Alex Hormozi's best frameworks for business and beyond

- November 14, 2025 (4 months ago) • 01:13:15

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Alex Hormozi	The highest returns on capital we get as entrepreneurs are talent—full stop. Where else do you get 10x, 20x, 100x returns so reliably? If I'm thinking from the "I really have to fill this role" angle, it's usually not the right person. But if I'm thinking, "How do I even care if I have a role for this person? I have to get them in," it's usually the right person.
00:17	Sam Parr	"Once you get to, like, 5 million in revenue, that's what you have to become: a collector of people."
00:22	Alex Hormozi	"It's pattern recognition, but especially when it comes to talent, you have to grow fast. I do think that's a virtuous cycle: the faster you grow, the more talent you get, which grows you faster. And so it can also be vicious in the other direction."
00:32	Sam Parr	It's mostly vicious in the other direction.
00:34	Alex Hormozi	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:34	Sam Parr	Yeah, I'm hiring for about 6 or 7 roles. What mistakes do you think I'll likely make?
00:38	Alex Hormozi	"Like, somebody comes in as a C‑level executive and has no network of people they've worked with in the past — that's weird."
00:44	Sam Parr	"Who have you hired recently that is significantly better than you or has taught you something — who takes you to school?"
00:50	Alex Hormozi	This is something that I can only say now, with 14 years of business experience, which is...
00:59	Sam Parr	I just... I think you, Sean, do this as well — you think in frameworks. I don't think like that at all. That does not come naturally to me. Whenever I hear you, or our mutual friend Ryan Dice, I feel like he was making me feel like a jerk. He was like, "You don't think in frameworks. How do you learn something and then think about how you're going to teach it to your team or whatever?" And I'm like, "I don't know, man. I'm like a Neanderthal. I just kind of float by life sometimes." I just... I don't like to reflect and think in a framework. But you do that.
01:28	Alex Hormozi	I think frameworks happen when you have to reteach or reuse the same thought process over and over again. Rather than re-deriving the same decision set, you create a framework to give yourself mental shorthand. I think it's like—I created the scaling one. You were at the implementation workshop: the "Mozy Six" (or whatever). It's more: metrics, market, model, money, and then underneath the model there are four offshoots, and finally manpower. These are the six reasons that people get limited in their business. That was because I had done so many Q&A calls; there has to be a decision tree. It might be more complex than I thought, but there is a decision tree that I'm going through. So actually crystallizing that. You totally think in frameworks; you just haven't documented them. That's my two cents—that's my opinion.
02:18	Sam Parr	Well, you had this cool—I've been watching your... I think I told you the other day: I was watching your content, not on tactics of making money but on tactics of leadership and management. You had this cool thing called "the diamond."
02:29	Alex Hormozi	Yeah, it's great.
02:30	Sam Parr	It was basically, for the listener: if you have an employee who's not doing what you want them to do, they're either: - they don't know what you want done, - they don't know how to do it, - they're not motivated, or - they don't know when you want it done.
02:42	Alex Hormozi	Yeah, or there's something blocking them.
02:43	Sam Parr	"Yeah. When you come up with something like that, is that something you make up? Or do you read other books, steal cool bits of inspiration, and repurpose them for your needs?"
02:55	Alex Hormozi	So, honest truth: I really don't read as much as I probably should. Almost all my stuff just comes from me doing it and then thinking, "Man, there's gotta be an easier way to describe this." If I happen to come across some coincidence that corroborates an idea, I see that as validation. But I don't really consume other people's stuff for inspiration. I have enough going on every day and tons of stuff to talk about. The management document came from that: fundamentally, people don't do stuff for a reason. I have to figure out what that reason is. If there's a framework I can use for that conversation, it makes it less like attacking the person. Saying, "You are the least piece of shit," is unlikely to be productive and probably not the real cause of why they're not doing things. Most people prefer to stay employed and want to do a good job, by and large. So if we take that to be true, and I want them to succeed and so do they, then what's getting in the way? Often it's communication. Maybe I didn't communicate that I wanted them to do this thing — that's on me. Maybe I told them but they say, "Cool, I don't know how to do that" — that's a training issue. Maybe they didn't know there was a deadline — that's a "when" problem. If they knew when to do it, knew how to do it, and knew I wanted them to do it, then we ask whether something is blocking them. The "not motivated" explanation is technically correct sometimes, but it's the last one I go to because most times people are relatively motivated. There are times when motivation truly is the issue, or when the "how" component requires a generalized skill someone lacks. Think of "attitude versus aptitude." That phrase used to bug me because it's not always that simple: sometimes there's a deficiency in someone's skill set to perform a role. If you're hiring for low-skill labor — say you run an Airbnb and need cleaners, or you have a yogurt shop and need people to clean the counter and check people out — those roles are technically low skill. In hiring, you'll hire for attitude, not aptitude. That's because the skills required to train someone in task-specific stuff are small compared to training someone out of a bad attitude. For example: if someone is already friendly, shows up on time, can smile and chitchat, you can teach them to use a cash register and clean in a couple of hours. That's a small investment. On the flip side, if you want the number-one AI researcher in the world, and that person is a bit of a dick, you can probably work with them on communicating better with the team. You're not going to take a yogurt-store cashier and make them the top AI researcher. So I think we should generally hire for small skilled efficiency. Then the business owner must ask: given that efficiency, is it worth our resources to train them? I take the position that every skill is trainable — it's just a question of whether it's worth training, or whether I get higher returns elsewhere. Over my career, the biggest change in my hiring practice is that I hire far more for general intelligence now. Intelligence lets someone bridge the skill gap faster, so it's a better return on resources from where they are to where they need to be. Whether it's an "attitude" issue or a "hard skills" issue, I see soft skills and hard skills as just skills: hard skills are easier to define and measure; soft skills are harder to define and measure, but they are still definable and measurable. I define intelligence as rate of learning. If I can get someone with a high rate of learning versus someone else, that person might start a little behind, but in six months they'll pass someone who might have experience. It all depends on the timeline. If I take a toddler, I can get them to be an adult in 18 years and be great, but I may not have 18 years to wait. That's kind of my general rubric.
07:10	Sam Parr	"When you're hiring for smart people, how do you figure out if they're smart?"
07:13	Alex Hormozi	"Really good question. I think the quality... So, a couple of things: the quality of the questions that they ask..."
07:21	Sam Parr	Let's go deep into each one. So, the quality of questions that they ask. "Okay, what's a high-quality question?"
07:27	Alex Hormozi	If someone said, "Hey, I noticed that you guys have this media brand here and you have this advisory practice here—what's revenue retention around that? Is there another vehicle that you guys have considered that isn't in the pipeline right now?" I'd be like, wow. That demonstrates they did a fair amount of research and were able to take a complex thought between these two things and ask me about it. That's a great question. Whereas if someone says, "What's the five-year vision of the company?"—I don't see that as a bad question. I just see it as kind of a generic interview question someone might ask. If that's not already answerable online—which, the pros and cons of our situation similar to yours is that a lot of my stuff is public—I expect somebody to come in with better-than-generic questions because I've already answered generic questions publicly.
08:14	Sam Parr	Hey everyone — really quick: if you're enjoying this episode on CEO stuff (delegating, having hard conversations with your team, hiring), then I've got something for you. The team at HubSpot actually went and put together a bunch of best practices that Sean and I use in our own companies. They put it together in something that's really easy to read and understand. So if you want to just save yourself 10 years of headache and heartache, you should check it out. I wish we had this a long time ago — it would've helped me a lot. There should be a QR code on your screen that you can scan, or a link in the description, so check it out. It's totally free and totally awesome. Okay — and so what was the second one?
08:50	Alex Hormozi	Oh, when they deconstruct a problem that they're solving in terms of what they're thinking with... To be fair, this isn't my invention, but in the consulting world people do "cases" for a reason. They want to hear how you think. For example, they might ask, "How many ping-pong balls sit on a 747?" This is a common question in, you know, a college or consulting interview—not because they care about the exact answer, but because it demonstrates a level of horsepower and how you think through getting to an answer. For us at Acquisition.com, a practice we use for our higher-level leadership roles is that, instead of presenting hypothetical cases, we present real cases. Worst case, we get free consulting. Best case, we get somebody who is capable of implementing the solution they just came up with. If candidates can bring frameworks I wasn't aware of or experiences I don't know about, those things will surface as they work through the complex issue we're dealing with. It's also way more interesting as an interview for me, because now they're solving my problem, so I'm much more engaged.
09:51	Sam Parr	So does that mean that the hiring manager—or maybe someone at the company—has a generic description of the company and what some of the numbers are, maybe even fake numbers? Then each role will have a specific problem that you need help solving for at the company. They get a Google Doc, a two-page brief, in advance. It says, "Prepare your thoughts and send it to me in advance. I'm going to read it and then we're going to have a discussion about it."
10:15	Alex Hormozi	I'm going to differentiate this by level of role and type. Right now I'm knee-deep in C-level interviews, so that's what I'm thinking about. If we're trying to hire an editor or a salesperson, those are roles that repeat a lot and, as a result, have incredibly structured interview processes. For a salesperson, for example, we send a script to every candidate we want to invite to a group interview. They'll get the script ahead of time, and we want to hear a one- or two-minute sound bite of the script. If they didn't take the time to go through it a few times, they'll sound horrible. Immediately, either they don't have the skill or they don't have the work ethic. Either way, we can weed those people out and tell within a couple of minutes. So we don't need to waste a 30-minute call on somebody who wants to be a salesperson. We can have 10 people on the call, give each one or two minutes, and find out if someone has a little bit of game. Then we can say, "Hey, you messed this thing up—tweak it, try it again." When we do that, we get...
11:14	Sam Parr	To see how coachable they are, how much ego they have, and how quickly they can learn — intelligence. I actually read a book that you suggested. The guy who founded HubSpot's sales team wrote that book. I — well, you do the same thing here. In the book, he actually says that IQ is the number one factor. He said, "Charisma is important, but it's not the most important thing — it's the ability to learn quickly."
11:37	Alex Hormozi	And I think part of that also comes from the fact that they were selling to business owners — and so are we. Most of our portfolio is B2B, and if a salesperson is consistently being outgunned by the people they're getting on the phone with, the people on the phone feel like they're talking to somebody who can't actually help them solve their problem. So, yeah, I think general intelligence is such an important part. It started there, but I kind of see it across the organization. Show me exceptional organizations that employ dumber people — there are some — but especially in the work that we do, at the higher level and in B2B, you need horsepower in terms of intelligence and rate of learning. We can actually demonstrate people learning on a small level, and that works. Same thing with editors. We follow a very similar process: here's some raw footage, send us a clip back with your edit. We can look at just the final output, and that allows us to be more objective. Some people don't present well, but that doesn't mean they're bad editors. I think interviewing itself is a skill, just like anything else. I don't need somebody who's great at interviewing — I need somebody who's great at editing. So trying to pull that apart... Something that Layla has taught me that's been really helpful for me lately is: some people are incredibly smart but are not very good at communicating. Depending on the role, they might not need that level of communication, and that's where it gets a little more nuanced. But I — [trails off]
12:55	Sam Parr	Other way around. Like, I've actually—yeah—talked to people who are very charming and who communicate wonderfully. And I'm like, "I can't fall victim to this. You're actually an idiot. I don't think you know what you're doing. I've hired these people before."
13:06	Alex Hormozi	What was it—there was, like, "always go for an ugly surgeon" or something like that. Yeah, there's some—there's some razor. I just wanted to put my little disclaimer out there, which is: I by no means claim that we are perfect at hiring or anything like that. We, like everybody, take our licks. I would say the hardest ones are always leadership. You have fewer of those roles. You might appreciate this: whenever I walk into a room of entrepreneurs I say, "Hey, who here is on their second business or beyond?" Almost the whole room raises their hands. Then I say, "Of those of you who are on your second business and beyond, who here at your current business grew way faster or past your first business?" Almost the entire room raises their hands. I always think, so why is that? At the most basic level it's pattern recognition, especially when it comes to talent. If you think about building, let's say, a million-dollar business, first you have you. You have some marketing function, some sales function, some delivery function—whatever. For the first time ever, when you hit, maybe $1 million, maybe it's $3,000,000 a year—whatever the threshold is—it's not you anymore. Somebody else has to do some of this stuff. You get your first pattern recognition of: this is somebody who can do advertising; this is some person who can do sales; this is a person who can do low-level management; this is a person who can do delivery. You basically keep struggling and plateauing at that level until you find that one person who's competent, and then you're like, "Oh my God, they can do the job—this is amazing," and the business grows until the next constraint. Then, department by department, one by one, you have these six- to twelve-month periods where you go through interviews, hiring, and onboarding just to see if this person is competent. Whenever they're not, you have to start over again, and the business basically stays where it is. I think the more experience we've had in each of these roles—like, "this is what an SDR looks like, this is what an SDR manager looks like, this is what a closer looks like, this is what a senior closer looks like, this is what a closing manager looks like, this is what a director of sales looks like, this is what a VP of sales looks like"—it took me time to learn each of these levels, and obviously to do that across departments. But after that...
15:13	Alex Hormozi	When you go out to these new businesses you go after, you're not even building the business — you're just assembling it.
15:18	Sam Parr	Yeah. And that becomes—it's actually, not frustrating, but it's a hard lesson to learn. Because, if we had to generalize it, my guess is somewhere around five million, or maybe like one million a year in profit, or maybe half a million a year in profit. I grew up going to Catholic school, and there's one of the most famous scenes of the Bible where Jesus tells Peter, "You are no longer a fisherman; come and work with me and you're going to be a fisher of men." I think once you get to around five million in revenue, that's what you have to become: a collector of people. And that is jarring, right? Because that's not typically why a lot of people started their businesses. But in order to make something grow past five million—I don't know where that number's going to be—you start just having to collect human beings.
15:59	Alex Hormozi	No, and it's the game. I think a lot of it is just pattern recognition around behavior, traits, and skills. You have to be able to say, "Oh, I know what this VP looks like." I had a VP of sales — they were awesome — so what does this person look like here? Also, and this is something I can only say now with, I guess, fourteen years of business experience: I'm just beginning to reap this, which I call the "snowball of talent." If you've had multiple businesses with good outcomes and you treated people well over an extended period, some people start following you from thing to thing. Then you start to have a core team that—well—they're good. When you do the next thing, they're all with you. I don't know, but I would imagine that in twenty more years the team of talent — those people who prefer to operate the way we operate, who like the culture we have and each other — will be even stronger. If somebody comes in as a C-level exec and has no network of people they've worked with in the past, I'm like, that's weird. You either don't think anyone from your past roles is a stud (which is odd), or you think they were a stud but they don't want to come to your new thing because you're not a good leader. That's a great litmus test for how good a leader this person is: who do they have in their black book? We need to build out this function quickly, and I'm expecting you to bring some of that to the table.
17:20	Sam Parr	Who have you hired recently that is significantly better than you or has taught you something? You're in a role now where you have to do all the talking and a lot of the teaching—for your audience, at your workshops, and with the companies you work with. Who takes you to school?
17:35	Alex Hormozi	Sharron — does Sharron? Sharron's great. Sharron's a president; he's so knowledgeable. I mean, he's knowledgeable on a lot of different things. He said two — 2+ billion-dollar companies — and so, obviously, acquisition is the third we're shooting for, depending on when we have our third-party validation. Basically, the bigger the company gets, I feel like the better he gets. You know what I mean? The more in his wheelhouse he is in terms of data pipelines, infrastructure, real-time dashboards. How can—how can finance get weaponized? I would say that, Laila, like, Sean's so good at the finance function and understanding just tax ramifications, entity structure — just a lot of the things that I... For me, my acumen is on: how do we let people know about it, how do we get them to give us money for it, and how do we make sure that they really like it and tell their friends? That has been basically the core of my skill set. </FormattedResponse>
18:25	Sam Parr	Does that include the last thing you said? Is that the product?
18:29	Alex Hormozi	Yeah. Okay—exactly. But everything outside of that is definitely not what I would say. My core, core... Leila's so good at that. A lot of what we were talking about there is me somewhat relaying Leila's, you know, je ne sais quoi—or, you know, Leila's mojo—around people and talent. But Sean's so good at enterprise value structuring, just a lot—the things that a public CEO would be good at. That's where he comes from. And he's also... I would say, from an observation personally, the true A-plus talent—they're not employees; they are partners, and they see themselves as partners. If you don't see them as partners, then they are not A-plus.
19:11	Sam Parr	How do you treat a partner differently than an employee? How would I know if I have a partner?
19:15	Alex Hormozi	Well, I think if you go to them because you're not sure what to do and they're giving you advice, to me that's a thought partner. If you're constantly directing them and saying, "This is what we're gonna do, this is what we're gonna do," there's nothing wrong with that, but they're not a thought partner. I also use that as a great litmus test for the true C-level executives that we have: do I want to talk to this person about a complex problem? If I don't seek their advice, then it means I don't see them as a value add and they're not super essential — which is not good. The other piece — and this is something I've learned more recently because I'm super deep in C-level stuff right now — is clouds-to-dirt: vertically integrated, full-stack skill sets. The best sales leaders can hop on the phone and, at the SDR level, get a cold lead to book an appointment. They can also build sales strategy, which starts to merge into marketing: what kind of messaging do we need, what avatars have the highest likelihood of buying our stuff, how can we weave that into our process and scripting, and how can we cut training time and onboarding for new reps? They're really thinking about the sales organization, but they can also do almost every job. I have yet to find truly exceptional people who aren't full-stack.
20:35	Sam Parr	So, right now, because of your size, you're competing — and I mean, the type of person you need — you're competing with a lot. You're in a very competitive industry in terms of talent. I imagine you're competing against some of the AI guys, you're competing against a lot of tech companies, and the VC/PE [venture capital/private equity] value that they provide, I'd guess, is just lots and lots of money. They have the ability to do that. We pay well, but they also have the ability to offer equity — like a lottery ticket, maybe. I don't know what else, but I'm sure there are many things they offer that you can't. What do you have to offer them other than market-rate or above-market-rate money?
21:14	Alex Hormozi	*Yeah, it's growth and impact.* If you were to ask everybody in the company, Acquisition.com, what the number one thing they come for is—it's growth. Like, a lot of those companies aren't growing at the rate we're growing. There is so much career advancement and opportunity. We're very meritocratic, so anyone can come here and move up independent of age, even independent of tenure. We had a guy who came here 90 days ago and got a very large promotion after coming in at a pretty high role already, just because he demonstrated he was great. We're like, "Great—have this opening; we think you'd be the best fit."
21:51	Sam Parr	And the growth is the revenue of the company, which then means you pull people up to higher roles. Yep. So, basically, in order to attract A‑plus talent, you have to grow fast.
22:00	Alex Hormozi	Yeah. I mean, yes—exactly. You have to grow fast. I do think that's a virtuous cycle: the faster you grow, the more talent you get, which grows you faster. It can also be vicious in the other direction.
22:10	Sam Parr	It's mostly vicious in the other direction.
22:12	Alex Hormozi	"Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're shrinking and you have no money to give people. Yeah... it gets... it gets tough."
22:17	Sam Parr	But you are, like... a lot of businesses are growing only "20 or 20 a year" [unclear]. I don't know. Some—yeah, fine, but that's a mediocre number. So where do they start if they don't have growth? Not growth in terms of just the money to pay people, but growth to impress the right people to join them.
22:33	Alex Hormozi	I think it all depends on the opportunity and the level of the pool you're competing against. If you are a true AI company, it is super competitive. On the flip side, if someone's going to start a new division for Acq, I can guarantee demand. Not a lot of people can do that. So it's not a question of whether this will work or not—it's whether this is the best use of the demand that we have. That becomes an opportunity-cost question. In some ways, it's less risky to come to Acq because we have so much demand and so much opportunity. That's basically it. For example, if you were working for Jimmy—say, use a different brand, like MrBeast—he has virtually limitless demand. If he said, "Hey, can you help me spin up... pick a random thing," and MrBeast wanted to start an umbrella brand, that doesn't mean he will for sure sell umbrellas. It's just not the best use of his resources. So you need somebody who can come in, recognize the best vehicle for the demand we have, and then execute on it. A lot of people don't have that built-in, guaranteed demand. They just don't have that, and so that becomes significantly riskier despite whatever other "perks" might exist. With us, you have guaranteed demand and basically guaranteed growth—as fast as you can grow, we can grow. We also still pay exceptionally well. Those things together let us attract very, very good talent. There are also people who are mission-driven. We have a lot of people who come in and say, "I've consumed your stuff for years; the recruiter reached out to me and I was stoked." That was it. In some ways, private equity firms are commoditized—it's like "private equity number 17." Their businesses are commoditized and just not that interesting, so they have to compete on price. Their price is their comp [comp = compensation]. If you have a strong value proposition—what's the "grand slam offer" from an employee perspective, rather than from a product perspective—you win. The process of acquiring talent is the same as acquiring customers; it's just a reverse funnel.
24:39	Sam Parr	"What mistakes do you think most people make when it comes to hiring?"
24:43	Alex Hormozi	Oh, man.
24:45	Sam Parr	"Maybe you could—maybe answer it differently. Hiring for about six or seven roles: what mistakes do you think I'll likely make?" </FormattedResponse>
24:52	Alex Hormozi	"Well, what's the role? Or what are some of the roles?"
24:55	Sam Parr	Yeah, so we could say, "What's, like, a really — a salesperson?" That's a simple one. But I'm hiring other roles. I'm hiring chapter leads. We have 13 chapters that my business is based in, and we're hiring people to manage each chapter.
25:09	Alex Hormozi	I mean the easy answer is settling, but it's so tough because there are trade-offs. These things don't exist outside of time. It's like: I have to fill this role, and I want to find somebody—especially for us at the C‑level, because that's top of mind for me. I have to have somebody who, when I'm on the phone with them, makes me think, "I have to have this person." If I don't have that and I'm just thinking, "Man, I really need this role," that's usually not the right person. On the other hand, if my thinking is, "I don't even care if I have a role for this person — I have to get them in," that's usually the right person.
25:43	Sam Parr	Are you willing to pay them more than you originally thought was reasonable? Yes — 100%. Not even a question. Have you ever... have you ever been like, "I gotta come up with enough money. I hope I can get enough sales to afford this person, but I have to have them"?
25:56	Alex Hormozi	"I haven't had the second part because we're a super cash-flow-positive company, so that hasn't been a problem. I mean, fundamentally, as long as I can just pencil out the ROI of the role, then yeah—I'll do it. I mean, it's just a return on capital."
26:06	Sam Parr	"What's your desired return, though?"
26:09	Alex Hormozi	Amazing. Oh, yeah. Well, it's like... I mean, it's—do you think?
26:13	Sam Parr	The sheets allow you to put "amazing in" — equals amazing. </FormattedResponse>
26:18	Alex Hormozi	I think the highest returns on capital we get as entrepreneurs is talent. Full stop. Where else do you get 10x, 20x, even 100x returns and do so reliably? Talent is one of those places you can. I will also say that typically the higher up the org, the higher the arbitrage. Are we fast to fire? We continue to get faster — I'll say that I think we get faster. I would say our firing practices do somewhat rely on constraints. Sometimes, you know, Layla says this, but some fires aren't kitchen fires — they're like the trash can in the driveway is on fire. It's a problem; we'll get to it, but it's not the thing that's limiting the business right now. So if we have somebody who's not as good as they should be but they're not in a role that's currently limiting the company, it's probably not going to be our first priority to take them out. But as soon as that becomes the constraint, it quickly gets unearthed and then it gets handled.
27:19	Sam Parr	Have you ever followed Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports? Yeah? Yeah. You know he's quirky, right? He's crazy. One of his jokes—though it's not really a joke—is he says, "I don't fire people." He goes, "I... I just—I don't want to fire people. If they're a loser, I'll just keep paying them and they'll sit in the corner and be a loser, but I don't fire anyone." I kinda thought that was hilarious. It's funny because he's a content company and he can make content out of it and get an ROI out of, like, just making fun of someone who wants to fire. But I was shocked that that would be his take on it, because he seemed like a pretty brutal guy—not brutal, but very blunt—and I thought he had no problem firing people. Then he was like, "I do—I suck at it. I... I don't like the confrontation. I don't like people feeling bad, so I just don't do it. I'd rather lose money." When I asked you about firing, I thought you were going to be like, "Yeah, fire fast," but I sensed a small bit in your voice where it sounded like you were potentially slow to fire. Maybe I'm reading too much into your sentiment or your tone of voice, but it sounded like, "Yeah, I just don't like it."
28:17	Alex Hormozi	Well, I don't think anybody likes it. I think we're fast to fire if it is the constraint of the business and, clearly, that person is the one limiting us. We will not sacrifice the company's growth and the opportunity of all the people who've trusted us with their careers to avoid having a comfortable conversation. There are levels to this. So, let's say there's red, yellow, green — right? If someone's green, they're great. Fine. So basically, maybe like yellow, orange, red — let's use those as the three levels. - For me, if somebody doesn't have complete competence but can still do their job, they're not doing it as well as they should, they're definitely not going to grow, and they can't take on new opportunities — that to me is yellow. - If they're for sure unable to actually do their role right now, that's orange. - If red is that you can't do the role right now and that role is required for us to grow, then that's red. It's a combination of what the business needs and how incompetent the person is, so the rates of firing depend on both. Obviously, in a perfect world we'd get everyone out who's not a fit as soon as humanly possible. Sometimes people do turn it around with good feedback and coaching, and that probably happens about half the time. I ask myself the question: why do I feel bad about making this decision? Then I try to make sure that I'm not acting in the "global bad for local good" — local versus global. I think about that as my way of breaking through that terrible feeling you have when you have to let someone go. You tell yourself, "If I don't, I'm choosing short-term comfort over long-term discomfort." Most of life can be boiled down to people doing that over and over again: they take the local win, the short-term win, for the global loss. If you do that enough times, you get a global catastrophe. That's what I try to avoid. I put the greater good as the frame — my little spiritual armor, if you will — when going into it, knowing that this person might get upset and this might dramatically inconvenience their life in the short term. But I owe it to the other zillion people who have put their careers and, to a degree, their lives in my hands through the decision-making process. I owe it to them. That kind of gets me over the hump to pull the trigger faster.
30:33	Sam Parr	"The Founders Podcast" — you ever heard that? By David Senra. Yeah, it's awesome. I love it, and I love reading biographies of historical entrepreneurs. A common thing I get from "The Founders Podcast" is patience — basically doing something for decades. That's another thing I've gotten from your content: things take a long time. They take longer than you think, and they're harder than you think. I believe that to be true. But then I see people like you. If you go to your YouTube — I think in every description it was like, "age 26 I was here, age 27 I was here..." — and I'm like, I don't think he was very patient. That doesn't read like a patient person. If I remember correctly — and I'm just making this up — I think you started acquisition.com at something like age 31, and then by 33 or 34 you had the seminar business you guys do. It was probably doing many tens of millions, probably mid eight figures, and very profitable. That doesn't seem like patience — that was pretty fast. How do you talk about being patient all the time but move at a wicked pace and get results quickly?
31:45	Alex Hormozi	I think patience is relative to the outcome you're going for. If you're trying to climb Everest, your rate of ascension in terms of altitude is going to be significantly faster than somebody who's trying to climb a foothill. The percentage growth might be the same, though. A patient person might be willing to grow at 1, 2, or 4% per year toward their ultimate Everest. But 4% of Everest is significantly faster than 4% of a foothill, so the absolute difference will be different. The relative difference—what I'm measuring myself against—is where I feel patient. I think that's where the whole idea of "macro patience, micro speed" is super important. We still need deadlines. We still need to move the ball forward. We still have to act with urgency. We still have to ask the question, "What would it take in order to do this in half the time? Would it take for us to do this in a fifth of the time? Can we do that?" If so, let's do that. I honestly see a lot of the job of the manager—or the driver or the operator, depending on what term you want to use—as consistently pulling the future forward faster. Even at the tactical level, when you're having a team meeting and you ask, "When can you get that done by?" they'll give you a date. A lower-level manager just accepts the deadline. A level-two manager asks, "What else do you have that's blocking you right now from getting that done?" They might say, "Well, I have these three things," and at that...
33:14	Alex Hormozi	They might say, "Well, this is more important than those things, so do this first." With that new knowledge, what is your new deadline? They might say, "Okay — instead of the end of the week, I can get it two days earlier." Then you ask, "How many actual hours do you think this work will take?" They might answer, "I think it'll probably take four hours." You respond, "It's noon now, so why isn't it 4:00 p.m. today?" I think somebody who's willing to continue to ask those questions — and who hears, "I could do it today, I just wanted to give myself some time," and then pushes on why — is doing the consistent pulling-forward that's necessary. It's almost like mini, confrontational conversations that I think are required to move an entire organization at breakneck speed. I look at Elon Musk a lot as an inspiration from a business perspective. All of his competitors talk about the "maniacal sense of urgency" that he carries. A lot of it is just consistently challenging: "What would it take?" and "Is it worth it for what it would take?" If the answer is yes, then let's do it. A lot of people make their decisions within their own frame or realm of reality when that frame isn't based on anything besides their own conjecture or some arbitrary timeline of what they think it should take.
34:23	Sam Parr	I've always been curious about how people get to that level. For example, I was a track athlete in high school and college. In high school I thought I was the shit because I was so much better than everyone else. Then you get around Division I guys and you're like, "Oh my God — I'm nothing. There are so many levels." Sometimes you rise up to that level, and sometimes you don't. You get hurt, or you just don't improve, and then you think, "I'm not good enough." When I'm hanging out with people like you, or when I think of Elon Musk—who does these super intense things—I read things you put out and think, "That makes so much sense." For example: > "When I get a new lead I call them in 60 seconds, and if I can't do that I hire someone and her full-time job is calling someone in 60 seconds." That example makes me realize why calling someone in 15 minutes feels inadequate. It's a small example, but it scales all the way up to building rockets, where someone might say, "I'm not going to leave the warehouse for three weeks." So how do people raise their standards to this extreme level? Were you around other extreme people and thought, "Oh my gosh — there's so much more to do, and that's now the standard"? Or do you think some people are just born extreme and they get there and bring others up to that level?
35:41	Alex Hormozi	I think it's probably a nature versus nurture question. To be clear, I don't know the answer—this is just my two cents. I've always been a really intense person. My father, my whole upbringing, used to always say, "Balance—you're so unbalanced." As soon as I'd find something, I would just want to do nothing besides that thing until I had finished it or whatever it was. I do think there's a component of that. The other aspect, though, is that I've definitely had beliefs broken—frame shifts—from people who were ahead of me. Even observing Elon stretches the horizon of what I think we can accomplish. It's actually, in some ways, very refreshing to think: where was Elon when he was 36 versus 56 (or however old he is now)? He had such an exponential crescendo in his career that, to me, is very inspiring. It shows that it just takes time. A lot of what takes time for entrepreneurs is that there are so many skills required to be good, and you have to be very good at all of them. That's why I see entrepreneurship as the single greatest path of personal development: you get real-time feedback that you suck and then at some... </FormattedResponse>
36:49	Alex Hormozi	Most of us, on some level, get to a level of success and then say, "this is enough," or I'm not willing to make the trade-offs beyond this. It depends on the entrepreneur you ask, but I would say the vast majority of entrepreneurs want to win the game of life. Business, as a component, is one of the games within that larger game. Some people get lost in whatever game they're in, or they consciously choose that that game is more important to them. I mean, like Steve Jobs—he accomplished a lot. There's been a lot documented about his personal life suffering as a result of his professional career. You could make an argument that he was an amazing net positive for humanity, but on the micro level he lived a harder existence. Elon is probably another one of those people. A lot of people wouldn't want Elon's life, and he says, "you wouldn't want my life." That's probably a lot of my free—like, shower—time right now: when I think about the price of the thing I want. It's okay to go into a store, see something you like, and then not buy it.
37:50	Sam Parr	Why are you questioning that now? Is it because you just had this huge launch and you hit a milestone, and you're like, "Oh my God—I wanted this the whole time and I finally got it"? Maybe you didn't want it as much... Or do you feel...? </FormattedResponse>
38:02	Alex Hormozi	Well, I had a confluence of three things happen within 30 days. I had—call it a four-plus-year project—come to an end, which occupied a lot of my shower time. It was around the whole $100,000,000 series and the culmination of the Money Models launch. That was one thing. There was obviously a financial outcome that was, you know, realized quickly at the launch. That’s the second thing. Then the third thing is my mother died within 30 days, so it was a very interesting mix of different emotions in that time. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what are the things that matter most. In writing—everyone’s heard the advice "write your own eulogy and then try to live that way"—except most people don’t actually take the time to write their own eulogy. In writing her eulogy, it was interesting to see what portion—if we had a pie chart—would be dedicated to her accomplishments. She was a relatively accomplished person, but compared to the rest, that slice was small. The vast majority of it was about service and character. So, in thinking about that, it’s like, okay: if I were to apportion my time based on what my eulogy percentages would be, I would probably not have the same pie chart that I do now. That being said, life has a lot of years, so maybe that slice of the pie chart—the first two or three sentences or whatever—might be 15 years, and then there’s just another...
39:28	Alex Hormozi	Of fifteen years afterwards or thirty years afterwards, there may be a difference in that chart. Yeah. If you — if you live right. Yeah.
39:34	Sam Parr	You live like she had.
39:34	Alex Hormozi	She had a freak accident, so hers was a sudden death. Yeah. That's what I think about a lot: trade-offs. I think most of my content exists because people ask me about hard work, and the reason I tweet so much about it is because it's always top of mind for me. We talked about this at the beginning: I don't have a content schedule. I'm not looking at trending tweets and trying to put my own spin on them. That's not how I make content. I tweet whatever is top of mind, and the things that come out are what I'm thinking about. You'll see the trends of whatever I'm focused on in a specific season. If you take the aggregate of a month of tweets, it's like, "Oh—I'm just thinking about this right now."
40:13	Sam Parr	Yeah. You're in a lawsuit, and you're talking about being tough or having grit, or— you know— overcoming an obstacle.
40:21	Alex Hormozi	"People betraying you, and... all this stuff has been..."
40:23	Sam Parr	Part of it is you're making all this money, and it's like gratitude. You know what I...
40:26	Alex Hormozi	I mean, yeah. I think there are two things that make entrepreneurship hard. Number one is uncertainty. It's the absolute, soul-crushing uncertainty that's present throughout your day while you're making decisions. There's always this idea that you might lose—and you don't know. The other component is the known quantities you believe you'll have to trade to get the unknown. I guess there's some uncertainty there too—the unknown upside. We can always quantify the downside, the thing we trade, but we cannot quantify the upside. I think about that a lot because, in entrepreneurship, many people—especially common examples like lifestyle entrepreneurs—make choices based on those trade-offs. I get tons of flack from that community, and that's okay. I just see that we all get to whatever level we're willing to trade for. I see those as trade-offs. I think most regrets come from wanting the upside of a decision or path not taken, without taking into account the downside they didn't have to suffer.
41:28	Sam Parr	"What's the pie chart like now?"
41:30	Alex Hormozi	I mean, I think for now it's almost entirely business. I would say I probably have 15% that's dedicated to marriage—Leila stuff, and probably 15% that's dedicated to health. So I'm probably like 70% work, 15% health, 15% marriage.
41:50	Sam Parr	"What do you think when you're in the—when you're thinking about what it should be? Do you ever think, 'Well, I would like to try on this style or this'?"
41:58	Alex Hormozi	I think I would love to see a world where, like, 25 to 30% is business. I'd love to see what happens there. I also think that there might be—and I say this understanding the position that I'm in to say this—that I'm approaching a point where more hours really don't add so much more at this point. The leverage will be the decisions I make more than the work that I do. I think I'm feeling that transition right now, and so it might be.
42:31	Sam Parr	That could have been earlier, though. I mean... I... I... I... you know, yeah, a bit.
42:35	Alex Hormozi	I just feel it now.
42:37	Sam Parr	"For whatever that's worth, he's got a good team, I guess."
42:40	Alex Hormozi	Yeah, the team is getting better and better. We have a huge amount of true A-level talent coming in, and I'm very excited about that. A lot of the leverage is in decision-making. Maybe it's just that some of the bets I made five years ago have come to fruition and paid off, which then gives more leverage. Fundamentally, output is just volume times leverage. I could maybe make the algorithm I used even better. Elon still works a lot. If you do a lot of volume with a lot of leverage, you build rockets and build trillion-dollar businesses. I'm not saying that I'm somehow immune to it.
43:13	Sam Parr	"25% business. What else?" </FormattedResponse>
43:15	Alex Hormozi	Oh, it would probably just be a more even spread. It would probably be like maybe 25%. I'd probably keep... I think health would still be around 15%. I might change what I do there, but I think I have an appropriate amount in the health category. I assume I'll just bucket Layla as just family — wife, et al. I just think the percentages will change. You know what? I'll just say that I don't know what they are. I think they will change from what they currently are; I feel confident in that. </FormattedResponse>
43:40	Sam Parr	What's a non-business pursuit that you'd want to put in there, potentially?
43:44	Alex Hormozi	I don't know. I think I need to create the space in order for that to get filled. I don't think I'll have difficulty finding things to fill my time. I think... I don't know.
43:52	Sam Parr	[unclear]. We're buddies, but we're not terribly close. I don't—I've never... we're not that close. Well, we're... we're friends. We've known each other off and on for a couple of years now, and I've never seen you show interest in hobbies. Like—I enjoy history, I love buying clothes (I think clothes are cool), I like cars and motorcycles. I have hobbies I'm passionate about—x, y, and z—but I've never heard you talk about anything other than your wife, working out, and business.
44:27	Alex Hormozi	And business — yeah, those have been my big three, I would say. I would define myself, for the first time in... fifteen years — not even fifteen, because I wanted to start making money when I was like 15 — so it's, I guess, been 21 years. It's the first time in my life where I've been open to having other priorities. I don't know what they are, like, straight up. I don't know. I don't know what they will be, and maybe... maybe I'll just discover that I like the life that I have now. But it's the first time that I've been like, "I am open to this mix changing."
44:59	Sam Parr	Andrew Ross Sorkin — he's got this new book called "Nineteen Twenty-Nine." I'm in the middle of reading it. I think you read science fiction, right?
45:07	Alex Hormozi	Yeah, it's just purely.
45:09	Sam Parr	I like science fiction — some of the more popular ones — but I'm a big history guy. This book, 1929, is about the Great Depression and how it came to be. Basically, credit had just become a thing. Credit — GM invented it — so you could get a car on a loan, and then eventually other appliances on a loan. Sears was like, "Oh, we'll do a layaway thing; we'll give you credit so you can buy clothing." Then Citibank, which back then was called National Bank, said, "Let's do it for stocks and bonds." So you can borrow money and we will let you buy stocks. They did it at a 10-to-1 ratio, meaning for every $10 of stocks that you have with Citibank, they're going to loan you $100. The Great Depression happened because when the market went under — which happens occasionally (it happened during COVID, too) — it was just a domino effect because everyone was incredibly overleveraged. He tells this amazing story about it. There are probably 20 characters in the book, and they're like the Jamie Dimons of the time. They give you the day-to-day life of these characters, and it's really fascinating. My biggest takeaway from this book so far — well, there have been a bunch of takeaways — but one is that the executives of these banks didn't work that hard. They were like the Jamie Dimons at the time, and their income was the equivalent of $100,000,000 a year. One guy had a routine: "I'm up at six, I exercise, I'm at the office at ten, I'm home by five." Another guy had a similar routine, but then he would take off — he took the summer off to go to Europe with his family. Going to Europe meant taking a three-week boat. Same with Andrew Carnegie [industrialist popular in the late 1800s; died around 1920] — he did the same thing where he would barely work. I read about some of these modern examples, too. I think Brian Halligan, who's the founder of HubSpot, just tweeted: "You don't move mountains working nine to five." All these people — yourself included and myself included — talk about hard work, but I see all these other examples and I'm like, isn't it crazy how much you can get done by actually not working hard? Lately I've been interested in some of those examples. Have you ever read about that?
47:11	Alex Hormozi	I haven't read about it, but I've definitely observed it with some people who are further ahead than I am. I think what's always difficult is: do I model the "top of the mountain" or do I model the "climb"? Am I trying to extrapolate how someone currently lives from what they did to get there? That one's always a really dangerous trap that I try to catch myself on. We're in different seasons, so I have to make sure I'm comparing this person's spring to my spring, not my winter to their spring.
47:41	Sam Parr	Well, like... I'm just — I can list so many people. I read their books and I'm like, "You don't work hard at all. What the hell? What am I doing?" Ted Turner was another example. When he built CNN, which made him a multi-billionaire, he was also a professional sailboat racer and would be gone for three months at a time racing sailboats. So yeah, anyway, I could give you so many examples of that. It's just crazy.
48:04	Alex Hormozi	When—wait, let's take that for a second, because I think that, like, let's say within your business you could find the perfect Sam as a thought exercise. The perfect Sam you could hire and pay, who could do everything you can do just as well as you can. So whatever your current profit is minus Sam's compensation, if you could do that, then you would have almost the same amount of money you have now. Maybe in two years the perfect Sam would grow the pie so that you're making the same or more than you're making right now, but you're still not working at all. If that's the case, then we're always—in the hypothetical world—one hirer away from somebody who could do 100% of what we're currently doing, and the business would be able to continue to grow. About patience: most entrepreneurs are like, "I'll find that person, I'll give it to that person, and then I'll start the next job," whereas some other people just say, "I'm just not gonna start that next job" and are willing to let the company continue to grow with the team they've assembled. I think both—fundamentally—if you work or you don't work, as long as the business performs these functions, it will grow.
49:05	Sam Parr	I heard you say something kind of interesting. A lot of people shit on course makers. I was thinking about my life — I've bought a lot of courses, actually, and many of them were not only great, they changed my life. One of my good buddies, Neville Bedora, had a copywriting course that changed my life. I took it; it changed my life. There've been a bunch of others, too. Have you ever bought or taken any courses? If so, which one was game-changing for you?
49:34	Alex Hormozi	The biggest thing that really changed my life was networks of people more than anything. Getting in the room with people who were ahead of me—within my current realm or even across realms—was the stuff that really changed my life the most. From the tactical level, books, courses, workshops, seminars—those things absolutely helped. I'm a product of the alternative education world; I have no reservations about that. Some people are able to learn on their own. I was willing to pay to learn from people who were ahead of me, and it was more than worth it. But I think the biggest difference comes down to two types of knowledge. You have declarative knowledge, which is knowledge about stuff. Then you have procedural knowledge, which is knowledge about how to do stuff. The courses and DIY stuff are predominantly procedural: here's how you set up landing pages, here's how you write copy, here's how you structure a video sales letter, or whatever. Those help you develop blocking-and-tackling skills—learn how to run a webinar, how to do a sales call, etc. The networks and affiliations—when you meet people who are further ahead—are where you get your quoted beliefs broken. That's where you learn about things you didn't know were possible. For example: "I didn't know you could work four hours a week and make that kind of money." "I didn't know that real estate worked that way." "I didn't know the insurance industry was so profitable." Those realizations produced order-of-magnitude increases for me. So my incremental increases in business came from developing procedural skills. The large, step-function increases came through association with people who were way further ahead and would say, "Hey man, let me tell you what the next five years looks like if you keep doing what you're doing and what you need to do instead."
51:12	Sam Parr	"Who's on your list of people who you'd kill to meet and spend time with, or shadow for a day?" </FormattedResponse>
51:19	Alex Hormozi	Most of mine are the obvious ones. I'd love to shadow Elon. I'd love to shadow Zac. I'd love to shadow Bezos. Honestly, I'd especially love to have shadowed Bezos ten years ago. I'm not even sure what he's working on now or what he's doing next. He's got Blue Origin, and I think he's got other things going on. People who are in the thick of the game—I would love to shadow them because a lot of it is learning how they think. What frameworks are they using to make these decisions, since they've made these decisions a bunch of times? I would love to get that framework because, if I could apply it to my current state, I would move faster.
51:54	Sam Parr	I hear you. I learn these frameworks and I'm like, "Man — that is crazy: he is memorizing this stuff." But not just memorizing it. When I hear him talk about it, I believe that he actually uses this in his day-to-day life. Yeah, I would like to get better at that. I'm just amazed at how much information you retain.
52:12	Alex Hormozi	Thanks. I think that if you are not good at predicting what is going to happen next, life will be hard for you. The better you get at predicting what's going to happen next, the more you will get what you want. Being able to predict what's going to happen requires an accurate framework of how reality works. If you've lost everything and then you can rebuild it again, it's because you accurately view reality — it wasn't luck. You can redo it again. For me, a big part of it was, or still is, that I find most people don't know what they're saying most of the time. The vast majority of people spend their time regurgitating and parroting things they never thought about, saying words they don't understand. If you ask someone who says, "Hey, I think you should do this," you should just say, "Define that." Or if someone says, "My goal is I want to feel great about myself," ask, "What does that mean?" Most of the time they can't define it. No wonder they haven't hit it — they can't even define what they're going for. I think the single greatest razor I have for defining reality more accurately has been removing all sentiment, emotion, and "psychology" from the equation and only looking at it from a behaviorist frame: what can I observe? For example, if an alien came to Earth — or a toddler, depending on how you want to see it — and I said, "What does trust mean?" or, "Hey, you're not very trustworthy," I'd ask, "What does that mean to you?" Most times people will just say a bunch of nonsense back to you, and of course you realize they don't know. That's why most people can't communicate well, and as a result they don't receive communication well from the world: it's two people saying words that neither of them understands, and then they just roll the dice to see if they get what they want. That's how most people live their lives, which is why they don't get what they want: they didn't define what they want. The beginning of every one of my books defines terms. The beginning of every legal document has a recitation of definitions. You need that in order to be precise about what you want.
54:21	Sam Parr	What's that mean? So—defining what a "win" would look like. What does success look like? What does a "fail" look like?
54:25	Alex Hormozi	Well, those are the big, obvious ones. But underneath that is the day-to-day life you have. For example, you ask your wife, "I'd like you to be more loving towards me." What does that mean, really? What does the phrase "I need you to love me better" mean? Does that mean, "Hey, when I walk in the door, can you come and give me a hug?" That's observable. I can see that. A court witness could say, "He came in and did that." If we get as granular as possible—bringing everything down to what is observable in reality—then we can all get to agreement. That's why I think the content I have sometimes seems both the same and different from what's out there. People say, "Man, I listen to my marketing stuff and he says things I know, but he says it in a different way." It's because I think about, "Okay, what is selling?" A lot of people say, "It's a transference of feeling between two parties, you know, over a bridge of trust." Fifteen years ago I would have said something like that, too. As a salesman, I would be like, "Dude, sales is just a transference of belief over a bridge of trust." That sounds amazing; it has nice visuals. But what the fuck does that mean? How do I go transfer belief over a bridge of trust? People say, "Don't know how to do that." Of course you don't. Of course you don't—I don't either.
55:45	Sam Parr	"Bridge. I need a—I need a fucking bridge. Who's got a bridge?"
55:48	Alex Hormozi	And how do I give them this belief, right? So it's natural to use shorthand with language because it's faster to transfer ideas. Except neither party defines the term, and that's where a lot of miscommunications come from. I think to be an accurate communicator, we have to define terms before we can actually engage in the conversation. That's annoying for some people, but it's required if you want effective communication. And so, for that whole "salesperson" thing: what is selling? It's increasing the likelihood that someone makes a purchasing decision. Done. That's all it is—we just increase the likelihood. So your job is to increase the likelihood that someone makes a purchasing decision. We know there are a number of variables that affect that percentage, and those are the ones we can affect and observe. I think we should just leave it there. Then we get all of this hullabaloo about "manifestation," "synchronicities," "energy," and, man, you know, all of this crap. Maybe that stuff's true, but I can't see it. So how do I transfer it? I don't know. I just talk about the observable world, and it has made my life so much better and my ability to predict what's going to happen next so much better. Dude, this is...
56:52	Sam Parr	Why I like, by the way, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People — it's very tactical. One takeaway from that book (and at least one everyone will have) is: say someone's name. "A person's name is the most beautiful sound in the English language." Another really tactical area I love and think more people should read — particularly if you work in the internet world — is old‑school direct response copywriting books: Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Joe Sugarman, and Dan Kennedy. I love reading those books. They're my favorite because they are the most tactical, but they also teach you about life.
57:30	Alex Hormozi	They're also great writers.
57:31	Sam Parr	You know who's the best? I think it's Felix Dennis. Have you read Felix Dennis's How to Get Rich? Yeah, dude—the best writing I've ever read. Or Dan Kennedy, who is a copywriter. Somehow he has books on management, which I'm like...
57:45	Alex Hormozi	Don't—don't read that book, dude. He's...
57:48	Sam Parr	"Like, he's like in the beginning of—okay, so in the beginning of the book he's like, 'I don't have any employees because I hate employees,' but let me write this long book about managing a company." I read it and thought, "You are a quack, man," but some of his advice is actually quite good. He's so good at telling these stories and he makes them tactical, which is what a really good copywriter does. So it becomes quite actionable—maybe you're going to take the wrong action, but it's very actionable. Do you ever read those old, old-school copywriting books?
58:15	Alex Hormozi	No, I did. Basically, when I was in my rocky cutscene of flirty marketing, I read all that stuff. I haven't read much of it lately because I feel like the midwit meme.
58:24	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
58:25	Alex Hormozi	I feel like the midwit meme is one of my favorite memes of all time because it's been so true for me in so many domains of my life. It's like, when I started lifting it was: add more weight, eat protein, try hard. Do it over and over again — that was it. Then I got into periodization, volume blocks, peaking cycles, undulating periods... "this is better for hypertrophy, this is better for strength." I got all this complexity. Fast forward now: it's just, dude, just eat protein, add more weight to the bar, and thank your parents for your genetics. Now, of course, the comments will be like, "And Alex takes testosterone," which I've been public about, so deal with it. And so I think the same thing with marketing — a lot of it is...
59:10	Sam Parr	"Does your testosterone make you more Persian? Was it Persian testosterone?"
59:15	Alex Hormozi	"I don't know—maybe I think it's all genetics."
59:17	Sam Parr	Is that the ped is being bored Persian? [Note: Unclear transcription—words "ped" and "bored Persian" may be mistranscribed.]
59:21	Alex Hormozi	If anything, I think the testosterone would decrease the amount of hair I have on my head, at least. But anyway... With marketing, it's like—no persuasion occurs in the vague. Persuasion occurs in the specific. If you can articulate someone's pain to them more accurately than they can, they will buy what you have to sell without even hearing much about your offer. If someone describes every pain in your life in excruciating detail, you think, "If this person knows this much about my pain, they have to know how to solve it." What's also nice about pain specifically is that pain is more motivating than promise, and so it's also more compelling. If we think about what a salesperson or marketing does in general, we simply motivate someone to take action. We increase the likelihood that they see the message and take a desired action. So where does the basis of motivation come from? For me, motivation comes from deprivation. We have to deprive the prospect, or increase their perception of deprivation, around the outcome associated with the action we want them to take. That idea is summed up in one of my little isms: "The pain is the pitch." If you can accurately do that, it's not about fancy words. It's not about long, flowery language. It's short words, short sentences, clearly defined—language that takes no brain power to process and yet still has emotional resonance because of the specificity. "Lose weight fast" probably worked as the very first weight-loss ad in 1930. People were like, "Wow—short words, that's amazing." But then they had to get more nuanced. You just have to keep breaking words down into: what does that really mean?
01:01:10	Sam Parr	"It's like—have you ever been the overweight girl who wanted to take the photo instead of being in the photo?"
01:01:18	Alex Hormozi	You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. No, and that's real. Like—have you ever walked and had your thighs chafe together? Have you ever felt like you always had a cover-up on when your friends were in bikinis? Have you felt weird about putting your own sunscreen on? When you're in pictures, do you duck out? Do you duck out when you try to put on pants you used to wear? Do you find yourself holding your breath longer and longer in order to get them on? Those are, you know, specifics.
01:01:43	Sam Parr	Right.
01:01:43	Alex Hormozi	And that's where copy is driven: it's why you have to know the customer. In my opinion, some of the best marketers—the truly goaded marketers—can advertise pain that they have not experienced. But the vast majority of marketers who are good in specific spaces know the avatar because they are the avatar, or at least were the avatar.
01:02:01	Sam Parr	One time, I had this designer when I lived in San Francisco, working for my company, The Hustle. We had a new product we were testing — it was $300 a year. She made this beautiful page, and I was like, "You guys are insane. The design of this means nothing." They asked, "What do you mean?" and they said, "I spent so long on this logo." I said, "Oh my God, watch this." I wrote out a Google Doc, and at the bottom I put a link to an Eventbrite page because that was the fastest way I could accept money. I was like, "This isn't actually an event; it's just the easiest way I can accept your money." Once I got your money, I'd send you the product manually — the most janky thing ever. We drove something like $5,000 of Facebook ads to each of the things. One pretty page drove next to nothing. Just the Google Doc made $50,000 off of, I think, only $5,000 in ad spend. Please listen to me: copy matters more than anything. Now, if you can marry copy with good design, that's ideal. I was like, "Go look at Apple's page for the iPhone — it's the most known product of all time. There's tons of words and also tons of images." An image is worth a thousand words, but I was like, "Go look at Kindle — go look at the Amazon listing for Kindle. You literally only see copy. There are 10,000 reviews and it's just copy, copy, copy. Copy is the way to go." I was trying to convince my team, and that was the final example: "I told you, just good words can sell way better than anything else."
01:03:34	Alex Hormozi	Yeah, I agree. Also, I actually think that's true with content as well. If you're an educator—to be clear—if you're an entertainer, that's different. But if you're an educator, which most B2B businesses are, any business that makes content is more on the educational side. Whether you're a plumber or otherwise, you tell people about toilets and then people buy your stuff. I did this experiment with my team because sometimes my editing team gets cute—they want to get fancy. So I said, "This next one we're going to do the entire thing on an iPhone." Alright, so the whole thing is on an iPhone: the audio's crap, it's shaky, a guy's holding it, no tripod. That was it. But it was just about a concept that I knew was going to do really well, and it got about 1.7 million—almost 2,000,000—views from that video. I was like, we spend so much time in post on some of these videos, and it doesn't matter. Now, it might matter a little—it might matter 10%—but are we appropriately allocating the resources toward the thing that's going to get us the highest return? The answer is almost always no, because the words are the hard part. The words—you have to think—and that's what most people avoid.
01:04:40	Sam Parr	You know, the last time we talked was about ten days ago or something like that, and I needed someone to... I wanted to talk to you today because I enjoyed our conversation. I was like, I don't want a plan — I just want to have a conversation with Alex. And Ari made a joke: "I want you to talk in sound bites." I was like, "That's the exact opposite of what I want. I don't want you to talk in any sound bites. I just want to see what's up and catch up with you." I'm happy we did that.
01:05:01	Alex Hormozi	"No — I'm too, man. Alright, if you want, I can just read five tweets in a row and then Sam can react, yeah."
01:05:07	Sam Parr	"You're... you're a fortune cookie. That's what you are, yeah."
01:05:09	Alex Hormozi	You're a fortune cookie—would that be better? I'll just... I'll just wait.</FormattedResponse>
01:05:12	Sam Parr	So, is that really your writing process? Do you just, like, write one sentence at a time? </FormattedResponse>
01:05:18	Alex Hormozi	Well, for tweets, yes — that's exactly what it is. Like, literally, it's 100% what.
01:05:25	Sam Parr	It is. Do you use ChatGPT?</FormattedResponse>
01:05:27	Alex Hormozi	No, no. I don't use any AI for the tweets.
01:05:31	Sam Parr	Come on—dazzle me. Why not dye me with some lines?
01:05:35	Alex Hormozi	Either sell something extremely expensive to a select few, or sell something super cheap to everyone. The middle is where people die.
01:05:42	Sam Parr	"You're making me weak at the knees, Alex. Keep going."
01:05:45	Alex Hormozi	Right. Poor people stay poor because they want a fast way to get rich. If you're in your twenties and want to stand out, do what you say you're going to do—even if no one is there to give you applause. The fastest way to stand out is to put in more effort than everyone else: show up early, use names, do your research ahead of time, smile when you greet people, do more than your fair share, and follow up quickly. Work ethic is the universal currency of respect. It costs you nothing but can give you everything.
01:06:08	Sam Parr	That was a Facebook post of yours the other day, I...
01:06:10	Alex Hormozi	Liked it. Well, they repurposed it for my Twitter: > "You must first become misunderstood before you can become great." </FormattedResponse>
01:06:17	Sam Parr	Yeah, man — these are great.
01:06:18	Alex Hormozi	Yeah — how to win: realize no one is coming to save you. Take responsibility for your current position. Be willing to sacrifice who you are for who you want to be. The fastest way to become confident is to build evidence. Build yourself a stack of undeniable proof that you are who you say you are. Do so much volume that you don't have to doubt whether you can do it or not. That one “broke the internet.” Yep. It's very hard to have a vision when you have bills to pay. I said that one at the workshop, and the whole room let out an audible gasp. So the team was like, "Alright — that one's pretested; we know that one won't work."
01:06:48	Sam Parr	That one was a freestyle. That was a riff—you raw-dogged that one. </FormattedResponse>
01:06:52	Alex Hormozi	A bunch of these were, but that one was like word for word — didn't change anything. The fastest way to change your life is to get around people whose minimum standards are your life goals, kinda like what we were talking about earlier. Friendly reminder: feeling lost, anxious, and uncertain are good signs. It means you're pushing past what you know. They're called "growing pains" for a reason. Do the work tired. Do the work nervous. Do the work imperfectly. Do the work even when you don't feel like it, because no matter how bad you feel when you start, you know exactly how you feel when you finish. You have to risk looking broke to get rich. You have to risk looking weak to get strong. You have to risk looking desperate to get loved. Egos hold back more dreams than failure and rejection ever will.
01:07:30	Sam Parr	"Everything — you just speak in ad headlines. This is amazing."
01:07:35	Alex Hormozi	"Avoiding people who make it harder for you to achieve your goals is the highest form of self-care." "What do you write all this on?" "I just use an automation tool — a generic one. One of the ways I do it is this: a lot of my audience will hear a livestream or whatever, and then they'll tag me in a quote of something they heard me say. I'll think, 'Oh, great,' and then I'll quote them quoting me as my tweet. I'll be like, 'They thought that was good, so I'll just say that.'"
01:08:03	Sam Parr	It's like Michael Scott doing the Wayne Gretzky quote.
01:08:06	Alex Hormozi	Well, I think some of it—because part of what we're talking about is rhetoric—there's the idea, and then there's how you communicate it. Some of these things have rhythm to them. When you have opposites—good and bad, high and low, give and get—contrast happens in the words. There's typically power in threes; people like having threes. When you have sets, repetition, alliteration—those are all things that help. If you're thinking about how to say something better than just "do hard stuff," consider what permutation of that you can combine with some of these other writing elements to make it easier to remember.
01:08:44	Sam Parr	I think you're talking about the midwit meme. I was joking with Sean — in the beginning of my career I listened to all motivational stuff and self-help stuff. When I was building my first company that kind of made me, you know, get a little something, but I did not do anything. I was like, "No motivational stuff — I just need to get to it." Now I call this second mountain stuff, which is like: yeah, I'm now focused on real thriving, but also raising a good family and building a legacy of a company. I'm not particularly— I mean, getting riches or making more money is nice; I want that, no doubt about it, but it's not number one. Once I'm in that phase of my life, which I am, I am back to the motivational stuff.
01:09:24	Alex Hormozi	Totally. I think when we change goals, we become deprived around some other thing. We notice a discrepancy in our lives, and I think we search for the greatest discrepancy. In the beginning, the biggest discrepancy for me was, "I'm broke, dude." It didn't matter what—I'm broke. I can't do anything. I can't make an impact. I can't support my family. I can't live where I want to live. All of that became the glaring, hot pain in my life. Once that's solved, it's like, "Okay, well I'm not pain-free." There's still pain, and then other things become the pains of your life—those become the things you're deprived of. I do think we're exceptionally good at finding problems, so I don't think that's going to go away. You just get different problems as you level up. On a personal note, I'm about as happy as I was two years ago and probably as I was two years before that. I'm not materially different in terms of my subjective well-being. So I think, "What else am I going to do?" When I also think about things that could potentially stress me out, or opportunities I want to pursue, I try to fast-forward the present: I'll probably be just about as happy and content as I am now. That also eliminates a lot of the FOMO some people suffer from—the regrets like, "I should have done that thing," or "I should have ended up with that opportunity," or "I should have dated that person," whatever your thing is. You're probably about as happy—or unhappy—as you are right now, and that has dramatically quelled the amount of attention I allocate to those paths not taken because they're completely unproductive. </FormattedResponse>
01:10:54	Sam Parr	Yeah, but I think people get there — like, "I'm so happy. I've never been happier in my entire life right now." I like my job. I love my family. I'm happy with my fitness. I like living where I live; I love my unit, my apartment. I love living near my in-laws. I like my team. And, you know, Aristotle has this idea of flourishing: "You have to live a virtuous life." One of the virtues is courage. On one end, courage is like being reckless; on the other end, it's like being a pussy. I think that's what he said.
01:11:24	Alex Hormozi	That's— that's an exact one.
01:11:26	Sam Parr	Yeah, and there are like 14 virtues, and you want to be in the middle — which is courage. Same with being charitable. You don't want to be ostentatious, and you don't want to be tight; you want to be charitable. I'm kind of in that right now. I love that, and I'm happier than I've ever been. I think what Aristotle also says is you need money to do that. He says you don't need a lot of money, but you need enough to own things that make you happy and are beautiful. You also need enough time to have leisure time, because leisure time is important. What's interesting is — you were saying you're, I think, happy right now, but you said you probably won't be happier with anything else. I would argue it sounds like you're looking for leisure time. I didn't really realize that until just now. Since we're talking about Aristotle, he says you need a hobby. The business has been your hobby for a long time, but maybe it would be kind of fun to see what your hobby actually is going to be.
01:12:23	Alex Hormozi	I think I'll probably... I am happiest when I write. So I'll probably write a book that has no real financial benefit for me. I'll likely end up writing about some of the topics we talked about today—learning and behavior—because it's something I'm endlessly fascinated by. I think that's the defining theme and it will be something I will write. I also think it has the potential to change more people's lives than all the other books put together, but we'll see.
01:12:53	Sam Parr	"Dude, I'm so happy you came on. Alright — that's it; that's the pod."

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