Speaker A
So, you're going to be a dad? I'm going to be a father. Hopefully, everything works out. Yeah.
Alex Hormozi and Jack Neel discuss fatherhood, parenting philosophy, and preparing children for a changing world in 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Parenting success is hard to define and involves balancing genetics, upbringing, and values.
- Teaching courage is essential as it enables children to face fear, failure, and social pressures.
- Maximizing a child’s potential involves preparing them for diverse environments and challenges.
- Happiness is often seen as a measure of success, but usefulness and contribution may be more fulfilling.
- The world children grow up in is rapidly changing, requiring new strategies for skill development.
Summary
- Alex Hormozi shares his thoughts on becoming a father and adjusting to new priorities.
- He distinguishes between optimizers and maximizers, emphasizing maximizing outcomes as a parent.
- Discusses the nature vs. nurture debate and the importance of modeling and teaching children.
- Explores frameworks for deciding what skills and values to teach children.
- Questions how to define successful parenting and successful children, highlighting happiness vs. usefulness.
- Emphasizes the value of courage as a core skill for children to navigate life’s challenges.
- Reflects on the excitement and realities of impending fatherhood with his partner Leila.
- Considers the changing societal and economic landscape children will face, including AI and job shifts.
- Highlights the importance of equipping children with diverse life skills for an uncertain future.
- Discusses personal standards for parenting effort and the challenges of measuring success.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Fatherhood and New Priorities
- 05:16Parenting Philosophy: Nature vs. Nurture and Teaching Methods
- 10:40Defining Success in Parenting and Childhood
- 15:26Core Skills for Children: Courage and Values
- 18:30Partner’s Perspective and Emotional Readiness
- 20:03Challenges of Raising Children in a Changing World
- 25:00Preparing Children for Future Economic and Social Realities
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
Tell me about it. To be honest, I haven't really given it a tremendous amount of thought. Um, I kind of deal with things as they enter my queue. Um, Leila is the one who gets, her life is changing significantly
Speaker A
more than mine is in the short term. I think once the baby comes, I'll adjust when it comes. Um, yeah. I mean, new information, new priorities.
Speaker A
I, I, I'm really not that worried about it. Um, I mean, I think big picture, there's been what, 100 billion humans.
Speaker A
85% of humans have a child by the time they're 45. Um, or after 40, whatever. But by the time they've finished their ability to have children, it's like 85%. So, it's not something that's like really that rare of a thing. And so, I think I'll deal
Speaker A
with it the best I can. And, you know, my dad gave me a pretty good example of what being present looks like. And so I will take as much as I can from that.
Speaker A
You're kind of known as the guy who optimizes everything. I would say maximizes, maximizes. Optimizers get the most for the least.
Speaker A
Maximizers get as much as they possibly can. With a kid, what are the inputs you can actually control as a dad? And what's the output or outputs that you've already accepted is out of your hands?
Speaker A
Well, I think the question is a nature-nurture question, which is, okay, you know, how much of it is going to be genetic and I don't know, I think most of the science is 50/50, half genetic, half is, you know, your upbringing, etc.
Speaker A
Um, so then we get into the question, how does a child learn and how does behavior get shaped? Um, which, you know, the primary ways are going to be modeling, like me doing something and getting good outcomes in front of the
Speaker A
child. Um, and the second would be teaching the child directly, which I would say through demonstration, role-playing, practicing, training, repetitions. Um, and that can be from like, say please, say thank you,
Speaker A
all the way to learning more complex skills, you know, over time. Um, I mean, I like teaching and so I look forward to teaching the child the things that I know and what it will teach me about things that I don't know. I guess in a different way, like how do you
Speaker A
decide, uh, like these are the things I'm going to teach, these are the things that are unimportant. Um, like what's a framework for thinking about that?
Speaker A
Um, 'cause you always talk about like, well, this is what I would do or like this is, uh, what I would do in my own life. So, like when you have a child, it kind of creates this different dynamic when
Speaker A
you're, you have responsibilities in some way, but you also want to allow a kid to have freedom. You know, I think a lot of people derive, you, uh, you know, purpose from utility. And so I would want the
Speaker A
child to have as many skills as possible so that it could navigate the most diverse number of conditions it's exposed to. So there's a lot of, I mean, life presents a lot of different variables and so it's like if I can
Speaker A
prepare it for those variables so it makes choices that are aligned with getting what it would want, then I see that as a W.
Speaker A
I mean, I think the hard part, like there's two things that I've, I would say that I've, I've struggled more with defining, which is one is what is the, what is the measure of parenting? How do you know if a parent is good? And so
Speaker A
I'll give an example of both extremes. So it's like there's many stories of entrepreneurs and others who had terrible upbringings and then succeeded.
Speaker A
And so do we say that those parents were good if it created the outcome that was good, if we judge it by its outputs? Kind of interesting. Like would Michael Jackson have become Michael Jackson if he didn't have that upbringing? I don't
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know. I don't know if he knows. I don't know if we can ever know. Um, and so I think that's an interesting one. And the other is what do we define as a successful child? Um, I would say that
Speaker A
modern society defines success mostly as happiness. Um, they like to do what makes you happy. I just want my kids to be happy, things like that. Um, I'm not sure if I'm 100% sold on that. Um, because I
Speaker A
think that when you have somebody who tries to optimize or maximize happiness, it's a very selfish worldview. And I think that when it's one of those things that if you seek it, you never find it.
Speaker A
It only happens as a consequence of other things you do. At least that's been my experience. And so, I mean, I've, I've talked, you know, plenty of times about this, but like I, I have gotten more fulfillment out of being useful
Speaker A
than I have out of trying to be happy. And I, and having it happen as a consequence of like helping other people has helped me more than me trying to help myself. And so, I think, you know, a lot of things we gain by giving up.
Speaker A
It's like in a lot of religious texts, it's like you gain your, you gain your life by giving it up, giving it away.
Speaker A
Um, and I think those are like those two questions. How do we define a successful parent and how do we define a successful child? Um, I think are the hardest things to define because once you define those, then the rest of the actions are
Speaker A
fairly straightforward. And I think that getting alignment on that is probably the hard part. And again, it's like can you have a parent that has an unsuccessful child that did everything perfectly as a parent? I don't know. We
Speaker A
don't have any perfect parents. And so the, I would say what I have settled on, um, is I will do the best I can with the resources that I have available to me, um, to equip the child with as many skills,
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life skills as I possibly can so that it can succeed in the most diverse set of environments.
Speaker A
What's the one skill you hope your kid has before they turn 18? Courage. I mean, I think it's kind of the, the, the gateway trait to all other traits. And also, if you have no courage, the other traits
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become neutered because you can't do anything with them because you're too afraid. And so I think teaching the child to act and do the right thing or act in accordance with its values despite short-term consequences that could be aversive or
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bad or painful would be what I think would be the hallmark thing of, I mean, it's very hard to look at somebody who is courageous and not like, I see that as a pinnacle trait.
Speaker A
I would be proud of a child if they always did what they believed was right in each circumstance despite what other people thought, despite their short-term consequences. And I think that that core trait is something that generalizes to
Speaker A
basically every domain. Like how do you learn something? You have to have courage. You have to be okay with failing. You have to be okay with being wrong. You have to be okay with being made fun of. Um, all of those things are
Speaker A
come from courage. And so I think that's probably why I would put it at the core.
Speaker A
Is Ila excited? Yeah, of course. Leila's thrilled. Ila's, I'm, I'm very happy and excited and I would say Ila's even more happy and excited and I think part of that is because she has an actual human inside of her and I do not. And so I think she
Speaker A
uh, she thinks about it more often than I do because it reminds her that it exists. Um, whereas I, you know, just like you have your phone buzzing in your pocket, you don't have something kicking your stomach. Uh, and so like it, I, I'm
Speaker A
very always, I'm very aware of my phone existing. I'm less aware of the, you know, the baby existing. And so I think that's just partially just the logistics of it. No, she's stoked, though. Now, the world your child will be born into
Speaker A
is very different than the one you grew up in. Uh, the value of college degrees has changed, jobs are being eaten by AI, and young people are lonelier than ever.
Speaker A
Mechanically speaking, what's changed in the system that makes it challenging in a different way for young people to make money today?
Speaker A
Um, well, today versus when my child is an adult, I would say are different situations. I would say for today, it's never been easier to make money because we have these tools that are giving
Speaker A
work ethic and skill. Um, and so barriers to entry are getting completely flattened, which is amazing.
Speaker A
It's democratized access, but what it's really done is also just made it more competitive. And so, one of my favorite lines on The Wire is, uh, Cuddy, who's was a hitman, comes out of, you know, prison after 15 or 20 years. He's an
Speaker A
older guy, doesn't know what to do, goes back into the game. He then is told to like go do a hit with some other guy.
Speaker A
and uh it goes, you know, the wrong way or and they're sitting in the back of the car and he says, "Man," he's like, "The game's changed." And uh Slim Charles looks at him and says, "No, man." He's like, "The game hasn't
Speaker A
changed. Game's the same, just more fierce." And so I see that in a lot of ways, just the way that the economy, the way that business, the market has hasn't changed. The fundamentals are still going to be the same. It's supply and
Speaker A
demand. Scarcity is still going to drive behavior. Um, it's just that the variables around the core fundamentals will change. And so that's why I think like adaptability is a core thing to learn, which I just see that as like
Speaker A
being able to change paper quickly when new conditions arise. Um and so today a lot of money can be made digitally without nearly the amount of labor as before and you can run it a lot more efficiently which I think just
Speaker A
there are more people entering entrepreneurship than ever before which I see as largely a good thing because the most efficient organizations are single single person run like if you just think like there's so much uh waste in large organizations because of
Speaker A
coordination of people and so you know like a perfect world of efficiency would be that every single person has a business that requires someone else that everyone have their freedom, everyone, you know, delivers, uh, you know, valuable services to other people.
Speaker A
That's awesome. I think there's a world of more and more of that that will happen in a world where, you know, humans have no no inherent value. Um, from a quote utility perspective that a robot, you know, cannot do. Um, I think
Speaker A
that we'll do what we've always done, like we'll figure out something else. You said 18 years from now it'll be radically different.
Speaker A
Mhm. If you had to guess like, oh, what might that look like? I have no idea. I think my guess is is it would be the same as me making up a reality. And I don't think I don't think
Speaker A
there's too many variables. I mean, let alone like it's like trying to predict like what stocks can go up tomorrow.
Speaker A
There's so many things that are that can happen between now and then. Um, and there's also some things that I don't think are necessarily going to change. Like for example like what are it's I think basis is a question which I
Speaker A
like thinking a lot about which is rather than saying like what is going to change I think it's it's more valuable for someone today to ask what is going to stay the same and so I think that humans will still fall in love I think
Speaker A
that humans will still value stakes so give you a simple example like if Mr.
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makes a video and he's, you know, puts $5 million in the middle of an island and invites 10 influencers to go compete for it. Those influencers can't be AI influencers. They can't be fake. And if that $5 million isn't actually $5
Speaker A
million and you just have cartoons competing for fake money, I don't think anyone cares.
Speaker A
And there's also some things that people want to see humans do. So like we have cranes, we still want to watch who can lift the most weight. We still have, you know, robo chess that can beat any chess
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player on earth. And chess has never been more popular. And so we will still be attracted to human things, drama, story, narrative stakes, things like that that I think that humans want to see how humans are re reacting to those
Speaker A
things. Um, so I don't think that's going to change. I think humans are going to need to eat. I think they're going to need to sleep. They're going to have to have shelter. Um, all of these things I think will will remain
Speaker A
relatively unchanged. Um, will there also be AI entertainment? Absolutely. Will there be our first Star Wars epic? I mean, we're seeing it. I think you probably been attuned to this.
Speaker A
Like, there've been three big box office hits that are like 100 million plus movies that have come out from just like YouTubers. And that necessarily isn't all AI, but it will be like these tiny tiny um teams being able to generate
Speaker A
huge blockbuster quite literally um outcomes. Uh and so it's like again it's just going to have uh I think Nibal said this but it was technology democratizes consumption and consolidates production.
Speaker A
So if you get if you're the best in the world you get to do it for everyone. And so AI will will youtubify a lot of things. So what I mean by that is when mobile phones had videos, video
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making used to be a luxury thing and then everyone was able to make a video and then YouTube gave everyone a platform to post those videos on. And so it's like oh everyone can vibe code.
Speaker A
It's like well yeah but everyone can make videos but not everyone's Mr. Beast. And so just like always like it will still have like quality like we'll have when there's more supply we will index on quality. And so what are the
Speaker A
human things that are the non-replaceable things which I think are stakes. I think it's narrative. I think it's reality. And reality creates the stakes um for any of this type of stuff.
Speaker A
That's why reality TV is still a thing cuz we know it's real. You know, you know, to the degree that it's real people, right? And there's some sort of money or whatever that's on the line.
Speaker A
People still watch. But yeah, I think there's there's a world where there's a robot that cuts your lawn for sure.
Speaker A
Right. That's something I was thinking about was this idea of like reality TV for some reason has the highest moat in the next 10 years as far as content. Uh because it just seems as though AI is able to amalgamize education type
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content so well and like documentary type content so well like do you have any thoughts on that specifically that the info business content creation is going to be limited? I think it assumes that people didn't already have infinite
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access to information. people already have that. Um, so I think that when people buy if like pure information, yeah, tough. I think everything that comes around that again that's stakes. Like people people know to like you just recently lost weight,
Speaker A
right? So people know they need to whether you know any like anything about fitness, you know, you need to stop eating [ __ ] and move more. Okay, great. Your version of eating [ __ ] and moving more will be
Speaker A
different. But fundamentally, you have an idea that you do that. People still don't do it. Why? Because they don't have enough stakes. They don't have enough motivation around it. And so, like, there'll still be plenty of IRL and I would say human-based
Speaker A
interventions that will still work to drive those stakes and drive that motivation um for people.
Speaker A
You said the richest you ever felt in your life was when you and Ila hit your first $100,000.
Speaker A
Mhm. Uh you've since talked about a goal that you have where you want to help a h 100,000 young men make $100,000. I think it's small. I think we'll do a lot more than that. But yeah, we might have already done that. I'm
Speaker A
being real. The difficulty is how do you measure it, right? Um if I were to give a meal to every person, I give a meal, you check a name off and that's it, right? You can ship them out and it's
Speaker A
done. If I have to teach someone to do something and then have to have them make money and then have a way to know that they've reached past this point, like um when I announced that, I've gotten so many DMs of people like,
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"Dude, I'm one of those people. I made a million dollar cuz you made $10 million because of you." Um I'm one of those people.
Speaker A
Oh, appreciate it, man. Um awesome. Thanks, man. Um glad to hear that. Uh that's cool, man.
Speaker A
Like I mean, school is 27 million users, so 100,000 is like a rounding error. I think we'll do a lot more than that. Um, I have a lot of other things in the works, too, that are that will come by
Speaker A
the end of this year that'll make that more evident. Um, but yeah, I mean, I meant what I said. I I think that in order to change the world, you have to start with changing a generation. I don't think old
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generations change. So, you have to start younger. Um, and I think that the best system we have right now is capitalism. It is flawed. It is just the best flawed system we have. And so in order to get people to buy into
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something, you need them to be reinforced by it. So they have to have a good outcome as a result of it. And so I think um all you have to do is look at every other country that has not had the
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system and look at their outcomes over a longer period of time to be like, "Okay, well that system doesn't work." And to think that it's somehow is going to like this time it'll be different is ridiculous. It's like the, you know, the
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abusive the abusive husband and the and the wife and you know, he hits her and he says, "I'm sorry. It'll be different next time." It's like no man, that's the pattern. And so we don't need to like wait for a dictator to take over to to
Speaker A
know that that's how it's going to end. Um, and so I'm a big believer in free markets and I'm willing to deal with the downside consequences of free markets because I see them as superior problems to the downsides of communism,
Speaker A
socialism, and dictatorship, which are not necessarily all the same, but right often. I like that a lot. Uh, I mean, if money exists, it would make sense to me at least that capitalism is the best system. Um, what is capitalism? It is a
Speaker A
system that allocates capital most efficiently. So, it would make sense that it is the best at generating it.
Speaker A
I know this is something you've probably been asked before, but things are so different now. If you had to go from zero to $100,000 in the next 3 months, how would you do it? Maybe if you could break it down for me in five steps.
Speaker A
Sure. Um, so 100,000 total or 100,000 a month or 10,000 a month? 100,000 total in 3 months. Uh, no employees, just you.
Speaker A
But it's not me though, right? It's my skills, but not me. Yeah. Okay, that makes Right. And I don't content and I have and I have no network and I have no connections and I have no any of that. I
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don't have my phone with me. You can use Claude. Um I I so when you are starting out you want every customer to be worth it. And so I think one of the mistakes that happens when people are earlier is they
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don't sell expensive enough stuff. And so like if it's very hard for you to get a customer then you better make sure that customer is worth it. which means instead of thinking about scalability, we think about how basically potential
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money made from every person is what you want to maximize. And so that means that potential value created has to be maximized, which means that we might do unscalable things in the short term in order to generate cash flow. And so I'll
Speaker A
give you an analogy and then I'll give you the steps. um or not an analogy, a story, but when I when I started my first gym, I did personal training uh with one client and that client came 90 minutes a day, 5
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days a week, which is a super like a super client. And I ended up making I think it was like $45,000 a month in total from that one client. And that client and that model of me just doing
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oneonone like that obviously doesn't scale, but I was running my gym, the business all around that. and the gym, I would just take the cash and basically reinvested more equipment or I' or I'd spend more on ads to get more people in,
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whatever it was. But like I lived on the $5,000 a month that I was getting uh from the personal training client. And so the fastest way to go to $100,000 is not the fastest way to get to a million
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or 10 million. And so this is the big misconception with the question. And so like if I wanted to get to $100,000, I would go to a business and say, and the thing is like I have already done this
Speaker A
because I've already lost my money before and had to go do this. So I this is what I did. I went to a local business and I said, "What are the packages you have?" And then I said, "What's the cheapest that you're willing
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to do deliver those packages for?" And I said, "Okay, if I go get you customers and I sell it, can I keep this percentage of what I sell, if I go get them and I sell them, and then you get
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the customer for life after that?" And as soon as I had some businesses that said yes, I then got them customers and I kept the money. and then they delivered the services and got customers for free. And so when I lost everything,
Speaker A
I made $100,000 the first month after I lost everything. And so within the example, it's like I did that in 30 days. And so you can absolutely do that.
Speaker A
It's just that you have to work like a maniac. And fundamentally, it was I had an offer that worked that I knew worked for a specific local business, which was the gym. So, I knew I could run a weight
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loss challenge and I knew I could spend money on the ads and I didn't have to spend a lot because, you know, if you can get 10 to one, you spend 100 bucks, you have a,000 and then after you have
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a,000, you spend 10. Now, you have you spend one, you make 10 and you're good to go, right? Um, and so that was so then I would just limited by the facility's ability to handle customers.
Speaker A
So, I would try and find the most empty facilities because I knew I could sell them till they were full, usually within 3 weeks. And so, that is literally what I did. So step by step, I had an offer,
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number one. Number two, I had ads that I could record with my phone. Step three, I posted those ads and pushed them to a landing page. Step four, the landing page, this is at the time, just went to
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a Google sheet. Uh, step six, I called the leads on the Google sheet to make sure that they got scheduled. And then, uh, I think I'm on step seven, I would meet with those leads and I would present the offer that I advertised to
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them. And then I would get them to give me money for that offer. And then I let the business handle the delivery of the services and I kept the cash. It's the easiest business that you could run.
Speaker A
It's one person. It's functionally an affiliate business. If you were going to think of the easiest offer right now, what might it be? Uh, I mean because I think a lot about winners's effect and how people like I like to
Speaker A
give people I don't know those tactful gems even though they're not useful long term because long-term is just the fundamentals but to establish some type of winners.
Speaker A
Well, the nature of the offer is going to have to be some. So one is you have to decide with your B2B or B2C, right? So am I going to sell to consumers or I'm going to sell to
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businesses, right? If I had no knowledge of anything um and I just knew just basic AI stuff, it's not that difficult to go into a normal business and say, "Hey, can I observe your business for free and come with an AI plan that saves
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you at least $100,000 and would you be willing to give me a third of the savings or 20% of the savings that I get you if I can demonstrate that it will save that amount of money?" Most businesses would say yes. And it's just
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like it's nothing upfront. I just need these commitments. Like I don't I don't think like and then someone might say, "Okay, well, how do I get in touch with those businesses?" You've got two feet and two hands. You can knock on a [ __ ] door.
Speaker A
Like you have a phone with, you know, you've got two thumbs. You can text people. You can DM them. You can call them. You can email them. Like you can post content about it. Like there's a hundred. You just got to let people know
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about it. And the thing is is like, is that an in- demand service right now?
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Yes. And so the issue is more that people just don't have any skills. Like if you have skills, making money is not that hard. You do something for somebody else that they don't know how to do. So that means you need to learn how to do
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[ __ ] So learn how to do stuff and then do it for somebody else who doesn't want to learn how to do stuff, which really just comes down to like you have to be willing to work.
Speaker A
What's the one thing people waste most of their time on that doesn't actually make them money?
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I mean everything that is not the work. Like I have one plaque on my on my wall that says focus is subtraction.
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Like everything that is not the thing is a distraction. So if we define commitment as the elimination of alternatives, people are not committed.
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And so the most focused person in the world, most focused video game player in the world would not eat, would not sleep, would not drink water. And they would only play video games. And anything that is not video games would
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then be less focused. So if you drink water, you're less focused than the guy that plays 100%. Now, is that sustainable? No. But for the period of time that person was playing, that person would be the more focused person.
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And so there are a very small number of activities that generate money and most of everything else is just noise. Like you have to let people know that you exist. You have to make them an offer that solves a specific problem in
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exchange for money. You have to get agreement from them and you have to exchange money for services and then you have to deliver that product or service to them. Like it's it's I don't even like I don't know what else there is. Like I
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don't know how it gets that complicated. Like that's it. And people get the thing I think really what it is is like people get paralyzed by trying to pick perfectly.
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They trying to think like I want to have the perfect business. Well, like unless you're Bezos or Zuck who actually started their first business and are still in their first business as a gazillion dollar company.
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The vast majority of entrepreneurs that I know, your first business is not your last business. It is your first stepping stone. And so I just try to get people to concentrate on on get a stranger to give you money to do something or for
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something that you make for them. That's it. Like that's that's all of business. That's literally just accepting money from a stranger. So you like you need a way to process money. You need an LLC if you want to use credit cards. You can do
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it for cash and not have any of that [ __ ] Like I actually I struggle with the question because I'm like what part are we missing here? And I think it's because there's so many people saying a
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lot of words that they don't understand and confusing a large percentage of people. It's like, well, you start with a morning routine. It's like, bro, you don't need to do any of that. You need to let somebody know that you can do
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something for them and ask them if they want you to do it for them for money and then do it.
Speaker A
I I don't really have a But like sounds about right. Yeah. I mean for me I think about I I think about with my business because um I know it's not the typical business but I think people focus on similar
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things like with my business I sell to advertisers right and a majority of my time is spent on building the product to sell to them in a way which is the content and building like oh this is the data this is the
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data this is the data here it is and we spend so little time on selling because it's so important to present present the good data.
Speaker A
So, how do you go about selling it? Let's do this. How do you go about selling it right now?
Speaker A
Reach out to every single person at the company I want to sell to. Set up a call with them.
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Show them the data. You run ads on your podcast, right? You don't do any ads, but how do you make money right now? Just ad I thought you meant like uh advertise like advertising the podcast. Yeah. Yeah, we
Speaker A
do a bunch of ads. Yeah. Yeah. Can I give you a little trick? run an ad for yourself after this. Say, "Hey, by the way, if you are enjoying this podcast and you would like your business and an offer to
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towards whatever products and service you have, I have this available. Um, we get this many views per month and this is our demo. Uh, reach out to me here.
Speaker A
Would love to connect." Fair play. You sell media. Use it. You already have it. You have something that's free. You don't have to spend money on ads. You can literally just advertise on your own platform, right?
Speaker A
Yeah. You can take people 1 million to 5 million from that one. What else we got?
Speaker A
Hey, really quick, I'm going to take some of Alex's advice here. And if you're someone that happens to have a company, I have a really dumb idea for you. So, instead of you explaining to me what a KPI is and writing me a creative
Speaker A
brief and trying to hope that I somehow convert, I'm just simply going to make you money. Now, I'm not going to read you all my stats. That's insulting.
Speaker A
Like, how many viewers and listeners we have, that's all at jacknil.com/sponsor. I'll wait. Disgusting, right? In a good way. Now, here's the offer. You give me the product, I put it in front of the most engaged audience of young men on the
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internet, and you make a bunch of money. But the downside is there isn't one. I'm really good at this. Like, if you haven't noticed, I dressed up for an ad about an ad. This is my wife's tank top,
Speaker A
and the Sharpie on my nose is going straight into my brain. All of this was for you. So, again, if you want an influencer that'll make the ad for you, or do the ad exactly how you want, knows
Speaker A
what a KPI or an LTV to CAC ratio is, just go to jagnail.com/sponsor and contact me there. You can also hit the first link in the description. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast. Why is it so important to build a
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datacentric business in the age of AI? Well, you can't have AI without a data layer first because like AI is trained off of data. And so if you want to have a unique mode in some way to a business
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and not be obviously like the frontier models are all trained on all of the free available information and so in order to have any kind of edge on those models, you need to have proprietary information. you have to have data sets
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that they don't have access to um or that they don't have like call it clones or similar data sets because if you have a unique data set but it creates the same outcomes as a different data set that is not the same as yours it
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actually does not have the same edge and so you need to have unique data um that's if you wanted to have some sort of AI you know call it product as as a thing that you would sell if you want
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just to use AI within the business which I think is 95 or 99% of businesses out there um it's more in order to have, let me zoom out. If I wanted to have an employee come in, right, and do a job, I
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would have to train the employee on that job. In order to train the employee, I would have to document steps to doing the right behaviors. The documentation of those steps and the the when done right, it looks like this, that is all
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data. And so the more documentation you have around the processes you have in the business, which is what are the inputs and what are the outputs and what is the basically the manufacturing process step by step that takes inputs
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and turns into outputs. And how do we know output is good versus bad which fundamentally is just reinforcement training which works for humans and works for machines. Um we need to have that so that we can get the
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most out of the tools. That is all like it's just so that you can get more out of the AI versus having a generic out of the box AI. We have a this is how Jack likes to run AI.
Speaker A
Do you record yourself like all the time? Um not all the time. I would say that I record myself. I mean, I don't record myself. I have a team that records me technically. Um, and yeah, when I do stuff, I I record
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it. Huh. I was just thinking like every single meeting, every single conversation I have with people, just documented data turn into the model.
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I think that so if you think about like the digital world and the real world as two different places. So if you have a Zoom call, emails, everything that's digital is almost already pretty recorded. So your emails are already
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recorded, your Slack messages are already recorded. The only thing you have to add is for your meetings, your Zoom meetings, those get recorded and transcribed. If you do that, especially if you're a remote business, almost all your interactions already recorded. So
Speaker A
that's not that difficult to have access to. When you have an IRL business, you have to have more effort that goes into the recording. That being said, I think a lot of times the data can be a little
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bit richer. Um, but yeah, so I would say that when when if if I'm interacting with customers, then it is recorded. If I'm interacting with my team, it is recorded. If I'm not doing either of those things, I'm hanging out not with a
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camera on. What's the real reason most businesses die? I think depends on how we define businesses dying.
Speaker A
Because most businesses die because the entrepreneur quits because if entrepreneur doesn't quit then it's very common for businesses to evolve and change models and change structures and change pricing. um I can't remember but it's you know there's a number of examples of like um I want
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to say it was like Mitsubishi or Samsung it might be Samsung like started as something completely different from like electronics but it started there and it just continued to evolve and so I think it depends on how we define businesses
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dying if we say like this is bankrupt it like it like it's it's more like I would almost I'd rather almost have like when do like why do entrepreneurs quit is almost the question because like businesses come and go products come and
Speaker A
Oh, the market changes, technology changes, like it's normal for those things to occur. But if it's more like if the question is like why would someone start and not succeed, most of the time they don't persist? And their definition of starting is what
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most people who are su, you know, successful entrepreneurs would be like, you didn't even start. You know, I mean, like I um I had a this is a couple years ago, but I was I had a dinner with a friend of
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mine's kids and they were all college-aged and uh they said they liked entrepreneurship and so, you know, I razed him a little bit. Um and they were like, "Okay, you know, I'm going to uh well, I'm going to start this business."
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And I was like, "Awesome, man." And so I think 6 months later um I saw him again because I was hanging out with Tim Simon and uh I was like, "Hey, how's the business going?" And they were like,
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"Oh, you know, uh, I'm just working on getting the, you know, the LLC set up." And when I heard that, I was like, "What? Like the LLC?" I was like, "That's like 30 minutes, man. Tops." Like, "Go online, go on Legal Zoom, go
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on whatever the hell you want." Like, it's all automated. And then like take the LLC, start a bank account. Like, okay, now what? Like that's Saturday.
Speaker A
What else did you do for the last 6 months? Nothing. And so it's like the vast majority of business owners fail before they start because they never start to begin with which is why I think courage is such an important thing. Like
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you have to start and a lot of times it's like a lot of newer entrepreneurs convince themselves they did more work than they really did because they sat in front of a computer and messed around.
Speaker A
But like did you figure out something to sell? Did you let people know about it?
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Did you ask them for money to do it? Where do you fail there? Like, and if you have a service business, which is 78% of the US at least, you can always collapse a service business down to just the person who
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started it. And so, like, there's no reason for a service business to ever really fail because your your main thing is headcount. That's going to be your main cost. You might have some capital expenses for equipment maybe, right? But
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like the vast majority, it's person doing thing for other person. Okay? So, like you can collapse all that down.
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Like if you if you if you got in trouble, it could still be you doing [ __ ] for money. So did that business die? Might downsize, but it might not die. It dies if you stop on the physical
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product side. Uh you might have hard costs in order to sell something. That one is where like the core economics of the thing matter a lot. Um and so it's like we have to sell it for not just a
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profit, but enough profit to fund the rest of the business and growth. And that's where pricing can become obviously really important and brand and distribution, things like that. But that's a little bit further down the road. And that's not really why most
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people fail, right? Most people just give up because, you know, to be honest, like I I don't even know that many people who have failed at business. Realistically, I don't I know people who've changed businesses many times over the years, but like maybe
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people don't really give up. Most people just don't start. On August 16th last year, you launched your book$und00 million Money Models, uh, which teaches various systems people can use to build nine figure businesses.
Speaker A
Not nine figure businesses. I never promised that. Um, to build a business. Yeah. What's the smartest thing you did when you launched your book that almost no one talked about? We added 70,000 users to school in a weekend.
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How? See, no one talked about pretty show. Um, I gave a bunch of all my stuff away and also showed how to use money models in school because a lot of people who follow my stuff um do have businesses,
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but also there's plenty of people who don't have businesses and want to start a business. And so school provides a very easy platform for you to get started in business. Like you can accept payments in 30 seconds and you don't
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have to like even go through the LLC stuff at all and it processes the payments for you. So like you can literally just like start one about whatever the whatever you like, whatever you're passionate about and then invite
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other people like you'd invite them to a party. It's just online and you have a bouncer at the door which is a checkout page that collects cash. It's very simple. And so, um, I just put all the stuff from the books, applied it to that
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specific business and said anyone can get for free for 90 days, try it out. If you like it, you can keep it for nine bucks a month. And that has all the software you need to run an entire
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business with nothing else. And so 70,000 people grab that. 70,000 users like uh consumers or like people No, people starting communities.
Speaker A
People starting communities. Yeah. This is a rumor. Uh but did you break Tik Tok shop? I heard this internally.
Speaker A
Um so we so basically Tik Tok shop um had a feature in how it did payouts that miscommunicated when a refund occurred. And so we had um there was I think there was an influencer I mean it was obviously it
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was happening across all accounts but I'm just somebody that people can attack. Um, there was an influencer that I think had had made like $47 in total sales, something like that, and the sale that she had had, which was of the book. Um,
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somebody had refunded it or something like that, and the she got a deduction from her, which by the way, this is all Tik Tok, like I didn't build Tik Tok shop. They used it just like everyone else does. But she had a deduction uh in
Speaker A
I think commissions or she didn't get paid a commission because she she basically had a debt on her account which is like okay we paid you 17 but you owe us 17 and this next commission that was going to go out goes against
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this debt or whatever. There's some reconciliation that happened. But the way that Tik Tok communicated it to her was Alex is not paying your $17 commission. And so then she made a video saying that Alex is trying to, you know,
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take money from me or whatever. But no, what they did do though is that this went all the way to the the top of Tik Tok that incident.
Speaker A
Yeah. Um and they they corrected the the mistake. So they actually changed it so that it was clear that like this was like this deduction occurred because a customer not the business u refunded and that is what's being held against the
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commission. It's interesting. Yeah. That that Yeah. So, I don't know if I broke Tik Tok shop, but um the volume that we did exposed a flaw that um they were able to fix.
Speaker A
Huh. How much volume did you do? Um when I had it, I stopped doing it after that because I was like, it's just not worth it for me. Um but I think we were doing like 300 doing like 350,000 a week the last week,
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I think, in just book sales. But no, it was just it was one of those where like it's not worth my reputation to have anyone think that I would not like I always pay my debts. like it is
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something that I like I will always [ __ ] pay my debts. I do not want to owe anyone anything. Um it's very like I just it's just it's so core to who I am. I hated that. Um
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I like in my offers book I talk about this, but I had $23,000 in my account. I had a salesperson who did $100,000 in sales. I owed them 20%. I paid it was like 22,000 something like that out of
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my account when I had 23 before I received the $100,000 that ended up almost all getting removed. Um because I I never want someone to think that I I do not I do not keep my commitments.
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What's the biggest downside of building yourself into the type of person who can become a billionaire?
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I think it's very common that the pattern of behavior that creates financial success uh can create life dissatisfaction because the what you're looking for when you are building a business is what's wrong? How can I how could this be
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better? How can I fix it? And so it's a constant raising of the bar so that the business can grow. But when you do it that way, it often creates this constant sense of deprivation of never achieving what you wanted to achieve because by
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the time you do, you realize you could have done better. And so, um, I have a guy on my team who I would say suffers from this. Um, and we joke that like, uh, hey, you know, if you go do this
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thing, if, uh, if it's great, um, you should have gone harder and, uh, if it's not great, well, there's all the reasons you messed up. And so there's basically like no good outcome. Um, but I think that that's that's just a big part of
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it. Um, and I think it's learning when to use that pattern of behavior and when not to. And so it's like, what conditions is this pattern uh useful? In what conditions is it uh hurtful?
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It's just hard. Do you think you should ever meet your heroes? Um, why would you not want to meet your heroes?
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Dissatisfaction. uh like you have an expectation of what someone is. So would the question be would I rather live in a dream world than reality?
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H yes no I live here and more information about reality will always help me better understand reality which is where I live. I can understand I mean this is fundamentally the question of the matrix which is I mean my favorite movie. um
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you know, Cipher decides to unplug and wants to go back to the dream world. Um I think it's very difficult to know that there is reality and decide or opt out.
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I think I think some people do though. I think like and I also put no moral judgment on that. If if you want to keep living in a dream world, go for it. Uh it's just not for me. It has not been
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what has proven useful. Like if you live in a dream world, you were constantly surprised because your model for predicting how reality will work is flawed.
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Do you feel as though there's like an opposite of that? Because I think a lot of people live in this optimistic dream world like I'm the best. I'm a 10 out of 10. I'm going to make a million dollars.
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But there's also people that are like never enough. Uh never going to be rich.
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It's never like going to hit. Like are there two sides of the same coin and there's reality in the middle and you constantly try to adjust to that? I think it's more what do you want to have happen and then what actions do you need
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to take in order to make that happen. If you saying you live in a dream world makes it more likely that you take actions that align with what you want to have happen then do that. If you living
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in what you call base reality, these are super vague terms, but if that's what you know, we say I want to understand truth so that um by understanding that I will take better steps towards getting what I want, then you should do that.
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But I mean at the end of the day, the only thing that will matter is what actions you take and whether those actions have high likelihood of getting what you want. I think that they are less likely to get what you want if you
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do not have a model of the world that is accurate. Would you want to win the lottery?
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Really interesting question. Um I I do have the answer to that. Um so I bought a Powerball ticket when I was 20 and I remember I bought it with my like you know college girlfriend at the time and it was it hit over a billion at the
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time when a billion dollars used to mean something. Um kidding. Um, and I remember when the drawing was going to happen and then I felt this incredible feeling of dread of like, oh my god, what if I win? I don't want to win.
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Because the thought that I had was, if I win this billion dollars, I will never have been able to prove to myself that I could do it. And that was truly horrifying for me because it would literally be opting out of the one thing
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that I really wanted to do, which is to prove to myself that I could do it. Um, which I know uh the zillion people will make their comment about how that's ridiculous and I understand, but like you live your life, I'll live mine, you
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know. Um, I want to do things my way. And I think it's the same it's the same as and this is I mean actually the question that you ask is really really timely for me because for my child they're going to have been born
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into winning the lottery and it's something that I'm acutely aware of and I'm thinking I would say like that is actually where the majority of my thinking has gone in relation to parenting which is what you started with
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this with which is like how do by how do I give them the opportunity to feel as though they have earned their place when they already are born into just such extreme material you know situation success and so that's something that I
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think I'm thinking a lot about how am I going to manage this are we also going to change our lifestyle so that they have a more realistic world.
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Uh cuz I think that also a large degree of like why people who are born into wealth I don't don't succeed as much is because their view of reality is actually not accurate. And so like the vast majority of millionaires are
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self-made not inherited. And I think it's because they have a better view of base reality. If you're born into wealth you think the world is different than it is. And so you act as though the entire world is like you and it is not. And so
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I think it's like people who have traversed worlds have the most accurate view. They see heaven and hell together as one thing and they're like, "Okay, these are the different conditions that exist and I need to be able to navigate
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all of them." And so that's what I'm I'd say like what I'm thinking a little bit about. And also um you know if I have a son um trying to make sure that he doesn't feel like he has to beat me
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to be worthy and making sure that he would know that I am proud of his effort above all and that be to be fair it means I'll still have super [ __ ] high standards for effort but that that is how he wins in my eyes.
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um and shows courage and shows persistence and consistency and things like that. Um those are the things that I'm thinking about right now. But uh to loop around to the original question, that is why I don't want to win the
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lottery. And it's also, I think, a bit of a worldview question because if we see life as the path we take and who we become along that path, then it's like saying, "Would you like to have a video game?" And as
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soon as you open the game, it says you won. That would be a bad game. And so it's like saying, "Do you not want to play anymore?" That being said, in my current condition, if I were to win the
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lottery, I already have the credibility that I can build things and I know how to make money and all that stuff. And so, it would really just act like a uh, you know, just a a lump sum, you know, call
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loan that I don't have to pay back from the universe for me to just like move, you know, 5 years forward. Um, which would be nice, which I'm totally fine with. But at that moment when I didn't have it and I didn't have the proof, I
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didn't want it. Now, So, anyone wants to hand me a billion dollars, you're welcome to um in cash, totally good with that. But, uh but it was just because it serves it serves a different um objective now. And it doesn't prevent me
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from walking the path that I have to walk to get here because person who wins the lottery who has nothing is very unlikely to have the skills like the there's a magic card that I have that's my favorite magic
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card of all time. It's called burning wish and said uh they wish for a weapon but not for the skill to wield it. And so like just getting a billion dollars, that's why whatever it is, 80% or whatever of lottery winners have lost
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all the money by the time by 5 years or something. Um it's because like it's just potential, but if you don't have the skill to wield it, it's nothing.
Speaker A
I want to touch back on something you said a moment ago. Uh you grew up with a dad that pushed you hard. You said the moment your dad was proudest of you was when you were your saddest. Yeah.
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How do you make sure your child's happiest moments are also your proudest ones? I would say that I would I would reject the premise just because it assumes that that must happen or should happen. Um and I don't necessarily
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subscribe to that. Um but uh because this is what I was saying at the beginning like all of this hinges on what do we define a successful parent as and what do we define a successful child as. If a successful parent means that
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they have a happy child, then that is one definition. If you have if a successful parent is a useful child that contributes to society, that is another definition. Those are not mutually exclusive, but can be. And so I think it
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all under like that's why I'm saying like that is what I'm that is what I'm thinking the most about right now. It's like how do I define success in each of these roles? Um because I think once that's clear, at least clear for me and
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people would people for sure disagree on whatever I come on because they'll have their own permutation which I would say by all means live your life. um then I'll try and optimize towards that.
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I would say that the vast majority of like when you have uh you know a happy parent and a sad child, it is typically because it's focused on outcomes, not behavior like how could these things be mismatched, right? If it's I want the kid to work as
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hard as possible to achieve their goals. In what condition would the kid be happy that I would not be proud?
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Right. You said sometimes I think shame was invented by people who have to prevent people who have not from taking action.
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Do you think shame is an illusion? Um I would say shame is a feeling that people experience. Um and in order to know shame has occurred uh I would say that you broke other people's rules.
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So guilt is when you break your own rules. Shame is when you break other people's rules. You can feel guilt and shame if you break your own and other people's rules. You can feel just guilt.
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The things that you do uh on your own that you're feel guilty about um but you don't feel ashamed. On the flip side, um like basically the things that you do on your own you are ashamed of but you
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don't feel guilty about. So if I was just like the things you do on your own, um if other people were to find out about them, you might feel weird about it, right? That weirdness is the shame. But if the fact that you do
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them um means that you don't have any issues with it, you just know other people have issues with it. And so it's just navigating basically what whose rules am I listening to?
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And so it's a great signal to know who's whose rule book am I following for my life?
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Who who benefits from someone feeling shame? Oh, I mean it's a status thing most of the time. So like if if so shame has uses like shame is not bad. It's like shame. Like if someone does something [ __ ] up and it hurts lots of
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people, they should feel ashamed. And so it's a very powerful punishment mechanism that we as a group of humans do to get other humans to act in a pro-social way. Like we shame them. And it feels so bad because uh back in the
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day you getting ostracized from the group meant that you could die. And so it was a big point like you know don't don't do [ __ ] you're not supposed to do um according to our rules. And if you
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don't listen to our rules, you will know that you didn't listen, we will shame you. We will ostracize you. We will ignore you. Uh we will say bad things to you about you and you will no longer have access to the resources that we
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have. So I think shame absolutely has a purpose. The difficulty people have now is that like the stakes are different.
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It's not about life and death, but it still feels the same. If someone woke up tomorrow with no shame, how would their life change?
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Well, I think that they would do a lot of stuff that so I think there's a reason that a lot of really successful entrepreneurs have, you know, call it touch by the tism or a hint of asperers or whatever you want to call it. It's
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like they have less they have less social feedback loops. And what that allows them to do is just think purely from first principles rather than reasoning through other people's judgments. And so if you're like, I don't know if this is a good idea, I'm
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going to ask 10 people. Um, getting 10 people to agree is a great way to a stay normal and b do nothing. And so you have to you have to be willing if you want an outsized outcome, you have to be willing
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to do things that the vast majority of people disagree with. Now Larry Ellison said this and I think it's it's very good, which is if you do what other people disagree with, either they are right, which is the vast majority of the
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time and you're wrong, or they are wrong and you're right. And in those instances, if you base businesses around them, you make tremendous amounts of money. It's when you see something that other people don't see. And the way to
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do that is to be willing to accept that in the short term people disagree with you. And so that is where I would say shame does not pay off in the world of innovation. But in the world of social
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construct and like behaving I think shame is a very good thing. That's fascinating. Yeah. It's not good or bad. It's just it's under what conditions. Same thing with guilt.
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People should feel guilty about stuff. You broke your own rules. You shouldn't do that.
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All right. I'm trying to think through this in real time but just as a mechanism to find like business opportunities and in innovation like should you be looking toward the places which people typically have a lot of ideas and opinions around
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and try to see if anyone's actually thinking from first principles I mean I think uh a different way of thinking about it is just like what is you want to find people's trash what are people what does people think like I'll give a
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simple example a way to spot A quote good investment is a team that enters the playoff and is the 16th seed out of 16 seeds and you're like that is way too low of a seed. I think they're
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way [ __ ] better than that. That is where you bet on the fact that you're right. Now that's truly sports betting which I'm not condoning but that idea is how you translate that into the business setting. People are really sleeping on
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old people insurance whatever. Uh I don't see like nearly enough but like I'm looking at the math the you know the population is aging. If I look at where wealth is distributed, it's all here.
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When I look at new business being started, it's all targeting here. I'm going to go there. Like, it's just looking at at the at the numbers and saying like a lot of times the quot missed opportunities are supply demand
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uh mismatches. So, where is there significantly more demand? How many more people want this thing versus how many people are supplying that thing and looking at those. So, like why are peptides exploding? Okay, why are like why is medbot still a great business to
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get into? because there's still more demand than there is supply and the people who have demand are getting older and need it more and have all the money, right?
Speaker A
But I think just I I want to just make this one point for anyone who's listening, especially the younger part of your audience, you do not need to have something that is brand new. Like 99% of businesses are just businesses
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that already exist that you just need to you could literally just do the same and make money and if you do better, you'll make a lot of money. Uh it's like if you want to have a multi-billion dollar or
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trillion dollar outcome, yes, you'll need to do something that's truly net new. That being said, those things typically cost a lot of money upfront, which means you have to get into the raising capital game. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different
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way to play the game. That is how the truly denovo ideas um can sometimes come to be. But I think that's very limiting.
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So like I took an entrepreneurship class in college and I remember was like everybody had to come up with a business plan and like almost all the business plans were like inventions like almost all of them. And what's wild is that
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like that's not like if we were to take a random slice of of the United States economy the vast majority of businesses are not inventions. They are just like mowing your lawn, cleaning your clothes, like you know selling cars, selling
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insurance. It's like what are the things that people like the easiest way to look at like what opportunities exist especially for customers who are like you is just look at your credit card statement. Look at everything you spend
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money on. You are the customer. It's like any of these things are things that I'm interested in or think that I could do. Great. Maybe I can start there. And a lot of those businesses don't necessarily require a lot of startup
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capital to get going. You have a weed whacker. All right. Save, you know, save a little bit of money and you get a weaker. It's not like there's you don't have to start really big. I think that there's this whole again this this
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fallacy of the perfect pick that like the one business you start is the one that you're gonna have the rest of your life and that's just not the case.
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You're gonna learn how to market. You're gonna learn how to sell. You're gonna learn how to deliver. You're learn how to hire. You're going to learn how to fire. You're going to have to learn how to train. There's all these skills that
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happen even at a small local business that then you can translate to a much better opportunity when you have a little bit more foresight, a little bit more capital, and then you can take bigger bets.
Speaker A
Yeah. I I I'm shocked I haven't met any people my age that are just like a couple laundromats. You know, it's like no one's looking in those places. And same thing with what you said with old people insurance. Like probably a great
Speaker A
opportunity. You know, if you audited your behavior since we last spoke, what's one behavior that moved the needle for you? And what's one behavior that you deleted?
Speaker A
Um, think about what I've deleted. I'll start with what I what we've added. Um, we've we've fully incorporated AI into our content creation um and media as a business. And so our content output has probably doubled, maybe more. You guys would know
Speaker A
more than doubled in terms of total posts. Yeah, maybe tripled with same headcount. So I say that's moved the needle.
Speaker A
Um, doubled is big. How many pieces of content? It's a lot. It is a lot. It is a tremendous amount. Hundreds a day.
Speaker A
Thousand. It's not thousands a day. It's It's It's at least a hundred a day for sure.
Speaker A
Yeah. It's over a thousand pieces a week. Yeah. Do more, Jack. So that and that's only possible because of because of of AI. Um with the the head the headcount that we have. Um from a deletion perspective um it's more it's
Speaker A
less that I think I've deleted things and more that I've automated away tasks that I was doing before.
Speaker A
And so like there are things that I was doing a year ago that I no longer do that are still getting done. Hm.
Speaker A
Is there any like one tactical thing uh about AI claw in general that you see people doing wrong? Like something you've learned recently?
Speaker A
Um I think people use AI to do dumb things very fast. So like it still doesn't like because at least for now the models are very agreement biased. So they just agree with whatever you're saying most of the
Speaker A
time. Um, I think people just like get their cockamin ideas confirmed and so then they just take lots of wrong action and so it's basically just because AI says this is a good idea doesn't mean it's a good
Speaker A
idea, right? And so there's still judgment that's required today at least um to to make good calls.
Speaker A
And yeah, and the thing is is just that like no AI will give you more leverage than making a good decision. Like a decision can still have more leverage than AI.
Speaker A
And there are still old men right now that don't use AI that are making way more money than the kids using AI. And so it's like it is a form of leverage.
Speaker A
It has not replaced all leverage. Like I've got I have some older friends who are phenomenal business people and I'm asking you know I've asked them like are you incorporating AI? And they're like, I mean, my teams are.
Speaker A
They're like, but I'm paid to take risk. How does it change who you hire? Like, what about people who already have I mean, think of it like this. Uh, do I hire people today or let's rewind the clock 5 years ago. Would I hire somebody
Speaker A
who doesn't know how to use the internet? Would I hire somebody who doesn't know how to use Excel or Slack or email or calendar or Zoom or the basic tools that you use to run a business? No. Do you test people's
Speaker A
proficiency in like prompting? A lot more than that, especially for a role that's super AI native.
Speaker A
That's fascinating. You built an AI version of yourself. Uh, it recruits for you. It trains your team. It can coach people one-on-one.
Speaker A
What's left that only you can do? Well, I'm here. So there's this um I think it actually ladders up to the things I was saying earlier like I someone still has to make the call.
Speaker A
Someone has to still be responsible. As of right now, no AI is responsible for anything. Now maybe that'll change in the future, but like they don't have currently, you know, you you can't start an LLC as an AI and then start processing
Speaker A
payments and file taxes as an AI. That currently doesn't exist. Maybe it will in the future. Um, but right now a human needs to take the risk. And so I am compensated for risk. I'm compensated for the decisions that that that I make.
Speaker A
And even if you have AI to assist you, you still are the one who ultimately makes the decision. They make a suggestion and make a recommendation, but you make the decision, right? Um, me existing in reality is still
Speaker A
something that only I can do. So, if people will come to a conference and they want to see me speak, if there was a robot of me speaking, um, they probably wouldn't be that happy about it. And it's like, well, I mean, you
Speaker A
could just, you know, stream a recording of you. It's like, we've had that tech for a long time and people still don't care. And so, it's just like the robo chest thing. Um, a lot of it comes down
Speaker A
to stakes and risk is that version of that from a business perspective. But yeah, there's there's a world where I could have an AI doing my live streams for me, answering questions the way that I I would, but I still think part of it requires
Speaker A
some level of I don't I don't know if the audience would be happy about that. Like, are you just going to hop on a live stream of an AI, Alex? I don't know. I don't know if I don't know if I would. Um, and so
Speaker A
there's something that there's something real about live that makes us think anything could happen, right? And that creates the intrigue and interest. And it's unedited. It's raw. It's not changing anything.
Speaker A
A guy said to me recently, he said, uh, anticipation is the number one emotion that sells. And I do think that AI when it comes to content creation like kind of cancels out that level of anticipation.
Speaker A
What do you mean? just it becomes predictable, right? I think it depends. I mean, I think that an AI like in the future when it's a little bit better um can write an exceptional story and you might have
Speaker A
anticipation of the story even though you know the story is fiction. Same reason we read fictional stories now.
Speaker A
So, I think you can still build anticipation even if something's not true. The question is just whether things that are real people will still want to watch. Like there's a Bigfoot account, you know what I mean? Uh that's
Speaker A
on Instagram that I think is hilarious. Um but everyone knows it's fake. It's entertaining. If someone's saying, "Hey, let me give you advice on how to organize your taxes." Uh there's higher stakes involved in that decision and you
Speaker A
might be less likely, not not unlikely, but less likely than maybe like a beauty influencer. Like if there's a fake AI that's teaching you makeup tricks, the stakes on getting that wrong are very low. You do your makeup wrong, you wipe
Speaker A
your face off, right? Maybe you buy a pencil that's not as good as you thought. Okay, not the end of the world.
Speaker A
You file your taxes wrong, you go to jail, right? Or you get a big bill and it sucks. So like it's just as the stakes increase the credibility of the person giving advice and again this matters more for
Speaker A
educators than entertainers. Uh entertainers are I think going to be super bifurcated where if your entertainment style is something that AI basically has no stakes then AI will completely wipe you out. Um and to be fair there will also be human
Speaker A
influencers there will just also be AI influencers that can just pump out more. on the education side, the higher the stakes of the thing that you were educating on, the more likely that proof and credibility would be important. And
Speaker A
so, like, why are there no like someone could take 100% of my content right now, I mean, [ __ ] that this already happens. Um, they take the content and they just say the exact same words and it's them rather than me, and
Speaker A
their accounts don't do well. Why? Because I mean, they're not even AI, they're hi, they're human intelligence, right? And they're doing the exact same thing. So, why doesn't it work?
Speaker A
because they're not me. They don't have proof. They don't have the proof. If they also had sold a $46 million business and also had a portfolio of $250 million a year, if they also had, you know, 300 million in real estate, if
Speaker A
they also had those things, then maybe the videos would perform. But the first question that anyone asks when they're about before even want to risk the time capital to invest in in consuming content, you you ask the question, why should I listen to you?
Speaker A
And and AI will not have the answer to that. for the higher stakes things in the short term.
Speaker A
And as far as implementing stakes, like what variables can you play with to implement stakes into content? Which is cost, right? What? So if you think about content, this is funny that we're going this direction, but um people will consume this is specifically
Speaker A
people will consume content that's a good deal. So, if I do a 100 dates in 12 minutes, that's taking a full season of The Bachelor and putting it in 12 minutes. That's a good deal. It's a good return on your time. If I do 10,000
Speaker A
phone calls and I compress my learnings from 10,000 phone calls that I document me doing those calls and I say, "These are the three things I learned." And like imagine imagine I had a time warp camera and I show myself and it has a
Speaker A
little counter of all the calls I do while I'm doing it. And at the end, I say I learned these three things. I'll do it again tomorrow. That content would perform because they're getting a day's worth of value compressed into a few
Speaker A
seconds or at least their perception of that. And so that happens at all the way up, which is like, okay, I built a business over this period of time, all these years. These are the lessons um that I've learned. I think one one of my top
Speaker A
five videos is just like 13 years of business lessons in like an hour or whatever it is, right? And so it's just like people want compressions of time.
Speaker A
And so it usually comes down to time. Money is another version is a is a tradable asset for time. So if you can save someone money, you can save someone time, you can save someone risk. They're trying to get a deal.
Speaker A
That's fascinating. I've I mean, you've talked about that concept. I believe maybe it wasn't you, just that money is uh like units of human energy. It's compressed time.
Speaker A
Yeah. And I guess content viewing is just kind of the same thing, just packaged in a different way.
Speaker A
Yeah. They're trading time for it. I think you might reject the premise, but if you've built everything around being useful uh so maybe entertain this exercise with me.
Speaker A
Okay. So, if it's all handled, Leila set your child's happy, the mission's done, the legacy is secure, and there's nothing less that needs you.
Speaker A
Is there anything you still want? I think that that's that um assumes that I can no longer be useful and I don't think that's true. Okay. At the most basic level, let's say all those things are true. Can I help
Speaker A
someone across the street? All right. Then I can provide I can provide value. Like all we do is do that with just a lot more leverage.
Speaker A
Like you can serve soup as a soup kitchen or you can build a million soup kitchens. Yeah.
Speaker A
Both are useful. Do you think if you were the most useful human in existence, you would still crave to be more useful?
Speaker A
Yeah. Why not? Why would I want to help more people if I could help more people?
Speaker A
Is there any part of your life that can't be optimized? You said maximalized. Uh that you kind of just have to feel your way through it like everyone else. uh say like what is a rel relatable component of my life? Um I'll do two
Speaker A
different extremes. So uh one answer is like I go to the gym and I train hard and I train often. Not much of that is documented. Um and that is mostly because I just want to be present training. It's one of the few things
Speaker A
that I just truly enjoy for the sake of doing it. And um like we had an idea for um a show a couple years ago called you know between sets. And maybe I'll do something like that in the future cuz
Speaker A
usually it's like between sets where I can actually do a lot of my best thinking cuz you're fully present. And I think the reason I've I've always been attracted to lifting weights in general, especially like heavier weights, is that
Speaker A
like it it's a forcing function for focus. Like if you have an amount of weight that if you drop it, you die. You you have to be present. And I think that that is why I've always loved trading so
Speaker A
much. Um, and so yeah, there's no like from an optimization perspective, it would make a lot more sense for me to record content during that time period because, you know, it's me doing it's modeling a behavior that I think a lot
Speaker A
of people would like. Um, I'm actually pretty good at it. Um, and it's me demonstrating expertise in something like all of these things are would be good for the brand. Um, I just don't because I honestly just enjoy it so
Speaker A
much. Um, maybe in the future I'll do like I'll peel off a couple days a month that I train and you know I'll have a camera there and whatnot, but I like it the way it is. So that's like an example
Speaker A
of uh being inefficient uh and that's purely for enjoyment on the um you know the relatability side. Yeah. But like I uh I get indigestion sometimes. I you know I I get pains and aches like everyone else does. I, you know, traffic hits me the
Speaker A
same as it does everybody else. Like, uh, yeah. I mean, is that I I don't know if that one was what you're looking for, but that's I live like like everyone else does. I mean, there are there are
Speaker A
daily inconveniences that have been removed to the degree that I can, but there are some things that I mean, maybe I should take a helicopter home. I don't know. It's still going to take me time to travel. Like, there there there's
Speaker A
something like it's it's alo like I don't really see it as like a negative.
Speaker A
Like I I'll give you a different example. Like when when when Leila and I were dating, uh I was driving. We were talking about something and I missed an exit and she was like, "Ah." You know, that was that was the exit. I was like,
Speaker A
"Great. We get more time to hang." You know, and so it's like, "Does it have to be a bad thing?" You know, these inconveniences that we deal with. I don't know.
Speaker A
Leila said before that when you two went out on your first date for frozen yogurt, her tattoo was visible on her back. Uh she implied maybe you weren't the biggest fan. Uh, I'm guessing you've been able to move past that.
Speaker A
We were married, so yeah. If you absolutely had to though, what tattoo would you get?
Speaker A
Oh, um, I don't know. There was one tattoo that I considered when I was 21, 22. Um, when I when I set the Maryland state record, junior state record for uh I think it was I can't I think it was I
Speaker A
think it was bench and squat, something like that. It's sad to even I don't remember which one which one it was.
Speaker A
It's googable. Um, I thought about getting like a USAPL uh the logo which is like a cool kind of like abstract half barbell uh like here. And then I just said, "All right, well, I'll give myself a year and if in one year I still
Speaker A
want it, I'll get it." And a year later, I didn't want it. So, I didn't get it.
Speaker A
And then that was pretty much like the end of my tattooism or like desire to have a tattoo.
Speaker A
Right. You once quoted Idris Alba. Yeah. Saying, "Men fall in love with what they see, women fall in love with what they hear, which is why women wear makeup, and men lie." Mhm.
Speaker A
What do you think makes a man feel addicted to a woman? Like, what's the one behavior that makes men fall in love with women that has nothing to do with looks?
Speaker A
So if we define respect as allowing someone to maintain their original function or basically you reinforce them for being who they are.
Speaker A
So like someone comes into your house, let's say you normally ask people to take their shoes off, but it's an old man. You show them respect by just saying like you're a good man. You show deference. she basically reinforced them
Speaker A
for doing what they're already doing, right? And so I think that um men in general, I think they've done surveys on this, but like more men would rather be respected than loved if they had to pick one. More women would rather be
Speaker A
loved than respected if they had to pick one. It's like 7030 either way. Um which is kind of interesting. And so I think that um it's not one thing, but it's more an outcome. It's more the set of
Speaker A
behaviors that show respect. Something you said as well on this uh if you want to add any part of it was you said was making him feel important as well is the number one love drug something like that. Um what are the
Speaker A
behaviors specifically that you would guess would be within and I see respect as a lot like that.
Speaker A
You know what I mean? Like if if if someone shows you difference like they're saying that your your ways of behaving supersede the rules of the establishment or the rules of your personal preferences. you basically take their preferences over yours which in a
Speaker A
different way of saying like they become more important right um but that is functionally what happens which is like someone comes in let's say they're retired after a day of work rather than like unload all your [ __ ] on them you
Speaker A
would allow them to maintain their current state and reinforce them for doing that what else can I get you like and again this is not like a subservient type thing it's more that like I think that that is what a lot of men crave now
Speaker A
to be clear I think you have to also earn from that. And so that's the that's the trade. I also think that there are times when cuz it this goes both ways, right? Like if you have unconditional love, I think you also need to have
Speaker A
unconditional respect. Now people get weird about that, but I think that like if we show up both ways, right? Now it would be less popular in current society to say like is there ever a time that a a a woman or man does not deserve love?
Speaker A
Now deserve becomes a hard word. It's like do we deserve it just because we live, because we breathe, because we exist? I don't know. Um I I maintain zero of these premises but I just say only that that if we take it to its
Speaker A
natural end it would look that way. Um I think that a lot of relationships do come down to um do you serve the other person and do you allow them to do you maximize the likelihood that they hit
Speaker A
their goals. So I see support as minimizing the likelihood of failure. So someone supports you which also means that it has nothing to do with intentions. someone who had bad intentions and support you. If they do things that it's like you like the
Speaker A
people who hate on you, right? If they tell their audiences that they spend all this time working for about you, a percentage greater than zero will find you and like you and so they promote you. What a gift, right? And so they
Speaker A
support you. They minimize your likelihood of failure. And so you just have all these people who just advertise you.
Speaker A
Yeah. for free, which is crazy. It's amazing. So, anyways, um if we see support as minimizing the likelihood of failure, um and from a behavioral perspective, like I think and I'll I'll just instead of saying most men, I'll just say me. Um
Speaker A
I value Ila as a woman and I value as a partner and I value and she has different behaviors that she does in both those settings because she's also my business partner. And so we have almost these parallel tracks and no one
Speaker A
really sees like our married life much at all. Um but our business life is just us being business partners and we have a very good cadence on how we you know communicate about business. Um and we have lanes where I'm like this is your
Speaker A
call like you know this better than I do and there's things that she's like this is obviously your call like what do you think and we might weigh in on each other on on a normal marriage setting.
Speaker A
Um I would say Leila and I have far more traditional gender roles. Um, and I think part of that is like both of us, you know, luckily came from same Middle Eastern background. And so, um, even though we're both born in the US, we're
Speaker A
both first generation. And so we've adopted a lot, I would say, like very traditional views from that perspective.
Speaker A
Um, and so it's, you know, it's a lot of small things. Like Ila still likes making me dinner. Like Ila still, you know, she'll, you know, rub my back. I'm stressed. she'll, you know, she'll, it's little things like she'll clear plates
Speaker A
or she'll just say like, "Hey, I'm on my way to whatever. Do you want a drink or something like it's just very small stuff um besides like taking care of all the details of everything besides that stuff?" Um, but I think above all else,
Speaker A
so this is your one thing. Um, I think every man, so now I'm going to go back to generalizing. I think every man wants a woman who believes in them even more than they believe in themselves.
Speaker A
And I think it's having someone who on your worst day is still like you [ __ ] got this. You know, it's like you're Jack [ __ ] Neil. You got this. And it's like if your wife, the person that
Speaker A
you care and respect. And the thing is is like this is where it's tough because I think there's a lot of men who are married to women they don't respect.
Speaker A
They love them, but they don't respect them. and and that's their prerogative. You can do whatever you want.
Speaker A
That type of statement means a lot less from somebody you don't respect. But when the person you are married to is somebody that you actually respect, when they say you [ __ ] got this, it means a lot more.
Speaker A
And so I think like I think at least Leila and I have a balance of love and respect both ways. And I think that it benefits both of us because it also goes back the other way where if I'm like
Speaker A
you're [ __ ] or Rosie, you got this. like I'm not worried at all. Right? And so I think that if we if we see marriage as a partnership, then it's do we have aligned goals? Because I think there
Speaker A
there are unpopular, you know, um let's take marriage out of it because there's a lot of taboos. Take a business partnership.
Speaker A
There's a lot of reasons that I think people wrongfully end business partnerships. There are a few that are the right reasons. One of them is that we'd want different things.
Speaker A
It's very hard to optimize a machine around two different outcomes. If one of you wants to go and change the world and the other one doesn't want to leave the house, you will both compromise and both be probably pretty miserable. Um, again,
Speaker A
that's a choice. You can do that. But I would say that would be a reason to I I went back to marriage, but like uh in a in a general business partnership, then that would be one where I'd say like
Speaker A
this probably this partnership shouldn't exist because we actually both are not supporting the other person's goals.
Speaker A
We're maximizing likely to failure. Um but if we have aligned outcomes that we want and then underneath of that we believe in this way of doing things these behaviors is how we want to achieve this outcome then the likelihood
Speaker A
of conflict is significantly lower and the likelihood that the person can support the other when they uh deviate from the pattern of behavior that we've said is the pattern that we want to espouse or that we want to live by. Then
Speaker A
you basically have two guard rails on the bowling ball going towards the pens. If you only have one person that's holding it up, you only have it on one side and then maybe it shoots off the other. But if both of you have a
Speaker A
guardrail and you have an outcome, all you got to do is roll the ball. And if the guardrails are tight enough, you knock them down every time. And I think that is what a good marriage looks like.
Speaker A
I I love all that. I I've heard you say bits of those things, but never all together. Uh so every guest gets to a point in my podcast where they won't tell the truth about something. There's a line they
Speaker A
won't cross. Here's my version of it for you. What's the one thing about money you believe that you've never said in a video?
Speaker A
I'm I I very much struggle to answer that question because I feel like I've scrubbed every surface of money that I've that I've that I've seen. You know what I mean? like how to store it, how to keep it, how to make it, how to
Speaker A
multiply it, how to get people to give it to you, how to give it to other people, you know, the the upsides of money, the downsides of money.
Speaker A
Like, and a lot of it is just cuz like money isn't even a thing.
Speaker A
Like, it's just it's just a a generalized means of exchange. Like, that's really it. And so I don't think there's like some deep dark secret of money like it's just a unit of measurement for us to store you
Speaker A
know to measure value. And that's why fundamentally like you don't even make money. You earn money by exchanging by giving value and getting and then getting money as a monetary exchange for you giving something and then them not
Speaker A
giving you anything back. So they have to give you money. Right? If you do something for someone else and they provide value back, you don't need to exchange money because hopefully the value was equal. If the value was
Speaker A
inequal, you have some value and the rest is made up with money. It's just the the way that we we we uh balance accounts more than anything.
Speaker A
But many of the talking heads that I see on the internet talking about money will use vague terminology and try to anthropomorphize money in terms of trying to make it human or some sort of amorphous thing or they'll add mysticism
Speaker A
to it or manifesting it or attracting it where there's energy. Money has a frequency. They make up all this stuff and I think it's because they cannot be clear with their language in observable terms and it is easier to confuse people
Speaker A
with rhetoric in terms of words that sound good when set together than the reality of what money really is. And so because they cannot be clear about giving instructions because they are not good enough to do it.
Speaker A
There's a quote that I was told a lot when I was younger, which is um I don't agree with it, but it was said by somebody that I don't I don't particularly enjoy. Um but the individual said um if you cannot in
Speaker A
impress them with your intelligence, confuse them with your [ __ ] And um I would say that like I would say I live my life in the exact opposite of that of of uh do not try to impress people with your
Speaker A
intelligence and also do not speak [ __ ] Just tell the truth. State the facts, tell the truth. It's the number one thing that we say in this marketing department above all else. But the thing is is that it's the whole truth. That's
Speaker A
the hard part. It's the It's all the way down. It's six layers down truth. How like how true can this be? Um I'll give you I'll give you a story to to illustrate this example. There was a guy who had a um he had a company that
Speaker A
taught people how to like trade stocks, which is like a little okay, day trading is probably not the and he's teaching day trading. And so um he he asked to meet and I was like I was very skeptical
Speaker A
of this conversation to begin with. He said hey I want to grow this business.
Speaker A
And I said you have a big flashing Vegas lights above your head which is if you're so good at trading why should I listen to you? And so he's like well I have $100 million in verified earnings from
Speaker A
trading. I was like okay this is by the way why I took my conversation. I was like okay that's fine. then why are you selling courses on it instead of just like going making trades? And he's like, "Well, I want to make I want to impact
Speaker A
people and I was like, no, you don't, dude. No, you don't. What do you like, please tell me the truth cuz I will be able to help you if you tell me the truth." This went back and forth for a
Speaker A
little bit until eventually he was like, I I couldn't sleep. I lost weight. The amount of stress that trading it ruined my life. I couldn't find anyone to date because I had to trade 24 hours a day and it just ruined my health and my dad
Speaker A
died at 50 and I just saw myself going down the same path and he's like I've made enough and I don't want to keep doing this as my main thing and I was like that's the truth. So in your
Speaker A
marketing you need to tell the whole truth which is you need to say that which is trading ruined my life. It's also the only thing I'm good at. And so if you want to make enough money to ruin
Speaker A
your life, I can show you at least how I did it. I can't promise it's going to happen for you. Um, and my hope is that you make enough that you stop doing this and you do something else. That is a
Speaker A
compelling marketing message. Is it believable? Much more. I would buy that cuz you believe it.
Speaker A
Yeah, because you believe it though. And so that's the thing is it's like people look for these angles in marketing, but like the the rarest stuff out there is the whole truth.
Speaker A
Yeah. Do you want to do something really hard you tell the whole thing the whole truth and that is what will make uh compelling advertising. So to the the whole the whole truth of money is more so that
Speaker A
people who lack skills around money make up words that sound good that mean nothing and confuse many people. And as a result, they take action on things that do not result in any money-making and are confused as to why it doesn't work
Speaker A
because their model of reality is flawed. And I would say that the vast majority of the content I put out there, the reason I define terms so aggressively before I make statements or before I answer a question, it's like, well, are
Speaker A
we agreeing on these terms is because unless we agree on terms, the reason every agreement that makes any sense, the first part of every legal agreement, which means that we have communication that has stakes is a recital of [ __ ]
Speaker A
definitions. What does territories mean? What does non-compete mean? What are like we have to define these terms. And so it's it's funny because like I was uh at a podcast the other day and they were like, "Well, what do you mean by that?"
Speaker A
And they like try to throw at me. I was like, "I will define anything that I say because I stand by the words that I'm saying. I choose these words for a reason." When someone asks a question and then I ask them,
Speaker A
"What do you mean by that?" And then they get flustered. I'm like, "Well, then you're asking me to answer a question for a word that you cannot define. So, how am I supposed to get you what you want if you don't even know
Speaker A
what you're asking?" I had an exchange recently with um with uh um someone in this company um that uh not that recently, but uh that they made a request that I speak to them um more more politely or kinder. And I said,
Speaker A
"I'm super happy to." what does that mean to you? And so it ended up being that they wanted me to put a prefix before I before I made statements. So it's like, could you just ask these as questions rather than as statements? And
Speaker A
I said, to be clear, if I do if I say it as a question instead of a statement, you will deem that kindness and and politeness has been has been checked.
Speaker A
They were like yes. I was like done. And literally as soon as I started doing that, they were thrilled to tears. I was thrilled to tears too cuz I want to communicate in the way that is your preference. If your preference doesn't
Speaker A
cost me anything to do, then I'm happy to to oblige. Right? But the thing is is that so many people use these words and these words are used every day.
Speaker A
Kindness politeness empathetic energy, you know what I mean? Vibe. Until we define what they mean, we're just making noise at each other assuming the other person knows when we don't even know.
Speaker A
When someone says, "I'll know when I see it." That just means that you haven't defined it yet.
Speaker A
If you want to see it more, tell them what you want to see. And that takes work because you have to think, "Oh man, Susan's so lazy." You're like, "What makes why is she lazy?" Like, "What did she do to cause you to
Speaker A
say that?" And then eventually it gets really down to like she's pretty slow on Slack to respond to [ __ ] Okay. Well, if you want Susan to not be a lazy Susan, um, then we just need to talk. Hey Susan,
Speaker A
just respond to Slack faster and people start stop think you're lazy. That's it. Great. It's just like when you drill down, it's like you can become clear with your communication. And so I would say that the vast majority of
Speaker A
communication around money. My attempt at all has been absolute truth and truth as I define it as an observable reality.
Speaker A
And I try to use only terms that I can say that I can see with my eyes so that other people can also see it with their eyes and do it with their hands and feet.
Speaker A
On our last podcast, I asked you what words you would leave to the world if all your work was erased from history.
Speaker A
Some people liked what you had to say. Uh, I'll change the premise. Alex, you regularly talk to the 85year-old version of yourself, Solomon.
Speaker A
The one who's already lived everything and is at the very end. This question is for him and the answer is for you and everyone else.
Speaker A
Solomon, what do you understand now that you couldn't see when you hadn't hit your number?
Speaker A
The easy answer to that question would be that, you know, it it wasn't worth it or, you know, you were going to accomplish it anyways because you're the person who is the accomplishment. Like those would be the I would say like the answers that
Speaker A
people would applause and be happy for. But for me like specific numbers did change my behavior. And so I would say outcomes accomplishments material success, it is meaningless if it changes nothing about your life.
Speaker A
If it changes your dayto-day, then there was a purpose for it. And I tend to try and define my goals almost exclusively by what will this change about my life?
Speaker A
And so if it doesn't change my life, then I likely won't make it a goal of mine.
Speaker A
And so right now I have I don't have a tremendous amount of insight on it because I'm actively in pursuit of the things that I've wanted and the things that I have achieved up to this point I also
Speaker A
wanted and in achieving them the things that I thought would happen have. And so I never set out on the journey that I have to somehow reach some magical nirvana. I never expected that.
Speaker A
And so that's not what's happened. Um I expected that I would become more useful and help more people as I gained more skills and leverage. And that's been true. Um and I'm good with it.
Speaker A
Um, and so I would say that I have not had a magical revelation. I would say it's been largely that the things that I hoped would be true came true.
Speaker A
Do you suspect 85-year-old Alex will care so much about being valuable? Uh, yes. I just think that value will change.
Speaker A
It's just that the way that I will be valuable might change. That said, typically um Arthur Brooks talks about this um where basically there's there's these two kind of mountains in life where the first you know mountain is
Speaker A
basically all based on fluid intelligence just like how how sharp are you? How good's your memory? Like and a lot of achievements in basically the the domains that require the most fluid intelligence is like mathematics. And so like after you're like 30 like no one
Speaker A
has ever gotten a Nobel Prize. That's like all of it is in teens and 20s which is like everyone's peak and after that they just go down. you just don't have the processing power.
Speaker A
H um and then there's these different career paths that like they peak later and later and later and the career path that has the latest peak that basically doesn't really have an end is historians. And so uh the people who
Speaker A
have the largest contexts of just pattern recognition and so you look at like the Warren Buffets and like they're they're studyers of huge amounts of data and they synthesize decisions, right?
Speaker A
And I would say that the role that I'm currently in and that I continue to move more in that direction of is is translating um things to the masses, which is pattern, teaching, explaining, breaking things down. And those are
Speaker A
skills that get better as you get older, not worse. And so I would see an 85-year-old version of myself as having more proof than I currently do, having more track record. Um, I would say that there's a like I'm I'm very open to change. Like I
Speaker A
think there's there's a lot of people will see snippets on the internet and make a caricature in their mind of what the rest of this person's reality is. And that's just the nature of the internet. It's short form and that's
Speaker A
fine. But as a result, I will get questions that are like this, which is basically to this caricature of me, which is not reality. Like I have very strong beliefs loosely held. If there's new information, I will change. If the
Speaker A
day my kid is born, I want to do nothing else but hang out with the kid. I will do that. Why? Cuz I can.
Speaker A
Like I optimized for freedom for a long period of time, which is like, how can I maximize my optionality? I do think that there are times when you choose to actively go against optionality in order to make commitments to have
Speaker A
dependencies, right? Like having a family removes optionality, but I don't see that as bad. It's a you want to like you want to have options, but not to always just have options. You want to be able to have options so that
Speaker A
you can select the option that you want. And so I think this is probably one of the big issues that this might be the most valuable piece of the podcast for young people. So let me just make this
Speaker A
point right now. I would say the youth of at least the western world is obsessed with the idea of independence, freedom and optionality.
Speaker A
They want to do it their way and have all options open. They never want to get tied down. They don't want to commit to a career. They don't want to commit to anything. And it's because like I don't
Speaker A
I don't know if something's going to change. But the optionality that we earn, it's like just making a ton of money but never spending it. If you die at the end of your life with a big pile of money, never having spent it, you
Speaker A
wasted your life. It's like the ant that saves for winter and saves its entire life but never actually eats this big breadcrumb and then they're gone. And so options are like money which is that the only time that they have value is when
Speaker A
they are spent, when they are used. And so in the short term you'll have those options but you need to like the part of growing up is making commitments which is eliminating alternatives which means you make you walk through oneway doors
Speaker A
knowing that you can't walk back and like I see that as a big sign of maturity as you've taken these steps because you've decided and decaderee right the loudness to cut off you cut off options because you say this is more
Speaker A
meaningful to me and it's because people are unwilling to make trades like all decision like there are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. So like you will sacrifice novelty for loyalty when you get married. That's a trade. And at some point it will be
Speaker A
worth it more for you to have loyalty than novelty in your life, right? Um and so there are many trades like this that we have to make. But the ultimate trade is the one that we don't make when you
Speaker A
basically get neither thing that you want because you sit on the sideline with your big stack of money, your big stack of options, never having them because some doors also do close because at a certain point you do lose options
Speaker A
by not committing. Right? If you were a girl and you want to wait for your options, if you're 60, the likelihood that you're going to be able to have kids is very low. If you didn't have kids by the time you're 60, I'm
Speaker A
using that as an extreme example here because I don't feel like dealing with it. Um, then you're probably not going to have kids and it's because that option is now gone for you. And so some options have an expiration date on them.
Speaker A
And so sometimes we just have to decide and realize that we will not get everything in life. And I think that is that is probably one of the biggest things of I would say like what has changed about me from a maturity
Speaker A
perspective is realizing that you cannot have it all. And like very viscerally like if you want a house that has a mountain view and is on the beach and is also secluded but walking distance from grocery stores and shops and shopping.
Speaker A
You can't because you can't be in the mountains and then also have the the the shopping malls and all that stuff and you can't be on the beach but also have the mountain view. It doesn't like these things these things sit separately. And
Speaker A
if you want to also have uh the beach but also have skiing like there there is no place that has those things. And so we want everything and are unwilling to sacrifice anything and as a result get nothing.
Speaker A
And I would say that's probably the biggest thing that has changed as I've gotten older is that I'm willing to make trades.
Speaker A
Beautiful. Um, well everyone, this has been your guest, Alex or Mosie. This is the Jack Neil podcast.
Speaker A
Where can people find you? The internet. Just search my name. You can find whatever you want. I've got books. You can read them. They're free.
Speaker A
If you want a hard copy, they're obviously not free, but the digital ones are free. Um, I've got lots of courses on my site, too. They're also free. You can just watch them. You don't have to opt in. Um, I've got full stuff on the
Speaker A
YouTubes and I've got a podcast of my own. You're welcome to check it out. The game.
Speaker A
Cool. Appreciate it. Beautiful. Thanks for having me.
Topics:Alex HormoziJack Neelfatherhoodparenting philosophychild developmentcouragenature vs nurturelife skillsfuture of workAI impact
