I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place of 3000, right?
That's misinformation.
Clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
Five.
We are experts.
Founder Mel 5.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
UAV online.
Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Five coming. Go, please.
Team deathmatch.
We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Right.
Mark clearing order inbound. Come get up.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Mark clearing order inbound. Five.
That's a narrative violation.
Cortisol spike.
Another one. See multiple journalists on the horizon. Yeah.
You're watching TBPN. That voice changer does not work. It's too much. Uh, it's Tuesday, July 7th, 2026. We're live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of Invest Like the Best. Watch streams. We got Invest Like the Best on in the background. Do we have audio? No. But does it matter? No. No, it's just as compelling with the sound off.
Yes, it is. As I heard Jeremy talk about, there's a lot of episodes that people don't even watch and yet they are the most impactful things in the entire world. Uh, and uh, you know, it's a great episode. We threw it on on the big screen as sort of a joke. Oh, it's funny to watch a podcast on a massive screen like it's a World Cup game viewing.
I couldn't turn it off. I kept getting sucked back into it. Uh, fantastic episode, Jeremy and Patrick. Always fun in conversation. Also, the best part of that episode, there's a Ramp ad in it. We got a Ramp ad for you here, too. Time is money. Save both. These are used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. But the actual news. The actual news.
Well, should we talk about the show? Yeah, talk about the show.
Alex Hormozi in the Ultradome, live in person. We're going to be talking about bro splits, agents, mindset, content, community, sales, pricing.
So, Hormozi and I both started our YouTube channels the same year within like a couple months of each other. And we were both doing like somewhat businessy content. Obviously, I was focused on like Silicon Valley history and he was doing more like coaching, small business, scaleups, growth stuff. And he just absolutely destroyed me. It was insane because I think I had like maybe 10,000 followers and I saw his account when he had like 5,000 followers and then he just went on this absolute run to get millions and millions of subscribers and I plateaued at like a couple hundred k and I was like, ah, he's he's just built different.
A few hundred. Few hundred. 450k.
Yeah, 450k. Not bad. I mean, I'm proud of the channel. Honest work. Uh, a lesson in total addressable market there. Uh, his interest is everywhere, but seriously, he took it so much more seriously than me. He had a whole team. He was putting up multiple hour videos every single day, short form, Instagram. He really understood how to be a media company, whereas I was just like, nah, this is just my blog.
Bigger TAM. Yep. And better execution.
100%.
I mean, it's it's just it's worth saying.
It's no, it's it's just actually true. And and I mean it's a testament to he was basic he was full time on it. Said levels. There's levels. Yeah. Exactly. And I was like, oh, like we both started around the same time. We're both taking this pretty seriously. Nope.
Yeah, it was really, really good. It was fun to watch. Uh, so he's been on an absolute run. Set the world record for fastest book sales ever. Something like that. Huge record on uh on becoming. He has a Guinness book uh world record for uh for how successful his book launch was. And really, yes. No, this is this is true. It's on the wiki. Um, and uh I don't know if I have the actual stat here. Let me pull let me pull up the actual stat. So, he broke the Guinness book world record for fastest-selling non-fiction book last year, August 16th, 2025. His book, $100 Million Money Models, officially sold, oh my god, 2.9 million copies within the first 24 hours. That is insane. Generating over $100 million in total launch.
Read me the title again.
It's called $100 Million Money Models, and it generated over $100 million in total in the total launch.
Manifested.
Yes, he did manifest it. Uh, it's uh it's a wild story. He has so many different uh anecdotes to share. He's a fantastic podcast guest wherever he uh is appearing and we're very excited to have him join the show today.
23 minutes before we get into the news. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So the big news of the day is that China has taken a page out of Washington's playbook potentially and aiming to limit the export of AI models. Now, these are just meetings at this point, but uh Chinese authorities have reportedly, this is according to Reuters, uh held meetings with some of the country's top tech firms. That's Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.AI, uh DeepSeek, High-Flyer, not mentioned yet, but you have to imagine that they'll be in the conversation if they aren't already. Uh about potentially restricting overseas access to China's most advanced models. So, they're thinking about doing the same thing that's happening with GPT 5.6, Six, Soul, Ultra, Mythos, Fable, all these different models that are starting to get more restricted as they get more powerful. The government wants a say in what companies and what uh non-governmental organizations, what governmental organizations have access to them. So, uh the discussions are still preliminary.
When when did uh in AI 2027 did China wake up?
Right around this time. Right around this time.
Mid-2023. I actually have on my calendar check on Jack Clark for today because uh because last year December 23rd Jack Clark predicted that there would be big changes and acceleration in mid-2026. He said, 'So by summer of 2026, it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work further accelerating this economy and further changing things.' Do you think that's where we are? Is that an accurate assessment of mid-2026? When I saw this prediction, I put a calendar reminder for mid-2026. We're right in the middle of the year and I wanted to check in and say, does it feel like this? Obviously, this is not a quantitative benchmark. This is a qualitative feeling. Uh, fast evolution emitting a huge amount of heat and light moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes certainly are being won and lost every day in the market. Tyler, how would you assess the amount of heat and light emitting from some parts of the digital world? Would you say it's huge?
I would say it's huge. I think it's huge. It's kind of hard like I feel like I've been like very tapped in for a long time. So, it's hard to say like you've been Yeah. You've been feeling. It's hard to see like an outside view as like oh is this actually like is has there been a big change like recently?
Yes. So there's two things like one it's been kind of like a personal thing for you being so tapped in. Would you say that?
So there's I mean there's two things going on. One is that uh anyone has been like a personal thing for Tyler. He's been so tapped in for so long. It's no true so much of news coming out of DC Yeah. the past like two three months has been about AI which is like definitely was not true. Yes. You know even earlier this year I would say.
Yes. And the uh just just the amount of heat and light around cyber security issues, the coding models, the agentic capabilities, the revenues that we would see in enterprise, those have not been a shock to AI insiders who have been tracking the capabilities of these models since last October or even last summer uh when models started when vibe coding was coined by Andrej Karpathy and coding became you know not solved but you know greatly enhanced by so going back to AI 2027 which was published April 3rd 2025 by late 2026 they had or sorry mid-2026 was China wakes up uh in China the CCP is starting to feel the AGI export controls and lack of government support have left China under resource compared to the west I'm going to fast forward a little bit hawks uh hawks and the CCP warned that the growing race towards AGI can no longer be ignored So they finally commit to the big AI push that they had previously tried to avoid. He sets in motion the nationalization of Chinese AI research. Okay.
Creating an information sharing mechanism for AI companies. So right now they're just looking at export controls.
Feels like we're a little bit behind on this.
It's possible the CCP is just reading this as a guide and just implementing it. They're just planning to implement it to a T.
Thanks for the guide.
Just like Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for the playbook. You should have you should have billed me for it. Yeah. No, the real the real 4D chess here is to shame the CCP into not copying off of AI 2027, saying, 'Oh, really? You're just doing the AI 2027 thing?' Come on. You don't need to invest in AI. Don't be mimetic with our with our philosophers' literature and our most popular podcasts over here in America. Think of your own strategy. Come on. What? Do whatever. Uh no. So um the discussions around AI export controls in China are still preliminary. Uh and it isn't clear how Beijing could claw back access to models that they've already released. If they're on Hugging Face, you can download them. You can run them. And even if they had some sort of intellectual property, they could sue an open-source inference provider for running Kimi or something like that. That feels really difficult to do from Beijing. But uh there are other implications. So once open-weight models are posted publicly, of course they can be copied, mirrored, downloaded, reused anywhere, fine-tuned. Uh but there are several ways China could restrict future frontier models before they leave the country. Uh at the latest end, Beijing could require companies to file future releases with regulators or submit them for national security review before publishing model weights. A more aggressive version would require government approval before any advanced model could be released overseas. And at the most restrictive end, China could simply ban the public release of frontier open-weight models. They could say no more open sourcing. Although the game theory there is a little odd because it feels like the fact that China has been open sourcing near frontier capabilities has been to it to China's benefit um in general because it it creates like more disturbances like the DeepSeek moment was definitely good for China.
Pricing pressure.
Yeah, pricing pressure. So, uh, they could limit these to state-approved customers or Chinese government priorities, which at a certain level might just be the most important thing to do. Uh, the RSI loop, of course, you want all of the GPUs that you have focusing on advancing the frontier internally as opposed to sending it off to America. Uh, the talks come as the US is also moving toward tighter control of frontier AI. The Trump administration recently restricted access to Anthropic's most advanced models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, before later lifting some of those controls after additional safety mitigations. OpenAI has also reportedly faced government pressure around the rollout of its next frontier models. Uh, the issue has become more urgent because Chinese open-weight models are increasingly competitive. Uh, Z.AI's GLM 5.2 in particular recently impressed Silicon Valley by performing close to leading US models at a much lower cost. The Qwen family of models from Alibaba has also become one of the most important open model ecosystems in the world. While ByteDance's Doubao is one of China's most widely used domestic AI systems. I didn't know about that. Uh, if China places export controls on future frontier models, it could raise costs for American AI users and companies because it's obviously very beneficial to have a great open source model available to you um and uh for and use them for lower stakes tasks while reserving expensive US frontier models for their most important workloads. If the best Chinese models are no longer freely available abroad, some of that cheap model supply disappears. But you have to ask what happens to Meta? Do other do other labs start piling back into the open-source uh ecosystem uh and more uh or will all the demand just go straight back to the frontier labs? That's the question. It really does. It really does. We should play some clips because uh we need to be thinking about podcast safety because this is an addictive there should be export controls on this. It should be only available to American citizens. They should Patrick. I see.
Even though one of the one of the the uh one of the guys over there is Canadian. Yes. But uh maybe maybe North America. Uh let's pull up a clip from this. Uh I want to I want to hear Jeremy chat about all sorts of things. They they go all over. Where in the timeline is
Well, should we talk about SK Hynix's new listing?
Yes, we can run through that and then we can pull up
SK Hynix is set to raise around 28 billion in a NASDAQ share sale this week, potentially one of the largest ever New York listings by an Asian company. The South Korean memory chipmaker is already public in Seoul where its stock is up more than 750% over the past year. But the US listing gives American investors an easier way in. The story is big on the timeline because Situational Awareness, the hedge fund run by Leopold Aschenbrenner, may participate alongside Baillie Gifford and Coatue. Together the firms could take as much as 7 billion of the deal. SK Hynix has become one of the purest AI infrastructure plays because it leads in HBM, has become a key Nvidia partner, and now has a market cap around 1.1 trillion.
Which is like a quadrillion won.
Yeah, it's a lot.
When you look it up, it's very confusing. I think it's a lot.
The business is ripping. 2025 revenue grew 47% to 63 billion, profit more than doubled, 28 billion in profit. Uh, Q1 revenue tripled year-over-year, but interestingly, the stock only trades at 7x forward earnings because memory is brutally cyclical, and there's still a lot of people that are wondering what happens if there's another leg up in the AI demand, in the AI buildout. Will that mean more competitive pressure? Will there be a bottleneck where they do stagnate? How much can they actually grow? And so many investors that are just in memory have seen booms and busts from cloud or smartphone or crypto and they say, ah, like I don't know that this one's going to last forever. I'm pattern matching to previous cycles not thinking about this as a different technology cycle. So, uh, I think that's what's going on with SK Hynix, but it should be a blockbuster IPO nevertheless. Very interesting to see an Asian company listed.
And, uh, most, you know, notable part of this deal is is obviously Situational Awareness. Yeah. Uh, and their participation in it. Uh, they they cover in Invest Like the Best the billion-dollar PDF. It's an idea that that Jeremy and Patrick have talked about before, but uh Situational Awareness is turning out to be more of a maybe a 10 or a hundred billion dollar PDF.
Yeah, seriously. The whole investing thesis built around that. Uh, it's just a PDF. I I don't know. Is it an essay, a thesis?
If if so, if the PDF was worth a billion or or more than that, what was the Dario Amodei episode worth? It's got to be some percentage of it, right?
Yeah, definitely. Because a lot of people watch the podcast, watch the clips, scroll through the PDF. It's also breaking news. Meta unveils Muse Image, its first image generation model from MSL.
Waiting for this. Let's pull up some images of this and see uh the results. It should be good given that uh they have all the Instagram and Facebook data to train on. While we pull up some images of the new Muse Image model for Meta, let me tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Um, do we have any of this or should we click over to Jeremy Gfon?
Uh, I am working on pulling up Muse Image. Let's uh go through. Alex Wang has a post.
Cool. Let's pull this up.
Okay. Muse Image, Muse Video, Muse Image. Whole bunch of uh very detailed badges printed all in one image. Uh he says releasing Muse Image today, the first image generation model from MSL. It is crazy that they didn't have any like when back when it was FAIR did they do anything with image? Do they because they had that amazing model segment anything? So they were doing work on images and obviously they've processed a ton of images. Uh it pairs with Muse Arc to reason through your prompt, search the web, and plan before it generates. People get what they mean on the first try. Live now in the Meta AI app. Very very fun. Even puts a realistic QR code in there and can do infographics and uh old Polaroids as well. Big Sue, August 1983. Looks great. Three things Alex Wang is excited about. Under the hood, self-refinement. The model improves its own output within its chain of thought. Emerged during LRL, not by design. Multi-reference composition. Many images blended into one coherent generation. Multi-turn editing. Iterate without losing coherence or starting over. Make an image of this person riding a bike, this bike, and wearing this suit while passing by these people on a park bench. Make it look like a drawing in this style. That's cool. So, you can upload multiple images and sort of drop them in his various prompts. What you got, Tyler?
Uh, yes. So, Meta did release a number of image models. So, there was uh I think it's pronounced Chameleon in 2023. There was Emu also 2023. And then there was um another like version of Chameleon. Um I I think they were I they were somewhat different than uh the like diffusion which was like popular at the time. I think they were all autoregressive transformer which is like how you get the good tech stuff like that. But um I I believe this is a different uh that's cool. Yeah. And uh Alex is also previewing Muse Video, competitive unprompted fidelity, temporal consistency, also coming to Meta AI. This has got to be uh GPU intensive if they actually roll this out to everyone. Although Meta AI does have a smaller install base than Instagram, but I mean imagine you really push this in Meta AI and what they buy all the TPUs for. You got to you got to get people generating stuff. I I completely agree. I think put this in the hands of the the modern Instagram creator. Let them have fun with it and uh see you already have the algorithm to filter the slop out. The stuff that is sloppy but still entertaining and creative uh will surface to the top. So, congrats to them on a successful launch. Uh let's tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Uh, and let's click over to Jeremy Gfon on why he doesn't worry about AI taking jobs. A very, very interesting take on the latest episode.
Understand this idea of we're going to run out of jobs. To me, it's like very obvious that every certainly every white collar job is like totally fake and made up in the sense that like they are not contingent for shelter and food and medicine and other necessities. But most jobs do not touch those. Or if they do, they touch it in a very very derivative way. What is your job as an allocator? It's like, well, because capital is inherently inflationary, you have to you can't just leave it alone. And so like my job is like when you have money and you don't want it to go away, you have to give it to someone. And so you you give it to a bunch of people and then I take it and I put it into things that are productive. And then hopefully you don't lose your money, you get more money. And like is this useful? Is this good? Yeah, sure. But like it's not real. And to me, there's like unlimited amounts of jobs that you can create in those sorts of scenarios. We're going to have unlimited wants and desires and and and our economy is solely driven by our like unquenchable desire to consume things. And so we're going to have new things to to consume. And now again, in the short term and medium term, that might be volatile and there might be a lot of job loss, etc. And you know, that's not good. And uh you know, there could be a lot of despair. But in in in the long run, like we're just gonna invent new things to do. Like we've already solved all of our problems. Like the worry about, oh, we're not gonna have more jobs. It just doesn't really resonate cuz I feel like we just make up stuff for us to do. And that's sort of the whole point of it.
That makes me think we need an Invest Like the Best soundtrack.
We do need the Invest Like the Best soundtrack. Uh let's play the other clip that Patrick shared. The West Coast is definitely eating the East Coast. Um the founder is incredibly important and sort of the um the founding act is incredibly important in uh in any business. I I do think that it's notable that like the current paradigm in which we live the largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leverage buyout which it's extractive in so far as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. The core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to the core in Afterglow says, 'My god, what an obnoxious sound, unwatchable.' Sorry, it is a little loud today. I feel like the soundboard's coming in a little bit hot. We're sorry about that. But we're having fun here. And of course, we don't want to we don't want to pirate the entire Invest Like the Best episode. We got to tease it.
This would be a good use case for AI if we can make a separate show that's just the show, but an agent in real time pulls out the sound effect. Pull it out and just has a normal show, no sound. Sure. Sure. So, you can choose whether you want the soundboard version of the show or the not or or the Tyler says, 'Don't be sorry. That's why I'm here.' Tyler's just here for the soundboard. So, after unfortunately, there's people that are here that don't like the soundboard. There's people that are here only because of the soundboard. We are trying to find the middle ground and we don't always get it right.
We don't always get it right, but we're trying.
Sort of a cold war between the pro-soundboard and the anti-soundboard uh constituents in the audience. So, we we we'll do our best. But today is a soundboard episode, so there's going to be a couple. But I think the team did dial back the soundboard a little bit. So, not too bad now. Okay. Well, uh Revenge of the East Coast. The East Coast is trying to is trying to make a comeback. Jeremy Gfon says the West Coast is eating the East Coast, but the East Coast is trying to make a comeback uh across all of these big banks. Did you hear about this? They're going after the debit card rails. They're going after Visa.
This is news today. JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other big banks are reportedly exploring a deal to buy a Fiserv debit card network that would own let them own more of the payment rails um that the customers' debit cards run on. So the basic idea is that uh post I think it was post financial crisis there were limits on how much uh banks could make on debit card transactions. This is the Durbin amendment. Durbin, the Durbin amendment. I think Dick Durbin. Uh, and they want a way to turn debit back into a more valuable business. So, Fiserv owns major debit networks, including Star and Excel, which I don't run into that often. I usually see Visa, Mastercard, Amex. I mean, Amex doesn't have a debit network, but um, and but Star and Excel already connect to millions of cardholders and thousands of financial institutions. So, uh, this is like a it's a real rail with an existing bank and merchant connectivity. Um, and so this is like when Capital One bought Discover. Um, they own the issuer, then they also own the network, and then they can move their own volume onto their own rails and capture more of the economics. Uh, so who loses if this goes through? Who should be upset about this? It's probably the merchants, Visa, and Mastercard. Uh so merchants would probably see higher effective debit costs if banks find a way to route more volume through bank-owned networks while Visa and Mastercard would lose some leverage over US debit. Uh but the bigger story is that payments are getting vertically rebundled. Banks want the account, the card, the network, the wallet, the fraud layer, and eventually the AI agent checkout surface. So, it's all very uh they I don't even think there's a real bid for the for Fiserv's debit networks just yet, but uh it's it's like starting to leak out that they're doing it. Uh and I was interested to know like is this is this bullish for Ramp because they sit on top of of networks and I think it is generally positive and and because of the layer of abstraction they operate on. Um, and I was wondering like is this an attack on Stripe? Is this a is this an attack on any particular West Coast tech startup that we know. Uh, and it seems like it's much more of an attack on Visa and Mastercard in particular, uh, who have been driving up debit fees for them. Anyway, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.
Caner in the chat said to warm up the gong.
He got warm. I had to warm it up for him.
Okay. Well, the gong is warmed up. Maybe we need a couple more huge, huge hits to fully warm it up. Did you want to talk more about Fiat's next US car? You mentioned it when we were talking to Baiju from Cowboy Space Company yesterday. The Topolino. It's coming to America. Tiny two-seat electric micro car, they're calling it. Starts at $14,000, almost half the price of the other electric golf cart that we talked about last... what was that, last Thursday? We talked two... yeah, two...
But you can fit a lot more people in the Ami.
The Ami. Yes, that's right.
I like this move from... I like this move from Fiat.
You like it? I think that their cars are generally unserious.
Yes. And so I think it's good to just lean into... lean into that and...
And I think they're trying to price this so that when people are thinking, 'Hey, I need a new car.'
Should I go out and buy like a crossover SUV or...
There's no way anyone can consider this for their main car. It's impossible.
No, but you can if you typically roll around with a handful of people and instead of buying one car for...
Oh, you buy a bunch of them.
You'll need a train of...
You know how you know the range on this thing? 46 miles.
I mean, I guess if you have a 10-mile commute, you can definitely commute here.
They launch an EV with 46 miles of range.
They should have called it... They should have called Fiat... It's less than 10 miles.
Less than 10 miles. They should have called it the Fiat Dice, because every time you leave the house, you're rolling the dice.
It's 1,000 lb, so you can deadlift it with another friend.
It's... there's... Are you serious?
Thousand pounds. Yeah, this thing's tiny. It's... it's really, truly like so, so small.
They're saying it's the cutest car ever made.
The top... tops out at 25 miles an hour.
That's with a street-legal low-speed vehicle kit. By default, it only goes 19 miles an hour. So how long would it take you to get here? 19 miles an hour.
That's not too bad. That's not too bad.
Maybe. Maybe you got to do it. Okay, you guys are laughing, but you won't be laughing when... when I pull up to the office with...
With... with five of these.
And you need a support car like a multiple behind you.
Yeah. No, no. The... the... the Topo... the Topo is the support. You just have... you have a series of... you just go train mode.
Well, our next guest is the owner of a Hummer EV, or at least was. We can talk to him about that. We can bring him on down whenever we want. You ready? Let me tell you about Public first, investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Alex...
There. Grab that seat. Sit down for us. Do you still own a Hummer EV?
Uh, yeah, we do actually.
You do? Give us your review. We were just talking about the Fiat Topolino. I don't think you're going to be in the market for that.
It's 1,000 pounds.
So I think what we could do is like if you just lined up like 10 of the... like chariot... like...
The Hummer... like be my chariot. Imagine... imagine if the Hummers... the Hummer is kind of the front of the... the train and then you have like... you... you see the Hummer coming at you and then... and then a bunch of the Topolinos kind of pull out in like a V-shape, Fast and Furious. That would be... that would be badass. Yeah. Take over the whole smog.
How is... how is life these days?
Is there a new book coming?
There is another book coming.
Do you have a strategy for book launch cadence? Is it an annual thing?
It's more like every 18 months to two years.
But do you imagine that continuing for your entire career?
Every book I write, I say is the last book I'm going to write, and then I have like a six-month refractory period, and I'm like, yeah, you know, I could... I could write a book about something, and then I just start writing again.
Um, I have a bunch of notes on my phone of a topic because right now I have like probably like 10 books that are at different stages of... so I just mind dump wherever, and then once there's enough stuff that I think this is like... this is interesting, I'll then start the book writing process. But I'm a big believer in, um, surface area of thought. Like if you were to sit down and say like, I'm going to write a book about this, and then you have two weeks, it's like you don't have enough experiences that are diverse in a two-week period while you're writing to like let the paint dry. So I kind of want to like have... I want to be in, you know, a totally different state talking to somebody and be like, I didn't think about that, and then I add it to the book. And so then all of a sudden it's like the... the density of... of thought and ideas per word is much higher. But I think you just have to do it by like spreading out the time that... so like the time I'm thinking about a book is much longer than the time I'm writing the book.
Is it purely thinking, and you want a lot of thought to go into the different sections of the book over the course of 18 months? Is there actually a benefit to going out and having real-world experiences?
Oh, that's... I mean, that's...
It's 100% that, because I'll have a working theory of like, I think this is how... I think people are missing this part of it, and then I'll kind of start battle-testing it functionally. And then when I realize that I'm using the same framework over and over again and successfully overcoming some issue, I'm like, this is it, and then that's what the book becomes.
How narrow do you want to stay? How narrow have you been in the surface area of thought around mainly the last three books?
It's a really good question. Um, problem definition for the book, I think, is the hardest part of any book. Like the Leads book, which is the second book, was the hardest book I've ever written. I'll never write a book that hard because I was like, I'm going to write a book on advertising. It's like, Jesus Christ, there's so many ways to get leads. And I put it all in one book. It took 19 versions to get there.
The Money Models book was the fastest book because it was really just about wrappers for promotions. Super valuable, but really easy to consume and use. And so I was like, okay, this is the lesson for me. Like, and offers... super narrow, super narrow. And that book too was like... all three of those books started as one kind of gigantic thing, and I gave it to somebody and they're like, dude, you cannot. It was like this, and they're like... because I was like, I'm going to have a tome, and then I decided to... I want people to actually read it.
Is there an itch in the back of your mind where you want to do sort of the Tim Ferriss thing, where you go from The 4-Hour Workweek, a business book, to chef, body, lifestyle, money management, personal finance? Like there's so many topics that you talk about and people are interested, and I'm sure you could sell those books, and they might be edifying at a certain point because you're like, I've... I've scratched this itch three times, four times, 10 times. But is there a level of focus that you have to discipline yourself, or does it come naturally?
I only write about stuff that I feel like I have some unique take on. I think rewriting a book that already exists, other people already know, there's no point. Especially if like you're in the thick of it and you're thinking, 'Oh, this has already been written before.' It doesn't really motivate you. Like I think... like I want to write something that only exists because I made it.
Same thing with businesses. Like there's... I've had the experience of building a company or... or just like starting to work on a company and being like, I can stop working on this and it will not matter at all.
Yeah. The world... there's a bunch of alternatives, and... and that you can make that case for like most businesses, but there are some where you're like, if I don't build this, no one's going to build it, at least in the right way.
Yeah. No, I have 100% that perspective when it comes to book writing.
Yeah. It's funny, as... as we talk about this, Jeremy Gonne... I know is a good... good friend of yours, good friend of ours, and every time he talks, people just listen. And he's somebody who I would love to write a book almost because I just want him to go on another podcast... proper podcast tour. He just kind of pops up, does invest like the best, and then like goes... goes dark for like 18 months. But like it's somewhat of a tragedy that he'll probably write a book someday, but it'll be in like 40 years. So in the meantime, you have to like... in the... in the meantime, you have to just like, you know, take notes and... and try to pick stuff up from... from the podcast. But there's so many people that... like so many people that should be writing books just don't have the time, and they'll eventually come and take like a victory lap at the end of their career. But I think it's like you could just do a lot of stuff other than write books. But it's... but it's... it's very valuable to be like writing in real time versus like saving up a bunch of lessons and then kind of summarizing it at the end. I think you miss out on the... the wrinkles, like the tiny little details that like if you... if you think about like the story of how you met your wife and you go back, like you've told it a bunch of times, but if you told it the day after you did it, you'd have so much richer memory of all the tiny little things that happened. And so I'm a big believer of like while it's wet, like paint it, and then let it dry over time. But that's why like I always want documentation to be as real as...
Yeah. It's funny, the final book will actually be the easiest to write because you have all the books and you're like, okay, what... what was actually like worth kind of...
Greatest hits at that point. Yeah. We... we had Mark Pincus on the show, founder of Zynga. He wrote a book and he said that he thinks everyone should write a book in their life, but he also said everyone should build a house.
Do you have any aspirations to build real estate physically? Like, do you do it or not?
Not by hand, but just take a... take a piece of dirt and turn... working with an architect and team.
But is that something that, you know, a lot of people... that's on their bucket list? I don't know where you've been in your real estate journey, but how do you think about that as a... as a bucket list item?
It's not... like, why not? I mean, we buy big multifamily that are already existing and we do that. But if there were an investment opportunity that made sense, I would.
It's... you're not interested because it's not productive.
It's just not on my list.
Purely for like, you know, the satisfaction... like, have you listened to... like, thought about listening to Beyonce today?
I'd be like, not really. But I mean, like if it was on, sure. You know, I'm not against...
Yeah, I think some people just have the itch to customize their own living environment. And I'm curious about how you see your living environment, because I mean, from those first YouTube videos, like the monastic β what were you, in the closet? You were in the closet. Like, that was β I don't know if that was intentional, but it was somewhat deliberate. You picked that space over a big living room, right? And I'm wondering how you think about your living space, your work space, your office space today.
So I would say all of the time that I β when I work, I'm very intentional about that space. When I'm not working, it's whatever Ila wants. I don't care. Like, if she's 10% happier, I have like a percent correlation to my happiness. And me being more comfortable has no correlation back. So whatever she's good with, I'm good with. But in terms of where I work, it's almost all how do I eliminate every sense of distraction for me personally. And so it's like I don't have windows. Some people like having windows. I don't think anything wrong with that. For me, it's like I need no stimulation because I'm very distractible. And so I have to have like earplugs in, no light, all artificial. I have like soundproof β like, you know, like I want nothing. And then I can finally focus on what I'm trying to work on.
Yeah. Can we go back to the early YouTube days on the latest channel? I think 2020, in that closet. We both launched YouTube channels around the same time, and we were talking about this. You completely smoked me.
It was β John is, you know, obviously pretty good at media, and his channel was just following his interest, like Silicon Valley history. The execution was, by all means, amazing. Like, got to like half a million subscribers. I treat it like a blog, and you treat it like a business.
Yeah. And it was a much smaller TAM. And when you compare the two channels and your strategy, the execution difference was β it was me. And I had one remote editor for years, and I was like not monetizing, not really thinking about it as a business. But I'm interested to know, on day one of that YouTube channel β because I know you've done media stuff before, but the current media business β what was the team like? What was the strategy? How much time were you putting into it? Because I know you had exited some businesses, you had some space to breathe. But how serious were you, and then what was the evolution of that?
I'll walk you through as fast as I can. So the first thing was I found any media editor, like an agency. And they were like, three YouTube videos a week is what we do. And I was like, all right, then that's what I'll do. And so I just webcammed β and I had a little suitcase that would open up so I could travel, because Leila and I were traveling for the year of the sale. And so that's what I did. Wherever we were, I was like, open up. And then because at that time I didn't have really any work, so I had all these thoughts that I was like, I'm just going to get them. I'm going to dump them all out. And so that's basically what YouTube strategy 1.0 was. Yeah. I had somebody cold reach out, legit, right as shorts started. They were like, I'll do everything. You already have YouTube stuff. I'm just going to clip it. Just give me permission. And I was like, oh, cool. And so that's β accidentally started clipping. 100%. And so that was like we were really early on shorts. So good. And then as soon as he did a pretty good job, he's like, you know, if I actually recorded you doing these, they'd do even better. And I was like, fine, but I only want to do one day a quarter. And he was like, fine. So he'd fly out for one day and we'd do 100 shorts in one sitting. 100%. I would just do 100. And that style of filming and recording is pretty much how I still kind of rock that way, which is like I prefer a marathon day. Like I'd rather just start at, you know, six and then just rock until every ounce of juice is gone, and then it's like, great, we'll do it again in a week or whatever.
Yeah. We're sort of like that marathon every day. Yeah. One of my questions is like, what goes into a two-hour YouTube video? Because you'll do these like masterclasses, two hours, and I'm like, that is insane. And then I'm like, I do three hours every day. So like now it's become more possible. But I imagine that there's lots of β
But three hours was kind of like just going until we got tired. Like by three hours we're usually like, okay, like probably need to go to the bathroom, probably want to eat some food.
Yeah. And this show is much less structured. But when you're thinking about like the portfolio β the volume is just incredibly important to everything in media these days. You agree with that?
Oh, 100%. Volume negates luck all day. Volume negates luck. Violence is the answer. Yeah. It's like on our wall at HQ.
What formats are you most excited about for 2026, 2027?
Live interactive. Separate and together. So just going live like with the audience, Twitch style, YouTube live style.
And that was the book launch strategy, right? Was that your first taste? You've done live.
No, I've done lives before, but that was obviously, you know, intentional. And then interactive, which is not like β sure, there's chat interactive, but like how do I bring the audience in so that we can talk? That's why you see the β first it was Cash Cows, now it's Scale or Fail, which is the show we just launched. And we're doubling down really hard on that because if you think in a world of AI, it's like what are the things that can't be faked? Yeah. It's people. You know, like I want stakes. So for example, like if MrBeast's videos β if it was not a real $5 million or not a real Lamborghini, the stakes disappear. Now, to be fair, there's for sure other β like a fictional story. The whole thing we know is fake and we're fine with it, and the story is the story and it will crush that. But people still want stakes. Like right now, chess is more popular than it's ever been, but like humans haven't been able to beat computers for a long time. And so there are definitely these some areas where we want the drama, we want the stakes, and so I don't think that's going to change at all. I love the series that you've been doing with entrepreneurs that attend a conference, they stand up, they give you the pitch. It's so good. I just love all those live interactive.
I'm interested to know how you think legacy media will fit into your media strategy going forward. Is it about prestige? Is there actually an audience there still? Because you're part of the new guard, and yet you signed with CAA. I'm sure you have the ability to walk into a large media company and get a TV show. Does that make sense? Is that something that's interesting to you? What would the value be to β
I think it's distribution that I don't have access to. So like I think one of the biggest unspoken advantages that exists right now in media is Dave Ramsey has been murdering for 30, 40 years because he has 600 radio stations syndicated. Everyone's like, radio's dead. It's like he's murdering it, and it's because no one's looking. So like I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to attention. And so even if it's less or more, if it's something that's completely in this other bubble over here that I have no access to β and the beauty is like there's still like closer to like there's no monopoly online, right? The feed is like you can just get anybody can log on and it's beautiful because anyone can log on. You don't have to have an audience. You can suddenly have an audience. Maybe it's one video, maybe it's a flash in the pan. But TV still β like if you can figure out the right lane, you have this sort of like differentiated access to attention. And so it's like a different group of people and it's differentiated access that's not just like log on, immediately have access. And when something super pops, like you look at all the real estate shows that have come out, you've got Selling Sunset, uh, sir has his show. Like there's a huge distribution base that they gain access to as a result of that. All you have to do is look at those stars, look at their social media, and I would say this β I say this lovingly β it's pretty weak in terms of what they're doing, but their following is still really strong because it's carried over. And so I'm like, if those people actually tried on this side and had β so I'm an β and it's like how do we get it all right? And that's kind of the β
I think this is just underrated broadly for mostly tech people. They see the trend of the internet growing exponentially or e-commerce and they think, oh well, in a couple years like 100% of everything will be bought online. And it's like, no, retail still exists. And you know, for certain categories, you probably need to be in retail as well. And the same thing with, you know, the aging audiences on radio or TV, they're still there. They still watch. And so, interesting. What about the level of production polish? I imagine that there's a tradeoff there. If you go with something more produced that's not just you opening your laptop and yapping, right? You can get stuck in like the production quagmire if you're trying to build the Mona Lisa or some incredible show. At the same time, there's prestige that comes with that, there's a new level of authority. How do you think about that trade-off?
I think it's both. So it's either like make it the Mona Lisa and like play to win that game, or you're in the volume game and the volume is just value per second and just trying to get as many of those seconds out as you possibly can. And like I just think it's both, and I think they serve different objectives. To your point of like you gain authority in different ways. It's definitely there's an element that it shifts the brand. There's access to new distribution and eyeballs. All of that happens over here. But over here I think is where you get a lot of the closer to buying behavior, believe it or not. And so I see this as more top of funnel and this is like closer to middle and bottom. Obviously you can get discoverability. Like I said, this is full stack, but you get way closer to purchases on the site.
Yeah. Can we offer you a Diet Coke? Can we offer you anything? We have a variety of beverages if you'd like. What's a category of business that you haven't built or invested in that you're excited to at some point?
I'm still looking for the magical med spa. I think med spas are super β I love pseudo medical. Because you β What's maxing? Yeah. All of it. Well, think about it. Like there's this aging population that has more money than anyone else. They don't want to age. They see the Brian Johnsons β like it is the zeitgeist of right now of like I want to live forever. I want to look beautiful and young forever, and they have all the money. And so if you look at the demand side of that, it's huge. And you look at the supply, med spas are still wildly understaffed. And I know this because I see business owners every single week. And so I've like there's a handful of categories right now that I'll meet business owners and they're doing better than they should be. Like there's some business owners β I met a med spa owner when I first moved to LA. They had started their business and within a year they were doing like 1.2, 2 million of like straight free cash flow off of like $400,000 invested. And it was like actually unbelievable. Yes. The entrepreneur in this case was like very talented β cuz he watches this and he's like, oh yeah, he's great though. No, but this was years ago. But yeah, I'm surprised that also like differentiated shots at that category because if you look at like I would expect Brian Johnson to do something like this, right? Because there's a lot of people that follow him and he has, you know, as many β maybe he probably has like 10 times as many critics as he does people that are like, I'm going to do exactly what he's going to do. But that group of people that will just like copy what he's doing is actually pretty meaningful, right? And so med spas, you go into these like high ticket kind of like procedures, treatments, things like that. To me, that's where I think he could really start to print. He had 1,200 people apply for his million-dollar-per-year thing. 1,200. Do that math real fast, right? That's a lot of money. And then there was a $60,000-per-year thing that was underneath, and multiply that by just probably an order of magnitude greater. Wildly underestimated. So you take that and then you have these 10,000 or 15,000 med spas that exist. It's like it's nothing. And it's super fragmented because still no one's really gobbled that up. Well, not that I've seen. And to your point of like when I asked them like, hey, so what are you doing right now to get your $6 million a year topline and you know 40% margins, and they're like kind of just, you know, we just opened up and put the sign up and you just did a good job and you know, customers tell customers. Like you know, that's not how it works. And it's not how it's going to work forever. They're just in a completely supply-constrained environment. They just don't know it because when you're on the inside you don't know. You're like, oh, I'm doing a good job.
Is part of the problem that a lot of the med spa founders get a little bit too sucked into the biohacker nature of these things and it feels a little bit too scientific?
I don't think it's that at all. I think it's like it's so short-term. A lot of the med spas I think are like very short-term cosmetic driven. They're like how do we make you look good for the next three to six months, which is not necessarily what makes you look good over the next three to six years or over the next few decades. So that's at least generally there's a slice for Johnson to attack, which he obviously β he's a very smart dude.
How would you attack the problem? Roll up, find a bunch of operators, put them together, start something from scratch.
I mean, yeah, I mean the roll-up model would make the most sense. The thing is, is like de novo is not that expensive. And if you are a good operator, you can go in and just smash. Because when people are coming in, when your CAC's zero and your gross margins on these services are absurd, the actual difficulty in that model right now is getting the talent for the technicians, because it's supply constrained at the business level, it's also supply constrained at the talent level. And so β and it's so easy for them to open up a door. Exactly. They hang their own shingle. They take the customers, and like that's the issue that those companies have. And so the key to really winning that game is having a really good talent strategy for how do I make their lifestyles β how do I compensate them as directly as possible on what they're generating and get it to the point where β my godfather is in wealth management and he has a really cool model. He's managed several billion dollars, but he started at nothing and built it all himself. And his big thing was basically letting the other person have a little more. And so it's like he'll β he's like, I'll give you 51% so that you don't ever want to leave. But then you do all the work. Yeah. It probably looks more like a law firm over time. Yeah. 100%. It's more of a partner program. And to be fair, if you've been to any of these β I would say it's a high-touch service. They're not loyal to the business. They're loyal to the girl who does her injections or does their lasers or whatever. And so it's like we just got to tie those people in like a partner firm.
Speaking of Brian Johnson, do you care at all about living forever?
I don't even think about it. I expect to die. I would prefer not to, but like I'm good. I'm good either way. Like I think Marcus really has said the old and the young lose the same thing when they die, which is the present. That's all we got. So yeah, I love it. I'm a similar way. I want to have a full life, but I never at any point in my life have I thought, oh, it would just be the best thing ever if I could never die.
Going back to sort of core audience β I think of like the sweet spot is like mid-market owner-operator founder types. Is that roughly accurate?
One to 50 million. What is the expansion opportunity? Is there a business for you where you're giving keynotes at Fortune 500 companies, motivational speaking for like, you know, middle managers at companies, or is it getting people on the founder journey who are leaving companies, breaking out into their own and going from zero to one million? What do you think?
Well, from an expansion opportunity, like I think there's still plenty of people in one to 50 million who don't know who I am and haven't consumed my stuff or whatever. So like plenty there. But like if I just focus there, I get the zero to one million. Sure. Anyways, because if you're helping people go from one to 10, people are like, he can probably help me go from zero to one, right? And so I'm super broadly zooming out. I'm a big fan of capitalism and I think as many people as possible participating in a free market is a good thing for the country and for that person and for everyone else that they serve. And so I would like as many people to taste that forbidden fruit as humanly possible. And so I try and make it as simple and as easy as possible for people to get started.
Yeah. What mistakes do you see entrepreneurs making around AI? Because I'll give you one. The small business owners that I know that get too into AI and maybe they're listening to podcasts and they're on X and we're orange glasses ready to go. They'll like β they won't just apply AI to their business. They'll like start a new company that's like AI oriented. And I just think that's like the worst possible mistake because they end up doing something that like the model just does well. And it's like, okay, so you're going to compete just directly with like all the biggest companies in the world on something that you don't even know as well as the biggest companies in the world when you could just like β and so there's like this grass-is-greener thing happening where instead of seeing like, oh, I can just make, you know, these parts of my business even if it's just 10% more efficient, I can keep compounding. But what are you seeing?
All right. One, they're using AI to do dumb things really fast. So they're doing the wrong stuff with AI. So even like they were like a small business owner that wasn't making money, now still doesn't make money but has a lot more token cost than they did before. Number two, they're meeting β meeting summaries. Like I've never been successful. Like I've never β That was my bottleneck. I just need a summary. No, but it's one of those things like I think it's cool that these apps exist. I've never needed to take notes to achieve my goals in business. Like I'm just like, okay, what's the next most important thing to do? I'm going to do that thing. Okay, what's the next most important thing? I'm going to do that thing. I've never been like, okay, like what did we say? I mean, and I've worked in like small companies, right? I've only been a founder. But that's just such an example of like, yeah, my meeting note system is like so dialed. I'm like, okay, like how much money have you made today? Okay. So I'll tell you to counter-answer the two things that I think are the right way to use it, which is number one, how do we take every function of the business, take it from an org-chart-based thinking to workflow-based thinking, and then saying, okay, this editor used to be involved in these six workflows. We actually only need him to be now involved in three of those workflows, and the other three we can have AI do the vast majority of the work. And so all of a sudden we can 3x, 5x output. And so revenue per headcount on service-based businesses should decrease, which means margin should go up. Now there's this great opportunity window right now where prices aren't really going to adjust for a minute, which means that your margins get absolutely stupid. And so like you should do that. So there's two flavors of that. One is the β like I'm an advocate of like don't tell people you're using AI. Like go have a service business that people think is all humans in the background and then charge human prices and then have costs of tech and have the scale and operational β or the lack of operational drag of tech. That's the good game, right? Or take it department by department so you can just become more efficient at it, right? So those are I think the two good ways of doing it. To your point of like, well, being distracted is still a terrible idea as a founder, and so this has just made it so much easier for people to get distracted because like I could start a business on this or that or that. And it's like, yeah, but you still have your dry cleaning store, dude. Like what are we going to β and to be fair, if you want to be a trillionaire, you are going to need to get into bleeding-edge tech and AI, but you probably should get rid of your dry cleaning store and go all in. And so they're trying to juggle two plates and not really succeeding at either.
Totally. Totally. Yeah. The dry cleaning example is like use AI to constantly be monitoring every possible new space that you could expand into within your area or in the county over, etc. And just do that, do that, do that. But it's like grass is greener. Like, oh, what if I made the operating system, the agent operating system for dry cleaners? It's like, no, just like do the thing. Just win at dry cleaning because it's also so much easier to compete against other dry cleaning owners because you for sure know that they're not adopting it the right way because they're doing the same thing with orange glasses and banging out their replicated software. You know, like fine. Yeah. I mean, there's also like a fair amount of AI that a lot of small businesses are probably getting for free just in the sense of like if you have a CRM that's sending emails, like that company has probably adopted AI and is doing somewhat smarter targeting. And so you might not need to go and build your own CRM that sends emails that are customized for every customer because like you get it for free out of the box. There's also this tendency to rebuild the existing software that you're using. So it's like, oh, I've got, you know, I don't need to pay Calendly, you know, $9 a month when I β it's just like, oh, so instead you're going to use 200 hours to try and recode what they just did and it breaks all the time. If there's an error, then you lose nine grand. But like that is what I'm saying all the time. Yeah, we did have a β Ben on our team here was having had been β he does a lot of the automation that we do around like captioning videos. He had reached a point where all the existing software didn't do the thing that he needed to do, that he built something yesterday that now works and that it's saving him a bunch of time. So there are these edge cases β very narrow point solutions for us. I think specifically one β flip live streams very quickly with captions with our ads added on at the end and it saved a bunch of time in Premiere.
In media it's huge, right? Like we're using it β like I'll give you two examples. We're using it on the ad side. What we did was we built this gigantic data repository, which by the way I think that's what the big β the huge gap that small business owners are missing is they don't have a data layer. And so it's like if you want to have anything that's unique, it starts with data. If you want to build any kind of AI, right, that's actually useful. And so one is like how do we build a repository of all the data that we have in terms of sales copy, testimonials, videos, collateral, all of that in one place and then have that get piecemealed out into ads in real time and then also match those to dynamic landing pages. So we have that live right now at acquisition.com in terms of how we're doing it. So we have several hundred landing pages that are getting pushed against several hundred different ads that are going out, all being done programmatically with AI, which is really β but like we're not an AI company. But we use the [__] out of it. And so I think that those are like those are the β on the paid side where it's really, really exciting. Yeah. And then on the organic side, it's like right now we started More Mosy, which is like the highlights channel. Yeah. And I've got one cracked-out teenager who's putting out 20 clips a day on his own. No, no, he's doing five mids. So like we call mids, which is like call it like three to 10 minutes clips. And then he's putting out, I think, 15 or something like that shorts per day on his own. And so he just takes all the time if I'm talking to business owners, takes it, runs it through, it highlights the points from there. He just basically just makes sure that it's good, inserts automatically the CTAs that we want, and then boom, it's all β
What's your philosophy on bringing the cracked-out teenager in-house, remote, in-person versus agency versus platform where clipping can happen in a Discord that just β you hear about these Discords with like 200 clippers and they all get paid on a CPM basis randomly. It feels deeply chaotic, but if you can harness that, maybe it's powerful. But what's your philosophy?
Uh, yes. Okay. That's 100% my philosophy. Okay. Um, but like are you an agency fan or in-house? It's like I want three agencies working for me and an in-house team. Like it's all the impressions are out there. Like got to catch them all. Like go get them. You know what I mean? And same thing with like if I pay a lot of attention especially on the paid side to e-commerce. I think they're almost always the most cutting edge when it β well actually porn's the most cutting edge right before that is β I'm being real, right β e-commerce is second most cutting edge. And those guys are all completely β the ones who are crushing it going zero to 100 million plus in call it like 12 to 24 months, like all the companies that are running the same playbook is decentralized UGC with kind of like AI backend for screening for control and then just letting it [__] rip. Yeah. And there's obviously some considerations for brand, right? Which is like how do we make sure β but if the raw footage is β and you only put money behind the things that are exactly β Yeah, it's probably pretty safe.
Do you expect to integrate parenting content into your universe?
I don't think everything that's not business has not been like super deliberate. I just don't hold back. So if someone asks a question about it, I'll just answer honestly. But everything I try to think like the middle spoke is still β I'll use this. There we go. The middle spoke is still business. And then it's, you know, how am I seeing parenting through the lens of business as a business owner, if you want. How do I get an exclusive? We got it over there. And like how do I see like my relationship with Ila, but we're business partners, but we're also married. So it's always I try to keep that at the middle. But some people are like, I just want to talk, you know, with Taylor and Travis pairing up. Hopefully they have children. You guys having children. I think we could see a real baby boom. Yeah. But we need to get it out there. That's what we're doing. The Lord's work.
Can you walk me through how to sort of evolve a brand through what I expected to be more difficult, but you executed it very well. The headline was, I have nothing to sell you. Now you sell books. People want to buy stuff from you. Obviously, you sold a ton of books. But there's probably like a, oh, I wasn't expecting this. How did you work through that? Because I think there's a lot of companies where the business model evolves and they need to change their communication strategy and they need to deliver β like an lab is like we're not going to compete with all β what it's crazy. Asking a friend here.
I'm such an β like I think the absolute simplest media strategy for any kind of change is the whole truth. Yeah. Not half-truth. And I think if you just manage that so it's like I didn't have anything to sell. Yeah. And I was like, now I do. It's so simple. I love it. That's amazing. Wow. And if you don't want to buy it β here's the great thing about capitalism. It's voluntary exchange, so you can just keep getting the free [__]. Yep. All good. There's tons of it. There's tons of free stuff. Tons of free stuff. And we still continue to do that. If you choose to want more help with stuff in person where we're limited. Yeah. Spend money and we'd love to have you.
Yeah. It's fascinating. What is the term for like the economic ladder that you help build β help companies build? I feel like the first time I was exposed to this with Jocko Willink, you get to the end of the show and it's like if you want to spend a dollar with me, I got something for you. If you want to spend $100 with me, I got something for you. If you want to spend $1,000, you can come to my conference. $10,000, I'll hang out with you for a weekend. $100,000. And that ladder of price discrimination is hard for a lot of businesses where it's not token-based pricing where it's just as you know consumption-based usage of the product, but actually getting the place where look, if you have a billionaire in your audience who loves what you're doing, how do you actually get an offer to them that's the right size?
So customers are super fractal, right? And so you can absolutely make the same amount from 1% of your customers as you can from the other 99% and have half your revenue from one. And typically like at each level you have another double. So it's like if you're at, let's say, $100 a month price point, there's going to be another double of revenue at a $500 a month price point. Another double of revenue at $2,500 a month, another double at, you know, whatever five or 10 times that is going to be. And so I think making offers available to people, that is where business owners like struggle. They feel weird about it and they sell out of their own wallet when it's just like just make them available and state the facts and tell the truth. So it's like if we had one big plaque in our marketing team, it's state the fact, tell the truth, but it's the whole truth, which is, hey, we're going to do this thing. It's absurdly expensive. And it's only for somebody who if you're reading this and you're like, oh, that's not exactly expensive for me, it's for you. And if you read that and you're like, oh my god, I'm offended by that, good news. We have less offensive prices that are lower. And for that, we do all these other things that you're going to get way more people who are going to be doing it with you. But if you're a special snowflake, we have special snowflake prices. I just don't think β and to be fair, you're not going to make everyone happy. Like there's always going to be trolls. There's always going to be people. But like I think you have to make the decision of like do I care more about the people I help or the people who are angry at me for trying to help?
What's your international strategy? I imagine the content goes everywhere. Yeah. At the same time, you can't be flying around the world constantly. How do you think about different countries? I struggle a lot with international because β
