Whats happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dan Martell. Hes an entrepreneur, investor and an author. The saying money cant buy time is often used to emphasize the importance of not wasting your days. But what if there was actually a way to buy back your time? What if using your money well can actually liberate your life? Expect to learn what the bigger it gets, the harder it gets means in business why so many successful people suffer with more chaos rather than less as they grow. Dans framework for outsourcing. Discussing all the stuff you dont want to do in life, what the buyback principle is, what it means to run your family like a business, how to work out things that you need to let go of and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dan Martellite. The bigger it gets, the harder it gets. Is that a rule of business?

Most people would think so. I think that the truth is, if you do it right, that as you grow, the bigger it is, the more resource you have, and it should get easier. The way I think about it is I'm kind of on a mission to help entrepreneurs build companies they don't grow to hate because I have so many friends, people I've seen around that they're great creators, they're artists, they get a passion to solve the problem, that's for sure. But their own craziness, it's almost like the entrepreneurial crate. It takes a certain level of being crazy. That's why people call them crazy, because you're willing to do things that very few people are willing to do. You can hold a vision that most people can't see. The problem is, is that if you don't adjust, that version of you will be the Achilles heel to actually growing a business, you know, and oftentimes your Achilles heel to growing a business is the thing you're best at, because it's the thing that you're going to be most maniacal at. You won't, you won't allow, you won't allow anybody else to do. You don't know how to work through people.

Um, so it'll get you some level of success. But yeah, most people believe the bigger it gets, the harder it'll get. And because of that, they self sabotage to play small because it feels safe.

Your superpower, becoming your Achilles heel is something that I felt basically throughout my entire career in business. To give you my most obvious, ridiculous example of this, I ran one of the biggest events companies in the UK for about 15 years. And our first big weekly that we ran was a Saturday at a club called Riverside. Anyone that watched Geordie Shore, which was the UK equivalent of Jersey Shore, that was where they went every Saturday. And we were absolutely crushing. This was the hottest event in town, between 1000 and 1500 kids every weekend. And it was just churning out cash. Not insane money. You know, we maybe make five grand a week or something like that. Bottom line would be sort of two and a half to three. Something really, really great money. And I'm 2423-2425 phenomenal money between me and the other guys that ran the company. And we would need to set the club up, we'd need to hang inflatables from the ceiling, the smoke machine, the haze machine, the banners that go over the barriers outside. Just sort of getting the club built ready for this every Saturday for four years without missing a single Saturday for four years.

210, 208 Saturdays in a row. I built the club with my business partner. We could have paid any of the 400 students that worked for us, 400 there, and they would have happily done it for five or six pounds an hour. But I was adamant that nobody else could hang the inflatable in quite the right place that it needed to go, that what if this thing was missed off? This would be the beginning of the downfall of the business. Because if the smoke machine's five inches to the left, then asian society, he's going to stop coming to room two to watch r and B, and that's going to be the beginning of the end. I'm going to be homeless under a bridge. So for four years and the first weekend, I'll never forget the first weekend when I missed it was because I had such a bad stomach infection thing that it just ripped me out of it and I couldn't. And then sort of the veils fell from my eyes and I realized, why have I spent four years of Saturdays from 11:00 a.m. until two, sometimes three in the afternoon, when I could have been having fun, could have been working on the business, could have been doing anything, as opposed to just spending a bit of time training somebody up and, you know, 60 pounds a week to get someone else to do it.

It's one of those things because I had my equivalent experience on that. Just processing physical mail every Sunday, 4 hours, go get the mail from the PO box and just sit there and process mail.

What was the business?

It was a software company that sold enterprise and it was just like contracts, checks, like this old school. This is not 2004, 2005. And it was, you know, I remember reaching out to the CEO, because I just thought, I got to be doing this wrong. And he laughed. I said, who processes your mail? This guy ran like, $100 million insurance company. And he says, well, my assistant. Well, how do you know? What is that? And how do you find them? I just thought, like, that's not something people that start companies should have. In the early days, I had all these beliefs around it. But it's funny because it's also the reason you're successful, because there's, like, in a level of attention to detail that's required, that creates a product. Like, you obviously created a product. And I'm, I was a big, I have this, like, secret addiction to reality tv. So I'm very familiar with Geordie Shore, funny enough. Um, and, and then again, it's just at a certain point, maybe it would have been six months, not four years, you know, handing it off to somebody else could have been a better use of your time.

Even, just even energy. If you think about, like, just the amount of stuff people do they shouldn't be doing and how much headspace it takes with the energy, whereas they could be a lot more present with the people they're with or more creative. It robs, you know, distractions rob a lot of people from bigger visions.

Yeah. It's kind of embarrassing to realize there's something called path dependency, which you might be familiar with. So path dependency is also called the Einsteling effect, and it explains why we kind of get locked into particular modes of working. So, for instance, the QWERTY keyboard on laptops is a path dependency from the QWERTY keyboard on typewriters, where the most common letters would be out on the little fingers, and letters weren't close together, so it wouldn't fire two at the same time. There are other layouts for keyboards.

Yeah. My software programming friends use different ones because they're more efficient. Some of them actually have like four directions. It's like a touch and it's a direction.

Oh, so when you hit it, you can.

Yeah. So it's like, I think there's only ten buttons, but you push it in a direction.

Oh, my God. So you're never moving your finger away. Each finger has a button.

Ergonomically, it's like 160 words a minute.

So you've got this path dependency, and it's basically, you know, the entirety of the insight is the tools that got you here won't get you there. There's a lot, I think, that sort of correlates from your background to mine. I didn't grow up in a trailer park quite so much, but very much sort of super working class environment. The idea of leverage, the idea of outsourcing, you know, really was not a skill that was instilled into you from childhood. It's a type of physics that you have to learn when you're 28 and fold this into your worldview with your puritan work ethic guilt that you have over getting somebody else to do something.

That you could because you've been told the opposite your whole life. I mean, I don't know about you, but I was told by my dad or the people around me, if you want done something right, do it. Do it yourself.

Correct.

Right. And, you know, just like, all these money beliefs or outsourcing beliefs, or you just hear it all the time. Who does the real work? And, like, it's frowned upon to be somebody that doesn't do certain things. Like, you should be somebody that knows how to fix your car and take care of your stuff. It's like, till you just have so much you're trying to do that it's just physically impossible. I mean, like, I don't know. I just. Luckily, you know, 28, 30 years old, I realized that there's no way I can do what I want to do and possibly do it all. And that was like, so I'm sure, you know, naval ravicant and his stuff, that was, like, when I understood the kind of the high level concept of leverage, like, that was like, I've always been like, I was four hour workweek when it came out, you know, did. And that's what really inspired me to stop doing the mail. Right. I was like, okay, this is.

Thanks, Tim.

Yeah, yeah. That, you know, email, the autoresponder messages, all that crazy stuff. I mean, I picked some stuff up, left the rest. But naval taught me. I moved to Silicon Valley and started building tech companies there. It was just the idea of, if you think about it, there's only four ways to get leverage. There's the code side. So, software automation. I know that world. That's my world. So, you know, to the degree that you can automate a task that doesn't require any thinking, you never have to make that decision again. I mean, that spoke to me because of my software background. Like, I wrote code. That's the essence of it. Content. So, like, you've got documents, sops training, this, like, videos like this. So that was a kind of an interesting concept. I never really thought about it, but obviously, an SOP is the equivalent of writing code, but for a manual task, checklist. Then there was capital, which is the Silicon Valley, the valleys built on capital leverage. Raise a bunch of money, try to deploy it, and you're seeing, even with your product, like, it's. It takes money to make money for certain categories that have, you know, raw materials that have to be turned into finished goods.

So, like, then the last one was collaboration, which really took me a while to figure out, how do I work with other people? Like, I just had a hard time letting go. I would get anxious. I would get nervous. I'd be worried this person is going to cost me my money. And sometimes it did. Like, there was situations where, like, I was on the hook for somebody else's behavior. So those four paths of leverage occurred to me that if I could study them, work at them, like, those were, like, the four master skills. I call it. Like, if I just get really good at these four things, then to the degree I'm good at those, then really, I shouldn't have any constraints in anything I want to create. And that was, like, probably one of the best things I ever learned from naval, amongst many other things. But it was like, it was huge.

Well, given that most people intend on buying back their time when they become wealthier and more successful, why is it the case that so many successful and wealthy people suffer with more busyness and chaos rather than less as they keep on growing?

I mean, my experience was, I was so scared my first company, that finally, I just started young. I was 17, I think, when I started first company. And there's always, like, the projects, how many domains you own, let's put those aside. But corporations. So I went through two failed companies, 17 and 19, that left a scar. And it wasn't until I was 23 I decided, I'm going to do this again, try something different. And in the first year, finally got traction. Like, did, like, 900 and some thousand in year one, which is, like, blew my mind. The problem was, I didn't know why I was successful, so I was running around spinning plates, and I only had one tool, which is essentially work my butt off. Like, when I say 100 hours a week, there was no. There was no leisure, there was no travel. There was nothing. It was, I don't want this to implode yet again. I don't actually know why it's working. And I'm just. I'm gonna keep doing what I. Terrified of failure. Like, more like, so terrified.

Like, well, you become so. I have never understood the sentence, people aren't scared of failure, they're scared of success. Until I heard you say the reason that people are scared of success is that they have a higher point to fall from now.

Yeah.

You go, okay, so it's still failure. It's just failure from a higher altitude.

Yeah. A perceived failure of attainment of something. It's either where I'm at and I fall down or. And really it's. I'm, I'm not, I'm not scared of winning. I'm scared of what I'd have to get. I'm scared of having to renegotiate the new standards at that level with everybody in my life. Because that's what happens with success, is that you start worrying about, like, it's like if you lose weight, like, most people don't even want to lose weight because then they got to keep it off because if they put it back on, then they fail. So it's easier to just maintain what they got. Like, I don't want 10 million. And, like, what's funny is the language they use, they actually, like, pooh pooh. It, they like, it's not about this stuff. You know, it's like, I'm not a car guy. I hear all this stuff and I'm like, no, it's actually a lot of fun driving around in a fun car. So don't say it's not. You're not a car guy. You're telling yourself these stories so you don't have to attain. Because if you do, then you're going to have to ask yourself, like, what's this new level of responsibility?

What's funny is that most people, when they start, and I know this is true for me, when I started, the mental model I had about success was actually a lot. I was way more driven. It's when I got up the mountain and I was halfway and I had something to lose. Now I started getting scared and acting out of, you know, trying to protect. So I call that the big dog syndrome. When you become the big dog amongst your peer group, it feels good, but you're, but you, but, you know, inside you're just not there. And honestly, I want to say this about your pod. Like, what I love about what you've created is you continue to push. Like, you push, dude. Like, it's just, it's really cool from outside watching because I'm like, oh, no, this is a guy that cares about the craft of. And there's no, like, if anything, every resource you get, you're like, how do I pour it back in? How do. And I think that's. I didn't have that. When I started, it was something that I think I had to develop to respond to some of my desires and honestly do the work and be honest with myself.

But, yeah, I think. I think everything, it's like, you know, pain of fear, and then there's, you know, if you're lucky, you. You get to a place where you get pulled forward from a desire to do something bigger, and that's a different energy. Right. There's a dark energy of, like, moving away from pain, and then there's a light energy of moving towards some level of creating something that's never been created before.

Yeah. I think if you don't ever learn to let go of that fear of failure, as you become more successful, the fear grows rather than diminishes because of that.

It's a dirty energy.

Yeah. That higher altitude that you fall from. Okay, so getting into the buyback, your time and the buyback principle, it seems to me that there's going to be broadly two groups of people that this applies to. The first one is going to be aspiring little bit of disposable income within the business professionals, and then somebody, another group who maybe don't have the entrepreneurial side but have got a little bit of disposable income within their personal lives and are just wanting to sort of free themselves up for that. Take me through the buyback principle, how this works for someone that's never been introduced to it.

Yeah. So the concept that I learned to, that helped me get to this place is calendar over capacity. So, and it sounds so subtle, but the mistake to make is to add people to your life that can do what you already do, because then it costs money and you didn't actually get an ROI. So I always look at my calendar, I don't add capacity. So, like, if I was a logo designer and I was overwhelmed, most of them would go hire another logo designer. But what you should do is figure out the other stuff that isn't logo designing. Have somebody take that off your plate so that you could do logo design, because that's what you get paid the most, money. The buyback principle states you don't hire people to grow your business. You grow your business by buying back your time. Because if I buy back my time, then I can go do the thing that is the Achilles heel or the friction point or the bottleneck of why I'm not growing. And if you do that, that's where you can build a business you don't grow to hate, because as you grow, you have more freedom.

And it's kind of bananas because when people see it and it doesn't even take money. So, like, how do I get somebody else to help me with something? It could be an intern, right? It could be a friend. You can literally ask friends. Like you said, you could ask one of the 400 students. And the whole premise is, look at your calendar for the past two weeks and just ask yourself, where have I been doing tasks that are not things I enjoy doing? Okay. I call them energy suckers that I could have paid somebody at least a quarter of what my hours worth. Okay? So a quarter or less to do. And the reality is, if you're doing anything on that list, you're working against your dreams. Like, it's. This is, this is mathematical equations. If your. If value creation in the world is what value create within a unit of time, and let's call it an hour, then your ability to create value in that hour is the. The most, the most important thing. So you should not be doing anything for $8 an hour. Setting up the design thing when closing another or getting another contract to go promote another show could bring you, on average, $100 an hour for your effort.

Like, it's just bad math. And that's why, like, my background in software really kind of made me think about, like, what's the first principles to leverage, right. All those four master skills. Okay, cool. But how do I translate that into some kind of equation that I can kind of run through this loop? So the buyback loop, I run through it all the time.

What is the loop?

The loop is as soon as you feel pain. Okay? So I always say that most entrepreneurs hit a place where they hit a pain line, okay. Where their opportunity, they could say yes, but saying yes would create chaos in their calendar. And guys like us, that's every day. We are not at the mercy of not enough opportunity. Some people are. That's not us. And what you want to do is that when you accidentally get to a place where you have that pain, then you have to go to the audit. So it's audit transfer fill. So, audit stands for looking at my calendar two week window and literally printing it off. If you're diligent in putting stuff in your account, it's a lot easier. But if you're not, that's cool. And you just highlight in red things that take your energy and dollar sign. One to four. $1 sign is very inexpensive. $4 sign saying, paying somebody to do what you do, and then you take all the reds and all the $1 sign stuff, and you put them in a bucket. And that is the only person you should hire next. And if you don't, you're literally making it hard on yourself.

So I always, when people see me scale companies fast, they go, how did you do that? Well, I just, I followed that principle. Now, as you get bigger, now, all of a sudden you're outsourcing more complex skills. But that is actually the, that's the skill to learn. How do you hire a creative director? How do you hire general manager? How do you hire vp of sales? Like, these are, you know, it's easy to hire an administrative assistant, and even some people have a hard time with that one. But, like, learning how to build the machine that runs a machine is what I call it. And that is where, you know, some people say, work on the business versus in the business. I always use my calendar because I want to, I want to literally audit, then transfer. So the way I transfer is video cameras. I literally record myself doing the thing. So, for example, I do triathlons. I have a lot. I got one of these fancy bikes, I got two bikes, my road bike and my TT bike. And they have like computer chips and all this stuff and can't, like, all the Garmin devices.

And it's actually like a pain in the butt to make the maintenance of it. So I had my assistant did a video of me doing it. Here's how to do the chain, here's how I plug the machines in. It has to be done on this cycle. I just recorded myself for like twelve minutes and then messaged them. That video. They created the Sop for the bike maintenance. They followed the bike maintenance, and then if there's any tweaks, I put it in the document. But it's got a training video and it's got a document. So I call that the camcorder method. That's the transfer side. So how do I take something in my calendar I don't want to do? No, no longer transfer it. And then, Phil, this is the part most people get wrong. Most people hire folks before they know what they're going to do with that new time. So then they feel lazy, then they feel guilty, so they hire an assistant, and all of a sudden they have 10 hours back and they just, they watch Netflix, they chill out, they go to the friends. That's not what I'm talking. I want to help people build empires.

Like, the subtitle of my book is build your empire. And for me, an empire is a life of unlimited creation. You never have to retire from. Like, I really want to encourage every creator in the world, every entrepreneur, every artist, get to a place where, as you think, to create, you have the resources to create, and the constraint is a byproduct of your creativity. And the failed part is asking yourself, well, who do I need to become? So if I'm one hundred k a year and I want to make half a million, well, what are the skills you got to acquire? What are the character traits you have to acquire? What are the what? What? How do I look at the world? Dude? Most of it's beliefs, right? It's the money beliefs. For me. I had to, like, work in the early days of, like, valuing my time. My self worth was almost zero when I started off. The reason why I worked 100 hours a week is because I didn't value me.

But you want to prove to yourself that you're not a piece of shit. All of it.

I'm not enough.

The subtext that you've been taught from every working class person ever is your value that you add to the world is not your output. It is how hard you work. And if I were, that's the fundamental problem with leverage. You don't understand that you can multiply inputs over outcomes.

Yep. But it's not about effort, because if it was, if it was hard, if it was about working hard, I would have made a lot of money when I was putting roofs on houses.

Yeah. Mark Groves says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. That's leverage.

It's beautiful. So that was the beliefs, the traits I had to develop. And that's the Phil part. And if you don't do that, you don't actually complete the loop. So some people are really good at auditing their calendar, hiring people, transferring the stuff to them, but then they don't know what they need to do. So they don't evolve, they don't become better, and they literally oscillate.

What do they do? What do the people who fail at f do?

They do a lot of stuff. Some of them take time off because they've been burning the candle at both ends. Some of them have vices that they don't even realize are taking them away from becoming better. I call them the five time assassins. They, you know, they get working in the business again. They just kind of move around. It's like a.

Like that bits being filled. Some website design or something.

Yeah, yeah. They launch a new project. They self sabotage hand grenades. It's like, why? Yeah, why do you need a new website? You just did it 16 months ago. There's like, I don't know, it could be better. It's like, yeah, it could be. But is that the right problem to solve? So they get. That's why I say distractions has been the biggest destroyer of wealth, because they just, they. Because the fallacies, they think they're actually being productive because they're working. That's why the whole, like, when people say hustle, I know what they mean. I just don't agree with them because their version of hustle is working a lot. My version of hustle is doing things that scare me. So if you're hustling, it means you're inherently doing something, ideally for the first time, a little anxiety, right? I think you should choose goals to grow you. Like, I. When I look at opportunity, one of the big filters for which direction I go is, will this teach me some new skills? Will this push me outside of my comfort zone? Whereas most people, their hustle list is literally stuff they know how to do, and there's nothing hard about it.

It's just a lot of time.

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That's nomatic.com modernwisdom. It's interesting, you made a passing comment just before about how the only constraint to what you put out into the world is your own supply of creativity, essentially. That's so antithetical, I think, to how most people experience life that they have all of these things and ideas, and sure, probably 80, 95% of them are bullshit and not going to work, but they don't even have the opportunity to stress test whether they are bullshit or not because they haven't got the ability to deploy it. And a lot of this may be. I think I would have found this conversation quite triggering ten years ago. I think that this would have activated inside of me a very puritan working class mindset. I would have really felt like, oh, this is sort of luxurious, chattering class bourgeoisie. It must be nice. I would have felt. I think some of that come up. I would have also felt, no, these guys don't understand. I work harder than them, and that's not true. I definitely work harder than I did ten years ago. But also, I don't think that that's why people are here. We're not here to work as hard as possible on tasks that we've done a thousand times before.

That doesn't sound fun or cool. And I think it is a fallacy to believe that you can't make running a difficult, complex business fun. I'm yet to prove it to myself that it's true, but I know enough people that have made it work. But, yeah, just to think that you have all of these ideas, these dreams, these goals, the sort of creativity, deployment, and you don't have the resources to be able to channel that down. You're just throwing away stuff that presumably would fire you up. That would be really interesting to do. Great opportunity either for revenue or for life or just for memory dividend in Bill Perkins language, so you can look back and think, remember when we did that? Made a little bit of money or maybe even sort of netted a little bit of a loss. But, God, it was cool. It felt so good to do that. And if you don't free up that additional capacity to take ideas into reality.

Yeah, you're on the hamster wheel.

Yeah. You're just throwing them away and someone else will do them.

I love. I love what you said. Bill's book is one of my favorite. It's like a companion book to be. Yeah, I want teach people how to go be rich so they can then die with zero. Um, but I would have, you know, it's fine. I would have had the same response 15 years ago.

How. What would your advice be to the. That person to me or you 15 years ago, who, you know, they have that sort of antibody immune reaction to this. This odd guilt coming from somewhere you're not good enough.

I would literally tell me, Dan, you can have it all. You're not good enough. Comma.

Yet. What do you mean by that? Dig into that.

I'd have to tell myself. I'd have to jolt myself out of it, because I would be in the delusion that the harder I work, the better my life's going to be. The goals are going to happen. And unfortunately, I would just. I would be. And I know what I was selling myself, selling this pipe dream that someday, like, I used. I was engaged to a woman, and I worked my butt off to create a future for us that she never asked for. And she left because of your absence, 100%. I was so selfish. Told myself a story.

What was it actually for if it wasn't for her?

To the not enoughness to prove to yourself.

Validation earlier.

Yeah. I mean, that's. Again, that's just the dark energy we, most young men start with that we're trying to prove ourselves to our parents or dads or whoever. And, you know, recently I was on a hike with one of my friends, and, you know, he. I think he was doing like 3 million in revenue. He wanted to get to ten. And he's like, you know, he has young family. He's like, I'd love to do it. I know how I could do it. I want to do it. I think to myself, well, if I go on the journey to try to get to ten, to then have the freedom to spend time with my kids, I could actually. But I have the time now. I don't want to give it up. When I said, oh, no, that's not true. He goes, what do you mean? I said, dude, I love you, man, but I'm going to tell you, you're just not good enough. You can 100% go for ten and have more time for your kids. He's like, what? How? I said, dude, you're. You see me do it every day. Like, you're my buddy. You stay at my house.

You see my friends. Like, this is. You're. You're watching me operate. Just look at the difference between how you are literally addicted to your phone. You. You have to be involved in everything. You can't. There's no strategy. Everything's from the hip. It's like daily. Like, I literally sit there, and again, I'm a lighthouse, not a tugboat. I will sit back and let him do that. He's still one of my best friends. But don't tell me you want to do something and then you can't because of this thing. When the truth. And if you admit, like, I'm just not good enough, then cool, then hopefully you decide, how do I get better?

Good enough.

You just don't have the skill yet to do that. So you say, well, I don't want to do. If I have to go to ten, I'm going to give up my time. No, you don't. You just suck.

What does suck mean? And what does suck means?

You don't understand leverage. You don't understand how to let go. You don't understand how to create a system.

One of the component parts of that, that's this.

It is the audit transfer, Phil. You don't know how to look at your time. You don't value it. I mean, even the idea, one of the things I like to share with people is the concept that people don't buy your presence, they buy your standard. Like, if you build a business that delivers value, the person is buying the problem to the, or the solution to the problem. And if you built the machine that solves that problem, they don't care if you're there. They want the problem solved at the highest level. So, for example, the guy that was the owner of the bike store, I used to bring my bikes to. Used to bring my bikes to. Man, I probably spent 50 grand on fricking bikes that I push around my. They weren't even e bikes. These are these stupid, like, carbon thingamajigs. And all I wanted was the thing to be done when you said it would be done, or to show up when you said it would show up or what, like. And instead he had this belief that if I'm the guy that meets Chris at the front door and, hey, Chris, how's the family?

Da da da. That was business. So I just wanted him to run the company.

I think that I learned a particularly bad lesson in this from running nightclubs. And this is, I guess, where changing standards internally within a company, changing expectations with partners and stuff like that, very difficult when it's with partners and outside stakeholders or whatever, because you don't get to control their interpretation. But, for instance, I've stood on the front door of about 1000 club nights in my career. That's from nine to eleven ish until two to three in the morning, and then you cash the till. But the reason that we stood there, the reason that we couldn't just outsource this to the boys, was 50% that we needed to be able to see what was going on to kind of keep a. That's the moneymaker, right? That really is our skillset. Our skillset is building, designing brands, putting a team together, and then just making sure that the operation on an evening goes well because it's experiential. But it wasn't an unbelievable sort of skill. We could have got someone else in. They could have had some sort of sop for writing a report. The real reason that we stood in the front door is that if it's November and it's pissing rain in Newcastle and the manager of the venue stood there, you stand next to him, he's miserable, so you're miserable too.

And you fucking stand there and you stand there until two in the morning and then you go upstairs and you cash the till with him. And it was this sort of very obvious symbol of I am invested in this event, I am working hard. And that, I guess, reinforced to me that there is kind of this like peacocking pride.

Some people call it pride.

I think it was. It's kind of like a very costly signal of commitment. That's what you were doing. You were saying, hey, I almost know that this is fucking pointless, but this is how much I care. And we could see, we would know from other events, other companies around town, if one of the guys, one of the owners like us, stopped showing up on the front door and consistently did that for maybe sort of two or three months, we go, that's. That event's going to fall off a cliff because the manager's relationship with the events company owner is so important. All of the fucking contracts are made of toilet paper in any case. So someone could slip stream in and say, it's been a little while since Jerome's been stood in the front door. Are you a little bit worried? Do you think he's really committed? Oh, well, we have had numbers down a little bit over the last couple of months. So you were there as this sort of weird buffer that was built into stuff and that resulted in me spending, you know, ten, between 5000, 10,000 hours of my life stood on the front door of nightclubs throughout my twenties.

It's one of those things where, you know, I always go back to, is there a business like mine where somebody owns it and they don't operate it? That's. I always go to first principles, like, doesn't matter what kind of company I'm in. Is there a business like mine in the world where there is an owner who doesn't operate in the business? It's very rare that I say that I hear no, like, there is one, right? It doesn't matter if it's like, people say you can't make money in restaurants.

Fucking tons that do.

They just do. So. So then the question should go to, how do they do things differently? So even the idea of having somebody step in on your behalf. So, in my camcorder method, one of the philosophies is, what are the five criterias that you've taught somebody to look for that after they're done? The thing that you could prompt other people to give feedback on as a sensor on how well it did. So I have sensors set up in my companies that report up so that there's thresholds just like you would do for a production line where it's like red, green, yellow, and unless it goes to yellow, red, I don't need to know about it. Right. So you could ask yourself, for example, in your situation, what would some of those numbers be? Would it be attendance over time? Would it be some level text message, hey, how was the night? You know, feedback.

One out of five customer complaints.

Exactly. So. So then, because this is the part that broke my heart the first time I realized it, you may have somebody on your team that are going to get better numbers than you. And ill tell you, man, just even recently, I have a company Im involved in that coaches software, CEO's biggest in the world, and I hired a CEO to run it. It was actually in Austin in February. I came here and I transitioned, I guess, from the guy to the talent or whatever, and he asked me not to come to 98% of everything and just do a 45 minutes q and a. And I went. I did my q and a, and then they did the NP's score at the end of the event. Net promoter score, which is like a customer satisfaction score, and it was the highest we'd ever gotten. That one hurt because, I mean, essentially, the business in many was an extension of who I am. I was part proud, but I'm not gonna lie, man, it really hurt. I was like. And then it made me question, where else in my business life am I bottlenecking the team?

How can people who say, okay, Dan, I trust that you're not lying to me. I believe that I can overcome my puritan work ethic from my working class background, but I've got this existential connection to being the guy. I have this sort of need to feel needed and to contribute and stuff like that. How can people learn to relinquish some of that existential guilt?

It's beautiful because I actually want them to lean into it. So I love that people have that. If you didn't you're gonna fail in business. So let's just start that. So like they've got the right desire. It's just their approach is wrong. So like most people that are like that, they hire people and they wanna see the person succeed so they jump in and help them out. Well you just hired somebody and then did the job for them so you didn't actually buy back any time. So how about instead for example one of my philosophy is we train, we don't tell. So if I see something that somebody's doing wrong, if I outsource something or if I give somebody else accountability for something, I just say, hey, I used to do this, I no longer do it. You now own it. There's clear ownership. Anytime I see a defect in their work, it didn't get done the way I would have loved to or I would have done it. You write it down and you train them. Why would you do it that way? Well that way I record the training so then the next person, if somebody else doesn't work out, they get that training.

So most CEO's, this is fascinating to me and I got to get the stats around this. Most people spend more time training customers than they ever do training their own internal team. And I mean like training like sitting down and saying like heres a great example. I was coaching a CEO and he was pissed off at his team. Most CEO's are and id say can you make a list of everything that frustrates you about your team right now? Hes like yeah easy. I said cool, lets write him down. And they had toph, they dont ideate with me in meetings. Theyre quiet, they dont care as much as me. I was like well try to be a little bit more specific. It was a bunch of stuff from like oh they forget steps. Da da da da da. All right cool so you got a list. There's like 13 things. I said cool. Rank order it based on the thing that would make you the most money in your business. So like whatever the value metric is. Like what rank order? Like if this was solved this would make me the most money and impacts the most people on your team.

So like they don't know how to do email. That was probably everybody in your company that would be and I'm not sure that make you the most money but let's say it's customer service or something. Then I want you to ask yourself where in your company have you trained your people to do that? And he goes ah I get it. Said dude, leadership is building leaders you build the people. The people build the business, buddy. Like, this is, again, when I say to my friend, you're not good enough. That's what I mean. As a leader, I love the evidence of desire to, like, you know, roll up your sleeves, late nights, do the work. Awesome. But also, before you do that, ask yourself, is this building the machine that runs the machine? Because, like, for example, I had a revenue leader and his job was to hire somebody to replace them. And it was like, delayed, delayed, delayed. And I asked him why. So I'm too busy coaching the team. I said, how many hours you spend coaching your sales team? He's like, oh, probably 15 hours last week. I said, well, this is the thing, man.

Every hour you do that and not the thing, you're actually not building the machine. So you're working against our goals, your goals, your desires, because you want to roll up into a revenue officer, like, and he's like, oh, I go. And it's so subtle because, like, that he, of course, he felt like he was doing the right thing, but he wasn't because he didn't understand the problem to solve was, I need to hire a leader to build a machine to make those people's coaching his problem so I can move up and take care of the bigger picture. So I love the desire. I just think the execution of the response is flawed.

Yeah. And it's. It's so difficult to let go of because that hard work mentality is what got you there. Bore fruits in the past 100%. You're letting go of a strategy that is proven to work, to try and do a new strategy with a new person that is not proven to work, and it's just existential pain over and over and over. I'm terrified that this is going to go wrong, terrified that it's going to mess up. It's not going to be as good as me. They don't care as much as me. They haven't got the same.

They could cost me my business. These are real things. And I get where it comes from. The fear of, like, they could embarrass me. They could cost me money. They could cost me the whole thing. I get that. I had a guy one time, he was working on site with a client. We were deploying some software. Friday afternoon, he made friends with another guy in the office, and him and that person had some choice words to describe the manager and what they were planning on doing on the weekend. It involved some white stuff.

Good.

Gets picked up by the firewall, sent to the CTO, kicked back to the manager. They read the chat logs. I get a call. They're not only are they not moving forward, they're going to sue me because not moving forward costs, delays in their business, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think I was like, twelve employees. I was just like, I can't believe my whole company is going to go down because of one fricking dude. So luckily I got some good advice from mentor. This is crazy. I'm in Canada. This customer is in New Jersey. He says Sunday, he goes, if you want to show the customer, the client that you're serious, you get on a plane, you'd be there before they show up. I was so nervous. I'm 25, 26, suit and tie, get on the plane. And luckily they still kicked us off. Didn't buy the software, but they decided not to sue us. But again, that was the pain that made me go, okay, they buy my standards, not my presence. How do I instill a standard?

What did I do on the Internet? Log?

Yeah, like, but I hired the guy and I knew he was a little wild, but he was really technically brilliant. But I also know the first time I ever met him, I looked at him, I go, that guy's a guy that likes to party. Like, the reason he loved doing what he did is cause he liked traveling, getting paid to do it, and every weekend was like, how can I replicate Vegas? Kind of situation? So again, I think that's the big idea, my buddy, in regards to the conflict, my friend Sam said, he goes, what did he say the other day was so good? He goes, if you're not contradicting yourself, you're not growing fast enough. What got you here won't get you there. You have beliefs that you had when you started, that you have to redesign because they're just not going to support the future.

That's an interesting point. It's an interesting pivot on, if you're not embarrassed by the previous version of yourself, then you're not growing quickly enough. But if you're not contradicting yourself is another interesting one. And it gets to something I've been thinking about a good bit recently. Sam Ovens, who used to.

I've known Sam for. Yeah, he did some software stuff back in the king.

He's a king and he's crushing it with school now, seems like. I mean, I think he interviewed 400 people for that CTO role. Anyway, I was away with him last year and I asked him, why did you stop making for the people that don't know Sam used to kind of.

Be a, he was like the OG online info guy. He taught all the early guys, correct?

Yeah, he's like a real sort of God up there. So the Russell Brunson of the world, but more front facing, less Mormon. And I asked him, why did you stop making content? He said, I'd begun to feel like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public. And that's what's interesting about the contradicting yourself that a lot of the time we plan to stake in the ground. I've done that. I've done that before with the boys. I've said, you know, the guys that used to work for us, the managers, I'm like, hey, look, be on time. I was on time. I'm freezing my tits off. Stood in the front door. So you freeze your tits off. Stood on the front door. But if I'm going to be prepared to evolve through this, I need to go back and go. You know when I said that I stand on the front door, guess what? I don't stand on the front door anymore, but you still have to. So there is this. Yeah, you sort of create these odd standards for yourself when another thing as well is at the beginning of your business.

Just rolling up your sleeves, spitting sawdust is the way to go because there's no one else to do it and you don't have enough fucking spare capital. Yeah, yeah. So it is the right way. Okay. I really like this sort of framework, and I think it's important for us to get people across the line with this philosophically first, before getting into the.

Tactics, the mindset and beliefs first, and then they'll do the thing.

I think so. So hopefully we've managed to erode some of the blockages that people may have had. I really want to get, like, just super duper, duper tactical. Just before we even get to that, the pain line that you mentioned there, what are the warning indicators that you have crossed the pain line threshold?

I mean, it's everything from being on your phone the whole time you're on vacation, having your partner in life upset at you all the time for being delayed. I mean, I did it all. So I'm just kind of like, what else did I do? It's, you know, even, even, like, I think ten years ago I decided to take on a new project and I didn't talk to my wife and I all of a sudden I was doing calls at 08:00 and we had kids and she's like, what are you doing? Like, you. You've you hadn't done this in years.

Oh, I started a new thing, and.

I never talked to her about it. And, like, so, like, over the years, I've just like, oh, that's. That's a symptom. Um, not having space to think. Not having space for yourself. I think a lot of people, again, they don't. There's no self worth, so they'll start sacrificing the workout, sacrificing the routine, sacrificing the resets, the recharges.

Oh, this is noble.

Yeah. This is what builders do. They're dying on the sword. And it's like, no, you just suck. Like, it's actually not the way to do it.

You're just.

You just don't know how. Because I can show you. I can. I wrote about it. I can introduce you to people. And Richard Branson is a big inspiration for me, watching this guy, like, literally just live life and also run billion dollar companies. So it's possible you just need to learn the skill set. Um, but the symptoms are just overwhelmed, but. And physically, dude, I work with a lot of people. I talk about my book. One of my clients, Stuart, he had, like, um, got shingles. Like, even physical response. Have you ever gotten shingles?

No. What is it?

Shingles. I got him once. I had this. This. This spot on my back. It was, like, red and kind of patchy, and it hurt when I touched it. And I went to my doctor, Aaron, and said, uh, I got this thing, and he showed it to me. He goes, oh. He goes, what's going? He goes, you stressed out of. I said, nah, man. Things are awesome, you know? He goes, what's. What's going on in your life? I said, well, just closed a new round for my company. So close. About a million and a half bucks. Oh, we're having a baby. My wife's pregnant. Just found out. And, oh, we decided to move back to Canada. And he goes, one sec, he leaves, he goes, gets this. This pill box or whatever, and then he goes and he pulls up Google and he types and he goes, this is what it was about to look like, shingles. It's attached to your nervous system, and it literally is your body's response to stress. And so there's physical, uh, adrenal fatigue. Some people have that. If you've never felt that, it's literally like you're drunk all the time or hungover.

Sorry. You're hungover all the time, but you can't. It's like you don't know why. Um, anxiety attacks that's a big one that a lot of the women typically have. I mean, so there's as much as, like, I used to be the guy that was like, positive mental attitude mindset put, like, can deal, lean in harder. Oh, man. I, to give it to me, not like I'd, I literally would say to myself, I'd rather die. I'd rather, like, give it. I'm not gonna stop. I'd rather die. So. So either the world gets easier, or I'm gonna just die. And that's at least I figure out where my edges are. So I just think if anybody feels that, that's the pain line where. And really it's just asking yourself, if you tripled your business over the next three months, what would break? Because most people, they couldn't even absorb opportunity because of the way they built it.

So saying no to things, that should be yeses because there's just no spare capacity for you or the team or whatever.

Yeah. That email from a friend that wants to make an intro to the guy that could probably add a zero to your revenue. And you, it's. You don't even know you're doing this. You just slow, you put, you start unstuck, you know what I mean? Then one day after the gym on a Saturday afternoon, you're sitting down to do image, you're feeling good about yourself, and you reply two weeks later and the person's like, yeah, we already went a different direction. It's so subtle that most people wouldn't even know they're doing it.

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That's drinklmnt.com modernwisdom. Okay, so what are the principles here? Someone has realized that they've crossed the pain line. They're in that threshold. They're saying no to things that they should be saying yes to. They don't have time to think. Maybe they're feeling more stressed. And let's get tactical.

Like, I just love it. I can go to the extreme. So the extreme where I live is I don't do anything that I don't love. To do that requires my unique skill set or spend time with people I love. That's like, I. When I say I don't do anything, I'm talking about I don't put gas in my car. I don't pack my bags when I travel. I don't like, it's obnoxious. People, if you want to talk about luxury vibes and beliefs, I'll piss you off.

I think you and Bill Perkins would compete with each other.

Yeah, no, that's why I love Bill stuff. Message each other on Instagram, and I've reached out to him to do something, and he's like, I'd love to do it, but reach out to me closer to the date, because I don't schedule. Because I wrote, I don't know where.

He'S going to be.

He literally said, I wrote a book about it.

So I'm fucking Dan. Bilzerian is the same, man. I try and schedule that guy in, and he's like, when is it? And I'm like, three weeks. And he goes, I don't know what I'm doing in three weeks. I'm like, bro, it's three weeks away.

Yeah, it's API. I call them API. It's the software. It's an API. It's the interface. So what you see with these people is they say, here's my interface, and connect into it, but I don't change my process for the external world. So that's on the extreme. On the entry level is simple stuff. Like, you know, not running so many errands. Like, it sounds subtle, but, like, using apps to bring stuff to you, like.

A postmates, an Uber eats everything.

Yeah. Like, just understand what your value of.

Your time is whole foods through Amazon prime.

Yeah. And it requires a little bit of planning, I would say. You know, meal prep could be one. If you spend a lot of time on meal prep and you want to have your fitness on cleaning, that's a big one, right? I mean, at one time, literally. So I had a co founder in one of my companies, Ethan, and we had just gone through a major, like, setback. And I call him up, and I'm like, it's Saturday morning. We got to get to the office, whiteboard the solution, like, do or die. And he's like, I'll be there around three. I got to do laundry as politely as I possibly could. I was like, you cross in front of six, wash and folds on your way to the office, and you make 80 grand a year. Stop. Like, I'm gonna shut up now before I say something I can't take back. And he's like, heard. I was like, good. Like. But I mean, again, that's. Those are kind of the silly things that people. They do, right?

You don't think about it. And there is this. This sort of degree of nobility. Again, something else that will be sort of triggering people in the comments, like house, you know, full of yourself. Would you need to be. To get someone to come and be a chef for you or to do your laundry or to do the gardening or to clean the house? Like, who am I?

Ass in your car. You're an asshole. Yeah, I'm okay. That's cool.

I understand. And it really has the, you know, me, ten years ago, 15 years ago, sort of curls in disgust at the fact that I don't do those things anymore. But on the flip side, I know that it's the right call. And, you know, when I was in, back in the UK, the first person that I got when I moved into a house was a cleaner, and she was 40 pounds every two weeks. But it meant that I haven't picked up a hoover in, I think, eight or nine years. I haven't hoovered anything. Maybe I've dropped some glass on the floor, but I haven't hoovered anything in eight or nine years. 40 pounds every two weeks is not nothing. 80 pounds a month to me back then was 80 pounds a month. That's a grand a year that I'm going to spend on this thing. But I never had to clean. And it was so revelatory to me. And I think that, you know, this is what I like about the principle. It's the same thing with. With Bill's same thing with yours, that it works. Whether you're going to go to the complete sort of disgust mode that you're in or whether you're just sort of at the.

Fair enough.

The white belt mentality, which is try anything.

Try. It's literally, it's a gateway drug.

So talk to me. Let's say that there is someone who is taking the absolute first step. What would be the first places that you would suggest professionally, personally, that someone should have a little look at?

I go into their calendar. I literally go on the calendar and I say, tell me about your week. What do you do? Where do you go?

And what are the most common culprits?

It's everything from, like, why do you go to that gym that's 30 minutes away? Well, because it's cheaper. Like, it's really like that level. I'm like, I'm challenging some weird things that you didn't even consider because I'm just trying to. I'm trying to give you back time. Right? So it's everything from travel time. It's kind of like I'm a, I'm a six sigma lean. Like I, back in the day, I studied manufacturing because I'm a software guy and I wanted to, like Toyota production system. I don't know why. It just spoke to me. And I just love how, like, they would have people walk around with pedometers to measure steps, and they'd be like, why does Bobby walk twice as far as everybody on average during a day? Well, it's because he has a product that's only stored in this room. Can we bring it closer to Bobby as an example? So I think that's the philosophy that people need to look to and also understand what their times worth. Because to your point, when you say a thousand pounds a year for some that's going to help you out and clean up, then you also have to go, okay, well, I'm going to get that time back.

What am I going to do with it? And that's the fill part. And that's where I think a lot of people fail, because they don't plan ahead of time to say, okay, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm willing to go on the journey, Dan, you say my time's worth something, so let's pretend it's worth a $100 an hour. Okay, then, all right, I'm going to pay somebody else $12 an hour to help me out, and I get an extra 5 hours back a week. What do I do with that time? And that's that's where people, I think, don't think enough about strategy in their own life to say, if I'm here and I want to go there, I'm not good enough yet. What do I need to do to become the person who creates more value per our unit of time? And that's, that's the big thing. That's, you know, so I'm always looking at skill acquisition. I'm looking, and I also realized at my level, the number one thing I could be is the person who has the. The knowing of who can solve the problem. So, like, when you, we were talking about CBG brands, like, you can give me a problem and I actually know the person.

I've never solved it. I don't know how to solve it, but I know that guy knows. So even just saying to yourself, what makes somebody valuable? Like, sometimes it's not a skill. It's actually just knowing how to solve a problem, even if you don't know how to solve it yourself, but know where to point somebody, and that could be something. You can invest it. Right.

Let's say that we're talking professionally.

Yeah, yeah.

Uh, where should people focus their hiring plan first?

Typically, I have a framework called the replacement ladder, and I design. Actually, Hermozy, I know you've had him on here. Some of the best content he's ever done is with you. So thank you. The world thanks you guys. Is, you know, we talked about it, like, if we were starting, you know, and I love, what I love about Alex is his background with gym owners. They're very, you know, entry like. You know what I mean? They're not. I'm a software guy, so, like, sometimes they come out of Harvard, Stanford. He's working with Jim. So it's like, what would the order be if we had first principles? Sequence. The one that I think we might have gotten to where we differed is sales and marketing and sequence. But we both agreed administrative tasks right off the bat. So anything that's low level, running errands, paperwork, receivables, accounting, email, calendaring, scheduling, coordinating research, like, just, there's, there's a lot of stuff. It doesn't mean you're not involved. It's the 1080 ten. It's 10% upfront. Setting the thing 80%, they can go do the thing. And the last 10% is where you come in with the information they've gotten to then finish the thing.

Right. So. So it's not like 100% give it to somebody else, but it's, it's starting to figure out in your workflows what parts don't require a lot of creative pattern matching, thinking that you can give somebody else to do so. Administrative work, usually inbox encounter. That's level one.

And that is a. Administrative assistant. Personal assistant.

Most people start with a virtual assistant overseas at first and hours a week. Like, if we're talking, like, day, 100% there, and I always joke, like, I would sell everything I own to not lose my assistant. And she. She is. She's a clone to me. She's 100%. Can go to meetings on my behalf. Like, I mean, when you get to the level, you have a partner in your life who can decide. Like, she. If I was doing anything she can pick stuff for. She knows my preferences. That's invaluable.

So why would you go for the 10 hours per week virtual assistant?

There's a thousand versions of it in the Philippines and whatever. And it's actually not necessarily who has the. Because, like, really, nobody's got a lock on talent. Right. So really, it's. You're learning the skill of working with that person. And that's why I like going 10 hours, $5 an hour, just practice most people. Again, four hour workweek taught me there are certain things I just need to not do. And once I set up a system and gave it to somebody and they did it, I never had to do it ever again for the rest of my life. But that's a skill I had to learn. So I like the low stakes. You know, it's like a tightrope. It's like slack lining in the park. Like, you're not going to fall to your.

Not a big fall. Yeah, I think that's. It's a nice way to start. Obviously, Athena is real.

Yeah, Athena's great.

Hot shit. The problem with that is that you have to commit to having somebody who's essentially full time.

Yeah, it's three grand, and they're a higher price .3.

Grand a month.

Yeah.

Now you get this unbelievable system behind them, and they're trained up and all the rest of it. But that's. It's a big three grand.

Just. You can literally start with an intern. Like, I remember, like, early days, Lisa, who was my first assistant helping with the mail, I think I found her through a friend. She was like a mom. She had kids. She worked in an office but didn't want to go full time. And she was cool. She still, to this day, 20 years later, does my mail. She's cool, and she's changed jobs six times, but she just loves picking up my mail. She knows, she knows my lawyers and my accountants and she brings stuff around.

Okay, so we've got administrative time.

Yeah, that's level one.

Calendar scheduling, email.

I would say inboxing calendar is where the opportunity is. If you really want to go full time with somebody, if you have somebody process every new email that comes to you. I'm not saying they have to reply on your behalf, although it's fun. They at least can start to understand where their to dos are because it's.

In your inbox just downstream from that, actually, when it comes to email. What's the process from there? You know, you are this complex decision engine. No one fully knows whether you're going to say yes or no to a particular thing. What is your step by step inbox management triage?

You're talking my love language right now. I will give you the goods. So here's the concept is, you know, in your inbox, even if you get a thousand emails a day, 5000, like there's, there's certain things that are just don't require immediate attention. Right. So. So what I like to do is, you know, even before you hire somebody, just go start setting up some rules, right. So like there's, in every email tool, there's filters. And you could set one up for just newsletters and say anything with the unsubscribe link, put it in this folder, set a task every Friday for 45 minutes to process. And that way you go in there, you scan through, you read the ones you want to read. That could be a beginning start. And then what I do is I have seven folders. So the big idea for me is all companies im involved in, if I have different domains in my Gmail, they all go to one spot. So I have all mail goes into my primary inbox and then what I have within there is a label in Gmail or a folder in outlook.

That is, that's what you're using.

You're using Gmail to do all this. And I've tried front, like front app was. I went there for a bit, but because it does some cool routing task stuff, but super human, superhuman, I don't know if it has this feature. I'm assuming it does. What I love about Gmail is the delegated access. So I can give access to my assistant and her assistant because she's that busy without giving them password to my Gmail because my Gmail is essentially everything vulnerable. Yeah, you just. There's certain things. Attack vectors you just don't want to do.

Yep.

So then the folders are my folder. Dan, exclamation mark. Dan Martel. And then that's where my phone goes to. When I open up my email on my phone, it goes to that folder. Okay. So I never, ever, and this is the hardest part. I remember when I first did it, I just kept checking. Kept checking, right? Again, you teach people how to treat you. So if you hire an assistant, tell her to manage the inbox, and then you keep checking and replying whenever it's a week or whatever, then she's gonna go, well, if I just wait long enough, Chris or Dan's gonna reply to it, you know, so that was a hard one. And then what I do after that, and these are the. There's seven. The other ones are like finance, anything, you know, financial related, reporting all my updates, I want that in one spot. It's easy to find, but the big one is responded to, respond in review. Okay. So what happens is email comes in, and this is why Richard Branson showed me how to do this, where essentially every morning he ran his. Everybody that needed anything from him went through Helen, his assistant.

She's still with them now. I think it's 16 years she's been with them. She travels with them, I'm assuming, still, and they would just have breakfast. And essentially she would only bring to him the things that she didn't know how to deal with. But again, she's been there for that long. Everybody knows her. She knows his preferences. So 99.2% of the stuff she just moved forward and they routed. Right. And this is like, the concept of routing is actually financially a very important decision, like strategy, you know, what's his name? The CEO, the previous CEO, Eric Schmidt from Google talked about. They said, my job as CEO is a route. Email comes in good. Like, he just needs to send to right person. So the review folder is only the things that my assistant doesn't know how to deal with. And then we have a daily meeting where she. She listened, talks to me. She's like, chris emailed, da da da. He wants to do this. And I don't know, should we do it this date or that date? I say, well, in the future, this is the principal. What would you do? See, I'm teaching, right?

So I use the review folder to actually teach my thinking behind the. Because if not, then you're telling somebody.

Doing that in person or a video phone.

I try to do it over phone because I'm always in commute. Right. I don't want to have to be in front of a laptop.

And honestly, so as that's coming into your assistant, they're making notes in future when x, then why do a draft email?

And they put their notes in. So they process the email. They put the draft for them to read to me over the phone. It's a little hack, for what it's worth, because there's no really no note place in Gmail.

Yep.

So they reply, and then if I ever see it in there, I can actually leave my own notes. And we just put our initials before.

Be careful that you don't send that to someone by accident.

It's never happened. But I 100% have done something similar. Oh, yeah. And then, and then the cool part is, is some of the control freaks in the world, they were like, well, I need to know what's being said on my behalf. So that's where the responded comes into play. So everything. My assistants reply on my behalf, they tag responded, and then if anything comes into my folder. So let's say they put something in there, but I wanted them to deal with it. Like a contract that I reviewed. I then label it to respond, and that's their to do list they start with in the morning. So we built this cool little mechanism where emails can still flow. There's no bottlenecks, and over time, they get better. Now, the whole philosophy for me is, I believe, like, if you think about velocity of opportunity, see, your inbox is nothing more than strangers requests on your time. Like, really, that's all it is. It's like anybody can guess your email. They send a request, and then it's just a thing that you have to do.

Do.

If you had an office, like on Main Street, Austin, right, 6th street, you wouldn't just allow strangers to walk into your office and interrupt you. Yet that's what email essentially is. So my whole philosophy is create somebody that stands in between. They protect your time, they interact, and then that way, if somebody needs something, they just get it right away. It's like, if I'm speaking on an event and they want my headshot, I want. So there's actually language that I've created that I think would help anybody. That's like, ooh, that feels a little. And I'm canadian, so, like, that's, that's like, that was really hard for me. I didn't want to, like, it felt super douchey. So the language is, hey, this is Ann, Dan's assistant. I got to this before he did, and I figured, and I assumed you wanted the fastest reply. And then she replies.

That language is that coming from Assistantmartel.com dot?

No, it's coming from Dan. It's my email. Yeah, I don't want to give my, well, yeah, it's not hard to guess.

Yeah.

And then it's a reply, and then it says so they know it's her. So here's another trick. All my, everything goes through my email. Because in the future, if I'm at, if I'm at a counter and there's a. What's your confirmation number? I want to search my inbox, but if they're doing stuff in their email, then I don't have the confirmation unless they forward it. So my rule.

That's why you like delegate Excel.

Yeah. And I put everything in one spot and then. Yeah, I mean, I joke now that, you know, inbox zero is cool, but even cooler. Zero inbox. I don't even do emailing. Like, no, I don't. I don't send emails for the most part.

I mean, people like, just the morning call that you have where you're.

Yeah, I don't, I don't want to do email. I just, I just gave up on it. I rather work with Ann. She knows everybody.

It's a big source of pain in my life. Very low.

I would love to show you, like, consider me an ally, like, whatever you need. Because again, I want creators to create more and sometimes, and look, and I get it because, like, we both have people that, like, we don't want our assistant to reply because they're relationships. We want to maintain all that stuff. What I've done is I've just been very strategic on my text messages. So, like, my cell is my, essentially my new inbox and, but I'll also, if somebody accidentally gets it that I really don't want to be involved in, I just screenshot the message and loop in my assistant in text message. And again, it teaches people how to treat you. The problem is, is that, like, people that respond to, and it's like somebody emails, you don't reply and then they message you on Facebook and you reply, well, you just taught them, message me on Facebook next time. So it's tough. It requires a little discipline. But I'll tell you, man, like, the ability for me to be here's where the money maker is while I'm here, there's messages that are moving forward opportunities. So when I think about the value in an annual, like, because really all we're trying to do is pull revenue forward, I'm going to say on the low end, we're talking two months of revenue in this calendar year, year.

And if you're really good at it, more like four months if you just think about response times. Because Ann doesn't give a crap about my personal emotions to that email. She literally is like, oh, I need to sign this. She signs it. Somebody asked to be on a pod. I don't sit there and hoe and hum and worry about like, am I good enough to be like? She just replies, yes, we'd love to do that, you know, and I'm just like, ah. Like sometimes, dude, Tony Robbins invited me to speak as event. If it was me, I would have stared at that email for two weeks worrying like, what do I say?

How do I say, well, Anne's been a tough time.

She already scheduled it. It's done. It's like, she's like, oh, damn, we'd love to take it. And yeah, it's scheduled. Calendars are done.

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Really lovely. And I think that it's good to have spent a good chunk of time on the admin thing, given that that's where most people will at least begin at. And maybe some people will stop.

And I want to say this, Chris, if anybody's stuck on this, because I think the admin wants such a heady piece, they want to know what do you. I have a document, 47 pages. Okay. If anybody wants it just follow me on Instagram. That's all I ask. Message me ea, and I will send them the Google Doc. It's my internal doc. I just sanitize it. It's got preference section. It's got travel set. It's got my five north star principles. Like, I think once you see it, like, once, I remember one time I paid a guy to buy the subway sop, the subway food, the sandwich place, the standard operating procedure. Cause, I mean, like, I want to know. I wanted to see them. I'm a nerd. I'm like, what's a McDonald's one look like? Like, wouldn't you be fascinated to know, what does a McDonald's franchise? What do they get?

This huge, big operation.

But it's beautiful because once you see it, it's like, oh, because if you've never created an sop, you may not even know how to word it, how to categorize it. I mean, for example, the subway one, I remember they had a diagram of where the store needed to be, and it was a right turn corner near, and then I think it was within 2 miles from a university. So they had all these details that this is the optimal location. And I would have never even thought of putting a doc. I mean, I'm like, I'm writing words. They're like, no, put diagrams. Like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Pictures. So. So I. If anybody wants that, I'll send it to them.

But that's cool.

Instagram.

That's really cool. Okay, level two.

Level two is delivery. So doing the thing just like you were outside freezing your butt, you know, it's once you have somebody help me with the administrative task, which is like back office, then start looking at where in the workflow somebody else can help you with delivering the thing that you deliver. It doesn't mean you don't do it. If you. If you paint houses, like, paint the house. But maybe there's an account manager. Maybe you have enough work where you need to start hiring somebody to help you with coordination and other stuff. So kind of, usually the admin person can play that part a little bit until it requires somebody that's a little bit more knowledgeable in the, you know, the domain. And I always say for that one, it's. It's onboarding and supporting. That's what. So if you have any aspect of what you do, like this pod, like having somebody help, once you approve the guests schedule, coordinate. Da da da da da. So onboarding and support answering questions, somebody else takes over that. So it's delivery. Third is marketing. And really the big idea is build a marketing system. Most people do marketing.

They don't have a marketing system. So a marketing system is somebody else that wakes up every day and looks at traffic and campaigns. That's the way I look at it. Like, I mean, how many times have I changed something and broken a landing page or broken, you know, change a color and some css file and then the button is the same color as the background and nobody knows how to check it. I mean, it's just stuff like that. So having somebody that wakes up every day that moves traffic into your business opportunities, leads. Build that system. Right. When I say, like, what do you do with your new found time? Learn marketing. Read the books, build an SOP.

What books?

For that one? For marketing. I'm going to go one page marketing plan by Alan Ditze. It's an awesome book. Yellow book. So good. I'm going to say marketing. Seth Godin. I mean, yeah, if you want more tactical, honestly, Gary Vee's latest book was super tactical. So, yeah, I would say, like, depending on your industry, what you're trying to do, paid ads versus organic versus, you.

Know, socials, just thinking, you know, as we go from level one, where somebody's kind of a bit of an unlock, they require maybe quite a lot of training, but they should, over time, just accumulate stuff by watching you do it. And then you get maybe to level two, where you're starting to have some key ancillary business operations being assisted with, and then you get to three. But I imagine that at this stage, we're actually going to start to feel the pain of coordination because we now have more people that report to us and that in itself can create dis economies and that can be a source of stress. Fucking hell, Dan. You told me that I was doing this to make my life easier, and now I've got all of these people that report to me, and now I feel like a prick because I hate the people that report to me because they're now a drawer on my time. How can people alleviate the pain of this coordination problem?

Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, these are the skills of the entrepreneurial journey. So, like, what? What you're. It's funny because my next book's probably going to be on this concept of talent, because I think most people don't know how to identify, acquire and develop talent. But the whole philosophy is there's really five hires. If you do it, you have freedom in your business, right? So most people will never. Most. It's interesting because I've talked to an account once, and he showed me the data, and most businesses never crack about three to reason why is that? Individual never learns how to delegate. Like, they're literally control freaks to the point where they really everything they have to be involved. They could be a surgeon, they could be an accountant. They could, you know, but they could never have a team or have anybody else. Else. The next level, what you're talking about is just like having anybody on the team. If you don't do it right and you don't allow them to do the work, you hire them and then do their job for them. Then you end up what I call transactional leadership, where you tell them what to do, you check they got done, and then you tell them what to do next.

The problem with that is that about twelve employees, you'll wake up with projects you want to get done and all this stuff, and you won't even get to them till about 06:00 p.m. at night. Right? That's what happens. It's usually for most companies, the numbers about 1.4 million, a dozen employees. And that's the pain line. So there is a different way, which is understanding how to communicate rhythms, right? So I always, like, I was on a podcast recently. The guy said, well, why do you hate meetings? I said, meetings are great. If they have a purpose, they're not good. If they got a second meetings, last minute meetings, it means we didn't do the strategic work up front. If we don't give a quarter, like 90 days of effort to execute admin delivery. Like, you built a thing, let's just try it out for a while. Then you're always, you're reactive, and it becomes really hard for people on your team to even. I mean, I used to be the guy where they'd ask me what book I'm reading because they wanted to get ahead of the whiplash. Like, literally, I remember a guy saying, hey, man, what book are you reading?

I was like, why? He goes, because we want to get ready for, like, what you decide you want to do next to the bid. I was like, am I that bad? He's like, 100%. Yeah. So that, to me, is there's a whole strategy on how do you run a company that most people don't want to do around strategic planning, reporting scorecards.

Just before we go into level four, what about the sort of internals for a business, the use of slack rules around that, async communication, stuff like that? You dig into the nitty gritty.

Yeah, I just, I just literally did leadership training on Slack, which I think could be one of my best pieces of training I've ever done.

Was that available?

It was internal. I'll put it on the Internet. Just message me on Instagram if people want it, and I'll tell Sam to consider putting it out. He's so he doesn't think my stuff as cool as I think it is. But because the thing is, Slack can just become another inbox, and it is for most companies. What I love about Slack and the problem that it solves is it creates an organizational knowledge. And I think that's what makes it more powerful than email. And what I teach people in regards to slack is the difference between one on one. Because, like, even if you start, if you're using Slack and you're direct messaging me for stuff that should have been put in a channel, then that also takes away from the potential it could have, which is the power to create search and discovery. Like, the reason why I remember Gary Vee said this once, he said, my competitive advantage is continuity. And most people would never understand that if they didn't understand how to operate and lead people. But having somebody on your team for seven years is incredibly valuable in regards to the understanding of why decisions were made, why we went this direction, where things.

Yeah, context. So slacks. Value prop is organizational knowledge. But you don't get that if you don't use it, or you don't get that if you don't structure it, right. You don't get that if you don't integrate it, right? So that's what I was teaching everybody is like, there's certain, like, there's one on one, in person and virtual. So, like, even sometimes in the office, I'll tell people that meeting should be a Zoom meeting. They're like, but we're all here. I know, but you're not allowing yourself, like, sharing. Like, on your, like, when you're on a Zoom meeting or even on your phone on a Zoom call, it's easy to share when you're in a room and you're, like, talking about the diagram of the thing. It's like, I gotta get my laptop, I gotta pull up. You just don't do it and you lose the richness of the potential communication. So to me, I think slack is a beautiful tool and understanding. One on one, one to many, digital or in person. Like, you don't fire somebody over slack. But I have to tell people this, right? You don't criticize publicly in a channel, right?

Praise in public, criticize in private. All these kind of things. But so that would be level three is the marketing systems. Level four is sales. And I call it the freedom stage. And the reason why it's a freedom stage is at that level, if you can actually trust somebody else to take an opportunity to have the conversation to bring them into your world. Okay, what I really look at the sales call and the follow up. Then, for most small business owners, they have a thing they've been dreaming of, which is a business that makes some money while they sleep. Because you have somebody who's waking up every day, getting you an opportunity, traffic somebody talking to that person, somebody onboarding them into your world, it still requires you to come back to do the thing, potentially paint the house, create the logo. But while you're on vacation, the machine runs, and we're talking four hires. So, see, the difference where people make the buyback principle is like, we don't hire people to grow our business. We hire people to buy back our time. If you do it right, you actually will grow your business because you adding people just to design more logos.

But when you didn't solve the right problem in the right order means there's not enough customers to keep somebody busy. Like, how many entrepreneurs hire somebody because they're busy and then have to fire them because they're not, because they didn't build a marketing system. So that's. That was, like, the mental model I was trying to solve for. And then the highest level is leadership. And this is where, for me, you know, some people that are further along, because that's what's cool about the principle. It works when you're starting off. And if you're a nine figure CEO, most people, when you start off, you start, you build from the bottom up, right? You wear the 17 hats, you take a couple off, you hire the first intern, you give it to them or your admin. But as you actually become successful and you have resources, you make profit. If you're starting something new, you should be starting top down. So, like, when I start new companies, I'm hiring the person to run the company as the first hire. I'm not hiring an engineer. Now, if that engineer is going to also run the company, cool. But to me, I want to start top down, and then that way, everything I work through that person.

So I start my new media company. One of the first hires was Todd. He's my general manager. I remember I was sitting in the office, we had just built this new built in shelf for the set, and he looks at me and he goes, dude, looks kind of bare. I said, yeah. He goes, well, like, are you guys going to get that fix? I just stared at him and he.

Goes, oh, I'm going to get that fixed.

I go, Todd, I work for you, man. I'm the talent, you're the guy. So anything that you see that should get better, just know you own it. Even, even understanding how to communicate ownership and letting people, you know. Steve Jobs called the DRI, direct, responsible individual. Right? Like being clear, these are the things that I hired you to do. Own them. Ownership looks like this. These are the numbers I'm going to hold you accountable to. And if there's a deficit, I'm going to write it down. And in our one on ones, I'm going to coach you up. And that's the difference. When I say transactional leadership versus transformational leadership, transformational leadership is every time there's an issue, I don't address the thing I talk about the principle that was violated. I teach or train or coach against the principal so that I'm developing my people. So the bigger my team gets, the less time it requires me, because I'm not jumping in, putting out fires all the time, like they say all the time, like, you don't want to be a firefighter, you want to be a fire preventer, like I want to. And, oh, by the way, there's a difference between a dumpster fire and a kitchen fire.

And that is a skill that entrepreneurs should learn. The difference, because if you treat everything like a kitchen fire, because like this, 100%, I think Warren Buffett said this, he goes, 100% chance right now, amongst the 200,000 employees that work for me at one of my companies, somebody's doing something that would embarrass me. So I just got to be okay with that. Right?

But the cost of doing business at.

This scale, Jeff, I think, and I think at twelve employees, there's a cost of doing business at the scale that we just have to reevaluate. And at every level, level, there's just like, what am I now willing to? I know it's a fire, but I'm going to let it burn.

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I like using zoom. Share my screen.

So you're doing it live with someone whilst recording?

No, I'll do the work myself.

Right.

Like even creating slides for a keynote, for a presentation I don't do anymore. I did it. I recorded a bunch. I said, here's my outline. Here's how I find my images. I put one word on it. I did that three or four times, and I gave it to my designer. Now all I have to do is give them the words.

So turning the recording into an SOP.

The person that I'm delegating to has to do it.

Right.

The reason why I do that is because then I get to see, did they actually understand?

Have you interpreted this correctly?

Yeah.

So that I remember, you have an SOP department. That takes all.

I don't have an SOP department. Whoever I'm giving the task to creates the SOP. Now I have an SoP super meta on how to create an SOP.

Knew it.

Of course there's a template, there's a blueprint. Right? We build the machine that runs a machine. But what's unique is, like, I'll tell you. One that you'll love is your iPad has a control panel, and you can actually put in there, there's a way to record your screen and audio. So, for example, when I'm doing, you know, if I'm creating a new architecture for some software and my designer sends it over to me, I'll pull it up on my iPad screen, record and do the audio, pull out my pen and I go through it and I talk through it. It. And what happens is I'm creating a training to train the guy that's going to run the department. So, like right now, if I'm the product manager, that's my job. But what I'm doing is, as I'm done recording, I save it in a shared iCloud folder that notifies a person because there's a trigger on Zapier or whatever it says, hey, there's a new video, they watch it, but I automatically save that to a Dropbox folder. So every time I've done that, I might have 13 examples, but it's me talking. Why? I don't like the, you know, really the golden ratio is this, this, and this, like whatever nerdy thing I know about the thing is being captured in audio.

And then when I hire the person, they go through those and they create the sop if it doesn't exist. So I don't. That's why I call it the camcorder method. In net time, no extra time. So, Chris, I just want you to do the work. And because like, nobody, man, I see people, they're like, oh, I love this. I'm going to go and do an off site with my team and we're going to create the company way, the document that we all follow. And it's like, that's dumb. It will be stale in three weeks. It will not be relevant. Nobody will look at it. It's a cultural thing. So the culture is you cannot do a process unless you have the document open. So that is a, that's something that you have to teach. You have to train people. You gotta be like, first time you see somebody that makes a mistake, it's like, like, I remember, you know, I was like, hey, do you have a checklist? He's like, yep. Show it to me. Yeah, I didn't look at it. Cool. Hey, we have a rule. If you're doing the thing that has a checklist, you look at the checklist.

Are we on the same page? Yeah. I apologize. So again, CEO's are usually the worst ones, culprits of this. So it's like, you know, sometimes you'll contradict yourself, but it's at the end of the day. There is no other way. That is how all great companies are built. Every company at scale, right? You can. You can be the crazy genius with a thousand servants, or you can build people, and the people build the business. And that's if you want to create something meaningful. Even Steve Jobs or every. Every person that you admire. If we went and watched the way they work, you would see Gary v 1080 ten. He has, like, most people, team Gary sits outside his office and they're executing while he's doing his thing. And, you know, like, they're listening to it, they're writing content, they're editing videos. He sets up the first 10%. They go do 80%. But he's still. For the most. I don't know if he's still doing it, but he said, and I still post myself. Does he post the same video on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube shorts? No, he might post it on Instagram. And then the team goes, oh, and then they'd finish it off.

That's the process. So it's like, I would assume he's spending two, $3 million just for Team Gary, just for him to do. Like, people realize his social media is a side hustle. Like, it's not his primary thing for the most part. It's like he. He's an operator, and he's. I remember, like, I've known Gary since early wine library, like, 1213 years ago. And it's like, that's how he. He's always. And the people he's had around him, the continuity. He's actually. I just want to say, like, I think Gary's one of the best operators that most people don't give enough credit for because he never talks about as much. He's actually an incredible operator.

He's just out there as the louds New York empathy. Yeah.

You know, like, he literally. I've also never met somebody so consistent on messaging. Like, I get bored with my messaging fast. Like, I don't want to talk. I feel like we share that same, like, what are the new concepts? He said the same thing for as long as he's had a camera in front of his face. Different ways, different formats. Nfts, you know, social media.

But get bored of it.

No, because he's. It's like, these are my core principles. These are my life philosophies.

How do people get past the. No one can do it as well as me trap.

Well, first off, my philosophy is 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking awesome. Let's just try to buy into that 80% done by somebody else is a hundred percent freaking awesome. Meaning that that hour you didn't have to clean your apartment or your flat, that was 80% awesome. Could you have done it better? Maybe, but you didn't. So while they were supporting you on that part of your life, you were hanging out with your friends, going to the gym, or working on that new project. So I've just gotten to a place where I. My expectations are lower on regards to the. So does that mean it cost me a little bit more than if I did it myself? Yes, but I also didn't have to do it. So even the mental beliefs around, like, when you hear people say, like, I don't like doing shit work, like, like the length, the way they look down on certain things, I go, you shouldn't say that, because first off, there are people that play at the things you work at. Like Sandy on my finance team loves spreadsheets. Like, she. She would be happy all day long if she could just sit there and reconcile bank accounts.

Like, and she does. So there are people that if you hire in to support, you will love doing it. And your judgment against the type of work it is, is actually stopping you from getting other people to do it. Right. It's like people that are like, I can never ask my engineer to go get lunch for everybody. It's like, no, you can. Well, no, I got to do that. I'm the leader. I got to go get lunch for. Okay, you could or you could not. Instead, you could go work on the architecture diagram. That's going to help them all, and they'll probably be a lot happier with you doing that than going to get them lunch. Just saying, they're like. Like, yeah, probably. That's like, to me, I'm always thinking about, where should I be spending my time? That's going to create the most value for the team. And I got to. Sometimes you got to talk to them and let them know, because like you said, if I didn't stand outside in the pouring rain, what story would they have told themselves? And rightfully so, if you just stopped going to work and that was the case, then, of course.

But if you said, hey, team, I just want you to know, you probably haven't seen me around lately because I've actually been working on this big opportunity that's going to help. And this is the bigger idea. Help your dreams come true by buying this other thing or starting this other thing, like leadership. One on one. Is having a vision big enough for everybody on your team's? Dreams and goals of. To sit inside of. That's like, leadership 101. If you know everybody's five year dreams and goals and you wake up every day to build a business, to learn to let go, to be okay with it, and they know this and they believe it, they'll literally give you permission to pull back because they just trust. It's like, Chris gets up every day to try to make this vision. I want to have my own agency someday. And he's told me if I help edit the pod, that someday, you know, he'll vouch for me and send clients. It's like, so I need him to not be doing this thing so that I can. He can go do the thing to help us build the bigger thing.

And I think that's, like, a big part of it. Learning to let go, doing the work. Dude, do you know how much of it is all childhood stuff?

It's old roads lead back to childhood trauma, dude.

Everything. I actually have this thing I teach about, like, goals and current, and, you know, essentially, there's limiting beliefs and negative beliefs. Right? Like, really, everything comes down. It's like, why did you not achieve that goal? I either have negative beliefs around achievement, rich people are evil, or I have limiting beliefs in my skill, and then people go, well, how do I overcome that? And then I.

Go back looking in the wrong direction.

Yeah. I mean, trauma is a book we're meant to read, not just put on a shelf. And it's in that space of doing that work. And that's why I think entrepreneurship is the ultimate personal development program.

Correct.

It's the coolest thing in the world.

James clear talks about building a business, being a personal growth vehicle masquerading as a capitalist pursuit.

Totally. Totally. I remember when I finally occurred to me that my work was literally becoming a better version of myself every day.

I was like, well, there's just so few. There's so few places. I guess your relationship is one of them, too. Your intimate relationship is one. There's so few places that you go to that push you beyond your acceptable limits. Your morning walk. Isn't that your Saturday afternoon pickleball game? Isn't that all of these things? This is one of the problems that I had with Crossfit back in the day, even as an avid ex crossfitter with the. To prove it.

Yeah, you and I both.

I never liked the get comfortable being uncomfortable thing because the discomfort in Crossfit was always done through choice. So, yes, Fran is an ugly workout. 20 115. Nine of thrusters, aluminum taste thrusters and polyps. Yeah. It was not fun, but you chose to do that. What would be real discomfort would be me telling you that you need to sit on the couch for a week and not train. Like, that's actual discomfort. There's so few areas that you get to wherever where the things that you have to or get to do are sort of forced onto you, that there's real pressure coming in from the outside.

That's interesting. So what you're saying is the frames of things you do that are hard, that you decided to do is a different type of hard than the things that happened to you that you didn't decide to.

Of course, you and your triathlons, your ironmans or whatever, it's fucking hard.

But I chose it.

Let's be serious. It's a hard that you chose to do. You know, it obviously fits even the person that's 450 pounds. But, you know, lot of a child. I literally about to say loss of a parent, you know, like, you've got this thing and it was a shock, and fuck, the funeral is next week, and I have to hold family together. Okay. Like that. I'm not advising losing a parent as a personal growth strategy, but, you know, that's real discomfort. And I think that we get a little taste of that when there are other people that are thoroughly invested that we can't get away from. You know, even friendships don't necessarily push the limits in the same way way, because you can. Ah, fuck them. Fuck them. They're out of my life. It doesn't matter. This is your fiance or your husband.

You know, that's a little bit hard.

Correct.

So you're gonna fire an investor?

Yeah. You have to hold on. And with business, like, unless you're gonna close the business down, you're not you. And that's why it is a personal growth vehicle, because it pulls you. It is progressive overload on a treadmill rather than road running.

Yeah.

Right. It is moving at a pace, and you have to keep up. And if you don't, things will start flying off on the sides and eventually it'll spit you out the back. So, yeah, I think that's an important insight to remember, which is the part.

When we go back especially. I love you said progressive overload. It's like the volume has to go up, which means I now have to maintain a level of volume to make forward progress, which is why people are scared to make forward progress, because that's a new bomb. It's a new.

But, I mean, you know, there's better and worse ways to think about this. For instance, we did a video about a year ago with Chris Bumstead talking about ten exercises. Every guy needs to blah, blah, blah. You only had ten exercises for the rest of your life. What would you do? He did a million plays in 24 hours. And you have this odd sense of elation and fear and wistfulness at the same time. And it's silly because it's about plays, but it's a nice microcosm for bigger, more existentially connected things. And the other thing is that when I talk about plays on the show, it's not something that we focus on tremendously, obviously, but it is very, well metric and dashboard. It's okay, unpack that. So what you.

What did you find fascinating about that?

So the fact is, million plays in 24 hours on a video. Oh, we did Tim Kennedy last week. Trump.

How did Mike Doctor Mike's do compare? Because I saw his answer.

His fucking. His crush, but not his answer was actually better. I mean, well, look, hey, who am. Who am I? Yeah, that doctor Mike with his jewish foreskin is better than Chris Bumstead.

Sickle hard. When he. He did lizard, what his name? Liver King. That one was so funny.

He's built different, man. Mike's built different. In fact, Mike is the other half of the new thing that I'm launching later.

So jealousy.

Any more opportunity to do more stuff with him? We set a new bar. This could be anybody that runs a business that has a great training session that gets in there and just gravities at 70% of what it is usually, you go, oh, my God, I feel super human. Did sleepers dial? The creatine was dialed, the caffeine was dialed, whatever you did. And then you have this odd sense of elation and fear or wistfulness at the same time with that great pr session, with that new record breaking video, because you go, oh, my God. Yes, that's a new record. And immediately after that, you think, oh, fuck, that's the new bar. That's now the new standard. In order for me to get our best performing video ever, it needs to be 1.1 million within 24 hours. Needs to be 1.2 million. In order for me to get my next pr, I need to pr a pr. I only just pr today. Hey, in a workout or stressing yourself out, pick your pursuit of choice. And there's this, that framing. It's a really lovely little sort of microcosm of the peril of success, the peril of pushing yourself to a new level, because that then becomes the bar that you measure yourself against.

I've posited an ideal. I've achieved an ideal. And now if I want to grow, I need to beat the thing that previously was a dream, now has been achievable, and I need to go. What? You tell me, I need to go even further than that to do the next thing again. Again. It's like a reverse hedonic adaptation where it's like goal adaptation, and it's interesting. It's one of those things that I sort of play with with regards to the show. And I think fucking about with metrics is one useful way to teach yourself this lesson. But at least what I've learned is that after a while, you realize that there are other more important metrics hiding behind those. So, George, one of my friends who is a great writer, talks about after you reach a certain number of followers on Twitter, you realize that it's not about how many retweets you get, it's about who retweets. And he doesn't look at the number of plays or the number of exposures that something's got. He checks to see if Paul Graham or Elon Musk's retweeted it. Because that's what he's bothered about. Yeah, he's bothered about that.

And what you really learn from that is that you're talking about sort of depth, you're talking about resonance, about the.

Quality of the work of, what is it, qualitative versus quantitative. So, like, if you. If you quant everything, my buddy Shawn say this, he said, if we split test, everything will end up to porn. So there needs to be art.

Correct?

Right?

Taste.

Yeah, taste, you know, curation. But that to me is, you know, back to, I think you said a few times, just like, we're here to create and express ourselves, and we need the data to give us a feedback loop. But the real big wins, like, have you ever heard of the local maxima problem? So, in software, it's like we talk about all the time, because we could be on to something that actually has product market fit, but it's only going to have an impact to a certain size of a total addressable market. And to go on the journey of trying to make this thing appeal to a larger group of people, we have to kind of work backwards. And it's scary. I mean, that's the hard thing about building innovation is sometimes, and I think even Elon talked about this for his, like, neural net when they were building self driving. He woke up one day and looked at it and he said, we have to rebuild this whole thing. And most people would not have ripped it all out to rebuild it, but he just. He could see we're at the local maximum.

There's two great examples of that. Three, actually. One from my personal life. So Tiger woods gets to a good level of maturity within his game, but his original swing had a lot of inefficiencies in Ithoodae. So he had sort of unnecessary movement as he was pulling back. And he learned from a coach, look, you're really good, but you're not going to be world class unless we get rid of this. Which meant that he needed to get worse before he could then rebuild things from getting better. And the rebuilding was even harder because he had to deprogram the habits that he'd spent a decade or a couple of decades building up. So that was the first one for me, an equivalent in my life with this here. I worked on vocal precision for a long time in terms of articulation, in terms of my cadence and a lot of other things. But it's very difficult to think about how you're saying something as you're saying, while allowing the thing to come out naturally. So the show got worse. My elucidation got worse.

You saw it?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I could feel it. And thankfully, I sort of was able to carry it through. And, you know, did you notice it.

Or did somebody say something?

The audience never knows. And this is the thing.

No, that's the thing. That's why I.

Well, this is Alex's thing about. But I'll know. Right. That's Alex's standard that he holds himself to. But I'll know, and I understand why that's useful. The problem being that there's certain times that you need to sacrifice particular areas in order to be able to move forward. And I'm sure that he'd sort of accept that as a little caveat, but, yeah, nobody else knows. This is the beautiful thing about anyone that's concerned about too much scrutiny from people outside. No one knows the sentence that you could have said or the paragraph that you could have written.

You forgot to say correct.

No one knows how beautifully you could have delivered X or Y or Z. Only, you know. So there is a lot of responsibility on you, but there is also a degree of relinquishing that you can have from this sort of concern about skepticism and scrutiny from people that are outside of yourself. And that's. I find that. I find that quite nice. So, yeah, it's interesting to think about sort of, okay, I need to go back. Yes. I need to take a few steps back, back. And then I'm going to allow myself to move forward. And it's a difficult thing to be prepared to let go of.

It requires trust in yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. And Will Smith said in his memoir that gaining fame was amazing. Having fame was a mixed bag, and losing fame was the worst thing ever. That basically, on the way up, it's fantastic. At the top, it's like, and then on the way down, it's brutal. And if Tiger woods is. Tiger's fallen off his game. Game he can't hit. You know, he's going back and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, he knows that he's just sort of on the other side of his local maxima, heading up to a bigger false peak on the other side. But, yeah, it's an interesting challenge.

Again, back to entrepreneurship being this ultimate personal development program. I think, just like, I don't know what the quote is, but it's about the bird doesn't land on the branch. It trusts the branch won't break. It lands on the branch because it trusts that it can fly. So, like, it does require people always ask you, like, you know, how did you know or how did you do it? It's like, I don't know if I can tell you, because there was a point where I started to trust myself, right. Because I'm not going to move forward if I don't trust. So it's like, how many times did I fail that overcome the failure? Because there was a number of them. At what number was it that I finally said, okay, I'm going to trust that I know how to solve problems?

Well, the difference is that the trust thing is kind of like my. My conception around motivation, that most people over complicate motivation, and they presume that it's in this necessary step in between not doing a thing and doing a thing, where you decide that you're going to do the thing, but, like, the only thing that's doing the thing is doing the thing. There is no deciding to do the thing. There is simply just doing it. Yeah. Sam Harris and Jocko willink talk about how there's no such thing as faking courage. You know, if you do something in spite of being terrified of doing it, that is what courage is. That's bravery. And I think that the equivalent exists with motivation, that there is no such thing as faking motivation. If you do the thing in spite of not wanting to do the thing, that was motivation. And if you didn't do the thing, no matter how much you wanted to do it, then that wasn't motivation. So we add this sort of unnecessary middle step, and the trust in myself thing is a huge part that you kind of just add.

So do you get rid of the word motivation?

For me, it's not something that I use very much at all.

You don't ever say, like, I just don't feel motivated.

No.

You know, I'm not gonna do it.

No. And that's not. I haven't gone, you know, like, full, like goggins meets Hormozi meets some linguist, neuro linguistic programming to get it out of me. I just learned that insight about two years ago, and I just really think that most of motivation is bullshit. That you. You've got this. It is, and it might be something which is. I love this idea. I'm writing it, writing about it at the moment. It's taking forever, this idea of something which is literally true but functionally useless.

Say more.

So porcupines can throw their quills. No, they can't. Porcupines can't throw their quills.

Fascinating.

They're not fucking dark throwers. But if you believe that porcupines can throw their quills, you'll stay a bit further away. Way. So even though it's literally false, functionally it's true.

Oh, good. That's good.

Pigs are uniquely morally dirty animals that you should never eat. Not true morally. I think they probably hold the exact same worth exactly as a ton of other animals, but they do. Their flesh does carry a higher pathogen load, especially in a lot of the countries that said that you shouldn't eat them. So literally false. Functionally true. Something which is literally true, but functionally false would be an equivalent of, well, I suppose another one would be, always treat the gun like it's loaded. Right? Like, never point the gun at something. Even if you've checked the chamber a million times, you know that there's absolutely nothing in it. Just do not point the gun at somebody that you intend, that you don't intend to kill. But my point being that there are lots of things that you can do.

Wherever it's good to believe them. How do you use that in your life?

I think the line, and this is kind of a through line from what we were talking about before, that Mark groves quote where he says, there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little, if you focus on inputs, you don't actually know whether the outcomes are going to increase. But if you focus on outcomes, what is the thing that I meant to achieve. You're egalitarian, you're non prejudiced about all of the different routes that you can take in order to get there. But you don't mind about how I actually go through these things. I get there on the other side, and it comes back to what you were saying about having self trust after a particular amount of time, I built up enough trust that I could then have faith that I was going to be able to do the thing. It describes the sensation that you go through. The sensation that you go through as you're becoming more experienced and having more faith that you can do the thing is more enjoyable because there's less of that sort of tight uncertainty if you're doing it.

That's why.

But the outcome is the same. The outcome is the same. Yes. The input and the experience are different because as you go into it, you go, yeah, I'm going to crush this keynote. Like, I've done this 50 times before, and it's a, you know, it's a keynote that I've delivered specifically this one to a similar crowd. I've got lots of, as Alex would say, undeniable proof, a stack of undeniable proof that I can do the things I say I can do, but the thing still gets done on the other side without them.

Are you saying without the emotional shrapnel that you might have brought?

Of course, dude.

This is like, my people are like, well, how do you deal with that? I go, that just. You just. You're literally doing it to yourself.

Mm hmm. Yeah. You are the. The sort of taskmaster that's whipping yourself. You're the guy with the keys.

You're telling yourself a story. I mean, some people do it where they lit. They. They can't even get work done until they put themselves in a position where they have to do it, but they did it to themselves. Or they. They tell themselves a story about doing the work that just. You could tell yourself the opposite story, and again, the work still gets done. The thing still happens. Just one is a lot more pleasurable. So that's why I like your philosophy of, like, motivations bullshit. Because it's either I did or I didn't do, so I don't have to make a big thing. It's like, I just didn't do it. Just be honest with it. It's like, yeah, motivation. What is. You know, it's a neat. It's a neat concept.

Going on to the finding and recruiting process. Where do you find these people? How do you test first hire?

Yeah. This is like the people side again. That's why I think talent is such an important thing. The core philosophies that I have that's different than everybody else when it comes to talent, is, first off, I have to give them a test on the front end to see if they even can do basic stuff. So I. Every role at any company, unless I'm going outbound, I'm trying to pull somebody from another company, which I do, director level and above. I'm always stealing from an existing company. They have to submit a video. Video. And they got to answer some questions. And if they can't do that, Chris, there's like, that my recruiting team ahead of people. They just archive. Like, there's no conversation. If they.

What is the test?

It's a video. They have to submit a 62nd video answering certain questions.

Okay.

And if they go three or four minutes, they didn't read the instructions. The last thing I want is that person on my team. Right. Or you find out they don't even know how to record a video and send it to you. Like, we don't. We don't have an upload button. We say record a video and sent and paste the link. I mean, I live in a digital world. Like, if you can't figure that out.

We got drive or fuck.

We just have bigger issues. Right? Like, the other day is funny. I was at one of my companies, and I was watching one of the new sales guys in SDR and asked the guy who ran, I said, have you seen that guy, titan? He's like, no. And he goes, I was like, do you not test typing skills? Yeah, it was just an oversight, you know? So I think, like, having an initial kind of filter is a really great idea.

Gets rid of a lot of the competent shit. Test.

Yeah, it's just a signal to noise ratio. The next level is profile assessment, and I like a lot of them. For an assistant, I like Colby A. It's a great one.

You want to.

And the thing with an assistant is, don't hire somebody that maps to you. You want to find the opposite. So it's like. Like a key. If you're a high researcher, you want to find somebody that's low. If you're a low follow through, you want to find somebody high. Like, it sounds obvious, but I know some people hire their friends to be their assistant. That's not a winning strategy. So, um, the other one we use is profile XT. We use a bunch of different ones. I let companies decide, but the big idea is just the default cognitive pattern that that person inherently like. People have certain ways they act, and certain ways people act will be better for a role than others. So different leadership styles, different.

And what are you using to assess those?

Profile XT is one of them. Profile. But what's neat is, like, if we're hiring a VP of sales, we can actually profile the other people on the team, the other vice presidents, and it'll tell us the candidate is because of the way they are. If they're going to cause conflicts, it doesn't say don't hire them. It just gives you a data point.

How accurate do you find those to be?

Well, the very accurate in regards to, like, how they're going to work together. But really, it's the maturity of the person to be self aware that they're going to work with to solve that. But it tells you how to solve it. This person's usually going to act like this in a meeting, so you're going to have to act like this. But if you're self aware, you'll adjust, right? If you talk a lot and somebody doesn't talk, you hopefully should shut up and, you know, let them talk. But the thing that it does that I'm like, 100% stickler for is cognitive tests. So just pure ability to solve problems. So, like, funny part is, I think I'm one of the lowest cognitive scores on my team. So, like, when they say, hire the bottom end, it's like I've got data.

To back the idiot in the room.

Yeah, by design, I think I was in high iq. That one's still profile Xt.

Okay.

It's got both the cog plus the profile fit. So that's number two. And then the third is test project. You know, Seth Godin said this me years ago. He said, I can't work with you till I work with you. We were talking about a new startup, and he said, you know, how do you hire people? And when he said that, it was just like, off the cuff, can't work. I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, I haven't hired anybody for a decade where I didn't start off by working on a project on some kind of thing just to see if we gel on collaborating communication style. So what we've gotten really good in our companies is just how to hire people. Setting up a test project. So for an assistant, it might be like, hey, here's a person's profile on social media I need. It's his birthday. What should we get them? Just see and you give everybody, this is the key, is you give everybody the same test project, and they present it, and then you can. You can map it. What most. Some people do, they're like, all right, they asked this person to do this.

They do this. And it's like, if you're hiring a designer, you don't want them. Do you want to say, like, redesign our homepage and then see which one did it? Right? It's like, I was hiring a CEO once, and I was like, just the. The test project for a CEO. For everybody listening, is to build the 90 day plan. So you're going to hit the ground. What are you going to do in the first 90 days? Talk to everybody. You need to, on the team, figure out what you're going to be dealing with, and then present a plan that's actually the test project. So there's, like, three candidates. First guy goes up, starts reading, and PowerPoint slide. I don't know about you, Chris, but big no no, I can't. It's like, I can read faster than you can read to me, so let's stop that. Next person's plan was just not even. It's like they didn't talk to anybody. It's like, what company did you make that for? Third guy pulls up a dial, and I could tell by the quality of the diagram, the quality of thinking. It was almost like, you had me at hello.

So, like, to me, test projects is non negotiable. Every. We don't skip it, and that's what makes it very different. So it doesn't matter if it's admin delivery. Like, just give them the thing you want them to do. It's like, my buddy Brian hired somebody to help with marketing, and they fired them because their ideas for TikTok videos weren't good. And I said, well, did you make that part of the test project? He's like. Like, gosh, I should have done that. So. But, I mean, that's just like, where.

Are you looking for these candidates? Are you using headhunters?

We use. I think we use, indeed, a lot. So, again, director level above, we go outbound. Direct below that, we use indeed. What's unique is we do spend money on boosting the post, so we'll spend it on LinkedIn, et cetera. For remote roles, we'll use. I think it's remote IO. There's different website. Again, I'm not involved in it, but, uh, it's the idea of spending money on amplifying the opportunity because most people don't. And then they just get a bunch of, like, super low. It's just, you get a man. It's like, this person isn't like, why did they apply? I don't. I don't know what their role. Like, it must be like a select all apply or something. It must be way too easy to apply for jobs, so. But, um, I mean, for an assistant, truth is, I think last time we hired somebody on a team, it was like 800 applicants. We had to sift. Like, it's. It's work.

We did a two job postings, one guest booker, one general manager, and we had 6000 for two roles, for sure. In your world, a fucking nightmare.

Yeah. So, I mean, again, you don't want to be. You want to get. You want to do that. I do finals. Like, I do. I do. I do 15 minutes finals. In most of my companies, I don't want to, you know, I try final interviews. Yeah. I asked three fun questions. First one is because I'm pretty public about my childhood and some of my trauma. So I always say, you know, what's the. You know, what are some of the things that you went through as a kid that shaped you as a person? I asked a broad question. I see where they want to go with this, right? Cause, like, I don't know. I just don't like doing the whole, like, suit and tie bullshit kind of vibe and work, so they don't tell me anything. Well, I had a great childhood, and I'm really grateful for my parents, and nothing bad happened. I'm like, okay, good. Good to know. Then the next question ask is, what are the two toughest things that you've ever gone through in your whole life, and how did those shape you as a yemenite leader? Try to give him another, like, can you knock it out of the park, please?

Some of them are beautiful. Yesterday, I did an interview, and it was actually quite sad. The guy that was applying for the job, his sister's child, unfortunately got run over by a car a month prior. I was, like, still in it, my heart. But the fact that he shared that with me, I was like, dude, we're going to create some magic together, and someday I actually know somebody that his sister should be working with that. I didn't want to offer it on that call, but, you know, I'm waiting until timing's right. I'm going to offer that up. But, you know, that's a great question. And then my favorite one is, five years from now, you're living your most beautiful life. I want to know where you're living. Who are you living with? What are you making? What's your job? And pretend we can't work together. So we take that off the table so we can't work together. You're pitching me on your ten out of ten, five year life. What does that look like? The reason I do that is, first I want to see if they have a vision for their life. If they do, I'm looking if what I need them to do, if they would be selfishly motivated to create that, if it's what I need them to do.

So, for example, Sam, who you met out there, when I first interviewed him, he had a vision someday to own his own creative agency. Well, I needed to build that inside of one of my companies. So the cool part is, if he. If he wants to do that, someday, he's going to go learn the skills, and I'll pay him to learn it. So him do it here, so someday he can do it out there. So, alignment was there. And then what I like to do is I like to make notes of those. So, like, my assistant's assistant, Fabiana, when I was interviewing her, she says she's from Brazil. She goes, I have a vision someday, somehow, I'd love to live in Florida. Okay. Didn't judge her too hard for that one.

The capital of Central America.

I was like, okay, Florida it is. And then she wanted to do pattern design. It's like, there's actually a name for this, people that design patterns for, like, different things. Like, this is. I don't know. It's not tapestry, so I don't know what it's called. But I happen to know the ex, the number one woman in the world that does that. So I just filed those back in my mind, and anytime I have interaction with Fabiana, I tell her, I'm still looking out for some home for you in Florida, and I can't wait to introduce you to my friend. And because of that, like I said earlier, if I know her dreams and goals, and I can tell her that I'm working hard to make those true resources, opportunities, skill set, I just think that creates the alignment and the culture that those people will show up and do the thing. Like, I don't have to bribe them. I don't have to. You know, one of my most viral videos recently was given sam, again out there, a GT four. Porsche GT four. Because on his phone, dude, it's on my instagram. And I'll tell you why.

He's been with me for six years. The guy is solid to solid. He started when he was 16. He's 23 now. And one of the ways that I do this process. Five year goals. I teach it to my teams, and then I get them to create a wallpaper of their vision, what they want to create on their phone, so that when I go around the office, I just tap their phone. I don't even have to be that smart. I'm a system. I'm not. Again, my cognitive score is low, so Sam. And you can ask him to see it. He still has it there. He has a white GT four on the top right corner of his phone. Yeah. I just want. I just. I don't know. I just was like, he just. He absolutely knocked out of the park from last year, everything we've done. Everybody follows me in the media stuff there. I'm like, dude, this is the guy. He showed up every day. So it. It was. I remember when we landed, I was trying to. I was trying to trick him. I got to go to the dealership. The guys want to sell me this car.

I don't know if I want to get it, but I need you to come with the camera. And I told the team to come. He's like, all right. Then we're walking around, and the car is there. My heart, like, dude, I was so nervous. I've never, like, it'd been a while since I proposed to my wife. Had I even become close to that nervous? And I was just like. Because I didn't want to mess up my words.

Hmm.

And it was. We put it on the turntable, so it's sitting in the whole showroom. There's a turntable. And it was sitting there, but we walked in the other corner. I was looking in the cars, and then you can see in the video, he's like, is that a GT four? And I was like, I don't know. Is that. And I told him, is that a Porsche? Because he's like, yeah. And he walks over. I was like, isn't that the car on your phone? He's like, yeah, same spec, white. And I go. And I started. I just started telling the guy about Sam. I said, hey, can I tell you about Sam? He goes, yeah, so let me tell you who Sam is. This is literally the guy. I kept saying, I need you to make more money, so give it to the team. I need you to. I need you to, you know, I need you to be rich, bro. Like, help me help you. He goes, I'm here to learn, not earn. He would never. He would have probably waited another decade before he ever got himself the car he literally had the money to buy.

Instead, he bought it home because he's at 22 at the time.

Smell good?

Yeah. And I'll tell you, man, I bought myself some cool cars. It's a hundred times cooler buying something. Like, it was, yeah, it was special. And I just think that that was a symbol as well to everybody else. Like, just understand your team's dreams and goals and just, if you wake up every day to try to make theirs come true, everything gets easier.

I've heard you say that you run your personal life like a business as well. What does that consist of?

Every, like, the comments when I talk about this, they're like, hey, you should be so fun to be married to. I would love you. You are so awesome. I'm like, shut up. Like, I just. For me, dude, I, again, I went through massive pain when I was engaged, and she walked away. Like, that was one of the hardest. 28 at the time. 27, 28. And I realized I was good at business. Like, I finally figured out the rhythms of success of business, but I sucked at being in relationships. Like, I literally, I remember one time I saw an Elon interview, and the interviewer is like, do you ever think you'll date again? He's like, hmm, I know I need to allocate some time to dating. Do you think 5 hours a week is enough? I was just like, okay, he's worse than I am. But I just asked myself, like, well, why am I so good in business but so bad in relationships? And I started thinking about, like, what I do in business that makes it successful. It's, you know, it's a relationship with my team and all this stuff. And I just, I just got to a place where I applied some of those principles.

So, for example, you know, every quarter we do an off site, okay. And it's two nights, three days. Initially, I didn't know what we were going to do. My wife fought with me for it when we were, we were dating at the time, but I just said, like, I just think that it's important that we build a rhythm. So now we look forward to them. They're incredible. We pick cool destinations, and it's just for us. We do weekly meetings, you know, every week we have lunch together. We have an agenda structure. One of the coolest things we ask each other is, how have I been for you as a husband? And I listen, Chris. I just sit there and listen, talk, talk, talk, criticize. You did this on Monday. Like, I'm so fascinated by how good her memory is. Like, she can remember you left this cup on this table, half on the corner, and then my only response is, thank you. And then she asked me the same question. And I usually say, you are incredible. There's nothing wrong with it. Like, dude, this is like natural selection. Like, I mean, what. I'm not going to criticize, but even on those meetings we talk about, like, because I managed to find I don't want me.

If anything happens to me, I have a great team, but I want her to know. So any big decisions, I review it with her. Talk about the weekend. So, like, we just figured out where the friction points in our lives were, and then we review them in that weekly meeting. We do date nights every week. We just, you know, we have core values as a family, Martell. Core value. And those are really cool. Like, our kids are eleven and twelve now, but ever since they were young, we've. We used them, because then it's a, like, here's what Martell stand for. And when you're punching your brother, we're going to go to, we love and support each other. So you tell me how punching your brother love and support each other. So it's not. And it's an identity thing, right?

Have you got a family crest like Ben?

We didn't do the crest, no. I have a lot of friends, Ben, and that's how I met Ben. He put our family in a presentation he was given on his family stuff. And I'm not going to send my kids in the woods at 13 years old to fend for themselves. It turns out the world's hard enough if you just let it affect your kids. But I do love that he does everything at the extremes, but, yeah, so I would say core values, we have a scorecard. Kind of like, we measure ourselves on different dimensions of, like, spirituality and hobbies, and we just ask for a community service. Like, are we living up to the core values? So we review them, but it's just. It's gotten to a place where. Where, you know, I think what happens with some entrepreneurs that are, like, growth minded and their partner's not, is that the partner starts feeling scared. They may never say it this way. Scared that you're going to depart and wake up one day. It's like when I go do, like, retreats, like spiritual retreats. My wife is always like, do you still want to be with me?

Like, yes. I never worry that that's going to be the. I don't know, maybe I'm just weird. But she's. She goes and does her thing I'm like, are you going to be with me? It's like, yeah, we're pretty good. Like, so to me, it's the fear of the person going on a growth journey and them being such a big chasm and what this does. Even the weekly meeting, right? Because a lot of my friends, unfortunately, you know, 50% have been divorced since, you know, last decade. And it's usually because there was a crack that nobody talked about some kind of resentment, some kind of moment, a fight that just never got resolved and it just kept breaking. And eventually, by the time it gets bad enough, it's, we're talking Grand Canyon type scale, and it's just too far to come back. So, like, even the concept of having practices that are, you know, resentment inoculators, like how I, in my book, I talk about how to do clearing conversations, which is the same thing you do with your spouse that you do with your team.

How do you do it?

I think it's probably one of the most important things in the book that nobody gives because it doesn't make them money, but it is. It will make them the most money. It's essentially if you do something that I've, like, I've got resentment for, or if I do something, and I know you have resentment for it because you can see, you know, those people in the meetings that just keep chirping and you're like, they're chirping about, it's not even a thing.

It's bullshit.

It's this other thing. They just haven't, they don't want to bring that up. So they're going to chirp about this. So the way it works is you go to them and you go first and you say, hey, I want to be the best leader for you. And I realize the only way I'm going to be able to do that is that if you're honest, if I get honest feedback on how I've been showing up for you, and I'm not perfect unless you think Jesus or Messiah, like, I'm not. Like, I got opportunities and I, I can't get better if I don't know what they are. So, Chris, can you think about something that's happened in the last six months that, you know, you were concerned about, question didn't understand and, and that might have caused you some feelings around it? And they go, yeah, I do. You got that thing? They go, yeah. I say, cool. Would you do me the honor of sharing it with me? And I sit back and I listen. Now, the key is, is most people don't want to do that because they're like, well, I know what he's going to say, and I don't agree with them.

That's not the point. The whole point is literally taking the venom out. It's letting the person. Well, I was in. I mean, dude, the shit I've heard is fascinating. You didn't say hello to me the other day when you walked in the office. Thank you. And again, the only thing is. So you repeated back. So what I heard you say is that when I didn't come in, say hi to you, you felt that I was in a mood or I was upset with you. He was, yeah.

Yeah.

I said, okay. Appreciate you sharing that with me. First off, thank you. Always. Thank you. I would have never known. Thank you for sharing that. And then there's a. I accept it, and here's what I commit to change or I want to. Is it okay if I share with you why? And see, most people think, well, if I go to the why, I'm dismissing what they said. 90% of the value is them saying it. And I will tell you, they will say at the end of it, I don't even care if you agree with me or you agree to change anything.

Hear it.

Heard, seen and appreciated.

I was at the element off site last week.

The. The powder thing, correct?

Yep. So I was with them in Bozeman, Montana, and then big sky, and they did basically the same thing. I think it's called a discharge. So they allowed a name. Well, I mean, it depends. Yeah, it depends on what lens you're looking. And they, I think maybe opened it to the floor and just said, okay, so basically the same thing. You bring up something that's occurred within the last few months, you say to it, and the person says, thank you, and whatever. Whatever. And I remember thinking, like, God fucking ballsy, allowing all of these people to unload these things, but it's taking the tension out of it. And you're right. It's sort of just getting into it early. Neal Strauss, who sat in that seat not long ago, my favorite quote from last year was, unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. Just fucking. Yeah. Absolute banger. And it's so true. It's so true. You know, because we get mad at people for doing things that we haven't told them that we don't want them to do.

What a crazy.

And then we get irritated at the fact that they don't know that we didn't want them to do it. And then it grows into this big thing like the way that you slurp your tea at dinner, all of the different. What a british analogy that is. The idea that you had about someone that's very high growth and somebody that's lower growth made me think of one example and one idea that I've got. So the example is Aaron Alexander, the big bloke that was outside that came to come and greet us when we first started, started playing pickleball together about two years ago. I said, I'm friends with Zayn Navratil, who's the current men's number two, and he's got this great coach in town. He said that the coach could work with me. And Aaron got nervous and angry about the prospect of me working with a coach when he wasn't working with a coach. Because the concern in the disparity between us, because it's only fun when you're at the same sort of a level. He also happens to be much better than me. So I think he just a bit of an ego boost for him.

You know what I mean? He regularly beats me. The other one is, I had this idea that I came up with actually, while doing my live tour last year, which is personal growth velocity, which is what you're referring to. So there is a pace that you move. Imagine that you're Falcon nine or you're the challenger and you're taking off from the launch pad and you're moving at a particular pace and there's other people that are around you and they're moving at velocities, too. And there are some people that are ahead of you, but if you're moving more quickly, you catch up to them and then you sort of strip past them. And the goal is to find someone who is moving at roughly the same sort of velocity that you are so that you can keep up together. The problem is that a lot of the time we are friends with people who are still sort of on the ground. And there's this odd unspoken about tension when you mention things, you don't feel comfortable talking about what's happening in your life because you know that it's in some way sort of triggering to them.

It kind of puts them into a harsh light in retrospect. I did a big chunk of time in my twenties not drinking as a club promoter in 20, 1617. That was pretty radical. I know sobriety low and no alcohol. Kind of super popular at the moment. But that caused a lot of friction in many of the relationships I had because the subtext was, oh, Chris thinks he's too good for us.

Better than me?

Yeah, yeah. Oh, he thinks that because he's not drinking, that it throws my behavior into sharp contrast. And that caused me to see a lot of the friendships that I had as drinking partners, rather than general, genuine compatriots. Yeah. They were only happy to be friends with me as long as I was destroying my life along with them. They were more happy to be around me doing something I didn't want to do, but they did than being around me doing something that I did want to do. And it just highlighted a bunch of different friendships that really, I didn't need to go sober to have this be identified. But that personal growth velocity thing, I think is really important. Especially in marriages. So much in marriages and finding, especially as a guy, I think there is often a question, why are so many of the top podcasters and the top non fiction authors in the personal development world men? And I think that it's the same reason that more men are CEO's, that there's this sort of obsessive need to fill a void inside of us that conquer and mastery is somehow going to give us.

The problem being that if you're a guy who has this high capacity for personal growth and already has built this into your life, it's going to be tough for you to find a female partner that's able to keep up with that pace. I think that you're, you know, for all that, how young she is and fecundity and waist to hip ratio and mate value and your resources with her youth and all of this fucking bullshit, it's like, dude, if you like personal growth, it's going to be one of the most important things in your life. Finding a emotionally balanced pretty girl who is into self development is. You're talking. That's the real unicorn. The real unicorns from a wife perspective are finding women that are into personal growth. And, you know, fortunately, we've sort of cultivated the microcosm below this particular podcast. So, you know, the modern target rich audience, the modern wisdom dating pool would actually be fantastic if I could just.

Fucking access to it.

Yeah, exactly. Get the mailing list from the 2 million people on YouTube. Yeah, but yeah, that's really where you're struggling. And it's because of that personal development you feel people pulling away from you and you have this, I call it personal growth guilt, like survivor guilt, that you've sort of come back from Nam, this difficult place, and you're now in a better place, and this person's still there, and you feel like, oh, God, maybe I should be spending time fixing trucks and sheds with my uncle and his crazy racist brother.

I. So here, this is, this is my opinion I think on that is a little controversial in the sense that I believe when we live our truth, oftentimes we show people where they've been living their lie and that, and that's the feeling. And, you know, so I coach a lot of CEO's that run into this, hey, how did you deal with your wife? And this and this and this. This is just personally where I've gotten to similar to motivation concepts is nobody has to change for me to win. That is my, I repeat that to myself.

What does that mean to you?

It means that I'm not going to make anybody have to change for me to win. I'm not going to require anything from anybody for me to win. I do not need the rest of the world to be any certain way for me to win. And I just, as soon as I started thinking that way and started seeing me react, frustrated, resentful, I'm like, oh, no, I can be with somebody that chooses not to be, be on a path of growth. And that's okay. I can choose to talk. It came from my dad. Okay. Like most young men, I think when we talk to our dad, you know, they have this beautiful way of asking us questions that makes us feel incompetent. Like my, even today, my dad, you know, worked at a job for 32 years and, you know, never really became like, rich, but, you know, he retired. He makes me feel like an idiot. And I remember one day I go, so I could either get frustrated every time he does that or just get to a place where it has no bearing, kind of the trigger back to the trauma, whatever. It was just like, I got to a place where I had to reprogram and just say to myself, like, every time he asked me a question, that's his way of saying I love you.

So literally, every time he would say, like, hey, that new business you invested in, you know, who's the CEO or whatever, all I heard was I love you. And I, and I just, it's funny because the more I did that, the less he worried. Like, I grew up and I gave my dad a freaking, sure, I gave him micro heart attacks. His whole, like, I was a wild and it's like he's chilled out with me and I think it's in response to me, right? Like, my wife is a happier, more fulfilled, loving female, expressive because I don't need her to be anything. And that was not the case, Chris. I mean, dude, I had some weird shit I had to work through in my early relationship with her came from previous relationships of like, hey, we agreed to this and I thought you'd do this, and now you're not doing this, and blah, blah, blah. And now I got to get a house manager and da da, like, what are we doing? And then I was like, dude, you got to get over yourself. So I just got to a place where I don't need anybody's.

I don't need anybody to act a certain way for me to win.

How do you avoid that making you too jaded or detached or, you know, there's obviously going to be preferences that you would have for how you could connect with your father.

It's. It's such a good question. So have you ever ran into Peter Crone?

Yeah, he's been on the show.

Okay, so Peter, I've coached with him twice. Okay. Because Peter has a way of explaining things to a software guy in a way that resonates. And, you know, when times working with him on something and he goes, how does it make, how does it feel making people wrong? So what do you mean? He goes, essentially that thing you just did, you're trying to make them wrong. And, you know, Dan, you're very, you know, he has this, you know, british way of saying, you know, you're very, you're very compliments me. And then he punches me in the side of the neck. But he goes, it's just a way for you to control. He goes, so instead of making people wrong, how about you allow people to be. Doesn't take away from your opportunity to express your preferences. But expressing your preferences is a completely different language pattern than criticizing people for who they are or choices they make. And I was like, wow. I remember writing down making people wrong and underlying highlighting and just kind of think about all the ways I'd done that in my life to people. People. And that was the beginning of where I came, kind of came to this conclusion.

And he says it differently, but the way I think about it is the world shows me where I'm not free. And then through that experience, I'm then going to evaluate how do I. Is it big enough? Is it worth even addressing? Or do I just have to let it be to your point, like being too passive? Or is it something where I'm going to express my preferences and if it continues, also choose to no longer engage, right. Remove somebody from a team, move on from a friendship. I'm still trying to figure it out. But I'm telling you, like, my I'm a happier person once I started adopting. Nobody has to change for me to win. I'm going to win. I'm willing to do the work, be consistent, show up. If you want to join the go train, jump on. If not, that's on you. You're on your own journey. I'm going to move forward. And then what's funny and this is the way I do my content is whenever I see something that I don't agree with, I then show share it on social. I don't attack them, I don't even tell them, but they inspire the content.

Mm hmm.

And I think it's the coolest. Like, I think it's a spiritual thing that we should all do where our inspiration from the way we see the world through our lens is actually our learning. Then we get to share with other people.

It's a beautiful way to transcend things that have hurt you or challenged you in the past, which is to say, you didn't stop me and I'm going to make sure that you don't stop these other people too. To treat.

Yeah, I'm going to take the bad and turn it into I had a.

Post that I wrote a couple of months ago after spending time with a friend, which relates exactly to what you're talking about. I had a conversation this week with a friend about emotions, specifically jealousy, frustration and anger, about how they hijack even the most cerebral, cognitively sophisticated person. It's highly annoying. You spend all of this time trying to be a rational, agentic beast. Then a thing happens that disrupts your emotional state and you turn into a petulant toddler. He explained that when he finds himself getting carried away by jealousy, frustration or anger, he asks a few questions. First, out of all of the emotions that you could have chosen, why did you choose that one? You have this huge library of emotions to tap into. Why did that one get activated? What is it about you, your desires, your assumptions about the world and your patterns that caused that emotion to rise to the surface so quickly? It's not strictly true that you chose it, your body and mind just delivered it to you. But I love the language and framing for retaking agency over our emotions. Emotions second, and hows that working out for you?

What has been the outcome of that emotion arising? Has it made your relationships life quality of mind better or worse? I love this language again because it creates distance between you and your feelings. Plus it assumes that you chose it, giving you a sense of power. Third, do you want to be right or do you want to be loved? Often when we feel emotions like jealousy or frustration and anger, its because we feel like a boundary has been crossed. Someone should have known that we would have felt this way if they did that thing, and they didn't. So we need to get them to realize their transgression. In our less gracious moments, we hope to achieve this through mistreatment, passive aggression, mean comments or distancing. And in our more gracious moments, it's done through a calm, honest, and open explanation of why someone did something that made us feel this way without accusing the other person of having done it on purpose. Unspoken expectations are premeditated results. We assume the best of others. We assume that our friend or partner wouldn't ever mean to make us upset, that their impact, their actions that had on our psyche, was done through ignorance, not negligence or malice.

Maybe their behavior does warrant the silent treatment. Maybe we are righteous in our indignation. Maybe they should have known better. You may even be right for reacting this way. But do you want to be right? Or do you want to be loved? Because your petulance in response to a situation you wish hadn't happened is unlikely to create more love. And if your partner or friend is incapable of hearing you gently and frankly explaining why you feel bad, then you have a good indicator that your interlocutor is a bigger problem than just their behavior.

Did you like encapsulated cool. So good.

It's cool when you arrive at the same sorts of insights.

The word you said is agency. It's agency. It's when we get to a place where we can be aware that we control the meaning to everything. Like. Like, my kids fight. Like Max said, I'm this. I go, dude. All right, let's talk about. I teach this stuff to my kids, and they're young. It's. If he's sitting there screaming at you, saying, you have purple eyes, are you gonna care? Well, no, because you don't. Why? And he's okay. Perfect. So whether he says you have a crush on a girl or. Or not, like, let it go. And they're like, sid, you don't control what other people do. You control how you respond and what meaning you associate to what's going on. And again, I'd shoot. Like, to your point, I'd rather be loved. I'm okay not being right. I got the point. Guy, literally, this morning, text messaged me. I gave him a emoji. His response was some sort of a sentence. It sounded like, you know, I I don't know if you realize how insensitive that was. I sent you a heartfelt message, and you replied with a thumbs up. And, you know, I don't know why people think that's okay, but.

And I'm like, dude, that's okay if you don't understand that. I, like, I at least replied, haven't seen you in years. Love you, hope you're doing well, but, like, your feeling is what it is. Like, I don't need to be right about it. I just. I just replied. And I gave him that one of those emojis. What do you want me to do?

Oh, God. You can't do. You can't do thumbs up.

Oh, yeah, I did passive aggressive, 100%.

It was less gracious.

Yeah, I can't win them all. I am human, and I do enjoy a good. Like, I like the joke enos of it. It is what it is, but I don't know. I just. I try to go to a place where I don't need anything from anybody. I just. I'm just a happier place, and then I'm going to create, and then if it works, even just the desire to making things work, I had to like that. This is. Again, it's contradiction. Like, I actually. I think I wake up and I create, and I. You know, like, I'm very focused. But at the same time, if it doesn't happen, I'm not gonna be sad. I'm not gonna cry. I'm not gonna. Not gonna scream at anybody. Try not to, anyways. Just. Just try to, you know, buddhist ish. Mine, like, water ish. But again, to your point about the past, this is where I'm going back to what Peter said, okay. Because, like, I was like, okay, I can get on board with this. Don't react. Nobody needs a change for me to win. Stop making people wrong. But then I felt like life got really boring.

Like, I literally.

No stakes anymore, dude.

I got on a call with him, and I was like, I'm doing the thing, and it's pretty flat. Like, it's. It's the emotional. Like, if you're addicted to chaos, which a lot of entrepreneurs are, and I talk about that in my book, big time, because I used to be that person. And most people, it's normal. So they're comfortable in the chaos. Turns out chaos is a really shitty way to be a leader for a team. You got to get over that. So if. If you go from, like, chaos is, like, super normal for me, and then you go to, like, plane and there's no more chaos. It's actually a, it's a new place to get comfortable. And he says, oh. He goes, you forgot the other part of the equation, which is you still have to create. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, um. So the way you create when you disconnect from a behavior is you actually, this is so bananas. Okay. And I'll tell you a real example. So I'm sitting on the couch and my wife wanted to go to CrossFit. She's a hardcore crossfitter, so she's a better person for all of us when she does crossfit.

55 spine bulging disk.

Yeah. I don't go to Crossfit anymore. She loves it and we're happy. I don't think she pushed it. She just, she just likes to, takes over. Yeah, yeah. And she's like, hey, the boys need to be ready by 08:00 because this person's going to pick him up for a soccer practice. Yeah, no problem. Like, I'm a man and I, I think I know how to do handle stuff. So anyways, 30 minutes later, she texts me, are the boys ready? Now she writes, are the boys ready? I hear you are a horrible dad, irresponsible, and can't tie your own shoelaces. So I'm telling this to Peter, but I, again, mine like water. I don't respond. So what should I have done in that situation? Because, like, I heard that. And he goes, well, let me ask a few questions. One, did she say that? That. No. Which is a big idea. Like, did she say those words? No. Do you felt that way? Yes. Why do you think she said those things? Well, because she's, you know, sometimes she gets worried. She thinks about the kid. I mean, my wife puts sun's block on my kids at 04:00 in the morning, looking at the weather, thinking about the rest of day.

So like, she, you know, moms do that. And she goes, he said this beautiful thing. He goes, do you think that's because of who you are or who she is? So because of who she is. Was she that way before you met her? Yeah, probably. Let it go.

It's not a you thing, it's a 0%.

You think this is who she was before she met you? But then he said the, the cool thing. He said, what would you have rathered happen instead? Well, I mean, I would have rather a message that said, you're the most incredible husband. Thanks for taking care of the kids this morning. That would have been cool. He goes, all right, so this is the creation part. You forget, I got, I want. Next time, reply to her and tell her how incredible she is for that. I go, what do you mean? He goes, tell her what you wish she told you. So I replied to her, all good kids are ready. I love how much you care about the boys and always making sure things are done on time, set, safe.

I feel safe. I feel reassured.

Dude, I'm talking like, ninja level relationships stuff. I've not. I've been non stop doing this. Anytime I feel away, I don't respond. And instead I take the opposite to create the future that I want it. And it turns out if you express, because somebody said once they said, what you repress gets expressed. So if you, you know, masculine feminine energy, like, sometimes the wife starts acting like a man because you start acting like a wife. You know what I mean? The masculine energy. So the idea of expressing and creating a future state that you desire anytime you feel the opposite has been game changer for me in all aspects of my work.

There's two ways that you can get people's behavior to change. Sort of interpersonally. There's probably a ton of others, but there's two big ones. You can either criticize the negative or reinforce the positive. And the reinforcing of the positive is way more fun, dude.

It's more fun. It's ten times more effective.

But people defi. I wonder why that is. I know this, too, in my, it's easier.

It's literally lazier. It's easier for me to be critical in front of you in a meeting than to make a note, write it down, and save it for a one on one, and come from a place in the one on one to be, support, to be.

This is. So this happened during the meeting. You know what I really love? I love it when x, y, and z. This is when you're at your best. And this is really what I want you to bring to that. I don't think that that's necessarily, that's.

Exactly how you do it. And just think about how cool that is where you're like, oh, why is that person doing that thing? And it's like, hey, can I know? And again, I don't always do it in public. So again, praise in public, criticize in private, but I'll use that like I'm. It's their bright spots, right? And people have talked about this for years. It's way better to identify a good behavior and reinforce it and praise it and celebrate it. And then everybody else starts seeing, oh, if I do this and I get praise. I'll start doing that, and then it creates a culture of we're looking for bright spots versus I'm scared to do anything because if I put my head too high, I'm going to get punched in the face. Because I saw Bobby.

Yeah, he got punched in the face.

Punched in the face hard.

Two insights around that. Do you know Rory Sutherland? Do you know who he is? Vice chairman of Ogilvy Advertising. He's been on the show five or six times. The guy is a fucking absolute force of nature. It's a big, gruff british man and everything's a bit fucking shit, isn't it?

I know exactly who you're talking about. Yes. Yeah, he's got some great stories.

He came into a podcast episode with seven vapes around his neck once, which was fantastic because of, and I quote, range anxiety. Range anxiety.

What did he teach you, though? Because, I mean, he's.

He's one of the great stories. He's one of the greatest advertisers on the planet. So here's one insight in particular, that non creative people are always made to dance to the rhythm of non creative people. So, Silicon Valley, almost all businesses now see pretty much everything as an operational and logistic solution to be solved, as opposed to something that requires something new and creative. Creative. So his quote is, you never get fired for hiring Deloitte. The point being that, well, we followed the blueprint. The blueprint that didn't work for the last eight times. Yeah, but we followed the blueprint as opposed to potentially succeeding at something that's new, because you're not going to lose your job for doing the thing that's always been done, even if it's more guaranteed to be unsuccessful. But there is a potential that you're going to get punched in the face for trying to do something that new.

Not even potential. Probably proof. This is where I think Jeff Bezos at Amazon is probably one of the best innovators in the world, because even the Firefox, most people forget about the Firefox. $600 million investment in a phone to try to compete against Google and Apple. And he, by design, and I can't imagine what it took, he celebrated that the team got built. They tried it. In hindsight, Alexa came from the that and the Kindle, which have been category leaders in the home space and et cetera. So, like. But his whole thing is that if we don't build a culture where we celebrate failures and everything has to win, it would be impossible. To your point, it's impossible to assume that we're going to be able to innovate, because innovation requires a level of, like, a massive level of uncertainty. Because if we just follow the blueprint everybody's got, we're going to get what they got, which is not what we're after. So I think that, like, Bezos leadership strategies is one of the few that I study. I think Netflix is another one, but, yeah, it's like, celebrate people doing the thing you wish more people would do.

It's kind of like in. My buddy Phil Jones said this to me once. We were doing something, and he's a speaker, and I want to speak more, and he said something so simple, yet so profound. He says, take pictures of you doing the thing you want to do more of. It's like, what do you mean? He goes, you want to sell more copies of your book? Yeah. He goes, do you take pictures of you signing books for people? No. You might want to do that. So that simple concept of take pictures of you doing things you want to do more of is find the thing that people are doing, you want more people to do and celebrate it. And I just. Those simple little mental cues are, I think, just the coolest. But again, I got to rewrite some beliefs because there's probably some scary stuff around that. What are you saying? I don't tell somebody to do something wrong, so you can tell them. You just tell them differently. And again, that's where you're not good enough yet. That's. That's the skill. It's like, yeah, it's where. Where's my gap? Am I willing to create the space in my calendar to work on it?

You know? Am I willing to hire a coach to look at the way I operate? I mean, some of the coolest stuff I do is actually watching CEO's interact on me meetings and giving them some feedback because they're so close to it, they can't see it. And once they hear it, they're like, oh, I didn't. I thought I was leading through transformational leadership. I'm like, no, dude, you told everybody what to do on that call. So, yeah, I think it's just like one of those things of just creating space to do the work to become better.

There's a Kevin Kelly quote from his most recent book where he says, you lead by letting others know what you expect of them, which may exceed what they expect of themselves, provide them a reputation that they can step up to.

Dude, Kevin Kelly's a stunt.

He's a beast.

Let's go. That was awesome.

The one thing I wish he'd done in that book, that most recent book of his that he did, it was fucking 300 pages of aphorisms. Want him. I wish that he'd done it over ten volumes, and I'd got, like, a daily stoic. Yeah, I just. I want to hear. And, you know, that's. It made for a very easy episode for me in the hormosi stylistical thing that we've, I guess, kind of owned cornered, cornered the market a little bit for. But that's my favorite thing. Okay, here's a lovely aphorism and what that. That's like a. It's a compression fight. You remember win zip? It's like you're zipping this.

It kicks the llama's ass. Win zip. Oh, no, sorry. I'm thinking of the MP3 player. Oh, winamp. Do you remember Winamp?

I fucking do.

Remember when amp kicks the llama's ass? Remember when it starts, it says that.

What was the one that's got the orange cone? What's that?

Oh, was it. Sorry.

To zay v player or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. V player.

Anyway, when you've got this, you've got this sort of entire idea. You know, whatever Kevin's. Whatever life experiences Kevin's gone through to think about, you set this sort of expectation of people, and it may be beyond where they're prepared to go or what they think of themselves, and you allow them to step up to it and stuff, think, okay, wow, okay, so this is, you know, 500 hours of business meetings where that little sort of insights come about, and then it's been synthesized and compressed down. But there is a part of me that wants to go, okay, but I need the fucking password to unlock this. This zipped file so that I can then see it in all of its full resolution.

Yeah, you need this. To me, the stories are the glue for the concept, and sometimes I need more of the painting to be able to see my exam.

Aphorisms on their own just aren't enough.

Well, you're. You're putting the onus on the receiver, the listener, the reader, to then unpack it themselves.

Correct. Work out what this means. Work out what this means.

And it can go down the wrong. And it could go down the wrong path. They could live. Like, how many times have people heard you say something? They're like, you know, and that meant this to me. And you're like, oh, I meant the opposite.

Yeah, correct. The best thing, the single best thing is when you get to this stage, which I'm starting to get to now, at least a little bit, is where people don't. They misattribute quotes. I didn't say that are better than the ones that I did say.

Dude, that's the coolest thing in the world. World that people quote you for things you didn't say, but it's the coolest.

Thing, but it's better. Yeah. Hormozi did that. He misquoted something that I came up with, made it better, and then gave it to me, and I was like, that's mine. Now. I know that it's technically yours. Technically, there's an idea called churchillian drift, which is that unattributed quotes, over time are more likely to be attributed to Churchill.

Dude, all of them are.

You basically want to. You want to accumulate sort of martellian or williamsonian drift over and time. I just want to keep doing this. Dude, I really, really appreciate you. Let's bring this one into land. People want to check out all of the shit that you do. Resources, book, everything else they go.

Instagram is my favorite. It's where I push to everything else, and it's where, I mean, my whole thing is, I want to die empty. So it's like, I give it away all. It's free. It's like my best stuff. We produce. I mean, we spend close to a million dollars a year just on media, just giving it all away. Alex was a big inspiration for that. My books on Amazon you can get at bookstore, and it's, you know, the mission there is to help entrepreneurs build companies they don't grow to hate. And it's going to take me a long time to kind of try to move the needle on that because I think a lot of people, they climb these ladders that just suck, and then they go, and then they just stop. That's the worst part. Creators that could have been great at creating cool new stuff, they just decide it's not the way they want to do it. And then my YouTube. My YouTube has been a big focus of us just trying to, uh, to understand the algorithm. And we put out some pretty cool bangers lately.

I like it. You're getting them and. Yeah. You really?

Yeah. It took a year of just testing and iterating, but we're starting to get some wind.

Heck, yeah.

This is an honor, man.

I really appreciate it. Dan Martell, everyone.