The Wisdom Wall

“So your brain books the fantasy as like a partial payment on the real thing. And it actually gives you the reward before you've done the work. So the drive to do the actual work drains out of you. Fascinating. So in other words, manifestation is actually anesthesia, not fuel.”

“The problem with that is the minute you take capital from a traditional investment fund, you are on this, like, rat race where everyone is chasing growth and these, you know, whatever the hot metric of the month is.”

“in the early days, why would you go to a middleman, like a venture firm, whose value add is to connect you to somebody else, who by the way, then still doesn't have any interest in actually helping you, right? Versus going directly to these companies that you want to sell to anyways. And having them partner with you.”

“once you grow and you get to a certain size, you need experts. That's the biggest bunch of bullshit ever. I mean, literally like the number of people that I brought in to Tom's later, like once we were like a couple hundred million dollar business that quote had like big company expertise did not help. If anything, it,…”

“If you're not going to offend anybody, you're not going to have any impact.”

“because of how these AI tutor works. It's not about IQ. It's literally about effort. Wow. And we show them if you, if with this tutor put in the right way in the, in the system, they all can do it. And it literally will calculate for them. It's this many hours of time. For you to get to top one percent.”

“for sure in, you know, K through eight, the K through eight curriculum, you know, if you take 95% of America, they could all be top one percent, that there's just nothing intellectually challenging enough. If done with a mastery-based education, with an individualized tutor, that they couldn't get to top one percent,…”

“the reason is nonprofit means non-scalable. Like if I have a set of donations, right. And I build the world's best product, the better the product, the faster my money goes away. And now I'm done, right?”

“Alzheimer's, cardiovascular disease, Diabetes, obesity, that these are all symptoms of unhealthy skeletal muscle”

“GPT, ChatGPT, Cod, all of them, are simply machines that are trained to regurgitate all the materials they've read online, right? They're amazing machines, they can do programming, all that stuff, but they are a function of their data. You know, like you say, garbage in, garbage out. If you get a garbage, it's gonna…”

“The extreme binary View of the world I always articulate is that there are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world. There are businesses that are perfectly competitive, and there are businesses that are monopolies.”

“Nobody is ever authentic. It's a myth. It's bullshit, in fact, and it kind of is annoying because to be a human being is to be social and is to wear a mask, is to be an actor.”

“the ultimate arbitrage in our economy is fossil fuels, but the second of that is finding young, super hardworking, super talented people who are better with technology and And paying them 30% of what you're paying Bob, who's a forty-year-old, and they do 90, they add 90% of the value.”

“I've always said in relationship, like, if you're gonna rob me of solitude, you owe me companionship. If I'm gonna trade having sex with lots of women For having sex with you regularly. Then that's the deal. Like that's the economy that we've agreed to.”

“Instead of waiting till the product is done a hundred percent, wait until it's done 20% and call a paying customer.”

“I mean, a two to 3000 hour car, three to 4000 hour car that also puts you in a bad financial position. Cause it's not pre pandemic times where you could get a beater. Like that now your new beater that's going to be reliable for a while is like, 10 K.”

“One of my rules is never justify your price. So when they say, why does it cost so much, Chris? Because it costs that much for me to do it. I'm not saying you can't get it done for less, because I'm sure you can, but not for me. You have a right, and I encourage you to explore those options, and if you feel like…”

“Because for them to, for me to be proud, it means there's times when I'm not proud. I'm always proud. I'm proud when you exist. That's all that needs to happen. You, you get You get, um, love, appreciation, and joy just because you exist in this world. I bet you're proud of what you did. Okay, so I'm not really into…”

“And what I realized is like erring on the side of firing too quickly is actually so rare. And so we have such like an emotional reaction to it. Oh, it's unfair, but actually 99.9% of organizations on the planet are erring on the side of firing too slowly.”

“I'd rather pay to get two of something because I find when I force people to collaborate too soon, they gridlock and argue about priorities, and what I actually get is nothing. And so I'd rather pay for two Then get zero, and if we're so lucky as to get two working things, that's a first-class problem we'll deal with…”

“the problem with the question Uh, tell me the hardest thing you've done is that the person we're most interested in wouldn't be able to answer that question because they wouldn't have perceived it as hard.”

“it's pretty much the same process when you're raising a hundred million dollar check. Um, if anything, it might actually be easier. Yeah. Um, because you're talking to folks at that scale, this is what they do institutionally.”

“he talks about how, um, you know, you'll never get rich renting your time. And I actually don't agree with that. I mean, mathematically it's not true. Like Sheryl Sandberg, quite rich. Always been an employee.”

“If you use AI as your therapist or your lover or your friend, It will leave you feeling empty, depressed, and anxious. That's the bottom line.”

“Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me.”

“with AI and automation, it's not eighty-twenty anymore. It's ninety-nine-one, which is like the right decision at the right time Will always outperform effort alone, and the one percent of things you choose to work on will now drive 99% of your results.”

“Passion comes from artistry, mastery, and economic security.”

“I describe business school for the elite and the aimless. Ooh. You're good at what you do, you're smart, you want to make money, you're disciplined, but you have no idea what you want to do. We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications, but if you were really good and knew what you wanted to do,…”

“women are generally attracted to men for three reasons. The third is kindness. They want someone who's going to be a long-term partner. The second is intellect. Um, if you're funny, really lean into it because the fastest way to communicate intellect and men who make good decisions, women are attracted to them because…”

“The ultimate arbitrage in our economy is fossil fuels, but the second of that is finding young, super hardworking, super talented people who are better with technology, and paying them 30% of what you're paying Bob, who's a 40 year old, and they do 90, they add 90% of the value.”

“And we've seen Incredible businesses built by great founders who have pivoted a 180 degrees from the original idea. Um, Discord's that way, for example. And, um, and, you know, Slack was famously that way. So the, the, the, the person matters more than the concept.”

“You know, a series A quickly becomes a series B quickly becomes a series C. And before you know it, the founder's equity is down around 10% or lower. And you know, if you can self fund your business, you know, you can exit at 30 to fifty million dollars and make lifetime wealth. But if you start down this path and get…”

“You don't have the steering wheel, and your ability to influence is limited, um, and so, You do everything you can to earn the respect of the founder, and, and respect is a different word than affection, I think, and it's hard. Like, it's super hard, and the great ones have figured out how to do it. Um, and by the way,…”

“You will never meet someone who is just an uneducated country bumpkin who can do open heart surgery better than a Harvard cardiologist. That will never happen. It's impossible. But not only does it happen with money, it happens pretty often. Where ordinary people with good behavior outperform extremely educated people…”

“for a lot of people, there is a net worth at which not only do you stop getting happier, but your life gets more complicated, and you start dealing with like big existential questions of who am I and what do I do with this, and it becomes a social liability. There's a level at which your friends and your family are…”

“if you could just cut me off or cut somebody off based on who they voted for, you never really liked that person.”

“In a man's world, the more you solve problems, the more you move up the hierarchy of being a man. In a woman's world, no, you share your problems so you can connect and feel for the person, right? And you want to stay with it, and so forth. So what happens with that is it's actually good for a feeling of support, but…”

“The system is shaping you every day that you are in it. And you are internalizing its values and its, uh, personality and its identity. And the idea that, like, yeah, that you're gonna go along to get along for 40 years and then be a visionary, rule-breaking leader is extremely unlikely.”

“confidence isn't about believing you're gonna achieve success. It, it's a comfort with failure. It's knowing that you're gonna be okay if it doesn't turn out okay. Like, that's actually what makes you confident in a situation.”

“An advance is a loan for your ego. With shitty math.”

“you must sever your audio rights on every single book you do. An audio book is like having the world's single best rental property at a beach town. And there's no cost because it's one digital file and it will be around in perpetuity.”

“You're going to look at the spreadsheet. And you're going to say that cell doesn't work. So the spreadsheet doesn't foot, right? It doesn't work. So I'm not going to do this idea, right? Cause you're just looking at it and analyzing it. I'm like an entrepreneur looks at that cell and says, I will change that cell. I…”

“The number one motivator and the name of our product is time back. Give kids their time back. There is nothing, more than money, more than anything, time back is the biggest motivator.”

“You just branding wise, you have to own the high end in education, right? You can't, you, you want to start at the high end. You want to be the Ivy league, right?”

“I actually believe MVPs are not the right way to sell. So an MVP is a minimum viable product. I think that's too far advanced. We do a technique we call sell the tell.”

“your clients want you to be profitable. In fact, it's the number one customer, the number one person in your life that wants to be profitable is not you, it's actually your customer, and we don't believe that.”

“if you're a creator today and you're not thinking about acquiring businesses and how to get equity and what's called distributing equity, where they keep paying you over time, you're making a huge mistake. If you are only living off of AdSense and you are only living off even info products or education or anything like…”

“So if you're like, it's hard being a woman, nobody wants to give me respect as much as they do men, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You make yourself a victim. Then you get treated like one. If you act like prey, you get preyed upon.”

“Because parents don't realize if you're paying for your kid when they're a grown adult, you're telling your kid you don't believe in them. Through your actions, not your words. They know they're a loser. Yeah. That shit hurts. You know?”

“Do you know what imposter syndrome is? It's called insecurity. We've just given it makeup. Nobody's like, yo, I'm insecure. Nobody says that code, but so many people are like, man, I have imposter syndrome. Makeup. Got it? The definition, literally the definition of imposter syndrome is slang for I'm deeply insecure.”

“when we're doing important shit, I tell the team, I have to be involved in the first 10%, because I'm molding it. Then I disappear. And then you need to come back to me to close it. I open and close. The middle's the problem. And winners, and people aspiring to build big things, spend way too much time in the middle.”

“Winning and losing is incredibly imperative to the human race. Nothing is good out of balance. Of course, people are like, Gary, winning and losing, like, is it ok to, like, hurt people to win? No, no, it's not ok. But is it okay to completely eliminate merit and competitiveness and winning and losing? No, no. That…”

“technology, even if it's immediately available, takes a long time to like propagate. In other words, you could stop right now. Google just did its big announcement, like stop, pause, you know, nothing else. And we would have, A few decades of like very profitable, meaning like good uses of technology to just harvest,…”

“UBI Crucially separates, like, untethers one's contribution from one's reward. And I don't mean this in a kind of moralistic way, like we need contributors. I think we do need contributors, but I mean that the price mechanism in markets is the thing that tells us what is worth figuring out about, what people value,…”

“AI will not be a good central planner. Fundamental epistemological reasons why it will not be a good central planner. Same reasons that were surfaced by Ludwig von Mises in the 19 twenties, enhanced by Hayek decades later, um, same wall.”

“And so you absolutely have to be dangerous, never toward your family, but on behalf of them.”

“the barbarians are kept in check by the good people that are willing to use physical violence in order to maintain order.”

“Ego, politics, playing, you know, making other people look good. That is 90% of the game, especially when you're starting out.”

“We want to be led. We actually want to be deceived. We want illusion. We want fantasy. We want pleasure, and so you want to be the person that's supplying that fantasy, that's giving people that pleasure, because if you do, it gives you a lot of power, right?”

“I will get one out of every four hires wrong. And if you work with that constraint, you can be smart about it. So wherever possible, I love to have people contract or do something for a couple of months, because you can always tell after you start working with someone, if they're going to be good. In fact, I almost…”

“So there's five things you can do with money. Okay. This is a very much a Cody Sanchez, uh, part of the conversation, isn't it? Number one, you can buy stuff, right? We've already talked about that. Number two, you can buy experiences. Number three, you can buy time. Number four, you can give it away, and number five,…”

“So when you can decouple those, Then actually you give yourself the ability to influence people in a way nobody else can.”

“No, I don't think it's ever necessary. I'm very much against it.”

“your response to my tone of voice is a neurochemical response, which means it's not a choice. And if it's, if I can trigger neurochemicals in your brain, then you can't stop me from triggering them. Now you can fight them. But I can initiate the process, which then is why curiosity is impossible to resist, because my…”

“there actually are defense chemicals in vegetables, and some of these can be detoxified when we cook them or when we ferment them, but not all of them, and a lot of people with autoimmune conditions do feel better when they eliminate some or all vegetables.”

“It's not that great, period. If you're, you know, especially when you're hitting your late thirties and early forties, it is just not a good idea because of our hormones. Our hormones are much different than a man's hormones and that can wreak havoc. Um, in our hormonal system.”

“Government, when an economy goes above sort of 30, 32% of spending is the government, it just becomes very inefficient.”

“I describe business school for the elite and the aimless. You're good at what you do, you're smart, you want to make money, you're disciplined, but you have no idea what you want to do. We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications, but if you were really good and knew what you wanted to do, you…”

“A hard truth is if you don't like your bank account, Your bank account is a reflection of how valuable you are currently in your skill set.”

“Recessions are actually good to have every once in a while. Um, they clean out a lot of nonsense. You know, what happens is there's, there's a lot of resources being used for things that are not productive in the economy, and you need a sensor mechanism. You need certain things to go bankrupt.”

“What happens when your guys go out of power and the other guys come into power? Then you just play a game of going after one another. It's why we shouldn't Arrest former presidents for political reasons.”

“The last one is the one you want to watch out for, which is a victim self-narrative. A victim self-narrative starts like the hero. Challenges, mistakes, problems that they couldn't overcome. That no matter how hard they worked, They weren't able to change anything. They typically are the ones who feel they have very…”

“And then they show us how a crowd of peaceful demonstrators, numbering anywhere from 50 to 2000, Can be turned into a raging violent mob by six instigators. Only six instigators to turn a peaceful crowd of a thousand into a raging violent mob.”

“If you're not eating processed foods, you don't have to give a shit about seed oil.”

“You implement term limits, the power, the, the money and the attention shifts from the special interest away from the elected politician and towards the unelected chiefs of staff, professional committee staff members, those who stay on regardless of who the elected official becomes.”

“Like, if you're not capable of hurting somebody and you don't hurt somebody, that doesn't mean you're good. It just means you're useless. But if I'm able to take your face off, but I choose to be kind and gracious and giving and selfless to you, now I'm good.”

“I think if you are young, Hungry, and you want to make big moves, and make a bunch of money, you should not take a remote job. You want to be in the office.”

“the data shows us that women are the, have the purchasing power in the household. Like if you are Amazon or Walmart, you actually want to get to the female. Because she's typically the one doing a lot of the household spending. But the one with the understanding of the full financial picture is typically the man.”

“If you have an 80% close rate, you are way too underpriced in your business. If you have a 60% close rate, You're too underpriced in your business. If you have a 45 to 30% close rate, you're probably sitting just about right with your business pricing. And that's if you have a normal sales team, not even a good one.”

“And I, I want to always be slightly uncomfortable, and I want the client to be uncomfortable with accepting the price. I don't want them to say yes easily. I want them to be a little bit concerned, consternated about it a little bit, and just like, ooh, it's a lot, but you know what? You're worth it.”

“Also, by the way, way easier to sell fewer people more expensive things than it is to sell a ton of people something really cheap.”

“Never, ever imitate. Don't let your sales people talk you into it. Don't let your friends talk you into it. Don't do it. Go premium. Premium is always easier.”

“The market rate is the average of everybody else's fear. It's basically like I mean, most people are broke. Most business owners don't make any money. Why, dear God, would you price off of what most people do?”

“If the line's out the door, that's a clear sign of, in some ways, a pricing error, unless you have high volume, high speed sales.”

“Your floor is double what you charge today because anything less than double isn't worth the sweat.”

“Part of being a founder is adaptability. You have to be able to adapt. You can have a clear goal, but if you need to shift things to actually, like, be able to make a return to your investors, to be able to actually, you know, hire more people or really produce something successful, the plan from day one is not going…”

“That the first impulse is the real you, and it's not. The first impulse is your defensive mechanism that you learned probably when you were a child.”

“Because most owners don't have their business fail because of not enough cash flow or because they can't generate enough profit. It's because they give up. And this problem has nothing to do with talent. It's really that you're too tired to keep going this way.”

“marriage is a symbol. That's all it is. It's a symbol. We've decided we're gonna create this legal connection or spiritual connection that's gonna symbolize this way of keeping the relationship safe. It's an illusion. It's not real.”

“The thing that's interesting to me, and I've, I've, I've talked about before, and I talk about my book, is the question when people are confronted about adultery. Because the man's first question is, did you have sex with him? And the woman's first question is, do you love her?”

“that first 1,000,010 million are much harder than the hundred million to a billion.”

“I could tell the good operators by the status of their cleaning vans. And so you open up the doors, and if it's a mess, I know that guy's not going to be on time, they're not going to hit their quota, and they're definitely never going to be in management.”

“the number one quality to me is I would rather have somebody That's an eight in intelligence and a 10 in work ethic than a 10 in intelligence and an eight in work ethic.”

“Chefs generally make poor business people. Doctors are very poor business people, right? And a lot of time lawyers don't translate into being operators. Like that's just a, something I've noticed.”

“A junior person is not going to suggest an idea in your company. If you walk by the hall and I'll walk into his office, like, what are you working on? And like, well, we have this crazy idea. They're not going to call my assistant, make an appointment to do a phone call with me to tell me that idea.”

“Never quit at the hard part. Either quit before you start, Or quit after the hard part, but see that the hard part is coming, right?”

“Because everyone who makes a decision is correct based on who they are, what they believe, what they want, and what they heard from you. Every single time they are correct. And if you want a different answer, you need to tell a different story and create different conditions for that to happen.”

“High school is where we got indoctrinated. Indoctrinated to go get a job at a famous company. Indoctrinated to do what the boss says. Indoctrinated to say, will this be on the test? Over and over and over again, the hierarchies, the status, the affiliation, it's about high school.”

“And then, when it's time for the business to be managed, you should probably sell it.”

“If you want the prizes that come from that, you have to pay the price that comes from that. So in your case, there's an alignment. There are a few people who when you like it, they like it. And that's great, but if you want to be Oprah, you can't do that. Because Oprah has to do things that large numbers of people are…”

“That's what the internet's for. It's a terrible mass medium. It's a very good micromedium.”

“No one has writer's block. Writer's block is a myth. You don't get talker's block. So write down what you say. You're done. You wrote.”

“Most people do not get rich through a salary. Pause. They get rich because their skills were so good somebody wanted them to own.”

“I've learned that great employees want clarity. Great friends and partners want clarity. Weak ones want comfort. And I don't want you to confuse the two.”

“the standard management advice of like how you're supposed to give feedback, which is called the sandwich, which is praise, criticism, praise, trains employees to distrust, to distrust, praise and dread criticism.”

“Urgency gets you out of poverty. Patience gets you to wealth is what I had to learn.”

“Biggest lesson I've learned is great salespeople solve problems and sell value. Bad salespeople sell product or something tangible. So I've also learned great salespeople never ask for an order. They make the client believe it is the right solution for them.”

“Inevitably to be a great leader, you have to be great with people up to a point, and then you have to have that level where you don't care. I don't care if you agree with me. I don't care if you like me. I don't care what you think about me, but I need you to follow me.”

“when people say, our business is like a family. We're like a big family here. I'm like, that's such bullshit. Cause there are things I would do for my kids and things I would put up with from my wife and my kids that if you worked for me, I would fire you tomorrow. We are not a family. We're a team of people that…”

“people hear about building agents, like, oh, I gotta build an agent. For most people, that's a distraction. I really think of AI adoption like dominoes. If you stand them up and line them up correctly, How do you knock them all down? You just tap the first one. Agentic AI is like the 18th domino.”

“If you study technology shifts throughout history, It didn't take jobs. Remember, a job is just skills you apply and processes you follow. What it did is it made the value of certain skills and processes skyrocket in value and the value of certain skills and processes plummet in value.”

“the creativity is not your ability to create the draft. Your creativity is the ability to cast the vision for where you want to go, to be descriptive with AI on the types of things you're looking for, to be creative in terms of the roles that you pull in, or the type of tasks that you wanted to do.”

“So I would say look rich more than be rich, but even more than look rich is just to have the lifestyle in their own life of like convenience. They'd rather have that more than anything, especially in America.”

“I'm not pro infinite student loan debt forever because every time we raise the gap on student loans, the cost of college goes up. It is an infinite cycle there.”

“If we have an entire generation of angry, non-motivated, uh, left out of society young men, it doesn't end well for any society. That's usually the case for revolt.”

“Stranger gives advice on life they don't have to live with no repercussions for actions. Not a great incentive alignment.”

“Walking the factory floor often is you choosing when to get information. Letting the factory floor come to you is information attacking you all day, every day, forever, and having no prioritization.”

“Everybody thinks you're being underpaid, and it's not always true. Right, so I just want to put that out there, and what we do is we're contextual learners, so when you hear Sally's making more money than you, you don't consider Sally's more experienced, shows up on time, does extra things, Is more experienced. Went to…”

“When you charge more, you could deliver a better client experience. You can go the extra mile. You don't have to nickel and dime them because they are like, oh, make it a little bit bigger, or can we try another option? You could be thrilled to do that.”

“I, I want to always be slightly uncomfortable, and I want the client to be uncomfortable with accepting the price. I don't want them to say yes easily. I want them to be a little bit concerned, consternate about it a little bit, and just like, ooh, it's a lot, but you know what? You're worth it.”

“First of all, when somebody says to you, I don't know what my budget is, you tell me, you are the professional, they might say it in a more condescending way, it's a lie. It's a very easy way to figure this thing out. Because though they might not know the number, they know how much is too much.”

“the only reason anybody, anybody buys anything is exclusivity, timeliness, scarcity, uh, relevance. And he's like, if you can figure out a way to wrap all four of those around whatever you do, you'll be able to sell more and more frequently, um, and with less struggle.”

“Most of us will lie to ourselves and say, well, I buy Nikes or Adidas because they're a better shoe. That's a bunch of BS. You buy it because your story is involved with theirs.”

“being eco-conscious is a luxury of the people who have means.”

“This is why I think people make it hard to buy their products, hard to take care of, because Like, we need some challenges in our life, and we feel like we have to work for it, it's worth more.”

“the most successful people I know have nothing in fucking common about how they run their days. Like, Almost nothing. Some of them drink a lot, some of them drink zero, some of them get up early, some of them stay up late, like, almost no similarities. But they all did aspire to do something really, really big or…”

“I think a troll is someone who actually wants to like your content, But for some reason, their self story is challenged because you're saying something that would wreck their world.”

“He says, if you're not adding back 10% of what you removed, you're not removing enough.”

“So, you know, if they were a Green Beret or a nuclear sub operator or, you know, investment banking or, you know, worked at McKinsey on their acquisitions team, I just know they're going to be able to handle a lot. And if they've really only worked in corporate jobs, or especially if they've only ever freelanced, I…”

“Reject the trilemma because speed lowers cost, and so if you hold the quality bar and just move faster, you should be able to lower costs.”

“what Elon does, which is so He has a knack for it, but anyone can do it in the proper context is have empathy at the level of the mission, not empathy at the level of the individual.”

“You know, the rule of thumb in startups is like you, you're a different organization every time you triple in headcount. Or roughly an order of magnitude, right? And so, what he says is like, what looks like a three-year churn is actually a full tour of duty. It just, at another company, it would take 10 years to do…”

“The algorithm is five steps, and the order is very important. So the first step is to question every requirement. Um, he says, no matter how many requirements there are, question them, eliminate as many as you can. Every existing requirement must have an individual human being's name attached to it. Um, the more…”

“Entrepreneurs do not take risk. They do everything in their power to minimize risk.”

“It is very difficult for any company to get even one dollar from you. Very difficult. So the products and services that you're already using means that those are incredible businesses. And then look at, can multiple versions of that exist?”

“I think there's some ego and I see it a lot in our, in our leadership teams where they want to figure out an innovative way to do it. And I'm like, why would you, you have no context. You haven't wanted this before. You haven't done it before. So why would you With no data, no context, and no history of winning, just…”

“I think that if someone followed Buffett's approach to investing, they would do better than the 98%.”

“when you find yourself In the happy position of partial ownership of a great business, don't sell it when it's fully priced. Don't sell it when it's overpriced. Only possibly sell it when it's egregiously overpriced. Like, you can't justify it in any possible way. Then you can look at it.”

“Another stupid thing I did, which is a company like Goldman Sachs should never be sold.”

“The rational buyer can only be met With emotional responses.”

“Betrayal is the number one. Any sort of, and to some degree that's the letting me down where you promise something, like I'm counting on something and then it doesn't show up and it makes me look bad. Anything that hits people's ego or identity is actually more than raw performance. If you lose me money, I'm upset, but…”

“when you go out and you raise billions of dollars, like, one, or some, some people raise billions of dollars, but millions of dollars, one, like, that company isn't yours anymore. Like, you have to deal with, like, you know this, having a board of directors, that's like fucking Game of Thrones.”

“for them, like, a Forex return, they're like, why are you wasting our time? Like, they need that 102 hundred X return.”

“my job as a CEO, and people may not like this answer, but my job as a CEO is to make sure that this company goes on for the next 1015, 20, a hundred years, and to drive shareholder value. Take the emotions out of it. Right? That's gonna hurt some feelings, but my job, why they hired me, is to make sure that this…”

“you got to be even more aggressive about your goals. You have to be more on top of people's performance, like performance management, setting aggressive goals, making sure that people are actually locked in, like is really, really important because I've learned personally that if you don't give people enough work and…”

“If you spent more than two weeks planning without doing one thing that touches a real human with a real ask that is uncomfortable, you're building an idea instead of a business.”

“In an academic context, there are real costs to being in the bottom third of your class. There's a huge amount of research that just says, when you're in the bottom third, or the bottom quarter, whatever, it's psychologically Quite debilitating. And if you're not a strong student to begin with, you're compromising your…”

“There is some intriguing evidence that, um, if you're an employer and you're hiring, You're better off choosing people who are at the top of their class regardless of where that class was situated, right? In other words, paying more attention to class rank than you do to the prestige of the institution.”

“What you want is someone who's one step ahead of you. So you can actually kind of grow with your mentor, right? Um, and they're much, they, they have just been through what you are about to go through. So their advice is actually current and useful.”

“Now the reason to go into work is different. Now the reason to go into work is to allow others to have the same opportunity that I had, right? But, but if I had to work remotely for the rest of my career, would I be fine? I'd be totally fine. It just doesn't make any difference.”

“if you're interested in getting better, you cannot have a thin skin. So, If you want to have a, if you want to continue on with your thin skin, then you have to give up on the notion of being, of getting better. It's fine. If you want to be, you have to essentially say, I'm, I'm fine with being mediocre”

“I, there's all, and I think that for most leaders, when we confront failure, we, our first assumption is it's a failure of incompetence, and it rarely is. Most failures at a high level are failures of overconfidence.”

“if somebody started the conversation by saying, I want to build a big business, I would say, go stay at your day job. Um, because it is so painfully difficult, and unless you are so passionate about the problem you're solving, it's not worth it”

“And if someone's asking you how many people they get to manage, like red flag number two, right? Because immediately they're thinking about empire building, not about winning.”

“I find our best product development comes from going to all the naysayers and just trying to pitch them over and over and over and over and over again to see what hits and what doesn't. Like, I don't believe in the, like, go send out a survey to 10,000 people and get, like, you've got to be in it, because if somebody,…”

“Hard work is, you know, respectable and admired and yes, we should work hard, but hard work can only get you a two or three X improvement in what you're doing. And if you don't learn to improve how you're working or the elegance or improve your leverage, like learn where you can have those hundred X, you know, where…”

“the degree that you specialize, even if you set out to be a generalist, you will end up becoming a specialist. A sufficiently, like, advanced generalist becomes a unique specialist”

“if you grind and beat yourself up, and have this brutal internal monologue, and, like, Right, all the way to, like, winning the game, finally achieving all these things that you hope to the whole time, you have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that, like, none of it matters.”

“you can probably be equally effective by just, like, Uh, by having emotional detachment, rather than having, like, being all in, all consumed, emotionally, like, wringing yourself out every day, feeling massive stress about everything that you're doing”

“Discipline is not a signal of high character. It's a signal you respect systems that keep you disciplined. Believe it or not, a lack of discipline tends to be a design problem.”

“Let's spin this up in 24 hours and see if anyone bites. If they do, we'll build it, which basically means we don't have a product. We're not ready, actually, to launch this, but I want to spin it up, see if we can get credit cards, and if we can't, we're gonna launch it, and then we'll figure it out. We'll build the…”

“And so the worst entrepreneurs, I think, try to ship at a hundred percent and end up shipping at 40% six months later because they never had real data to work against.”

“we've actually found when you're a woman and you're selling to another woman, you should underdress a little bit. When you're selling to a man, you should overdress a little bit.”

“the real players are stuck in an office. They're grinding away on their computer. They're too busy to go enter a room with people that don't have any value to give them.”

“no one of value who values their time is Ever gonna network with you for free. There's always strings attached, weird dynamics, or it's just not true.”

“Like for example, rich people care about saving time and getting things done right the first time. Poor people care about getting the best deal and just getting like a couple dollars off. Um, old people care about security. Young people care about the dream. Um, women care about beauty and, you know, Making sure that…”

“So you always have to flip the difference between rapport and then the sell, because that's what everybody does. It doesn't work. It makes you more of a salesperson. Two, selling them, providing value, and then building rapport after.”

“Price dropping is when you're making something cheaper or offering payment plans. You have to look a little uncomfortable while you're doing it. You can't just be like, oh, you can't afford it. We'll just do a thousand dollars cheaper, or, oh, no problem, we'll just split it up. It's like, why didn't you tell me that…”

“a gatekeeper is different because the sale with the gatekeeper is you're not selling the product because that's not their decision to make. You're selling the chance to pitch the decision maker. Versus if you have a non-decision maker in front of you, you are, you should never reveal price without having a decision…”

“When nobody believes, that's when you know you're actually doing something interesting.”

“The wealthiest people in the world, they are not building apps. They're not on magazine covers. They're not pitching VCs. They own boring businesses that print money.”

“Very successful, very toxic personalities, and every time we ultimately made the decision to get rid of those toxic personalities, we got better. Now there was always a period of, of insecurity where we were concerned, like, oh my God, we're gonna lose all these clients. Oh my God, this could be terrible. But then you…”

“most owners have what we call poor owner mindset, which I don't love the words because it, it's kind of got a negative connotation, but, um, they price things below what they would pay for them. They don't price them based on outcome. They price them based on wallet. That's really dangerous in business. That's why…”

“People get religion all wrong, by the way. They think you have to, especially in the current generation, you have to feel something, and then you'll believe something, and then you'll practice something. That's exactly backwards when it comes to religion. First practice, then believe, and occasionally feel.”

“And fame, by the way, is the worst because fame is the only one of the goals that you can only ever be happy in spite of. And you have to, so most people who get famous, they become less happy because of the fame.”

“if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means, therefore, That time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all about managing discomfort.”

“How exactly do you think the New York Times makes money? Or Fox News or CNN? They're all in the same business. They're monetizing your attention.”

“What's fascinating is that even if you objectively have all the reasons to claim victimhood, It still serves you more to have an internal locus of control. You still will go farther and be happier, have less depression, less anxiety, all the good things come from having that agency.”

“chronic pain, you know, pain that doesn't have a, a physical cause that lasts for more than six months. So we're talking fibromyalgia, we're talking insomnia, we're talking, uh, chronic back pain, all these things. Turns out they are what we call neuroplastic pain.”

“the standard advice is if you have some kind of pain, ice it, heat it, don't move, immobilize, rest, right? Don't stress it. Turns out that's not always the best advice. Now, if there is, if there is an actual physiological cause, different story, but if it's chronic pain that lasts for more than six months without a…”

“AI is just a giant replication machine, right? It's gonna take everything that it's been trained on and give you the average.”

“My biggest concern today is if you outsource your thinking entirely, like I am seeing people do to AI, your critical thinking skills and your taste will just Atrophy. Like muscles.”

“If intelligence is cheap, then judgment probably matters more. If content is infinite, then what type of content means more? If perfection is standard, Then authenticity is probably what we're chasing.”

“in some ways, the execution now is not the hard part. It's like, what idea are you gonna do?”

“putting housing permits or taking them out of the hands of officials and putting them in the hands of homeowners, you have absolutely no incentive to ever approve housing if you're a homeowner. Because an absence of new housing makes your house go up in value.”

“the way you get rich is probably through a little bit of concentration, your own business, you double down on a house, you fix it up, you flip it, whatever it might be, but the way you stay somewhat rich is through diversification”

“Like if I will take a confident executor with a sprinkle of delusion over almost anybody else, the entire game is almost all confidence.”

“The winners are so big at that level, you could have 80% of your portfolio fail. So it's a game that's a lot riskier, and you're searching for the really big outcomes.”

“And I often think about from the GP's perspective, the person underwriting the SPV, the one trying to talk you into investing in it, I think they got a free roll. Cause if it works, they make money. If it doesn't work and they got fees, they still make money. Um, and they got nothing in it.”

“you don't need intelligence and connections and education and experience to do well. All you need is like a couple of behavioral attributes That Ronald Reed had. Patience. Low ego. That's all you need. And even if you have all of the intelligence in the world, you can go broke.”

“And I think what's closer to the truth is that it's rigged against professionals who have to compete against each other on a 90 day clock. What were your returns last quarter and how do they rank next to your peers? That's what you live and die by. Like, the rigs game, the game's rigged against them, but for ordinary…”

“nobody cares about the driver, but they want to be the driver because then they think people will care about them.”

“There's no difference in lifestyle whatsoever. For most of the people, there'd be no difference in lifestyle between a hundred million and a hundred billion. You know, you're, you're, you have too many houses, you have planes, you have everything you could want.”

“I think we did a lot of harm in society when we taught people that a rising home prices are a good thing that did a lot of damage to people. It's, it's a, it's a terrible thing. And, and B, that in the decision of whether you should buy, you should rent or buy or rent is a, is a spreadsheet decision versus just the…”

“I think it, it rarely, if ever, exists, because what people think of passive income is, I don't have to work to get this, and anyone who's been, like, uh, uh, a landlord, like, realizes, like, that could be a full-time job for doing it, or owning small businesses.”

“And also the, I think there's a, there's a Paul Graham quote where he says half of the attributes of very successful people Are actually liabilities to them.”

“And I think it tends to be in finance that sometimes the smartest people are the most impatient. And because they want to use their intelligence and their IQ to be like, well, how can I speed this process up and get it as fast as I can? And that's the source of every blow up.”

“Of course some people can beat the market. People have beat the market, and they'll continue doing that. And some people have done that profoundly well. But it's like asking, you know, should, should most people try to get in the NBA? Like, no.”

“If you can wrap your head around those concepts, You've learned 90% of what you need to know about investing before you've bought a single stock.”

“Terrible. They're terrible. I mean, there's very few people because you tend to be obsessed. Like I also think like it's important to note. So the, the people that appear on founders podcasts, right? They, they were so good at their jobs that somebody wrote a book about their life. This is like the tiniest percentage…”

“I would just say that I don't think it's prerequisite for extreme success. It's just that most humans grow up in bad environments. And so I think you just, it's literally just a bigger sample size. Um, there you can, you know, grow up with, you know, loving household and still have extreme success.”

“I don't think you choose to be an entrepreneur. I think, like, there's this great line from Jeff Bezos where he says, we don't choose our passions, our passions choose us. That's how I kind of think about it. So I think even if they, that entrepreneur type didn't even have trauma, they still would do what they're…”

“usually if you want the most talented designer in the world or the most talented programmer in the world or the most talented ex Anything in the world, they're going to be unusual people with very distinct personalities, and a lot of their personality types will They usually lead to, like, bad behavior”

“and really the importance of like knowing yourself, and then you're not gonna be successful unless you can build a, a, a company that's a reflection of you. You know, essentially like a, uh, an echo or a shadow of the founder.”

“it's not people like, oh, to be a master or something, it's 10,000 hours. No, it's 10,000 iterations.”

“Like, our job is to push our people past the level in which they think that they are capable of, and if you can't do that, um, then you probably shouldn't be in charge.”

“a lot of the content that entrepreneurs are actually consuming or actually created by investors. And so you could have incentive alignment with them, but many cases, your incentives are misaligned and we should just think about that. And what's disturbing about that is how much of it is about start scale.”

“people think entrepreneurs are obsessed with money. I would argue they're obsessed with control. And that if you're talented, and you're working on a valuable product, or a problem, and you solve the problem for other people, and you maintain control, you wind up with the money.”

“Go for freedom. He's like, if you keep your freedom, you can control what you work on. If you control what you work on, you can work on what you love. If you love it, you'll do it all the time. If you do it all the time, you'll get really good at it. And money will come as a result.”

“you see the success in most entrepreneurs lives happen multiple decades in. Because they didn't interrupt the compounding. You had to wait for time to do most of the work, and that's why the start, scale, sell doesn't work.”

“Bezos's analogy for this. Cause he's all like, all he thinks about is AI all day long now. Is he calls it these thin horizontal enabling layers. And he thinks AI is more akin to electricity than it is to anything else. The internet was a thin horizontal enabling layer. Electricity was a thin horizontal enabling layer.…”

“He had this, there's another maxim, belief comes before ability, which I hate when people are like, oh, you shouldn't have so much self belief. You tell us entrepreneurs, like generate evidence and then have belief. And I'm like, well, I've read 400 of these books and none of these people did that. They believed in…”

“I don't think that having experience in an industry makes you more likely to have success. Because when you have experience, you kind of know the rules, so you don't have, like, the courage to break them. And you're limited. You already start with a set of beliefs that are limiting the innovation that you would have.”

“You don't take a break from opportunities just to focus on operations unless you absolutely have to. And I think that's right.”

“in business you should take the first 10% of every dollar that you make and you put that in your bank account. Not in your business's bank account, in your bank account.”

“I think every couple should split things in an equitable fashion. That can be proportional. Doesn't have to be. That can be, oh, one, one partner just says, I'm gonna cover it all because you make so much less than me that I want you to save and invest your money.”

“The only, I think, truly passive income strategy, the only, is ownership. You have to own something. Whether that be a business that is making you money, whether that be investments in the stock market, whether that be a bond that is paying you interest for having borrowed your money, you have to own something.”

“Because you can't manipulate someone who likes being alone.”

“Most creators are exposed to feedback constantly. The result is work shaped by reaction rather than conviction.”

“burnout is not you're overworked. Plenty of people work hard without burning out. So what's the difference? Why can this person work forever, and that person hates their life at the same job? Well, it happens when you live too long against your nature. You suppress parts of yourself to maintain this identity, and your…”

“I would actually tell people that, you know, in this profession, work-life balance is actually what's probably going to make you have more success, because for what we do, you know, on, on these microphones, being able to Communicate life in a way that connects with people is what kind of makes people gravitate towards…”

“We all know that the money is in the audio.”

“To do most things at the highest level, you have to be fucking unhinged. You have to not be normal. That's what's required.”

“People who are great Are not great because they believe they are. They are great because they're always trying to prove themselves because they know how flawed they are”

“This isn't going to be something that you want to hear because it's a little off brand, but I would say change the goals because we don't want to be reaching for things that we don't believe in. If we have a goal that feels out of alignment with what we believe we are capable of, we actually start to show up for it…”

“in your self led energetic state, your partner has two choices. They can rise up to the occasion and get to work on their own, or they can stay stuck in their parts. And that's when a relationship choice is made. You know, is this, are we gonna grow together or are we gonna separate?”

“Toxic people don't wanna change with feedback. They change with reduced access.”

“toxic people don't win because they're evil. They win because everyone else is so busy trying to be liked.”

“part of my screening process for hiring is actually, yeah, I love taking them to coffee. I love, yeah, I love, you'll see all of our offices are glass, so I watch how they walk in, how they walk out, um, because it really is a sign of, I haven't met a lot of people who have been really successful at our firms, um, who…”

“if you know that someone unfortunately has that tendency, again, we're separating person from toxic behavior, but for the sake of illustration, I'll just say the toxic person, cut them out. It's too hard. They leave too big of a footprint in a team and same with someone in your life who's manipulating you. They can…”

“Your state controls your story. Your story and your state control whether you do anything. If no one showed you how to get the strategy, you'd figure out the strategy. You'd find the way you'd make the way with the right state. So all the work I've done most of my life, I realized was start with a state because…”

“I think sometimes we look for technological solutions to make things easy, and the whole point is some things are supposed to be hard. You know, it's supposed to be difficult, and it is in the difficult part that you're scratching it into the steel, and then it's there.”

“whether they're true or not is much less important to me than whether they have some kind of moral lesson that sticks with them that, by the way, when they get into situations in life, um, I can be like, this is like that thing that we learned about.”

“I think a lot of people, they spend all this time trying to create this, not just success now, but this monument that endures for all time, as if that's of value. Like, it isn't. It's not only something you don't control, even if it was guaranteed. It doesn't do Marcus to realize any good that I'm quoting from…”

“The truth of the matter is to win, you have to suffer. There is no other way around it.”

“And so the fake Rolex for me was I was trying to find a way to enter rooms, not as a broke kid and enter rooms as the person I wanted to become. So it wasn't fake it till you make it. It was how do I give myself the confidence when I'm 24 to be future me?”

“Billionaire class is that bullseye, but they are protected by six rings of sphere of influence, right? From advisors to family to friends to assistants to bankers to the outermost ring. Of vendors. So who is somebody that has already broken through and gotten their trust to get their share of wallet? That's interior…”

“as soon as you adopt a label as an identity, like, the way our minds work is, is whatever I've defined my, my, myself as part of my identity, I'm gonna defend it, and I'm gonna become emotionally attached to it.”

“I feel like cutting family members out of your life is, is a, uh, a move of last resort. Like, there's a lot of intermediary steps you can go.”

“if you just avoid everybody that you don't like, or everybody that is even toxic, or everybody that is pushing boundaries, then that means you don't get better at holding them.”

“here's the funny thing that we've actually noticed with a lot of our early users as well is that like people are way more honest with an AI than they are with a therapist.”

“it's actually very, very hard to, you have to be extremely skilled to get it to do what you want extremely well, and, and oftentimes, the amount of effort it takes to get it to do something you want extremely well, You might as well just do it yourself, so.”

“praising the behavior that you're trying to facilitate is the way to do it. And, and, and in marriage, that's incredibly easy. It's incredibly easy because you have all these levers. You have affection, sex, romance, You know, you, you have all of these things that you can weaponize in a good way to modify the behavior…”

“But really, like, love is loaned. Like, your husband's love is loaned to you, and your love is loaned to him. It's not permanently gifted. And your marriage will end. Every marriage ends. It ends in death or divorce.”

“infidelity is a symptom. Of the problem. The problem is almost always the same. Disconnection. Disconnection from self, and then disconnection from the other person. Because the two biggest problems are, we don't know what we want, and we don't know how to express it to another person.”

“It's a terrible line that everybody says at the wedding, like the uncle who says it at the wedding, I should pay him a dividend. He's like, hey, he made a lot of money for me. But it really is. I mean, if anything, it should be happy spouse, happy house. But, but even that, if your meaning is, yeah, just like do what…”

“if we were going to invent an infidelity generating machine, it would be called Instagram.”

“And sex, I think, is the glue. In marriages. Otherwise just be roommates.”

“If, if like 90% of your sexual outlet is women on a screen you will never meet and not your primary sexual partner, you're, you're gonna have issues with that.”

“Like people lie to their therapists all the time. They don't lie to their divorce lawyer. Like there's absolutely no profit in lying to your divorce lawyer.”

“if you actually want to change the divorce rate, we have to create barriers to entry.”

“The nanny, in some ways, represents a lot of the aspects of the wife before you guys had kids. She has a life outside the home. She, you know, has interests outside the home. She is still something of a mystery to you, and you're a mystery to her.”

“optimists, they sound too Pollyanna, but, and, but they make all the money, and pessimists sound smart and then make nothing.”

“The more difficult conversations you have, The higher the bank account you will eventually have.”

“When you authentically love what you are created, have created, or, or what you're building, or what you're doing, you don't have to be good at sales, because that passion will come out naturally and authentically.”

“The goal for the people that you hire in your retail stores is not for them to sell. It is for them to connect. It is for them to make every single human that has taken the time out of their crazy busy schedule, who decided to walk through the doors of your store, which is a gift by the way, to make them feel loved,…”

“So the issue isn't food dyes. The issue isn't seed oils. The bigger issue is how do we feed for human health? All these other things are distractions.”

“I do not recommend 24 hour fast or longer, because again, it's difficult to hold on to muscle as it is. So if you reorient yourself to muscle, then fasting over 24 hours is, you know, that's like the no-go zone.”

“if you are not training and you are sedentary, do not eat a high carbohydrate diet, or you are essentially giving yourself an oral glucose tolerance test three times a day. We don't want that. Because as we have these metabolic dysfunctions, she then is at a greater risk for Alzheimer's and all these other diseases.”

“We usually cut the lowest, 20% of customers, Because inevitably they are costing you money, and you don't even see it. It's like, oh, I'm making revenue, this is great. The expenses are in excess of the revenue, and the emotional, you know, the emotional weight is killing you.”

“We believe that sales cures everything, and that is total nonsense. Total nonsense. What sales does is it can bring in more cash, but also brings in more organizational stress. You have more responsibility now, more things you need to service.”

“So when a business says we're cranking up revenue, I am looking to see, are they doing it through diversifying their offering, which I think is a mistake. Instead of becoming special, they're doing many things, and they dilute their ability, they're not efficient.”

“so not only do I think we don't sell enough, I think we price ourselves out of deals all the time, because we're the cheapest, you know. Because we're like, oh, no, no, no, I want to over serve the customer. No, you lost my business because I don't trust that it could be quality at that price.”

“And what price dictates is the quality of customer. You will find customers at the lower price point. And for anyone here that sells at a low price point, if you ever found that your customers are really bitchy and moany and they really suck, it's because you're attracting the shit customer. The one who says, I don't…”

“We generally say, if you're not generating ten million dollars doing your one thing, you haven't arrived yet, you're not good enough yet. For most businesses, that's about point oh, one percent of the market cap. So, it's nothing. Yet most businesses said, oh, we're doing 300,000 in revenue, I should diversify and do…”

“The number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. The number one job of an entrepreneur is to create jobs for the other kids in your class. 19 kids in your kindergarten class want good jobs with good companies to live a good life with just good experiences. If you are doing the work in your business, you're…”

“What do you love to do so much you'll never give it up? Delegate that. Because when you can delegate your passion, you'll learn to delegate the entirety of your business.”

“So especially in beverage, there's literally three people that can buy you or you can go public.”

“Well, above and beyond in this instance means something that drives meaningful revenue or views, let's say on a video. And if it doesn't do those two things, it's actually not meaningful work. It could just be busy work.”

“I think burnout actually happens because we don't have processes. If we had processes, and systems, and people, and ways that we followed along to things, we wouldn't burn out.”

“I think one of the worst things you can do as a creator is hire the thing you think the business needs, not the thing you want. And so, take your pain off as the creator before you add in to the Uh, need of the business.”

“You shouldn't angel invest in like high growth startups unless you're already a millionaire. Like if you can afford to lose money, then I think angel investing makes sense.”

“everybody says, like, don't build angry. I'm like, wrong. Like, there's no greater fuel than being a little pissed off.”

“I think that 10 X is often easier than two X. That actually, if you try to build a really big business, you are gonna bumble fuck your way at least into a lifestyle business. But if all you try to do is build a lifestyle business, you're gonna end up building either a business that is a job, or not make enough money…”

“you can only save your way to zero. Uh, there is a bottom on it, and you gotta eat, and you gotta look cute, like you guys all do, and you gotta, like, go out and enjoy life, and so, um, I don't like the obsessive focus on savings culture, because I actually think it's much easier to earn than it is to save, and if you…”

“you are also more likely to make more money if your friend group has more money, and it doesn't mean we should leave people behind that, that aren't our aspiration. I'm not saying that. Bring them with you, but get a couple rich bitches in your group because it helps.”

“It's not product that's king. It's distribution that's king.”

“And so I think anybody that's telling you that actually doesn't realize that they have survivorship bias. They went on one thing and it worked, which is actually an anomaly, not normal. And simultaneously, they don't actually understand portfolio theory and the rule of diversification.”

“I do not believe the underpriced attention is on a platform. I believe the under price attention is in your niche and choosing your niche intelligently will catapult you.”

“if I have as much information or more information, I'm always going to make the first offer because I know the power of anchoring. I'm not going to give that away to the other side, but if they know more than me and I know that, then I'm going to sit back, wait for their offer and then counter”

“Venture scale companies are, are hard. And if you want to do one, do one because you really love the mission, and you want to build something big, and you have the chip on the shoulder. But if you, if you want to get rich, if you want to build a business, it is not the best way to go.”

“And the way that you get intention, in my opinion, is you don't do content, you do community.”

“flying private is a waste of time. Don't do it for other people's reasons.”

“Nike still gets it right, in a sense, um, and I'll just say a reason why. You know, they'll do a custom shoe for one person. You'll say a thirty billion dollar company doing a custom shoe for one person. What they're doing is they're putting that algorithm together of all those people that order these type of custom…”

“C players, for my businesses when I hire, I love a good C because I think we have a system to get people to Bs, and I think Bs are great.”

“give me an A plus personality and a C player, because C personality is death on arrival.”

“I continue to believe that most people get successful because of insecurity, and there's a rare breed That gets there through confidence, and I'm so grateful that I'm in that small group, and I see it in others.”

“people that have over-indexed on that move, I have found over the last 20 years, tend to struggle to stay on top, Tend to be less happy.”

“building your personal brand, I do believe is a moat. I've always believed that it was the moat. I've talked about it for 15 years that it's the moat. It is the one true asset that doesn't get commoditized even in the AI world. You still have your IP. It's your copyright. It's you.”

“Disproportionately, the biggest opportunity to grow your business, traffic to your business, average receipt size, is to run, if you're a local business that people come to, is to run 10 mile radius Facebook ads.”

“production often, often again is Disguising insecurity. A lot of people talk about production, if you listen carefully, it's just an excuse to not do.”

“You don't wait for top talent to fit your role. When you find top talent, you bring them in.”

“Because they're going to be your next referral source. They're going to send you talent better than any recruiter.”

“culture doesn't drip down. It radiates out. It's like a cold. It spreads person to person, desk to desk.”

“You need to bring different versions of you to different conversations and to different people. I'm, I'm in business now. You and I were talking a little bit off camera, and when I work with people or have people work with me, I want the business version of you.”

“There's no such thing as being fully healed. You recover, and you become resilient, and you bounce back.”

“if you're pretty serious in business, there's a great reason to, like, never settle a case if somebody comes after you, and you think that it's ridiculous, and they're just trying to be litigious. It's like, no, no, I will go and spend much more than it would ever take to settle with you, because I refuse to allow this…”

“if you're in a, a business environment, you've been there for years and people have just been crushing you and dominating you. There's, I want, I don't mean to be negative, but there's almost no way to fix that. You have to leave and go somewhere else and start in you and start from the beginning. Cause once you set…”

“Don't talk a lot in that first meeting. Say nothing. I have the meetings I go to. I say nothing. You don't need to talk. Nobody cares. Like, unless you have something of value to say, you don't need to say anything.”

“the more you're a pro, the more you get to draw that line. So if you feel like you can't be authentically yourself to come to a job yet, and that is somehow important to you, that you can wear whatever you want, do whatever you want, get better. Because the better you are, the more you get away with.”

“when you do that, you make it about yourself. So what you're also saying is, I'm not a team player. I just care about me, and I dress for me, and I do me, and whoever likes me. And again, you can do that, but you will be isolating yourself from opportunities and from people wanting to bring you in.”

“I'm not telling you to forgive. I am not a forgive person. I will let it go. I'm not letting you in. Oh, no, no, no. You're, I learned my lesson the first time. Thank you. Stay all the way over there. Uh, but I'm not gonna take you, and what you did to me, and take it with me, like, the next seven years down. I'm not…”

“Because the truth those guys know is that it's actually far easier to buy profits than it is to grow them, and yet we sell this dream that startups are the way to go, and that we should start from zero, even though 90% of them fail, most entrepreneurs only make 67,000 dollars a year that start a startup, and the first…”

“A lot of people don't realize that your only job as a CEO is this, that you have one job as a CEO, and this is what I tell all my teams. I am here to protect our ability to persevere. I'm here to make sure we survive. That's it. Everything else doesn't matter”

“this is a, um, this is a software system that is programmed by another. And so it is very easy to modulate the extent to which and the way in which it delivers said recognition. So it's a, it's an incredible platform for manipulation. In other words, it's not an authentic, um, mutual recognition as you would see in a…”

“The reason I invoke this is because when you have a small number of AI systems that have the role of giving this medical advice, like they may suppress treatments that work, but are not kind of like sanctioned, if you will. And if that happens, like a lifesaving treatment or an angle that was like underexplored could…”

“AI cannot be your friend. Why? Because it can't have your same life experience. A friend is somebody who can sit there with you, who can travel through time with you, Who understands what it's like being human, who understands your perspective, and will Tell you the difficult things when you need to be told the…”

“And not to be flippant, I don't think it's all that difficult as long as you just ignore everything modern culture is telling you with respect to masculinity and boys.”

“when somebody says man up, be a man, your mindset automatically goes to overcome difficulties, problems, pain, and danger in order to accomplish your mission and uphold your word. That's what it is.”

“what you realize is you didn't teach your kids values. You taught your kids an authority structure and the authority structure was you're in charge and what you say is go and what you say, go. And you know what? Maybe that's fine as long as you're in charge because you love them. What happens when it's the college…”

“you need to learn how to fight. Um, and you need to go through what it looks like to, to really come up against that concept of fight or flight and to choose fight. And when you can do it and when you come in more competent at it, you are far more likely to utilize it in a way that is both effective, um, and measured.”

“I kind of disagree with Alex and the idea that there's no such thing as imposter syndrome because I, I know one in, I think this is really common among, uh, combat vets. I think it's really common among, um, military personnel. ... Well, because somebody else did something more or somebody else did something more…”

“really what free markets and capitalism and all this does is it allows you to con, it allows you to conquer through voluntary cooperation and through the benefit of the people that choose to do business with you. And that's an incredibly positive form of conquest.”

“They need the return on that dollar to be so significant that they hold you to a level that is actually irrational.”

“I think it removes a variable. You know, I think it takes something off the table that becomes a deep source of, uh, antagonism in a relationship.”

“Some weird things happen in our culture today, where we think that if we fix things and somebody doesn't pay us for it, that's like, ugh, really? Like, I'm working at this company, and I shouldn't have to do this thing that's not my job. That's a terrible way to stay poor forever.”

“I really never believe in hiring people when they are on a losing streak. It's like, I don't believe on betting on sports teams when they're on a losing streak. It's the same thing. They've got to break that streak and then they can come and work for you.”

“Don't start with why, start with who. So I love Simon Sinek and, but when you're building a personal brand, What matters most is being clear on who you're talking to. The sooner, once you're clear on who you're talking to, every other downstream decision becomes clear.”

“Which is you have to almost water down your message slightly to go so wide. And it has a direct anti-correlation to conversion, aka getting people to buy things from you.”

“I think most of the people who I know who are rich or filthy rich, they didn't get rich from multiple streams of income. They got rich from doing one thing really, really well. They had one business that really blew up. They, they, they focused on concentration first, then they broke through the wall and then did…”

“A book still to this day is the primary way that you break through the wall of the mainstream to become recognized as a true thought leader.”

“If you charge low prices, your product will be perceived as low value, increase your prices, and you will not only make more money, but people will actually use your product and value it more.”

“Also remember guys, you can only price yourself the absolute cheapest to the bottom. There is no value in being the second Most cheap.”

“Price sensitive customers are often less loyal anyway. They'll jump ship the second a cheaper option comes along. By raising prices, you filter out basically bargain hunters and find your true fans or what we call your right fit customers.”

“Moral of the story, guys, if you don't raise your prices, you won't have any margin. If you don't have any margin, you won't be able to beat your competitors, and the number one rule of business is whoever makes the most money wins because they can just pay more for your customers, and eventually, because you were…”

“Hotels aren't businesses. They're real estate with too many parts masquerading as a business.”

“Even at a smaller size, consulting firms, they require too much capital in the business attached to your consultants, aka labor costs. People are expensive. It's kind of also not a business, but a collection of individual jobs. So don't buy jobs.”

“Until AI completely takes over and can deep fake mimic everything, which is probably like tomorrow, you can't transition a personal brand to yourself. I've seen lots of people try to sell their face branded YouTube account, social site, or education business. Again, with their face all over it, it doesn't really work.”

“if you cuss in every other sentence, what you really indicate is, I am emotionally sensitive. It's, I, I'm over seasoning my food. I don't have any other words to explain how I'm feeling or what I'm doing, so I just expect that throwing a curse word right in front of it is going to make it more impactful in some way,…”

“When you're around these people that are always anxious, always go, go, go, always wanna just, you gotta, 10 x everything about your life, like that is, that's a quick way to being really unsatisfied with a lot of, a lot of things.”

“if you can be clever, and you can kind of indicate, and you can kind of send them in a certain direction, it's a much more powerful form of communication.”

“if I had to put a percentage on it, and I've thought about this, and it's not scientific by no means, I think about five percent of people actually understand these laws intuitively”

“As an entrepreneur, this business that you created at this very moment, there are vultures circling around. We're going to buy your business out and crush you because that's how business works, right? It's a merciless environment.”

“When you have leverage in a situation, in any situation in life, you have to use your leverage, and what a lot of people do, they're afraid of the leverage that they have. They're afraid they're going to offend the other person. They're afraid they're going to go too far, and they, they kind of compromise, and they…”

“And I say, if you do too much of that, I'm not going to use her name, People will become so familiar with you that you're gonna lose that aura of being a celebrity. They're gonna take you for granted, and you might shine for a year with being out there and having all of your posts and doing all these things, but after…”

“If you dress a certain way that seems a little bit out of character, not completely out of character, you go, wow, you need to do that in a relationship constantly, otherwise it's just gonna fizzle, all the energy's gonna go out of it.”

“I actually think you need to work more in order to stand out because AI, you can only reap the benefits of AI. If you have something worth scaling, AI can only build off of a foundation that you have spent time building. If you haven't built that foundation, you're just gonna get a plateau that everyone else in the…”

“Specifically AI really benefits generalists, um, because it allows anyone to be a polymath before to be a polymath, you really had to be like a special kind of person. Uh, but now AI democratizes access to a specialization. You can become a specialist in a couple of days.”

“I think it's such a difficult problem to solve because you get into like political bias and like what's actually right. What's like, what's true and what's false. And then you have like the Orwellian, 1984 view, where if someone has control over, over what's true, then like they can control the narrative of history. So…”

“Your raise is effective when you are. It's not when you get another degree. Don't, I couldn't care less about your certification, except the, except it gives you the ability to get something done. And that's all it's good for.”

“I think women in particular, they think, okay, orange theory, CrossFit, I'm going to hit it hard. As we get into menopause, that becomes less, uh, the success rate goes down there.”

“Because that's their hammer. And that hammer is profitable. It's their hammer, you know, like every, every doctor is going to have their hammer.”

“Last time, I think we overplayed the mission side because like, again, mission is important, but we still wanted people who are primarily there to win. But last time we're like, Hey, you know, education is really important, but then we ended up getting a lot of ex teachers and Um, who struggled when things got hard.”

“The thing that's been interesting is when most people come back, their reaction is not like, that's sick, why can't we do it always? Like, they're like, yeah, it was great, but they're like, oh, I missed the office. I missed, I kind of missed being around everyone, and it almost builds renewed enthusiasm for being back…”

“We're, you know, RIA. We're going to be a broker dealer. Even if AI makes it really easy to do stuff, the SEC is not going to approve people in two days. FINRA is not going to approve people in two days. So regulatory modes, I think are real and will continue being real even as everything else gets faster.”

“my whole thing about these trackers is the fact that we should use them to get the data. Once we get the data, once we make improvements, we should actually stop using them. And I say for every single one of the people, should I get an honor ring? Should I get a whoop? Or whatever it is. I'm actually saying, like, you…”

“And I, in fact, think that if you work for a business right now where they tell you that it is a family, you should run away because it's not true. You don't fire your family unless, you know, they did something really gross. You don't, uh, you don't yell at your family in a performance review and tell them that…”

“But I think we should be honest about the fact that the best businesses are like teams. You trade players when they don't fit anymore. They trade you when they want a different salary or a different geography. You guys hope that you make each other better. You take care of each other. You exit in the right way. You…”

“In fact, if you're running a team right now in the business sense, one of the most important things that I've realized is you have to have built in incentive friction on your teams.”

“One of the other keys to teamwork that I've been thinking about a lot lately is I think personality hires got a really bad rap. So if you're a personality hire out there, I actually think you got a really big place. Um, there are a lot of reasons why you need a team that is completely different.”

“The more that you're learning about yourself from therapy, the more likely it is to have a, to have a, a beneficial impact for the long term. When somebody just wants to solve your problems, Or give you hacks. Run the other way. That's just not very helpful. And it's certainly not enduring is how this works.”

“dating is not entertainment. Dating is auditioning. You're auditioning for the role of husband. And that means not very many second dates. Not very many second dates, because you know. Second dates are mostly entertainment.”

“You can compare people in countries over time. That's legit. I do that all the time. If we're looking at happiness trends inside populations, you can look at individuals all day long, but I don't, I don't compare countries. I don't think it's a, I don't think it's, it's a legitimate empirical thing to do.”

“Fame is the only one of those you can only ever be happy in spite of.”

“Debt is terrible for happiness, except for mortgages. Because mortgages actually make a little bit more progress in owning your home than rent.”

“Work-life balance is complete nonsense because it suggests that work is not part of your life. There's a separation between your work and your life. Your work should be part of your life. That should be work-life integration.”

“And today more than ever, I think attention is critical. And so one of the reasons I got online is because our businesses need the lifeblood of the 21st century highest form of leverage, which is attention.”

“I put those people in the same category of humans that are in the rat race on wall street. It's the same thing. It's just a different industry. You know, you're still trying to climb the biggest mountain and do it the fastest and be out there. And, um, You know, it's a, you know, the guys and girls you see on Wall…”

“networking is dead, um, because it implies a transaction that is not conducive to building real relationships.”

“I personally think that having an incredible marriage is the biggest cheat code for making a lot of money in life.”

“the money is easy. It's having an idea that you can execute on. There's tons of money. There's tons of rich guys that don't want to work. They just want to invest in somebody and make a good return.”

“and so I, I, I say to most people, um, at this level of education and intelligence, like, there's no financial risk, there's only ego risk.”

“Um, and the reason why people love a failure is not that they're evil, but it validates their own cowardice, right? They had dreams too that they didn't go pursue.”

“The, your ability to convert your capital into meaningful experiences or useful experiences declines as you age. Your lung capacity goes down. Your muscle mass goes down. Your fragility goes up. Your, your, even your attitude. You're like, I don't like that anymore.”

“if a person is coming in, and they're tight, and their traps are tight, and their jaws tight, and their hands tight, and all that stuff, For you to just go in and start, like, banging away, chipping away at their shoulders, it's fine, it will have effect, but it wouldn't have as global of an effect as if you just first…”

“if a person experiencing knee pain, the, and I was treating them, the first thing I would do would be work with their feet. Like, bar none, hands down.”

“a person that is, is pronounced, like, chest out, all that stuff, beta. So that's a person that's, that's trying to be alpha, and they feel insecure, and they're trying to project out, I can hurt you, you know, I'm confident.”

“if you want to change a cell in a Petri dish, you don't do anything to the cell, you change the, the culture that it resides within.”

“And then why, if you're not angry yet, I might say to you, this is gonna make you angry. And it doesn't plant anger, it inoculates you from it.”

“no matter where you grew up, no matter what your ethnicity, your culture, your diet, your religion, I know that you've got these five core emotions. And so empathy, tactical empathy works with Arabs, works with Persians works with Latinos because you're a human being.”

“Simultaneously, I can, I can open anybody up like anybody with my curiosity because curiosity is impossible to resist.”

“They're prepared for arguments. They're not, they, they were never prepared for empathy. Ever.”

“So tells per se are strictly within context to the person. And I will talk to you long enough until I get an idea of what you look like when you're telling the truth. That's what I'm looking for.”

“there's no difference in leadership from military leadership to civilian leadership. Leadership is leadership. And when it comes to strategy, rehearsals, and time management, civilian and military approach to that, I, I think should be the same.”

“if you're not going to be faithful to your wife, you're not going to be faithful with my money. If you're not going to be disciplined with what you're going to be doing with your time, you're not going to be disciplined with my time.”

“The bluff, the bottom line up front is a weak man is not a good man because he's not capable to do one or the other. A strong man that's capable of violence but chooses to be kind, chooses to be gentle, he's clearly morally a good man because he has the capable to do violence. That weak man is just, frankly, useless.…”

“You can look at somebody's calendar, and I know if that is a five million dollar entrepreneur, if that is a billion dollar business owner, um, just by your calendar.”

“the thing is, is like, I think that's an old paradigm of like, if I want to be successful, Then I, it, my, my relationship with my wife needs to, you know, hurt because of that. I don't get to see my children as much because of that. That is a, like, a scarcity mindset. And scarcity is or. Like, so it's like, it's…”

“If you have health issues, think simple. Start maybe with meat and fruit, and then see if the health issues get better over time, and then add things back gradually. And that's just, I think, a good starting point for people as a framework, as a blueprint.”

“The most obvious one, and people probably have seen this and heard about it, is the eye flutters.”

“So you can be honest without being fully transparent.”

“I don't want streams. I want a river, right? Like, so let's get your river first. Once you have a river, then get your other streams. And I think that so often people try and just think, they hear this buzzword from, you know, whether it's influencers or whatever it is, oh, we need streams. It's like, Yeah, that's…”

“I would side with Mike's a little bit on that, in the, in the sense that Let's tackle like the big rock issues, like the, the easy, the easier issues. And, you know, um, are you eating? What are, what's the calorie amount that you're eating? What's the macro breakdown? Like those are, I feel in a sense, a little bit…”

“That degree is gonna get you your first job, maybe your second, but probably not even that as much. It's, it's these other things that you have learned how to do that really make you capable in the, in the workplace.”

“These broad ones, which in the Trump administration tried to do this, did this last time, there's talk of doing it again, like for every new regulation, we take two off the books. Well, That's, that sounds great, but you can, you can implement one very costly regulation and then eliminate two that really aren't having…”

“over time, specifically after roughly the 19 fifties and moving up in an exponentially increasing curve. What you could call the price palatability of food has skyrocketed.”

“the biggest factor of who's getting super obese and who's not is probably just people's genetically determined, largely genetically determined baseline hunger signaling and food pleasure response.”

“Corporations do not want you to be fat. Not in the least. It turns out there's no, they want to be rich. And how do they get rich? They give you what you tell them you want. Not verbally with your dollars.”

“The average person, if they're eating a decently well-balanced diet, just doesn't need any supplements. Uh, of any kind.”

“Many of the people who are anxious are precisely the people for whom life is the easiest.”

“And to, to extrapolate on that, if your kids have never flown Commercially, you're probably gonna spend a lot of money on rehab later on.”

“the reason we don't have pitchforks outside, and the, the, the rich don't get, you know, Guillotine and lynched is because every American knows that they too could one day be a millionaire. So there's a potential. The potential to be a millionaire is huge in the American spirit, and it's a large part of the glue that…”

“the way you get rich is probably through a little bit of concentration, your own business, you double down on a house, you fix it up, you flip it, whatever it might be, but the way you stay somewhat rich is through diversification, and I didn't realize that.”

“He said, when it's easy, do more. When it's hard, do something totally different. And I loved this principle. Easy, Keep going. Apply pressure. When it's hard, stop, think, change your frame.”

“Why do you think so many of us make money today? It's because we normalized 70 hour workdays with incredible amounts of output required. It sucks, I remember doing it, but you are much more likely to win if you are willing to do that.”

“If you want to achieve really high-level things, you have to be around others who have already achieved those things. So I often talk about this idea of you need to leave your hometown to grow.”

“And if everyone tells you it's a bad idea, then it must be a good idea. That is a crock of shit. Um, if everyone tells you it's a bad idea, then either it's a bad idea or you're asking the wrong people. You're not asking your customers.”

“first step is product team fit. Do we want to use this product? And you got to be honest about that. And if we didn't want to use it and it wasn't good enough, back to the drawing board. Um, so now we want to use it. Great. So the next is like product friends fit to the sort of closer customers around us.”

“if I had the choice of rocket ship over six years, or maybe something that's a little more balanced over 12 years. I probably would pick a little more balanced over 12 years because, you know, it's not for the faint of heart when, when, when something, building any company is hard. It's just a lot harder when you're…”

“I think most people who had to consider smart people, you know, that I met at university or, or, or, or in science and engineering, I think their first question is usually, is usually why it won't work.”