Alex Hormozi's Playbook for Building Billion-Dollar Businesses

Summary

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TBPN Podcast Summary

Episode: Alex Hormozi's Playbook for Building Billion-Dollar Businesses
Date: July 7, 2026
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Guest: Alex Hormozi

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Episode Overview

This episode features Alex Hormozi, entrepreneur and author, in a wide-ranging conversation on building and scaling businesses, the evolution of his media strategy, the modern content landscape, and high-leverage business opportunities. With characteristic candor, Hormozi discusses his process for writing business books, his investment focus, lessons from his own successes and failures, and how entrepreneurs can navigate the rapidly changing world of AI and media. The hosts and Hormozi also dive into timeless entrepreneurial tradeoffs, the myth of “passive” business ownership, and practical advice for both early-stage and experienced founders.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Book Writing Process & Intellectual “Surface Area”

• Cadence: Hormozi releases a book every 18–24 months but resists sticking to a strict schedule.
• Idea Generation: He maintains ongoing notes on topics across up to 10 potential books. Writing only begins once he's thoroughly “battle-tested” an idea through real-world application.
• On Depth:
  “I’m a big believer in surface area of thought… You just have to do it by spreading out the time.” (Alex Hormozi, 01:13)
• Narrow Scope Wins: Learned to focus books tightly rather than attempting a massive tome.
  “Problem definition for the book, I think is the hardest part... The Money Models book was the fastest because it was really just about wrappers for promotions. Super valuable, but really easy to consume and use.” (02:33)

2. Writing vs. Doing in Real Time

• Hormozi values authors who document insights while actively solving problems, rather than after decades have passed.
• Quote:
  “You miss out on the wrinkles, the tiny things, if you only write later. I’m a big believer of like, while it's wet, like, paint it and then let it dry over time.” (Alex Hormozi, 05:30)

3. Intentional Work & Living Environments

• For work: maximizes focus with distraction-free, windowless, soundproof spaces.
• For life: wife Layla’s happiness is the driver; he’s indifferent as long as she’s more comfortable.
• Memorable Analogy:
  “If she's 10% happier, I have a percent to percent correlation to my happiness… But when I work, I eliminate every sense of distraction.” (07:28)

4. YouTube Channel & Content Operations

• Started simple (editing agency, three weekly uploads), then quickly innovated with Shorts and massive batch production.
• Prefers intense, marathon filming days occasionally rather than daily content grind.
• Key Principle:
  “Volume negates luck all day. Volume negates luck.” (11:13) “Violence is the answer. Yeah. That’s on our wall at HQ.” (11:17)

5. The Future of Media: Live & Interactive

• Sees next-level opportunity in live, interactive content (e.g., audience participation in real time).
• Stakes and authenticity—like live shows with entrepreneurs—can’t be easily faked and are valued highly.
• Quote:
  “In a world of AI, what can’t be faked? It’s people… people want stakes.” (11:27)

6. Legacy Media vs. New Media

• Willing to consider TV/radio for distribution, noting Dave Ramsey’s dominance via 600+ radio syndicates.
  “I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to attention.” (13:06)
• Barbell strategy: either create highly-produced, authority-building content or maximize value-per-second via high volume.

7. Finding High-Leverage Business Models: Med Spas as Example

• Spotting large, underserved, and supply-constrained markets is key.
  “I’m still looking for the magical med spa… There’s this aging population that has more money than anyone else. The demand is huge, but med spas are still wildly understaffed... super fragmented.” (16:14)
• Roll-up models and talent retention (e.g., partner shares) are central for service businesses.

8. On AI for Entrepreneurs and Pitfalls

• Many founders misuse AI by chasing new tech businesses instead of using AI to make their existing firms more efficient.
• Outline of Good AI Use:
  • Replace parts of workflows, not whole jobs.
  • Hide AI in the background for margin gain, don’t make it the product.
• Humorous Critique:
  “They’re using AI to do dumb things really fast. So they’re doing the wrong stuff with AI.” (23:33)
• E-commerce and porn are highlighted as most innovative sectors in media/ops automation.

9. Audience and Offers: How to Scale Upwards

• Focused on founder/ceo market (typically $1–50M businesses), but offer value at every level.
  “If I just focus there, I get the zero to a million, sure, anyway.” (21:56)
• “Economic ladder” strategy: have products/offers for every customer segment, from free to elite/high-ticket.

10. International Expansion & Scaling Investments

• Cautious with international: doesn’t want to dilute core offerings or overload operations with cross-border complications.
• Acquisition.com started as family office; now only big/high-leverage opportunities get attention and investment.
• Quote:
  “If you have a stallion, run it... The bar is the product has to be fucking insane. And then we bring distribution and cash and that's the holy trinity.” (37:39)

11. Learning from Failures, Upsides, and Downside

• On “pre-fall vs. post-fall” founders: rejects binary but notes massive value in being seasoned.
• Seek feedback loops; don't take risks you can't afford.
  “What’s my upside, what’s my downside and can I live with my downside? If you can’t live with it, don’t take the bet.” (50:41)

12. Advice for Young Entrepreneurs

• Focus is output = ‘activity volume * leverage of activity.’
  “Pick the right boat, pick the right opportunity, based on your goals... You’ll dominate if you do one thing for 40 years and improve every year.” (39:47, 44:30)
• Avoid “fake work”—prioritize real cash flow, not vanity metrics.
  “If what you do does not translate into the money that you make and money that you make is the goal, then you are doing work that is not effective.” (52:52)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Volume in Content and Business:
  “Volume negates luck all day... Violence is the answer.” (Alex Hormozi, 11:13)
• The Key to Med Spas:
  “They're not loyal to the business. They're loyal to the girl who does her injections or lasers.” (20:32)
• Truth Is the Simplest Strategy:
  “The absolute simplest media strategy for any kind of change is the whole truth, not half truth... I didn't have anything to sell, and I was like, now I do.” (31:59)
• Entrepreneurial Dissatisfaction:
  “I think humans are inherently dissatisfied. We want the benefits of a trade off without the negatives of the trade off.” (57:33)
• On Every Business Having Its Downsides:
  “You know what, Alex? It's all shit. Every business is shit... Different type of suck, but it all sucks.” (Suzanne Shiflett anecdote, 58:46)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Book Writing Process – 00:46–03:51
• Blueprint for Media Success (Content volume, live/interactive formats) – 10:36–13:26
• Radio, Legacy, and New Media – 13:06–15:34
• Med Spa & High-Leverage Businesses – 16:14–20:47
• Building Teams & AI in Business – 24:11–29:13
• Audience, Brand, and Product Ladder – 31:48–34:33
• On Upside, Downside, and Taking Risks – 49:02–50:41
• Advice for Young Founders, Opportunity Selection – 39:36–45:47
• On Fake Work and Content as Distraction – 51:58–53:50
• Entrepreneurial Dissatisfaction & Business Suffering – 57:29–59:07
• Pitch for "Scale or Fail" Show – 59:13

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Summary Tone

Energetic, irreverent, and densely practical, with Hormozi offering direct, often blunt, guidance. The episode is filled with both tactical and strategic gems, delivered in a conversational style punctuated by humor and memorable analogies.

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Takeaways

• Build with intensity and focus: long time horizons, high leverage, and “violent” volume strategies win.
• Be honest with your audience and with yourself.
• Adapt relentlessly—use new tools (AI/media) to serve proven business models, not as distractions.
• Most business niches, even those that appear ‘boring,’ can produce outsized results if approached systematically and with operational rigor.
• Entrepreneurial discontent never disappears—success is about choosing your trade-offs wisely and focusing where you can compound skill and value over time.

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Transcript

[Alex]

Grab that seat. Sit down for us. Do you still own a Hummer Ev?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, we do, actually.

[Alex]

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 neck and neck. It's a thousand pounds.

[Alex Hormozi]

So I think what we could do is like, if you just lined up like 10 of the Fiat, like chariot. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. That could be my chariot. I think the Hummers.

[Travis]

Imagine. Imagine if the Hummers, literally nine of these. The Hummer is kind of the front of the train. And then you have like, you see the Hummer coming at you and then a bunch of the Topolinos kind of pull out and like a fast and furious thing. That would be badass.

[Alex Hormozi]

Take over the whole hot mog.

[Alex]

How is life these days?

[Alex Hormozi]

Good.

[Alex]

Is there a new book coming?

[Alex Hormozi]

There is another book coming.

[Alex]

Okay.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Do you have a strategy for book launch cadence? Is it an annual thing?

[Alex Hormozi]

It's more like every 18 months.

[Alex]

18 months, two years. But do you imagine that continuing for your entire career?

[Alex Hormozi]

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. Then I just start writing again.

[Alex]

What's the process? Like?

[Alex Hormozi]

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 interesting, I'll then start the book writing process. But I'm a big believer in surface area of thought. Like, if you were to sit down and say, like, I'm gonna 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.

[Alex]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

So I kind of want to like have. I want to be in 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 density 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

[Alex]

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 or over the course of 18 months. Is there actually a benefit to going out and having real world experience?

[Alex Hormozi]

Oh, that's. I mean that's.

[Alex]

And anecdotes. Right?

[Alex Hormozi]

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, this is it. And then that's what the book becomes.

[Alex]

How narrow do you want to stay? How narrow have you been in the surface area of thought around mainly the last three books?

[Alex Hormozi]

It's a really good question. 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 gonna 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 rappers for promotions. Super valuable, but really easy to consume and use. And so I was like, okay, this is the lesson for me. Like an offers super narrow, super narrow. And that book too is 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. I was like, I'm going to have a tome. And then I decided to want people to actually read it.

[Alex]

Is there a itch in the back of your mind where you want to do sort of the Tim Ferriss thing where you go from four hour work week 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, ten times. But is there a level of focus that you have to discipline yourself or does it come naturally?

[Alex Hormozi]

I only write about stuff that I feel like I have some unique take on. I think rewriting a book that already exists. People already know there's a point, especially if you're in the thick of it and you're thinking, oh, this has already been written before. It doesn't really motivate you. I want to write something that only exists because I made it.

[Travis]

Same thing with businesses. Like, there's. Oh, yeah, I've had the experience of building a company or just, like, starting to work on a company, being like, I can stop working on this and it will not matter at all.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, the world will be fine.

[Travis]

There's a bunch of alternative and that. You can make that case for, like, most businesses.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Travis]

But there are some where you're like, if I don't build this, no one's gonna build it, at least in the right way.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. No, I have 100% that perspective when it comes to book writing.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Travis]

It's funny as. As we talk about this, Jeremy Giffon, I know, is a 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, to where he just kind of pops up, does invest, like, the best, and then 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. In the meantime, you have to just, like, you know, take notes and try to pick stuff up from the podcast. But there's so many people that, like, so many of the 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. Yeah, 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. 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.

[Alex Hormozi]

I think you miss out on 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.

[Travis]

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 was actually, like, worth kind

[Alex]

of greatest hits at that point?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[Alex]

We. We had Mark Pankas 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 me?

[Alex Hormozi]

Do it.

[Alex]

You do it.

[Alex Hormozi]

No, no, not by hand.

[Alex]

Work on it.

[Travis]

Not by hand, but just take a. Take a piece of dirt and turn it on.

[Alex]

You're working with an architect and a 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?

[Alex Hormozi]

It's not.

[Alex]

Why not?

[Alex Hormozi]

I mean, we buy big multifamily that are already existing, and we do that. But if there were any. An investment opportunity that made sense, I would.

[Travis]

It's. You're not interested because it's not productive.

[Alex Hormozi]

It's just not on my list.

[Travis]

Purely for, like, you know, the satisfaction.

[Alex Hormozi]

If you're 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.

[Alex]

Sure, sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

You know, I'm not against it.

[Alex]

Yeah. I think some people just have the itch to, like, 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. Were you closet. You were in closet? Like, that was my business.

[Alex Hormozi]

Thoughts.

[Alex]

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 workspace, your office space today.

[Alex Hormozi]

So I would say all of the time that when I work, I'm very intentional about that space. When I'm not working, it's whatever Layla wants. I don't care. Like, if she's 10% happier. I have a percent to 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. I'm very distractible. And so I have to have, like, earplugs in no light, all artificial. I have, like, soundproof, like, you know, like, I want nothing.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And then I can finally focus on what I'm trying to work on.

[Alex]

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.

[Alex Hormozi]

You.

[Alex]

Com. You completely smoked me. Yeah, it was.

[Travis]

John is, you know, obviously pretty good at media and. But. And was, like, his channel was, like, just following his interests, like, Silicon Valley history. The execution was, like, by all means, amazing. Like, got to, like, half a million subscribers.

[Alex]

But I treated like a blog, and you treated like a business.

[Travis]

Yeah, yeah. And it was like. But it was a much smaller tam, and, like, when you compare the two channels and, like, your strategy, the execution was like, yeah, it was me.

[Alex]

And, like, 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, because I know you've done media stuff before, but, like, the current media business, 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. And then what was the evolution of that?

[Alex Hormozi]

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, and I had a little suitcase that would open up so I could travel, because Layla and I were traveling for the year 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, and I was like, I'm just gonna get them. I'm gonna dump them all out. And so that's basically what YouTube strategy 1.0 was.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

I had somebody cold reach out, like, legit. When write a short started, they were like, I'll do everything. You already have YouTube stuff. I'm just gonna clip it. Just give me permission.

[Alex]

Yep.

[Alex Hormozi]

And I was like, oh, cool. And so that's what 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, that kind of style of. Of filming and recording is pretty much how I still kind of rock that way. Which is like, I want. 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, yeah, we'll do it again in a week or whatever.

[Travis]

Yeah, we're sort of like that marathon every day.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah. One of the questions is like, what goes into a two hour YouTube video? Because you'll do these, like, master classes. 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.

[Alex Hormozi]

But that's.

[Travis]

The three hours was kind of like just going until we got tired.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Travis]

Like, by three hours, we're usually like, okay, like, probably need to go to the bathroom. Probably want to eat some food.

[Alex]

Yeah. And this show is much less structured. But when you're. When you're thinking about, like, the portfolio, like you. The volume is just incredibly important to everything in media these days. You agree with that?

[Alex Hormozi]

Oh, 100%. Volume negates luck all day. Volume negates luck.

[Alex]

Volume.

[Alex Hormozi]

Violence is the answer. Yeah. That's like on our wall at HQ.

[Alex]

What formats are you most excited about for 2026, 2027?

[Alex Hormozi]

Live interactive.

[Alex]

Okay.

[Alex Hormozi]

Separate and together.

[Alex]

Okay.

[Alex Hormozi]

So just going live, like with the audience, Twitch style, YouTube live style.

[Alex]

And that was the book launch strategy. Right? Was that the first taste? You've done lots.

[Alex Hormozi]

No, I've done lives before, but that was obviously intentional. And then. And then interactive, which is not like, 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 first it was cash cows. Now at Scale or fail, which is a show we just launched and we're doing. We're doubling down really hard on that. Because if you think in a world of AI, it's like, what are. That can't be faked. It's people. You're like, I want stakes. So, for example, like, if Mr. Beast store videos. 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, like a fictional story. The whole thing we know is fake and we're fine with it, and the story is the story, and I'll crush that. Yeah, but people still want stakes. Like, right now, chess is more popular it's ever been. But, like, humans haven't been able to beat computers for a long time. And so there are definitely some areas where we want the drama, we want the stakes. And so I don't think that's going to change at all.

[Alex]

I love the series that you've been doing with entrepreneurs that attend a conference. They stand up, they give you the. It's so, so good. I just love all those.

[Alex Hormozi]

Live, interactive.

[Alex]

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 CIA. 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?

[Alex Hormozi]

I think it's distribution that I don't have access to. So 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 is dead. It's like he's murdering.

[Alex]

Yes.

[Alex Hormozi]

And it's because no one's looking. So, like, I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to attention.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

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 since year, I have no access.

[Travis]

And the beauty is, like, there's still like, closer to, like, there's no monopoly online. Right. The feed is like, 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, like, if you can figure out the right lane, you have this sort of like, differentiated access to attention. So it's like a different group of people and it's differentiated access. That's not just like, log on immediately, have access.

[Alex Hormozi]

And when something super pops, like, you look at all the real estate shows that have come out, you've Got selling. Sunset Sirhan has his show. There's a huge distribution base that they gain access to as a result of that. And all you have to do is look at those stars, look at their social media. And I would say, I say this lovingly. It's pretty weak in terms of what they're doing. But their engagement. Exactly. 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 someone and it's like, how do we get it all right? And that's kind of the.

[Alex]

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. 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 have, they still watch. And so interesting. What about the level of production Polish? I imagine that there's a trade off there. If you go with something more produced that's not just you opening your laptop and yapping. Right. You can get, you can, 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?

[Alex Hormozi]

I think it's barbell. 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.

[Alex]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

And like I just think it's both and they're. 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 is 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 Discover building. Like I said, this is full stack but you get way closer to purchases on the side.

[Alex]

Yeah. Is there. Can we offer you a Diet Coke?

[Alex Hormozi]

Can we offer you anything?

[Alex]

We have a variety of beverages if

[Travis]

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?

[Alex Hormozi]

I'm still looking for the magical med spa. I think med spas are super. I love pseudo medical because 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 Johnson's 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 look at the supply med spas are. They're 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.

[Travis]

I mean, 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 million of like, like straight free cash flow off of like $400,000 invested. Yeah. It was like actually unbelievable. Yes. The entrepreneur in this case was like

[Alex Hormozi]

very talented because he watches this and he's. Oh yeah, he's great.

[Travis]

No, but this was, this was you know, 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 maybe he probably has like 10 times as many like 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, pretty meaningful. Right. And so meds, bars, 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.

[Alex Hormozi]

He had 1200 people apply for his million dollar per year thing. 1200, do that math real fast.

[Travis]

That's a lot of money.

[Alex Hormozi]

And then there was a $60,000 per year thing that was underneath and multiply that by just probably an order of magnitude.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

Wildly underestimated. So you take that and then you have these 10,000 or 15,000 med spots that exist. It's like it's nothing. And it's super fragmented because still, no one's really like gobbled that up. Well, not that, 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 top line 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, and you know, you know, people, customers tell customers like, you know, that's not how it fucking works.

[Travis]

Yeah. And it's not how it's going to work fore.

[Alex Hormozi]

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.

[Alex]

Is part of the problem that a lot of the med spa like founders get a little bit too sucked into the biohacker nature of these things and it feels a little bit too scientific.

[Travis]

I don't, I don't think it's that at all. I think it's like, it's, 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

[Alex Hormozi]

slice for Johnson to attack, which.

[Travis]

Yeah, that's.

[Alex Hormozi]

He's a very smart dude.

[Travis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex]

How would you attack the problem? Roll up, find a bunch of operators, put them together, start something from scratch.

[Alex Hormozi]

I mean. Yeah. I mean the roll bottle would make the most sense.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

The thing is like de novo is not that expensive. Sure.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And if you are a good operator, you can go in and just smash. Because when people are coming in, when you're CAC0 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.

[Travis]

And it's so easy for them to open up a door.

[Alex]

Exactly.

[Alex Hormozi]

They hang their own shindle, they take the customers. And that's the issue that those companies have. The key to really winning that game is having a really good talent strategy for how do I make their lifestyles, how do I compensate them as directly as possible on what they're generating and get it to the point where my godfather is in wealth management. And he's 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 ao, and his big thing was basically letting the other person have a little more. And so it's like, it's like, I'll give you 51 so that you don't ever want to leave, but then you do all the work.

[Travis]

Yeah. It probably looks more like a law firm over.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, 100%. It's more of a partner. And to be fair, if you've been to any of these, I would say it's a high touch service. They're, they're not loyal to the business. They're loyal to the girl who does her injections or does their lasers or whatever.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so it's like we just got to tie those people in, like a partner firm. Yeah.

[Travis]

Speaking of Brian Johnson, do you care at all about living forever?

[Alex Hormozi]

I don't even think about it. I expect to die. I would prefer not to. But like, I'm good either way. Like I, I think Marcus really has said the, the old and the young lose the same thing when they die, which is the present. That's all we got.

[Travis]

So, yeah, 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.

[Alex]

Yeah. Going back to sort of core audience, I think of like the sweet spot is like mid market owner, operator, founder types. Is that roughly.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. One to 50 million.

[Alex]

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, no interest. Or is it, or is it getting people on the founder journey who are leaving companies, breaking out into their own and going from 0 to 1 million? What do you think?

[Alex Hormozi]

Well, from an expansion opportunity, like, I think there's still plenty of people in the 150 million who don't know who I am and haven't consumed my stuff or whatever. So, like plenty there. But the, like, if I just focus there, I get the zero to a million. Sure. Anyways.

[Travis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

Because if you're helping people go from 1 to 10, people are like, he can probably help me go from one zero one.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

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 human. And so I try and make it as simple and easy as possible for people to get started.

[Travis]

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

[Alex Hormozi]

go,

[Travis]

they won't just apply AI to their business. They'll start a new company that's AI oriented. And I just think that's the worst possible mistake because they end up doing something that the model just does well. And that'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. And so. And so there's like, this, like, 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, I can, you know, keep compounding. But what are you seeing?

[Alex Hormozi]

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 costs than they did before.

[Travis]

Number two, there's meeting summaries. Like, I've never been successful. Like, I've never.

[Alex]

That was my bottleneck. I just need to summarize.

[Travis]

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?

[Alex]

Note on your phone.

[Alex Hormozi]

I'm going to do that thing.

[Travis]

I've never. I've never been like, okay, like, what did we say? I mean, and I've worked in, like, small companies, right? Only. Only been a founder. But. 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?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. Okay, so I'll say 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 and take it from 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 3.5x output. And so revenue per headcount on service based businesses should decrease, which means margins 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 you should do that. So there's two flavors of that. One is 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 or the lack of operational drag of tech. That's the good game. Right. Or take it department to buy department so that 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 then it's like, yeah, but you still have your dry cleaning store, dude. Like, what are we gonna like? And to be fair, if you have, if you wanna be a trillionaire, you are gonna need to get into bleeding edge tech and AI. Sure. 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 it either.

[Travis]

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, et cetera. 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

[Alex Hormozi]

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.

[Alex]

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.

[Alex Hormozi]

There's also this, this tendency to rebuild the existing software that you're using. So it's like, oh, I've got, you know, I don't, I don't need to pay calendly, you know, $9 a month. When I. It's just like, oh, so instead you're going to use 200 hours to try and recode what they just did and

[Travis]

it breaks all the time. There's an error, then you lose nine grand.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, but like that is what I'm saying all the time. Yeah.

[Travis]

We did have a. Ben on our team here was having had been.

[Alex Hormozi]

We.

[Travis]

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 it's saving him a bunch of time. So there are the edge cases, very

[Alex]

narrow point solutions for us, I think specifically flip live streams very quickly with captions with our ads added on at the end. And it saved a bunch of time

[Alex Hormozi]

in premiere in media.

[Alex]

It's huge, right? Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

Like we're using it, like I'll give you two examples we're using 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, 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. Actually useful.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

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 [e-mail] in terms of how we're doing it. So we have several hundred landing pages that are getting pushed against several hundred different ad ads that are going out, all being done programmatically with AI, which is really like we're. We're not a. We're not an AI company, but we use the shit out of it. And so I think that those are like, those are the. On the paid side where it's really, really exciting.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And then on the, on the organic side, it's like right now we started more mosey, which is like the highlight channel.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And I've got 1, 1, 1 cracked out teenagers who's do. Who's putting out 20, 20 clips a day on his own? No, no, he's doing five, five mids. So like we call mids. It's like call it like three to ten 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 CTA's that we want and then boom, it's all.

[Alex]

What's your philosophy on bringing the cracked out teenager in house remote in person versus agency versus platform where clipping can happen. A discord that just. 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?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yes, 100% my philosophy. Okay, but like are you an agency fan or in house, it's like I want three agencies working for me and in house, team. Like it's all, all the impressions are out there. Like gotta 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. Well actually porn's the most paid me right before that is I'm being real. Right. E commerce is second most cutting edge and those guys are all completely the ones who are crushing it. Going to 0 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 fucking rip.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And there's obviously some considerations for brand. Sure. Right. Which is like how do we make sure.

[Alex]

But yeah, but if the raw footage is.

[Alex Hormozi]

And you only put money behind the things that are.

[Alex]

Yeah, it's probably pretty safe.

[Travis]

Do you expect to integrate parenting content into your universe?

[Alex Hormozi]

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 of, like, the middle spoke is still. 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,

[Alex]

you got it over there.

[Alex Hormozi]

Like, how do I see, like, my relationship with Layla? But it's. 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

[Travis]

just want to do that. I'm thinking, you know, with. With. With Taylor and Travis pairing up, hopefully they have children. You guys having children? I think we could see a real baby boom.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Travis]

But we need to get it out there.

[Alex Hormozi]

That's. We're doing the Lord's work.

[Alex]

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 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.

[Travis]

Yeah. Like an AI lab is like, we're not going to compete with you.

[Alex Hormozi]

What? That's crazy.

[Alex]

Asking for a friend here.

[Alex Hormozi]

I'm such an. I think the absolute simplest media strategy for any kind of change is the whole truth, not half truth. And I think if you just manage that. So it's like, I didn't have anything to sell, and I was like, now I do.

[Alex]

It's so simple. I love it.

[Alex Hormozi]

That's amazing.

[Travis]

Wow.

[Alex Hormozi]

And if you don't want to buy it, here's the great thing about capitalism. It's voluntary exchange. So you can just keep getting the free shit.

[Travis]

Yep.

[Alex Hormozi]

All good.

[Alex]

There's tons of it. There's tons of free stuff.

[Alex Hormozi]

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, spend money, and we'd love to have you.

[Alex]

Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. What is the term for, like, the economic ladder that you help build, Help companies build? I feel like the first time I was exposed to this with Jocko Willink, you 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 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?

[Alex Hormozi]

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 1. 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 $500 a month price point, another double of revenue at 20$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 facts and tell the truth, but it's the whole truth, which is, hey, we're gonna 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 extremely 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 gonna get way more people who are gonna be doing it with you. But if you're a special snowflake, we have special snowflake prices. I just don't think. 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.

[Alex]

What's your international strategy? I imagine the content goes everywhere.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[Alex]

At the same time, you can't be flying around the world constantly. How do you think about different countries?

[Alex Hormozi]

I struggle a lot with international because the business side of me is like, I don't want them to clog up our funnels.

[Alex]

Oh, yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And like have people who can't speak English that well talking to the team and it's just like, it's like we don't have Italian versions of whatever.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

[Travis]

Right?

[Alex Hormozi]

So I struggle with that part. On the other hand, we're taking steps now to have something to, you know, serve that audience. That being said, I don't think I'm gonna be traveling internationally anytime soon. But having call it services and offerings for that audience, I'm. I'm more inclined to be able to.

[Alex]

Yeah. How are you thinking about scaling acquisition.com, the investing side of the business? Raising outside capital, scaling up the fund. We talk to VCs all day who are just like bigger and bigger mega funds.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

We're like 30 days away from closing a gigantic deal. So come back. Yeah. But like, I would say that what acquisition.com is when we started was a cash flow based family office that Layla and I ran. And that was honestly the chillest my life has ever been. I was also bored to tears, but like a good life and probably might have been better for the season I'm about to get into. But it became apparent after we did something like 24 deals in 24 months. And these were not like VC style deals. They were like real purchases that portfolio theory rules. And of the 24, like 3ish were like the really good companies. And then on top of that there was like our brand blew up in this time period. And so we had to basically have this recalculation of like, okay, well these are all the resources we have at our disposal. We have cash, but like this brand is getting really big, even almost greater than the cash that we have access to. Just our own money.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so then it was like, okay, well we started the advisory practice in January of 24 and I think we did 36 million in EBITDA year one just on that one unit. And so it was like founder and so. And then obviously the book launch last year we did 105. And we still have the advisory practice which grew the next year. And so basically we stopped doing deals that we were just investors in. And now it's brand plus capital plus work. And I'd rather have fewer eggs that we're going to get huge outsized returns on like school was junior of 24 as well. But school has, you know, we have 30 million users now and you know, we've a billion plus GMV. Like, it's, it's a very big platform. And so like I, you know, Zuckerberg didn't have Airbnb as side hustle, you know.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so it's just like if you have, if you have a stallion, like run it. And so I think that's where we're at, where it's like we're being really, really specific. I'm willing to put more capital at risk now because I'm going to put my brand behind it and make sure the product's exceptional. And that's, I mean, the bar is the product has to be fucking insane. Yeah. And then we bring distribution and cash and like, that's when it's like the holy trinity.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Travis]

Jeremy, our friend Jeremy has this idea that everyone is like pre or post fall. Where are you, you familiar with this concept?

[Alex Hormozi]

No.

[Alex]

So, yeah, he says you can instantly tell if someone has had their downfall, had their darkest moment. You know, they've been through the wringer, they got chewed up and spit out by Silicon Valley or private equity or whatever industry they were in. And you can tell that this person is now, they've, they've been humbled and so they're ready to build back appropriately, not get over their skis. And then you can also see it becomes a massive advantage. And then you also see the founders that are sort of pre fall and they're doing a lot of things that

[Travis]

you're like, yeah, this is like this.

[Alex]

You better get lucky.

[Travis]

24 year old who's like on a crazy terror.

[Alex]

Yep.

[Travis]

Has raised money, showed up for free, they're spending it and then suddenly like, you know, the business stops growing. Like execs are leaving, things like that. But I'm wondering if there was like this like crucible moment for you before this latest run that you've been on.

[Alex Hormozi]

Two answers. One is, I'll reject the premise, but just because I don't like to say it's super binary. Right. Like, people are either before or after the hard thing in their life. It's like, I think people have lots of hardship that happens at different seasons in their life. Like, I've lost everything two times, two falls twice. But then it's like, okay, am I now post fall? It's like, well, I Mean, I hope that nothing bad ever happens to me again, but I'm pretty sure bet shit's gonna happen to me again. And so I just commit to not stopping controlling the controllable. And that's basically all I can do.

[Alex]

Do you have a good answer to pithy advice for young people? We got asked this on a podcast recently and it was like the closing question. It was like, you got one minute. And I was like, I could. You could talk for hours. Like, where do you even start? How do you think about packaging information like that? And I actually want your advice for young people. If you have one thing.

[Travis]

It's so hard too. Like, work hard. It's like good general advice. But then I've been in points in my life and I know people that are like working hard on the dumbest thing and that ends up being the

[Alex Hormozi]

worst thing that they can do. What you accomplish is a direct output of the volume of activity that you do multiplied by the leverage of the activity itself. And so you have to pick the right boat. You have to pick the right opportunity based on your goals. Some people only want to make $1 million and they want to make 10. Somebody want to make hundreds of. Make a trillion. Like everyone has different. So like the leverage that. What's interesting about that is that you just get to pick and it's going to be hard no matter what. I think Naval said this thing where it's like, it's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful. It's also really hard to build a billion dollar unicorn. They're both gonna be 80 hour weeks. And so, you know, and Stuart Schwartzman from Blackstone said, like, you might as well play big because level 10 talent has only attracted level 10 opportunities. It's harder to attract good people for bad opportunity because then you've got to do it all yourself. Which is why I have so much respect for some of the guys like Peggy and Andrew CHERNG who are Mr. And Mrs. Panda. Panda Express dude. Deca Billionaires selling chicken.

[Alex]

Passenger royalty.

[Alex Hormozi]

Right, Dude. Like, but like, like so much respect for that level of grit. 45 years selling orange chicken, right? All that to say you will pick based on the level of awareness that you have at that time. Where it gets more difficult is that you learn more shit as you go and you realize that there are higher leverage opportunities. The difficulty is that if you're four years into one thing, year five of an existing thing that you have four years of reps on versus year one of even a slightly better opportunity, you have to compare year one versus Year five of the other one, not year one versus Year one, because time you can't get back. And so that's where the compounding of getting better at something at some point does have outsized returns even. It's an inferior vehicle.

[Alex]

Yeah. Talk about that idea of you're an A plus operator, but you're going after a C plus opportunity. How do you assess your opportunity? Because I feel like I run into people who are working on A plus opportunities, and everyone will say, that's the dumbest idea ever. You're gonna put couches. It's gonna be called Airbnb. That makes no sense. Right. And then it's a boom and it's huge. And then simultaneously, you can be working on a terrible idea. But if you went and got, you know, a puff piece in Business Insider and Forbes, it's like your parents are like, oh, it's amazing. Good job. Even if you're grinding and it's not going anywhere.

[Travis]

Yeah. The way. The way I look at it is, like, in every single category, there's an amazing business. And the funny thing. The funny thing with everyone thinks about, like, Airbnb as, like, the dumb idea. When it's like, it wasn't a dumb idea. It just seemed ridiculous.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[Travis]

And that's very different than, like, somebody that, like, chooses apparel as a category, which everyone knows is, like, structurally really, really, really challenging. Really, really competitive. Yes. There's, like, 100 companies in the world that absolutely print, and if you're one of those companies, then you're. Then you're great. But some people, like, choose apparel, and then three years in, then they understand the competitive dynamics and they're like, I'm in a shitty business. I think that's very different than, like, choosing the thing that seems silly. Even though Airbnb at this point is now, like, the best business, Right?

[Alex]

Sure, sure.

[Travis]

Massive scale, network effects, a great product, all these things.

[Alex Hormozi]

I think if you look at the marketplace that you're trying to get into, there's usually going to be a bolus of businesses at some part, and that gives you some idea of where the difficulty in that business is. And so, like, for example, if you're going to get into I want to start a social media marketing agency, it's like, well, there's a bolus at the bottom, and then very few who ascend at the top. And it's because it's really, really difficult operationally, because if you're really good at marketing, then you can usually make enough money to not work at one of those types of businesses. And so you're constantly, you have to be so good at ops and so good at marketing and branding and sales in order to just slowly get these bigger and bigger accounts and you kind of level up the types of customers that you can go after. Because all those businesses go after SMBs and S&Ps are inherently volatile and so even if you do a great job, they'll still cancel. And so it's just a churn and burn business.

[Travis]

Not to mention your flagship client will eventually say, like, hey, we're spending $100,000 on this service. We could hire five people that are the best in the world at what they do and they'll just focus on us. Let's do that instead.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, like there are, there, there are impediments to that business scaling. Can you do it? Absolutely. But I'm just a huge advocate of just like, just look at what the biggest version that business looks like. Because this is obviously a more tech forward show. But like the vast majority of businesses are not tech businesses. Right. There's like H vac businesses all over the place. There's pool cleaners. Like, there's a lot of shit you can do for money. And so I like, unless you want to be a trillionaire, like you can be a billionaire in just about any boring business you look at. What's his name? Is it Brad Jacobs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, six times or. Yeah, yeah.

[Alex]

Make a few billion dollars.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, a few. And then he has a sequel, a few more billion.

[Travis]

You guys are kind of, you guys are very.

[Alex]

I never thought of you as home building materials.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, there's just a lot of businesses out there. And so it just depends on like what the goal is. But any business done for like zooming all the way out, if you do one thing for 40 years and you get better every year, you're going to fucking dominate. And so on some level, going after the tech opportunity, though they're for sure are the big mega winners. It's easier to compete against the people who are going after the pool cleaners. There's just, there's, there's less sophisticated players, there's less capital. And so having a little bit of street smarts and a lot of work ethic can get you pretty far there. And you look at that compared to like, you know, you look at the guy who's doing 7 million a year top line, two and a half million dollars in bottom line doesn't really work that much. Has a crew of guys. Is that the life you want. Yeah, because there's nothing, like, there's nothing wrong with that. And so I think it's deciding first to the younger guy, like what do I want or what is an acceptable outcome. And then what of the many, many paths that are ahead of me have the highest likelihood of me getting there. And then once you pick that path, know that if you stick with that path for 20 years, the likely that you fail is basically zero. As long as you have some feedback loop for improvement, that's basically it. Figure out where you want to go, find the highest likely path of getting there, and then do not let the opinions of strangers or people who do not have what you want dissuade you from getting there.

[Alex]

Yeah. What do you think about. There's this odd trend of entrepreneurship, like, I don't know, like mindset stuff where you got to be doing sauna, cold plunge meditation. And I feel like that only makes sense once you're successful. And then you look at the successful people and you're like, well, yeah, the rich guy has a sauna, but what was he doing when he was broke? He was waking up and getting on his laptop. But how are you reacting?

[Alex Hormozi]

Rich people fly private, so I should fly private in order to get rich. It's conflation. Okay. So at the most basic level, you have to do work.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And if it is not the work, then you have to have a very strong argument that is going to increase your output per unit of time period. And so if you have a three hour morning routine, and that's the first three hours a day, when you're probably the cognitive, like the freshest, have the most energy, you would have to have an incredible. Do you curse on the show?

[Alex]

We don't.

[Alex Hormozi]

Okay. A credible darn argument. You're welcome.

[Travis]

Our kids are watching. But you know, by all means you

[Alex Hormozi]

have to have an incredible argument for why that's going to improve your output. And so like the morning routine that I'm a big advocate of is you wake up and then you caffeinate, you shut off your distractions and then you begin the work and how much you can compress the time from waking to beginning. Work is the ideal and you are the freshest whenever you are post sleep.

[Alex]

Yep.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so if you want to do that stuff, I'm like, by all means, go for it. But just understand you can. Plenty of people have hobbies. You can have hobbies. Like there's nothing wrong with that. It's just is this actually. And you also didn't need to work 16 hours a day in order to get what you want. I have plenty of friends who are super successful and don't work that much now. Did they work 16 hours a day to get there? Probably. And so this is the modeling the rise, not the plateau. And what's difficult is the plateau is what's more visible.

[Alex]

Sure.

[Travis]

What do you think?

[Alex Hormozi]

And then you can make the content, right? What? No one's making this part?

[Alex]

No, no.

[Travis]

What do you think about people sort of like staging out their sort of career as an entrepreneur? I was talking to a friend of mine who has a, something like an agency business and fashion. He's gonna do like about a million dollars this year of like profit. It's a fantastic business he has. He eventually wants to have his own, his own brand. My advice to him is like, fashion is such a, like bad business until it's a great business. Till you have like a flagship brand that takes 20 years to make. I was like, get your business to like a couple million a year, get it like established. A couple million a year profit at least get it established, get you know, 10, 20 flagship clients that are on sort of long term contracts and then basically use that cash flow to invest in your brand. And like a lot of people would be like, give them the advice now of like, just go all in on, go all in on the brand. Like, why are you wasting time with this other thing? And I feel like that's very, that, that works super well. Like if you have a trust fund, but for somebody who's like 27, let's assume they want to have a family in a few years. I was pushing him to say, like, make this thing great, even though, you know it's not the thing that you want to be doing for that 40 year chunk of your career. But how would you talk to somebody in that sort of space?

[Alex Hormozi]

So I don't think there's a right answer because it's all dependent on risk, which is entirely personal.

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so if you want to go balls on the line, that's not cursing, then, then do it. Go all in. But like just understand the risk that you're taking on. And so I would say that that's not a risk that I would take. I would say that I'm there.

[Travis]

There's risk to being all in and then not having the capital to actually fuel the opportunity. Right. My point of view is like, you're going to be way, way, way higher likelihood of success if you sort of build slow and you can put half a million a year of like outside capital into the business versus like trying to build this brand when you don't have a capital source.

[Alex Hormozi]

Depends on gold, depends on risk tolerance. Like I want to be a trillionaire and then, and I'm willing to take the risk, then it's like it, I mean you should have started yesterday, you know what I mean? But my perspective is I would like to get my oxygen mask on personally and I was able to make, I've been able to take significantly bigger and bigger bets in my career because I don't. They're free swings. If I lose, my life changes to zero. And so in thinking about big life changes, what's been really helpful for me is what tactically changes about my life? Do I change what I eat? Do I change what I wear? Do I change where I live? Do I change the car I drive? And do these things matter? Does it change who I'm married to? If none of these things change, then almost none of these decisions are going to actually have a huge impact on my life. Which then makes the argument for like maybe I should take a higher risk adjusted return move. But I would say that from the emotional side rather than logical side, it was, I have tried, I very quickly tried to have a nest egg to be like I'm good. And that's what's allowed me to take really big bets like things like school. Schools.

[Travis]

Yeah. Likelihood that oxygen mass is a great way to. Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

Put that on if you're gonna be, if you want and if you have responsibilities too, if you're, if you're a parent and you've got kids and you've got mortgage and you want a certain lifestyle for them and certain schools that they, you know, that cost money, then you're also risking their futures to a degree. And so again it's your decision. But just know what you're putting at risk and how much is my life going to change if I lose. Keith Cunningham has a great frame on this, which is just what's my upside, what's my downside and can I live with my downside? If you can't live with the downside, don't take the bat.

[Alex]

You mentioned that the success and the habits are visible at the plateau, but not on the rise. And I agree with you, like you're not actually seeing the accurate picture of the up and coming entrepreneur, the future trillionaire as it's happening. But at the same time a lot of businesses increasingly need to do some form of social media on their way up. And the risk there is like sometimes companies Just get sucked into just being full media companies or the brand value and the cash flow from the media business outgrows whatever they were doing originally. What is the right balance? How should entrepreneurs think in the modern era? Like if you're starting a company consumer product in 2026, what's the right level of social media and, and actual owned content without it becoming like fake work?

[Alex Hormozi]

What do you mean by fake work?

[Alex]

Fake work would be like you're, you're growing your following account but you're not growing your cash flow or your actual.

[Travis]

Yeah, there's a generation of entrepreneurs and like you're probably a huge driver of this that are like, that are like I need to work, I need to like I need to build my personal brand. They don't realize that like if make an amazing product that millions of people benefit from, they just default get the personal brand and they could just. If you care about like attention and being on camera then you can just do that later. But maybe just make something amazing.

[Alex]

And also your personal brand is an actual media company that has cash flow and is like a successful.

[Travis]

Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be. You wouldn't. I don't think 0 like on camera if you weren't.

[Alex Hormozi]

No, I wouldn't. I hated it. Yeah, it was like it was very hard for me to decide to do this.

[Alex]

But there's a lot of people that are basically doing the media for, for the clout and they put it it's fake work because they're saying they're justifying the cloud chasing by saying oh it's marketing for my business.

[Alex Hormozi]

If what you do does not translate into the money that you make and money that you make is the goal, then you are doing work that is not effective. To the example you gave earlier. If you start a business and you get better at media and the media is making more money than your existing business, then maybe you're better at media than you were at your business and maybe that should be your business. And so I think constantly being flexible about reassessing what the market wants versus what you have. I think Bezos says this, but determined on goal, flexible on path or whatever way he says that. And he's also a great example of what's Bezos personal brand? Well, everyone knows who he is. Does he make a lot of content? No. Why? He just happens to own Amazon. Right. And so I think it depends on what sphere you want to get into. This is kind of interesting. If you were to say I want to be a big B2B influencer. You cannot be a big B2B influencer without evidence that you are good at business, period. You could take. And there's plenty of people who take word for word the stuff that I say, aren't there?

[Travis]

There's probably some good counter examples to that. We don't need it. We don't need to name that.

[Alex]

Yeah, you know, it's. It's tough. It's tough. Like, there's people that complain.

[Alex Hormozi]

I would say the biggest. The big. I think the biggest B2B influencer right now is Elon.

[Alex]

Oh, sure, sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

Right. And he also has the biggest business and is the richest man. Right. And so. And that. I think that just cascades all the way down. The only reason that. So, like, I was. I had a podcast that started in July of 2017. That's when I started. It's called Gym Secrets, and I rebranded it as Just the Game. But as I continue to make it, we went from, like, you know, 2,000 downloads a month to millions when I sold my company for 46.2 million. And then people were like, oh, this guy actually knows what he's talking about. And then the brand took off because I had evidence. And so I think that the amount of legitimacy that you need to be an influencer depends on the risk that the consumer has in taking action on the nature of the content that you're making. And so if I'm a beauty influencer, if I buy lipstick or I do a, you know, lash technique, I'm getting waters I'm not familiar with here. You paint your face in some way.

[Alex]

Right.

[Alex Hormozi]

The risk is relatively low right now. You move a little bit over here and you got like, personal finance. Well, it's like, who's the biggest there? Dave. And then there's. There's some of the new age ones. Erica Culver, she's got hurt, but she was also. And there's Vivian, too, I think. But, like, they have some credibility behind. And, like, there's tons. Like, if a teacher is in her basement talking about how you should invest in the S&P 500 and says exactly what Warren Buffett says, and maybe they even say it a little bit more compelling than the way that Warren Buffett says they won't be Warren Buffett because they just forgot to build Berkshire Hathaway.

[Alex]

Sure, sure, sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so it's like, the proof is the pudding. I think at least my perspective on media is the proof is the pudding. But it varies in terms of how much proof you need. Now, if you're ugly as shit. Very hard to be a beauty influencer.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

But if you can use. But if you are ugly and then you paint your face so well that you become hot, then you. Absolutely, yeah. Because you have evidence. Right. And you have a more dramatic performance.

[Travis]

No.

[Alex Hormozi]

100%. This is how it works. Yeah.

[Alex]

I like that talk about status seeking. It seems like in Silicon Valley there's often, you know, naval talks about this. Like there's value, just Silicon Valley. Yeah. Well that's what I want to know. In Silicon Valley there's a lot of trend chasing, there's a lot of status seeking and there's value in like doing low status activities. And I'm wondering in mid market entrepreneurship, small businesses, like what is the shape of that? Is it different than Silicon Valley? Is it less pronounced? More pronounced. Like what is the version of look, you just need to run a series of golf courses and be happy with that type of thing or whatever the equivalent is.

[Alex Hormozi]

I think it depends on who they compare themselves to. I think it just comes down to that. I think tech guys compare themselves to other tech guys and they want to from tech guys. And so they do the activities that tech guys approve of. If you're an H Vac guy, then it's going to be you're going to do the activities that H Vac people think are cool. If they're the peer group that you actually compare yourself to.

[Alex]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

Which they might not be. And to be fair, I love the

[Travis]

tech guys that sell their business for nine figures and then are like, I need a cash flowing lifestyle business asap.

[Alex Hormozi]

I know a lot of them a lot like a crazy amount like buying gas stations. Like it's a lot.

[Alex]

How bad is that bad?

[Alex Hormozi]

What do you mean?

[Alex]

Like, because I imagine it's a grass is greener on the other side thing where they enjoyed building their business, they sold it, they have all this cash, but they want cash flow. They want the stability of the cash flow. And so they want the idea of running a small business check every month. And they don't. Exactly. But they don't think about what it means to like at 2am Your gas station got robbed and you got to go down there and sort it out with the cops or something like that. And so I'm wondering about like, like what is the actual lesson there for someone who's like about to get over their skis?

[Travis]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

I think humans are inherently dissatisfied.

[Alex]

Okay.

[Alex Hormozi]

And I think whatever you have, you want what you don't have. And so if you're married, you're like Ah, life would be different if I'm single. If you're a parent, you're like, ah, can you remember when we didn't have kids? And when. If you don't have kids, you're like, I wish I had kids. If you're an employee, you're like, man, I wish I had an entrepreneur and somebody. You're an entrepreneur. You're like, man, it would be so nice to just show up and clock out at 5 and have to think about it and get a check. Like, we just always. We want to make. We want the benefits of a trade off without the negatives of the trade off.

[Alex]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so when guys are in the cash flow business, because that's who I talk to, the majority of the time is like, what they're thinking about all the time is like, it's hard to sell this business. I'm not really building my net worth. The multiples that I'm gonna get on this aren't gonna necessarily be that high. I'm dealing with people all day. I've deal with low skilled labor and I've got, you know, churn issues or finding techs that aren't gonna show up drunk on the job. Like, there's like my. One of my favorite quotes of all time. I'm gonna try not to cuss on this one, but my CFO was deep South Texas. When we were, when we were in Texas, when we were building Jim Launch, Suzanne Shiflett. Shout out to Suzanne. She was the reason we were able to sell at Jim Launch. She had been a CFO for four companies from 1 to 100 million plus, had done a $5 billion exit. And I think she'd been either buy side or sell side over 20 times. She was just like, she was just so weathered in a good way.

[Alex]

Right?

[Alex Hormozi]

And she said, you know what, Alex? She's like, it's all shit. She's like, it's all shit. Every business is shit. It's all shit. And I. And it was. But it was like she said it with so much sincerity because I was like, at the time, I was like, man, be cool if we got this kind of multiple blah, blah, blah, blah. And she was like, it just doesn't. It all sucks. And it's just different type of suck, but it all sucks.

[Travis]

Yeah, we're at time, but give us a pitch for scale or fail.

[Alex Hormozi]

If you like seeing entrepreneurs try their absolute hardest and have a completely new paradigm shift in 90 days to scale their business the most, then watch the show. I meet with them for an hour. Give them a whole blueprint of what I would do if I bought the business 100% today. And then they execute and they compete.

[Alex]

I love it.

[Travis]

Amazing. So reminds me of PMF or Die. We experimented with the show last year. Yeah. It was like we put this team in an apartment in New York. They were not allowed to leave for 90 days until. Or. Or until they build a million dollar ar. Business descended into chaos and Lord of.

[Alex]

Lord of the flights.

[Travis]

Totally crazy. And we were like, we don't have time to do this and this.

[Alex]

But it had. It had like hundreds of people watching at all times. It was actually gripping and it was

[Travis]

just stream of them in the apartment. Just like cooking.

[Alex]

Yeah. But one of them got really good at talking, to chat. It was a whole thing. It was sort of opened us up to.

[Travis]

Well, that was a good example because, like, one of them clearly was like a gifted content creator and the other one was like, why am I on camera?

[Alex]

This is terrible.

[Alex Hormozi]

Did he become a content creator?

[Travis]

We got to check in with him.

[Alex]

Yeah, we got to check in with him.

[Alex Hormozi]

But they're both very talented.

[Alex]

A little bit.

[Travis]

Yeah, they both needed to like, it was.

[Alex]

But yeah, so don't do the show live.

[Travis]

Then people will actually go.

[Alex]

Edit is a good dude. This is. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.