Alex Hormozi returns to discuss how Acquisition.com has evolved — its mission, deal structure, portfolio companies, and why he’s moving toward majority ownership. He also opens up about the downsides of fame, his admiration for Buffett, Elon, and Mr. Beast, and goes deep on his obsessive approach to personal optimization — from his uniform to his gym bag.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Alex Hormozi (guest, founder of Acquisition.com)
The Game Never Gets Old [00:00:00]
Alex: Like everybody here, we can all consume whatever we want. You can fly private, stay in the nicest hotels, get the nicest Airbnbs, go out to dinner every single day of the week at the five-star Michelin-star restaurant — and you can do that for the rest of your life. Your personal needs as a human being are satisfied.
But I can’t buy that skyscraper right there. I can’t buy this huge company. What happens is the things you want to buy change, and so you create a new deficit for the amount of wealth you want. Again, this is just assuming you like the game. I like the game, so I just want to keep playing.
How Alex Likes To Be Interviewed [00:01:00]
Shaan: Where should we start? You do a lot of these interviews. What’s the fun version of this for you? Because I feel like if somebody actually wants to know an answer to something, it’s been published. You’ve got a book, you’ve got Twitter, you’ve got a thousand YouTube videos. If you’re motivated, you can go find the answer.
I tweeted out, “Yo, Alex is coming on the pod — what would you like to know?” and they’re like, “I’d like to know his thoughts on offers.” Making an offer — that’s literally his book. And I think the book is free or 99 cents, so that’s just a lazy question at this point.
But I know whenever I do interviews, there’s some version of the conversation that’s more fun, where I’m like, yeah, when we talk about that stuff it’s more interesting to me. What is that for you?
Alex: There are two things I’ve been focused on lately. One is obviously Acquisition.com — what we’re doing, clarifying the mission, and all the stuff we’re actually doing every day. The other is that the Leads book is coming out. I’ve been working on it for two years and I don’t want to talk about it until it’s ready to launch. The six weeks before, all this pre-recorded stuff drops — I’ve got bull courses, I’ve got everything ready — but I haven’t talked about anything leads-related publicly because I didn’t want to blow the launch early.
So those are the two things on top of mind: what we’re doing on the Mosy Media side and Acquisition.com, and then the lead stuff.
Shaan: What’s the split between those two? On a given month, what percent of the pie chart is content versus Acquisition.com? And on the money side — are you making more off the media or more off Acquisition.com?
Alex: We lose money on media. Between AdSense and book sales — the book does about a million bucks a year in profit, and AdSense is probably like 500 grand a year — so that’s one and a half million, and that barely covers the media team.
Shaan: How big is the team?
Alex: Ten people, plus vendors.
Do You Enjoy the Fame? [00:04:00]
Shaan: Are you enjoying it?
Alex: Yeah, I dig it. It’s fun. We do one recording day every 14 days for the direct-to-camera stuff, and if I do a podcast, I’ve got one of my guys here — Trevor — reporting our side so they can use it later.
Sam: Are you enjoying the celebrity that comes with this? Getting recognized, that kind of thing?
Alex: “Enjoy” is probably the right word, but with a caveat. I was deliberately not public for a long time because I wanted to be rich and anonymous — that was the mission. Now that we are public, there are pros and cons to recognition.
The pros outweigh the cons. But there are cons. You get weirdos. We have security. I can’t attend any event casually — I can’t go to somebody’s small group meetup because I’ll have a line of people asking for advice, signatures, or pictures. I’m grateful to everyone who does that, but it just changes what the in-person experience is like.
It’s made the online experience great but the real-life experience different. I was able to track how my audience had grown by the number of real-world interactions per unit of time. The first time I was recognized in public — then once a month, then once a week, then once a day, then every time I walked outside. Now it’s about five or six times every time I walk out the door.
Alex: But here’s the upside: we get the best talent for our portfolio companies and for Acquisition.com, because so many people want to work here — often at market rate or below. We get the best deal flow: proprietary companies that want to work specifically with us, not exit to anyone else. So the pros outweigh the cons, but there are definitely cons.
Sam: I talked to Tim Ferriss once and you could just tell — he had high-profile people reaching out to him who were like real deals. He’d have someone like Matthew McConaughey or some football coach reach out and be like, “Man, I love your work.” Ryan Holiday has that too. Have you crossed that threshold where people you actually admire are messaging you?
Alex: Yeah. I don’t want to put anyone on blast, but there have been some mega, mega influencers who followed me and hit me up and were like, “Dude, this was awesome.” And I’m like, well, now I think less of you because you follow my content. Big red flag.
Some NFL players I really looked up to. Huge MLB stars. Huge podcasters. It’s been cool.
Shaan: One of the reverse situations is when you go to follow someone and it says “follow back” and you’re like, oh damn.
Alex: Yeah. But it’s surreal. I’m sure you guys have had it too.
Sam: I grew up big into endurance sports, really admiring Lance Armstrong. One time I got an email — “Hey, just wanted to let you know I love The Hustle” — signed Lance, from his Gmail. I was like, I don’t believe this is really Lance Armstrong. If it is, here’s my phone number, call me right now. He called within three minutes. He goes, “Sam, what’s going on?” I was like, Lance, is this really you?
I remember thinking — growing up playing sports, I would have killed to have an athlete like that recognize me. I could never achieve the athletic greatness that would make them acknowledge my talents. But you take this completely outside path and somehow get there.
One time the lead singer of Linkin Park — Mike — tweeted that he liked our podcast. I was like, I never would have met you through any normal path. But this weird path somehow worked.
Alex: It’s sort of that “be so good they can’t ignore you” as general life advice. Whatever you want is on the other side of being so good you can’t be ignored — at anything. And it doesn’t have to be the thing you’d expect. You want to meet Warren Buffett someday? You don’t have to be a stock picker. That’s probably actually the least likely way Warren Buffett’s going to want to know you. You should pick based on the thing you can actually get so good at that you can’t be ignored. It’s hard, obviously — but it’s more of the right Northstar than most other bits of advice.
What Is Acquisition.com, Actually? [00:11:00]
Sam: Are you happy with Acquisition.com? When we first talked, I think you were maybe only a year or two in, relatively new. You had just sold Gym Launch. Are you happy with it? Is it what you thought it was going to be? And explain what Acquisition.com is.
Alex: So it’s Acquisition.com — I emphasize that because there’s somebody who bought Acquisitions-plural.com and it’s not me. Acquisition.com is our portfolio of companies.
The tldr in 90 seconds: I had a chain of gyms, licensed the IP to 5,000 locations, started a supply company to sell through that distribution base, then started a software company. We exited all three in 2021. We’d taken about 40 million in distributions prior to the exit, and we sold for 46.2 million. The software company I did separately in a strategic deal, all stock.
I mention this because people Google “Alex Hormozi net worth” and it says 15 million. I sold the company for 46 in cash — I don’t know where that number came from. Anyway. We closed December 24th — Christmas Eve — and then we started Acquisition.com the next day.
Shaan: If you started it the next day, you had this idea cooking. What was the genesis? Why did you think, this is what I should do next — take minority stakes in companies like the one I just built?
Alex: During COVID, gyms were affected. We took a major hit — still profitable, but hard. And there wasn’t a lot more I could do tactically; I was above the business enough that I was at a ceiling.
So by happenstance, a guy who owned a single photography studio made his way onto my calendar. He had read my small book in the gym space, Gym Launch Secrets, applied it to his photography business, and had found my software company. He hopped on a sales call and said, “I have no interest in your software. But can you please give me 20 minutes?” I liked his vibe, so I said sure.
His photography studio was doing 1.6 million a year out of a single location — pretty awesome. He had also started an agency for photographers to replicate his model. I asked how much they were adding to the top line when they used it. He said about 400,000 a year on average. I asked how much we were selling the agency for. Pennies. I said, let’s not do that. Let’s own them all.
He actually shut down a business that was making him 500,000 a year in profit because he believed me enough to go all in on private ownership of all the locations. As of today — that was 2020 — we have 36 locations in that business, doing over 30 million a year, and it continues to grow by one or two locations every month.
Sam: That’s Enchanted Fairies — children’s photography?
Alex: Yep.
Sam: That’s insane. When I went to the website after the last time you were on, I saw Enchanted Fairies and thought, okay, they’re doing the Gym Launch playbook in another space. Makes sense. But if I go there today, those same companies are still the ones listed. How come you’re not putting new acquisitions up there? You’ve clearly made a bunch of deals in the last 24 months.
Alex: Two reasons. One: my brand has grown to where if I say “this business is awesome” and it has national scale, it could 5x or 10x the company overnight. Most of the businesses that come to us are business services — national, international. I haven’t negotiated those deals with brand endorsement included, and I’m not going to risk my face on something I can’t control.
Two: if we were to exit a business and I had done an endorsement in a minority position, I’d have to go with the deal. As an acquirer, if there’s a massive influencer associated with the brand, he’s not getting out. Our whole goal is to build value in the business so that the business is sellable. We use my face to bring deals in — but that’s it.
Shaan: How many deals have you done total?
Alex: Right now we have 11 portfolio companies.
Shaan: Is it all your own money, or did you raise a fund?
Alex: All private. All mine.
What’s Hard About Minority Investing [00:21:00]
Sam: So — are you happy with how this is working out? Is it what you thought?
Alex: I think knowing something and experiencing it are two separate things. I knew that in a minority position we’d have to use soft influence to move things forward. I knew that. But the most difficult part is half-listening. I’ll give you an example: I say, “Hey, we think you need a new operator.” They say, “Okay.” We find them a new operator. They hire the new operator. But then they don’t fire the old operator. What the hell?
It’s like following half of someone’s diet advice. “Yeah, I do the cheat days.” Yeah, but the other days you need a deficit. It’s listening incompletely.
Transparently, the business I enjoy the most is the one where we have complete control. We bought majority of that business and we’re growing it like gangbusters. The speed to action is so much faster.
That said, our biggest win is a company that came to us doing 16 million the year before — they did 50 last year, 20 million EBITDA. And Enchanted Fairies is pacing about 2.7 million a month right now.
Shaan: I heard a friend describe your deal structure as: “They give us no money, but they get ownership if we grow it above X.” Is there a standard structure? Is that the gist of it?
Alex: We’ve iterated a lot. One of the hardest things about the investment cycle is that when you’re making a product you can ideate, build an MVP, pitch it, and see how it goes in 60 days. For deals, you can think of a structure idea, it takes 90 days to six months to close, and then another year to see even preliminary results on whether the structure worked.
So I still feel like we’re in our infancy on deal structures. There are deals where we put money in, deals where we don’t — it depends. The big one for capital is brick and mortar. We’re about to close on a 28-location chain, and that requires capital to open more locations. I know where the capital’s going, I can see the returns — let’s go. But if it’s a national service business, like mortgage sales, they don’t need capital. They need recruiting. They need guys.
I don’t want to just write a check so the founder buys a mansion. The goal is that we’re both working together to grow something massive.
Over time, the deal structure has gotten less cute and less clever. Originally I had a Grand Slam Offer type thing. Now it’s much more straightforward: we own a big chunk of the business and we grow it. Our hold-co costs are about 500,000 a year in labor — that’s if I don’t even mark up labor. So if a company is doing, say, 5 million a year in EBITDA and I’m buying a 30% stake, how much of that value is going to come in the form of work we do? That’s where valuation, deal structure, and cash in become more of a per-deal basis.
Long story short: soft influence has been something I’m learning. In the future we may just do more majority deals where the founder stays on. I want to murder this majority deal and then come back and say, “Wouldn’t you like to have 49% of something 10 times bigger?”
The Andrew Wilkinson Comparison / Why This Model [00:29:00]
Sam: We talked to Andrew Wilkinson — he’s done a similar thing. A handful of other friends have done it too. They say they were inspired by Warren Buffett, the power of compounding. What transitioned you from one brand model to this PE-style model?
Alex: If I were to give us a name, it’d be the merger of a family office and a conglomerate. Family office in that it’s literally just family money — no outside investors. Conglomerate in terms of business model — I’m not trying to exit anything. I want to continue to compound.
The inspiration came from Gym Launch. There are only about 50,000 micro gyms in the US, and we’d already been on the phone with 20,000 of them. I realized the ceiling was there.
I went to a little meetup of entrepreneurs — six or seven people — and the whole room was doing in aggregate about 500 million a year in revenue. I was doing mid-30s. I was really excited to go because I thought, what do these guys have that I don’t? And we’d been in mid-30s for three years.
The big takeaway wasn’t that they had better systems or were better at marketing or sales. They were just going after bigger markets. Every single one of them had a market that was 10 to 100 times the size. I said whatever I wanted to do next was going to go after a much bigger market. There are significantly more businesses than there are gyms. Something that can compound forever and has a huge TAM.
Alex: In terms of how we actually built the model — we believe you build the people and the people build the business. The most valuable thing you can do for a business is find A-players, put them in the business, and that value stays inside the enterprise. Not in hold-co — not the goose, but the egg.
So we recruit crazy talent. Our competitive moat is that we have more influence than they do. We have the Mosy Talent community, and our head of people brings in tons of applicants for portfolio positions every day. We screen, vet, and then because we’re long-term incentivized, we fill each role once — with somebody who matches the culture and the skill set of the business at that level.
First-time entrepreneurs at a million a month ask: do I hire a bookkeeper, staff accountant, controller, CFO, Director of Finance? We’ve done this enough times to say, at this level you probably need a controller with experience going from a million a month to three million a month. And we’ll tell them upfront that we’ll bring a CFO with transaction experience later — so they’re not jostled when that happens.
Same thing scaling a sales team. You’ve got three good guys — you need 20. You can’t just take your best closer and make him manager because he’s never done that before. We want someone who has built one or two sales teams specific to inbound or outbound, whatever matches the sale process. And we do skill tests. The founder still has final say because they have to like the person. But we do a lot of the heavy lifting.
We might take a hundred interviews at hold-co to find one guy for one specific role for one company. That’s where that labor cost comes in for us.
Should You Sell Your Company? [00:37:00]
Sam: There’s this cool video of you with Grant Cardone where he says something like, “Rich people sell their companies. Wealthy people never sell.” You’ve sold a company. Do you wish you had just held Gym Launch?
Alex: No. The person I was then wouldn’t be able to do what I can do now. Could I hold it today? Yes. But I don’t think I could have done it then.
Transparently — if I’m being honest — I got more credibility from selling Gym Launch at 46 million than if I’d just held it. It was valued at around 150 before COVID, so yes, it was kind of a bad sale on paper. But I was emotionally done. I just didn’t want to do it anymore.
I still own a third of the business, so when they crush their next exit at 250 million, I’ll still get my check. But my close people were telling me, “Dude, you sound depressed. You’re not interested.” And when I talked about this new thing, I lit up.
I actually walked away from the deal during the process, then came back. People give me praise for the sale, but they don’t have context. We did 30 million in EBITDA in the 24 months prior to the deal. Selling for 46.2 isn’t exactly a transaction I’m proud of. I’m proud of what we built.
What I understand now — that I didn’t understand then — is how debt works. I realized that 80 or 90% of the money the acquirer put in, they immediately pulled back out by leveraging the company’s books. I could have kept the whole thing and gotten 90% of the money without a personal guarantee. But with the understanding I had at the time? That wasn’t on my radar.
The sale was required for that step in my journey. My brand was still the CEO brand of Gym Launch. I needed to create space so I could build Acquisition.com.
Shaan: I think you explained it beautifully. Two things you said resonate deeply with me. One: to have what you want, sometimes you just need to make space.
When we sold Bebo it was the same thing. I’d been doing it for six or seven years. By other people’s standards, it was a good business. By our own mission — we had gone in to do something massive — it was going to be a failure. I knew that. A friend said, “I don’t get what you’re doing. You just need to shake things up.” I couldn’t sleep. He was right.
I went to our investor the next day and said: I need to change things up. You can hire a CEO and I’ll give you back my shares, or give me 30 days to try to sell it. Either way, in 30 days this is changing for me. He asked what I wanted to do next and I said, honestly, I have no idea. I just know I need to make space.
Sam: That part resonates. And also — I didn’t understand my options. When I look back now, I didn’t know what an acqui-hire was until later. I didn’t know you could do an asset sale. I didn’t understand refinancing on business assets. You could basically take 90% of the value off the table. I had that same feeling of stupidity later on — but that’s how I mark years of time. Not by calendar days, but by how many times I look back and say, God, I was so dumb. I didn’t even know what I was sitting on.
Alex: That’s exactly it. The gap is going from tactician to strategist. I used to make fun of my finance buddies — “you’re just an Excel monkey, you don’t know business.” And then I realized how debt works. I was like, oh my God. That’s the strategy. If you’re going to be really good at your job, you have to understand the tactics and the strategy.
The hundred million dollar offers stuff — that’s mostly tactical. But understanding how you can borrow other people’s money, take it off the table, use leverage without a personal guarantee — that’s the big-picture stuff.
Alex: Without a personal guarantee. Because I thought, why would I take on debt on the business? I don’t want to risk that. And then I realized — you’re not risking it. The business is risking it. And if you’re willing to sell for X, are you willing to basically refinance for X? Because the business is going to take the risk either way.
For the everyday business audience — the guys with massive roofing businesses or a chain of teeth-whitening studios — your likely exit is a rollup or a PE acquirer. And I think where you get really dangerous is when you understand both the tactical and the strategic. PE firms do almost purely inorganic growth: they buy four companies doing 3 million EBITDA, now they’ve got 12 million EBITDA, and they can do multiple arbitrage. What if you do that and you can also triple all the businesses? That’s when you get breathtaking home runs. That’s what we’re trying to do with Acquisition.com.
Mission: Praise, Not Punishment [00:49:00]
Shaan: Have you heard Felix Dennis’s book — How to Get Rich? We love it. “Comfortably rich, then rich rich, then super rich.” I feel like you’re identifying as comfortably rich but not super rich yet, so you construct these new ambitions to keep playing.
Alex: Right. The funny thing is what you actually like is just playing the game. If you just said, “I’m rich enough,” you’d have to stop playing the game you love. So you start coming up with things you want that in actuality sound a little bit silly. I don’t even think you really want that skyscraper. I think you’re Peak loving the game right now — and the game only works if you care about the score. You can’t play if you’ve already said you’ve scored the maximum number of points.
Shaan: That was huge. As a side note: what’s exciting for you right now — not the hard parts, but what’s good?
Alex: What’s good is that we’ve finally separated Mosy Media — Leila’s and my personal brand, the books, courses, and content we put out — from Acquisition.com. When we started, the mission of Acquisition.com was “make real business knowledge accessible to everyone.” That’s still the mission of Mosy Media.
But our hold-co team — the exec consultants, the talent recruiters, the heads of sales and marketing and customer success — they didn’t resonate with “making business education accessible to everyone.” That wasn’t actually their mission. So we got really clear on what the mission of Acquisition.com actually is.
I’ve always envied how Elon ties the mission of everything he does to saving the world. Even Twitter — “free civilization needs free speech.” How did he take a meme platform and turn it into free speech for civilization? I think that’s a lot of his genius.
For us: we want to build a company off of praise, not punishment. We believe you get more performance out of praise than punishment. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, McKinsey — a lot of people describe those as toxic environments. They’re punishment-driven cultures. We want to prove there’s a better way.
The billion-dollar Alex Hormozi story is basically irrelevant because to really win by those standards, we need to build something that’s 10 or 50 or 100 billion — and that might take the rest of my lifetime, and it might happen after I die. But if we can prove one thesis — that people want to work, most environments are set up to punish people, and all raising the bar does is raise the floor of what it takes not to get punished, which leads to burnout and people hating their lives — then I think we’ve done something.
Leila and I are going to try to dedicate the rest of our lives to prove that. And given how I look and how I talk, I can probably deliver that message in a way that lands differently than it would from someone else.
I haven’t felt this pumped about something in a long time. The last time was when the mission of Gym Launch was to take the gym industry from its knees to its feet — because the average gym owner takes home $36,000 a year, has maxed-out credit cards, and has 18 days of cash on hand. I wanted to fix that.
What ended up happening was I took enough hits from people close to me — clients and employees — that I burned out on it. I had 17 different people who worked for me try to start their own version of my business. Clients who had been on the brink of bankruptcy — used everything I taught them, scaled to three locations, sold them, got their families financially set — and then turned around and tried to undercut me. It happened enough that I felt disenfranchised. I poured my soul into fixing that industry and felt like I got kicked for it.
I think I could handle it better now. But at the time I just felt hurt. So we created space, it became an asset we owned, and that’s why I was open to selling.
Sam: It’s so funny you mention the Elon big-mission thing — he did it with Twitter, and then while he was doing that deal, news broke that he’d impregnated a woman who worked for him. He goes, “Overpopulation/underpopulation — we are at risk of population collapse, and I’m just doing my part.” This guy is Teflon Don. He did a full 540 on that. “Actually, I was also saving the planet with that one too. You’re welcome.”
Shaan: What’s that thing called — the male ability to just confidence your way out of everything?
Alex: Elon is the world leader in that, for sure. There’s wisdom in it though. Even thinking about a stronger narrative for ourselves — there’s power in reframing what you do as something that aligns with Humanity. Because if you chunk up almost anything enough, it’s a pillar of society.
Shaan: It’s all what story you’re telling yourself — and then you tell that story to others. If the story serves you, great. But personally I have silicon Valley PTSD. Anytime I hear a mission statement I just think, shut the hell up. Tell the truth: you want to make money. You realized that in order to get that value, you had to create value in the world. You identified people who needed something and you provided it.
Evan Spiegel’s original landing page for Snapchat was basically two girls in white bikinis taking a selfie with a giant countdown timer. When he emailed the fraternities and sororities, he wasn’t saying “I wanted to reinvent the way humans communicate.” But then in the pitch he says, “For too long, images have only been used for memories. I wanted to use them for communication, the way we originally did with hieroglyphics.” Bro. It’s okay that you thought it was fun and cool and that it might be a hit.
They always do this. They always tie it back. And now the word is “democratize.” “We’re democratizing access to private limos.” And then of course it becomes: “Our mission at Uber is to make transportation as readily available as running water.” The early stories from anyone who knew Travis and Garrett at Uber — they were pushing the button at a Michelin star dinner like, “Watch this. Car shows up. He’s my private driver. I can see where he’s at on the map.” That was it.
There’s always this disconnect between what I think the truth is — which is skeptical and a little jaded — and the revisionist history story that sounds admirable and noble.
Alex: I get it. And I hear you on the BS-ometer. But I think two things: the truth can change. When I started Gym Launch, I’ve said this before — the mission of Gym Launch was to not be broke. That was it. But after I saw the lives that got transformed, and I was no longer broke, the mission had to get bigger. Because I had families relying on me, employees, customers. So it did truly become: take the gym industry from its knees to its feet.
And Acquisition.com started with the one thing I was passionate about — spreading business knowledge. I love talking about business. I write books about it, I make courses about it, I make content about it. And I do business in the meantime. I just love business. So that was the only thing I felt passionate about.
But as we walked the path, we realized that the reason our businesses do well is because of the cultures we create — and those cultures generate really good bottom lines and really great experiences for the people who work there. So I’m more amped now. My reasons evolved. I think it’s both: personal goals that grew beyond the money, and a vision that genuinely got bigger as we built it.
Who Alex Admires [01:05:00]
Shaan: Who are some people you admire? Past or present, people you’ve met. I find this interesting — getting famous on YouTube opens a lot of doors, you expand your circle. Who stands out and why?
Alex: I definitely admire Andrew Cherng from Panda Express. He and his wife built the whole thing without outside money, have owned it privately, have 2,600 locations, do 3.7 billion in revenue with 27% net margins, and take 935 million a year in personal income. I think that’s only possible because they created a new vision for what they wanted the company to be about — which is their employees.
I’m inspired by Warren Buffett. The long-term mentality. He built Berkshire Hathaway on the power of compounding and patience and rational decision-making. If we can build something like that but with our own spin — praise not punishment — and win by their scoreboard but do it our way, that’s the Warren angle.
I admire Elon a lot. His ability to see vision and connect to a larger mission — he’s done it masterfully at every single company. His track record is incredibly impressive. He just stares into the abyss and says, let’s do it. He obviously has flaws like all of us, but he’s also been good about owning them publicly and being like, I’m just a human. He may create a new model for how big public CEOs operate.
And on the totally other side — I admire what Mr. Beast has done from a personal branding perspective. I’ve gotten to know Jimmy really well. He thinks really big and has tremendous work ethic. And he’s merged personal brand with enormous monetization vehicles. If you’re a fan of Elon, you want to buy everything he’s associated with. Same with what I’m trying to do.
So if you look at what we’re doing: Mr. Beast on the personal brand side, Warren Buffett on the investment side, Elon from the big vision side. Those three are probably where I draw the most inspiration.
Shaan: What’s interesting about you is you’re very good at the lyrical framing. “Knees to feet” is great. And then “reward versus punish” for Acquisition.com. You’re quite lyrical.
Alex: We want to beat them at their game and do it our way.
Business Analogies From Fitness [01:12:00]
Shaan: You’ve mentioned casually a few things I use way more than your business stuff. “Never skip dessert.” And there’s this 23-year-old Alex video where you’re doing a bulk over eight weeks with before-and-after photos. I look at that stuff significantly more than a lot of your business content.
Alex: I joked about it in the comments once. People admire my way of thinking about things in business, and I’m like — for a decade I did that with fitness. I just don’t talk about it because everyone feels entitled to an opinion because they have a body. I have so little patience for it. No one who’s been more in shape than me has ever criticized any of my fitness content. It’s only people who are, let’s say, still figuring it out.
Shaan: The cool thing about it is the fitness analogy carries over to business perfectly. Hard but simple. Lift this much weight, eat like this for a year — you’re not going to look like Arnold necessarily, but you’ll be better than where you are. Just do it for two years and be fairly strict about it.
Alex: Simple, not easy. It’s the theme of so many things — fitness, nutrition, marriage, business.
Shaan: What’s the simple not easy for marriage?
Alex: Reward more than you punish. If I want my wife to scratch my back more, I have to wait until she does it on her own, reward her immediately, and she’ll do it again. Very Pavlovian, but we’re all basically that, right?
There are fundamentally three things you can do when anyone does anything around you: punish them, ignore it, or praise them.
Tony Robbins talks about four levels of love — I’ll try to remember it. The first is baby love: “I need love, I don’t have to give anything back.” That obviously doesn’t work once you’re an adult. The second is tit-for-tat — this is where almost everybody falls. You measure what you get and give based on that. When you’re getting a lot, you give a lot. But as soon as someone short-changes you, you pull back. They pull back. You end up in a race to the bottom. That’s where most relationships stall.
The third is unconditional love: “I give regardless of what you give back. I give because that’s who I am.” That’s the simple not easy of being in a relationship — just go unconditional mode rather than tit-for-tat. And then there’s monk love, which is “I love you even though you hate me.” Nobody really gets there, but aspirationally — that’s the ceiling.
The Uniform, the Bag, and the Obsessive Optimization [01:22:00]
Sam: I saw this video of you where everyone was giving you a hard time about wearing the same outfit all the time. Instead of just saying “it’s comfortable,” you go into full Darwinian mode. You said something like: “You want to go work out? I can go work out. You want to go to a restaurant? These look just good enough. I can do anything — I’m Darwinian. You’re not. I win. You lose.”
I bought the sandals you mentioned — people in the comments were like, “Yo, what’s the sandal? Where’s the affiliate link?” — and some dude 50 comments down tracked it down. But does your mom ever call and say, just wear a normal outfit? At what point is it brand strategy versus just living your life?
Alex: “Good for the brand” is actually not really a thought when it comes to it. Brand comes as a result of what you do, not from conscious strategy.
The “never skip dessert” thing — I was originally making fun of fitness people who obsessed about not eating cookies. I was like, screw that. Eat dessert and still have a six-pack. “Never skip leg day” became “never skip dessert” in that spirit.
The calves thing is because when I was younger, a girl told me my calves weren’t big enough. It’s been 12 or 14 years that I start every training session with calves. They’ve grown a lot. So everyone sees the calves and asks about them. Is it part of my brand? In some ways, yeah — but because it’s true. Thank you, Lindsay. Fourteen years of fuel.
The outfit thing — my content team wanted to make content about it because they’re like, dude, you’re a maniac about this. Everyone who knows you in person knows about the shoe boxes. For almost a year and a half I had stacks of shoe boxes. I’d wear different shoes for an hour, then a day, then a week. Most of them never graduated. A few finalists made it. I just obsessed about making things better.
For me the criteria is: what covers 40 to 120 degrees? I’m almost never in less than 40-degree weather because I tend to be in warmer parts of the country. This outfit goes 40 to 120 degrees. I can go to the gym, the pool, walk for hours, go to a nice restaurant. Done.
Sam: Your wife dresses beautifully — hair always looks nice, fashionable. And you’re over here saying “40 to 120 degrees, like a car going zero to 60.”
Alex: Once it drops below 40 I get cuts, I have to put pants on. But within that range — I can button this flannel all the way up for a restaurant, sleeves rolled for the gym, beater mode for the pool. Sports mode, comfort mode, weather mode.
My whole outfit has sports mode. People are like, “Pro sport?” No, my whole outfit has sports mode.
Every morning when I put this on I get a little boost. I know I’ve picked every single one of these pieces out and I have no doubt it’s the best thing for my day. The white beater I have on right now — I tried 40 or 50 other brands. This one sits where I wanted it to sit. Not too thick on the shoulder, not too thin. Doesn’t have a weird drop in the back. Beaters are thinner than tank tops, they’re ribbed so they fit right. Some of those Under Armour shrink-wrap tanks — they look synthetic to me. I like cotton.
Shaan: I have a few friends like that. Not as extreme, but they buy and test a ton of stuff. They have spreadsheets.
Alex: I have an Excel sheet. I broke down every shoe. And the shorts — they’ve got back hooks so I can hang them to dry. Built-in iPhone pocket so I don’t have to pull it out when I sit down. A slot for an iPad pencil because I use my iPad a lot. Cargo on the other side. Stretchy but not too stretchy. What are you hauling in there?
Sam: Gummy bears? What are we doing here?
Alex: Mic packs, mostly. Right now my mic pack is in my cargo pocket. I could fit a water bottle if I need it. Hotel key. Nicorette — I chew it, so if I go on a podcast I’ll have some on me.
Sam: This is my favorite kind of podcast — when I see you’re weird. Until I see you’re weird, I don’t actually know you.
Alex: The backpack — I won’t show the brand, I’m in talks with them about something. But I can travel for four weeks with that one bag. Three pairs of identical shorts that are multi-everything. Tank tops equal to whatever the laundry cycle is. One flannel on top. Done. I don’t even need to use the expansion section, but I have the option if I need it. It’s got a flat front organizer for all my wires that doesn’t take up space. I went through a zillion bags to find the gym bag, went through a zillion to find this one. Now when I pick it up I think: this is the best bag for the job.
How Alex Spends Money and His Investment Portfolio [01:35:00]
Shaan: What’s the best way you spend money personally — not a business investment, something that gives you joy or just works for you?
Alex: JSX is wonderful. It’s semi-private flying in the southwest. A ticket is like 300 bucks when it would normally be 50. You walk up to the plane, you get on, you walk off. That’s it. Like private — just a few other people.
Private flying has the most benefit for the shortest trips. On a five-hour flight, the hassle of security is a smaller percentage of the total trip. But on a sub-two-hour flight, you can double or triple the effective length of your trip by flying private. And it’s the cheapest per hour because it’s the shortest. So that’s where we get the highest marginal benefit.
Sam: Last time you were on, Shaan asked about your portfolio. What’s it looking like now — private investments, equities, how are you allocating? Last time you were super heavy in treasuries.
Alex: Probably still half treasuries — except now the rates are a lot better than before. Probably a quarter in indexes. The other quarter in private companies.
Over time, the treasury portion is going to decline as we do more deals. But I still think like — I never want to miss a 10x deal because I don’t have cash. The cost of missing the 10x is well worth whatever inflation I’m suffering on the difference between the treasury yield and the inflation rate.
Wrap-Up [01:41:00]
Sam: Well, thanks for coming on again. If you go to our YouTube page, you’re like the pinned video on our main page. It’s a clip of you saying something like, “I’ve come to the conclusion that I just like to work.” People love that. Thanks for doing this again.
Alex: Thank you guys for having me. And thank you to the audience — if you made requests to have me back on, I appreciate it. It means a lot to me. Thank you guys for being awesome hosts.
Sam: That’s the pod.