits versus skills versus hard skills. Have you ever seen that executed outside of acquisition.com? And how do you teach a 50 year old how to change their behavior?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Oh, so, okay, a couple, couple of things here just for defining terms. So hard skills, soft skills, I see those the exact same thing. They're just words that people use, but they are fundamentally changes in behavior. So across the board, thing number one.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  And how do you change a 50 year old's behavior? It will take longer. They're less plastic. But nonetheless, they're still still teachable on a long enough time. Right, because the thing is, some people, so everyone is teachable. The question is, is it worth it? And that, no, that's, that's actually the real, that's the organizational question. It's like buy or build is an ROI decision, right? Like, should I buy this and what's the likelihood of success and and somebody coming in? Or, you know, immersion into the business versus me, you know, building this capacity internally? How much does it cost in both time and money? Right? And a lot of that's going to come down to your efficacy at transferring skills, at teaching somebody else how to do something. And so, what part, so what part was controversial? I'm like, I'm so curious.

• 38:01David Weisburd?

  The controversial part is, is you don't work, so at acquisition.com, you recruit for people that want to develop themselves. So you have a very special culture. But for the average business, if somebody, if CFO comes to me and I want to put them in a public company.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 38:17David Weisburd?

  And I start telling him like, you should smile more, you should wave more. That's going to be a very difficult conversation.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:22David Weisburd?

  Is that practical? Or am I missing something? And how do you go about changing somebody's? What I would call soft skills, what you would call just another type of skills.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Just a bucket of term of.

• 38:32David Weisburd?

  A bucket of.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like here's 28 small, you know, things that you can do differently that will increase the likely people like you.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  So I think it would be awkward if I demanded every single person does this. I don't demand that everybody smiles. If if somebody has a problem where people are not listening to them, and I think that they do have the base skill set, but they're having like they're having difficulty with influencing their coworkers. Then I would probably say, okay, well, let me give you a remedial course on influence, which is here's six things that you're currently doing. That decrease the likely they listen to you. So if we reverse these six things, we'll increase the likely that that the desired outcome happens. Like, and the the the most difficult part about this is actually the the observation.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  It's. People will use a bucketed term to describe somebody else, right? They'll say this guy has a lot of charisma. But if you ask them, why does he have a lot of charisma? That is where people get in trouble because there's so many things you notice that you don't put words to typically, right? Like, we have a lot of good pattern recognition, you know, for like this has a threat. This guy, I don't know, he just gave me the wrong vibes, right? It just really means that he did things that remind me of other people who have wronged me. And I don't like and so being more conscious about it, this is where like watching game footage and things like that become incredibly valuable. Because you say like, he blinked a lot. And he was, you know, wringing his hands. Now, if somebody comes in and a lot of people in the office are saying, I don't know, this guy doesn't seem trustworthy.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  The question is, is this guy trustworthy? Or does he behave in ways that remind them of other people who are untrustworthy? Which are two different questions. And so if I just want to teach somebody how to act in a way that that decreases the likelihood that people call him untrustworthy, then I could say, hey, put your hands in your pockets. And do this instead, right? And so.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  We always hire for the smallest skill deficiency. And so the public CFO for sure is going to have to have a massive, you know, skill set that's going to take many, many years to develop, right? If I'm picking between two candidates and I've got a nice guy who doesn't know finance and a guy who's a killer at finance and he's not a nice guy, I can teach somebody to be amenable not that long, right? But teaching somebody finance is going to be a much bigger, a much bigger.

• 40:46David Weisburd?

  And this guy, the guy who's really good at finance, I might not, you rather hire a nice guy that's really good at finance, but if he's the guy you have, there is a way to change him.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Yes, and then again, all the, the thing about this is like, I think people hear this and think, oh, like Alex has a soft, like, let's go train everybody. It looks, no, 100% not at all. It's, it's an ROI decision. So I see the, the chief role of the entrepreneur is allocation of resources, period. That's what we're supposed to do. And I see strategy as prioritization of resources. So like, how are we prioritizing what we got? We have limited resources, unlimited stuff, and be able to make the decision to where you get the most bang for the buck. And so if we can have somebody who has, you know, tremendously, you know, deep finance, decides to finance savant, okay, great. Is the deficiency that he has in the interpersonal apartment something that's going to cost us our culture? And how little do I need to do to improve where he's at to make it at least not a negative? Right?

• 41:39Speaker 01

  And so that's, that's the, I think there's the basic calculus there that happens. Now, if somebody has like a massive ego, it's going to be tough because they're not going to be receptive to anything, which means what you see is what you get and you've got to be really happy with that.

• 41:52David Weisburd?

  There's also a difference between somebody that lacks self-awareness and somebody that knows that they're an asshole and is basically, doesn't care.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59David Weisburd?

  Thinks they're so good that they're not going to change.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, some people are like, I am an asshole and they have accepted that about themselves and some people had no idea that people thought they were an asshole and would love to change that. And I think the, like, the crux of that is, is, you know, maybe the difference between somebody you hire or don't.

• 42:14David Weisburd?

  You mentioned game footage for your last book launch. You practiced over 30 days. You did over 100 presentations of the presentation. You mentioned that early on you got a lot of benefit and then you were getting incremental benefits with each iteration. Why keep doing that? Why, why do 100 iterations of something where you're getting marginal returns?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  So my initial response is marginal returns are still returns. But beyond, and I think that most, most games are won at the edges, right? They're one in the margins. And so the benefits in most systems accrue to the person who's number one. And even if you're number one by a tenth of a second, you're still number one and you get a disproportionate amount of the gains. And so I've been rewarded so many times historically for just getting a tiny bit better with a shitload of work that I still, it's still worth it. So I have diminishing returns in skill, but gigantic absolute returns in, in what I get for getting that increment, that very small increment.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  And so to put math behind it, if I have, you know, 500,000 people who are signed up for, you know, the book launch, if I knew that there was going to be a stage that had 5,000 people, I'd probably prepare. Like, I'd probably prepare. Well, imagine 100 times that, where each increment is an entire stadium, you know, or gigantic arena of people. Well, if that's the case, then like, I will get a good return on that. Now, if I'm gonna have a presentation in front of 100 people, if I get 1% better, maybe it affects one more person, but if I get 1% better in front of 500,000 people, it's 5,000 people. And so it makes sense there. So it's like, again, it's an allocation of resources thing. I will prep that much because it's worth it. If it's not worth it, I'm not gonna do that kind of preparation.

• 44:02David Weisburd?

  So it's efficiency equals work over returns?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:07David Weisburd?

  So in other words, it's highly efficient, even though from the outside sounds, feels inefficient because you're just getting just a little bit better, but it's being magnified by it.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  It's relative versus absolute. So I had this, because we have this big, you know, book launch coming up and we're saying like, I won't share too much, but like, we have such big numbers that I'm expecting of people who are going to be coming because last one was awesome and this is the third book, you know?

• 44:31David Weisburd?

  Do you have a date for that?

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, August 16th.

• 44:33David Weisburd?

  Okay.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, just announced.

• 44:34David Weisburd?

  So it's not exactly on my wedding day, that's great.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's not exactly on your wedding day.

• 44:38David Weisburd?

  We'll try to make it out.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  And so the point, though, is that that if someone says, ah, that's going to be, you know, if we add that little, you know, an abandoned cart sequence for the book, like, ah, it sounds like work. It's like, dude, we're going to have a million people register. So 2% right is 20,000 more books sold, right? Which is, and I've got some goals that I have around the book that I'll share after the launch. But like, yeah, man, it's worth it. Like, except there's some businesses that do entire campaigns that don't even come close to that. Yes, we're gonna, we're gonna hit all the little crumbs. We're gonna hit all the little crumbs. Because the thing is, is when you have that much scale going through it, the crumbs become bakeries. And so, yeah, and I would say like, I tend to be a maximizer

• 45:24Speaker 01

  more than an optimizer in general.

• 45:27David Weisburd?

  And I want to double click on what you said. You want to share your goals after. Talk to me the pros and cons of sharing your goals ahead of when you're going to do them versus.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  It's a great question. I say, so I think of this is like, does sharing the goal, there's two components. So one is, or at least two components that I think of, which is, does sharing the goal increase the likelihood the goal occurs? And the second thing is, does sharing the goal give me some other benefit? So I think Babe Ruth calling a shot and then hitting the home run accrues a benefit to like, for him calling the shot. If he had just hit a home run, no one would remember it. And so there's other benefits. Now, does him calling the shot increase the likelihood that he hits the goal? On one hand, maybe his adrenaline spikes because now he has way higher stakes. On the other hand, maybe the pitcher pitches a little bit nastier too, and decreases the likelihood. So there's

• 46:17Speaker 01

  a little bit of, you know, there's, there's multiple variables at play. But I think that if I shared all the goals that I have around it, I don't know if it'd increase the likelihood. And for me, even if it's a null outcome, like it doesn't increase or decrease, for me, it would take this, take the spot of a different messaging that would increase the likelihood. And so by default, the opportunity cost of the headspace that it would take up to talk about it in the prospect of the audience's mind is not worth the real estate. I'd rather fill it with something that's more salient to them.

• 46:52David Weisburd?

  I know you hate the word manifestation.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Hate it, yeah. Well, the word I have no issues with.

• 46:57David Weisburd?

  But if I was to re, if I was to repack, and I agree with you, just for the record. If I was to repackage it into visualization.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:05David Weisburd?

  And also, comma, and, also bring up the fact that Michael Phelps visualizes, Michael Jordan visualizes, people that have accomplished great things use this tool of visualization. Is there a room for visualization?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  So I think visualization and manifestation are different. So we, I would have to define the terms, right? So like, and I've had a really tough time. So I've, I've probably gotten a handful of, like, heated, heated discussions about this. But I've yet to have anyone clearly define manifestation, manifestation for me. Which is why I, like, manifestation to me, as I define it, is a word that people say to other people that gets them to nod and give them approval for saying the word. And so.

• 47:46David Weisburd?

  And not, and also not take the actions that is required to actually get the outcome.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  And that's, and that's, and now, some people then go to, well, you have to change things in your mind before they, you know, occur in reality. And then I would just say, like, how do you know that? And what, what can we observe, right? So I just focus on the observable world and I pretty much ignore everything else. And it's been one of the most useful razors for, honestly, predicting reality much more accurately.

• 48:11David Weisburd?

  It's like evidence-based versus non-evidence-based.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 48:14David Weisburd?

  And where does visualization, obviously, you could probably run a scientific experiment, but it's not very evidence-based as there's.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  So that's a tough one, because I, I, I do think that there's a decent amount of evidence that, like, you can, like, like, if you practice free throws in your mind for, like, two hours.

• 48:32David Weisburd?

  I think there was a study on that.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  And then you do it, yeah.

• 48:34David Weisburd?

  There was a real study on that.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and your, your percentages go up.

• 48:37David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  And by, by like, almost more than if you just do, like, it's, and when you pair them, it gets, it gets crazy. And the visualization exercise, I think, is really interesting, especially for, like, athletes, because you have no joint wear and tear. And so it's risk-free upside. So, so again, I'm, I'm all for that. Now, me telling someone, hey, you have to visualize.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  How do I know they did it? Like, so this is where I get into like, I just try to focus on the things that I can see. And I'm trying to think like, in what, in what context would I say visualization is the thing that I would tell someone to do? Because they're not going to change reality until they interact with reality. And so that's why I just focus on that. So like, did visualization help people? Sure. And they still had to pick up the basketball and they still had to go do free throws too. And so I think that's the, that's the yin and yang of it. But for me, I just focus purely on what we can see. And I think it makes conversations so much easier.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  And I do owe a disproportionate amount of, I think, the accolades that I receive from content and whatnot, because I exclusively focus on that. And so people say things like, man, your content's so digestible. It's so easy to understand. It's because I just eliminate everything that is not observable. And then it becomes very clear. And that, I mean, that's the thing is.

• 50:04David Weisburd?

  It's repeatable.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  And people use words, people use words that other people don't understand. People use words that they themselves don't understand. And so it's like, if we can't even define the terms that we're talking about, what are we doing? We're just making noise at each other. And then one person nods, the other person nods. Neither person knows what they're talking about, but they've been rewarded for nodding and talking and making noise at one another for a long time in their lives. And so they keep doing it and that's fine. But it doesn't really change behavior. And so I'm very obsessed with what changes behavior. Because if I change behavior, then I change what happens in reality. And that has a high predictive function.

• 50:32David Weisburd?

  Which, by the way, circles back to what we were talking about earlier, which is if you hang out with you and watch you do content, you may realize what you thought was working hard on content is orders of magnitude away from what you're actually doing.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  You can't witness it. That's, that's, that's what's been, that's what's difficult. It's like, I can say, so there's a video that I'm putting on one of the pages for the book, kind of like marketing pages and whatnot, that I've now done nine times.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  And we have edited three versions of it. Three, like I've done nine recordings of it. We've edited it and had to edit it from scratch three times. And I saw the ninth version and I was like, ah, it's missing these two things. And so a lot of people probably would ship it and it probably would do fine. But. Again, 2% on a million people is a big number. And so, yeah, I think, I think that's, that's the part that people don't say is being willing to do it again.

• 51:25David Weisburd?

  And that's intuitive, kind of the 2% multiplied by millions of people.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:30David Weisburd?

  It's a real number. What may be not as intuitive is why there's these zero sum dynamics in some of these industries. In sports, there's one champion.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:40David Weisburd?

  You know, Olympics, there's one Olympian. But you seem to think that there's kind of this winner take all in, in many of the things that you do. Why is that?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I think, I think it depends on goal size. If you want to, you know, make a million dollars a year as a long care person, you don't really need to worry about your competition. Like, you just need to go find 200 houses that'll pay you whatever the math is to get a million dollars a year. Like, it's not, it's not crazy complicated, right? 400 bucks a month.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  But

• 52:13Speaker 01

  in the OpenAI world, right? Like, there's probably going to be one model that ends up, you know, winner take all, or it'll just be like Pepsi and Coke. But there's, there's not going to be a ton. I don't know. Like, I guess if there's a network, you know, effect that's going to occur, then it makes sense to try to like get market share. And I guess in the marketing world, you could call it maybe attention share. But the, so there is a fixed amount of attention, like in the world, take 8 billion people times 24 hours or times the number of hours they're working. Like, there's, there is that much attention, right? And I think technology has just increasingly put advertise, has stolen attention from IRL. So, you know, in real life, things like friends and family and put it in a place that you can advertise.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  And so from, that's what I think from an attention perspective there, like there is, do we know what that number is? No, but it, there is a, there is a number and it is finite.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  And so, does somebody watching my video preclude them from watching your video? No. Because they could watch both videos. But if they only have an incremental 10 more seconds that they're going to watch one business clip, then in that instance, the person who has.

• 53:24David Weisburd?

  Right.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  And so that's, that's kind of how, how, how I think through it overall. But I just, I think about a lot of life in, in percentage like likelihoods. How, how likely is this? Does this increase the likelihood that this thing that I want to have happen occurs? And so that's, that's basically all I do is I just try to make bets.

• 53:41David Weisburd?

  Looking back, reflecting on your career and your inputs and your outputs.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:46David Weisburd?

  Do you find that if you would have spent more time on the things that did really well, they would have done even better well? Or would you have more diversified your time and effort into different projects?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Man, it's a really interesting question. So like the, the biggest mistake, like the biggest financial mistake I've made was I, so I had GymLaunch. And I started this company called Allen, which was a software company that did, did lead nurture before all the AI stuff. And so it was just like decision trees on response, responses and things. If I had not done that and simply made a CRM for gyms rather than a lead nurture software for gyms, that company would have sold for half a billion dollars instead of for $50 million. And 46, to be exact.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  I, that was the biggest mistake that I made. But when it comes to like, would I have, you know, gone deeper on one thing versus spread out? It's tough because I can't play out the other, the other side, right? Like if I had never diversified, maybe I'd have 500 gyms right now. If I never got out of the first thing that I did, it's possible, right? And like, maybe with 500 gyms, depending on how profitable the gyms were, maybe I'd be richer than I am now. I don't know. Actually, 500 to be tested, maybe 2000 gyms by now, like some, some, some monstrous number. So. I think the difficulty is like, we can't play out the other, the other, the other way.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  What's been unique about the path that I had, because it's been so defined by my ADD, which is why I'm so focused, why I talk about focus so much, is that like, I've had a B to C business. Like, you know, I've had a service business that was brick and mortar. I've had an online service business. The first business I had was an online, online fitness business that I then turned into in person. I have had a physical products business, which was B to, B to B to C. So I had to manage both direct to consumer, you know, media buying and ads, and also have kind of a wholesale distribution to brick and mortar gyms. I have had, you know, B to B SaaS with Allen. I've had B to C SaaS or prosumer with school, right? I have, you know, the, the investing side.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  And then from the exit side, it's like, I've sold to a competitor. I've sold to a customer. I've sold to a partner. I've sold to private equity. I've sold to, I've sold to friends. Like, I've had, I've had, and I've, I've done seller finance deals. I've done cash deals. I've done, you know, leveraged buyouts. I've done, like, so this, this very weird, it's kind of like calligraphy for Steve Jobs. Like, that became, you know, key to the Macintosh and kind of their whole vibe. But for me, all of those experiences have made me exceptionally good at what I do now, which is to talk about business. And so me being able to talk with like, good depth on each of these things, because I founded and started and scaled almost all of those, not school, but like, those companies and deeply involved in them.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  I have a, I have a very good understanding of how these businesses work. And so that, like, maybe if I hadn't done any of those, the Alex from Ozy brand wouldn't be what it is today. And so that's why I have a tough time with like, was it, was it the right call? Well, it's like, I don't, maybe, maybe I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. And what I'm doing now has worked really well. So like, I don't know.

• 57:00David Weisburd?

  You know, Peter Thiel says is his number one regret in his investing life?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  What?

• 57:05David Weisburd?

  It's actually not doing Facebook Series A. He did the seed round. He was on the inside track. He didn't do the Series A. So sometimes really double downing, double, doubling down on your, on your successes could, could have really big returns.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  I think Munger talks about that, too.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  And I mean, yeah, I think just like, what's, what's tough about, and I'm sure you've seen this too, is that like, The best companies are really expensive.

• 57:34David Weisburd?

  Yeah, feel expensive.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they feel exactly. Great, great. Yeah, great correction. Yeah, like best companies feel expensive. And still yield higher returns oftentimes. And I have to be reminded of that sometimes because like the, you know, I think a lot of this is me, you know.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I know you'll have a lot to say about this, but like, I think a lot of investors who start investing their own money, you know. They almost have to re reinvent the wheel. It's like Warren Buffett talks about the cigar butt businesses where you just take your last few puffs and. And they're, you know, wonderful prices and fair businesses. And then eventually you just get, you're like, you know, this is not worth it. Like. We can get even better returns and less headache if we just buy these, you know, wonderful companies at fair prices or even would feel expensive.

• 58:21David Weisburd?

  Right.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  And so I've had, I mean, I feel like I'm still, the game's long. So I'm not saying I'm developed there, but. I've had, I've had to learn that the hard way with just some of the cigar butts fall on your lap and you're like, ow, that hurts. It's still.

• 58:36David Weisburd?

  Google Ventures, this was like a decade ago. Google's venture arm did the study on what drives returns. And one of the biggest signals that they had. Was when a round, a company was priced at a much higher round than the last round because it felt so expensive and yet there was a new person. And even when the insiders were the ones leading that round.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:56David Weisburd?

  So the insiders had this like, there's this friction of increasing the price and yet if it still got to that price, it was still probably underpriced.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Right. Because and I think Teal talked about this, but it's like typically if a company does have this material change, let's say in like six months, I think PayPal had like a three X or a five X or something. In terms of a change in valuation, he's like, well, it's because they like materially changed the risk profile. Like there was some. Big thing that they were able to solve. And so if you have this, okay, I think this is a 10% likelihood outcome of getting to a billion dollar company. And then the big thing that takes away 40 percentage points there is that. There's a network effect that hasn't really caught on where people are sharing, you know, with each other or you figure out, you know, your viral coefficient in terms of. Virality. It's like, well, if you get that right, then it's like. Well, boom, we go to 50, then it makes sense that even though the time duration has been

• 59:48Speaker 01

  small, the problem was still solved, which is the thing that created the discount for risk. That it's just like, it's just, you know, we all are like, it's not fair that six months ago, I could have bought this for.

• 1:00:01David Weisburd?

  But actually, it is fair if it was much more risky. Yeah, if it was much more risky, it's actually extremely fair.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. It's totally fair.

• 1:00:10David Weisburd?

  It's just, there's regret.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And then you like, don't want to, like, if I buy it now, then I'm, if I buy it now, I'm an idiot for not having bought it.

• 1:00:19David Weisburd?

  Yeah, you have to acknowledge your mistake.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So now you just hope this thing dies so that you, so that the first thing for when, now you hope it dies because you missing out when it was one tenth the price doesn't feel like as big of a mistake.

• 1:00:32David Weisburd?

  One of the interesting things on Facebook, the way that it all came together from investor standpoint is Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, who started LinkedIn and Mark Pincus from Zynga. And they had almost like this mastermind, they would sit around and talk about social networks. I think Reid Hoffman started outside of LinkedIn, also started another one that before wasn't successful. And they were in this small room of people that ended up being so huge in the space. When you think about building out your peer set in your mastermind group, I know it's kind of a hokey word, mastermind, but how do you look about, you know, your, your peer group and how do you build that out? And tell me about your strategy there.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  I would say it hasn't been super deliberate. I would say that a lot of it has kind of happened organically, pun intended with organic growth. But I would say we sit at this really interesting intersection between business and content, which is cool, right? Which is like, okay, there's this creator world over here, and then there's this investing money business world over here. And so finding people that are on either side of that, because like in this room, it's like, I don't talk about clicks in YouTube and retention curves and whatnot. And then I go into this room and I'm not talking about, you know, return profiles. But I think understanding both worlds gives huge alpha on both sides. Because everybody on, over here in the creator world is like, man, I just don't know how

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  to monetize. And everybody over here is like, man, I just wish I could have way more deal flow. And so it's like marrying those two creates a huge, you know, creates huge benefits on both sides. But in terms of, I'd say my, my, you know, I'd say it's less about masterminding and more like. If there's IOUs that I can collect for the future, I'll do it if I think that I might, I might need or want to cash it in later. And so it's like, if I can help somebody out, I tend to have that slant of like, I'll help if I can, because you never know when you'll need some. And so I just try and like, dig the well before I'm thirsty. And I would say that that's probably been the, the strategy that I've used for the vast majority of my,

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  my career, just like give first as much as I can, because those IOUs have been incredibly valuable for me at end times of need. But like, what am I, basically, who am I actively like recruiting in my, my head right now? It's not a lot. I would say that I'm, I'm trying to get more into the tech side of things, because like, these two sides, I feel like I understand okay. And that's, you know, with all the AI stuff that's going on right now, I see that as some deficiency. Like, I'm not deep in, you know, I mean, like, I have the same.

• 1:03:10David Weisburd?

  Yeah, the ignorance.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I have huge ignorance debt. And so.

• 1:03:13David Weisburd?

  I think people even deep in the industry have ignorance debt. And they, most of the people don't know what's going on. And they're all running around. And then if you're not in the industry, you're.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:03:22David Weisburd?

  Even more disadvantaged.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  You're like, I mean, no, I, I use ChatGPT. Of course, it's like, yeah, I try not to think about that too much, because it makes me depressed.

• 1:03:36David Weisburd?

  You're the most methodical person I think I've ever observed or looked at. And yet you said your networking strategy is, you know, I like to give and do IOUs and see what happens.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47David Weisburd?

  So double click on your strategy there. And tell me about your thinking. I'm sure you've thought deep on this. What's your thinking in terms of the give and take in interpersonal relationships?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  So I would say that the, the earlier on in your career, so this is me going to the audience more, but like, the earlier on in your career, the more generalized you should be in your giving, because the variety of things that you will need will be very diverse in the beginning.

• 1:04:10David Weisburd?

  And unpredictable.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yes. And so you just want to give to as many people as you can. At some point, you will exceed your capacity to give. And then if you gain skills, then people will want you to give to them, which then means you start to shift the supply demand curve in your favor in terms of favor giving and favor receiving. And so like when I remember the first or the second, the second kind of like peer group that I entered, I actually won an award. They invented an award for me, which was like member of the year. And it was because I I met with every single person and was just like, hey, I'm really good at these three things. I can help you with these three things. And so I would just do that, which at the time was just like sales and marketing. And so I would just be like, cool, I'll help you with, you know, build a sales team or help you script this out or help you, you know, put the sales motion in place with this process.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  And they'd be like, can I do anything for you? And I'd be like, honestly, no, but I'm sure like I'll need help with insert whatever thing that you're good at at some point in my life. And, you know, that, you know, maybe I'll hit you up. And a lot of the businesses that I had, like when I do those like deep dives in industries, I'll call up somebody that I talked to five years ago that I did a favor for. I'm like, hey, man, you got an hour? I just want to understand more about this particular thing that you're involved in. And they'll give me a huge amount of information really quickly.

• 1:05:21David Weisburd?

  And that's because you gave them something of value.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23David Weisburd?

  It's not because you tried to give them something of value.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Tried versus actually.

• 1:05:28David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. I think even trying still buys you something.

• 1:05:31David Weisburd?

  Do you ever remind them of what you did for them? So they they basically subconsciously have already integrated that you've provided values.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  And I will. So this is me just being transparent between different stages, right? So like in the beginning, I had nothing. I had only the only thing I had was skills. I had very little money and I was just like, I'm good at this. And so that's, that's what I gave.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  As I became more materially successful in business, people wanted to talk to me in general just because I was pretty good at, you know, stuff that they wanted to get good at. And so I guess the level, the level set of the skills kind of, kind of increased. But and so not to contradict my earlier statement, but like, I think where I focus my attention now is like pretty narrow in terms of the people that I will regularly interact with because.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  The it's like the path that like I have, I think to use Naval's, it's like I have significantly less exploration now and significantly I'm on I'm in exploitation mode. Like, I know what I'm good at, and I'm and I'm pretty clear on what the path is ahead. Right, there's there's some there's some degrees of variance, but it's still super narrow. And so

• 1:06:37David Weisburd?

  Which is basically getting even better at what you're already doing.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, if I like, right now, it's like if we have to call it fifteen or twenty million, whatever it is, you know, followers across platforms that are in business, it's like, well, if we get to fifty, then that'll be better than twenty.

• 1:06:49David Weisburd?

  What's the TAM of small business owners or however?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Well, there's thirty two and a half million in the US. And that's if we define that as people who have an LLC. But we're like my audience right now is, I think, fifty five percent ex-US, so non-US. And so take the rest of the world, there's a huge, a huge amount of people there. So I'm obviously cool with with sticking with US and English speaking for now, but we'll probably quickly, not quickly, but like probably in the next quarter or two, we'll be transitioning to everything will be all languages.

• 1:07:18David Weisburd?

  Yeah, I mean, AI obviously is

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Enhances that for sure.

• 1:07:21David Weisburd?

  I'm guessing you're not learning ten different languages.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Actually, I'm really curious your take on this. So like, I have held back, even though like the tech has been there for probably two quarters for us to do the translations and dubbing in in different languages globally, especially on like YouTube, we can do it all. I haven't because I actually don't want deal flow from countries from people that I don't speak the language for. Now, maybe the the two point O version is probably me being short sighted, but like the two point O version of this is like, we're both talking through AI mics to one another, and we're both listening in, you know, in in our own languages and whatnot. But I just haven't done any any international deals. And so that's why I haven't I haven't really pushed it. And also, it's not like we can, you know, give them services in a language they don't understand, you know what I mean?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  So that's that's why so I'm curious to your take on that.

• 1:08:10David Weisburd?

  I think that's very thoughtful. I think it makes a lot of sense. I think also one of the areas that AI is gonna really help is is deal flow analysis.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18David Weisburd?

  So you're gonna be able to, if you don't already, you'll be able to to process hundreds of thousands of deals to find the one or two that matter. That being said, you don't want a market, a product in the market that disappoints ninety nine point nine to the twelfth power of your audience. So I think I think that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Okay, no, that's interesting. Yeah, the to your point, though, some of the AI stuff, it's like Like resume, like resume screening, right? Like such a, like you just upload job description and say, here's, here's 500 resumes. Tell me which one are the ones that you would select? And then what questions would you ask these people? And it's exceptionally good.

• 1:08:56David Weisburd?

  I want to put a cap on this giving and taking.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59David Weisburd?

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• 1:09:44David Weisburd?

  Because I think you're really good and you have been very giving to me. I just want to understand your strategy and what are some of the mistakes that you made? I'm sure you gave too much to somebody or you made an ask too quickly. Like what are the best practices there?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  You know, I actually don't think I've made an ask too quickly.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  I tend, maybe I tend to be like too ask insecure of like, I want to make sure that there's like,

• 1:10:06David Weisburd?

  So you have the same issues as me?

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I leave no doubt that I have.

• 1:10:09David Weisburd?

  Two blind people talking.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Like I have given enough here that I can make this small ask.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  You know, I would say that honestly, one of my, one of my best skills has been that. Like, you know, I've never actually identified that until like this moment right now. But it's probably one of my, one of my strongest skills, skill sets has been. Knowing when to invest and when to pull back in relationships.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  And people will probably see me as transactional.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  I just believe everyone's transactional and some people are just better at defining it. Fundamentally, like you, if you have a, like if you have a relationship with someone and like, man, we, you know, we used to be homies and, you know, I gotta be loyal to that. To me, translate that into human behavior is I have a history of reinforcement with this person and I have a belief that that, that reinforcement will, will return. On a long enough time horizon. And so I'm willing to incur some cost in the short term. And obviously the relationship they've had the strongest and longest periods of reinforcement for like a spouse. You're willing to give longer periods of time where things suck in order for things to, you know, come back to being good or different.

• 1:11:16David Weisburd?

  Or the payback is your ego of being somebody that never defriends your homies or is always like friends with the same person.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  True.

• 1:11:24David Weisburd?

  That's your payback.

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26David Weisburd?

  You, you get to see yourself as such a good person.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah. You get to be an idealist.

• 1:11:30David Weisburd?

  I got a definition for you. So I call a friend, somebody that provides more value than he or she detracts from you in your life.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37David Weisburd?

  So.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  A lot of people don't fall into that category for many people.

• 1:11:40David Weisburd?

  A lot of people don't fall in that category and also it's also two, two sided. So you could have somebody completely crazy.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47David Weisburd?

  That you would never even want to associate yourself with.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50David Weisburd?

  But that's comes through for you when you need them. That's a friend. And somebody that's there every day and just like, you know, making you depressed and you've known for 30 years would not be a friend.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  No, no, that's really good. And what's interesting is that if you, if, if, if you keep a relationship, right? Then it means you, you do have reinforcement from this person. The question is, what are they reinforcing? So like, maybe you hate being alone. And so even though you don't like being with them, you prefer being with them than you prefer being alone. Or to your point about the, like you have some story that you tell yourself about how you are ex person and you get to tell yourself that story over and over again, every time you see this, this, this friend. And so this person, having this relationship serves you in some way. And it's usually just not in the way that people expect that they're being served. But to, to try and put a nail on, on the original thing.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  I think one of the big like, I wish I, I wish I knew where I read this, but I remember being completely engulfed in this game theory book about basically the prisoner's dilemma where they, they played out different give to take strategies within the prisoner's dilemma. And they proved that the best give to take ratio was eight, eight out of 10, give to take. Cause if you're 10 out of 10, you get walked all over, right? And if you, if you're on the other side. So eight give, two takes? Yeah, basically. And, and they even went so far as like, it's eight out of 10. And they factored in forgiveness and learning between all the players with the different give, ask ratios.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  And so it was like, um, somebody who learns, um, but does not let someone wrong them. Yeah. At an eight out of 10. And so it's this really like, it's pretty precise in terms of, and I think the, the reasoning behind it, cause they wrote this whole thing about it was basically the eight, like you have to give first most of the time because that's what opens up doors of opportunity. If you're tit for tatters, so the five out of 10, like give and take, then you don't. Wait for the other person to give and then you give back. Yeah, those people don't get nearly the exposure of the eight out of 10 people on the givers because they open up so many more doors by giving first. The never askers just never, they never benefit, right? And so there's, there's a sweet spot, which is disproportionately giving, but you still have to know when to ask.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  And, um, I think this is really, this is, I think about this a lot because this, it's, it's actually very akin to people who get good at saving, saving money, just in a basic term withdrawals and deposits, right?

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  There's, I call it the fallacy of the third marshmallow. So in the marshmallow test, you know, they have, you know, take one now and take two, two later. People have this, um, pathology where they believe that if I wait forever, I'll get a third marshmallow, like an even bigger outcome. And that's not the truth, right? Like there is a point in your life where you should start spending more money than you make, which is frightening for high achievers and earners who've spent way more time always earning more. Then they spend, but it's like, okay, then at the end you have this big, big pile of crumbs as an ant and then you die. And so like you didn't get any of the, so there is this sweet spot and obviously it's difficult to get to. To balance that, because most people don't even know how to like save. It's like, so this is only for high achievers that I'm talking about here.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  But I've had so many doors in my life and so functionally, what I think organic content did for me was it allowed me to do that at scale. So as I, as I, prior to making, me making content, like Leila existed in my life to be the yang to my like yin of give first. So she was like, you just like Alex would be nonstop, just like, let's do this dinner, let's do like, let's, let's, I'm gonna hop on the phone for three hours and help this guy redo this thing. I'm gonna, I'm gonna help this guy with this, whatever the things were that I was trying to help somebody with, I would just always do that. And she would be the one who was kind of like, and that's why I think Leila and I have been such a good partnership. And she'd be like, I think you're about to get taken advantage of here. I think you're, I think they're just, they're just using you at this point.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  And so it was right that she would kind of pull me back. But as soon as it would transition into making content, that allowed me to, it's the same energy for me. Like me making content is the same energy as what I used to do for one person, all that effort and for like helping someone solve a problem. I now just do that same thing and then just many people benefit. And so that's where the huge leverage on giving.

• 1:16:14David Weisburd?

  You've, instead of fighting your, your intrinsic traits, you've weaponized it into scalability.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  One on one and then so that like.

• 1:16:22David Weisburd?

  It reminds me of a, a quote that Naval says, he says, my brand is my value add. He'll invest and he'll say, my value add is that Naval Ravikant has now invested in your business. So for you, your brand is your value add.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36David Weisburd?

  And your, and your content is your value add.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And ideally, you know, someone's had such a strong history of reinforcement from consuming stuff and using the stuff that I gave them. That I'm already in the green, you know what I mean? Like if they do a deal with me, they're like, you've already paid for yourself.

• 1:16:51David Weisburd?

  A surplus.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:52David Weisburd?

  Before you've even talked to them in real life.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so my cool giving strategy, I know this was probably deeper than you expected, but um, it was actually an awesome question because I hadn't thought about it. But my strategy has remained the same. I give to as many people as I possibly can. It's just that as soon as technology and distribution came into play with media, I was able to put that on absolute steroids. And so I do, I do significantly less. These, you know what I mean, like, um,

• 1:17:17David Weisburd?

  One to one.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and those, those ones are.

• 1:17:20David Weisburd?

  But there's also the audience.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. Like, so it's like, they're still in, you know, there's still an excuse, right?

• 1:17:26David Weisburd?

  Still scale.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Um, but if, but that's, but if I'm, if I'm going to choose at this point, and I'm sure you have the same issue, which is there's a supply demand of your time, right? There's just such a limited amount and as supply, sorry, as demand increases, the supply's fixed. And so it just becomes so, so, so precious. So you have to just almost be path a lot. You have to completely switch, which is what's been tough for me, but I have learned it, is you have to almost pathologically say no to everything. No is the default.

• 1:17:52David Weisburd?

  How many messages or inbox?

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 1:17:55David Weisburd?

  I'm always very conscious to text you because I feel bad because you're probably have thousands of messages.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  No, but what's where it gets, when you take it to the natural extreme is like, you don't actually owe someone a response. Just like.

• 1:18:09David Weisburd?

  Especially since you've already given them so much of your content. So it's not that they haven't done anything for you. It's that you've already done so much for them.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Just the time. Like if I, so right now I probably get somewhere in the neighborhood of like a message every like three minutes. Um, across social media. It might be, it might be hard, but it's probably in that neighborhood, right? And so like, if I were, because I remember, um, I, I think it was right after the book launch. The, yeah, right after the book launch or, or my offers book, maybe it was the offers book came out. I manually DM'd anybody who, who tagged me in the book. And I said, could you please leave a review? And.

• 1:18:48David Weisburd?

  Manually being you did it.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I did it. And I remember finishing my inbox. And then the responses from the people who I DM'd, plus the new DMs that had happened in that same period of time were greater than when I had started. Like, it's like you have to paint the bridge by the time you get finished painting, except it would be like, the bridge now extends. It's like, it was literally impossible for me to actually DM every single person because by the time they had responded, there was even more that I had to respond to their response. So I had to just get, uh, I did it for four days. That's all I did. Um, because I wanted to get.

• 1:19:24David Weisburd?

  That's another. Efficiency thing.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:26David Weisburd?

  It seems hyper inefficient, but yet it probably made your, your book rise and it had some.

• 1:19:31Speaker 01

  It got to a few hundred, you know, I think it got to like six hundred five stars within the first few days. And I was like, okay, that's now it's an Amazon book that it doesn't look like it has five, you know.

• 1:19:39David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Five star, five stars on it. Um, but a, a, a, all that to say, um. In the beginning, you have to say yes to everything and in the end you have to say no to everything. And so being able to manage that apparent dichotomy. Comes down to resource allocation, which is still the core entrepreneurial skill set. Like where is it worth it?

• 1:19:59David Weisburd?

  What got you here? Well, won't get you there. One, one tip that I, that I've learned, and I, I think I came up with this. I can't remember where, where I learned this, but. How somebody treats you in the first day, in the first week of how they, when they meet you is how they will treat you over the next 10 years. Because it's not about you, it's about them. Some people are naturally givers. Some people are naturally takers.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:20:21David Weisburd?

  It has nothing to do with you. They're a formed individual. They might be a 30 year old. They have 30 years of conditioning. Just because they met you doesn't mean.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28David Weisburd?

  You change their behavior and their neurobiology. So I tell everybody. Notice how somebody treats you in the first day, because that is how they will treat you for the rest of, of their lives. And that, that's very telling.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  It's super good. I'll give one more. I'll give a tactic to that, that I found is, um, never. Decline or cancel the first meeting. Because like you meet at a, you meet at something, someone makes an introduction, you have a text convo, whatever. And someone says, hey, you know, can, can you meet at seven or can we do this dinner? Can we do this call?

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Things come up because especially a new connection is very, has low, typically has lowish value to you as a person. So like. Almost anything that could come up that is not that you probably might be willing to move. The, the call or the meeting for to take the thing that you know has more importance or whatever. I. I have found that it's very difficult to get the second, like the second conversation, the second meeting after the, if the first one gets canceled for whatever reason, especially last minute. And so I have like an increased priority on making sure that if I do meet somebody who's new and I think they're worth meeting, that that meeting takes a huge priority to one, happen quickly, and then second, that it actually occur.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  And the flip side of that is that I'm actually willing to be very flexible for first meetings because I think that typically even just to that one meeting, it's like, it transforms from being like, someone introduced us to like, we have had a conversation and I have a good feeling, I have some feeling about this person.

• 1:22:03David Weisburd?

  Strong signal.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. One way or the other. And even from one meeting, I can, I can probably call somebody up a few years later because like, we had the meeting. If we didn't have the meeting, it's useless. And so I try to prioritize that.

• 1:22:16David Weisburd?

  One other kind of relationship hack that my friend Max, who worked at Goldman for many years, he said, always be willing to fly out, even if it's 3,000 miles for a single meeting.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27David Weisburd?

  And because it's that powerful. If it's an important meeting, flying out and spending a day or two days, it goes back to the sufficiency thing. It seems hyper inefficient, but yet if you calculate efficiency as input over output, it's actually highly efficient.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  And especially because there, especially, there's the assumption that if I'm flying out, I'm not going to somehow work on a plane when I, which is like, it's almost

• 1:22:49David Weisburd?

  Or meet other people.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, some people like just choose to fly because it's the most efficient working. So like, it's really just the meeting takes the same period of time. Like, the only inefficiency is the drive from the airport to the meeting. Like, that's the actual inefficiency in that, in that process. And I'm, I'm so on board with that.

• 1:23:05David Weisburd?

  You are one of the best communicators I've ever come across in real life or

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:23:10David Weisburd?

  on YouTube or podcasts, et cetera. How have you become such a good communicator? Break that down for us.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  I'd love that the response starts with um.

• 1:23:25David Weisburd?

  Feller, feller, feller.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  It comes down to everything that we've talked about, which is you have to define the terms. That's like, that's really it. Like, if we think about communication, like, what is communication, right? So what is, so what is the objective of communication? So I would ask that.

• 1:23:49David Weisburd?

  To communicate.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you think, what do you think, so what is the output of communication? If I were to ask you.

• 1:23:55David Weisburd?

  It's interesting, because when you say that, my head goes to two different things. One is sounding really smart.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:24:00David Weisburd?

  And very charismatic. Another one is transferring knowledge.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  Okay. So, so for me, the purpose of communication is solely to change behavior. That's it. It's the only reason, only reason that we communicate anything to somebody else is to change their behavior. Now, if we want to sound smart, it's because we want to change their behavior around how they treat us in some way. We want them to treat us like they treat people who they think are smart, right?

• 1:24:22David Weisburd?

  Or have a certain social status.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Sure. On the flip side, what was the other one you had? So one was the being smart.

• 1:24:29David Weisburd?

  So one was the being smart, the other one transforming of information.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:31David Weisburd?

  The semology, essentially.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so if I, if I want to transfer information, I don't actually want to transfer information. I want to get someone to do something, right? So either of these situations is the purpose of communication is to change what they do. And so if we, if we, if we say that is the, the point of communication, then being very clear about what I want someone to change makes it way more effective. And so you waste so few words when you're clear, which is what I want you to do. And so on the flip side, I listen with that filter, which is, I had a, I had a meeting with a VC. So they're on the board of one of the companies that we're invested in. And they wanted to touch base. And I was like, okay. And I asked five times during the meeting, I said,

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  what would you like me to do as a result of this meeting? And they're like, well, we just wanted to, you know, just get your perspective. And I was like, what is going to change about reality as a result of us talking? And there wasn't really a clear answer, and that for me just drives me absolutely bananas. And so then I have to infer what I think the, because obviously there is a point for the meeting. And so. There, you know, I'd be like, there is a point. There's either they're gonna tell me or I have to figure it out. But that's, that's allowed me to make such stronger predictions on, on what someone wants from me. And also, if I want something to occur, asking like, even simply like, if you have, if you have an employee who's, who messes something up, right?

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  The natural instinct is you want to punish them in some way because you're just upset that they messed something up, right? It's a very human thing to do. But if I think to myself, what would I like to have happen? What do I want to occur? It actually fundamentally changes what I'm going to say to this person. I'll give you a perfect example of this. So, um, gosh, I want to say six, seven years ago, I had, I launched a company called Done For You Meals. So we had our distribution of gyms and I thought, man, we could do Done For You Meals. I partnered with a white labeling, you know, company that did it and then we launched it, right? So this was a huge launch for me at the time and we had 4,000 gyms had signed up to, you know, attend the launch. The 4,000 locations saying that they wanted to distribute meals is a lot of locations. Like that would have been really big.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  And so the day before the launch was supposed to happen, my, call it my secretary, sent out the text at noon saying, we're live. 24 hours early. And so now all 4,000 of these people are like, I thought it was tomorrow, but people were like, well, they said they're live. And so they start hopping on this Zoom after like probably a million dollars in advertising and months and months of prep for this launch. And so she's like, well, what do I do? And I was like, you need to hop on the Zoom and you need to have a sign that says, you know, we messed up. And so people hopped on and were like, god damn it, hopped on, guys, like just over and over again. And she just stood there with the sign telling people, my bad, it was there tomorrow.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  And so after that, you know, onslaught, she, um, you know, I, I met up with her and she said, um, don't worry, I'm packing my stuff. Like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm sorry, I'll, I'll, I'll get out. And I was like, what are you talking about? And she was like, well, I'm assuming you're firing me. I was like, well, does this increase or decrease the likelihood that you're going to make a mistake again in the future? And she was like, well, I mean, I'll never make this mistake again. I was like, right. So you're technically more valuable to me now than you were before.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  And so I was like, I just paid a million dollars for you to learn this lesson and never make them stick again. I was like, I will always trust you with my launches because you will never have this happen again. Now, if somebody has a history of many, many, many mistakes, which this person didn't, then it might have been maybe different. But this one, I was like, I was sure, I mean, she was, she was the type of person that would, that would, she would like die of anxiety. And she actually doesn't, I won't even get into it, but like she had huge anxiety issues around this stuff. And so for her to make this kind of mistake was like gargantuan. And so thinking about it from that perspective, of course I was upset, but what is it? Me yelling at her increases the likelihood that she makes a mistake again in the future because she's stressed.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  So thinking always through that filter has, has.

• 1:28:36David Weisburd?

  Double click on that. Why would that, so let's say there's a launch three months later.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40David Weisburd?

  Why is she, let's say you yelled at her the first time. Why does that increase the chance?

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Well, I think that she'll just, she'll just have increased anxiety and she already had too much anxiety. So if anything.

• 1:28:48David Weisburd?

  Anxiety leads to errors.

• 1:28:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:28:51David Weisburd?

  Why is that?

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Um, that I don't know. I would just say that I've observed people who are very stressed out. And like if you go on stage and you're very stressed, you do worse than if you're relaxed, I would say in general. And so people don't do as well when they have super high adrenaline. That would be my, my pseudo scientific guess. But that has been my filter and that has, has led to like such higher percentage goal achievement and behavior change in the direction that I want. And so this also works with relationships, like if you have your wife and it's like, you're upset about something, but it's like, does this increase or decrease the likelihood that she wants to talk to me? Does this increase or decrease the likelihood that she does this thing again in the future? And that has, I'm telling you, like that has been, so you asked the question of like, why are you such a clear communicator or quote, good communicator? It's like number one, I define communication as changing behavior.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  And number two, I'm very clear about what behavior I want to change and I only think in service of that goal. And that's it.

• 1:29:43David Weisburd?

  So said another way.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45David Weisburd?

  What you say in a YouTube video gets people to change and that ties it back to, they're conscious of this. That ties it back to your content versus I might listen to somebody else and it sounds really smart, but it's not actionable.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:59David Weisburd?

  And it doesn't change my life as much as a Hermosy clip. And that's what you would attribute to your communication, not some kind of stylistic ways of talking or some rhetorical device.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Maybe there are some, um, I would say they're not super conscious. I would say some rhetorical devices might be like alliteration. I know, like if I can say something that alliterates it, like people tend to like it better.

• 1:30:18David Weisburd?

  Give me an example.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Um, shoot, I don't know. We just look at my Twitter. But like if I say, you know, if say, if you, if you repeat words in a sentence, or if you have, you know, flips of like,

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  it's more sentence structure.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  It's not the X to the Y, it's the Y to the X, right? That's almost always going to be something that's going to convert no matter what the, the X's and Y's are. If, if the sentence still makes sense in both. So you like, kind of look for those like isms that, that makes sense. Words that are similar in nature. You know, exploration and exploitation of all talks about that. It's like, he used those words because they sound similar and they start with the same letter. Right? And so, because if, if it rhymes, it means it's true. I'm joking, but like, we do remember that, right? Like, um, and so where this gets really nasty in a cool way, um, is that if you want to change someone's behavior, the most effective way to change their behavior is for them to think it's their idea.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  For them to think it's their idea, it means they have to remember it. And so by making things that are memorable, people will forget that you were the one who said it. But then they will think that they said it or they thought it, and then they will believe it's true. And then they will act on it. And so having rhetorical style increases likely that you change someone's behavior, basically vis a vis that, that pathway.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  So that's on the stylistic part, but I still think the vast majority of it, um, to what you originally brought up is, if I can give people clear instructions on what to do, and then they do those things and they get the outcome, it will increase the likelihood that they'll listen to my instructions again in the future.

• 1:31:58David Weisburd?

  And then somehow their brains are, are linking it. So the dopamines are getting released ahead of the time that you're even talking, because the last three times that they've listened to you.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  History of reinforcement.

• 1:32:10David Weisburd?

  Yeah, it's history of reinforcement. It's not really what you're saying. It's the history of providing value-added advice to people that basically makes people just encapsulate what you're saying.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  And I'll give you, I'll give you an example. So of, I had this happen to me. So I'm not a huge, uh, I don't, I don't consume very much. We talked about this earlier, but I, I saw this clip by Huberman. And I don't listen to much biohacking stuff in general. But he said this thing, it was like, how to get rid of hiccups if you have hiccups. And I watched it and I was like, huh, I'll remember that. And then I had hiccups like a month later. And then I remembered the clip and then I did the thing in the clip and my hiccups went away. And in that instance, in that moment, he gained influence over me. I am more likely to listen to something else he says in the future to solve a future problem that he prescribes a solution for. And that happens whether you want it to or not.

• 1:33:06David Weisburd?

  What's even more nasty about that for you to even remember that clip? You already had some level of subservience or status to him speaking.

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  Enough to try it.

• 1:33:16David Weisburd?

  We, we have, uh, there was a study, Queens University. We have sixty two hundred thoughts per day. It used to be, there's, there's this old tale that's like sixty to eighty thousand, but sixty two hundred per day. So we, and we forget almost all of that. So you don't even remember all the thoughts that you forgot. So the fact that you even remembered to try it itself, there was status and then, and then you were reinforced.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, so functionally, that is all I'm trying to do within a very narrow audience of business owners. Which is if I can give, and this is where it separates from. I read this book, I thought it was good and I read Hermosy's book and it made me this much money. That is what I am going for. And if I do that, like there's, I think it was Boardwalk Empire. He says, uh, nothing says sorry like money. Or nothing makes friends like money. I can't remember what the saying was, but I just, I remember hearing that and being like, that's cute. I will remember that. And so it's like, well, what do most business owners want? Most of them want to grow, most of them want to make more money. Well, why don't I just give them instructions that I think will increase the likelihood that occurs? Now, when I do that over a massive population, there's going to be a good percentage of people that will be better off

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  from directly following that thing. Like I think Martha Stewart was one of the most influential, or was the first female billionaire, self-made, because of the nature of her content. So the reason that entertainers have significantly less influence than educators is because entertainers never give you anything to do. They just distract you. The point like what is

• 1:34:42David Weisburd?

  They never let you disappoint yourself.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Right. What is the output of entertainment? The output of entertainment or what's the point of it is to continue to be watched. That's it. The, the only point of entertainment is to be consumed. Now, the point of education is to change behavior. Now, can these two things occur at the same time? For sure. Right? Like if you watch the Avatar movie, plenty of people at the end of the movie felt more green earth and might have, you know, changed their, changed their behavior. So in that instance, it would have, you know, it changed some, some, some percentage of the population. But if you are a pure educator, then you gain more influence because you have given people instructions, they have followed those instructions, and they have improved their lives. And so when they want to improve their lives again, and you give them instructions on how to do it, which might be buying your thing, they're more likely to do so. And so

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  that is why you have these massive TikTok accounts, you know what I mean, that have 20 million subscribers, and they launch a popcorn, and no one cares. Whereas you have this micro influencer, I have this lady that I've met, 5,800 followers on Instagram. She only makes content about how to more effectively bill insurance as an RD, Registered Dietitian. That's all she does. She just talks about how to better bill insurance for Registered Dietitians. For 5,800. Yes, 5,800 people. And she's doing, I think it was 1 or 3 million dollars a year, I can't remember, but it was between 1 and 3 million dollars a year in that business, with 5,800 followers exclusively sourced from her Instagram. And so you say that,

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  like, an entertainer, plenty of entertainers have a million, 2 million, 5 million followers, and barely make a million dollars a year. She has 5,800, and she's making over a million. And so, to me, the difference there, the differential, is just influence. Now, does it make sense for the Logan Pauls and the Mr. Beast to have, you know, these brands? They confer some status to whatever, you know, company is. I think the greater value is that they increase exposure to the product, and the more on-brand it is, the more similar it is, the things that they have reinforced their audience for it, then the more likely

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  it works. But this is something that I think, I mean, obviously, I think a lot about it. Like, why do some entertainer's products bomb, and other ones succeed?

• 1:37:06Speaker 01

  To me, it comes down to this.

• 1:37:08David Weisburd?

  Let's say you wanted, you needed to start a YouTube without your face. You had AI replace your face with just some random person, nobody knew. How long would it take for you to reestablish and to get rabid fans for that?

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  I think it would still work and I actually, I just, it was so weird you asked this. I was thinking about this this week.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  And I have proof that it's not because of my dashing good looks and my high sense of fashion.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  It's because like when I started my first book that I wrote, Hundred Million Dollar Offers, I had no, virtually no following.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  I had enough following to make a post to say, I wrote a book, go check it out. But then that book, every single month, sold more and more copies than the month before. And that was before I had an audience, before I was making content. And so it was the quality of the ideas. It was a book, they didn't even see me, it was just text, right? The quality of the ideas, the clarity of communication is what people were attracted to.

• 1:38:07David Weisburd?

  People read it, applied it, got results, told their friends.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  Yes. And to this day, offers still continue to sell more and more.

• 1:38:14David Weisburd?

  And the brand was actually the book, it wasn't even human.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  People don't know that. Yeah, I'm a writer first. Like X is my, is my, so all content that you see from the Alex Ramosi brand is written first. So like this is gonna get wild.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  I post on X probably thirty, forty times a week. I post all the time.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  From the posts that do well, those become shorts that I then say those, those tweets. They become carousels that are just different versions of the exact same tweet. They become the captions of all of my images. And so if I have one tweet about friendship, they'll just search friendship of my, you know, six, seven thousand tweets that I've made. And they'll just find another friendship tweet and post that as the caption. My LinkedIn is multiple tweets stringed together. Just in a longer format. My YouTube videos are like 20 to 30 tweets put together that are high performers.

• 1:39:16David Weisburd?

  Twenty-seven truths or fifteen truths.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, hundred percent, that are transition lines. Every single thing that comes out was started written first. They're like, how can the brand, like, how have you been able to get so much content out? Um, when you are like, don't control it? Well, I have one pot that I put my, my effort in, which is X. And then every, that feeds literally everything.

• 1:39:38David Weisburd?

  Team literally goes in and repackaged.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Our paid ads are my organic content that are high performers, which came originally from Twitter. And then, uh, or from X. And then, uh, we just staple CTAs on the end.

• 1:39:51David Weisburd?

  And the principle there is that if the atomic unit of the tweet is good, putting them together will create something even better.

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:39:59David Weisburd?

  And then you put in a bunch of lights and a bunch of crazy graphics and it's going to be even better.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  What's interesting is that it doesn't work in reverse. So if you have a viral clip and then I take the transcription and then I post it, it, it may or may not do well because there's so many other variables. But if the foundational lead of just black and white text, the idea, the words are interesting or compelling or clear, you can do it in another format and it works.

• 1:40:25David Weisburd?

  When you have an original idea, how much of it is something you've heard before? Said other words or?

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:33David Weisburd?

  Is there such a thing as a truly original idea?

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  I would say that the, the majority of my tweets come in response to things. So either it's something that will come out organically, like we'll have this conversation and my team will be right there and they'll be like, you said these three things, we wrote them down for you. And then I'll just tweet those out. Um, or I'll scroll, I'll see something that'll trigger some sort of like, well, that's retarded. Um, then, and then I'll basically tweet a response to something that I won't call out. Um, and so that's why sometimes my tweets are emotionally charged is because like, they're typically me responding to either something that happened. Uh, you know, like somebody shows up late and says something and I'm like, People want to get these, because like I'm like, this person wanted a promotion and he didn't show up. He showed up late to a meeting. I'm like, what are we talking about here?

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Right. So then I probably have some, you know, triggering tweet about being on time and how they, people don't even do that and they want the world. Right. Um, and then that would probably get some people upset on LinkedIn and other like, you should, you should, you know, whatever. And so that's, um, that's the core of how, um, everything that I have is spread. But to loop to the original of like, if I had a faceless account, um, would it work? I think so, because it's the ideas.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  And clarity of communication to your point. Do I think it's original? No. I think the thing that makes the content maybe slightly more, slightly differentiated from other people's, um, is number one is I always try and state the facts and tell the truth. And focus only on the observable and I talk in terms of behavior. And so the nice thing is that if you have those two filters and you apply it to all content, you can filter out the vast majority of content because it's mostly noise. People just like, quite literally, no, people just making noise with their face, uh, and just saying words that they've never defined. And telling, and not telling people to do anything and mostly entertaining when they think they're educating. And so it serves as a, as a wonderful filter for, uh, consuming information.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  But in terms of dispensing, the word condition becomes so much tighter that the quote value per word or value per second goes way up because you actually can do something with this.

• 1:42:35David Weisburd?

  One of the topics you talk a lot about is doing things that other people may not approve of.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:41David Weisburd?

  And now with your social network, you're around many billionaires and you get to observe them. What is something that billionaires do that would surprise the majority of the population?

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  I don't know if it would surprise them, but it might, I guess it would probably be jarring for many of them, um, in, in close quarters. Is they would probably be surprised by the level of agency that billionaires will demonstrate, like they're.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Almost all of them are just, they come up to their own conclusions on their own. And if everyone disagrees with them, then great, because they got there by disagreeing with the masses. And so like, you can't have an exceptional outcome and also do what everyone else does. Like it's, they're antithetical, like you can't. And so you're, you know, kind of by definition, going to get people who reason for themselves. And I think that that's like, it's such an, it's such an underappreciated, underestimated component of success to get outsized returns. You can get, you can get beta, right? You can get the normal returns. And I say, not just from an investing perspective, just from like a life perspective. If you just like, like get life beta, right? If you just follow the norms, like you will get a normal outcome. If you don't want a normal outcome, then by definition, you can't follow the norm,

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  which then means that you will be, you will be an outcast. You'll be in the outgroup. You will be not the norm. And then people have to, in some way, resolve that discrepancy or that apparent discrepancy. And so, and the more outsized the return you want, typically, like almost like the more

• 1:44:19Speaker 01

  willing to disagree or, you know, willing to disagree with, with comment, with convention, you have to be. And so I would say that that's probably the huge through line for all of them.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Beyond that, they focus on leverage, focus on what they're going to get, you know, return on time, return on effort. I see that as a huge thing. And if you are able to make decisions for yourself and get the highest returns possible, which is only enabled by making decisions for yourself, then you typically get better returns than people who don't.

• 1:44:50David Weisburd?

  I've interviewed now eight billionaires. I found two, two necessary components. One is going non-consensus, doing something away from everybody else for many years typically. And two is some compounding. Either it's network effects where it's like Facebook, every new user, or it's a marketing advantage or some financial advantage. So it's literally like running in the opposite direction. Everyone's walking in one direction, you're not only going in the opposite, you're sprinting.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  You're all in.

• 1:45:17David Weisburd?

  Like 90 miles per hour. And everyone's looking at you like you're an absolute maniac.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  No, and I think.

• 1:45:22David Weisburd?

  And for like nine years. And people, I think that's one of the things, people do not realize how painful that is for nine years.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  This is why I think that first point that you made and I just made about like being able to buck consensus or reason from first principles, reasons for yourself is that if you.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  Only believe what you believe or act in the way that you act because of other people's approval or it was because someone else's idea. It's very difficult to maintain conviction for an extended period of time. And so if you find yourself waffling, it's simply because the ideas that you're adhering to are not your own. If you, if you derive something from zero and built the foundation of whatever reasoning you have for whatever outcome or conclusion you have, and you believe in all the math or you know, the reasoning that you're, you're basing, basing the, the decision on. If so, if someone just, if the whole world shouts at you that two plus two was five. If you're like, it's, I mean, here's two bottles and here's two bottles and one, two, three, four. Like that's what it is. You're, and if you know that there's a big pile of money, if you're right on that,

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  then you're almost excited that most people don't agree with you because you're like, it's just going to mean a bigger pot at the end. And so I think that it's so difficult for most people because thinking is very hard. It takes, it takes effort to.

• 1:46:39David Weisburd?

  You almost need to create a bunker of like-minded people that believe in what you believe. And you could basically like stress test each other's theories or have somebody stressed us and be like, are you seeing what I'm seeing? Oftentimes we have the same thing. We're merging media and limited partners, literally trillions of dollars of people have gone on this podcast. We're at five trillion now.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  That's amazing.

• 1:46:59David Weisburd?

  And now it's become a little bit more consensus, but in the beginning people are like, why are you running a media business? Why not an asset manager? We were like, this is that, this is the right to win. This is a competitive advantage. So it's, it's even the most obvious things, if they're non-consensus, it could seem like you're, you're an idiot.

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  You're like, well, explain to me how this decreases the likelihood that I get more deals.

• 1:47:22David Weisburd?

  Yeah. Or explain, here's my logic, poke holes in the logic. Forget about what everybody else is doing, but here's kind of my business plan.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31David Weisburd?

  And sure, like I want to actually improve, which, where are the big holes here?

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. What assumptions, yeah. What assumptions am I basing this on that you think are wrong? Cause there's obviously going to be some assumptions that we're not going to prove. And so some of them are going to be wrong or could be wrong. And how wrong can I be and still be right? And how many of them can be wrong and I still be right? And so I like, we call them need to believes, but like. If we have some big bet, it's like, what are the need to believe for this for this to work? And if we're comfortable with the like, there's really only one need to believe and we we think it's likely. Then it's like, well, hell, like, let's, let's push, let's push our chips in.

• 1:48:05David Weisburd?

  This rooting of conviction, I think, is the most underrated thing, one of the most underrated things in investing. The joke is people ask when to buy, they never ask when to sell.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:15David Weisburd?

  And I'll give you a good example, let's say your friend told you to buy Bitcoin at a hundred dollars.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21David Weisburd?

  A decade ago, you probably would have sold at one forty, once it went down from one sixty.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:48:26David Weisburd?

  So you could have bought Bitcoin.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28David Weisburd?

  But if you had spent, you know, ten, fifteen, two hundred hours really understanding Bitcoin and stress testing it and understanding the strengths and the weaknesses. You might have hold, hold.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40David Weisburd?

  Huddled because you actually had conviction. So I think it's this investment of time and understanding and rooting of conviction that helps you weather any kind of storm.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  And I think the only way that you can have that level of conviction is either you're delusional. Or you have it in some sound argument that you reasoned. And I will also say this is probably like one, one wrinkle that I would add to the, the two elements of like. High agency, some sort of leverage or compound, you know, some element that speaks, gives them better returns. Is the willingness to change on a dime. If something of some part of their reasoning was proven untrue. So it's not like they are romantic with the truth, not romantic with their process of getting the truth. And so if you said here, these are the, these are my five points, and this is why I'm going all in on this thing.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  If someone says, well, I think this one's wrong, and here's my evidence.

• 1:49:37Speaker 01

  My experience, the people that I've seen that are most successful will just look at that, they'll take like a big, long.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  We need to change everything. And it's just like, and then they take action, right? Because they're like, wow, this whole pillar that I that I base this whole, you know, thesis on is actually incorrect. And so I need to change everything now.

• 1:49:57David Weisburd?

  Andreessen Horowitz defines this as strong conviction loosely held.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:50:01David Weisburd?

  The ability to have very strong conviction, but yet be able to revise them when new data comes up.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  He's great. He's a G. I love his ex.

• 1:50:10David Weisburd?

  We're both big Elon fans. I sent you some clips on Elon specific portions. I've been going down this rabbit hole of how he manages his companies. How do you explain how a human being could manage seven companies now also run Doge and all the other things that he's doing?

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  I can't. You know, I think he gets, he is tremendous, like, he obviously gets tremendous return on his time and operates with huge operational leverage. There's, you know, the thing is, I have, I have very little insight besides the clips that I see, you know, on Instagram is like, what is reality? Yeah.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  So, I mean, decision making is probably some of the highest leverage thing that you can do. And so it's like, it's probably just what is the minimum amount of context that is required to make an accurate decision? And then he just is a decision making machine and is able to spot problems, pattern recognize, and quickly correct course on the most important things across that many companies. I mean, it's obvious that he has some, I mean, I think he said it was like some sort of genetic mutation, some likely thing that his brain works better, faster, stronger than most people's. But from what I understand, he just basically works until he's exhausted, then plays Diablo for, you know, a bunch of hours. And then like, that's what gets him to unplug and then he like starts again.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  He obviously has a bunch of lieutenants in each of those companies that he has, you know, absolute trust with, and they know kind of like the Elon way. And so I'd say probably a large degree is his ability to reinforce behaviors within the company that are conducive to value creation. And so that has to happen from the top down in terms of like, what culture exists at SpaceX or Tesla or the Boring Company, where they operate with this, you know, in his words, a maniacal sense of urgency at all times. And I think a big part of that is. You know, one of the things that I think Elon has been exceptional at, which is something that I'm, it's actually a deficiency of mine, something I'm working on, is like, he's very good at painting a very clear vision for the future,

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  which is typically like a big amorphous word for, you know, if someone liked me to say, but,

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  you know, we're trying to make human life multi-planetary. Okay, that's a gigantic goal. And in order for that to occur, we need to have solar power. In order for that to occur, we would need to have cars that work on electricity. In order for that to occur, we need batteries. In order for that to occur, we would need, you know, tunnels, tunnel, tunnel technology. In order for that to occur, we would need to have that freedom of speech. And so he has, he has somehow, because of this massive thing that he wants, linked every one of his companies to, we're saving the world. And I think that people will bend over backwards and work a hundred times harder to save the world than they will for just about anything else. And they will also sustain and endure significantly more pain. So there's this,

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  this study was done, I wish I could remember what it, what the name was, but basically, your ability to endure pain on behalf of somebody else is like five times greater than your ability to endure pain on your own. So like, if Jessica's in the other room, and she, it was like, you take a shock or she takes a shock, your ability to sustain higher and higher levels of shock is, is like supernaturally higher if you know you're saving her from the shock. If it's just you, you tap out way sooner. And so I think that that can be generalized to like, I mean, people stormed the beach of Normandy to save the, the world functionally at the time, right?

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  And so I think that he has, he has created that environment where everyone feels as though they're saving the world and acts in accordance with that. And so if we think about a vision and culture or values as very large

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Bundled direction sets that included within them have hundreds of behavior sets underneath of them that orient behavior, then they are some of the highest leveraged things that you can do in a company as the leader of the business. It's just difficult. It's not, it's rare. It's not common that like our bank is saving the world, like we're gonna have to have banking in space, like you're gonna be like, how do you tie that? You know, like my fund is gonna get a good, like, how do you really get everyone that level of motivated? And I think that to me is like, obviously, he's got the deep technical expertise. Obviously, he's, he's a, he's a maniac with his time and all that stuff, but I think that he's able to get that level of behavior change across hundreds of, I don't know how many employees

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  he has, lots, because of how that, how everyone's oriented towards that call.

• 1:54:53David Weisburd?

  Do you want me to take a stab at this one?

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:54:56David Weisburd?

  I'm, I'm like, I'm like the one eyed man in the land of the blind. I've had probably dozens of conversations. So I've seen a couple of aspects.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:05David Weisburd?

  One is he fundamentally redefines what the CEO title. He even had this whole tweet how CEOs are made up titles. So when you, when you apply for Delaware C corp, there is no CEO title. So it is fundamentally made up. So he doesn't, he doesn't do things like operations and things like that. There's probably for everything that he does, he doesn't do a hundred different things. So first of all, he fundamentally focuses on a couple of things. What he focuses on is really his brand. His brand allows him to recruit the very top engineers in the world. I interviewed Jamie Gull, who previously worked at SpaceX. And one of the things I said that there was a lot of people at SpaceX that were lifers because they couldn't find a bigger mission.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:47David Weisburd?

  You know, they, they believed, and I think appropriately so, that human beings going to Mars was important for, for the, for the species to survive. So, so one aspect is he uses brand and recruiting. The other thing, the most interesting tactical thing, which was popularized by Marc Andreessen, is he goes into his companies and he deals on with one issue a week. And he sits down with people, five to 15 minute meetings, and he says, what is your number one issue? And he helps them solve that. Which has two effects. One is they're constantly getting rid of their constraints. They're constantly removing their bottleneck at speed. And and four, and this kind of bleeds into the fourth aspect is he is a player coach.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30David Weisburd?

  He is in the cockpit. He is working the hundred hour weeks.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:33David Weisburd?

  He's not telling people, this is, this is my mission. Now you go and I'll be on a yacht.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:56:38David Weisburd?

  He is in in the arena battling battling the bulls with everybody. And I think that really has huge effect on the culture and huge effect on recruiting. I think the more interesting question is, how did he start SpaceX before he was Elon? Kind of like, how did you start with a hundred million dollar offers?

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59David Weisburd?

  You know, I have theories on that, but today he just keeps on leveraging his existing, uh, which is recruiting and brand, and those are interlinked. And when you go, when you go to these highly technical problems, there's actually the most finite resource. It's actually not money. It's actually engineering.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Talent.

• 1:57:14David Weisburd?

  The top, top engineers in the world.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57:16David Weisburd?

  The ten X or the hundred X engineers, and he has a large market share of that. Sometimes they even transfer companies. That's what I've been able to.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  No, I love that. I love that. And so I took so two things, then one add on. So the doing, you know, helping them solve in these five or 15 minute meetings, whatever the one problem is, also force functions them to prioritize. So if you're gonna bring one thing to Elon.

• 1:57:39David Weisburd?

  Know what their one problem is.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's like just that, that alone probably generates a huge, huge alpha for, for the business. The, the plus one piece, um, as you've heard of Elon's algorithm.

• 1:57:50David Weisburd?

  I don't think so.

• 1:57:50Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. It's like, I probably use this all the time. Like I, it's like the most useful thing that I've gotten from Elon of all the things that I've consumed. So it's the five step process that they apply at SpaceX, but they apply it to everything. And he now just refers to it as the algorithm, which is question the requirements, delete all the unnecessary dumb rules or requirements.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  Optimize, then pull up timelines, then automate.

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  And so it's like, if you're trying to fix a media department, you come in, you're like, why do we do this that way? Okay, well, we don't need to do these 28 things that you guys are currently doing because it's dumb. All right. So how do we get the best guys to do the thing that that makes us the most money or gets us the most views optimization? So we're reallocating resources towards the highest return. Okay, great. Now that we're doing that, how can we do it faster? Great. Now, how can we automate it? And walking through that process has been like, it's been the back of my mind for when I'm fixing something because it's just like really good.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  And especially the question, the requirements, which was one of the hardest ones because it forces unconstrained thinking, which is you have to be like, well, why do we do that? And a lot of people don't know why they do what they do because it's how we've always done it. And most, it's so funny how how humans are so easy to add things, kind of like we referenced at the very beginning, like, we add things so easily and we're and we're so afraid to remove things, remove steps, remove processes. And we almost developed this mythology around around process. We've always, we don't do it that way. And I think that's a survival brain, right? Well, it has, it has worked. We haven't died doing it this way. So we should just keep doing it this way and wear pink socks, right? But why? Right, totally.

• 1:59:30David Weisburd?

  You know what? The greatest thinkers in the world and seven year olds have in common? They always ask why. And if you just listen to a seven year old and they'll say why, and then they'll say something, and then they'll say, why, why do you do that? And you lead to some really good questions. I ask even on the podcast, I ask some very fundamental, like, are you diversified? And if it's a very high level thinker, they'll actually like think really deeply on it. And because it's like, how do you know diversified by what vectors? These like dumb questions could end up being quite, quite interesting answers.

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  One of my, well, not one, my, my closest friend, who's basically a brother to me.

• 2:00:07Speaker 01

  He has a saying, which is the shorter the question, the longer the answer. Like, what's the meaning of life? Like, wow.

• 2:00:12David Weisburd?

  What is it that I I wrote of? I didn't have much time, so I wrote a very long letter.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, a hundred percent. I think it's I think it's Pascal. Who said that? But yeah.

• 2:00:23David Weisburd?

  Another concept SpaceX has specifically is responsible engineer, which you mentioned this high agency, which is the engineer in charge of the part. They are fully responsible for everything with that part.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36David Weisburd?

  And the example they give internally is if supplier hasn't delivered any of the parts, why aren't you on the plane going to that supplier?

• 2:00:43Speaker 01

  Right, it's your fault.

• 2:00:44David Weisburd?

  And and a lot of the employees burn out after six months because they can't deal with this level of agency. Agency has a cost.

• 2:00:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:50David Weisburd?

  There's a reason why everybody is in high agency. It takes a lot of mental and physical power and emotional.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's so funny. The the question, the requirements, like, I won't even get it because I could tell horror stories of the times where I've like walked in and been like, why do we do this? And it's like, oh, that costs us 500 grand a year for this one department and we don't even need it. Like, I'll I'll tell you one. So we bought for media, right? We bought a bunch of really expensive cameras that looked really nice because, you know, the team was like, all right, we're going to build the studio or whatever. And so then I was like, why? So it started with, I was told we were going to build the studio so that it would be faster for me to record so that I could just like literally walk across the hall and then just record, right? But then I I realized months after the studio was built, because we'd always done it that way,

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  that I would have to say, hey, I want to go record. And then they'd be like, all right, we'll be ready in two hours. And I was like, why? Why is this taking so long? And

• 2:01:53David Weisburd?

  This is your new studio?

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And and so they said, well, we have to set up the the lights or whatever. And I was like, I'm always in the same spot. Why are we? Why do we have to reset up the lights? And they're like, well, we use the same lights in your office as we do in Leila's studio. And I was like, well, how much do lights cost? And they were like, it's like two grand? And I was like, so I spent $500,000 on this studio. And we didn't think to spend $2,000 on the lights, which confers the main benefit of having the studio, which is we don't need to set it up and break it down. I started with the idea that the expensive cameras, right? Here is another one.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  After the videos were happening, I was like, why can't, I was like, tell me what stops us from posting it within 24 hours? Cause I had like two week lead times on my videos. I was like, this is absurd. Like, why is this taking so long? And they were like, well, you know, it actually, there's a big part of it is like uploading and download the files. There's actually this big pain in the butt. And I was like, okay.

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  Why do, why do we need big files? And they're like, well, because we have these nice cameras. And I was like, why do we have nice cameras?

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  And there was no real answer because I have tons of videos. They're nicer than the not nice cameras. Right, right. Because, because all the people who were buying or people who are, you know, media dorks and love, love cameras and audio, right? But the reality was, I can have an iPhone and say the same video and it'll crush because the only thing that really matters, at least in the education space, is the quality of the information, not. The behavior change. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It almost matters zero. The effects and the lighting and the, like, none of that matters in terms of video performance. And so when, when I, when I brought that up, it was like, okay, so we have these massive 16, I don't know, some massive, very expensive cameras. And I just said, like, we're not gonna use them.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  Put the, I was like, put iPhones up. And so I got so upset about this that I went on a plane and I was like, we're doing this whole thing with an iPhone and you're gonna post it in 24 hours. And we did that. I saw that on the chat. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. And, uh, yeah, that video got almost 2 million views. And so it was to prove the point. I'm like, guys, this is not what matters. And so I had to, like, I had to go through each of these elements of like, and, and, and so, so walking through this, it's finding the constraint within a process. And I think that's what the algorithm is so effective at is like, is, and so we ask this also with companies. Like, one of my favorite questions is, okay, so what stops us from ten X-ing the current, our current deal, let's say it's demand constraint. So like, what stops us from, from doing 10 times more what we're currently doing?

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  And they say, well, we couldn't do that because, and then insert a reason. And if that reason's solvable, then it's like, well, why haven't we done it? Now, if there, if that reason is obviously solvable, then well, then why haven't we solved it? And then they'll bring up this other reason. And so you keep asking why, and eventually you get to like, oh, HR just hasn't put out the rec for that person yet. And I'm like, why? Because we have these other three roles that don't matter nearly as much, but this is the one constraint of the business. So this happens all the time in businesses and I think part of it is because it's so rare to have people who actually do, I call it like pulling the thread. It's like just keep pulling the thread. Like what happens next? What, why is this preventing us from, from doing ultimately the thing that has the greatest leverage on the growth of the business?

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  And a lot of people just don't know. And I think part of that is because they don't have enough business acumen or business context to see like, no, when like this is the tip of the spear. Like if we, if we need three times the sales guys to triple the business and let's say that's aligned with the business objective, then us not had like, why haven't we just hired 10 recruiters, vendors to just go place all these roles immediately? Well, you know, we have one recruiter. I'm like, yeah, but it'll take us two quarters at our current rate. I was like, when we could fill it in seven days. And so the cost, and this is what I had to outline. I'm like, the cost is what 3X sales is over two quarters? So if we tripled revenue because we tripled the sales team by, you know, because let's say we have sufficient demand, I was like, the cost, let's say it's a million dollar a month company for

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  simple math. It's like, okay, so it would cost us $12 million of lost gains because you didn't want to pay a recruiter 20K times whatever the number of sales guys is that we needed triple revenue. Do you feel like that's a good decision? Like, we don't want to pay 200 to make 12 million. That seems dumb. We should not do that. But people don't boil it, like people don't pull the thread.

• 2:06:20David Weisburd?

  Do you solve that on an individual level or do you find ways to get people to be a higher agency?

• 2:06:29Speaker 01

  So what I'm gonna say is probably gonna be a little controversial, but I do think, I do think a big part of it is actually just like mental horsepower. I think some people don't have it.

• 2:06:39David Weisburd?

  Can't cope with that.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, multiple variables, actually being able to sustain like multiple thoughts in your mind at the same time and play out scenarios. I think it's really tough for a lot of people.

• 2:06:50David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:51Speaker 01

  And, and that's where.

• 2:06:52David Weisburd?

  It's not that they don't, they want to be inefficient.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't think anyone wants to be inefficient. That's where that's where it gets into competence. And so like, is that trainable? Maybe. I don't think horsepower is trainable. I do think that skills are trainable. To what degree is that a skill? I don't know. I probably have to think more about it. But.

• 2:07:11David Weisburd?

  Skill is almost a reallocation of horsepower.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where it's like, what behavior change? Yeah, I can have someone follow a process, but like, yeah, anyways. But that that piece, though,

• 2:07:25Speaker 01

  I I think a lot about. And I would say the I would say the one common theme that's occurred in my business career has been that the quality of talent that I bring in has literally only gone up. That's like one constant in terms of like, my income has been directly correlated with the quality of the people that I bring in. And what I'm willing to pay them. Because I mean, every every person has the it's almost like this limiting belief of like, what you can pay somebody. I mean, shoot. They just paid, you know, John Ivy.

• 2:07:51David Weisburd?

  Six point five.

• 2:07:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, six point five. It's like, there's a price, right? There's a price to get the best in the world.

• 2:07:57David Weisburd?

  And AI, open AI stock.

• 2:07:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean.

• 2:07:59David Weisburd?

  Not cash.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  Good on that. I mean, that's a big commitment on both sides.

• 2:08:03David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  But I mean, if they do go to the hardware thing.

• 2:08:06David Weisburd?

  It's a very rational deal.

• 2:08:07Speaker 01

  It's a completely rational deal, because if he actually unlocks the hardware, then they combine Apple with their, I mean, they they just murder. And I think they will.

• 2:08:16David Weisburd?

  Are you familiar with David Deutsch's concepts on memes? He's the person that popularized memes that Elon passed. And I think everything in kind of a medic behavior, humans are basically follow these memes. You mentioned one earlier that's so ingrained in Silicon Valley that startups change the world. That's actually a meme.

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34David Weisburd?

  That's that's there's there's no rationality behind it. Why a fintech company is changing the world.

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:38David Weisburd?

  Just something that's that's repeated. One thing that I found in a lot of the top CEOs is that they have these meme, the specific type of meme called folklore. So do you know about like the Nordstrom tire? Meme. So Nordstrom, back in the day, was number one in customer service. And they used to tell the story that this angry customer comment came in and they wanted. That had been using a tire for like 10 years and they wanted to change the tire and Nordstrom has this unlimited return policy.

• 2:09:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:07David Weisburd?

  And they gave him back the money on the tire.

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:10David Weisburd?

  And the joke is Nordstrom doesn't even sell tires.

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 2:09:13David Weisburd?

  And there's this extreme version to show that the customer is right.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:16David Weisburd?

  And if they were to go around and say the customer is right, it may not resonate.

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:20David Weisburd?

  But the tire story.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22David Weisburd?

  Kind of, and you see this over and over.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:09:24David Weisburd?

  Amazon has the meme of the two pizza teams.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:28David Weisburd?

  And these are like really useful packaging to tell these beliefs. So maybe that is a story is maybe the light story becomes a meme at acquisition.com and you tell it to people. And then they may not think from first principle, but they might remember, oh, like, is this like the light thing? Why is there a company we could make a hundred million dollars from and we won't pay for their lunch? Because it's not in the budget or something.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:09:49David Weisburd?

  This, it could be memed into, into the actual culture.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  No, I love that. I love that. Yeah, I see that exactly. Like, so I see these types of folklore stories as coming with a series of behaviors that, that they seek to change, right? So it's not just one thing, it's many sets of behaviors. So I'll tell you, oh, I mean, I could tell a zillion of them, so I'll, I'll, I'll pause, but like, um, yes, I love that.

• 2:10:11David Weisburd?

  I wanted to get your advice on my own business and just brand building. A lot of what we're built was inspired by you and just like giving content for an audience. Outside of just doing more, we're seeing some really great early results.

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 2:10:26David Weisburd?

  What are some other kind of practical guides for somebody wanting to build their brand in an audience, whether niche or not?

• 2:10:33Speaker 01

  If I want somebody who's between, they're, they want to start a fund or they already have done their first and they want to get their second or third, right? Um, I'm then thinking like, what do these people consume? What is the, what are the biggest problems that they're dealing with right now? And then all of my content seeks to solve all of those problems. I mean, that's it.

• 2:10:55David Weisburd?

  So create the reinforcement loop of listen to David, problem solved, listen David, problem solved.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's, this guy's helped me so much.

• 2:11:02David Weisburd?

  That's the Hermosification.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what do, what do business owners struggle with? They struggle with marketing. They struggle with sales. They struggle with cash flow. They struggle with fixing their product, decreasing churn, you know, recruiting. So these are all, because obviously like we're, we're operators. We actually run a business. So like, um, that's what they struggle with. And so I make my content for business owners because that's what I'm trying to attract.

• 2:11:22David Weisburd?

  So the two sides, the two sides of your business, just to distill what's made you so successful. One is you're reinforcing, listen to Alex and good things will happen.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:31David Weisburd?

  And two is actually you're building, you're building a surplus of, of goodwill. So there's both goodwill as well as trust in you as an operator of businesses to make them more successful.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  You know, interesting because the trusting about the like, so like I would get into, those seem similar to me, both those buckets. And probably derived from the same action set. And I think it just comes down to like, does this increase the likelihood that someone would, would, would do something

• 2:12:04Speaker 01

  with me, for me. Uh, and if they have a history of positive reinforcement from me, then that increase, that, that likelihood increases. And that's, that's, I just leave it there. Um, that's about it. Like goodwill. I just would redefine as a history of positive reinforcement. That's it. And so there's this big misconception, I think, in the kind of creator world. You've probably heard the like,

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  give to ask ratio, you know, that kind of thing. But it's interesting because when you, when you read Steve Jobs' autobiography, he talks about this, or not his biography, but Isaac Water-Walterson.

• 2:12:39David Weisburd?

  Multi-Isaacson.

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you. Um, he, he, he talks about how like, he still saw that withdrawal deposit concept within Apple, but with via, via every product. And so he saw some like, he, he believed that if the product was great, then we've deposited into the person's bank account, right? Figuratively.

• 2:12:59David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:00Speaker 01

  Whereas a creator feels like if they ask for money, they have withdrawn from their quote goodwill. But the underlying assumption there is that the thing that you sold them was not good.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

  Because if you were a creator and you came up with an iPhone,

• 2:13:14David Weisburd?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Then people would be lining up around the block for the next time you sold something.

• 2:13:18David Weisburd?

  So it's this zero sum mentality where I've provided all this and now you spend your money. You spend, you spend something that you don't really need.

• 2:13:25Speaker 01

  Reciprocity.

• 2:13:26David Weisburd?

  Yeah, you don't really need it, whereas your second trade would also be accretive.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think that is a fundamental misconception. And I think the reason for that is because creators typically don't know how to make products that are exceptional. And they typically don't put, not always, but like they don't, sometimes don't have enough capital or they are, you know, aren't good at making products. They're gonna make a media. It's just a different skill set.

• 2:13:47David Weisburd?

  So just to double click on that for acquisition.com. So you give all this content. They love it. You help them go through one to 10 million. They come to you 10 million.

• 2:13:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:56David Weisburd?

  They're lucky enough for you to invest. You could take them to 100 million. So you're not taking 30%. You're saying this is mine for helping you.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:14:04David Weisburd?

  Actually, you're helping them even further.

• 2:14:06Speaker 01

  Everybody wins.

• 2:14:06David Weisburd?

  You're like, give me the opportunity to help you further.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  And the reason that you can believe that I can help is because I already have.

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  So it also self-selects because if they, if they, if they adhere, basically if they have changed their behavior based on the content that I have, then it's likely that they will be able to respond favorably again in the future to the same types of direction, right? Then now the nature of it.

• 2:14:27David Weisburd?

  And also likely that they're grateful in that they're aware that you helped them. Because some people will be helped and just never, never attribute it to it. Will just internalize it.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  So that's actually a super interesting one. Yeah, attribution's very interesting. Most like, think about, it's, think about how tough it is to have something amazing happen in your life and say, that wasn't me. That was that guy or that was something else. Like, we usually take the opposite approach, which is everything that's good is because of me. Everything is bad is because of other people and circumstances. And so it's actually.

• 2:15:01David Weisburd?

  Do you think that's true in successful people?

• 2:15:04Speaker 01

  I think it's true in humans. I think there's just degrees, like not binary. I think it's just a continuum. Probably some people are more this way, some people are more that way.

• 2:15:12Speaker 01

  But no, a hundred percent getting attribution, the, and this is why I think having directives that are so specific is so important. If I, if I gave vague, vague directions, right, that somebody has to derive behavior change from, then basically the more derivatives they have to do, then I think, and I think rightfully so, the more they should attribute that to themselves. If I said, on this podcast, make it this headline and I will give you the thumbnail and then it outperforms the click through rate. If you thought that was because your team did it, I would be like, that feels a bit odd.

• 2:15:53Speaker 01

  If I said, I think it should be you and me and both of our faces kind of, you know, big in the middle. And this, you know, let's start it with the tweet that we know already, you know, performs best. Maybe that's a middle, like he gave us some insight. It was kind of helpful, but like we still made it, right? And that, it's that last, like, well, we still, like, whatever that part is, it's like the less gap there is between whatever your, your, your advice was and the action. I think the smaller the gap, the more the attribution will be there, which is why I am so specific with, with the stuff that I put out.

• 2:16:24David Weisburd?

  And would you, would a good criticism of my strategy be, it's always podcasts, it's always with LPs or GPs and there should be more talking heads? Or if people are observing this and getting the, getting the value from the actual guest, that's fine. Do I have to go to a talking head as well?

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  So thinking about this from like a short form, long form, how do I translate this into action for us, right? Short form, let's say somebody watched one short a day for me for a year. Okay. And let's say that a short is 30 seconds for simple math. All right. So I have 365 shorts. That's a hundred, a hundred and eighty ish minutes, right? So that's three hours that they watched from me. Now we know that most shorts are not 30 seconds. It's probably, probably a third of that, right? So if they watched a short every day for a year, it's probably an hour ish of content. Okay. I would for sure rather have someone just watch. I mean, I would probably like that frequency of exposure, like if it was one hour to one hour. But if I had to pick, I'd rather have a one, three hour podcast versus that.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  But that's to me, I see the purpose of.

• 2:17:29David Weisburd?

  Is that why podcasts are underrated medium? Because you have one listen, but it could be two hours and it goes pretty deep.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  I've thought about this at a decent amount. So like I see podcasts actually as email lists. So with the exception, like true podcast, this is like YouTube plus podcast, like you have, you repurpose there. But the vast majority, I would bet of the channel growth comes from YouTube. And then it sustains on the audio, right? If you did audio only, it's very difficult to grow audio only because there's very little suggestion. Spotify is beginning this, but for a very long time, people had to only grow off of word of mouth, sending podcasts to friends and family, whatever. And so if we see podcasts as a, an email list, then when someone comes to me and says, hey, I'm thinking about starting a podcast to grow my business. I'm like, that's like saying, I'm thinking about starting an email list. Like that's not going to grow the business.

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  Now, unless you have a way of getting, you know, exposure to it, then that's the way that it's going to grow. But if we look at, you know, percentage likelihood of conversion, a podcast listener who subscribes is, is more valuable than any other subscription. If we just think about percentage of kind of time share, if you will, which is the average person, I think has like five or seven, five to seven podcasts and like that, that they subscribe to. You think about Instagram, it's like most people have like a thousand people. They, it's like not even close, order of magnitude is different.

• 2:18:48David Weisburd?

  You go on a lot of other podcasts. Tell me about the calculus. Why would you go on somebody else's podcast? Essentially you're building their, their listenership.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:18:57David Weisburd?

  Tell me about the, the thought.

• 2:19:01Speaker 01

  So I don't do a ton.

• 2:19:04Speaker 01

  I almost exclusively do with people that I like. It's somebody that I actually do really want to have a conversation with. I would say that's probably the biggest.

• 2:19:11David Weisburd?

  It's like a take conversation.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the biggest. Yeah, it's like I'd seen you a while and I always, I always find our conversations fascinating. Cause you have such a different perspective from the, from the like super LP side, you know what I mean? Like that always brings such fresh eyes to what I'm thinking about, like in the super kind of like operational side. That's probably the biggest thing from a, from like return on time perspective. I think it's like clips will generate. That's like, what's the, the only upside for me realistically is probably like clips and relationship. But those are, those are the two kind of like alphas for, for doing it.

• 2:19:46David Weisburd?

  It's not because you get to talk to a whole new audience and part of them will convert to you.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  With your audience, it's, it's, it's so niche and unique. Like there's definitely value there because you have a superstar audience. I would say asking as a general, like why, why do I select them in general?

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  The audience that I have is the audience that I want.

• 2:20:10Speaker 01

  And so when I'm going with someone else's audience, I'm basically trying to like, I don't even think about it this way, but I guess you could, you could imagine it's like, okay, of the people, where's the overlap of business people who listen to Chris Williamson, you know, and modern wisdom. Okay. Like I'll, some of those people will then start, you know, following my stuff that they hadn't heard about me before that. But if that were the case, then I would definitely be maximizing like only new podcasts rather than doing the same podcast over. And I tend to do the same podcast over. So if I'm looking at my behavior rather than what I would like. So my behavior would dictate that I usually just go to people that I enjoy talking to.

• 2:20:47David Weisburd?

  Well, Alex, this has been a pleasure to catch up. How should people follow you?

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  On, on whatever platform you watch or listen to the most, you can just type in Hormoz and hopefully I'm there. But I do have a book launch though, August 16th. So if you want to come, you can go to acquisition.com. Actually, I don't know. I can't, I can't tell the link yet. So just, you'll find it.

• 2:21:13David Weisburd?

  Alex from Hormoz new book launch. And for those that have only watched the YouTube videos, I did read the book. They're, they're exceptional. They're exceptionally well written. So highly recommended.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  The third one's going to be the best.

• 2:21:24David Weisburd?

  Awesome. Looking forward. Thanks, Alex.

• 2:21:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 2:21:27David Weisburd?

  Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow. Also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.