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- [00:00]
A
What do we really want to do? Like, what's the actual impact if at the end of our lives, we have something that is a shining beacon of a different way to do business? That to me, is something worth fighting for.
- [00:11]
B
What's on deck for today
- [00:15]
A
I am working on the book.
- [00:21]
B
You know what's gonna happen when everyone sees this moment, right?
- [00:24]
A
What?
- [00:24]
B
They're gonna be like, when's the book coming out?
- [00:26]
A
Yeah.
- [00:26]
B
What do you have to say?
- [00:28]
A
Oh, oh, I don't know. What is it?
- [00:33]
B
We can mention it. We could just, like, insert it casually in this vlog. That's a pretty big deal. Honestly, they just found out for the first time.
- [00:43]
A
That's right. I get some messages that are, like, offended. They're like, yo, what the. Where's the book? Like, I need some leads, bro. Give me your book real quick.
- [00:52]
B
This is really the first time we're kind of seeing you in the morning and you're not meditating, you're not journaling, you're not doing your red light sauna.
- [01:00]
A
I mean, I should normally I have like a three hour routine just so that I'm capable to function as a human being. I have a long affirmation routine that I do. There's a wall mirror over there that I just. That's where I just say them to myself. You're amazing. You're fantastic. People love you. Comments don't mean anything.
- [01:24]
B
Like, is it decaf? Is it a random.
- [01:25]
A
This is decaf.
- [01:27]
B
All decaf?
- [01:28]
A
Yeah.
- [01:29]
B
Wow. So you drink it just because you like the flavor?
- [01:33]
A
Actually, I drink whatever Leila usually drinks because it's easier for me to just be like two. If someone gets plastic surgery, right? Of any kind. The real real is that, like, either say nothing or be positive about it because they can't change it. Like, you wouldn't say that to somebody who didn't have their nose changed. But the. The feature is still permanent.
- [01:56]
C
I had one guy message me and he started commenting on all my posts and he was like, evil, horrible, all this. And then I like, looked in my inbox and he was like, messaging and he was like, we don't want what's best for us because if you really did, you would give us the name of your plastic surgeon.
- [02:12]
A
He's like, you want us all to be poor and ugly.
- [02:14]
C
That's literally what he said. He was like, you just don't want
- [02:15]
A
us to know the secret. There are days where, like, Leila would be not in as good of a mood and I would try and be like, hey, what can I Do like let me do these things. And she would still stay in kind of a bad mood. And so then what would happen is I would then get stern and be like, all right, do your own thing. And what would happen is that she would then step out of it as soon as I got mean. And so then what she taught me is that if I am mean, she will stop being in a bad mood
- [02:40]
C
in front of him.
- [02:41]
A
I will not be in a bad mood. Right. As soon as you start having punishment and reward as things in your, in your dialect and thinking what happens afterwards. Kids cry, parent gives them a cookie and you now teach them to cry, to get cookies. Like it's just like so simple. And the other piece is if you reward too long afterwards, you still teach them something, but not what you intended. A parent, for example, fast forward has a teenager who sneaks out of the house, right? And then they come back in the middle of the night. And then as soon as they walk in the door, they punish them. And so what happens? You punish a kid for coming home and then they're surprised the kid doesn't come home.
- [03:21]
B
What's your day looking like? What's on the agenda?
- [03:24]
A
Leadership meeting, pipeline review, book meeting. I have a bi weekly with two of our teammates that I try and do with some of the non executive team. And you do that every day.
- [03:36]
B
You try and block up until like noon or one.
- [03:39]
A
Yeah. And then Layla's been doing such a good job though that there are more days where I just have nothing on my calendar at all, which is awesome and amazing.
- [03:49]
B
Why do you like having nothing on your calendar?
- [03:52]
A
I just, I just have more time to work. Farewell, farewell, my love. Sweet queen. Little guy, for a guy. You want a little. You want a little guy. Where to start the day? You can see my little, my little workstation. I've got my iPad, which is where I draw my stuff. I've got earplugs, I've got my Nicorag, my work timer going. So I actually don't use it all the time. It's more during the week because people ping me. I'll just set my timer for really how long I think something's gonna take and then I'll hit it. I just keep it right like in plain sight and that works really well. So interesting combo is if you go headphones, earmuffs, nicotine, caffeine and like work and a timer. I've yet to find like a better combination of productivity use if useful.
- [04:48]
C
I really realized I would love to do with acquisition.com is be able to build acquisition.com to whatever, a billion, 10 billion, leading with praise, not punishment. If we could really do this and then teach other CEOs how to do this, that's something worthwhile doing. And it's not like anybody else. But on the same side, we have our mission, which is to make real business education available to everybody. There's often two visions in a company. There's the internal vision, which is much more relevant to the team and the employees and the vendors and everyone that you touch and even the customers. And then there's the external vision, which is like, how are we affecting the greater community that is affected by acquisition.com and I think that we actually really have two.
- [05:32]
A
As we've clarified this conversation, it's been an ongoing dialogue between Layla and I of like, what do we really want to do? Like, what's the actual impact? At the end of our lives, we have something that is a shining beacon of a different way to do business that is more profitable by building something bigger and better. But do it our way, which is praise over punishment. That, to me, is something worth fighting for. It just takes more skill. Because when someone messes up, all you want to do is punish them. How can I not do that and then get the desired result? We will define somebody who is motivated by reward or reinforcement as someone who is. Who utilizes all of their discretionary effort. So if there's the level of effort that is required to not get fired, and then all the effort above that is discretionary effort. In a business that is based on punishment, people will go to the law of least effort, which is as little as they can do to not get fired. So if you have a business that's based on that, then how do you get higher performance? Well, look at McKinsey, look at Goldman Sachs. They'll get a lot of the PE industry. You raise the bar, and so what happens is you get really high. Performers are the only ones who can perform in that. In that place. And they are driven by anxiety, they're stressed out of their minds, they drink, they do drugs, they get hooked on porn, whatever. It is right to deal with the stressors in their life, but you just move the bar. And so the alternative is a world where everybody is working even harder than that, because the law of least effort, there's still people that are so talented that they can work medium and not get fired. But you lose out on all of the discretionary effort that they would be putting in if they felt that they were being reinforced in a safe place. And so that's the kind of environment that we're trying to build. I'm not saying we're perfect. We will mess up, but that's. That's, I think, something that's worth fighting for.
- [07:14]
C
I really think that we have a shot at, like, fully embodying these principles that could change so many people's lives.
- [07:21]
A
So, fun story. One of our teammates went to an event and was rocking an acquisition.com trip. Now, they're not for sale, obviously, and many people came up to him, asking to take pictures with him, invited him out for drinks, invited him out for food to portions of the event he wasn't allowed to go into, but he was able to because he was wearing that shirt. So how does that happen? They read a book that gives them value, they're reinforced and rewarded for that thing. And then when they do the stuff from the book, they associate the rewards they get from that with the book. The book they associate with me. And then they see me in all the videos and all the content with this thing. And so eventually you remove me and you just keep the thing, and you associate that thing with all these good feelings, all this reward. And so then someone else wears the shirt, and then they feel the same way towards that person simply because they have associated so many good things with that. And that is branding. And yes, let's switch the pipeline that would allow us to do that kind of vision of the 49 or 51 for new companies, just adding them straight to kind of like our top line, bottom line, that would be a huge move.
- [08:33]
B
What was that? What was that meeting that we were just in?
- [08:36]
A
So this is our pipeline review. So it's looking at companies at different stages in the deal process. And, you know, mind you, of people who even get to this level, 95% of deals, we don't do, it's just because we're looking for a lot of very specific things. And it's not just necessarily, like, is the company valuable? But, like, can we add value to the company? Fundamentally, there's two schools of investing. There's betters and builders. So betters are like, can I find a mispriced company that I will simply put money in at less than its intrinsic value and then hope that it will grow over time? That's kind of like the Warren Buffett style. Probably the vast majority of investors are that way. And then there are builders who have, like, a unique set of skills in their hold code that they try to try and templatize those kind of like, sops. Those playbooks and just deploy them into the companies knowing that they're going to triple 5x 10x the companies that they have. Private equity is usually a combination of both those things. I would say that we lean towards the building side of like, we're not trying to be like amazing pickers. We just try and find companies that we know our playbooks will immediately 10x and then try and work with them. Who's texting? My wife. Gosh, I'm pumped. Because in the, in the new place, I will be able to fit my entire wardrobe in my bedside table. Oh yeah, we'll show Layla's entire closet and then I will pull out my two drawers with beaters and shorts. It'll be great.
- [09:53]
B
Why are you so obsessive about that stuff?
- [09:56]
A
Well, I will say this. I don't know why I know that I am. I have become more that way because it's probably been reinforced. The more obsessive I am about like iterating things until they're like just right, the more rewarded I get. Trevor was saying that like he's alarmed by the number of people that he has worked with who do not read. Well, he said we need to teach them to read. He got a kid who was struggling to stay focused and so he came to train the kid with a bag of Skittles. The kid would read three words and he would give him a skittle. But if he read four words because if his previous best was three, he would give him two Skittles. So he reinforced him doing it every time he had a bigger reinforcement for when every time he hit a new record. So if he read a full line, he would give him more. By the end of the first session, he had them reading entire pages. Hello. Hey, what are you talking to? So we're doing this whole vlog thing. So we're capturing day in the life, the very, you know, the high energy life of a CEO who lives in a closet. Yeah, I mean, like, I don't see an issue with translating into more languages. Like that doesn't bother me. Then we just have more people who get the book. Can they do Mandarin or Japanese or Portuguese? Portuguese would be big. German, I got a lot of DMs after I showed the French one. So that was a meeting with my book manager, who also happens to be my father in law. So we have massively improved our relationship since the first time I stole his daughter, told her to quit everything to join me to gallivant across the country living in motels. Six weeks after we Met. But yeah, he runs everything with the book. So we have a French and a Spanish version out and then looking at other languages that we want to translate it into and looking at publishing and printing firms in Germany and Italy. So that's kind of what that, that meeting was about. We got different versions of the books as they progressed over time from different printers that I could see the print quality. Just so you guys know, I don't go to one printer. I go to a bunch of them and make sure that the book quality is good. And if you're like, well, why are you even dealing with this rather than going to a publisher? Because publishers don't want you to give away your book for free. And so I, you know, Uncle Alex foots the bill, I'll have probably a million. I'll add it up probably like a million two into this book. Negative. I mean, that's why most publishing companies will front the money. And I would have done that with this book, just so you guys know. Except if I had done it with this book, it wouldn't be out until spring of 24. Like, it has to be 100% done nine months before you actually get it. I finished this and then I'm releasing it 16 weeks after it was done. And that's because 12 weeks is printing. If I wanted to just do like drop ship real time printing and then wanted everyone to wait forever, I would do it that way. But it's also way more expensive to print that way. And, you know, the books fund Mosey Media, which is really. So you guys know, where did the dollars go from the, from my $2.99 books that I get a dollar from. It goes to, goes to the team so we can put out more stuff for you guys. Tobias, what's up, man? Tell me your most painful moment.
- [13:00]
B
If you don't mind me asking. What's yours?
- [13:02]
A
Painful stuff. I mean, like cutting my eyeball. That sucked. I took sales call still. So, yeah, there you go.
- [13:10]
B
Yeah, fair play. I want to get your opinion on fixing the sales issue.
- [13:14]
A
Here's what's crazy is that if the other guy gets up to 40, it doubles sales. I think that if I had a two prong approach, get a salesman in there and then double the throughput. On the webinar, I'd say, like, that's a 4x if you double, double.
- [13:25]
B
Sometimes people ask, why don't you make videos like you used to?
- [13:29]
A
Why, why the change?
- [13:30]
B
Why all the editing, the new thumbnails, all that?
- [13:35]
A
More people see it. I mean, it's just that we see the comments. This actually reminds me of a story that you told me. But like whenever a band goes from like a small town to like they go, they go bigger audience, they go more mass market. People are like the band selling out or whatever it is. But the reality is that like the band morphs into the thing that reaches the most people. And so if you believe in the message that you have, then packaging it in a way that allows the most people to consume it. If you believe in what you want to get out there, as long as it doesn't dilute the core message, which I don't think us editing more heavily and having higher produced videos does, just gets more people to see it. And so here's the thing is that everyone in Mosey Nation votes with their clicks and their eyeballs about the things they find most interesting. And so you train me to make the content that I have. So if y' all in general like the webcam only thing more then I would be making more of that. But you train me with your clicks and your watches of the things that you care the most about. And so we make more of those things. So in many ways you guys control the content. And to all the day one homies appreciate y'. All. Many of you guys were like at 5k, we're like, dude, this guy's gonna be in a million. And it's true, we got there. But it was just because you guys appreciate you guys sharing, commenting, send it to your friends, all that kind of stuff. I feel really confident in saying that like in two years you will laugh at what we are putting out right now. I know I certainly will. There are some things that are gonna get released that are going to blow what we are doing out of the water. We like to say we think in decades, not days. But I think you can just watch and see if we're full of it or not.