The Man That Makes Millionaires: Turn $0 to $10k With This Step By Step Formula! Alex Hormozi

0:00 if you want to make more money you might want to consider doing this so number one is hold that thought for just a second because the thing that comes before that is this grow of yours oh God this is the entrepreneur life cycle and there are six stages now the vast majority of people get stuck on stage three and I've made some of the biggest career mistakes at this point and you end up living the same 6 months for 20 straight years suffering until you learn how to break free from it I want to go through the whole thing this is going to be awesome Alex horos is the master of business strategy an autist in tring companies into the millions and a leading voice in how to craft your way to success he's an entrepreneurial Powerhouse whether you're starting out or want to go from 1 million to 10 million there are certain behaviors and actions that will increase the likelihood of success that we're going to go through but here's the really hard truth that a lot of people don't like talking about entrepreneurs must be

0:46 willing to make impossible choices have the courage to be willing to be wrong have Shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about and that fear keeps people stuck in a job and a life they don't want for years and that was my path I had a white collar job condo overlooking the city everything's according to plan and I remember thinking like I didn't want to be alive cuz I was so afraid but once you get over the fear it unleashes this whole new realm of possibility of being able to do what you want and that is when you can learn the real game of Entrepreneurship such as knowing that business ideas typically come from one of three piece and you only need one of those three and then there's the four RS for customer success how to learn new skills quickly how to stand out in a competitive market the winning strategy for 2025 and so much more so where should I start

1:31 I have been forced into a bet with my team we're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube which is our biggest Milestone ever thanks to all of you and we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes so they said to me Steve for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days can $1 be given to our celebration fund for the entire team and I've agreed to the bet so if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at D of here all you've got to do is hit the Subscribe button actually this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up costing me an [Applause] [Music]

2:18 awful Alex if someone's just clicked on this conversation and they're considering listening for the next couple of hours based on everything that you do for the millions of entrepreneurs that follow you that read your books can you tell me exactly why you believe they should stay and listen and who should stay and listen at acquisition. we scale businesses the content that I generate that we put out conversations like this helps people who are going from Z to one just getting off the ground to helping people go from 1 million to 10 million um to helping the entrepreneurs going from 10 to 100 either get there or exit along the way and there are Frameworks that cross all three of those that I consider both deep and wide um that help

3:05 any business navigate whatever strategic decision is in front of them to get The Highest Potential return for their time and so if you're listening or watching then if one of those Frameworks applies immediately to your business and allows you to pull five years forward in your career I would say that's a pretty good return on time for the people that are at zero yeah what is it that they're typically coming to you to help them with so if you were one of them yeah what is it that they want from Alex hzi I think it's um there's what they think they want and what they actually need um which are two different things and so I think what they think they want is uh some tactic that's going to immediately help them start a business um what they

3:51 typically actually need is um the courage to be willing to be wrong and to be willing to have Shame by failing at things in front of people whose opinions they care about and I think that's like if I re rewind the clock for me it was probably one of the hardest things that I had to get over and so I think that's why maybe my message resonates with a lot of people is because it was so hard for me um to get over and what's interesting is basically anybody who's listening the harder it is for you to break free of whatever kind of mental prison you've made for yourself whether that's real or just in in your head the more compelling your story will be when you break through it um because it will resonate with even more people uh

4:37 for the people that it was easy that their story doesn't have doesn't have a lot like I was immediately an entrepreneur like I wasn't like that I had a job when I was in high school I had a job immediately out of college some people were like I was selling lemonade out of the back of my you know thing when I was 13 I didn't do any of that like I School failed me I actually was pretty good at school uh I didn't have any of those issues you know what I mean and so I had a pretty clear career path and so I had many would consider like I had a real opportunity cost so I had a white collar job and I had uh a GMAT score above Harvard's mid score and so I had a a really clear path of what my life would could look like in the next 20 30 years and it was fairly well defined like I'll go to Harvard or Stanford or one of the top Business Schools and then I will either go back into management consulting or I'll go into Investment Banking and then eventually end up in private Equity um

5:23 and that would be the path right and then all the flowers would be set at my feet and you know everyone would say we approve of you you're an excellent person but when I saw the people who were 20 years ahead of me I really didn't want their life and then it started making me look at my life and I was like I don't even know if I really want my life um and so the the big decisions that I've made in my life unfortunately um have almost always come at the at the the doorstep of a parent death um and I think maybe in some ways that makes me a coward uh for having needed death to make decisions and so operational realizing that has been something that has helped me move faster to make decisions that I know I need to make but don't and so like the first big kind of like what felt like a death

6:10 decision was um I was a consultant 22 is years old I had a paid for you know condo that I bought uh overlooking the city and I remember thinking like I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow and that and I don't mean that to be melodramatic it just I just for a period of time I just always just like hooped every night I was like I just really up I don't wake up tomorrow like I just don't want to do this and what was difficult about that was that at that time was when my father was most proud of me uh because I was doing everything that was according to plan you know he could talk like his son who graduated in three years from Vanderbilt had the had the good job like everything was we're following the plan um and it was upon realizing that my ultimate expression of

6:57 living out his dream was me feeling like I didn't want to be alive and so in and it took me time to get to that point to even articulate that because obviously you never want to kind of like admit failure of like I have really messed something up here um but I was living my life to win someone else's game and when I realized that I realized that one of our dreams had to die either his or mine and when I realized that his dream must die in order for mine to live was a a statement that I kind of crystallized when I was at that point in my life like I had to keep repeating that like his dream has to die in order for mine to live and so to put this in perspective of like how afraid of my father's judgment I was I left the state and

7:44 drove across the country halfway through before calling him to tell him that I was gone and so I I bring this up because I don't try I'm not trying to be dramatic here but I'm saying that if you feel a lot of pressure I get it like I tried to leave the job that I was at to pursue just literally anything that wasn't that just I wanted to start a business at some point I didn't know how I was going to do it I just knew that what I was doing was not the path I wanted to be on and everybody around me wanted me to be on that path and so I went to go be like hey I'm thinking about doing something else and you know it would always be that ah you know don't later later like everything's good later you know and um I remember when I called my dad and I told him that he said understand why don't you come like come home well uh well I didn't tell him that I was I was gone yet like I said hey I want you know I want to go pursue this Fitness thing

8:30 um he said cool come over for lunch we'll talk about it you know and and he and I was like I'm I'm already gone and then obviously his tone changed a lot um and um and you know our relationship struggled for you know years after that and I I also bring that up because sometimes there's this illusion that like you know you get on the on the Oscar stage or whatever it is and you're like hey I just want to think you know my mom my dad my friends for always supporting me and um I can't say that and I wish I could and you might not not be able to say that either and I also don't think that's a reason not to do it and so um we did struggle for years after that to kind of like because I was basically living as what was once his prodical son uh goes and takes a minimum wage job as a personal trainer at a gym

9:15 uh like you know cleaning floors and stuff to learn just to learn the gym business um but that was ultimately like how I broke free literally you know physically uh leaving the area and you know mentally but I think that I had to accept that there was a there was a timeline where my father would never talk to me again and I had to be okay with that um to pursue what I wanted and I think that when you ask the original question what are the people from 0 to one really looking for I read tons of business books at that time but I couldn't use any of them because I was so afraid and what's crazy is that like I think about it now in retrospect and it's like it's crazy how large the perceived monsters can appear and Leila has this quote that I love but it's um is a mile wide an inch deep and so you look at it it looks

10:03 like this ocean and then you take the first step and you realize you don't drown because it's like oh there's ground underneath of this right there's other people who are more on my path and the friends you lose you gain new friends right and so um that fear was the hardest decision that I've had to overcome in my entrepreneural career and I think of all the of all the the split paths in my life that was the one that if I had many timelines or many universes that existed that was is probably the one that is the most likely that I would not have parted from so I think in like 90% of universes that Alex rosi exists I'm just a consultant somewhere and so um I would encourage you if you do feel that you're not going to die like you won't die and you might just live it's so interesting because I think

10:50 everything you've said is just absolutely spot on but you're right in way you say that if you'd asked an audience member listening now why they haven't started yet they would say fear they would say I haven't got the X I haven't got the Y but actually it is such an emotional thing and we don't talk about that enough because uncertainty is humans seem to be allergic to uncertainty and they'd rather the certain misery of their current situation typically than uncertainty and I think um and I and I used what I consider a very non-p palatable word of coward purposefully because no one wants to say they're afraid because if you say you're afraid then it means you're a coward and I think that it only means coward if you don't if you allow that fear to change your behavior in an aversive way as in

11:37 it not towards what you want and so you know the inverse of that many people have heard it Courage is not acting um without fear but despite fear um and I think that um when you act when you allow fear to change your behavior the wrong way that is when you can give yourself that title of coward and I think that that is a title that I feared my whole life and that label is almost I'm more afraid of that label than the label of failure I'd rather be a failure than a coward is there a framework for knowing when to quit so I think there's the there's like the math behind it and the math I think is pretty straightforward so like when do you quit your business I like you've saved up three to six months of personal

12:23 savings number one number two is that you have started something because nowadays in the digital age you can begin a business on the side that can generate income and that income um in the small amount of time that you're not working uh replaces or at least matches the existing income you have from your your current job and you've been able to do that or demonstrate that income for like 3 to six months if you do that that's a very like math way of approaching it that also is basically never the reason that people aren't quitting their job right like that's a really s like I have I have I have backlog I've matched my current income with my part-time work and if I just put my full-time work I would probably make more very reasonable but never actually the reason that people don't do it I was I was thinking about the two sort of reasons why someone might quit something

13:09 or feel like they want to quit and one of them is clearly because it's hard and that's obviously not reason enough to quit and then there's another one which you are speaking to there which is it's not moving me towards a meaningful goal irrespective of how hard it is like a marathon you're raising money for a charity you care about it's hard but you don't quit yeah and then there's maybe if you're running a marathon for no apparent reason you know there was no charity there was no one watching there was no like Fitness benefit then that's a good I guess moment to consider quitting um my story mimics yours in a way that I didn't realize I didn't realize you went through a similar thing in terms of call the parents disownership yeah um no real great option to to flee to but feeling like the current path that would have led me to be I don't know business management student was significantly worse on

13:55 balance than taking the risk but I think maybe a point of Distinction is it didn't I was so naive that it didn't feel like a risk yeah so what's really interesting about that is um the guarantee and so a lot of times we don't we don't look at what I call the don't which is like the the alternate path and so if I had played out my existing path I had a guarantee of outcome I didn't want it was just out a delay whereas here there's a chance that I can make it and so one of the final kind of framework for making the decision was guaranteed bad chance at good and I was like well I might as well take a chance and I I strongly um

14:41 encourage thinking about uh playing it out and so what I mean by that is like I think fear exists in the vague not in the specific and so when you say I'm GNA quit my job and then what if this doesn't work I'm GNA failure tons of fear if I say I'm going to quit my job and then I'm going to try and start a business and if the business doesn't work I'll probably have a compelling story that I could tell for business school if I wanted to to show that I had some entrepreneurial slant in the meantime I could use that experience plus my job experience to probably get another or maybe even better job in the meantime and match or or supersede my existing income and the actual loss would be maybe the savings that I had

15:26 saved up but if I'm younger or I haven't made as much money as I want then that's never been the amount of money that would be material anyways on the grand scheme of what I would like to make um and in terms of living situation I will worst case go back to my parents house with my tail between my legs or sleep at a friend's couch because I have enough people that would be willing to put me up in a garage if I had to and so it's like okay so my actual worst case scenario is just like I have a cool story and maybe some shame that I is self-inflicted cuz it's not like no one else cares really but it's self-inflicted shame and maybe a detour or a different story that I have to tell later on in my career not as much fear there right but like the first one like I'll fail everyone will hate me and I'll die the first one sounded like it was written by

16:13 your like amigdala like the Fierce and the second one was pure like prefrontal cortex it was all logic yeah and I'm wondering you know as you're going into that decision obviously fear is going to lead it so of course you're going to go for option one where you just think about the downside maybe there's a practice that allows you to get into your prefrontal cortex into logic and I think that's I actually so I think you nailed it and said it way better than I did but I think that's I think going from vague to specific basically disengages your mdala because it's it can't reason the logic chain of causation and causality of what's going to happen next in a chain of events and so when you get into the specific of it all of a sudden you're like okay I'm not going to be homeless and then shamed and die um I might live in inferior living conditions for a short period which by

16:59 the way when you're later on in your life you'll look back and think of as the good old days cuz I can't believe I was couch surfing I was pursuing my dreams right it's it's only like in the moment that it feels bad when you look back like even I I find this hilarious like like how long after you do something embarrassing is it funny right like at at some point for almost all of us with enough time the shameful experience becomes funny and so if it is going to become funny eventually it might as well become funny now yeah and so it's just like pulling the time Horizon up but all of that prefrontal cortex decision making and so um no but I think that's exact like I think that that nailed it because when I thought about this this decision obviously I had my very you know emotional statement around like his dream has to die for mine to live yes also logic downside risk here I'll have

17:44 a story and I can always get my job back okay and if I can't get that job back I'll will have other ones that will be available fine and if I have a downgrading and some people think that I'm not as successful as then okay I'll not stop though and so I think that that that demystifies a lot of the fears I think that applies not just for entrepreneurial fears I think applies for any fear like I'm going to talk like I can't tell this person this bad news all right let's play it out I say something and then they're going to kill me probably not so what's going to happen I'll say these words and then there they they they'll flip the table they'll they'll flick me off they'll maybe just feel hurt and maybe they'll cry maybe they'll shout okay okay if they shouted at me what do I do like and you just kind of play it out and you're like okay I think I have like most of these conditions prepared for and then

18:30 all of a sudden you can like have those things what you also said is that in the face of guaranteed misery any option is better yeah like it's real you get to live once yeah so like why would guaranteed misery be better than any available option it's delay discounting that's what's crazy is delay discounting happens both ways like um so like you set your alarm for 5:00 a.m. at night and you're like I'm going to wake up at 5: but that's because you're delaying the pain of waking up and when it's immediate when I have to quit the job like I'll quit my job tomorrow for 20 years and so it's just like we always we we we delay the fact that we're going to be miserable into the present uh to like a like we we massively discount what a whole lifetime of misery would be amen when you're thinking about what to

19:16 pursue so say you've left the job you've quit the thing when you're thinking about what to pursue how much of that is a decision derived from self-awareness because you know they'll someone will look at you now and be like Oh No Alex did this so I'm going to start a acquisition. comom you know or they'll say um I want to I saw Steve Jobs did that thing with the computers I'm going to start Apple yeah right or Elon I'm going to do the spaceships how much do you have to know thyself to know what to pursue man this is a really good question so um there's a tweet that I love by Andrew Wilkinson which is um every entrepreneur ever colon here's the winning number for my lottery ticket and so it's like every entrepreneur will say here's the winning lottery ticket but

20:01 it's like that game already that drawing already happened ah okay yeah right and so like you can't cash that ticket in it's already done and so people say the word first principles no one really knows what it means uh I mean some people do but the I think far more people say it than know what it means and so basically there are foundational truths of business that that exist and the conditions of the environment will change and so you have to apply those truths to whatever the current condition is and so that's what I try and tease out with the books and the stuff that I that I put out in content but at the end of the day you have an input of time like zooming all the way out if the goal assuming that your goal is to make money okay like and this is just a purely economic business goal then you have time which is the primary currency that

20:47 you trade it and you make dollars over a period of time and so I tend to reject the idea of like never you know never trade time for dollars or anything like that because everyone trades time for dollars it's just some of us are more efficient at it than others but even exchanges that occur that just are not denominated in time still occur over time and so uh you have this foundational unit of time which you're going to give in what we're seeking is the highest return on that time and so there you know within a business context there's kind of three levels of uh things that have to occur in business you have to you know attract attention you have to convert attention then you have to deliver something uh for that attention and in each of those things you want as much leverage as possible so you want as little time as possible required to get the most output and so I

21:32 have built acquisition. comom on basically two primary thesis uh which are in the logo which is this is a full Crum for leverage for people that can't see it's like a triangle yeah so it's like a triangle or the Illuminati because that always gets brought up um right so we've got the full Crum for leverage and then inside of it you have supply and demand and I see those as the two foundational principles of business and so which is you need supply and demand to have a business and then leverage to get as much out of it as you possibly can and so um when you're looking at the assets that you have assets can also be skills resources what you have available to you now if you have nothing then all you have is your brain your hands and the time that you have that you can put towards learning something which is why I'm a big fan of skill acquisition as one of the the

22:17 primary things that you can do is educating yourself and not formally educating but informally or alternatively educating yourself on super tactical things uh once you get over the fear then you start asking okay okay how do I let people know about my stuff and what do I let them know right and so you have to have something to sell which is the offer and ideally you want the offer to have as much leverage as possible like so if you sold software or you sold media those are things that you can U cut once sell sell a thousand times um if you have a conversion mechanism it's like you can have it be automated like a check out page or some sort of video sales letter or something like that where people just buy without a phone salesperson if you add a phone salesp person there's less leverage not to say this wrong but you you want to have the highest leverage opportunity and then from a um from the

23:02 deliverability expect uh perspective um I kind of talked about deliverability first but uh from the advertising perspective uh if you reach out to people one-onone that's lower leverage than being able to make one piece of content that a million people see right and so over time you go from low leverage to high leverage uh where you have the same inputs but you just get significantly more for your output and that fundamentally is like if we're reasoning up from first principles how do I get the said differently the question someone I think is really asking is how do I get the most for what I put in and you have to reason within your current context of your skills and your resources and your assets in order to derive that solution for you so if someone walks up to you in the street and they say Alex what idea should I pursue I've just quit my job yeah right so I would say um business idea is

23:49 typically come from one of three PS so it comes from a pain that you're currently experiencing a past profession so the thing that you just quit or some of the jobs that you just quit or a passion MH so it's something that you're inherently interested in that you would spend your time doing anyways uh some skill that you learned while you were in the workforce which by the way is one of the most proven ways of making money because the economy has already showed you that people are willing to exchange money for that for that specific job and so uh in the world of gig economies and solar preneurs every business can be dismantled into just jobs being done and all of those jobs can be fractionalized so anybody like we look at any business you've got sales you've got you've got marketing you've got customer uccess you've got you've got customer support if you want to differentiate that you've got product you've got design you've got web pages there's you know there's so many

24:34 different components to a business you just need to learn one of them and then it's like boom you have a skill that you can trade for money that you don't have anybody else to report to um and then pain is usually I think um in some ways um sometimes one of the biggest drivers it's like you had an eating allergy and you couldn't find pancakes that dealt with your specific eating all and you bet that there's a decent amount of other people with that allergy that also like pancakes and so then you make pancakes that that are delicious and amazing that also cater to people with that food allergy and then all of a sudden like you have a business based on pain and why why does that matter what the Pain part um I what leverage and Advantage does it give you for the next five years I think that deep knowledge of the prospect is Paramount or very

25:22 important for creating exceptional products and you can either do that by doing a ton and ton of research or by being the Prospect and there's a certain amount of like visceral feel that you'll know like if someone wants to make a nose product for breathing I have tried every product since I was in eth grade so it's been 20 plus years 30 whatever a lot of years um that since then and I've tried everything and so I know the pros and cons of every product that exists on the market and I can tell because and I've done it's not like oh I tried it for a day it's like I'll try things for a month at a time and so I have so much time exposure to this problem that I have a lot of nuance in my opinion on what's wrong with the solutions so I can formulate a way better hypothesis on how to fix it and that hypothesis would will be for an investor so much more

26:08 compelling because you lead with a story as opposed to logic I met the guy who uh invested in Regal Cinemas which is the probably the biggest chain in the US um and it was when it was there was guy had just one theater and it became now obviously Co has disrupted that business but you know for 20 you know years whatever they they crushed and he said it was so weird to say that oh Cinemas are going to make a comeback because they'd kind of been on a downturn or something like that during the time that he was making the investment and he said the reason I decided to invest in it was because this guy knew everything about the business down to how much the cost of Colonel of popcorn was and he just knew it so like the back of his hand that he was like this guy can't fail like he just knows too much about this business to not have it work and so he investing in you know making gazillion dollars and so but I think that that

26:53 deep understanding and if you look at all of these the passion things you'll have deep understanding because you're spending spending all of your discretionary time pursuing this passion the pain you have a deep understanding of the of the problem and the prospects going through it because you've experienced it probably for years now the professional one I would say is a bit of a shortcut um because if you're quitting the job because you don't like it and then you say I'm now going to do this for myself well you're okay um I mean well the the the one the one proven point about that is that that one is proven to work from an economic perspective you will be able to make money doing that because you already have made money doing it these other two are less proven but sometimes have a significantly more upside when you were talking about the breathing example with your nose it's funny because if you had sat down and

27:39 said to me Steve I've made these like breathing nose strips um they are better they're 20% more durable they expand your nostrils by 20% it is multiples less compelling than you telling me that story you just said about being a kid having breathing problems trying to solve this problem for yourself and it's funny cuz that that story you told versus the sort of rational logical approach or the benefits approach is your marketing campaign for the next five years on Tik Tok and Instagram it's I had a problem I solved it I tried everything and solved it for myself there's almost like nothing more compelling and believable no we see that in Dragon's Den it we'll be sat there listening to these pictures all day then someone will come in and say I had ADHD I tried Energy Products they all made me crash so I went out and solved this problem for myself and we're on edge cuz we almost can't argue with it yeah at

28:26 that point you know yeah so basic has this great framework where he talks about missionaries and mercenaries and so it's kind of like you have the guy who says okay I looked at market trends and this is a growing category and you know I surveyed people and this was the you know the result that came back and so I believe that if we time this product right uh at this point in the market we'll achieve huge you know a mass adoption blah blah blah blah and it's like loging your way through and to be fair some people do you know do make it work but the missionaries are the ones that end up making the most money because is like they do it sure for the money cuz the business has to have some economic engine behind it but really because they viscerally experienced this problem and don't want anyone else to solve to deal with that problem either and so like if I were to tell that story like you were saying like when I was in

29:12 eth grade it was the first year that I I started really noticing I couldn't breathe at night and so I learned how to fall asleep with my hand on my face like this so that my nostril would so I could fall asleep in my hand with because you there's no actually other because you can't hold your because you fall asleep right and so if I fall asleep with my hand like this right like like I'm on the couch and I fall asleep like that it keeps my nostril open and I can fall asleep and it doesn't move and so that's how I learned how to sleep for years uh before founding like just like simple nasal strips and things like that but there's tons of problems with with those solutions that exist right now that I won't get into but um maybe someday I'll make a nasal product I think I mean literally just delivered [ __ ] I can tell you if you put if you put every product in front of me that exists right now I can tell you what's wrong with it cuz I've tried I've

29:57 tried literally all of them not like I'm pretty obsessive and so like I've tried all of them missing opportunity here I've tried I've tried the ones from Europe I've tried the like not just us like I've tried I've tried every product that exists on Amazon I've tried all the ones from foreign countries every every fan or follower who sends me a product that is a nasal company that's new um I will try the product I still do um and there has yet there's there's yet to be one that has truly solved it I mean you should I mean but I I think in some ways uh so this is actually a really good meta uh concept here which is that um if you want to be compelling a demonstration or a model is always more compelling than anything else and so me even going through that entire narrative right is taking everyone else

30:45 who's been listening to this on some Journey it's like if you want to make a compelling pitch for a business it's like we pretty much just kind of went through one um and so that's that's really what it comes down to you're like well what do I do with my business it's like create your Narrative of why you're even doing this and if you can explain to somebody why why they should care about this problem or more specifically why you care about this problem I'll tell you this more investors will like I might be like I don't care about kitchen utensils but this girl certainly does and I'm sure there's other women who do too and what everyone wants to see is Obsession and unfortunately in like some of the world I know more in the UK than the US now like that kind of perspective of like just being all in obsessed with stuff has almost been like um bastard or like

31:31 you know been um chastised and I but the people who are obsessed with the ones who changed the world at least changed their world and um and I think that so a very close friend of mine um did all the uh Olympic teams um nutrition and supplementation stuff for uh a country overseas and he said you know the difference between Champions and everyone else and I was like what he said everyone always looks at them and says what do champions have that I don't have and he said it's they have it backwards he said it's what do Champions not have that I have it's what do they lack and it's an off button they just don't stop and so in dealing with the gold medals he's like they just never stop they just can't stop everything in their life is geared

32:17 towards one goal and so finding that thing and they approach everything in their life that way and I think that that level of obsession of around like everything that you touch on a daily basis is required for really getting to where you want to go so interesting because as we spoke there about the reason why the story was so much more compelling it was back to the amigdala it was back to emotion right and it's funny because we we said a second ago that when someone's thinking about quitting a job they're like SE in their amigdala humans run mostly on their amydala so when we think about pitching we should really be aiming at the same part of the brain which is what you did when you showed me that you were sleeping as a kid with your hand stretching across your face I immediately felt sorry for you felt

33:03 sympathy and I immediately believed that if anyone's going to solve this problem it is this [ __ ] guy who's been through that pain I've had two surgeries both of them didn't really work like I mean like i' I've got the story my girlfriend's the same what really two surgeries but she's coming up to her third one now we've tried all the nose drips I saw you wearing one I bought that one for her yeah um and so there's a lot of people watching right now and there's something going on with these bloody [ __ ] like noses yeah people shouldn't like yeah we're doing something I I feel like I may it popular some of the N Stuff yeah but D making it cool pain profession passion yeah ideally you have all three if you have all three then you're I mean my God you're set like if you if basically pain created an obsession and for some reason you also were doing something like that in your work like I feel like the likelihood that you don't succeed is

33:48 almost nothing you only need one of those three you just pick one like if you just had one pain that you had that you wanted to overcome or one passion that you were just inherently interested cuz sometimes passion has nothing to like you might just be really into model cars it's okay well there's a lot of businesses that you can build around model cars it's like you can you can manufacture model cars uh you can have services around model cars making them faster because some people race model cars you can uh be a collector and start flipping model cars like you can just make media around how to build them and then have a media company around like there's so many different components of any Obsession or interest that you can make I I was talking to um on one of the future episodes of uh mosy tank uh that's coming out we have a guy who's um he loves Dungeons and Dragons so he's an it he's an IT guy and just loves Dungeons and Dragons and he was like I

34:33 just want this to make enough money that I don't have to do ID anymore and but it was so pure you know what I mean and so I was like we're going to help you do this and so we kind of walk through the business plan for it but like is he going to be a billionaire no but I also don't think that's his goal and so I think being really clear on what you want um is important so if you're like I want to be the richest person in the world I think it's a terrible goal but if you want that great well you have to have a multi-trillion dollar idea because now because by the time that occurs there's already multi- trillion dollar companies now so you got to be looking at like Deca trillion dollar opportunity and so believe it or not basically the bigger the goal the narrow the scope of the path to get there if you're like I want to make $10 million like you can literally do that in almost any business you want to make $100 million probably still almost any

35:20 business you can do it on a long enough time rise and you can do it a trillion or decad trillion it's going to be some sort of tech it's probably going to have some sort of AI like and so you get basically the bigger the goal is the narrower the scope of of how to get there but the vast majority of people were like I want to be the richest man in the world it's just because they don't know how to like really think through it and be like all right well after like a hundred there's really nothing you can't do except buy more big things but like in terms of your actual consumption maybe even 20 is like you can only eat at restaurants that go so expensive you can only stay at the best hotels you can only drive the nicest cars you can do that with about 25 million what do you think the cheat code is then so I've got my idea what do you think the cheat code is in 2025 to win at the game of attention like there's got to be some new rules here because we've got AI we've got new platforms we've got New

36:06 Media you know I'm give you a hypothetical business idea I'm going to be a personal trainer okay and I pick that because everyone can do it and it's it's a saturated industry if I'm if I'm a personal trainer in the 2025 how should I be thinking about building attention mhm so I'll tell you what I wouldn't do first which is I don't think I try and out science the science people uh because like unless you have some PhD there is a PhD guy who's already jacked who's making content and so he's more knowledgeable and more Jack than you so you're not going to win there and so I think in the game of attention it's trying to find what is unique right and so how do you how do you quote stand out when everyone's loud and this is going to sound trite but your fingerprint is

36:52 unique literally from a biological perspective but so is your life and your experiences and so there's there's real Alpha or or benefit to be had above normal level of effort by leaning into you and so what makes every person unique is what makes their content unique and so trying to be like oh I want to make content like Alex is probably not the best way to do it because you're not going to beat me at being me but you'll beat me at being you and so it's basically your flavor of media so like for me it's like you know what is you know my brand to to to to model this it's like well I have elements of flly philosophy that are in my brand well do I need that no but that's like kind of me um I obviously talk a ton about business marketing and sales promotion conversion those are all things that I spend a lot of time thinking about and so a lot of my

37:38 content about that um Fitness is a component of my life and so there's light sprinkling of Fitness uh in my content also I come from a background of Fitness um with the the with gym launch and and the companies that I owned before that and so that would make sense that and I've my wife Lea and so that sprinkled in and so like those are basically the components of My Life um and so that's what kind of shines through in my content I consume a ton of comedy and so sometimes you'll see some dry humor and dark humor that that shines through um but that's me now you have all of those little buckets of you and not only are those buckets unique but also the proportions of those buckets will be different and so maybe your philosophy is way bigger or maybe Fitness part is way bigger but I think what makes the truly unique personal trainer or Fitness brand is leaning into people being interested in you for

38:23 being you and then being like by the way I have Fitness stuff if you want to buy it from me and I think the key part is the vast majority of products and services are commone tized there you're not you're probably not going to be significantly better than other trainers just being real you probably aren't but you will be different than them and we want to lean on I I want to buy Fitness from somebody and so I might as well buy from her or I might as well buy it from him so you're taking basically this audience that would buy from anyone but your brand premium gets them to want to buy it from you we think about Prime for example with the drink the drink company like it's a it's a drink that there's other products that already exist in the marketplace that satisfy the same thing

39:09 as Prime but if you are agnostic to that brand and you have brand Affinity with that that Creator then you're like well then if I have two things that are basically equal and I just like this guy better I'm just going to as long as the prices are comparable I'll just vote with my dollars here and so I think that if you're a personal trainer in 2025 um it's going to be longterm it's going to be building the content short term it's going to be Outreach to people that you know and making a compelling offer to get people to try to work with you this overarching point you said there about being yourself as I was thinking about it I was thinking gosh do you know what the thing that all of my favorite creators and the Really successful creators have in common is they all have and I use these words intentionally the courage to be themselves yeah because I

39:56 tell you what when I was starting out as a content creator and I looked back I was showing one of my team members the other day the things I used to post it was like everything happens for a reason it was cringe cliche fluff and it took me several years to almost relax into just realizing that the game here was to get to the point where I could be myself on the internet and actually that was the most high value because of you know of what you said it's the uniquest part of me but the courage to be yourself and it's it's it is the winning strategy for 2025 and it's I think um it's leaning into it and the thing is is that everything in you wants to not do that I'm not really sure why um but I was having a conversation with Ila I want to say two nights ago or three nights ago um I got a bunch of flack for uh some X poost that I made and she just looked at

40:42 me and she was like never dilute yourself because I was like maybe I was like maybe I shouldn't talk about this stuff like maybe I should just like you know I'll just lean off and she was like never dilute yourself like there are so many more people people who need that message than people who are hating that message and she was like and if you're actually going to make a difference in a lot of people's lives there's going to be an equal and opposing force of people who want to reject that and she's like this just comes with the territory of like how big of an impact you want to have and it was just such a great you know wife talking to husband you know conversation um that I guess for me at the end of the day I'm like as long as she thinks I'm cool like you know I I'll keep doing it but um but yeah it's just

41:28 uh because the diluted down version all all of a sudden becomes everyone else's stuff well you said a second ago you're not sure why that is but by very definition of it being unique that that means that there is no blueprint yeah there is no person that's come before you and proven that it works so the courage of being yourself there's only one Steven Bartlett so if I'm truly myself it's never been done before that means that the risks are unknown the upside is also unknown yeah but so again going back to to our our hate of uncertainty it makes much more sense for me to try and copy you because I can see a blueprint there than to run the risk of being yourself and you are someone have to say who is running the risk of being yourself and actually as someone who's observing you now I know who you

42:13 are and I now know who you're not and it's important for me as someone that follows your work yeah that actually I see consistency because I've established Alex os's values yeah and anything that diverts from that is actually less valuable because you say it's more like everyone else and the things I've had before but it's also it wouldn't feel true anymore yeah and um and this is something that even as a Creator myself I I have to fall back on is my audience know who I am now For Better or For Worse yeah they're not going to learn anything new yeah you know what's really interesting is navigating the gray and so there are contradictory ideals and this is what I kind of come back to when I'm when I'm like worried about these types of things which is like you've got mercy and you've got Justice they are somehow opposed and

43:01 they are both ideals so how can we believe in Justice and also believe in Mercy at the same time and so and I mean there's you can have variety and consistency like there there's there there's tons of examples of this right um and so we have these diametrically opposed ideals which means that if you ever say by the way I'm a little bit more of a Justice guy like I understand they had a hard time but at some point you got to take your own personal accountability so like no you're not going to get out of the speeding ticket you're going to get like that's what's just on the other hand it's like hey single mom uh gets pulled over uh for driving too fast you know what maybe we let her off today both of those stories fair but you're going to get attacked by the other side that has an ideal that all humans try to strive for and it will

43:48 feel terrible because they are right and so what and so I think that like understanding that that conflict will always exist between two apparent ideals that and this is fun this is foundationally what politics is right is that there are two apparent ideals that bet all of us I would say 99% of people would say justice is good Mercy is good variety is good consistency is good right respecting values is good so is innovating and doing new things how can we have both of these contradictory ideas and at the same time like navigate that without conflict you can't because how much becomes the question and so I think that your thumbprint as a Creator is that when someone presents a scenario and says does Alex choose Mercy or Justice in the scenario that your

44:34 audience says gets it right and so I think about um branding in general as basically a mosaic that you get to create and so like each piece of content is a little tile that has a single color on it and if you just see one piece of short content of of Steven Bartlett you you don't really have an idea who Steven Marlett is but if you see a thousand of them all of a sudden you zoom out and you get to see the whole picture and I think that that the the colors that are in those mosaics and the and the proportion of how many yellows how many Reds how many greens and where are they is what ultimately creates the brand and so um because people want to try and turn this into okay so I make one post about family I make one post about finances I make one post about whatever right it's like I don't think that's how it works I think you just be you and

45:19 then those proportions will naturally shake out and also over time you will change and so it also makes sense that your brand will change and was I had to recile which likeit I don't know if I agree as with some of the things that I said years ago the thing is in the digital world like my first podcast was 2017 July of 2017 wow episode 8 is called stop branding I have changed my views on branding to be clear yeah but that first podcast is 90 days from when I lost everything MH and so the entire the entire like horm Journey if you want to call that from zero to billion is actually documented 90 days from zero it's all there and so you can see how my

46:05 my my views on business have changed and like what I was thinking about at every kind of portion of my life and so I had to just be okay with the idea that like I will change my mind because I will get new information because let's take the alternative stance if I get new information do I just keep parting what you did before this is also an issue with politics right is that like he's flippy floppy it's like so they're not allowed to learn yeah you've been in politics like you haven't learned anything like no stances Chang like I feel like we should be able to do that obviously Brands don't work that way so it has to be gradual over time which I think if you were always you at all times it will be gradual over time yeah I don't know I think a lot of the time we end up over focusing on unreasonable people which is a war we can never win anyway because you say that to me I think so I think it was

46:52 like I had this uh this guy therapist on my podcast who I then spoke to after the podcast and he basically broke it down to me he was like there's 20% of people that just absolutely love everything you will ever do like you could say anything you change they're [ __ ] they're just super fans there's 80% of people that are actually like he said there 60% of people that are really reasonable they don't speak yeah they just watch they're like reasonable and there's 20% of people with no matter what the [ __ ] you do they're going to be he is like don't spend your life focusing on the the 20% the quiet majority the 60% they don't tweet they don't they just chill and then the 20% you know they your evangelists but you know I find myself falling into the Trap of the so what's interesting about the 20% is that like um I was thinking about this today the your so no matter who you are you're going to be disliked period because no

47:38 one's liked by everyone so we just have like let's if we can accept that as a premise right no one's going to be like for everyone you might as well be disliked for being you than being somebody else amen am at the most basic level you the being disliked is a fixed cost and and I think to to to to take the opposite pers perspective I think it is far better to be disliked for being who you are than loved for someone you're not yeah and one one of the great entrepreneurs I interviewed on the podcast said to me when it comes to marketing and branding and this sort of attention conversation we're having she said to me that in order to reach your 80% you have to piss off your 20% or at least be willing to piss off your 20% it was Jane warang who's the founder of demica global Beauty um brand with I think hundreds of thousands of people

48:24 and she sat and said to get to your 80% you have to be willing to piss off no actually [ __ ] she said to get to your 20% you have to be willing to piss off the 80% and from a branding perspective it makes so much sense because when you stand for something clearly which you do you inadvertently stand against a you have to if you draw a line there's there's there's a side on either side and you have to say like I'm on this side did you see that Nike ad dude I was just going to say that I was just going to say that yeah the William defo ad yeah like what's yours is mine and what's mine is mine yeah just like it was actually the first time that I'd seen something from Nike in a long time that I was like this is what built this brand and I think they have they had lost their way for a while yeah uh with like the wokeism and all that stuff and I think it's like Nike means Victory

49:11 which means people have to lose yeah and they were willing to say that for the first time ever right I posted it on my LinkedIn and it was 50/50 yeah I'd say it was actually more like 80% of people were either neutral or pissed off and 20 yeah and 20% of people were like that is me I am a Nike person and for me when I saw that I thought I want to buy some Nike shorts yeah it was I mean it was the first time I actually felt like I had positive brand Affinity towards the brand in a long time how important in this game of building and starting is people oh very a hiring question I'll tell you why I asked this question because when I look at my portfolio early stage first Founders never seem to understand the importance of hiring in people yeah and I bang my head against the wall trying to convince them that actually the game they're playing is in the company group

49:59 of people yeah so I would I'll start with one thing and then I'll answer the question so I was talking to um a mentor of mine and he said when I was in my 20s it was all about the destination he said when I got to my 30s I realized it was all about the journey he said when I was in my 40s I realized it was about the company and I was like I can't wait till you're in your 50s the next one right but I thought that was such a great like such a profound shift in terms of how he thought about his business success cuz he was like I don't need to be a you know a Deca billionaire he's like I'm I'm cool where I'm at um and now I just want to do it with people that I like and so to the question about um people overall I believe that the potential of an organization is directly correlated

50:44 with the aggregate intellectual horsepower of everyone contained within it and so if you are the smartest person in the business then and you can do every everyone's job better than everyone in your company then it means that the limit of the business is purely based on one person's horsepower and one person's life experiences and that will be the cap and basically it doesn't matter how smart you are you can't live a 100 lifetimes like you can learn quickly sure there's some people who can learn faster than others but you're not going to be able to live a thousand lifetimes and so as a business grows more expertise is required and I think the easiest liit test for this is if you look at the richest people in the World almost none of them Own 100% of their business so

51:29 number one most of them don't even own 50 like most of them are small percentages Jensen WIS at 4% for NVIDIA basos is at seven or 9% for for Amazon uh I think elon's at 20 for Tesla like small percentages and it's because it takes a lot of horses to take a chariot to the Moon right and so basically as you put in more intellectual horsepower the potential peak of the business goes so much so much higher so much faster Keith rabois from um he's one of the original PayPal Mafia guys has a really good analogy for this and he talks about it in terms of barrels and ammunition and he says so as soon as you get some product Market fit the business starts to grow and you say okay we need to start shipping things faster and this works the same with a Services business

52:15 a physical products business software business the concept's the same and said so what happens is you then hire a lot of people and you assume that your throughput is going to increase proportionally so we have 10 people we hire 50 we should 5xr output and then you quickly realize that that is not the case and so what happens is uh there are people who are rate limiters for or or and organization and those are the barrels so think about like a civil war Barrel you know Old Cannon and you've got these cannonballs next to it he said most people are ammunition and so you bring more ammunition but you're still going to be limited by the one barrel capacity of how how many shots can get taken by the barrel and so you need to find more barrels so you have to go from one barrel to two barrels two barrels to three barrels and that becomes an increase in capacity or throughput for the organization and there are very few of those in a different um I can't

53:02 remember the law but it's some organizational uh law but uh the square root of the number of people in a company generate 50% of the work so you have 100 people in an organization 10 people are responsible for 50% of the value that's created facts right anybody who's been in like you're like of like preach and so the thing is is I think the real game of Entrepreneurship is that your standards rise over time and it's unfortunate because we we hear things that other entrepreneurs tell us it's all about the people stupid and then you're like sure but look at my and it's like no you're not hearing it and I don't know there are some I think Williamson talks about this how there's like some lessons that for some reason it's like we have to learn for ourselves I still believe that that it's like we can operationalize this at a lower level so that we don't have to learn it for

53:47 ourselves but like I'm convinced I haven't figured it out yet but um so every entrepreneur can can can can resonate with this which is every business that I've started I've gotten to the success of the business Prior Way faster and I kind of liken it to a video game where it's like you beat level one and then you know you get to level two and it's like you spend months trying to beat this boss and you finally figure how to beat the boss and it's like great and you spend another three months getting beating Boss 3 and let's say you start the game over with a new character it's like you just zoom through level one two and three and then you get to level four and you're like shoot now I got to spend time it's like virgin land like I don't know how to beat this yet and so I think that that happens for archetype finding for skill and talent within an organization and so say that again so if you have functions across an

54:35 organization there are people who are going to drive results within that function and the first time you hire a salesperson for example you don't know what you're looking for and so you just hire a human who says they can sell and maybe they can maybe they can't and then you cycle you try to train them that doesn't work does work whatever and then finally you let's say you cycle through three sales guys and finally you find a killer and then you have this recognition you're like okay that's what I'm looking for and then all of a sudden you try and approximate that person or that archetype as as much as you can and so when you start your second company you're like oh I can quickly staff up sales because I know what I'm looking for but then you're like shoot I've never really nailed sales manager yet and so then you cycle through you start you start whacking away at the boss and then you have to end up firing the boss at level because you're like oh God this didn't work and then six months are gone

55:20 because you had to find them recruit them hire them train them and then find out they sucked and then start over again and maybe it takes 18 months to really find the right sales manager and then you're like okay I know what that

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