Alex Hormozi: How He Built A $150 Million Empire And His Best Business Advice
01:28:00 Share

By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

And I think the big problem is that people expect that they're going to have a perfect business. I can't think of an entrepreneur besides Jeff Bezos, who's a freak of nature. Most people have a graveyard of failures behind them. The idea is you start not with the intent of saying this is going to be the one thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life, which is the fallacy that employees have. When in reality, it's I just have to do a thing that I'm good enough at that I can learn the game. And the thing is, once you start taking steps,

The next step becomes illuminated. You trying to think a hundred steps into the future when you have no context is irrelevant because chaos is going to break your plan. And a lot of people think they need to have some novel idea. The best way to start a business is just look at what everyone else is doing and just try and do it better. What are things that I already know how to do or I have past experience in? What things, because I have past experience, I know that other people struggle with that sucks about this thing. And then I will solve that specific problem. And it could also be a problem that other people solve too. You just try and do a little bit better.

Hey friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it is my immense privilege to sit down with authors and academics and entrepreneurs and creators and other inspiring people. And we talk about how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools that we can learn from them to apply to our own lives to help live our best lives. Now, what you're about to hear is an interview between me and Alex Hormozy. Alex has been absolutely taking the internet by storm over the last year or two. He's a business owner, I guess. He's just, he's also absolutely jacked and just produces loads and loads of content, which is all around fascinating.

helping you start and build a business. He and his wife, Layla, they own businesses together. Their portfolio is worth over $150 million. And Alex has written an absolutely fantastic book called "100 Million Dollar Offers," which is a book basically all about how to craft an offer, which converts people and which

which sells well. And he's genuinely one of the most inspiring people that I've ever come across in the world of entrepreneurship. He has nothing to sell you. That's like one of his selling points. His whole mission is to help people start businesses because starting a business and growing his business was what allowed him to become free and get ridiculous levels of wealth and be able to do whatever he wanted. And so in the conversation, we talk a little bit about how, let's say, someone working a normal job

could potentially be taking those first steps to start that business, which could potentially allow them to quit that job if that's what they want to do. And we touch on a bunch of other things around the importance of learning versus owning, investing in the S&P 500 versus the S&ME 500. And we explore a little bit of Alex's backstory where he quit his corporate job and then started gyms and like all of the various lessons learned along the way. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Alex Hormozy. Yeah, so thank you.

Thank you so much for taking the time. No, you're welcome. This is a conversation I've been looking forward to for a while because I've discovered your stuff around the time you were blowing up seemingly on all of the social platforms.

And then I came across your book and I listened to it on Audible. And around the same time, all of my friends had also discovered the book. And they were just like, we were all messing, being like, oh my God, have you read $100 million offers? It's just absolutely sick. And it's just like jam-packed with value. So firstly, thank you for that and for providing that as a 99 cent service to the world broadly. How did you think about pricing for that book, by the way?

I mean, I think it's always like, what's the, you know, what problem are we solving? And so for me, like the point of the book is not to make money from the book. The point of the book was to, you know, help as many businesses make money. And then, I mean, the play for acquisition and not comp is a very long play. You know what I mean? Which is just, I believe that there's lots of

I think that the biggest inflow of deals will actually come in five years from all the people who've consumed the stuff and have gotten to, you know, three, five, 10, 20 million. And they want to work with acquisition.com who are not at that threshold yet. But it's guys who want to go to a hundred and they're capped at 10 and they're trying to figure out what to do. That's, that's what I'm making all this stuff for. But yeah, so the problem that we're solving is like, how do we get this in as many hands as possible? And so,

Giving it away for free, I actually don't think would have gotten as many hands because I wanted to use – because if Amazon makes money, Amazon will push it. And so at $0.99, Amazon gets two-thirds of the revenue from the thing. If I was at $2.99, then I get two-thirds and they get one-third.

And so my, at least my mental argument was it's easy to sell a 99 cent thing. I can tap into the traffic that Amazon will provide and what problem am I solving, which is mass distribution, you know, as many people as possible. And I think there is also a tiny element of free versus paid. There's like an emotional difference of like I paid something. I mean, it's a difference between a customer and a voyeur, you know what I mean? And so that was, that was at least the thought process behind it. And yeah, just that was it. There wasn't, there wasn't too much more thought than that.

So one of the things that you open a lot of your content with is the phrase to the effect of, my name is Alex Ramosi, I own acquisition.com. And I'm going to help you get to 3 million in revenue. If you're more than 3 million in revenue, then talk to me. I want to acquire you. But if you're less than 3 million in revenue, I want to help you get there and I have nothing to sell you. And that's, that's interesting. So it's,

It's interesting, A, because like the way people were describing you when it was sort of on the grapevine when you first started blowing up was that phrase that and I have nothing to sell you. And that was that really tapped nicely into some something in the zeitgeist where everyone knows someone's always trying to sell you something. And then just the fact that you're so blasé about throwing the word three million out there, where for most people, they hear that number and they're like, shit their pants, because like three million is a lot of money. But the way you seem to talk like it, it's

It's almost like it's not. And it helped, for me at least, helped me change my mindset around multiple millions to the point is that it didn't seem like such a big deal. So I wonder if you can just kind of speak to that a bit. What's the philosophy behind the introduction?

Yeah. I mean, so many, many of the things, uh, that I feel like I've, I've gotten some notoriety for have been, uh, you know, sheer accidents. I it's, it's, it only seems masterful in retrospect than more than it was, you know, um, intelligent design. Um,

I got frustrated because a lot of people were like, he's just trying to sell a course. This is like early on. Because, you know, and I was like, I was like, I'm not, I have nothing to sell you. I was like, I have nothing to sell you. And so the very first video, I can't remember which one it was. I just said it like, I was just annoyed when I said that. And then,

You know the comments just like poured on if there's a go so I just need to be more like more explicit about this I'd people just don't know I was like I have nothing I have a 99 cent book like you know what I mean like if that and that's actually the one thing that I've struggled With is because like the internet doesn't do well with nuance And so they're like, you know, so we're like he's trying to make money I'm like dude like yeah in the book does make money the book makes Probably about 60,000 a month in income Then I make from the book. Yeah

So, I mean, like it makes money. But like relative to my income, it's just like, it's irrelevant. Like it doesn't even, you know what I mean? Like it doesn't, it doesn't, my top employee makes a million plus a year. Like it doesn't do anything for me. So,

So, it's just like for context, right? So, anyways, all that to say, the thinking process was more just me trying to be explicit. And in terms of talking about 3 million, I may even change it. I've changed a lot of my profiles to 10 million and up. But the biggest issue that most people have between zero and three specifically is just ignorance.

People just don't know what to do. You know what I mean? And so like, just, you know, getting to six figures is literally just like sell something to someone. Like that's it. It's all you have to do to get to six figures. Like one channel, one product, one avatar, like that's it. You don't have to do anything else. And then, you know, when you get, you want to get to seven figures, then you just do that and then add the word consistently, which is you do, you know, you input, put the inputs in the system in a way that's consistent so that you get a consistent output. So

it's whatever way you acquire this customers, whether it was reach outs, whether it was content, whether it was paid ads, whether it was affiliates, whether it was referrals, whatever the thing was that got you the customers. Cool. Do that consistently and you'll be at a million. You know what I mean? Which is, which is still only 20 K a week. It's not like a huge number. You know, one to three is usually, uh,

increasing output of that main thing to a small degree and really just like baseline efficiencies and building out the core team. So usually at that point, going one to three is getting the person out of delivery to a large extent. And usually they get their first kind of first follower, first like one or two

I'm trying to think the right word to how to say this. Competent individuals who are helping them out. And then, you know, a handful of frontline. And so it's usually like companies that's, you know, 3 million, they're like 5 to 15 employees. And so, and there's usually really only like two-ish good ones. And the rest are okay, right? Yeah.

And so at that point, you know, going from three to 10 is usually where we get, it's the minimum level that we take people on. And it's not because there's something magical about 3 million is that 3 million typically checks two boxes. Box one is that they have product market fit at some level. People want something from them. Like something they're selling is resonating enough that they can generate sales.

And the second thing, I guess there's three boxes. One is that the second is that they have at least one reliable acquisition channel that they're currently doing. And the third is that they have a core team in place. So they've demonstrated product market fit. They have a reliable acquisition channel, just at least one. And they have a core team in place, which may be relatively dysfunctional and have very few key players, but at least they have some semblance of structure. And so if they meet those minimum requirements, then we can at least start from at least some level of leverage to start helping them grow.

Okay, so I'd love to talk a lot about that initial bit that you sort of

threw away with like, oh, one product, one channel, one avatar. So for a bit of context, a couple of weeks ago, I happened to be on vacation on some Greek island and I posted an Instagram reel of like, hey, this is the creator life. I'm working on my iPad and stuff. And there were a few comments from people being like, I'd love to live this sort of lifestyle, but I just don't know where to start. And that sort of, that idea of I'd love to be able to keep

you know, if we imagine 99.9% of people listening to this, if you told them they could make six figures a year doing what they love, they'd be like, mind blown, would absolutely love that. So I wonder if we can kind of explore that zero to six figure jump or sort of process. Let's say someone has got a full-time job. Let's say they're working in, I don't know, consulting or something corporate, and they love the idea of, I want to make a living doing what I love. How would we break that down? And this is under the assumption that they hate doing what they're doing.

Yes. I was like, because I always like to be clear. I was like, I've got employees that make a million bucks a year plus. So like you can absolutely become filthy wealthy and that's income, right? And so a lot of businesses that are at $10 million a year, the owner might only take a million bucks in income depending on margins, et cetera. And so like,

A lot of employees will wish for... They see top line as income, which is just a very employee mindset. They're like, oh, if I make six figures a year, I'll make six figures a year. It's like, well, if you really want to make six figures a year, I'll probably make 500 grand a year. You know what I mean? Revenue-wise, at least. If you don't want to have just bought yourself another job, right? Let's talk through this transition. If you're an employee...

When you make the switch, you're still an employee. You're just an employee of a different business that you happen to own, and you are basically 100% of the expenses. And so the business itself actually makes no money. You as the sole employee of that thing and the boss gets to call your own shots, but you were still the employee, right? So you're wearing all the hats, etc.,

And so it's relatively nuanced. You know what I mean? Like if you had a six-year consulting job and then you start consulting on the side, for example, through your own LLC, you have the same job. You just got rid of the person who was giving you direction and now you are responsible, right? The thing that most people have to do is they have to go get money, right? You have to go make money.

And the way you do that is you sell stuff, right? And the way that you can even begin the conversation to sell stuff is that you have to have people who show interest in the thing, which means you have to make your products known. And we do that through advertising, right? And there's five ways to advertise, which I just went over earlier. And so it's like, pick one of those five ways, start doing it on a consistent basis, bring people in. What do you sell them? That's what the $100 million offers book is for. It's like, this is how you figure out what to sell.

And then you sell them the thing. And then after that, you'll have some delivery. Now, usually if you have a consistent method of advertising and selling with a what to sell from the offer, then you can start getting people to help you on the level of delivery you have, which comes down to breaking the delivery into chunks rather than holistically and saying, how can I specialize the labor? Because you trying to say, I just need somebody to do what I do is silly, right? You need to figure out how could somebody do

How can I get five people to do 20% of what I'm doing and do it consistently, right? And then you could increase your advertising. Sales is a very high leverage thing in the beginning. If you spent all day selling, just you, you would have enough for five people to do work, right? And so then you would have a business, you know?

Just a quick announcement from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is brought to you by Heights. Heights is a brain care smart supplement that I've been taking every morning for the last 12 months. I love it so much that I actually became friends with the founder, Dan, who we actually had on season one of the Deep Dive podcast. We also have an interview this season with neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Tara Swart, who's the chief science officer of Heights. And I like the product so much that I actually became an angel investor in the company.

It's great. Everything they do is completely evidence-based. So on their website, they've got a list of all 20 something micronutrients that they've got in these two capsules, along with links to all of the various scientific papers and consensuses on why these sorts of nutrients are good for you and why they've got them at the appropriate dosing, which they have in the capsules, in the capsules. It's super easy to sign up. You just go on the website, which is linked in the show notes and in the video description, and you put in your address and they send you one of these little boxes of pills every month or every quarter,

I sign up to the quarterly subscription, so I get three of these every three months. And the quarterly subscription is great because A, it's discounted from the monthly subscription and B, if you use the coupon code ALI15, A-L-I-1-5 at checkout, then you'll get an extra 15% off the already discounted price of the quarterly subscription.

Now, obviously it's ideal if you can actually get all these micronutrients from your diet, that would be the gold standard. But as studies show, 99% of us in the Western world don't in fact have the absolutely perfect gold standard Mediterranean diet. I certainly don't. I eat a lot of takeaways. And so these two capsules, just two capsules every morning has my bases covered.

And it's a lot easier to take just two little capsules with water than it is to try and drown green sludge or whatever else other companies have in the market that kind of does the same thing. So anyway, thank you so much, Heights, for sponsoring this episode. And let's get right back to the podcast. So let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking, all right, cool. I know, like, I've read Alexis Berkey. He's telling me I've got to sell a thing. I don't know what to sell. I don't know if I have any skills. I don't know what I could possibly offer to the world. How do we break that down? Yeah.

Yeah, this is actually a topic that I cover more in the Leads book that's coming out soon. Soon, relative term, six months-ish. Everybody knows something, all right? And so the idea is, what do you have... Like, everyone has unique depth of knowledge in certain areas because you've been alive and your eyes and ears have taken inputs, period, right? And so I like to think of people starting... Like, so if you look at... Are you familiar with Y Combinator?

Yeah.

And so they're okay with somebody who's super young, et cetera, but they want to, they want you to have experience in the industry because there's just so much ignorance debt that you have to pay down. If you literally know nothing about an industry, like there's just so much, like if your dad was a mechanic, you know, so much about cars just by osmosis of being around a mechanic for 18 years. And so I like to think past jobs you've held, you will know stuff about that industry. Um,

the jobs of your parents are things that you will know about that industry. And then you've got personal interests. And so I think that if I had to put those into three buckets, it's like parent stuff, past jobs of self, and current interests. And so it's like, of those three things, which of those three buckets do you think you could help someone do a thing better? And so the idea is you want to sell the most valuable thing.

Right? And so the most valuable thing is what is the problem that I can help somebody else solve that I could charge the most money for? Or in reverse, that could make them the most money. And then I will be able to charge a percentage of the money that I'm able to make somebody else in this thing. Now, that's in a B2B setting. In a B2C setting, it would be how valuable do people perceive the problem that they have as, right? Whether it's like I can teach music,

Tons of people want to be able to learn how to, and if you're better, you know, because you've had a side interest in that, awesome. Maybe you have a side interest because you're really good at editing the songs. Well, there's tons of musicians who would love, who hate that part and would love to have it. So it's like, we all know how to do stuff. And all we have to do is package the thing that we're doing. And I think the big problem is that people expect that they're going to have a perfect business. But if you look at the track record of all, I can't think of an entrepreneur besides Jeff Bezos, who's a freak of nature.

whose first business becomes the most valuable business in the world is most people have a graveyard of failures behind them. And so the idea is you start not with the intent of saying, this is going to be the one thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life, which is the fallacy that employees have.

that whatever they pick is going to be the thing they're going to do for the rest of their lives. When in reality, it's I just have to do a thing that I'm good enough at that I can learn the game. And the thing is, once you start taking steps, the next step becomes illuminated. You trying to think 100 steps into the future when you have no context is irrelevant because chaos is going to break your plan anyways. And so do what you know, exchange ideas,

I like service businesses to start because they are, in my opinion, the lowest risk to start because it's just your time. So service businesses meaning? Do stuff for money. Like mowing the lawn or cleaning windows? 100%. Service. Clean houses, whatever. All of those are just service businesses, and they're fine. And a lot of people think they need to have some novel idea to start a business. In my opinion, if you're getting into it, the best way to start a business is just look at what everyone else is doing and just try and do it better.

Like, I mean, and there's obvious holes. Like if you've, if you've gone to, if you've gotten your dry cleaning, it's like, can I do this in half the time? As this guy, if I do the lawn care, what are the things people hate about lawn care? Ah, they leave the, the trimmings around the edges. They're all shitty. The person doesn't speak English that well. Like, well, cool. Then I've got advantages, right? So it's like, what are things that I already know how to do or I have past experience in?

What things, because I have past experience, I know that other people struggle with, that sucks about this thing. And then I will solve that specific problem. And it could also be a problem that other people solve too. You just try and do a little bit better. It's just not rocket science. You know what I mean? And then you start selling your time for money. So yes, you're still trading time for dollars. You don't need to read Rich Dad Poor Dad just yet. You're still trading time for dollars. But the point is that you're trading that time for money in order to learn not to earn.

You need to earn in order to pay your rent, eat, etc. But the major thing you're doing is you're paying down ignorance debt. So the vast majority of your income is coming in the form of education rather than earning. Yeah, there's a few things there that I think are really interesting. The first is that I think if we think of how an employee thinks versus how an entrepreneur thinks or a business owner,

An employee sort of mindset is often sort of the activity that I'm doing, whereas the entrepreneur is more like the problem, the specific problem that I'm solving, right?

And I found that when people in our team have started doing freelance work and now they have more of an idea of what a creative business looks like and they can solve a specific problem, they're just like, oh my God, it's so easy to make money. Whereas before they were thinking of this service as like, oh, I offer writing as a service or something like that. But as soon as you connect it to a problem that preferably a business has because businesses can pay for it, suddenly the eyes light up and you realize, hang on, what does money even mean if it's seemingly so easy to make it? Yeah.

I like what you're saying about service-based businesses because it's not that sexy. Like when you hear people on podcasts, you don't tend to hear of someone who built a service-based business and it went really big. You tend to hear the stories of like the tech entrepreneurs that built an innovative product and stuff. They don't see the hundred failed startups. Like the failure rate on tech startups is insane.

just as high as everything else, except it usually takes capital and it doesn't take capital to start a service business. So with you, my understanding is that you quit your corporate job and started the gym business. And I wonder if we can kind of explore the story there a little bit more. I can actually even rewind. There was a half step in between there. So

So this is also covered in the leads book, but I'll give a sneak peek. So what I did is I actually, because I'd been interested in fitness, right? That was my interest. So like I had past experience. I was obsessed with fitness. At that point, I was 23.

I've been training for eight years. I had several state records. So like I was a pretty, you know, I was pretty into it. Right. And it was to the point where people were asking me for stuff, you know, workout programs and things like that, just because they knew my interest. Right. And so as a, as a quick, you know, pro tip for everybody, if you've got stuff that people ask you to do for them, because you're good at it, maybe you're good at tech. It's like, can you help me set up my like wifi and stuff, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's like,

That means you're solving problems. You can chart... Like what people ask you to do as a favor is an indication of the things that you can charge for later, right? So...

I had all these people who were asking me, not all these, I mean, a handful of people who had asked me for programs and stuff. And so what I did was during my last year of consulting, I started something called the Free Training Project. And so the Free Training Project was I would charge $500 to $1,000, but I wouldn't charge it. They had to donate that to the charity of their choice in exchange to work with me.

Right. And so that way I wanted people to value it, but they weren't paying me directly. So they'd get a write off. They felt good. I had a ton of goodwill also in the marketplace too. Cause I was like, I'm doing all this stuff for charity. I got, I got all these people reaching out to me like, this is so cool, blah, blah, blah. Right.

And so after a year of doing that, I had probably, I don't know, 12 really good test of like great before and after pictures that I had collected from my clients. And I told them that was part of the deal. I was like, you have to donate it. I would like to do this for real later, but you have to let me use your testimony. And they were like, that's fine. So once I had that, I had those first 10, 12 customers who had great before and after pictures donated.

Um, I transitioned many of those customers that, Hey, I'm doing, I'm going to do this full time. Now, are you comfortable paying the same amount you're paying to charity, except just making it charity of Alex? Cause Alex can't eat either. And so, and that was actually how I transitioned from not-for-profit or donating everything. Um, and I'd even set up the entity. I just told him to literally donate it and send me the screenshot. I didn't even do anything like that. Um, and so I didn't have a website.

All I had was an LLC and a PayPal account. So like for everybody's like, I don't know how to start a business. I was like, you literally just need a bank account and a way to process money. That is it. Like two things. And you can Google how to figure out if you can't figure it out from Google, entrepreneurship might not be for you. All right. But you look like, think about there's 30 million businesses in the United States, 30 million other people have figured this out.

which means you can too. So bank account, payment processing, make the first 10 free or some sort of charitable thing so that people don't feel weird or you don't feel weird about selling, et cetera. After you have it, after you're providing this service to people, you can transition people from free service to paid service. And if they don't want to start paying you, then that gives you insight as to either you suck or they suck, which is also possible too. But either way,

A certain percentage of those people will continue to stay and pay you. And now you have income. Now, you can also ask those people for referrals, which is exactly what I did. So I think half that business came in just for... The initial ones came in from friends and family and me posting. And so I'll close the loop on what I said earlier. A year later, after I had those testimonials, I made a public post being like, hey...

I've got this thing now. I made a website, which is, that was my big announcement. I made a website. I still have the post. I found it. It's 2013. I was like, I made a website and I am now open for business. And so if you would like training stuff, let me know. This is what I'm doing now. And I had some testimonials and go check out the site, whatever. And so from there, I was able to get, I think about 20 guys

uh, who were willing to let me do just like almost bodybuilding type stuff. Cause I was kind of like what I was parlaying bodybuilding back then. And so, um, I think I want to say I got 20 guys at 200 bucks a month. And so I was making $4,000 a month, uh, from those people. And it took me four hours every Saturday to do the fulfillment. What was the fulfillment?

I would just, I would just update their training programs and send them nutrition, uh, like update their macros, updated meal plans. Um, and then like, you know, new workouts for the week, et cetera. Um, and then I, and everyone had my cell phone and I would just text them the new stuff. And if they had any questions, they could hit me up. Like it was a very simple business. Um, and so that's what I did. It was just one-on-one online and it only took me four hours on Saturday morning. And to show you what kind of person I am, I hated it. Uh,

Uh, even though I loved fitness, I hated having to do something the same thing every day. Um, like on the delivery side. So I ended up having the genius idea of saying, Oh, I need to own a gym because then I'll be a business owner. I'm really just self-employed right now. Um,

And so that's what got me to start my gym rather than probably doing the wiser decision and saying, okay, this cost you four hours a week and you're making four grand a month. Maybe you should do this for 40 hours a week. But doing more of it to me felt like a horrible idea. So I didn't want to do any more. So how did you jump from that to, therefore, I should probably own a gym? Oh, I don't think that's... The inferential jump was not high. Yeah, it was not an intelligent one. I always thought I was going to own a gym. That was, I mean, that was the, not always.

I had done a, so, so these are the three things that I was deciding between for my business. I was decided between a test prep company because I was really good at standardized testing. Um, and I had a process for how I, how I did it. I had a yogurt business idea cause I was a big yo pro yo guy. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I was like, I'm an avid consumer of this shit. I feel like I know. And I, and I hated, there's so many things I knew that I thought I could, I actually know a lot about the yogurt business now. Um,

And I was good at fitness. So those are the three things that I felt like I could do for anybody's list. Like those are the three that I was picking between the yogurt business cost 250 grand to start up. I didn't have that money. So I couldn't do that one. Um, I had saved about 50 or 60 grand. I can't remember 50 or 60 at the time. Um, I was 23. And then, uh, the test prep business, I actually did a ton of work on. Um, and I was going to partner with a professor from my university to do it with me. And so I set up all of the initial materials, um,

And based on a miscommunication, I'll just put it that way. He ended up either taking the materials and not and using them without me to start a business consulting thing.

Either way, it became clear that what I thought was happening versus what he thought was happening were not the same thing. And that left a very sour taste in my mouth with test prep. I do think it was the smarter business I probably should have done. And so all that was left was fitness. And so fitness, I was like, I already know that. People already want me to help them with it. So I'll just start that. And so the gym was what I would have said is like the legit business. I didn't think that the online thing was legit. Remember, this is 10 years ago.

So like it wasn't... No one even thought it was... That was a concept of legitimate business. You know what I mean? So I was really early days on it. And so, you know, from there, I hit up 40 gym owners to see if I could just...

basically apprentice for them and just work for free. One guy hit me back. He had a mastermind. I joined his mastermind for $10,000, even though I didn't have a gym. And I said, are you sure that that makes sense for me to join? He's like, oh yeah, sure. And it did actually make sense for me because then I could learn from all the mistakes everybody else was making before I started. So I was like, okay, this works. And

And so I learned all the stuff that I could from that mastermind and from him. He ended up signing me as an employee. Yeah. A couple of questions on that front. So yeah, the test prep thing is interesting. I didn't know that part of the story. So my first business that went well was also a test prep business. And I still have the Evernote document from 2012 where I was like, shit, I need to make some money. What am I good at? And what could I possibly do? And it was like test prep and web design. I was like, cool.

cool let me make a test prep course thing and let me advertise it on a website because back then it was hard to make a website look pretty and that that's what ended up ended up making the money initially um on the on the gym front so it it seems to me like there's two leaps there um leap number one is i want to do this thing like i start a gym maybe um

And therefore, I'm going to work for free. I want to own a business. Yeah. I want to own a business. Therefore, I'm going to work for someone for free. That seems like a bit of a leap, which these days seems very unfashionable to even say because everyone then goes down your throat for being that's only available for the privileged, et cetera, et cetera. What's available for the privileged? Working for free. Yeah, the working for free thing. It's quite unfashionable to suggest that people work for free. Oh, all right. I mean, I was making four grand a month from my little online thing.

So I made money from that. Now I offered to work for free, but he quickly was like, I don't feel good about it. I'll just pay you. And so he paid me. He paid me like minimum wage, but I mean, I think I made like, I don't know, 2,800 bucks a month, whatever it was. I don't even remember what it was because I made more from the four hours a week on Saturday than I did from that. But again, the point wasn't to earn, you know what I mean? It was to learn. And I had saved up 50 grand. So I knew I could live for, you know, at least two years on that.

Um, I tried to live when I was, I was, I spent 400 bucks a month splitting a bedroom. Um, and then I ate, you know, I spent a hundred dollars a week on food. I was eating, you know, I was spending nothing to live. And then the rest of my time was at the gym trying to learn.

Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Shortform. Shortform is the world's best service that summarizes books, but it's way more than just book summaries. They almost have a whole study guide for every book that they've got on the platform where they've got a one page summary, and then they also have chapter by chapter breakdowns. And it's not just chapter by chapter breakdowns. Also in between the chapter breakdowns, they have interactive exercises where you can engage more readily with the ideas in the book.

Shortform covers nonfiction books from a bunch of different genres that you might be interested in. For example, they've got a load of stuff in the business world. So if for example, you are an entrepreneur or you want to become an entrepreneur, that'll be great for you. They've got books in motivation, they've got books in education, they've got books in lifestyle and communication. Basically any genre of like nonfiction, personal development, self-help stuff that will help you level up your life. It's all there on Shortform. Shortform publishes new book guides and articles every week.

And if you're a subscriber, then you get to vote on what book they cover next. And in fact, through that system, I have voted for various books. For example, one book I've recently rediscovered is On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Now, this is a book I actually read absolutely ages ago, and I

I read it and I thought, oh, wow, this is really, really, really good. And I'd actually forgotten I'd read it until I saw that this was actually covered on Shortform. And so I went on the app on my phone. I usually go on Shortform when I'm on the toilet, if I'm feeling particularly productive. And I saw, oh my God, they've got On Writing Well on here. And so I revisited the key ideas, which I immediately applied to the articles and to the book that I'm writing. Anyway, if any of that sounds up your street and you would like to sign up to the world's best service that summarizes books, then head over to shortform.com forward slash deepdive

and that will give you a completely free five-day trial, and you can try out the service to your heart's content. That link will also be in the video description and in the show notes, and thank you so much, Shortform, for sponsoring this episode.

The thing that's always struck me about you, like when I've heard other interviews, is that you're so matter-of-fact about all of this stuff. And whereas to me, like at every stage of the journey, I know people who are at that point who have gone the other way and decided, you know what? Oh, I couldn't possibly leave my 40K a year job, even though I'm living with my parents and I don't have any kids or anything. I couldn't possibly leave that and take a pay cut because that would be bad. And you're supposed to make more money as you grow older rather than less. And do you kind of get that problem? Yeah.

I guess the sorts of people you speak to these days are mostly the sort of 3 to 10 million plus, rather than the people that are just struggling to get started. But I imagine most of the people that follow you tend to be in the beginner camp. 88%. I wonder if you can...

How do you know that? We have a survey on our site. Oh, yeah. Nice. 88% of people want to start a business. At least that following. So I wonder if you can speak more to this idea of like learn versus earn. Because I think that's a good model. And this idea of paying down ignorance debt. I think that's a great model that more people could. It's the most expensive cost.

Like right now, it costs me a billion dollars a year to not know what to do to make a billion dollars. Or I do know how to make a billion dollars and I just have to wait and pay down my time debt, which is what I feel like I'm doing right now. I'm just paying down time. And so I think understanding whether it's a lack of knowledge or it's just a timeline thing, like those are big differences, you know what I mean, at the baseline, right? You could be doing the right thing, but just be 10 years behind when it's going to come to fruition. You will get outsized returns on the information, right? On the knowledge and the lessons that you will learn. And so...

You want to pay that ignorance down as fast as you can because as soon as you have that knowledge, you'll be able to skyrocket straight to 20, 50, 100, 500,000 a month very quickly because you know how to do it. People are getting obsessed about these micro changes. When the big scheme changes...

This is why, in my opinion, all of the money that someone would be spending, and this is relatively controversial. It's a whole S&P 500 versus SME 500, but you will get a significantly higher return investing in your own ability to make money than you will in any market. And so if you look at the vast majority of very, very wealthy people, they have tremendous earning capacity.

right? They know how to do stuff that makes money, right? So it's like, we got to go get that. And so there's really not like, if you were to, if you were to dollar cost average a thousand dollars into a month into the S&P 500 for, for, you know, 50 years, sure. You'd also not live a fun life, but you could do that if you wanted to, you could do that. You absolutely could. Right. Or you could take that thousand dollars a month, join a mentorship program every year. You know what I mean? And this is why my whole argument against like

College is not that I'm against college. I think it's just overpriced. And so you could take 200,000... You want to have a trippy thought? In the US, you can get a student loan for the full amount of college. It's about $200,000. If you go to a really nice private school, that's what you can get subsidized through the government, $200,000. And you don't have debt payments for a very long time. Here's a crazy thought. You could take that $200,000. You could buy a fucking rental property that makes you $4,000 a month

And then you would literally exit the system before you even got into it with the money that they're giving you to become a worker, which is just fat. And you wouldn't even have to pay down the debt service for the real estate. A buddy of mine did this. He's a PhD student. He got grants to go to school. He still took out the student loans and he finished his PhD with 20 homes and $10,000 a month of income from doors that he didn't even have debt service on because it was student loans.

Crazy, just as a fun side note. But I won't even get into that one. But if we just think, okay, I'm paying $2,000 a month if I'm going to school for $25,000 a year. It's 100 grand for four years, whatever.

I pay $2,000 a month. Is there another place that I could spend $2,000 a month and get a superior return on my ability to earn money? And my argument would be, yes, there are many places. Most places arguably will give you a better return on your money than a traditional four-year degree at this moment.

Right. And so you take the, you take the $2,000 a month, you go and you buy a six month mastermind on placing ads. You buy a six month thing on selling. You buy a six month thing on making courses, whatever. Maybe it takes you 18 months. Well, you're still two and a half years ahead of the other guys.

So what? You know what I mean? Yeah. I think this is, this is like a key, a key like mindset shift. Cause I'm just thinking there's so many conversations I've had with friends and people in my audience over the, over the years where it's like, you know, they've got like a regular job, maybe earning 50 K or something. And they're like, Oh, or, or even 30 K, like whatever. And they're like,

I know I want to make some money on the side. Therefore, you know, talk to me about investing. I like, do I pick stocks or index funds? And I'm like, I mean, index fund, but like, hang on, how much money, how much money do I make? Yeah. You're poor.

There's no, like, you're not going to make, you're not going to make breathtaking. And the thing, and here's, here's the thing is when you, when you do the dollar cost average thing, because everyone likes to put it in the Excel sheet, everyone gets Excel rich. The thing is, is that by the time you retire with $4 million on that Excel sheet, $4 million will be a million dollars today, which is not a lot of money.

Now people are like, that is a lot of money. It's not when you're trying to live on it and you got like 30 more years to live. It's not, it's not a lot of money. Right. And that's an, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's just, if you just take, take the compounding of 4% a year on inflation and do that for 40 years and then see what the money really looks like. Right. Like people aren't taking the inflation into account. And that's just not because it's hot topic now. That's just always whatever it is. I think it's around 4%. It's been the compounding rate of inflation. And so,

Point is, and this is the simplest example I have that can illustrate the concept. The same PhD guy, though, good friend of mine. He has a daughter. His daughter got a job at a bowling alley, minimum wage. She just lets people to the tables and get some shoes or whatever. It doesn't matter. She could spend $500 and get a weekend certification to become a phlebotomist. All right, phlebotomists draw blood for people. All right. All you need is a two-day certification. So you get the certification, cost 500 bucks. Her earning capacity would go from $7 an hour to $25 an hour.

just from that one thing. So she has two options. She could wait eight weeks, save up the money, and then spend the money on their certification, right? And then her earning capacity would go up. It would triple immediately. Or she could borrow the money from her parents and then do it that weekend, pay the money back the next week from the earnings that she had, and then be seven weeks ahead of her other path, right? Or she

She could save up the $500 and put it in the S&P 500 and make $2.50 a year. Nice. And so the thing is, is they're making these assumptions and they're just not thinking through the math, which is like the problem they have is they don't make enough money. They have an income problem. They don't have an investing problem, right? The nice thing is that if you're poor right now, it means you have learned how to live on less, which is a good habit. So keep living on not a lot.

But then this is where like, this is where I don't understand people. Cause like my, my plan B for like, if the gym didn't work, cause you have to like, for me, it's always risk mitigation. So plan B was, um, if I didn't want to do the entrepreneurship thing after that, I'd have a good story for business school. So that was, that was one path, which they love, you know, having people try stuff, whatever the other path was. And this is probably the real path. As soon as I started, I knew I wasn't going to go back. Um, was that I would strip at night and I would drive Uber.

So if I drove over during the day, I could make, I knew if I drove all day, if I drove 12 hours a day, I could make like 80, 90 grand a year if I just did that. And then at night in four or five hours, I could probably pull another 150 in. And so I could make 250,000 a year just stripping and driving Uber, maybe even more. Now, once I got the first level of skills, I learned how to sell. I realized that my base levels, my base level opportunity rose because then I was like, I could just sell cars and make 400,000 a year and keep my clothes on.

right? I could just sell cars and then I wouldn't have to stretch. So that became my new baseline. Now, once I knew how to market and sell, then my new baseline became actually what started, which became my intermediary model between when I owned my chain of gyms and when I started doing gym launches, when I flew out and would do the turnkey sales system. Because I knew how to market and I knew how to sell. And so what I did was I would just run ads. I would spend the money on the ads.

I would get the leads. I would work the leads. I'd sell the leads. And I kept all the cash. So when I did that on my own, no employees, I'd make 100 grand a month. Like zero employees. I mean, I had to work 14 hours a day, but that's all I did. If I did that for a month, I would make 100 grand.

And so that became my new baseline, right? Of how much I could make on my own. And so like my baseline has continued to rise as my skillset has improved. And so I could go down that trajectory, but basically going back to the girl, going back to the girl, a lot of people are in the girl's position and are saying, I am going to save my $500 over the next eight weeks and try and earn $500.

$2.5 to $5 a year on that money when they should be trying to solve the problem, how do I create another $50,000 a year in income? Well, boom, she can triple her earning capacity. And if she lives on the same $750, she now has $1,000, whatever that is, $25 an hour times $2,000. She's making $50,000 a year. So now she can still live at her parents' house, have $30,000 a year. And for $30,000 a year, you can go buy any education you want in the world.

Any skill you want is available for $30,000 a year. Any sub $10 million skill. I'll put it that way. So we're the girl. We want to spend money on increasing our ability to earn more rather than trying to screw around with 3% returns in the S&P 500. Yeah. So hence, sort of when you're working for free and maybe, I don't know, taking a bit of pay cut, apprenticing for someone else, you're understanding, you're learning how the business works, and you're learning...

how specifically that business works, i.e. the gym business, because you maybe wanted to own your own business and you're interested in fitness. And you're also learning how generally business works through like sales, marketing, operations, all of that sort of stuff. So what happened next in your story? Yeah. So I joined the mastermind and then he quickly was like, you know what, it felt weird for him to not pay me because I was just there all the time. So he started paying me whatever it was, minimum wage. Um,

Um, and so I, I was there from 4am to 4pm every day with him. So that was, that was what we did. So 4am to 4pm, I was there with him every day. And then he would go home. I would stay for a few more hours to just like work out, hang out at the gym. So I was pretty much there all day, every day.

And then for the next, I think, 12 weeks, that's what I did is I just hung around the gym, learned how to sell, learned how stuff worked. I learned sales was a thing. I didn't know the term sales. I didn't know email lists existed. I didn't know any of this stuff. I truly had no idea how any of this stuff worked.

And so I learned a lot very quickly just from observing normal business happening, right? And I think small businesses are more useful for people to be at because like corporate, it's so specialized because the coverage is so big. You have such a myopic view of how business works that you have no idea. You are actually the very special cog that does one thing, right? So you don't see the holistic view. Whereas small businesses, because everything's so shrunk down, you can see end to end how things work. It's like we do...

We do this direct mail piece, a certain percentage call the phone. We set the appointment. They buy a membership. They go to the trainer who helps them. You know what I mean? Like you can see the whole life cycle, right?

So 12 weeks later, I was doing it every weekend. I would go out and look for locations. When I found a location that I liked, I still had my 50 grand saved up. And so then that's what I spent. I spent, I think, most of that to outfit the facility. I think I had 10,000 left over because I knew I had two months worth of rent saved up, which was 5,000 a month in rent. And honestly, in retrospect, it was one of the riskiest things I've ever done. Like I went straight to a $5,000 a month lease and I had no idea what I was doing.

That's a lot for rent. Oh, I'd never even made money before. I mean, it was funny because I can only think about this in retrospect, but the online business that I had, I didn't have a reliable way of getting customers. I just like the people that I knew and I immediately was making money from that, but I wasn't keeping everyone always and it was starting to go down. And I was like, ah, what do I do? So I was like, oh, I'll just sign a lease for way more money than I've ever made in my life. That sounds like a reasonable thing to do. And so that's what I did.

I wonder if we can zoom into the sales thing a little bit. Because I think selling is a massive black box for a lot of people. And even for me, when I first started actually selling stuff, I'd been doing YouTube for five years. But I don't feel like I was selling anything for the first three because it was all like sponsorships. And then two years ago, when I had an idea for a course that teaches people how to be YouTubers, I came up against so much internal mental friction around the idea of selling and feeling weird about it and like...

then realized sales is a thing. So I wonder what was your experience sort of on the ground in the gym? How did you learn how to sell? Yeah, I hated everything to sales. And the side story that was that when I quit my job, my dad's buddy was a, or my dad, my dad's financial, his investor, dude, right? The guy who managed his money was like, dude, you should just come work for me. He's like, you can sell. And I was like, me? I was like, I'm an academic.

All right. I'm a, I am a cerebral thinker. I'm a management consultant. Like I am known for, you know, I am not a salesman. Like that was my thing. And so I was like, I was, I thought it was beneath me. I really did. And so anyways, I got the job. Um, I, I did the interviews, got the job and I ultimately like, they told me what it was and it was like, here's the phone, here's names, bang. And I was like, Oh, I don't want to do that. So then I started my gym and I realized that I had to pay $5,000 a month. And then it was like the first day and I was like, Oh fuck, how do I get people to give me money? And I was like, Oh,

sales. And so it was a, it was a forcing function. So I had gone to a weekend workshop that I spent $3,000 for, which was a tremendous amount of money for me at the time, um, to go learn how to run Facebook ads. It's 2013. So I learned how to run Facebook ads in that weekend. Um, and I ran Facebook ads for my gym. And that was when people came in. I signed up 27 people the first two weeks. Um, I charged 300 bucks a head.

I think I spent a thousand bucks on ads. So I made, you know, spent a thousand, made 8,700 or whatever it was. And that was how I paid my first month's rent. And my selling was just literally, I had an empty gym with no equipment. It was literally turf and a table. And they were like, are you going to be here? Is this like a scam? I was like, no. And people just believed me. I was like, I promise I will do everything to get you in the best shape ever. And they were like,

Are you sure? I'd have some people come back two days later, make sure I was still there in the two-week period. I also didn't understand a lot of stuff. I thought I had to open as fast as possible because I thought that opening meant that I would make money when really I should have had a really long pre-sale, just collected cash the whole time. I didn't know how any of that stuff worked. I just tried to open as fast as I could. That was it. I had my first 27 clients. I taught all those sessions. I was doing six sessions a day.

And then I would run ads, I'd have sales appointments, then I'd clean the gym, and then I would do all my billing at night. And that worked the least like it was I was I was it was the hardest I've ever worked

Time-wise. I've still to this day never worked that hard. Okay. Let's zoom in to some of these. So you had the idea of like, I want to start a gym. You worked in a gym for free for a minimum wage for a while. So you understand how a gym works. And then were you just like roaming around looking for a warehouse that you could convert into a gym? Yeah.

And then you signed a lease for $5,000 a month. And you're like, all right, cool. I now have a box. I need to put some gym equipment in there. So you put some gym equipment in there. You take a Facebook ad workshop over the weekend. You spend three grand on it. And that helps you run ads in your local area that says, hey, by the way, new gym opening something or other. And then people walking through the door and then

what happens when people walk in through the door? Do you just say, hey, this is the gym. Can you give me your money? Or how does that process work? I had an offer. I had an offer, which was a six-week challenge. I said, if you lose, because it was similar to my whole charity thing where I wanted people to like have skin in the game. So it was, if you lose 20 pounds six weeks, I'll give you your money back. So people would bet it was 300 bucks. I would train them for six weeks. And if they lost 20 pounds, I'd give them their money back. So that was the shtick.

So are you relying on then people not completing it to make money or what's going on there?

Um, the second bucket is people who hit it and then have more weight to lose or want to keep working out because they just started this habit and want to keep going, which is the vast majority. I think we had just under an 80% success rate. And then the third bucket is people who want to lose the weight and then say, I'll take my money, please. Right. And the sale is actually very easy. I mean, you're just like, Hey, do you think that working out six weeks and then going back to not working out is, uh, is going to be a good long-term solution? No. Okay. Well, why don't I just take your 300 bucks off credit towards the next year staying at the gym? Because now you've started this habit. You don't want to lose it when you have the momentum. Right.

And they'd say, sure. Cool. And I had people commit to the year before they even finished the challenge. Halfway through, I'd be like, you like everything? Everything cool? You're 10 pounds down? Awesome. You're halfway there. So, I mean, how much weight do you want to lose? Because I promise you, once you're 10 pounds lighter than you are now, you're still going to want to look different. Like, you're not going to be perfect. I've yet to meet somebody who has a perfect body. You're still going to have stuff you want to work on, right? They're like, yeah, yeah, of course. I'm like, okay. So, the question is, do you want to do it on your own? Because that's what you were doing before this and that wasn't working. Or do you want to do it with me?

They were like, I want to do it with you. And I'm like, cool, I'll take the money. I'll credit it for it. So you won. Congratulations. High five, big hug. You won it. You get it. Because the point of the challenge is not for you to actually lose the weight. It's for you to understand it's a lifelong process, not six weeks. Done. That was it. That was the whole process. How did you do the transformations? How do people lose 10, 20 pounds in six weeks? It's all food.

Okay. So you're giving them meal plans or what? Yeah, I would give them meal plans, grocery lists, food preparation instructions, eating out guides, the whole thing. I'd give them a whole custom thing. And then they'd work out at the gym. Originally it was five days a week and then I switched to three days a week. And so that's your offer. So the offer isn't like a monthly gym membership. It's just like, hey, get into the weight loss challenge. You do the thing and then you're signing up people as they walk through the door.

Yep. And what happened is, and I still do like this in terms of businesses in general, is I do like having defined in programs on the front end because it gives a very specific outcome for someone on a specific timeline. And what it really becomes is your onboarding process.

So you can typically charge more for a one-time expense, usually three or four times more than you can on a recurring basis. And so what that affords you is the ability to liquidate acquisition costs more easily. And so it's like, if I can charge four times more for the first six weeks of service with somebody, I should do that because it costs me more A, to onboard someone and B, to acquire them. And so I should make more money in that first period of time. It makes sense. And so structuring business models that way is I've almost done that in every business I have.

Got it. Did you feel weird about selling initially? No, I was begging for money. I needed the money. Right. I got over it very quickly. I mean, it was just like, I had this ethical, I had this like, I'm superior. I'm not going to lower myself to selling. And then I was like, oh shit, I'm going to lose all the money I have. And so I didn't even know it was sales. I just said like, I will help you. I promise. Please. You know what I mean? Like, I didn't know what I was doing, but the thing is I, you know, I, I'd done,

4,000 sales consults before I ever consumed a piece of sales training. So like a lot of the stuff I got, I learned most of the things I've learned through just doing it.

And just on this note, so you paid $3,000 for a Facebook ads weekend workshop type thing. These days, so we're sort of almost 10 years on from that. Do you think there's value in people paying for something like that? Or can everything just be learned on YouTube and there's no point in paying for a thing? Yeah, I think things can get learned on YouTube. I think what you pay for is speed.

So you pay for speed, you pay for trouble troubleshooting, you pay for somebody else who's already done it and not fucked up as many times as you're about to, to get you there faster. Like I remember most of the, I've, I've paid for tons of one-on-one stuff. So I had a guy who had a course, this is later, this is probably two, three years later. I didn't, I knew enough to make, you know, to get ads going, but like I really did. I wasn't like a genie at it. I just knew enough to get leads so I could sell them.

But a few years later, I wanted to get more sophisticated. I wanted to learn how to retarget. I didn't know any of that stuff. And so I paid a guy who had a course. He said, I don't do one-on-one. I only do courses. I don't sell my time. And I was like, it's America. Everyone sells their time. Just tell me what the price is. Went back and forth and finally it was like $7.50 an hour. And I was like, done. Cool. And I think I did eight sessions with them. So it cost me like $5,600. Because I didn't want to just learn how to run ads. I wanted to learn how he would think through running my ads.

And so the deal was he would get on and then I would be like, this is all the stuff from last week. This is what I have. This is what I'm thinking of doing. Why is it wrong? Or what would you do? And then I did all the clicking of the buttons and he would tell me why he would think about things in different ways. And so that was how I learned how to run. And it only took me like eight sessions. So it was like, I didn't even have to go through a course. I took eight hours and I learned the skill. Probably by the sixth time, I was like, I'm good. And I just did two more to make sure that nothing happened.

Yeah. And now you've leveled up your baseline for how much money you can earn by having this deal. Totally. So I spent $5,600. $5,600. And if I wanted to go run ads for gyms, if that was all I wanted to do and have no employees, I could make 10, 20 grand a month easily if that's all I wanted to do.

So like there's, you know what I mean? Like you just keep adding to your, to your skillset and stacking on top. Now I also knew how to sell there. So I, you know, you stack those two skills together. All of a sudden I'm a hundred thousand a month scale. Right. And so they just keep multiplying and multiplying and multiplying. Nice. Okay. So how old are you at this point when you just start your gym and you've signed this 5,000 a month lease? 23.

Sounds crazy. Yeah. And so you said that was the riskiest thing that you've ever, like, what was going through your mind at the time, if you can remember for like that, because that's a pretty big, big decision. Not much. Not much, honestly. It was ignorance. Like it was, it was, it was, it was, I mean, I, I got lucky. You know what I mean? I got lucky that I didn't know what I didn't know. I probably wouldn't have advised myself to do that now.

But I was fortunate that I, by chance, went to a workshop for, it was a marketing workshop. I didn't even know Facebook ads wasn't even advertised as the thing because no one even knew what they were. No one even knew if Facebook ads were a thing yet.

And so I showed up, they're like, oh, there's these things you can run on. And I didn't, I didn't use Facebook. I had one, but I didn't like, I wasn't like active on it. I was like very like productive mindset. Like I don't use social media. Like I was very big on that whole thing, but he was like, oh, you can run ads on there. So I learned, and it was two weeks before my gym opened. If I had not had that, the plan going into the gym was the guy who I apprenticed under, he just ran Groupons.

And that was how he got. So that was my whole plan. I was like, I'll just run a Groupon and I'll just get people in the gym from that and I'll convert them. That was his whole business model. That was what I was sold on. And then I ran a Groupon too. And I didn't get anybody. No one came in. And I ran the same Groupon.

Because I was in the most competitive part of Southern California. I was in Huntington Beach. I was in Orange County. There's a hundred fucking gyms that are running Groupons. And so he had a more established business. He'd been doing it for 20 years. So when he ran a Groupon, people all bought it. Every month, he was getting like 120 people a month coming in for Groupons. So it was free customer acquisition. It was free. He was getting paid to get these people in the door. I didn't have any of that. And so I, by chance...

Went to a workshop two weeks beforehand. And that is like, honestly, it's the only reason. I mean, who knows? I might have figured I probably would have tried to figure out another way, but it would have been tough. You said that quitting your job felt like the riskiest thing. Yeah. What did that feel like? Because at that point you were making like 4k a month off the personal training stuff, weren't you?

So why did quitting your job feel particularly risky? But it didn't feel regular. It didn't feel consistent. I was like, this is one time. I don't know how long this is going to last. You know what I mean? Like, it didn't feel like a regular thing. But it wasn't even that because that would have been a math decision, which at the time, it was not a math decision. It was an emotional decision, which for me was, I'm leaving the path that I spent the last, basically my entire life leading towards, which is management consulting, business school, like the whole thing. Yeah, and then, you know,

Middle Eastern father, same deal. He was like, this is a terrible idea. I strongly disapprove of this. And we didn't talk for a while. You know what I mean? Because he's just throwing it all away.

So that was very tough for me. It was that it was just that. And I mean, at the end of the day, like my, my, my final decision came down to, I mean, I give you the risk things, which is like, I'll have a good story, like blah, blah, blah, blah. But I was, I was not really willing to let that be the story. Cause I just didn't want him to be right. And so I was just going to do anything to not make him have that. I told you so moment. I just like, I was going to, I was going to fucking die. I just wasn't going to do it. And so,

Um, the final decision came down to a point where I was so miserable at the job that I had, cause I really didn't like the job. Like I was fortunate. I think if I had liked my job, I don't know if I'd even be an entrepreneur. I just really hated the job I was in. And so I disliked the position, whatever, or at least that my day to day enough that I said I would either have to die to him or die to myself. And I felt dead inside at the time. And so I was like, I don't want to continue life living this way. I would rather accept myself and have him reject me.

than me reject myself and have his approval. And that was ultimately the decision that allowed me to do it. Now, I was still a pussy about it. And I drove halfway across the country before I called and told him because I didn't want him to be able to tell me to come over to convince me that I could come back because he did. He was like, ah, come over for lunch. We'll talk about it. Because he would always just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure you want to. We'll talk about it over lunch. You know what I mean? Then he would always talk me off the edge. And I was like, no, I'm in Ohio. It's like, I'm gone.

He's like, what about your condo? And I was like, it's there. He's like, well, what are you going to do? I was like, I'll sell it. He's like, well, you're not going to sell it. I'm going to have to deal with it. I was like, I'll figure it out. I was like, I'm gone though. I'm not coming back. How's your relationship with your dad today? We're good. We're good. I mean, he's proud of me now and he's happy about all that stuff. I mean, he's got plenty to be proud of in terms of material success so he can rest easy on that. Yeah, I had a similar... I think when I...

took the decision to leave medicine after two years of working. At that point, my YouTube channel was making way more than I ever would as a doctor. But it still didn't feel like a mathematical decision. It was very much an emotional thing. The whole Asian family, medicine is the pinnacle of all of the things, like 10 years of sub-cost, etc. And what it took, weirdly, was I was on Lewis Hose's podcast. Yeah, he told me this story. And he just like...

sort of talked me out of it which is bloody hell I've never considered it in such stark terms before and that was what made the decision to be like you know what let's say goodbye to medicine at least for a while and see what happens yeah it's only for a while and I can always go back to it because the thing is once you have an MD you can do it you can always go back to it if you want to

Okay, so we at this point, you are sort of in your early 20s, you've got your gym, you're paying 5k a month, and you're getting people coming in through through the door to do your six week transformation program, and you're upselling them on the longer term thing, I think after the fact, what happens next in the story?

The gym starts being successful. It grows by $5,000 a month for the first seven months. It goes up to $35,000 a month. By month nine, I had the whole gym outsourced, so I was just managing it. By month 15, I took the profit from that gym to open my second gym, launched that one profitably. Now, this one, I learned a lot at that point, so I pre-launched it at full capacity, did it the right way. Then I opened location three, four, and five.

And then using the same concept, then I went and I felt like I was stagnating. I felt like I didn't know what to do next. I joined an internet mastermind. And they were like, if you're really this good at business, you shouldn't be owning gyms. You should be like teaching people how you fill your gyms up so fast. And so then, and then I transitioned to the turnkey. Like I fly out and do the thing, which I make a hundred grand a month on with no employees. I was like, this is cool. So I did that for

a year-ish. And then there's a million series of unfortunate events that happens during this period of time, lose all the money like twice. I sell the gyms, I go all in on the new concept. We switched from doing the turnkey system to doing a licensing model. And then that was 2017. And that's when everything just took off like a rocket. So let's say someone's listening to this and they're into fitness and they're thinking, you know what? I'd like to own a gym.

What does, like, is it something you'd recommend? Like, can you make any money owning a gym these days? What's the deal with that? You can, you can, you can make money owning a gym if you love, if you, you have to love small business ownership. And it has to be about really being in love with the product and the experience. It's just like, you know, we have this kind of thing with a lot of the gyms is once someone understands how to run a seven figure or multi seven figure gym, you now have the skill set to run a $10 million other business.

It's just a limited opportunity vehicle. It's a great vehicle to learn how to do everything because you have to do everything in a gym. And I think some of the best entrepreneurs, some of the best salespeople, especially learn how to sell in fitness because you get so many reps.

You talk to 10, 20 people a day, just rep after rep after rep. So you get very good at that. And you have to deal with people because it's an all-service business. So you have a lot of headcount for very low revenue. There's lots of things that are very good to learn. When I had the same headcount with the turnkey sales model, I had a third of the employees and I was making four times the revenue. You know what I mean? And then when we went from there to the licensing model,

I went from eight employees to like 30 employees just like that first year. And we did like 7 million. And then the next year we did 26. It was just huge growth. So it's just more leverage. What does turnkey mean? They didn't have to do anything. I'd fly out. We'd do the marketing. We'd spend the money. We'd work the leads. We'd do the sales. They didn't have to do anything. I just hand them customers. You were confident enough in your ability to get customers and convert them to things that they were just absolutely signing up for this. But hell yes, you can transform my gym. Yeah.

Yeah, they said they didn't have to pay me anything. I just took 100% of the cash I collected. Okay, so then what are they getting out of it? Oh, they're getting the recurring revenue. Yeah.

Levels of wealth. So you are very open about net worth and money and stuff. And I just love the way you talk about it in such a matter-of-fact way. One thing that I've been curious about is what are the levels of wealth beyond which you get significant diminishing returns? People say 75k is the peak happiness. But clearly, there are people that...

300K is better than 75K, a million is better than 300K. Have you got in mind a rough sort of ladder of at what level of wealth unlocks certain things? Yeah, I think there's like the I don't have to worry about any basic needs level. And then there's the I don't have to worry about discretionary spending level.

within reason. You know what I mean? I can go out for drinks, I can go to a fancy restaurant and it's not going to affect me. I can buy appetizers and not just buy the cheapest thing on the menu with no appetizers, no alcohol and call that the dinner. So Layla spends a lot more money than I do because we just have different... But that being said, I spend money on other stuff. So I spend a lot of money only on information. It's all I spend my money on. It's just information, access, that's all I spend my money on. And that stuff is expensive. You know what I mean? It's

She offered one guy 350 grand for an hour so I could just learn from him. You know what I mean? Just for context. So like we'll spend whatever it takes to learn anything. But like it's always been the highest return for me. So for me, it's just like, sure, let's go. You know what I mean? Like I've made so much. Every penny I've made has come from knowledge. And if I can buy someone else's 10 years and say, if I could save a year of my life for 350 grand, why would I not spend that?

You know what I mean? So we've got needs, we've got discretionary spending where you're not worried about appetizers and stuff. Yeah. And then you have what I would consider like luxury wealth, which is probably like, you know, a hundred grand a month, but it all depends on what you're willing to save. And so like Layla and I have always lived on less than 10% of what we make. So whatever we make, it's 10% of that is what we're kind of willing to spend. I don't even think we spend that now. We probably spend about 5% of what we make.

Still a lot of money, but it's not a lot relative because we're both actually pretty risk averse, but we're not illogical because some people, I know there's some people in the YouTube space I was having a conversation with, they're clearing eight figures and are like splitting entrees at dinner.

I mean, dude, like you, we literally made more money than this dinner cost while sitting here. You know what I mean? Like I was, I was having a conversation with my father-in-law and he offered to pay for, for lunch or something. And I was like, while we have waited in line, I have made more money than this lunch costs. Let me cover lunch. I don't care.

So it really depends on your savings versus spending percentage that you're comfortable with. So that's the big multiplier on those levels. But I think those are the three levels. And it just depends on what that percentage is for you. So if you're a five to one person, I want to save 80%, spend 20%. Then when you go from needs to level one discretionary, you need to still five extra income to do that.

But it's just that smaller percentage. So I do think that's individual. I'm super risk averse, ironically. So what do you do with the cash? Like if you're spending 10% or and sort of what happens to the other 90%? Are we now going S&P 500? Or is that still like... No, I count it. We invest, but I have a bigger, I kind of a bigger play for what we're going to do. So right now, I'm just stacking it. And I've always been a pretty big cash stacker. I always have a lot of liquidity. I just feel better with it.

People are like, you're not getting the return. I was like, dude, I make a ton of money. I don't like, that's not like, what am I getting the return for? So I would rather have big chunks of cash that I can go on big offense when I want it. Then it's just different ways of doing things. You know what I mean? I also have Layla. And so she handles a ton of stuff internally, but

And so I wouldn't be able to do some of the investment stuff that we do. I probably wouldn't do some of the investment stuff we do right now that takes a little bit more time, like deal analysis, et cetera, if I didn't have her. So if I didn't have Layla and I were just trying to live the most passive chill lifestyle, I'd probably just put everything into a dividend ETF.

makes 3%, 4% a year and still gets the appreciation. And I would just love paying down or paying up that dividend check every month and just watching it go up. And it would probably just become a game for me because it's truly passive. You know what I mean? That's just truly zero management passive income, which I do like from a cashflow perspective. And qualified dividends, for anyone who's curious, gets taxed at capital gains rates, which are lower. So even if you make a ton of money, you're still only paying 20%, 23% depending where you're at. So

For me, I was like, okay, that works. It's still relatively tax efficient to get the cash flow from the investment. But for me, though, I am going to take bigger risks with the wealth I have because it's kind of the next level of the game for me is taking big bets. So what does that look like?

You'll see more stuff for me on the media side, probably in the next 12 to 18. I'll be probably making really major investments in media. Because like, you know, here's a fun one, which you can appreciate from a YouTube perspective. It costs me like less than a dollar or it costs me a dollar, whatever. It's around a buck per subscriber per month.

Now I'm taking my entire media team costs, which goes across all platforms, which is not really fair. But if I were to, if I even took that whole media team and put it against YouTube, um, it costs me around a dollar ish a month per subscriber. And I make more than a dollar a year per subscriber, just in ad sense. So like from a return, you know what I mean? Like that doesn't include like what I actually make money, which is my, you know, my deal flow side. Um,

So it's, you know what I mean? It's like, well, then I should, you know, put my money there and I will be, I'll be taking bigger and bigger chunks of companies. Right now we do minority deals, but I will be taking majority interesting companies where it makes sense. So it's like, if I see a company that makes sense within the entire portfolio. So I'll give an example. So like if somebody has an accounting firm,

It would be great to just have the accounting at Holdco and I'll just buy 100%. And then I can provide those services internally. And then because of the buying power that I have between the entire kind of conglomerate, for lack of a better term, if I have...

$250 million a year in business that I can push towards something. It's like, I'm not going to push that kind of money towards something that I don't own majority of at least. So those are kind of the two directions that I'll probably go. And it's just reinvesting more in the team.

And, you know, taking, I mean, from a money allocation perspective, more of that would go towards the majority purchases of the team. But that's just, you know, fundamentally how I see it. Like, I'll get better returns on that stuff than I will on the S&P. And I have to take, if I want to get to a billion, I have to make some bigger bets, which is fine. What's the goal here? Is the goal to get to a billion? Like, what is it? The goal is to get to 10 billion. Yeah, the goal is to get to 10 billion. But the mission is to just make real business knowledge available for everyone.

And so that's what I'm trying to do. And so everything I do aligns. That's why I make the books. That's why I make the courses. That's why we do the YouTube stuff. That's why we make the shorts. That's why we do podcasts. That's why we do all of it. It's just to make real business education available to everyone. But I have to answer the question, why should I listen to you?

and I want to be unassailable in that perspective, A. And then B, I do believe that I'll gain more perspective as things grow. So it's more that I'm just curious what I'm going to learn going from a $200 million a year portfolio to a billion dollar a year portfolio to a $10 billion a year portfolio. And so I have wished that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Warren Buffett would come out with a course. Wouldn't that be amazing? But they didn't. And so my goal is to just document the path that we learn along the way.

And, you know, when I die, hopefully there'll just be a whole bunch of people who are younger than me who make way more money than I do at my age because they were able to just shortcut a lot. Why is that the mission? Like making business education available? Like where's the kind of emotional resonance with you for that thing? Because that's what set me free. Free as in free from the corporate wage slavery? Yeah, from everything. Not even corporate wage. Like I'm free. I can do whatever. I don't have to do anything.

If I didn't want to, so I just get optionality, which is all I want. I just want to have options.

And so I wouldn't have that if all of this stuff didn't exist. And I have had many mentors and many coaching programs and many courses. And so, you know, I would say that I differ from the vast majority of the talking heads in the business space in that I, to my knowledge, I'm the only one who came up through that world. Like you look at Andy Frisella, you look at Ed Milat, you look at Gary, you know what I mean? Like there's, there's, they've, none of them came up through learning stuff on YouTube, going to seminars, going to coaching programs. I did.

So I'm a huge advocate for alternative education and paying for skills as fast as you can. To what extent do you think about the balance between, I guess, optimizing for

freedom, freedom, fun, flexibility, all of that, like living whatever life you want kind of vibes versus some people say that once you get to a certain point, you realize that, oh, actually more money, more status, more success, more freedom is not actually thing. And actually the thing I care about is investing in a relationship and like having a family and having kids and like buying a house and the sort of putting down roots versus having wings kind of vibe.

I have options. So if I change my mind, I can change my mind. But as I see it right now from where I sit, the thing that lights me up every day is making business knowledge available to everyone. I mean, I spend an inordinate amount of time. I spend so much time on those books and presentations that I make when I give speeches and stuff. Every presentation I make up to this point in my career has been custom.

And that takes me like three days, you know what I mean? To make a presentation. So like, if you've seen Last Dance, Michael Jordan, there's this, there's this moment where he says that he always has to bring his all because it's the, there's some person who spent hard earned money and it's the only game they're ever going to see. And he wants to bring his best for that. And so that's how I see it. You know what I mean? Like there's people who will never, you know, they spent real money to be there. And it was like, they're hoping that they can get one thing from this thing that's going to like change their life. And I want to honor that.

What does like a day in the life look like for you? Oh, it's, I mean, I could share my screen, but it's, it's, it's, uh, I, I, I work on my own stuff until about one most days. Um, so usually five to one is Alex time to do whatever. Um, which is 5am to one. Yeah. Uh, PM. Um, and then usually from one to four, one to four 30 ish is when I do meetings. And then, um,

That's it. Go to the gym, eat, and then I'm done. Sounds pretty chill. And where are you based at the moment? We're all over right now. The hub is in Vegas, but we're here. We're all over. I mean, we travel a lot. So it's kind of like this is our in-between when we're traveling spot.

I remember you just talking in an interview about how you like your office to be very sparse and not overly fancy and stuff. And that's one of the things that I really vibe with in your videos, in that you seem to, except until recently, you seem to just be filming on some shitty webcam and just spouting knowledge. And it's just mind-blowing because you haven't got the... And there's a charm to the jankiness. And it's just like, whoa, shit, I'm getting the real truth without any of the production value that normally gets in the way.

Yeah. Again, was that deliberate? Is that just accidental? Is that just how it ended up being? I mean, that's how it started. You know what I mean? Like I'm a big, I'm a big believer in just start and you'll, the path illuminates as you walk. You know what I mean? We now have, I mean, I started without a media team, so I just clicked record and I would send it. I mean, I had my media team at gym launch, but it wasn't, that business wasn't built on content. It was built on outbound and paid ads. So I just said, you know,

clip, you know, clip it, put a thumbnail on it and post it on my YouTube. I don't even know how to upload them just to show you how silly it was. I was like, just upload it. And so I just put it in a Dropbox and they would upload it. And then that was, um, that was what I did for the first, I don't know, six, nine months.

And then, um, we hired somebody to, uh, to actually do recordings with the camera. Um, and so he's like, you know, if we did it like on the couch, it would look a lot better. I was like, okay, that's fine. So it took the same amount of time for me. Now I just had some more people who could, who could help. And it has shown despite, you know, as much as I would lament, you know, I would love to just do it like this, you know, the audio quality is better. The video quality is better. Um,

And the newer videos definitely do better from an objective standpoint. So some people need to, you know, can't focus as long. And so they need a little bit more happening. And so we can now, again, the whole point is to make it available to everybody. So that means that people who don't have the attention span, I need to make something available for them too. So I'm just doing my best to, I'm just not going to bitch and moan about the fact that like people's attention span is shortened. Like some people are like, I can't cover anything in 60 seconds. I'm like, there's a hell of a lot you can cover in 60 seconds if you know what you're saying.

So, you know what I mean? Like, I'm just not one to complain about what it is what it is. And so I will do my best to match, you know, providing value to the context that people are consuming it. It seems like you're spending like, I don't know, half a million a month on content? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not even close. I think we're spending about 100 grand a month.

Oh, okay. If you said $1 per subscriber per month, it's what it's costing you? Yeah, per year. I make $1 per year. Oh, per year. Oh, okay, cool. I was thinking like per month. Oh, shit, that's a lot. Yeah. No, my channel makes, I think, as of today, like right now, it makes $41,000, $42,000 a month. And then Layla also uses the same team. I think hers makes...

six or seven, something like that. So that's just that. And then the book, the book revenue comes on top of that, which I count those kind of the same thing. Cause I think that's where a lot of people find us. Those two things together, you know, are, are more than that. So I am, I technically spend a little bit less, uh, than I'm making, which kind of further reinforces the point. Um, just depends if we're just saying only ad zones, if we include the book, whatever.

So what does 100K a month look like? What does that look like at the back end of the content production engine? Yeah, it's not huge. Right now we've got four in-house. I still do Twitter. So I do Twitter full-time. That's still just me. And it's because I like it. I would do it anyways. We have a podcast vendor, a LinkedIn vendor, a YouTube vendor, a Shorts slash TikTok slash Reels vendor. And by vendor, you mean like...

A company that, yeah, okay. Now we have our internal components because like my whole playbook is pretty simple, which is go find the best person who's already doing this at a high level, pay whatever to get them to do it. Be clear that your intention is to take it in-house over the long haul. Start doing it with them only. Hire somebody to be the inner person

the interface between those two who has the skill set and then eventually get to the point where you double your volume because you do half from the vendor half from the in-house person when the in-house person beats the vendor you fire the vendor and so what does it look like to work with like an agency on the youtube side are they telling you that hey alex we need to do a video with this title and this thumbnail go talk or like what does that look like so my team does so because i have in-house team too so they will they'll send me

Like I could show you a document, but it's like the next film session, they have like eight ideas for videos. I'll just pick the three that I'm feeling. And so they have like a headline idea, talking points that they've grabbed from my other videos and shorts that they've kind of combined together into one video. And I use that as a loose outline for what I'm going to talk about. It has to be minimum. And this is one of the things that my team gets. It's like,

It has to be minimal on my side because I'm still doing other stuff. You know what I mean? So yeah, that's the big, big. And so as part of the overall mission of making business knowledge accessible to everyone, as part of that, like you getting as big as possible in all the social platforms as quickly as possible with as much content as possible, like the Gary V model? Yeah. Probably. 100%. Nice.

We're still not even like we're barely scratching what I would consider to be phase one of that, but we're on just phase one. What are the next few phases? We're right now, we're just getting all the platforms. Then we need to maximize all the platforms, which we're currently not doing. We have to take it all in house. We have to do that, which we haven't done yet. I'm not running any paid of any kind, which I would add on. I don't have any affiliates or endorsements, which I would add on.

I don't have any like, in terms of level of content, I would like to do some more like custom production stuff that's more show-ish than just like, you know, seven ways to make a million dollars without any money. So those are kind of like the direction of where I'd like to go with it. And it'll just, it'll take time and that's fine. Like great things take time. And do you think at all about sort of

pitching certain content like like for example pitching it to a complete beginner who's never even heard of business versus pitching it to someone who hears how to level up your sales which is a bit more advanced like how do you think of that balance um it's a discussion that we actually have internally a lot so i believe because our beliefs shape our world that we can make content that helps both so 100 million dollar offers if you don't know what to sell that will help you if you sell loads of stuff it will help you so i do believe that if you

I think if things are packaged and presented properly, like sales to your point, could I make a half step and just call it persuasion? And all of a sudden, it's not sales guys. It's sales guys, marketers, and general population that want to influence people. So all of a sudden, it becomes a much more open topic.

So I'm trying to think about all the, like, this is what I'm asking. Like, this is today, Alex is what I'm thinking about right now, because I think that there, and you know, this better than I do, but this is just my inkling is that there's a natural ceiling that start, you start to approach. Now we're, we haven't seen any slowdown at all, but like, I would imagine that there's a ceiling that you begin to approach as you start to kind of own, I don't say own, but like take up a big slice of like brain brain share of a certain niche. Right. Yeah.

And so the only way to expand beyond that, I think I've, you know, I've known people who went from sales to marketing sales to business to make money. You know what I mean? And so they just go, they go broader and broader. But I think if you have the depth of knowledge behind you, you can make something wide yet also deep. So that's a belief that I'm choosing right now is that we can do both. We can make content that is wide and deep. It's just harder, but I think we can do it. So that is what I'm committing to.

If you were to start the whole content thing again, like from scratch, what are some things that you might do differently? I would have started five years ago. That's what I would have done. The only thing I could wish for is for things to happen faster. The only thing that would happen faster is if I started earlier. So that's it. But then there's also the caveat of like, I have credibility now that I didn't have five years ago.

So, I mean, you could make the argument I did. I could probably just show my tax return when I was 27 and show $17 million of income. Like I could show that. I could have done that. Maybe. I don't know. I could have. But like I honestly don't spend much time thinking about it. I'm content with what we're doing now. We know what plan we have to execute. And so now we're just laying the bricks.

Final thing I wanted to ask you about. So I think I heard you say in one of the interviews that you've had six-pack abs since the age of like 16 or something like that. Yeah, let's see if I still got it. No, love it. I've had six-pack abs on my kind of annual bucket list for the last several years and just never really gotten there. Is there like a single resource? Is it a lack of knowledge or motivation?

Okay, well, that's a totally different thing. You know what I mean? Like, you might also want to be a trillionaire. You might want a lot of things. But like, if you don't want it enough, it doesn't matter. I think it's just more accepting that you're not going to have it because you're not willing to pay the price and that's fine. What is the price? You like want to be motivated. Yeah.

What is the price of a six pack? It's not that hard though. That's why I'm like, and everyone who's listening is like, fuck this guy. I don't know. I've counted my macros for 20 years. Have you? Okay. So go away. But it's just calorie deficit. You know what I mean? It's just like-

There's tons of people in Africa who have six-packs. They just don't see the sign of status there. It's just everyone's skinny. You know what I mean? And so six-pack is purely body fat percentage. That's it. It's just body fat percentage. It just means you eat too much. That's all. And six-pack plus being jacked is progressive overload, protein. I've seen one of your videos where you sort of break that down. And then to get to six-pack abs, you're just sort of calorie deficit and while training broadly. I mean, truly, that is it. And so...

Hit every muscle group, do it three times a week, add waiter reps over the bar over a long period of time. That's all you have to do. And then eat less than you burn. Do that for a long period of time. You'll gain muscle, you'll lose fat, and then you'll look up after 18 months and you'll have a six pack. Like it just, that's it. Yeah. When people are signing up to the weight loss programs or like a gym program and stuff,

Presumably they know this. Is it the motivation gap, the accountability gap? What is it that is the secret sauce that makes someone lose their way? To your point, even of alternative education in general, when you say, hey, you could learn this stuff on YouTube, etc., etc., the issue that we're solving for is not that it's not a knowledge gap. The issue is an accountability gap, is that people don't do stuff. That is the primary issue with all humans in general, is that they will not endure short-term discomfort for a long-term achievement.

That is it. You hack that, you hack success. That's all it is. And so it's just, how can I make it more inconvenient for them to not follow than to follow? So I can still lean into their humanity and just say, how can I make it more uncomfortable for them to not follow? And that's an element of that is accountability. It's that someone says, hey, bad boy, you had a cookie when you shouldn't have. You feel bad. Feel bad. I am punishing you. Because the only way to change, you only have two things you can do to change behavior, right? You can reinforce, right?

Or you can threat, you can punish. That's it. You have carrots and sticks. That is literally it. And so currently they're getting reinforced by their current way of living. So think about it this way. What does not having a six pack do for you? It does something for you because you keep buying it. What does not having a six pack do for me? Yeah, because you choose something else over a six pack. So what does that do for you? The food just tastes too good. And I know that I should, yeah. But it's probably not. And I get a McDonald's drive-thru at like midnight and I know it's bad. It could be convenience.

convenience and then the story you wrap around like i'm an entrepreneur i need to just do things on my own time etc right so i think if you if like it's unpacking those things of just trying to find your own and or if it's meaningful for you because like i understand why it wouldn't be i was on this podcast and i got an argument with the the spokesperson he's like don't you agree that every entrepreneur should be working every day and i was like no and he it did not go the direction he was expecting he looks at me and he expects i'm going to say that i'm like no

Like, what are we solving for? If you just want to live a long time, then just walk. Walk and don't eat a lot. Like, that's all you have to do. Like, literally it. That's all you have to do if you don't live the longest amount possible. Like, I am going to live a shorter amount of time because I have more muscle mass. I'm shortening my life by being how big I am. So it just depends on what problem we're solving. But given how you look now, you could look fit in 12 months. Like, you could look like a person that people are like, oh, wow, this guy works out. Because you don't have a baseline of fat that you really have. I mean, you do. You have body fat. But like, you're not...

You're not overweight. Your body composition is poor. Not poor, but you know what I'm saying. It's not what you want. Yeah, I know what you're saying. Nice. So figure out what you want, find out what the price is, and just be willing to pay that price. Yeah, or don't, which is also fine. I don't buy everything that I see on the shelf. If it were free, I'd want it.

Right. Maybe if I were, you know, a hoarder of some sort, but like, we like, like the thing that everybody has is we all have a wallet with the same dollars in it. We have $24. Right. And so it's like, everything has a ticket on it and we're just choosing to spend that dollar, whatever we want. Now, $8, we got to spend on, on sleep. It's like, okay, well now I only have, you know, $16 left. I'm like, all right, well, what does this cost? Well, this costs a dollar a day. It's pretty every day I'm committing to a dollar of my $12 or whatever my, my $16, it's a big cost. Does it make sense?

Coming back to the six-pack example again, how much time effort, how many dollars do you pay each day to maintain the six-pack? Minimal. I have a passive income body now.

okay fine already yeah this is this is passive dividends i don't need to do much to maintain this to get to here is much harder to maintain here is easy i mean think about this how much effort does it cost you right now to maintain your current body oh zero absolutely right that's how it really does not take like unless you give your body a reason to eat muscle it's been a lot of resources to to build it right and so you can have minimal stimulation on a weekly basis

to maintain contractile tissue. Provided you're eating sufficient protein, your body will take the protein it needs from your intake rather than its stores of protein, which is your muscle. If you watch the video, it's like you just... A pound a day of meat or something. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Alex, thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. Any final asks for the audience who might be watching or listening to this?

If you like watching stuff, you can check out my YouTube channel, Alex Ramosi. You can just Google my name. And if you are listening, then you can also search my name, Alex Ramosi, and my podcast called The Game will come up and you can check that out. So love to hang out with you more if that sounds like the pants that you want to wear. And hopefully I'll see you or talk to you soon.

Amazing. Alex, thank you so much. And if you're ever in London anytime soon, it would be great to do a round two in person. Yeah. That would be awesome. Yeah. Epic. All right. Appreciate you. Thanks so much, man. Take care. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast

Bye-bye.