[0:00]Open claw and claw bot are just kind of blowing up everywhere right now. What do you think about it so far and what do you think will be the biggest impact on business owners? I think it'll separate the business owners who decide to be more tech enabled than the ones who aren't. Um, you'll realize that anything that you can do on a computer it can do. Obviously, there's some safety concerns in terms of giving, you know, an autonomous robot access to whatever you want. Um, and there's been tons of case studies of people like going wrong, but I think by and large, you you often risk more by not adopting new technology than fearing the potential downside that a small percentage of people experienced. Do you have any experiences you've had with business owners where they needed to adapt to technology to advance and they just chose not to and it tanked their business? So, the only time you need to adapt technology is if every other person in your space has the technology and you don't and as a result can price differently than you and so they price you out of the market so that you can no longer do business. That's rarely the case. There's welders right now that only do fax machines. Like, there's a piece of gym equipment that I got from a guy who literally responds to Instagram DMs and he he texted me a picture of his checking account to get a wire. So like, you can absolutely make money with significantly less technology. It's just that you're less efficient than the people who do and at the highest levels of the game, it's going to be where it's the most competitive, but you can still make money because the tail, the long tail of of people adopting technology is very slow. Like AOL just stopped this year. How much money can you make without adopting to technology? You can still make tons of money. It's just that you probably won't make as much as you would if you adopted technology. I mean, what is technology? It just gives you more for what you put in. So if you do something and you do it really efficiently without technology, you would just do it more efficiently with technology, but you can still beat people who are not as good as you without technology. Yeah, that makes sense. We've been talking about it. But but if you're competing against somebody who's as good as you, and they have technology and you don't, they will win. Yeah. What are some of the things that annoy you the most about AI? Um, I hate two things about AI. One is that I think it is making people dumber because they are choosing not to think and they are letting AI make their decisions, but then they have no context into why decisions were made to begin with because they weren't the ones who did the thinking. The second is that I hate that so much of the world has almost immediately become AI slop. Like every caption on Instagram, uh, I mean, thank you messages that I get from people, people leaving testimonials, like it's just AI slop. And the biggest thing you can detect with it is forced negation and staccato sentences, meaning, it's not this or this or this, but that. Or it's not because this, it's because it's because this is, this is, this is, so they'll do this repetition of sentence structure, and it gets really, really annoying. And so most times you can take a paragraph of that and just turn it into a sentence of like, what the fuck are you trying to say and then just say that. Yeah. You've mentioned it a little bit in this shoot, but what kinds of businesses do you think are going to succeed because AI is so prevalent and people get tired of it? I think the businesses that will have disproportionate returns are ones that are very ops heavy. So a marketing agency, for example, that heavily introduces AI, there will never be a lack of businesses that want new customers. The difficulty with scaling that particular type of business is the operational drag and the head count and the coordination of people. And so if you can have something that has amazing product market fit, which is get more customers for somebody, there's lots of demand there. Um, but do it in a way that allows you to scale the ops so that you have increasing margins and you have less complexity, that becomes an incredibly viable business. So people heavy ops heavy businesses that are largely digital, those are businesses that will that will benefit the most. What are some things that you think haven't been popular? Like kind of this, you've talked about live streaming, for example. Like, as AI, as fake becomes more prevalent, real becomes more popular. Can you speak on that a little bit? At least in choices of content, choices to do brick and mortar, choices to your community.
[4:11]I think AI scratches a human itch but doesn't fully satisfy. And so instead of having real relationships, we have porn. Instead of having real friendships, we have social media. And so it's these these diet Coke versions of what we actually want. And so, I think there is a going to be a barbell experience of everything is truly fake, and then the other side, people want super real. So there's tons of Gen alphas and Gen Z's who are like switching back to flip phones because they're like, they want to disconnect to this. There's people who are like, went like the demand for ranches and moving out in the middle of nowhere has gone up. And so, I think there's a percentage of people that are rejecting it, or rejecting for a portion of their lives, and there're people leaning into it, and I think reality will probably be a blend of these two extremes. I think the middle is where businesses will suffer. Like, you have to know which which which game you're playing. That makes sense. Out of this question. going back to what you were saying about fear. A mile wide and an inch deep, sorry, go ahead.
[5:07]Um, on the topic of AI, people adopting to it, is it more fear or more complacency in their business? So, when people not adapting to AI or implementing into their business, is it more fear or more complacency in their business? I think it's I think it's complacency that they use the like the, the reason is complacency, the excuse is fear. So people are being lazy, but they use the legitimate reason of being afraid that it could do something to their business. What if it deletes all my emails? What if it deletes all my customer records? It's like, sure, but like, are there, would you want to take the next step of trying to figure out how to isolate it and give it clear guard rails to make sure or decrease the likelihood that it happens? Yeah, probably. But people don't do that because it's much easier to just be like, well, I heard it's not safe. You're like, okay. So just an excuse. Yeah. Pivoting a little bit into like kind of business mindset or kind of people that can support a business, what kind of person should not start a business? If any.
[6:20]I think business self selects for people who should start and own them. So I think many people want to have a business and the ones who do not have them should not have them because if they should have them, they would have them. You learn the things that you have to do to build a business and if you do them, you build a business. What's one of the skills that you had to learn? Believing that you have to be born with it is just a way to excuse yourself from trying. Real quick, if you are a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broken these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at, and the most important part for you, what to do for each functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstraint the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can just book a call with my team and we will look at your business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live. What's one of the skills you had to learn or a way you had to change in order to support your company as it grew? Well, I'll just start at the beginning. I had to be willing to have people who disagreed with my choice, including my colleagues, my friends and my family. And so most people cannot get past one, two or three of those, and so they just stay stuck. So, I mean, the first thing you have to do is be willing to be disagreed with. And I think you also need to be willing to look cringe because you will be cringe because you've never done it before. And so it is a prerequisite of doing something new that you will suck. And so many people are afraid of sucking and as a result, they continue to lose because they never try. A lot of ambitious people often ask. It's it's um,
[8:39]Losers stay losers because they are afraid of losing. So they never try. Fear failure? Fear of starting, yeah.
[8:51]What was it? Next one? A lot of ambitious people say that they have trouble making friends. If you are doing exceptional things, is it inevitably hard to become friends with people? I think that your frame, uh, I think you're,
[9:12]As you achieve rarer things, you will have less overlap with people who have not achieved those things. And if the vast majority of your time is spent achieving those rare things, you'll have a smaller selection of people who share that experience. That doesn't mean that you can't talk about football or talk about family or talk about relationships because many people have all of those things. Um, but if you want to be friends with people who like the things that you like, then you naturally are going to have a smaller subgroup. How did you choose the people that you keep in your circle? I just always think, does this person help me become the person I want to become? Do they get me closer or further? If they get me closer, then I want them closer to me. If they get me further, I want them further from me. And I don't think that's I don't think that's binary. I think that that happens naturally over time. Yeah.
[10:03]Speaking about the people in your circle, what is your favorite thing about your wife? I think Layla has more fight in her than most people I have. And so like, she will just keep going. And so she will fail, she will get knocked out, she will have pain, she will suffer, and then she will just continue to try again. And so she just doesn't have a lot of give up in her. And I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. What's the quality of your wife that you wish you had more of? Patience. Empathy.
[10:44]Poise. I would say those are probably the three big ones that if I had to pinpoint, or like probably the three areas that she had that I have grown the most of as a result of being married to her. Like I am more patient now than I was. I am more empathetic than I used to be. I am more poised, um, you know, I would say like high emotive situations than I used to be.
[11:10]What do you think you've rubbed off on her the most? Teeth.
[11:17]When I met Layla, she just wanted to like save the world. Um, and so that's yin and Yang. It's like you need both.
[11:27]It's like you need you need somebody who's going to like, you need good cop and you need bad cop. It's yin and Yang. And so I think like the the beauties in the middle, and I think it's it's a dichotomy to me to it's a, I think it's a dichotomy to be managed, not a problem to be solved. I don't think anyone's perfectly in the middle, and I also think perfectly in the middle is not really a thing because different sides of you need to come out at different times. And so I think that she's probably had more aggression as a result of being with me. Um, I think she's become more direct as a result of being with me. Um,
[12:05]I think that she's been able to draw boundaries better because she's been with me.
[12:13]So like, selfless selfishness. Like, if there's nothing left for me to give, then I will be able to give less. And so I have to draw these lines so that I can net give more over a longer period of time versus get overused and over given the short period. How do you do that? I actually think we both learn that from each other. We both were like over givers in the beginning and just got like taken advantage of a lot, and so we both kind of like, I think we both kind of protect each other from that. Like, he's trying to take advantage of you, or whatever. He's he's overstaying his welcome. This guy's trying to trying to he's got an angle. And we both kind of see it, and Layla has phenomenal judge of character. She's in our in our 10 years, she has never been wrong about anyone. Which is wild. I've been wrong about my punch plenty of people. Going back to setting boundaries. How do you feel best to do that in your position?
[13:09]I think it's being okay with delay and non response. So if I, and also distancing. Like, I had a conversation, um, two days ago with somebody that I see as a friend, but because of some, um, behaviors that they found permissible like within their presence, I was like, hey, man, just want to let you know, like, I'm still homies with you. I was like, but I can't have this around me. So I was like, so, I'm just making you aware, we're cool, but like you can't sit at my table anymore. And so it's just like, like, but like it's I've done that so many times now that it's not it doesn't even feel personal. And I think that I've been able to deliver that news like, I've just gotten better and better at saying it. And so it's like, to be clear, I'm not blaming you. You can make whatever choice you want. I'm good with it. It's just that like, these are my lines, and this is no longer acceptable to me. But if it's acceptable to you, fucking by all means. And so, to like that seemed to great is like, if you, if, like,
[14:05]I will judge someone by the company they keep. You know, like, and there's to be fair, there's a difference like, if you are taking care of your sibling who's a heroin addict, that's very different than like, I voluntarily choose to have to be all surrounded by drug addicts in my life. And I'm like, I mean, again, your choice, do whatever you want. I just don't want that in my life. And so like, I won't be friends with you because I know what you bring with you, and I don't want that baggage. You believe you are the sum of the people that you're around. I think that your environment shapes your behavior more than anything else does. And I want my behavior to be as frictionless as possible towards the outcomes that I want. I want to be I want it to be easy. I want it to be as easy as possible to work as hard as I can on the things that I find meaningful. How do you structure your environment to do that? Just like small things that people wouldn't think about. I think everyone gets this wrong. Structuring the environment to maximize your basically time on goal is about removing everything that's not on goal. So it's not like what are the 20 hacks that I have. It's really just what are the 20 things I remove so there was nothing left but the thing that I needed to do. And I think that works digitally, that works physically. It's like, like, you want, again, perfect focus means that you do literally nothing besides the task that you need to do. And so anything that is not that is by definition less focused. And so if I want to be more focused, I have to remove things, not add things. It's not this, it's that. It's not success, it's revenge. Not me. Not how much I. Yeah.
[15:41]Uh, pivoting a little bit, just as an opener. Is there a founder or business you've looked at recently where you have found what they are doing or how they are moving inherently interesting?
[15:57]I mean, I think Elon's doing a pretty good job launching a zillion satellites in the space, trying to generate power directly from the sun because it's five times more efficient and you don't need to have a battery. So like that makes a lot of sense and they're cheaper to send in the space. Uh the panels themselves because you don't have to have all the weather because there's no weather in space. Like, that's great first principles thinking, and being able to vertically integrate that with AI that then generates two phones because he has Tesla that can make the robots and the phones. Like he can go full stack from literally like the sun to people's hands and he owns the entire value chain. Like, and in order to think of that business model and having called that shot like 30 years ago and he's been working, if you look at his earliest interviews towards this one goal for that entire period of time like, Yeah, that's impressive. Is there a story, because there's a lot of stories that come out about Elon. Is there a story you remember that stuck with you in terms of what you learned from it? Well, I mean, my favorite like actual thing that I have learned from Elon business-wise is his kind of algorithm. Which is question all requirements, delete unnecessary requirements, optimize what's left, uh, accelerate, and then automate. And so, I would say tactically applying that algorithm everywhere has been like very tactically useful for me. Um,
[17:16]So, I think the, the biggest shift that has to happen for business owners in terms of hiring new talent in the age of AI is shifting from role-based thinking to workflow-based thinking. And so we put out job requirements the way we normally would, and usually there's like, oh, we need an X. But the thing is that the titles matter significantly less and less as so much of a role is really just like a circle with six or seven workflows that this person is interjected into. Right? Rather than like roles and responsibilities and like, you know, timeliness and whatever the hell people would put in there. Fundamentally, it's like, I need this person to plug into these six holes in the business. And these six holes actually represent these workflows, and then to what degree does each of these individual disparate workflows can be automated. And so everyone, every business owner at this point should be able to draw their business in terms of workflows of inputs and outputs rather than this is an org chart. And so this is the shift between, you know, 2026 or 2025 thinking of people in seats and in entering into the 2030 frame of raw inputs and outputs that are valuable. It's really cool.
[18:25]What's your self meme not Rushmore and why? Uh, my entrepreneur not Rushmore. I would have, Was it four faces? Yeah, so I'd have Elon, Besos, so yeah, so I'd have Elon, Jeff Besos, Warren Buffett.
[18:46]Actually, I'd probably have Elon Musk, Jeff Besos, Charlie Munger. I've learned more from Charlie.
[18:55]Um, who's number four? Rockefeller. Be my number four. Why? Savage.
[19:11]And um, from his letters to his son, I learned one of the important lessons for me, which was the reason I'm such a fan of Rockefeller is because of one of the important lesson that I learned from the letters that he sent his son, which was he tells a story of how he was the second largest oil producer, and he went to go try and buy the largest producer. And the guy like rebuffed him a bunch of times, every time he tried to buy, and then finally he was able to get a deal done, and he, you know, he he way overpaid for this facility. And the guy was laughing at him saying like, well, you know, you're an idiot, I can't believe you paid this much for my business. And then next 30 days, he did something like 24 deals. And the reason he was able to do those 24 deals is because once he was number two and bought the number one, he had such a significant part of the mark market share that he was able to say he was number one in the market. And with that story, he was able to do 24 more deals that were significantly more lucrative. And so what I learned from that was the value of the story. So there was the price of the assets in the business, and then everything that he paid in excess, he paid to do one thing, which is to be able to say that he was number one, so that he had the leverage in the rest of the negotiations. And so it was really shifting from this like, I have to get an amazing deal on every single thing I do, which happens across business all the time, to taking a step back at the global outlook of like, battles and wars. Like I'm willing to lose battles to win wars. That's really cool. That's cool. Speaking of famous entrepreneurs, I was watching the social network recently, have you seen that movie? I have. Where Southern gets cut out of, you know, his shares gets diluted. Eric and I were actually talking about it because I was like, well, he wasn't there. If he had been there creating value for the company, what would be the chance that shares would have been diluted? Do you think in most cases in life, you can avoid bad outcomes by creating value? Well, I think his stake is like 11 billion now, so he's done okay. Um, and the reason Savron was able to get paid was because he did the one thing the other two guys didn't do, which is that he took on risk. So he was the one who paid for it and it was his LLC and he was the one who capitalized the business and risked money. And so many people had had claims to Facebook, but when you write the check and you take the risk, it's something that no one can take away from you. Um, and so I actually see a very different lesson from that, which is he who takes the risks, holds the leverage, and that is why he was able to get such a significant chunk of the company. Um, and so in a world where all human tasks can get automated by robots and AI, the last bastian of value that a human can have is they can choose to take on risk. That's also. Good lesson. What's your perspective on risk and why most people don't take it? I think that risk, I mean, I've there's books and books written on risk, but I think risk is largely misunderstood by most people because they see the downside as exaggerated and the upside is minimized. Is that they extrapolate me failing into death and isolation and no one will ever want to see me or love me again. Um, and they truncate what they believe is possible because they can only see the two feet in front of them based on their existing vantage point. But like, once you start climbing the mountain, you get a better perspective and you start seeing what is possible. And so I think one of the the big gifts of entrepreneurship is that one, it is the best process of personal development, and two, the more you accomplish, the more you realize you can accomplish. And so you can set your sites higher, not from like a ever moving goal post perspective, but uh, how much more impact can I have that I didn't think was ever possible when I started this journey. And so if you're judging whether it's worth to climb Everest based on the first 20 feet and you think I could die, it's a very different bet versus seeing the top of the mountain and maybe you're going to have harnesses and hooks and chirpas and the likelihood to die might be there, but it's significantly lower than you think. What's one of the risks that one of the bigger risks you took that was a turning point for you early on in business? The biggest risk I ever took was starting the first gym. By far. Not even close. Um, signing a lease for $300,000 when I had, I mean, $50,000 saved up and I had never run a business before and I'd never gotten a customer before and having to pay $5,000 a month in rent with no clue of how I was going to pay it and I was doing 14 days. Like, that was by far the riskiest thing that I ever did and the only reason that I took that risk was because I was so ignorant. Like I wouldn't advise anyone to take that risk. I only took it because I, like, I, like, by the grace of God, like figured out in that 14-day period how to make it work. And I made the exact amount of money, literally $4,562, I still remember it, was what my rent cost. And I made that exact amount of money in the days that it took, like to the dollar. I didn't even realize it until after the fact. To the dollar, and then I remember all my rent disappearing and then having to do it again for the next month and thinking, man, real estate's not a bad business.
[24:26]I'm like, that guy just made literally every dollar that I made off of this last month. And he didn't do anything, uh, except he took the risk of owning the building. Do you think there's value in ignorance? Good question.
[24:41]I think that there is value in ignorance in that it lowers your action threshold. And so, in a lot of ways, many entrepreneurs start saying like, we didn't know what the hell we were doing. And it's like, of course you didn't, because it was the first time you did it. And the thing that you have in common with every great entrepreneur is that the first time you do anything is the same way they approached it too, which is that they hadn't done it either. So they don't you don't have an you don't have an inherent disadvantage. The Midwest meme is one of your favorite memes. Why is that the case?
[25:12]Because it's kind of like Poto's principle of like there's 8020 and I think the midwit meme just appears everywhere. Like there's so many, like, you know, I want to start a restaurant. Well, just make sure the food's good and it's not too expensive. And then in the middle, it's like inventory and staffing and like all this stuff and the end it's like just make sure the food's good and then it's perfectly priced. And the same thing for, you know, fitness. It's like, all right, just eat protein, lift more weights, you know, pick good parents, right? And then in the middle, it's like set schemes and rep schemes and, you know, undulating periodization and like hypertrophy and cycles and blocks and blah, blah, blah, and at the end you're like, just, you know, try hard, eat protein and pick the good pick right parents. Do you think the next decade is going to produce more or less entrepreneurs? Really good question.
[26:04]It's really tough. I think short-term long-term. I think short-term yes, long-term, maybe not. Why not?
[26:14]So, I see technology as something that increases the value of one human and decreases the value of all humans. Labor.
[26:26]If one person has a god robot, right? Then that God robot makes that one human significantly more valuable. But it makes the value of every other human less valuable. Whenever a robot can do something that a human can do, it means that when that human does it, it is less valuable than it was before. Which then forces, well then it forces people to learn. I'm like, yeah, but if we take the equivalent, which is that it was once valuable and is no longer, the technology made the human labor less valuable. And so that only works until it can replace all labor. And then money will still have value, but not labor. And that is where we get into a tricky situation. What do you think is going to happen to college and traditional schooling in the next decade? Oh, I mean, who I mean, college is so it's like, I mean, I think that it like college makes absolutely no sense. Um, and I and I've I haven't been as aggressive about that in past. I've been like, well, it kind of depends, but that was like four years ago when I made that my first college video. I would say with the advent of AI, it has there's there's two things that have made college significantly less valuable. So thing number one is that the education that you get at college is for sure inferior now to free alternatives. Like that, that was like maybe arguable and is now definitive. Like an AI tutor, they can teach you whatever you want in real time, is more valuable. On the other side from a cost basis, it for sure doesn't fucking make any sense because you can get a better thing for less. So like now there's that part. And so then the only thing that people make the argument for for college is that it forces networking for people to who are in lower who start with lower socio-economic status to network with people with higher socio-economic status. Um, that is maybe the only thing, but I mean like there's platforms like school and whatnot that can bring communities together. But the last piece is like, okay, well, do you have higher earning power, which is literally just not true anymore. Like you don't have higher earning power as a result of being a college graduate. And so the value proposition is just is is you don't get more educated. You don't get better job prospects. It costs money and takes longer. Yeah. And I think that that has just gotten more and more extreme in the past four years. And I think that that will accelerate. Like if you're if you're 18 years old right now, there's very little point in saying I want to become a doctor. Like by the time that you graduate eight years from now, and then you've finished your residency, 10 years from now, whatever it is, like there will be surgical robots and diagnostic robots right now that they will just they'll they'll literally beat humans at everything. And we can say whatever we want. When it comes to health, I think people are going to be like, I would choose human, but I'm going to choose the thing that gets me to die less. And so, yeah. If you were to make a new structure for the next generation of 18-year-olds that would replace college, what would it look like? Go outside. Yeah. Turn off phone, go outside.
[29:24]Go on dates. Meet people. Yeah.
[29:33]I actually think what Joe Liman is doing with Alpha school is really the the much better version of what education should look like, which is two hours a day of kind of quote formal study, which is AI tutor driven, which is learning based on the style of learning of the human. And then six hours a day of kind of real life skills and social skills, which are far more applicable. And even in those two hours a day, they advance at twice the speed at 98 percentile. And so it's just like the old system is broken. Joe Liman, thankfully, is a multimillionaire and like has the resources and horsepower to actually like affect change. Many people have tried to tackle education, few people have succeeded, mostly because education is such an entrenched government backed, blah, blah, blah. Um, but yeah, for 18-year-olds, I think I would more or less model that. And a lot of learning comes from eliciting trial attempts, which is how do I get people to try and do stuff, not to recite information because once they get in the real world, it has very little to do with reciting information. And when information is available at your fingertips in real time and personalized, that skill is almost nothing. In the world of infinite scroll, how do you suggest somebody builds structure? Build structure? I would put as much friction as possible between you and the things that distract you, and as much lubrication between you and the things that you want to do. So, for example, um, I have multiple layers of kind of like, bricking, you know, or multiple layers of stopping myself from like scrolling, for example. So like, number one, I have an app that like, I have to scan and I can put the token in another room and like my phone cannot unlock until I physically go do that. So that's number one. Number two is I have physical things that slow down like, even if that's not on, if I go on any social media, I have to wait 10 seconds between me hitting the app and it starting. So it delays the reward cycle. Um, the third thing is that if I'm going to post, I'll typically post through a tool. Even if I want to post in real time, so that I don't go on the platform to try and make a post and then lose 15 minutes getting, you know, sucked in. And so those are just like three micro examples of ways that I can just distance myself from something that distracts me. And then obviously, on the other hand, uh, lubricating the path of getting things done is just removing all distractions besides the work that you want to do. What do you get inspiration from? Um, I mean, I honestly do get inspired by looking at the best entrepreneurs of our time and like what they're doing.
[32:04]You know, the the Altmans, the the Musks, the, um, you know, Sundar and, uh, Satya, you know, just throwing down and like really making huge moves. Um, I aspire to get to a point where I can make bets that move industries. I'm not there, but, um, that is something that I find very cool. You mentioned that you typically are going to do one new thing. What's that thing for you? Can't tell you. Ooh. You'll know. You'll find out. Okay. Even if you can't share details, what gets you out of bed right now? Um, I wake up pretty much automatically. Uh,
[33:04]Honest answer is I like what we do. I like coming here. I work out with people I like first thing in the morning, it sets my day up. Um, we have a great team of leaders that are really competent that I admire, that I like seeing. So we have a community here at ACQ and Layla and I built it that way on purpose because we've done the entirely remote thing. And for sure you can succeed with it. It's just like, at what point you decide like how do I want my life to look? And we wanted to have people around us that we thought were cool. And so we structured our life to do more of that. Um, and I think a big part of that question is like, what what else would I do? Like, what is my best alternative? And there's not many things that I enjoy more than doing things I like with people I like, and I've just structured my work to be more or less that.
