If you suffered from racial inequality, if you suffered from gender inequality, you would be completely justified in the fact that you are not achieving the things that other people who didn't have those disadvantages have achieved. And I say this as a white guy who was born in America to a doctor father. But to the same degree, you have the opportunity that Chris nor I have, which is that you can be an inspiration to people who went through the same thing.
Because I can promise that there is somebody who has had it worse and has done it better. Alex Elmozzi, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
My pleasure, man. One of my favorite things to do is to scrape through people's Twitters that are aphorists and come up with little pithy statements and then break them down. So I want to go through some of the things that I've learned from you over the last year or so, go into those. And then there's some talking points that I don't think I've heard you speak about before as well.
I want to get onto. Beautiful. So the first one is so many lives would transform overnight if they realized my life sucks. I have nothing going for me really means.
I have nothing to lose. And that makes you a very dangerous person. So in any kind of game position, so like in business, right? Every position has advantages and disadvantages. And a lot of people look at the really big guys and they're like, man, they, uh, they, like, they're, they're looking at me like must be easy for Alex.
Right. And I remember when we had a gym watch and we had a very big company. I would tell the guys who are coming up, I was like, if you're trying to compete against me, I was like, you have advantages.
I was like, if you're on a sales call, you're like, listen, you're just a number to Alex. You're never going to talk to Alex, right here with me. You're going to get my attention.
I'm the one, right? I was like, that's how you're going to throw stones at me. I was like, but on the flip side, if it's me marketing to the masses, I'm going to be like, this kid's in his mom's basement. He has no idea what he's doing.
He's been in business for 12 months. And of course he has no idea. Like, wouldn't you want somebody who's thousands of success stories behind it? Because we've made a system like, Both sides have advantages. And so what happens is people are in this small position where they're more nimble, they can give more personalized attention to people, et cetera, and they see it as a pure disadvantage.
And so you can flip the fact that you have nothing going for you with you have nothing to lose. And that means that you can take lots of risks very quickly and end up in the exact same position you are, which is nothing. And so if you eliminate downside, it should.
decrease your action threshold, meaning you should be able to do more things faster rather than do fewer things because you don't have a great life or things going for you. And so I think if people flip that a lot more people would take action because they actually realize the advantage of their position. Jack Butcher says you get rich by taking lots of risk with small amounts of money and you stay rich by taking small amounts of risk with lots of money. Yes.
I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't know that was his quote. He may have repurposed it. There's something called Churchill drift.
Do you know what that is? no so it's a a phenomenon at the at the core it's not the opposite it's that um quotes that weren't said by churchill often get like erroneously attributed to him it's like all quotes lead back to churchill even though they didn't and socrates yeah it's like it's just one of those things it's like i think that churchill once said yeah get rich by making large amounts it's like no he fucking but there's another one as well uh that a good friend james smith talked about which is If you're succeeding at a job that you hate, imagine how good you'd be at a job that you loved. And that's kind of the same. This person is starting from essentially zero.
How much fucking worse can it get? Right. It's the downside.
If you can eliminate someone's downside for action, it's like then the bias, it should bias you towards taking action. Why is it that people in that case, if they do have nothing to lose, still feel like they have lots to lose? Because I think most of the times.
So. I think this is really important is that they have nothing objectively to lose. And so everything that they feel like they have to lose is purely made up in their mind.
It's stories they tell themselves about what other people are going to think about them when those people aren't even thinking about them to begin with. But that's where they live all of their lives or live out all of the potential downside is in the mere reflection of what other people will think about them in the future should they fail. And I think that is the... If we're trying to get real and I'm talking to somebody like, Yeah.
Well, I mean, because I know that if I actually had somebody in front of me, they'd start squirming. Right. If I said the first thing, right, like you have nothing to lose.
And then because then they do have something to lose and I have to name it for them and be like, OK, who is the person in your mind? Who's the voice? It's like, blah, blah, blah. Six questions deep. It's my uncle.
OK, why? Like, let me state it this way. Will your belief that you're going to be viewed as a failure by your uncle be the sole reason that you live the rest of your life below your potential? and regret everything that you don't do because of uncle Tom.
That's the wrong one. Uncle Harry. When you say it like that, all of a sudden they're like. I don't want to let Uncle Harry have that kind of power. And then all of a sudden it breaks and then they like get free of it.
And so I think it's getting really specific and really narrow on the, because people say it's society, it's other people. It's like, it's usually one or two voices. And if you can get really specific on whose voice it is, then you can name it.
And then like, I think I'm a big believer in like, shame only exists in the shadows, which is like, once you put it in the light, you look at it and you're like, my mom. That was really it. Like when I really think about it, it's because it's not even just my mom.
It's my mom in this circumstance. When I come back home for Thanksgiving, I just am so afraid of the comment that she's going to make. It's like, well, what if we confront that?
Okay. You mom, you sit down at Thanksgiving dinner and you haven't made money yet and you quit your job. Now what is that better than you spending the next 60 years hating her or resenting her for the fact that she held you back? and then it's like when you give the real scenario they're like well shit and then like this weight comes off and they're like fuck i guess i should do this you're like yeah shame on the shadows is nice i like that and it definitely is cleansing to just be like look here it is out in front of you yeah and it really you realize just how irrational it is because we don't want to look at it because it's in the shout and we put it in the shadows because of how it makes us feel about ourselves in my opinion and so it's it's so scary we avoid it we avoid it we avoid avoid it but it's like I think the faster you can kind of build that muscle of like, huh, I've got this hesitation.
What is the real reason? Because like logically I can do that whole thing. Cool.
You have nothing to lose. You're poor. Great. Zero. Right.
Okay. But then what is it that I'm, that I do have something to lose. It's relational capital. It's status within my tiny micro community. That doesn't matter.
But like my perceived status. Okay. Name the names. And, but, but by pulling it out from the shadows. it'll be like that confrontation from here to here is i think where all the fear is because it's embarrassing to be like it's my mom the other perfect thing or great realization i think for anybody that's starting out and is feeling self-conscious about what other people are going to think is when you're starting out by design, there are so few people looking at you that even if you do fail, no one fucking sees.
Right. So this is something we realized when we were running nightclubs that we would try and launch a new event around freshers week in September. And we would, we would have this great idea and it would be, everything would be about flamingos or everything would be, it would be a smart night on a Tuesday. So people could go out after they've been to sports club or whatever it was, and then it would flop.
Right. And we do. like 150 people and all of the guys that work for us would be stood outside looking destitute and upset and they go it's so embarrassing there so it looks like there's more room oh dude we had so many tricks we'd pump the pump the room full of smoke we would pad the back off so that everyone had to go to the front we get the dj to play music all sorts of shit but all of the boys would be like fuck this makes us look so bad everyone's gonna think that we're shit i was like no 150 people are going to think that we're shit. Like the advantage of running a shit business that doesn't reach many people is that not many people saw your shit business.
And that's when you're starting out. People that are concerned about becoming a content creator. I'm worried about starting a podcast because what if everyone sees how shit my podcast is? It's like, dude, no one's going to see your shit podcast.
It took me three and a half years to get even an appreciable amount of people listening to this show. And it was effort three times a week. No one cares when you start. So you can be liberated from that as well.
And it's just objection handling, objection handling, objection handling all the way down. I think a lot of, I think a couple of frames that are just different frames around content making sense. We're on the topic that helped me was one is seeing it as practice rather than the game. So like when we're doing a podcast, if you start, it's like, Hey, I'm going to do a podcast. I'm going to post it's practice for me getting better for future me rather than like, I am like, this is the main game.
It's like, no, the game is the whole thing. And this is just like, we're still in preseason. Yep.
Like these, these, these scores, these touchdowns don't even matter yet. Right now you can say yet, even though like I can still feel like I'm a preseason, but I think from a mental framework, it actually decreases the stakes associated with doing it. And I think that's been helpful for me, especially it was in the earlier days. The other one was, um, kind of the equal opposite of this problem, which is not wanting to start because no one's watching because it feels like you're doing all this work.
What's the point? And so I actually, the little mental trick that I had was, um, One, I track lots of stuff. And the more ways you track, the more ways you can win. And so that's a little thing that I found out.
So like if you track 100 sets and they only need one of them to go up, so you feel like you made some progress. So that's like an easy one. And the second thing around the tracking is that I would look at like the biggest possible number. So a lot of times you can see like the impressions of, you know, a post that you make, even if you only got like 16 likes, I got like a hundred impressions. And I thought to myself, I was like, well, if there was a room of a hundred people, I'd be stoked.
Like that would be awesome. Especially in the early days. I was like, that would be. I would totally feel like that was worthwhile. And so taking those little impression numbers and pretending that they were like micro events that I was making the work or the content for, all of a sudden made it feel worth it for me.
And so the combination of, I can have a small room and I'm really impacting, like when I get a view that has like 13 views on it, you know, for like a video in the early days, I'd be like, well, shoot, I made this video and 13 people saw it like a small room, like that works. But looking at both absolute growth. and relative growth.
So it's like, okay, well, I went from 10 followers this month to 15 followers this month. It's like, well, you can say that you only gained five followers. I was like, or you can say that you gained by, you went up by 50%.
And that was exciting. And so then I, cause I'm a Excel projection guy. I'll like, okay, well, if I do this every month and the team knows this, cause I, I project everything out. I'm like, if we do this, cause I I'll predict where we're going to be in like 12 months and we usually hit it.
Very, very. But how do you account for the unforeseen? five million play video that comes in well that's my padding right so well like i'll project out with no white swan events you know where something good happens yep but just if we keep doing what we're currently doing at this trajectory we compound at 13 a month yep that's what it is right now so 13 monthly and that's just on one of the platforms we're on um and so i can just see what we're going to be at six months and that's exciting so james smith gamifies it in the same way you know does he yeah absolutely exactly the same way and he always says that it's just like playing uh levels on a computer game and this month wow like i got another xp point or whatever and i think that's very important because social media and the fact that it is associated with status even though everybody says oh you know it doesn't really matter and blah blah it does like it's very hard for us to remove the human hierarchy from what is evidently just quantified fucking status right on a on a screen And what he did was he removed himself a lot existentially from that by saying, it's not a comment on my worth as a person.
It's not a comment on whether I'm going to be loved or accepted by the world. It's me putting some stuff out. And wow, we won this month.
And this month, maybe we didn't win. Why didn't we win? Or I'll go back.
The same way as if someone beats you at FIFA, unless you're like a pro FIFA player or whatever. But again, with that, what's the difference between the amateur FIFA player and the pro FIFA player? The pro has put his existential connection to his content and the success of it. There's so many little things on this that I want to go into. One of them is that, so Dr. Kashi is my closest friend.
He's like a behavioral whatever, loves studying why humans do things. And so people who are most successful, a lot of times, it's not that they necessarily have more willpower. They find other ways to reward themselves.
And so he's like, the more skills you have, the more ways you have to reward yourself. And so somebody who, somebody can extend how long their time horizon is. because they do gamify it. So people who don't have the skills of figuring out ways to reward themselves in the meantime, can't make it the whole way. But that's like when you're doing cardio and you're like, okay, it's five, you know, it's five times five to get out of here, right?
You create micro games within the longer game to keep yourself going. And the thing is, I've seen that across verticals. So like, if you look at, so Travis Kashi is a Olympic lifter, Olympic lifting coach out of North Carolina.
And he has this really cool way of getting lifters to PR every workout, to have a personal record every workout. And what he does is he have them map every single set and rep range for every single lift at every weight. And so what happens is all you have to do is go through your book of 200 lifts and every single weight, and you can always find one that you did a year ago.
Oh my God, this is my eight rep max PB on good mornings. Yes. And you're like, well, I can hit nine on this or I can add five pounds to it.
And so every workout they win. Yeah. And so. they get excited because they get rewarded every workout. And so that's why it's like the more ways you track, the more ways you can win.
And then I think that those little micro wins can keep you going over the long game that you have to just keep playing. One of the other associated tweets that you did was if your life sucks, the easiest thing is to change your environment. Oh yeah.
This is something that I saw moving from a very good life in the UK to now as excellent of a life as I can imagine in Austin. And I'd met about a million people throughout, my time as a club promoter and had a handful of friends i was like fuck like i i feel like my people met to friend conversion should be higher than this i feel like i'm the the funnel is very wide and like the conversions are very low to use your terminology yeah and then moved out to austin and it's like i have more friends than people i've met which is just fucking insane so definitely changing your environment what other ways given that not everybody could move to austin what other ways would you say if your life sucks the easiest thing is to change your environment what other ways could someone do that i mean the environment is I mean, like, you know, this is a, I'm going to tangent and I'm going to come back. So if you've ever heard somebody say like, man, I hate Cincinnati, Cincinnati sucks, right?
Or they go some city and like they go there for two days and they make a judgment across the entire city. Right. But it's like, okay, let's go really deep. You ate at three restaurants and you saw seven total people in Cincinnati.
Does Cincinnati suck? Or do the two restaurants that you went to or the seven people that you were with not, are they not that cool? Well, it's so easy to just move like.
two miles down the street. It's the same reason people do staycations. It's like, you don't even need to change cities.
You can be in the same city and still change the environment. Like just moving out of your mom's basement, you know what I mean? And just going into another place with four guys can change the environment.
And so like, that's the, the thing that to me was so telling on this was, uh, so heroin addiction, super addicting. I'll put it that way. Uh, and when a bunch of soldiers came back from Vietnam, they had been addicted.
I don't know if you've heard of this, but 25% of soldiers who went to Vietnam tried heroin. It was like an insane statistic. And in the US, 90% of heroin addicts who go to clinics relapse. So they have a 10% long-term success rate. Tough.
The stats are completely reversed from people who got addicted or did heroin in Vietnam and then came back to the US, which then you could draw the line, which is, it's better to change your environment than to even do anything else. Because what happens is you eliminate all the triggers and cues that are associated with a... Habit that you're trying to destroy you see that the American government was absolutely concerned that there was going to be an epidemic Yeah, they were they were adamant that all of these soldiers were going to come home and it were going to be these veterans that Were all addicted to heroin.
Yeah wild and there are for sure but Proportion so much proportion less than their quote should be Because the problem with the current system of and like for anyone who's listening You can still extrapolate the principle or the concept people are in the environment that they are addicted They change environments and they go to a clinic They change the environment, they change their behavior, and then they go back to the same environment and their behavior changes yet again to match the environment. And so it's like, if you want to change your actions, the easiest thing you can do is just change the environment. Because if you can do that, a lot of times, a lot of the negative things you have, you just don't get triggered. You don't get the cue for the behavior.
It just gets extinguished. So the way that I've worked this into my home. working setup is i think i have six or seven different places that i can work at yeah i do different tasks at each one of them so i've got a place i'm writing a book i've got a place that i write my book that's first thing in the morning i've got a place that i do my emails at that's a recumbent desk bike which is fucking unbelievable dude zone two 180 minutes a week of zone two cardio 180 minutes a week of emails with zone two cardio uh the place outside i've got my studio record inside we've got two living rooms with different houses that i can go into and i'm like different spots for each one and if i'm in this vibe i'm over here and everything's a bit go for a walk come back move somewhere else i'm like now i'm in a different mode totally and i i'm actually so it works in the equal opposite too it's if you want to start something right so like what we're talking about was extinguishing bad habits by changing the environment by eliminating the cue but on the flip side if you want to start a habit like for me one of my quote famous ones is like i want to put sunscreen on It's like this time.
It's like one habit that's like 80, 20. Why do you need to put sunscreen on so much? Because, oh, not, not so much. If I could just, if you do like, it's like kind of like walking. Like if you just walk once a day and if like, if everyone just did that, like you add 10 years to everyone's life. It's like, what are the few things?
It's like baby aspirin walk. Like if you do that, crushing it, uh, from a, like, uh, skin cancer prevention, a, and then be just like less wrinkled Alex future, um, suntan lotion or. SPF stuff is like the 80-20 of that, right?
Instead of having a zillion other things. So I was like, okay, I don't like it. I realized the reason I don't like it is I don't like oil on my hands.
It sounds so stupid, but like that's enough punishment for me doing it that I stopped doing it. And so I had to overcome two things. One was that I hate the oil on my hands.
And the second is that I don't remember. So I put one thing of sunscreen at each of my watering holes. So I get cued because I see it.
as soon as I sit down. So I eat lunch at the same table. I work at the same table and I'm on my nightstand. Those are the three places that I spend my time. And so I have one in each of the three places.
And then the type of sunscreen I have is that I have one that's dispensed through a thing. So I don't actually have to touch it. So it's like, Do I know why it's like if you can identify why you don't like doing something, then you can isolate why am I being punished for this behavior and think, OK, is there a way I can fix it?
And the other is how can I cue myself on a more regular basis by changing my environment rather than setting an alarm on my phone where if it goes off right now in the middle of podcast, I'm not going to pull out suntan lotion or I'd have to carry everything with me, which I would never do. Right. That would punish me far more than just not putting it on to begin with.
And so just thinking through both of those things. Anyways, that has been really helpful for me in starting. Queuing myself to do new behaviors that I want to do and then also stopping behaviors that I don't want to do very nice Most distractions come dressed as easy opportunities This is interesting because as people begin to accumulate the success that they say that they want, this becomes an increasingly big problem. Yeah. I think it was Andy Grove who said this.
Probably Churchill. There we are. Choke another one up for Winston. It might have been Packard. I think it might actually have been Hewlett Packard.
It might have been one of those guys. He said that businesses die of indigestion, not starvation. And so.
They overeat. They're not starving. It's the entrepreneur that, and this is like, you get back to human behavior, which almost all roads lead back to it. But the entrepreneurs get reinforced for changing direction because nothing worked, nothing worked, nothing worked.
You change that direction, something clicks. And so what happens is you learn a lesson from that. You're like, oh, so if I change direction, good things happen. But that's not the right lesson, which is one of my. favorite things about entrepreneurship is making sure that we learn the right lesson from the, from the, from the instance or the circumstance.
It's like, I hired a sales guy. He did a bad job. All sales guys suck. Not the right lesson.
Right. But that's actually something that is pervasive in even the internet community of like lessons that people they'll tell the story and then they'll say the lesson. But sometimes the less, all we know is the facts of what happened, not necessarily the thing you took from it. Anyways.
Um, I was making a point, Churchill, starvation, easy opportunities. So the higher up in business you get, the more attractive the opportunities that you have to learn to say no to. And this has been really hard for me because at every level, like I thought, great, I can check the box on distractions.
I've learned to say no to $10,000 opportunities. But then when you're making $100,000, then you have to be able to say no to $100,000 opportunities. And the thing is, I call it the woman in the red dress, but the woman in the red dress, have you heard this little analogy I have?
No. Okay. This is like one of my favorite analogies. So in the matrix, Morpheus takes him through a training program to teach him one thing about agents. And so they're walking down the street and there's all these people going, going, and he says, were you listening to me?
Or are you looking at the woman in the red dress? And he says, look again, he looks back and the woman in the red dress who walked by is an agent putting a gun in his head. And I see distractions the same way, which is that. The better you become, the more attractive the woman in the red dress is. And so you can say no to a six, but what about a seven?
What about a 12? Exactly. What about a hypothetical thousand? Yeah. Right?
Like that's, that's really what it becomes because there is no limit on the upside. And so that's why having like some of the soft stuff of like, this is the vision, this is what we're trying to do. And there's a hundred other things I could do, but each of the cost of those things is the one thing that matters most. And I think that One of the things that Layla has been so good at helping me with, and I think a lot of my success earlier on was propelled by the fact that like when I met Layla, I had a chiropractor agency. I had a dental agency.
I had five gym locations. I had a gym launch business where we did turnarounds. I had all of those things going on and there was no CEO besides me.
I CEO of all of them because I didn't understand how this stuff worked. And I also made no actual, I mean, I made money from all of them, but no income. Like everything was just enough to break even.
It was nine spinning plates. And it's because like I was so opportunistic and it's very classic new entrepreneur to just say yes to everything. And Warren Buffett said that the difference between really successful people and the most successful people, this is me paraphrasing, is that the most successful people say no to almost everything. And.
I've tried to take that because it's so hard. And I think that a lot of the, you know, it's so simple and so hard, which a lot of success habits are, which is like, if you do the same thing for a very long period of time, I think this is Neil, uh, shoot She. I can't remember the name, but I'll say that.
Yeah, it's Churchill again. He said, success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are. And I just love that quote. Why do you not need to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are?
It's doing the same thing. I think it's because you think you can handle both and so you're like, oh I got Okay, because if you did think that you were smarter than you are you would then start to take on more stuff So quote from John Maxwell, which absolutely adore that says you cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything which is just fucking perfect and it's the cool it was so uh greg mckeown's essentialism is one of my top five books of all time and it's for this precise reason that it's an antidote to the type a fallout right i can do it all i will do it all watch me suffer and bear this burden and you go like look you can do the hard work thing right you can you can do that but the working hard and being spread thin are two different dynamics and one of the, one of the like interesting idea I've been playing around with a little bit recently is periodizing work. So in the same way as your weightlifting coach will have the guys doing his sub max for 90 days, he is building up for 90 days.
He has comp prep. He has blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, mobility. That's a much easier way to blend what we're talking about here as maybe a little bit earlier. I think you need to specialize more as you get bigger and bigger because the distractions are going to be even, greater.
Especially how so? So if you are the CEO of your company and then someone comes in with, you've got so much more downstream from you that if you get distracted, the repercussions, the ramifications of becoming distracted are magnified even more. What do you think about that?
Do you agree? I think the specialist piece is the piece that threw me because I always feel like the higher up you go, the more generalist you become. In terms of skillset, but not in terms of projects or in terms of projects. specialized in projects, generalized in skills.
There we are. Yeah. Yes.
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That's click. hubspot.com slash modern wisdom to download your free email template today the first step to achieving a massive dream is conquering tiny impulses i think it's exactly what we were talking about earlier it's like if you like i i got a there's a a tweet that i made actually you you were the one who made it go viral you right uh which was uh when you quoted me quoting you to david goggins it's just this endless human centipede of fucking harmosey quotes it was really churchill who said it first um but it's like you don't you don't uh you don't build confidence by shouting affirmations in the mirror but by stacking having an undeniable stack of proof that you are who you say you thank you that's what yourself down thank you there i'll quote you to you, which is a new, a new low. So, so that, right.
Um, a lot of people were like, no, but what if you don't have any successes? Like, how do you get started? And I still think that the, the quote is 100% valid. It's that, that they don't realize the validity of the smaller things that they have done up to that point.
And so it's being able to transfer your successes of like, okay, like, did you get dressed this morning? Like, Did you, did you get in front of the computer? Like you have evidence, it's smaller evidence, but you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this. And then you do that enough times that you have enough evidence to make a claim that you can do this and support it.
And I think, um, that's where the big outcomes come from. Lots of, of, of constrained, tiny impulses of saying like, you know what, I'm going to get this tiny victory. And I know how to say no to that. I noticed a hair, say no to heroin today or whatever. Yep.
Um, that would be a hard one, you know, probably larger. Um, But that's the idea is just stacking as many of those pieces of evidence that give you proof that you are who you say you are, that you can you have done what you say you can do. Yeah, it's the. The challenge of action or belief first is something that I've been playing around with so much.
And my friend Jones, he wrote a book, The C Word, like confidence. It was a book about how to be confident, right? And I do feel like a big footnote summary could have been that quote from you.
Proof. And the problem is, this is something that I've seen as well. A good example coming from a world where I was successful in business before I was successful personally.
I have a skill set now. And my... capacity within this particular skill set and the performance of what that does are intrinsically linked right there's almost a linear relationship as i become better at networking with guests with recording with doing all the other things the show increases when i run a business there were so many degrees of freedom between my inputs to the business and the success of the business that someone with like malignant imposter syndrome could always explain away how things had gone well.
So I would say, oh, it's because we timed the market, right? Oh, it was because of like this member of staff that we brought in. I mean, I trained him, but really he would have been great without me or whatever.
And self-doubt can sort of wheedle its way in, in very sort of nefarious ways when you do that. Then switching to something where you have a relatively undeniable stack of proof, even undeniable to the part of you that wants to deny proof. right which is that imposter syndrome after a little while it's just a crushing weight that you i call it imposter adaptation so you know if you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world and it persists you have to admit to yourself that it's got nothing to do with your capabilities and everything to do with your addiction to feeling like an imposter this is just a trend of how you think about the world you're looking for competent you have competence without confidence which is a lack of belief and because confidence without competence is self-delusion, right? So you need to have this balance between the two.
But people, when they say, well, surely self-belief becomes before action. I'm like, well, not particularly, not if that's not your nature. I don't think like you're asking for delusion there.
And it is significantly easier for you to think, I am a fitness person. If you just went to the gym and did 10 pushups, then I am a fitness person. When I go to the gym tomorrow and do 10 pushups, like where's the, show me, spit and sawdust. Where's the fucking reality of this, you know? I agree.
Good. Opportunities only look like opportunities in the rearview mirror. Today, they look like risk. How does someone get around this, this asymmetry between the fact that in retrospect, it seems totally obvious.
And yet the thing that you're looking at right now, looking forward, you go, that might not be obvious in retrospect again. It's tough because. a lot of a lot of the big wins you like like uber's the classic example right like let's start a business where strangers pick up girls who are 16 you don't mean and drive them to their friends houses like that sounds like a terrible idea right like it just it but in retrospect you're like no it'll be totally fine because there's going to be a mutual rating system and blah blah blah blah right taking out the fact that there are people who've been captured and whatever what we'll put that to the side right um and the thing is is like just because we're on the investing side What we found is that there are always reasons to say no to a deal.
You can always find reasons to say no because there's nothing that's risk-free. Even treasuries have risk. The US economy could collapse and treasuries could be worth nothing.
And you could create a really compelling argument. Lots of influencers spend a lot of time doing that, right? Is it likely?
Maybe. I don't know. But it's probably less likely than a bank failing because if the US fails... all the banks by default are also failing.
So which one, you know, which of these is greater risk? So then it gets, then you start comparing risks rather than trying to eliminate risks. And so if we're looking at opportunities, that's why I like risk adjusted return is one of the things that a lot of investors look at, which is like, is there a way that I can appropriately adjust this risk to normalize different opportunities?
And I think that that single skill set is one of, if not the most important skill sets as an entrepreneur, because fundamentally it's betting. Like that's what we're doing. We're making bets every day.
We bet with our time. We bet with our money, um, with the limited constraints we have or limited resources we have against unlimited opportunities. Cause that's the hard part is that there is unlimited women in the red dress.
Now there's some fours and there's some sixes and there's some eights, but you have to both rate the girl, right? The opportunity. And then also how crazy is she, right?
Or whatever, you know, whatever risk factor you want to associate with this. Is she going to stab me in my sleep? I don't know. right?
Does she have a crazy ex-boyfriend? I don't know about it. I don't know.
Right. And so that's why we do the diligence process. But like the, the way that we, cause I just, just tied up this chapter in the book that's coming out is when we're organizing opportunities that we're going to pursue with a business, we look at what are the ones that we have the absolute highest likelihood of success that we, we, we need no new skills and no new effort.
If we can do that or the least amount of new effort and no new skills, that would be the first thing we're going to do. And then once we take off all the ones that take, basically no effort and no extra skills. We're like, okay, which ones take more effort and still no skills. And then once we do that, then we're like, okay, now we can start learning a new skill and of the different skills that we could learn, which of these is going to give us the highest leverage as in most output for the least amount of input.
And that's pretty much how we tick down which of these opportunities we want to pursue because those have the lowest likelihood of not happening. Does this work in the personal world as well? There's someone that isn't investor that isn't in business.
That's just thinking about life opportunities. Do I want to learn to sell sedans or code? I think that the investor frame... is simply people who have been scored and quantified on their ability to make decisions. And so I think that we can learn a ton from how investors make decisions overall.
It's like why Ray Dalio's book, Principles, became like a bestseller, even though... 99.9% of people reading the book aren't even investors or definitely not investors at his level. But the principles of good decision making are just quantified.
And we have a scoreboard for these guys being excellent decision makers. Whereas most other people, you don't have a real scoreboard. So we can't tell how valid is their advice.
And I think that's what makes taking advice from really world class investors who've been doing it for decades as a great source of information. Because we can validate that they have a stack of undeniable proof that they are who they say they are. very nice okay so this was not churchill this time so this was this is something that i've actually relied on a little bit myself uh whenever i get to a low point where i think why do i even bother i just remind myself this is where most people stop and this is why they don't win and this relates to another one which is a reminder for the gladiators in the arena who feel beat up and scarred with no hope in sight building a business is hard hard feels shitty this is what hard feels like and this is why most people can't do it you but you can, this is what hard feels like is so fucking nice to lean on. It is so nice to lean on.
Take me through that low point. There's actually a story. I'm getting a little goosebumps telling it. So, um, I was way back in my day, um, like you, a party, party promoter, but I was in a fraternity. So I was president of the fraternity.
And this was my first semester being president. And so you have a pledge class, you get two pledge classes as a president, you get a fall and a spring, and then that's your, your tenure. And then another president comes in. And what we knew, and this will be really interesting for the audience from a human behavior perspective is that like clockwork, every time we'd start a new pledge class within 14 days, 10 to 14, it was like clockwork. They would all get together and they'd revolt.
And they'd say, we don't want to do it anymore. This isn't what we signed up for. This is way fucking harder than we thought it was going to be. Like we thought we're just going to party with you guys. Like that's what we expected, which also shows you how long it takes people to.
adapt or acclimate to a very significantly more difficult situation. Right. I'll tell you what happens after. And then I'll tell you what happened in between after we have this kind of talk that we had.
And I'll tell you how I, how I explained it when I was president. All of a sudden it all vanishes because their expectations of reality have been completely reset. We break reality like in the first 10 to 14 days, it's so painful for them because it's such a contrast from what we have in the day. Not the fun stuff What's not fun? Oh my god I mean they can't drink can't talk to girls the only people they could talk to her brothers or each other and we're mean to them So they could really only talk to each other and the whole point here is that we're trying to get them close together because it's A bunch of dudes who don't know each other from different parts of the campus, right?
And we have to get them in 8 to 12 weeks to leave as one unit of people who know everything about one another that Trust one another that know everything about the other people in the house. So it's like how do you do that? Well, there's only X amount of communication you can have every day.
So let's cut out anybody who's not us. Okay. And then if we really want them to be close together, we'll also reinforce that we're mean. But part of what they had to do is they had to learn everything about everyone else in the house. And so every pledge has to do something that would impress a brother.
And then they get a signature from the brother being like, I approve of you. And you have to get every single brother's signature by the time you're done. Right.
And so that's where each of those side quests become as insane as you might imagine. Right. And there's lots of, you know, there was lots of hazing back in the day, which is not fun.
And you know, a lot of sleepless nights and things like that. And you go from like partying with girls, feeling like you're top of the world, all these brothers feeding you drinks, be like, be like, you're awesome, dude. To then like the next day.
And this is literally how it happens. This is how like the break in reality happens. We do this huge party to like launch the new class.
And the next morning they all wake up. They're all like, they all sleep at the house because that's one of the requirements. And they're all hung over. I've got their ties, like vomit in the corner, whatever.
And we're like, great, clean it up. And they're like, what? Because up to this point, they haven't cleaned after a party because all they did is got to party, see the girls and then leave. But then all of a sudden they're like mopping bottom in the corner and they're hung over and they feel terrible. And they're like, what the fuck?
This is what I signed up for. Right. So anyways, two weeks of this, they get together and they wanted me to meet them.
And this always happens because they want to meet on their, their turf. And I'm like, all right, guys, what's up? And so it's just me. All right.
And my vice president and like 25 guys. So there's like a, you know, there's like a size comparison of like. Just animalistically, there's way more of them than there is of me.
And so I just asked them a couple of questions. I was like, who here before pledging started was like, I want to be a part of this house. The guys were like, you know, me.
Okay. Like, okay, got it. Who here thought it was going to be easy?
Who here thought it would be hard? They raised their hands. I'm like, guys, this is what hard feels like. And all of a sudden there's just like this big exhale in the room.
They're like. expectations get reset. This is normal.
You wanted this thing. You expect it to be hard. Reality now matches conditions.
Sorry. Expectations now match conditions. This is what hard feels like. And then all of a sudden it's like they got permission to feel shitty. And by getting permission to feel shitty, they stopped feeling shitty because they're like, this is just my new world.
And so then, you know, you're like, listen, you give eight weeks, you're going to get three and a half years. Other people are going to drive you around late at night. Other people are going to clean after you.
Like. it's a good investment, right? And that it was a good deal.
Like you give one semester and you get the rest of them to just do whatever you want. Um, but that concept, like that quote on both of those came from that experience of having someone tell me this is what hard feels like. This is where most people stop.
And this is why they don't win is also another beautiful. bit of motivation and given that i spent a little bit of time with goggins and cam haynes two guys i was telling you about this before you said must be nice as we walked in so cameron haynes bow hunter extraordinaire lives in oregon and he has behind the power rack in his garage where he lifts he has must be nice written and i was like why why have you got that put up on there and he was like it's because everyone says must be nice to be you cam must be nice to be sponsored by height and all of these like top level bow things and go on rogan he was there was a video that went super viral of Goggins losing his shit after John Jones won last weekend and the guy that he's hugging his cam. So it's like, it must be nice for you to be backstage at UFC.
It must be nice for this. And I've seen what that guy does. And that guy picks up a rock that weighs about 80 pounds.
And it's got the word poser written on the front of it because people call him a poser. And he carries it up a hill that is maybe like a thousand foot of elevation, mile and a half high. with no fanfare at the end, no finish line, doesn't post it on social media unless the team's there filming it with someone else, and then carries it back down, puts it in the boot of his Raptor, drives away. And he just does that because he needs to remind himself that he's doing the stuff that is hard. And this is where most people stop.
And this is why they don't win. Combined with this is what hard feels like, justifies things being hard. Now, I do worry, and I find this in myself sometimes as well, that you can... to be so good at dealing with suffering that you can actually push yourself a little bit too far and you go i'm starting to bear more burden than i can basically take on and the art of not burning out is something that i think a lot of people if you if this resonates with you the art of not burning out is something that you really really need to be able to feel and like realizing what happens when you just start to glance off the bottom side of it and go okay i'm just gonna ease off the gas a little i need to take this afternoon to go sauna and get some sunshine and chill out and get some food and then i can put my foot back on maybe a little bit tomorrow and we'll temper it um but it just it justifies the fact that i use this stat all the time 90 of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 90 the 10 that do 90 don't make it past episode 20 so by making 21 podcasts you're in the top percentile of all podcasters ever in history that's what hard feels like.
And that's not even hard. It's just consistent. Fuck me. It's less than half a year.
Yeah. Insane. I hear stats like that.
And I just think, man, it is so easy to win like that. I mean, like when I hear that, that's exactly what I think. I'm just like, man, for everyone who's like struggling to win, it's like you, like most of the pain that people experience is purely in their own minds. And so to your point, I think there's an interesting one between like burnout versus hard. And so like for me, burnout is when my, I would define it as my output per unit of time decreases.
So I can see that that's measurable, right? Now, like I can say like number of pages that I edit or the quality of the content that I create, like my output per time, like the team knows when I like, when I'm like six hours, seven hours into recording something, they're like, I literally start like slumping. You're like, like physically, I just start like slumping and I like my, my cadence isn't as like, I'm just not as sharp.
Right. There's that versus emotional burnout, which I think people mislabel as burnout when really it's just like they don't know how to reframe reality. And so what it really is, is they got a comment on a post that bugged them. And like, again, it's like pulling it from the shadows.
It's like, no, this stuff doesn't work. It's like, hold on. What's the one voice that actually is coming through? What is the real thing? Well, there is this comment.
Okay, great. It's embarrassing to even have to say that. But when you say it, then you admit it.
And all of a sudden you put it in the light and the shame kind of starts to evaporate because then you can name it and be like, is this comment better than my bigger than my future? Is this comment bigger than me? And one of the things that I, um, that has helped me was saying like, what's true about this? We'll get back to Alex in one minute, but first I need to tell you about Seed. Seed's DS01 daily symbiotic is one of the most advanced probiotic and prebiotics on the market.
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Also, you can get 15% off your first month if you go to seed.com slash modern wisdom and use the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's S-E-E-D dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Are you familiar with Byron Katie? Do you know her? I've heard her name.
Yeah, the work. She does the work. And one of the first questions that she asks you is, is it true? How do you know that it can be true?
Yeah. And so it's like the same thing. Bring it from the shadows right into the light. Okay.
You have this sense. there's no shit it's like a fucking smell it's like yeah maybe something's a bit maybe something's maybe i might be like a piece of shit maybe i'm not competent maybe i'm not whatever yeah okay let's and the next one is like what if we confront it and say like what if they're right now what because a lot of i think a lot of effort gets put into trying to deny deny reality right like there's this clip that i shared uh from tom billiard and he was talking about how he gets made fun of for his ears being big right you And I think it's a really good clip because his point that he was making, because it's such a visual, easy example for people to understand. He's like, is that it's true.
I do have big ears. And. And so that's that's like the if they're like, you have no right to be making content. Are they right? OK.
And. Yeah, I'm still going to do it anyways, because the thing is, like, one of the things that I had earlier on in my career was like. I didn't think I was a really good person. Like I was like, I'm not a good person. Like some people like, yeah, I just had that.
Right. And I had a history, you know, whatever. And one of the things that gave me a lot of respite or relief from that kind of thought process was like, comma, that's okay.
Because I can still do the things that create success and not deserve it and still get it. And that actually felt very powerful for me because it was like, I don't have to deserve to success. I can still just do the stuff that gets it. It's like, you don't have to, you don't have to deserve the girl.
but you can still do the things that get her. And do you deserve it when you have her? I don't know.
Who knows? I hate the word deserve to begin with. Right. But like that concept, because also I could segue into like gratitude around, like, if you think you deserve it, then you don't, you don't enjoy it.
But, um, that has been super powerful for me, which is like, what if they're right? And because a lot of people just trying to, they spend so much effort trying to fight the fact that the comments might be right. This might've been a fucking terrible thumbnail.
You know what? this might've been a boring video. This, this post might've been regurgitated content.
This post might've been inspired too closely by someone else's post, right? What if they're right? And does it make me a piece of shit?
What if it does? And you end up getting down to base, which is pretty much nothing. All that there is is actions. All that there is, is what you're going to do in response to this. You know what?
Another brilliant, uh, add addition to this that you kind of mentioned. Yeah. Which is the fact that this is what hard feels like. Most people get to this stage and they decide to stop.
And now the bar is set so low. Goggins said this in the episode with me and it gave me chills when he said it. He was like, it's so easy to be successful nowadays because people are weak. Yeah.
Every's weak. Dana White says it as well. Yeah. I tell my kids it is so easy.
If you are even a like. weekend savage you will run these kids over and for every single person it's giving me chills again for every single person that likes to castigate the very padded victimhood mentality of the modern world okay cool like you can you can rail against people that say that the world is against them even though it's not and etc etc how does that inform the way that you should operate in the world right well okay what you're saying is everybody else It is fallible, weak, fragile in some way or another. How does that inform the way that you act? The way that you should act is, holy shit, if I have even a modicum of resilience, this makes the market environment for me so much easier. Whether I want to get the girl, buy the house, become successful in whatever domain I choose to, the bar is set so low.
And this, if we're going tweets, this segues into one of my favorite ones, which is you stay in poverty until you learn the first lesson of poverty, which is two words, my fault. And so when I was younger, I was really angry at my parents, like many people are, right? Justified or not, doesn't really matter.
I was very angry and I blamed them for the woes of my life. And I realized when I was 19 that these people that I hated. I was giving all the power over the fact that I wasn't the person I wanted to be. And I was like, well, it's their fault.
And the idea that I had actually given these people that I hated power over my success was ultimately something that made me feel sick to my stomach and was what allowed me to point the finger of blame inwards and say my fault. And then at least take ownership over the fact that like, and? Like, sure, maybe your dad didn't hug you enough or maybe your mom wasn't present or whatever it is. Right. It's like, and and like I said this the other day and it'll probably piss off a lot of your audience.
So, you know, we can put our soft earphones on. Like if you were if you if you suffered from racial inequality, if you suffered from gender inequality, if you suffered from being born in Bangladesh, if you were sexually abused your entire life. You would be completely justified in the fact that you are not achieving the things that. other people who didn't have those disadvantages have achieved.
And I say this as a white guy who was born in America to a doctor father. I understand that. But to the same degree, you have the opportunity that Chris nor I have, which is that you can be an inspiration to people who just, who went through the same thing and succeeded comma, despite those circumstances, because I can promise that there is somebody who has had it worse and has done it better. And I think that that one single point of proof and like, there's a global point of proof that you can look for, for sure.
But like, you can be that. very local point of proof in your community or sub community. And I think, um, as soon as we shed that, that's like, I just, I'm a big fan of, uh, power follows the blame finger. So like wherever you point the blame fingers where the power follows. And so it's like, if you point it, if you point it to the government, government has the power.
If you point it at your, your spouse and say like, it's their fault that I'm not in shape, it's their fault. They never let me do anything. It's like, well, you're giving them all the power. And so it's like, until you're like, it's my fault.
It's also becomes my responsibility. What is, what if it's not your fault? It doesn't matter.
And like, I can't run marathons because I lost my leg at birth. And either you can just never try or you put the metal thing on and you do it anyways. So this is one of the themes that I'm very interested in to do with your work in general. And it's one of the reasons why it bridges the gap. from what we're going through, which are, you know, some really lovely philosophical insights and all of the rest of it.
The difference is you seem to have a knack to be able to drag yourself out of the philosophy and get yourself into action. There's not too much mental masturbation that goes on. So let's say that there's someone who's listening to this podcast, you know, thousands of people that are listening who are that person.
Millions. Thousands of people that are that person. There'll be a lot of people that are listening.
Don't worry. That person that goes, I love when I hear these aphorisms and things, and maybe it goes on the whiteboard that's on the front of my fridge for a couple of months. How does that person get from mental masturbation around it to action? That this impacts my life in a tangible way that actually makes a difference to me. Any of the things that we go through today.
All right. Two things. One is knowing the input output equation.
The second is knowing what your fuel is going to be. So if you can't define the inputs and outputs that are going to get you what you want, then there's no way to start, right? Because you don't know what you're supposed to do.
So you have to define it down to like the most basic first actions. It's like, if I want to start creating content, that means I have to post something. If it means I have to start doing cold, I always think in terms of business, because that's what I'm in. But like, I'm either doing a cold reach out, I'm doing a cold.
Cold call, cold email, cold DM, whatever that is. I have to make a piece of content. I have to post it.
I have to make a podcast. I have to make a YouTube video. I have to make a short, whatever that is, make a blog post.
Um, I have to run an ad, right? I have to, I have to run the ad. I have to press go.
I have to spend the money, whatever it is, like whatever that core initial action is. Go to the gym, lift the weight, put the shoes on, get in the car. Whatever the input is, you have to define what the input is.
That's going to get you the output you want. Now, once you know what that input output is, the next one is why aren't you doing it? Right?
And so I think a lot of people are looking for something. that is very hard to find. And so, and then they attribute their lack of success or lack of action because they don't have passion or motivation.
Right. And I was the same way. And so the short story around this was that I, uh, I, I watched all the Ted talks in college. Like that was like what I was like, I'm not watching YouTube.
I'm watching Ted talks. And I was like, and then I realized, and then I heard the term mental masturbation and I was like, Oh, that's definitely what I'm doing. I was like, my life hasn't changed at all. And then I got my job.
So out of college, And I would read all the self-help books. I read like every night. It's all I did. I just read all these self-help books. And I found one of them that said, there are people who are wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs.
And I remember hearing that word wantrepreneur. And I was like, it made me feel sad. I was like, I don't want to be fucking wantrepreneur. I was like, I'm not some bitch.
Like, but I was like, but what if they're right? I am a wantrepreneur. I'm not an entrepreneur.
I want to be one and I'm not. And from that point, it took me six months to quit my job. to actually decide to do the entrepreneurial thing. And the thing, there are many things that contributed to me being able to leave. And I think a lot of it's not like people are looking for one thing.
It might be a big bag of wise, a lot of them, right. That add up together to be above your action threshold. And I think in the early days, people are looking for the big carrot.
They want the big vision. They want the big passion, but they don't have it. But I want to, I'll give you the first rule of entrepreneurship that I've learned, which is use what you have. And a lot more people have pain.
A lot more people have anger. A lot more people have shame. And if you can use that as your gas in the beginning, you'll eventually get to a point where you can get out of that loop and then find something that you are really passionate about. But if you can't tie your shoes, you can't lift the weight, you can't send the DM, then you have to start with whatever you have.
And so for me, it was hatred of my current existence. I hated being a entrepreneur. I hated being a wannabe.
I hated being one of those people who talked about all the things they were going to do and didn't do anything. I hated living the life that my dad wanted me to live. I was, I was his bitch.
That's what it was. I was his bitch. I was living his dreams out, not mine.
And that was, you know, led to that other tweet, which was, um, sometimes your parents dreams have to die in order for yours to live. And for me, I realized that the idea that my father had of me as his son, that image had to die in order for the image of myself that I wanted to be to live because I kept trying. to quit my job and go be an entrepreneur. And every time I'd have the conversation, be like, ah, come over, we'll talk about it.
We'll have dinner. You know what? And he'd always talk me off the ledge.
It was always over and over again. Yeah. And we're great authoritarian. You don't need to persuade when you have compliance.
And so, and so everybody has that person or, or it might actually be somebody who's talking off the ledge. Or might should be a voice in your head doesn't really matter because that voice in person that only happened once or twice Probably keeps talking to you when you're at home But the big thing for me when I when I decided to make the jump and mind you I was such a bitch about it That I had to drive across the country before I called him to tell him that I'd left Yeah, I remember like I didn't want to yeah, I didn't want to confront him Which he then like flew off the handle about but I Just knew and this is the Tom Robbins quote But it's just the when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change And I think that, I think pain moves people far, far more effectively than pleasure does. Like the easy thing to way to prove it is like point a gun at someone's head and you have absolute compliance and they will do what they need to do.
Right. Automatically. Just like that. Like death is the great motivator and the gun just reminds you. And so I think that if you can create the figurative gun to your head of the pain that you're experiencing, and then I'm a big fan of future casting out.
negative scenarios. So people talk about like positive visualization. I prefer negative visualization, which is what if I keep doing what I'm currently doing for the next 10 years?
What my life looked like then that usually takes my current pain and then just magnifies it. And then that allows me to get my action threshold high enough that it goes over the edge so that I can take that first move. And so if you know what the inputs outputs are of what you need to do, the guy who has the little quote on his wall and you figure out whatever fuel you've got, not the one you wish you had, but the one you've got, and you use that. To do the first input, you've crossed the line.
You're in the game. I told a story on the episode that I did with Goggins about bullying in school. And this was something where I opened up about a topic that I haven't spoken about a ton because it made me feel weak and it made me feel vulnerable and so on and so forth. But. One of the things that's only really recently happened, and it's actually been assisted by the guy that reached out and messaged me.
This dude messaged and said that he was sorry for what had happened. His daughter was going to school and it made him reflect on his time at school and how he treated me. And he was like, dude, I just wanted to say that I'm sorry.
I don't even know if you're going to see this. I'm happy that you seem to be happy. But, you know, I just had to get it off my chest.
And that really helped. Not that I was carrying much. But one of the questions, you know, you've spoken about your dad and this kind of like authoritarian relationship and living out that dream. Yeah.
How? did you avoid or how have you got yourself to a stage now where you're no longer driven by a chip on your shoulder toward him because i think that there are a lot of people that go through challenges in their past yeah that you find fuel in it and they go wow i i can be fueled by hatred yeah phenomenal i can alchemize this toxic thing into something which is useful totally but i would imagine that that has a shelf span right that if you keep on using that for long enough there are more optimal ways that you could start to move perpetually under your own motion transmuted into something else how did you get past having this chip on your shoulder about the relationship that you'd had with your dad and where it had set you back or forward or whatever um or have you yeah i think i have um i think my realization was you know first the goal was make as much as my dad then it was make more than my dad, then it was make more than my dad had ever made. And I realized that the approval that I had, that I sought was always going to be moved. Right. Um, I mean, I've told this story before, but, um, maybe not to your audience.
Uh, but like when I, when I, my dad and I didn't really speak a ton, you know, we texted or, you know, two minute phone call. Hey, you're alive. Okay, cool.
Um, but for that was kind of like for like five-ish years, um, after I left home, uh, to go do the gym thing. And only once gym lunch was like printing money. Um, and so we were, I think I was taking home million and a half a month at like 27 or something like that.
And he gave me a call out of the blue and like, my dad doesn't like cold call me. Um, and so I'm sitting at dinner and I step outside and he says, um, Hey, you're gonna want to sit down for this. And I was like, okay.
He's like, I'm sorry. And I was like, about what? And he was like, everything. And I remember in the moment actually feeling nothing and thinking that was curious and then being like, huh, okay.
And I probably should have just like accepted it for the olive branch that he was probably trying to like lean out to me. Um, but here's what I said instead. I said, you know how people get up on stage when they win the awards and they're like, I just want to thank my mom and dad for always being there.
Always believe in me. I was like, I'm not going to say that. I was like, cause you weren't and you didn't believe in me. and right after that, he was like, well, we'll see how long it lasts.
And so it was after that phone call that I realized that everything that I'd done to that point was to try and beat him at his game because everything my dad cared about and not everything, he's a good guy. Like, you know, we're fine now, but like. when I was growing up and it's fairly common in most foreign families to be very like money driven.
And I always knew that kind of subconsciously and he would never say this, but like I felt it because whenever he introduced somebody, he'd tell me how much they made immediately. He'd be like, this is John. John makes this. Like this is Bob. He makes this.
Like it was just, it was just like the worth and the name was like immediately tied together. And so I realized that I was trying to win his game rather than playing my game. And I think when that happened, it was the same instance of kind of like the blame finger. but just at a different level of saying like, okay, well, I don't blame my dad anymore, but I'm still playing his game. And so I'm winning, not my game, I'm winning someone else's.
And so I think when I was like, okay, well then I have to define the game and the meaning of the game that I want to play. I have more responsibility now because I have to define the rules of what matters most to me, et cetera. But that was where I feel like I got, and maybe there's more that I'll unpack later, but that was kind of the next level, at least for my awareness of how I perceived what I was going after.
Do you remember you, I think you spoke about people that break the law in an attempt to make money. You said we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. So we sacrifice freedom for money in the hopes that the money will give us freedom. Yeah. Downstream from that, this is one of the best things that I learned for all of last year.
And you created the framework and then I filled it in. So I talked about the tension between success and a desire to feel like we're enough. I think that this. speaks to what you're on about here success is a strange thing presumably we want success because we think a more successful life will bring us more happiness meaning and fulfillment here's the problem we sacrifice the thing we want happiness for the thing which is supposed to get it success failure can make you miserable but i'm not sure that success will make you happy and if you end up with an equation if you could imagine like we sacrifice happiness to achieve success in the pursuit of happiness like if you just remove success from both sides of the equation what you're left with it's just Happiness. There are...
we can't deny the fact that we're statusful beings that we, you know, we require external validation. We can't just, you know, go and live in a cave and in peaceful bliss and all the rest of it. Like there are things that we need to do, but I do feel like a lot of the time we overclock our lives with regards to success and the pursuits that we go through in an attempt to, to do this.
And that, uh, we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing, which is supposed to get it is like, I see that all the time. I always ask myself, am I overcomplicating this? Like, am I, am I doing more than I need to do?
Is there a simpler way to do this? I think, I mean, I think this is actually a game theory thing. And you're familiar, okay.
So I can go on it or I can not, if you want. Bring it on, bring it on. Yeah, so I mean, Simon Sinek popularized this, but you have finite and infinite games, right?
Finite games where you have known players, agreed upon rules, and an outcome that wins the game, right? And then infinite game, you have known and unknown players. no rules. And the point of the game is to keep the game going.
And what happens is that people apply finite rules to infinite games and then they wonder why it's not working. What's an example? So a finite game would be like baseball. You know, the players at the end of the game, the person you tally up the ones with the most runs and you win and there's, you can't, you can't run, you can't hold the ball and run it around the bases.
Like there's rules of play with an infinite game. So the Vietnam War isn't a simple example that Simon Sinek gives, which is basically the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because they were applying a finite structure, which is we're going to win this war. And the Vietnamese people were playing an infinite game structure, which is we're going to stay alive and keep fighting.
And as long as someone is staying alive and keeping fighting, they will beat the person who's trying to end something. And so the infinite frame always conquers the finite. And the thing is, is that most of the games worth playing are infinite.
And so. if you were trying to get in shape, you don't win getting in shape. The point is to stay in shape for the rest of your life. You don't win at marriage. The point is to stay married.
You don't win at business. The point is to stay in business and keep doing business. So the point of the game is to keep playing. And I think if, if the six, and I would imagine success, if you put all of those things together, it's an infinite game. And so the point of success is to do the things that make you successful.
And so if you're doing the things that are making you successful, then you are by definition winning. And I think that. For me, redefining what is a perfect day and living as many of those days in a row as I possibly can, to me, that's winning. And I, and I obviously have a relatively contrarian worldview, but which is that like when we die, nothing happens.
And, you know, we know what it was like to die because we've all been dead before, which is when we were, before we were alive. But I don't think that what I will do will ultimately matter in 500 million years. And so that kind of eliminates a lot of the pressure for me around like the external outcome.
Sure. I'm human. There are definitely motivators, but if I can just over time chip away at how much that weighs on the scale and I can keep putting more and more coins on the other side towards the infinite game of like the point of the game is to keep playing.
And like, there are some things that I remind myself over and over again. It's like the point of the game is to keep playing. That's the point. That is the point is to just keep playing. The point of the game is to keep playing.
I very much like that. What was that? You found out, um, the three trait.
the three most common traits of highly successful people. Do you remember those? Yeah, it was, um, it's, it's so funny.
A superiority complex. So the three most common traits of hyper successful people that they looked at. And it was interesting because there's the influencer world wants to be like, you have to wake up at five or you have to do cold plungers or whatever the fuck.
Right. But the thing that, but there was actually very few that they all had in common. So number one was that they had a superiority complex.
They thought they were better than other people and that they deserved more. The second is that they suffered from massive insecurity and feeling that they would never be enough. And third, they had impulse control.
And so you've got this combination of people who are like, I want to do this big thing. So there's a big toward thing. And they've got this big away pain that's like, I'm never going to be enough.
I always have to do more. And then they have impulse control that keeps them focused on the goal without seeing the woman in the red dress or getting pursued by her. And that like, so it's like shoot high. have a big thing that that motivate like have a big tiger behind you and stay on the path have you ever heard uh jordan peterson talk about that study of starving rats in a tube with a spring attached to that no fucking brilliant this is this is what you're talking about so um starving rats are placed into a tube yeah and they have a spring that is attached to the tail that can measure the force that they pull out and that's a proxy for desire Then they waft the smell of cheese in from the front of the tube and the rat pulls and they measure how hard they want to go.
And you think these rats are starving. They would be pulling pretty hard. Then they do another iteration of the study. This time they waft the smell of cheese in from the front, but they waft the smell of a cat in from behind.
And the rats pull harder. And what's the lesson? That you not only need to run towards something that you want, but you need to run away from something that you fear. Now the problem, and this is, I like superiority complex, crippling insecurity, impulse control. I like that.
The problem is. The people who we admire the most due to the most success in the real world don't necessarily have the most admirable internal states. That, to me, isn't necessarily the most peaceful, blissful way to live your life.
What does it say that, especially in the modern world, we revere the people who have external accolades of success, and yet the three most common traits of these super successful people lead from a place which is... almost objectively miserable, unadmirable. Yeah.
How do we, how do we square this circle? I think it's just, what are we solving for? So, um, like, I mean, a lot of people, I love watching last dance, which is Michael Jordan's, you know, mini docu-series.
Yeah. Unbelievable. Um, I think most people could see him there and be like, I don't know if I really envy this guy's life.
Like he still seems like pretty upset despite being a billionaire, despite all the, you know, these, these, these other things. And so I think that if like, you know, if you're a billionaire, you're not going to be like, oh, I'm going to be like, what are we solving for? Like my, my closest friend, Dr. Kashi, he has a statement cause he coached Olympic, uh, Olympic teams. And he was like, champions are broken.
I was like, huh? He's like, they, people look at champions and try and find something that that champion has that they don't have. And he's like, but it's not that at all.
He's like, they lack something everyone else has, which is an off button. They just don't stop. And at the end of the day, like if we're, if we're optimizing for outcomes, then the most broken person will win. The person who has the absolute biggest desire for achievement, the absolute biggest fear or pain that they're running away from, and the hardest impulse control. Now, impulse control, most people would agree is a good thing.
The other two, not as much. And so what are we optimizing for? What problem are we solving?
It's probably the number one most frequently asked question that I ask to our portfolio companies whenever we're about to do anything, which is what problem are we solving? If the problem that we're solving is that I want to be content. well, there's a lot of ways to do that. You don't need to do all these other things.
If the problem you're solving is that you want to be the richest man in the world, well, you're going to have to have a lot of superiority complex. You have a lot of crippling insecurity and you have a lot of impulse control and you have to wait a long time. There's a quote from Jason Pargan that says, except that all of your heroes are full of shit.
You heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else. Yeah. I just, I agree with the statement. Fucking money.
Um, I, I. It's just so interesting to me. I've been thinking about this to do with Billy McFarland. Let me just get this in.
Hit it. And that's okay. Because if they wanted that, then that's the problem that they're solving for.
Like I get criticized all the time for work-life balance. People are like, well, you don't have any hobbies, Alex, and you don't whatever, right? And I'm like, I don't fucking want any.
So why do I have to sacrifice things that I would prefer to do to do things I don't want to do to satisfy your objective measure of what you deem as work-life balance? why? So that's what, what, this is where you were talking about.
Uh, was it optimized for the outcome or, uh, what's the metric of success? Uh, yeah. You were saying like, what, what is it that people are optimizing for? Right.
It seems to me that you have stepped back and decided axiomatically, this is the thing that I'm optimizing for that I enjoy most doing. Yes. That's I enjoy playing the game. And so everything I do is about the game. Yes.
my podcast is called the game i draw pictures all day about business i write books about business i make content about business i spend the rest of my time i've never seen a picture oh dude 100 million offers zillion pictures in there oh are they done by you 100 all of the drawings are mine and 100 leads is like 100 doodles in it isn't it okay when you're good are they nice i think so they got are they cute yeah you got little animals in yeah they don't have animals and i'm not i'm not i'm not gonna look at them oh there's there's little bag of money big bag of money like that's how nice dead serious sweet but no but like and and i spend the rest of my day doing business you And so it's like, why don't you garden? Because I don't care. Here's the other thing, right? I always talk about this.
Steffi Graf, one of the greatest female tennis players of all time. And she gets tested when she's 10 years old, 11 years old, and she's in some tennis academy. And they gauge the players on two criteria.
They gauge them on desire to train and skill set. And she was 10 out of 10 on both. so okay not only has she got the raw materials to make a phenomenal tennis player but she'll outwork you and to her it won't even feel like work that's fucking terrifying yeah and that's why i do think for the people that look at yourself and say uh alex is on a road to burnout it's because you are using your theory of mind about how you would feel if you had to work as much as you do but okay what is the thing that you can do longer than anybody else and to them it looks like work and to you it looks like play or feels like play What would that be? Oh, well, for me, it would be computer games or knitting or rock music or whatever it is.
Do that. Okay. So imagine if you just got to do that all day, but instead of it being rock music, it was fucking business.
Simon commented the other day, was it you're sprinting on a treadmill. They were concerned that the pace that the show is going out at was going to cause me to burn out. And in retrospect, I'm, you know, in five years time, I might go, fuck yeah, I was moving too quick.
But I don't think that. Like. I work at the pace that I like to work at. And I also like to see where those limits are. And that's exciting to me to go, okay, just how much harder can I go here?
And then again, you've got to temper it with, that's burnout, like that's just the beginning of it. And you only know that after you've burned out like 30 times. But that's, it's tried to say after Atomic Habits by Jones Clear, right?
But the intersection of like what you love to do, what you're good at and what you can be paid for is like slap bang in the middle of it. slaves worked all the hours they were awake for their entire lives in American history, in Egyptian history, in the rest of the world that had slaves, which is most of the world at some given point. I think like if they can do it, so can I.
Now you're like, well, did they have a happy existence? Well, they didn't get to pick the work they did, but it means that you can work. That's if you have the cap behind you, you can work every hour of the day.
I'm like, well, if you get to have the cheese and you get to eat the cheese the whole way you're going, then I mean, there's the famous quote, you know, the person who the person who loves walking walks further than the person who loves the destination. Right. And so, like, I think it's the same thing. But the everyone so many people want to project their idea of of what they think your life should be like onto you. And it's just completely irrelevant.
It just doesn't matter. Like if all I did, if I, if I weren't married, right. Cause people were like, okay, well he is married.
And like, I am in shape, but I also just like working out. But if I didn't have either of those things and all I did was work all day, more people would talk about the work-life balance thing for me than they currently do. And who cares?
I just like, I just, I fundamentally, I'm like, you are going to die and you're not going to matter. And I'm going to die and I'm not going to matter. So why do I care about what you're going to say when you're not even show up to my funeral?
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There is something that you're optimizing for. I love the reward. What reward?
The micro rewards I get every day. Of operating a business. Of all things business related. So I love writing the book about business.
I love talking to my editor about what we're changing. Oh, that's a really way better way to say it. Right. Or I like tweeting about the thoughts that we have. I love doing discussions like this.
Cause I talk about my favorite topic, which is business for the most part. Um, like, and I actually am pretty averse to punishment. I've learned that about me.
Like I do not like it. And when I say punishment in the formal sense, like things you don't like. Right.
And so like, I avoid them like the plague. I don't do them. And so I just do as many of the things I can that reward me as frequently as possible.
But from the outside to a lot of people that looks like punishment. Right. Yes.
Interesting. How can someone cut through societal expectations, the ways they've dealt with past trauma, expectations from parents, all of the things that aren't their thing? Yeah. How can somebody, because what you've done again, axiomatically a priori, this is the thing I want to optimize for.
how do people find the thing that they want to optimize for i don't have a thing alex that's fucking great for you with your business it just happens to be something else that's at the intersection of making a shit ton of money yeah how do i find and i was lucky with that yes that that just happened to be the intersection because if i love knitting and i didn't like business yeah that's a whole set because like you can turn knitting into a business but like if i only like knitting then there's a way to make a living from that but to to get to the person who's like uh how do i find my thing um I'm a big fan of being directionally correct rather than absolutely correct. And so I think what happens is most people are trying to find the perfect answer when they have no perspective from which to make a judgment. They're trying to find the perfect thing to do when they haven't done anything. So how would you have perspective to make a judgment?
Like if you try a lot of things in the beginning, which you have to know what your inputs outputs are, decrease your action threshold enough with either a cheese or a cat, whatever you need. Most people have more cats than they have cheese in the beginning. So use the cat to start running towards something. And the thing is, is.
The rat, it's so simple. It's like there's cheese here. But what you really just need to know is that there's cheese out there. And there's a cat behind me for sure.
And so if I just go anywhere away from the cat, I will have a higher likelihood of getting closer to the cheese. Not that I will find it, but I will get closer to it. And I think it's, and I've lived my life through a series of rapid iterations, not trying to pick the right thing. Because I just like, even when I started my first business, I was between frozen yogurt, test prep, and a gym. Those are the three businesses that I was choosing between.
Makes complete sense. Yeah. It's a lot of things that I like, right?
And so, so I was choosing between those things and like, why were those the things I was like, well, I was pretty good at taking tests in college. So I get that. I like frozen yogurt. And I mean, it sounds simple, but like, I was like, everybody likes something.
Right. And I actually didn't know that I was going to like business. That's the crazy thing. Cause also a, when you and I were younger, Instagram wasn't there. You took like none of this shit existed and entrepreneurship wasn't cool yet.
And so I just hated my job a lot. And I hated where I lived a lot. And so I was like, well, I will just not be here. So cat, don't know what city I'm going to go to, but just not this city.
I went across the furthest place from Baltimore, which is California. And then I was like, okay, well, what do I hate doing? Well, let me not do that.
Which is, you know, sitting on meetings all day and doing whatever, you know, doing grunt work for shit that I felt like was meaningless. And instead I was like, I'll do fitness because I like fitness. And I was like, at the very least I'll do something I enjoy, which I liked fitness at the time. And if you're like, well, I don't like doing anything.
It's like, well, then that's impossible because your brain is wired to be rewarded for things. And so you are doing things that reward you. That's why you do them. Like everything we do is because we've been rewarded for doing things like that in the past. And we project the same activities and we predict that doing things like we did in the past that reward us, reward us again in the future.
That's where our behavior comes from. And so it's like, okay, well, what has rewarded you in the past? Where's the cat? go the opposite way. Yeah.
So the reverse role model is something similar, but you're almost taking this into a lifestyle perspective. So the reverse role model is if you live in a town or you grow up somewhere and there's no one around you like the sort of person that you want to be like, but there are tons of people like the person you don't want to be like, you can say there's a way marker. I don't want his relationship with gambling. I don't want the way that he handles his finances.
I don't want the way that him and his wife communicate with each other. It's like, okay, there we go. Warren Buffett. or mungers says uh like an amazing amount of success has been achieved by not trying to be smart but avoiding being stupid uh so there's your way markers there but what you're saying is that this is almost like a abstracted lifestyle version of this these are all of the things that i hate to do what's the opposite of that yeah and the challenge of i don't know precisely what the exact thing is therefore i can't move toward it is one of mine which is you perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control.
I was gonna say it's a, it's a, it's a fallacy. It's a, it's a decision-making fallacy. It's the same.
It's, this is why investor frames can be so useful. Like if you're looking for the perfect investment, you won't find one. There's always downsides.
Every, every investment has risk. Right. And so using that frame, you're like, well, there's all these paths.
Which one do I choose? It's like, well, you have to, the one thing that's guaranteed is if you keep the money, it will go down in value because it'll inflate. Right. So not investing is the only way guaranteed to not get a return on your investment. Is that the fact that inflation exists?
Do you think that's a useful motivating force for business people? You know, you could imagine a different form of world economics where, you know, like embedded growth obligations weren't there and like whatever, you know, inflation didn't happen. Do you think that that sort of motivates people to actually be like, oh, fuck, like I need to I need to do something with this money. I can't just sit, sit and leave it in the bank. I think it would motivate investors.
Yes. More. Yeah. Yeah.
But I mean, the business people would just like probably keep more coins in their in their vault and just keep transacting. Who's that Scrooge McDuck? Yeah, they'd be less likely to deploy capital faster. Because if you feel like there's a cost of capital that's higher for letting it sit there, then you have a higher urgency to do something with it. If you have less urgency, then you only do it when you know it's going to crash.
You gain nothing from underestimating your opponent. How does this relate to your world? So... a lot of the tweets that I have actually come from conversations I have with our portfolio Ceo. And so they'll say something, right.
Um, and they're like, Oh, we're way better than those guys. And I think somebody said like something like that on a meeting. And I just thought about it and I was like, what a stupid thing to say.
I was like, you gain nothing from that statement. I was like, you literally gain, like, what do you gain from that? You gain complacency, right? You, you, you increase the likelihood of looking stupid in the case that they do crush you. Right.
I was like, Because on the flip side, the only things that upset the guys who are on the top of the mountain is hubris. There's really no reason that the guy on the top of the mountain should ever lose. He has the most resources. He has the highest perspective.
He has the most vision. He has everything. He has all the food at the top of the mountain. And yet, history shows us humans act like humans.
And so we lose because of our egos. And because it hurts to say, what if that person's better than me? and so i think that if you it actually is really uh parallel with a different uh tweet that they kind of took off which was people underestimate how much smarter you can seem if you have 20 minutes of preparation yeah that's that's so fucking true right and so like people get into businesses and like well what if you actually had to face this team people were like well i don't want to practice it's like why not like why wouldn't you practice like for a lot of fighters show up not having prep for the fight not really hard.
I'm like, what do you gain from that? Because if you practice really hard, you get better, period. And like, all it is, is purely an ego play. The only, the only win you get from not prepping and showing up to the fight is that you appear to be more naturally gifted.
And I would rather be known for my work ethic than my natural gift as an aside, but you appear to be more naturally gifted. And then you win by less than you would, if you prepared, you gain nothing. And so it's purely an ego thing, but you, you, we do it all the time. And so I wanted to like my, my Twitter stream is just thoughts to self.
I deleted it because I didn't have enough room in my profile to say it, but it was originally like notes to self. And it's just like to remind me of things as they come up, because I fall into that trap too. I'm like, Oh, I'm going to, we're going to outperform this guy or like this company is going to crush it. I'm like, but we don't gain anything from that.
It's like, so we just have to assume that we're always the underdog. And then they've got a trick up their sleeve that we don't know about. it's like that's the whole the only the paranoid survive a reverse of that or something that's interesting to do with people at the top of the pyramid is there's only one way i know to beat people who copy you get bigger it's not by direct conflict but by making them shrink into irrelevance by comparison agree i just i mean especially when it comes to content creation i imagine that this is something that totally Yeah. You know, you see one thing that becomes effective and then downstream from that, a lot of stuff happens.
And, you know, if you've done the hard work of forging ahead, trailblazing, pathfinding, split testing, wow, we finally came up with this thing. And then within four weeks, you're like, oh, brilliant. This is all over the internet now.
Well, I always see it as like a first mover thing, which is like they need me. I don't need them. They require me in order to iterate their content.
I don't because I don't look at theirs to make mine. And so, and it's because like, everybody knows man as well. Every knows every single person that's copying thumbnails, that's copying subtitle, subtitle styles.
That's, you know, going after the same talking points. They know deep down that what they're doing is creating a rough hewn pixelated equivalent of what they think they can try and be at, at best, what you can hope for is being the second best Alex Homozy in the world. Right.
And I'll win that game, but like they would beat me at being whoever they are. Correct. I mean, it sounds so trite, but like I I'm trying to say this in a different way so that it hits because like people have heard like there's only one version of you.
Like there's just so much actual meat to that concept because this is this is, you know, Harry originally did the document don't create thing. And I think that the reason that the content that we have is, quote, original is because like we document. I document through Twitter the things that come up in my actual life.
And so it's not like what's trending right now. It's like, well, I had this meeting with the CEO and he fucking said that thing about the competitor. And that's my tweet. And there wasn't somebody else in the meeting also going, oh, brilliant.
That's a lesson that I can take that I can use for my Twitter. Right. And so it's all from like original source. And if everyone else like, and this is on the flip side, if you're the person who's doing this, like. you need to find what your original source is of content because like you will always be second or second you'll never be first is really the is really the statement and like at least for me if i'm playing a game i want to play for the long haul and the point of the game is keep the game going and if you want to keep the game going then you can't be dependent on someone else there was another one that i thought was quite interesting especially given the kind of current world of uh men's advice and rich guy uh you existence online more people stay poor because of their egos than get rich off them yeah at the moment it seems like egos are being valorized on the internet especially among men's advice yeah how is it that more people stay poor because of their egos and get rich off them if there's a bunch of examples of people with seemingly big egos that also have money i think that's um what's the fallacy um whatever the whatever the cognitive fallacy for what's in front of your eyes I think there are far more people.
Was it? Availability bias. There you go.
I think there are far more people who are successful and significantly more successful than the people who are visible on content. And I would say many of those people aren't actually that successful. And so if we're looking at the objective measure of success as like net worth, just for the sake of this conversation, there are far more people who are rich and anonymous than there are people who flaunt their Lamborghinis that they rented for a day. I mean, if you really think about the influencer world of business, There are not that many guys who actually like.
are really in the game. Like most of those guys sell something from their platform about building a platform. Like that's, that's 90, not even 95. It's probably like 98, 99%. And so there's only like a very small select.
And to be fair, those guys are all pretty humble. Like you look at the Harry's, you look at the Andy's, you look at the Tom Billy, like these, Ed Milet, like, you know, like the guys who have become, you know, in the business space, like. And they're not particularly egotistical guys.
And it's usually because they know what hard feels like. And they know what it's like to be inadequate over and over and over again, because you only can be inadequate if you go to another level. If you feel amazing, it's because you haven't moved up. Does that mean that if somebody wants to be successful and they feel like they've still got an ego, that they need to do some work on dissolving that?
I think they just need to do harder things. Like you need to fight harder opponents. like you're winning in this little pool the only way you can maintain an ego is by believing that you're a big fish in a little pond right or a big fish in whatever size pond you think it is and if you're a big fish you're not in a big enough pond it's totally delusion it's hard to comprehend like bezos if you've heard any of his interviews seems like a very humble guy but like you could have a hundred billionaires in a room and he is worth the same amount as them and then if you had each one of those billionaires is a thousand millionaires he's still worth the same the same amount as 1,100, whatever, 100,000 millionaires and then him. So like there's just levels to it. And I think the moment you get the ego is the moment you stop growing because you feel like you beat the level, but you just keep repeating the level rather than moving up because there is a harder boss and they just haven't faced it yet.
I suppose it's an easy way, you know, if you were going to a karate class, but you decided instead of going to the adult one to go to the one that's under 11s. Yeah. And you're going to kick the fuck out of all of these. And you video it and you're like, look at me. And it just happens to be that they're the same size as you.
And like, just imagine they're like dumb on the inside, but they're, you know, adult size and you're kicking the shit out of them. It's like, yeah, do it to Jones. Right. Like not going to happen. And so like, I'm going to say this.
Yeah. I was just, I'm just trying to say this the way that I take this the way I mean it. I get comments from people who are like, love your humility, Alex. And like, I don't think I'm that humble of a guy being real, at least internally in my own head.
But. I am reminded daily of my inadequacy on the business game. Because like right now we've moved up a level in terms of like, now we're making, now we're doing deals. Now we're investing in companies. We're taking on big risk.
We're writing checks, like the, another level of the game than just owning one, not to say that owning one business and growing it, it's not hard. It absolutely is a different kind of hard, but like I'm getting into this game and I'm absolutely the small fish. Like Warren Buffett made $90 billion on the trade.
He made an Apple in 2020 one move. Right. And so I'm like, I am entering into a game. Like, how?
How could I say that I'm good? Like, even if I was exceptional, it's still going to take 20 years to prove it. So like, I can't say anything.
And by that point, I'll probably have other guys who were, you know, who were fucking Titans at that point to remind me of the fact that I'm not as good as them. So in your estimation, is the presence of an ego something which artificially limits the size of the vision of how high you want to climb? Yeah, a hundred percent. Because it's, you cannot, you can't. both say that you are, you cannot admit deficits and say you're awesome at the same time, in my opinion.
Like, I can't say like, I suck at all these things and then also be like, I'm the best. Like, you can't do it. You either like, you suck at all these things. And it's, I think it's the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is like, the more you, the more you learn about something, the more, like, the more you realize you don't know.
And so I think that if you have a tiny, tiny subset of things that you were studying and a tiny subset of people you're comparing yourself to, then it's really easy to feel awesome about yourself. But if you compare yourself to, I mean. I compare myself every day to Warren Buffett.
And like he's my, him and Munger are like my heroes. Mostly because the way they lived life and what they, like just everything about the way they lived is something that I just love. And like I have Buffett's net worth by age tracked and I have like mine tracked and I'm like, all right, just got to stay above that line. Are you above it?
Are you above it at the moment? I am right now. But like I had, you know, like his world was different.
Yep. Like I got, Warren didn't have Warren to learn from. yes very interesting it's um i mean you talk we just spoke about this at the very very start where you were saying you have the opportunity of using the blueprint that has been laid down by me yeah like if you've got nothing to lose do do the me thing yeah you know you have all of the mistakes all of the failures and all of the successes and there was another one where you said the rarer you are the rarer the people are who share your perspective in this way the greater your success the fewer people you can share it with And I was playing with this quote from Alain de Botton from the School of Life for ages, which was...
loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind and i'm really not sure because since i've been in austin the complexity of mind thing which is that hasn't stopped but the loneliness changed and i figured that that was a big function of change of environment and maybe like whatever embracing or acceptance of of what was going on but again is this a byproduct of success that you a lot of people don't necessarily realize it's a price that's going to be need to be paid if you want to achieve a ton of success you end up at this rarefied strata out in the troposphere somewhere and you're like well i got like five people that i can talk to that understand what i'm going through at the moment or another question as well is that a combination of hubris and self-delusion like is that true or other things that the bus driver or the lady that serves you at whole foods can actually like relate to you on So two questions. One is I would probably reject the notion that it's a price overall, because like being in like if you think about it as a mountain, there's less there's less square footage at the top of the mountain. It just is. There's fewer people there and the air is thinner.
It's harder to get there, harder to breathe. And you have to adjust to it. You have to acclimate. And the people that are around you, like there are fewer of them, but you could make the argument that they have even more context than anyone else possibly could. And so maybe the relationship you have are potentially deeper, even if they're not.
humans don't need that many relationships. So like you just have a smaller pool to choose from, but like most people only have two or three good relationships in their life anyways. And so like you just have a narrower pool that you can make that selection from. And, um, I mean, of the people that I have interacted with who are far above that, above me on the mountain, um, that's been there. That's what they've relayed to me.
Um, but it's only bad if you think it's a cost, if you're okay with it, because there are plenty of people who are lonely right now and don't have shit. And so, and there's, you know, and you already know this, but like there's a difference between being lonely and solitude, you know, and one is seen as bad. The other is seen as fine or good. In some circles, that's seen as self-care. So to me, it just means that like, I think your tolerance or your standard for friends raises.
And I'll share this and hopefully it comes off the right way. I entered communities as I was coming up and was like, wow, everyone here is bigger than me. And then I was able to, through achievement, rise through that. And then I lost context with that group.
And so I think there's just more free agency of friendship that happens on your climb up because you're just moving between strata more frequently than it is that if I settled at one of these levels, then I would eventually find all the people at that rung. But if you're constantly on the move up the mountain, then more of that is in transitionary period. on the, on the climb. And it's only a problem if you'd hate it.
I don't. What don't you hate? You don't hate the fact that sort of people come and go, that some of these relationships are kind of transient. Yeah.
It just doesn't bother me. So I think it's like a should statement, which is like one of my big things is like, why should I, why does it have to be, why must it doesn't must anything. It just is that way.
And that's fine. Talking about social media. We mentioned this earlier on. What are your predictions for the next six months to a couple of years in terms of what you think is going to be big?
Any focuses or any interesting trends that you're noticing at the moment? I will state first off that I'm not a social media expert by any stretch. But just, you know, I think AI is going to be the main driving force behind the future of social media. And I don't know how we're going to deal with it.
I mean, there's already the deep face of Rogan doing entire podcasts with Steve Jones that are gone out there. And the entire thing is both created and recorded with AI. And so I think it'll be really interesting because right now it's still not as good as the best creators. But in a few machine generations, it'll make the best content every time in seconds. And I'm not sure what's going to happen.
I think I know the verification checkmark is going to matter more. It'll change in its meaning. Right now it means status. In the future, it'll mean real person.
So that I'll make that prediction that the verification of bot versus human will become more important in the future. I can make that prediction. And that there will be more AI generated content in the future than there is today. And how we respond to it, I don't know.
It's scary to think that what we basically had for the last five years or so since the algorithm started to get really tight is a three-way feedback mechanism from algorithms designing better delivered content to users. It also nudges the user's preferences so that they are easier and more predictable to predict. That two-way street was something I learned from Stuart Russell and it's fucking amazing.
everybody needs to understand that it's not just you programming the algorithm it's the algorithm programming you and it's one of the reasons that it explains increasing division and extremity because if you are far right or far left or super whatever or super the other thing it makes you way easier to predict and that's a byproduct of any algorithmic optimizing function and then the third element of that is audience capture by the creators because they are the third element of the creation of the content right that they go how well did that perform uh oh we'll red meat that a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more and then you end up on your knees like cooking for the audience right yeah the fourth element of this is going to be then you are able to algorithmically create content that understands the back end of the algorithm that can nudge preferences and can get feedback and all of that i mean that to me is fuck me if we think that you know like the degree of overbearingness that social has on our lives at the moment. Like that's a very, very big deal. Well, it could cut out the middleman, the creator being the middleman, and then just becomes a vertically integrated platform that creates content on its own using AI and just feeds it directly to the audience.
That's what I said. As soon as the AI images of hot girls came out and then chat GPT, you go, look, like OnlyFans, you're no longer an agency, you're now a tech company. That should be the move that you make. Every single person should have their own curated and automated platform. wifey girlfriend online and that's that's what you that's your thing like and it would be infinitely scalable you know like the perfect dirty talk completely curated and twiddled to your specific yeah whatever it is uh but that doesn't bode particularly well for how much limbic hijack and freedom people have from social media because it is only going to become more and more compelling which isn't necessarily a good thing i mean i good bad no idea um you I think there will probably be a little bit of a counter movement of people who want to do more things in person.
Make social media human again. Well, you know, an interesting thought experiment that I had, I was like, because we've taken some things and I do think AI is going to happen, but like as in it will continue. But I was like, we accept all technology as inevitable.
And I was thinking about this and I was like, has there ever been a technology that humans have created that we were like, nah, we shouldn't do this? I thought about it. I was like, there is one.
nuclear bombs we all were like i think it's better if we don't we should just not do this and everyone just like agreed we're like we're not going to do this and i i think the the rate of ai how disaggregated it is like will prevent that from happening but i just thought about that as like it just there hasn't been any other technological thing that i've seen besides nuclear bombs that we all together were like this isn't good for us have you seen how tabletop genetic sequencing machines work no This is a really good example of what you're talking about. So the way that pretty much all of them are cloud-based, and in order to sequence whatever it is that you're looking to sequence, it sends the request up to the cloud, and there's three gradings. There's green, amber, and red. And if it's green, you can just do it. No one checks.
If there's amber, you have to submit a proposal for what it is, where it's going, BSL level, et cetera, security, security. And if it's red, you just can't do it. And then presumably someone comes around and goes, Excuse me, what the fuck are you doing trying to make smallpox?
But that, there's been, I think it's either two or three times in the history of gene sequencing there has been a moratorium placed globally on this. Everyone's gone. Every fucking machine goes off. Everything.
Stop. Until we work out what's going on. So there are situations.
That's a great example. Like cloning. As you just said.
As soon as you start to atomize that and disaggregate it and distribute it between enough different actors, how are you going to be able to control? And the other thing is with genetic sequencing, the kind of machines that you need, the hardware is complex. Yeah, it's expensive and it's rare.
The hardware is not complex for anybody can code. And the reward is. everything it's the world it's the world it's it's it's domination it's money it's success it's all of those things this is why i don't know man like the fucking the techno optimist thing ever since i read super intelligence by nick bostrom five or six years ago i just don't see an agi future where stuff doesn't get fucked uh i don't know whether we get the general bit of agi super agi is like still up for a big part of debate but if you end up creating this very strange world in which everyone's limbically hijacked with their own personal news feed of like perfectly you remember cambridge analytica and the um those scandals around the hillary clinton ads it's like i know your preferences and we're going to create these perfectly done ads so okay i mean the ads were still created by a human and it was still you were bucketed into a content with other men of this age with these interests in this area with these voting habits imagine if every single news feed not just post news feed was perfectly curated to maximize time on says hey chris Like that's the first line of every ad. Yeah. Crazy.
But it might just be the same as email. The first time there was personalized email, all of a sudden you stop becoming responsive to your own name. So like, I think, I think there'll, there'll be push pool on that stuff. But I'm with you on the AGI longterm, you know, as a, as a, as a weird thought experiment, if you think about what God looks like in terms of most, most definitions, they're like an omniscient omnipotent being.
And I think we're just creating that. like what does ai know it knows everything right what can it do everything immediately like weird usually god would be benevolent yes rolling the benevolence in there yeah might be good if we could it's long god's long-term benevolent uh but short term sometimes mean yeah you are true definitely wrath yeah in almost all things what are you working on now what can people expect from you next A hundred dollar leads, $100 million leads, which is the second book in the a hundred million dollar series, um, is going to come out this year. Uh, so that's exciting.
Uh, we will, we will be done the, the edited final draft, uh, within seven days. So I'm like, it's been, uh, we put in 3,500 hours, um, together, my editor and I, um, combined or last two years doing it. So it is the first four to six hours of my day every day.
Like before I came here, I was editing the book and that's what I did yesterday. And that's what I did before. Um, so that it could be really, really good.
And so that's, that's the, that's the big creative side of me is the, is the book. It'll be 99 cents. There you go.
I get 33 of that by the way. Um, and then the rest of my life is all about deals. It's just, uh, we've got some really interesting companies that we're investing in.
Um, very, very pumped on that side. Um, So yeah, if you've got a $1 to $10 million EBITDA business and you would like a growth partner, go to acquisition.com and let us know. Dude, I really appreciate you. I really, really enjoyed this today. It's been cool to come and see.
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Hopefully the audience got what they wanted.
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