The Blueprint For Business Success (without hacks) w/ Clay Hebert | AMP # 468

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

AUBREY MARCUS: Clay. 

CLAY HEBERT: What's up, brother? 

AUBREY MARCUS: What's up, my brother? How are you? 

CLAY HEBERT: I am thrilled to be here. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, man. Likewise. So, we actually started to get to know each other, just playing ball, hanging out. And I was aware of your vast business and marketing expertise. And one day I came to you and I was like, man, I got so much going on and I really just need some help figuring some shit out. And like a friend, like a brother, you just stepped in and said, I got you. And we just went to work. And through that process, I realized that the reputation was accurate and you had a wealth of knowledge to share on brand, on marketing, on how to structure your own calendar and life and orient yourself to actually not only be creating something you're proud of, and that's going to provide for yourself and your family, but also live the type of life that you want. So I appreciate the breadth of the spectrum that you have to offer. And I'm excited to share some of your wisdom here with the audience, because I think it's something that so many people can benefit from. 

CLAY HEBERT: Thanks brother. I think I said, I got you with a choked breath because you just beat me nine straight games in basketball. I'm about 53 on me that day I fouled out. And so that was my last breath before I died. I was like, please. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

CLAY HEBERT: No. I'm excited. Yeah, man. I think happiness and success. We talk about that all the time. And if you look online, six figure, seven figure, eight figure, nine figure, you know, people talk about that stuff, but they don't really think about what it means for them. Right. I think you and I both know Gary Vaynerchuk. A lot of people want Gary's followers. I don't think a lot of people want Gary's calendar, but they don't really think about that. So one of my favorite things to do is to help people see who they are. And then that usually flows into what their business is and could be. And then the last step is aligning that business and building it in a way that can give them the calendar and life and success and happiness they want. And it doesn't always mean eight figures. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and one of the concepts that's around is this idea of the prostitute archetype, right? Which is basically you're whoring yourself out for your work to get the money but I think there's a kind of misconception with that because you actually just gave an example of someone who owns their surfboard and goes out and surfs every morning. He hammers shingles all day and roofs all day, but then has some beers with his friends and an acai bowl or whatever. And then wakes up the next morning, does the same thing, super happy. And maybe he's not like a carpenter like Jesus, and this is his actual ultimate plan, but he loves his life. And so he's not being a prostitute. He's just providing the means that are necessary through something that you can bring a positive attitude towards and understand like, no, no, this is my work. I'm doing this work, but it's also enabling me to live this life. Not everybody needs to be a painter or a poet or a life coach or whatever the hell that thing is that you're the most passionate about doing. So I understand that concept, but I also think there's some other nuance to this. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, you make a really great point. I think every human has creativity within them and your upcoming book, You vs Anti-you is going to get into that about the forces that stop us from putting our stuff out into the world. And Pressfield has written about this and Godin's written about this and lots of people have. Everyone as a human being, you're probably more creative than you think. You're very creative but a lot of people are stuck and Pressfield goes as far as to say he thinks that if everyone could have their art flow through them as purely and as easily as it does for you and some others that there wouldn't be cancer, we wouldn't have big pharma because we wouldn't need it because it would really impact our health. So he goes pretty big on that. I think where I'm at is, and to your point, it doesn't need to be your job and back to the point of the surfer, that guy's art and creativity is organizing the bonfire on the beach with his friends and running the WhatsApp group and getting everybody there. Think about how much happiness he brings to that, right? He gets people together once a week at this bonfire and et cetera, and shows us the hammering of the shingles for his day job that pays the bills that pays for his rent and a surfboard. That's not his dharma, his art, the organizing the people is, or the basketball game. We all have these things that we do and they don't always have to be your job. They can be the art that you bring to the world and when those two things intersect, that's wonderful. That's great. I think there's too many people trying to force their passion and their creativity as their vocation. That's like the difference between vocation and avocation, right? What are your hobbies? What are your jobs? You love to cook, I love to cook. I make sourdough bread, Vy loves her sourdough bread. People have had my sourdough bread and they're like, this is so good. You should turn this into a business. And I was like, have you seen the margins? 

AUBREY MARCUS: And also it's the best way to make you hate sourdough. 

CLAY HEBERT: A hundred percent. I love to quote

AUBREY MARCUS: This is another thing too. I remember a conversation between my stepdad and a gynecologist friend he had, and my stepdad, he created the flesh light. He loves pussy. Let's just, there's no secret here. And he's like, man, you got the dream job. And this guy goes, are you fucking kidding me? 

CLAY HEBERT: Sure. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I used to feel the same way about pussy that you did. And pardon my vulgarity here, but I used to feel the same way. But now it's just day in and day out. And that's all I'm looking at all the time. So it's actually ruined this beautiful thing that I love because now it's my job. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Now, of course, he's dealing with all kinds of complications, et cetera. But that same thing, although an extreme example, it's the reality. Anytime you turn something into the business that you have to do, there's going to be a diminishment of the pleasure of it. Whereas if you allow it to be purely your art, it's a different thing. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. And it can be your business if you understand all the moves, all the things it's going to take. And that's where I think the calendar is in the middle, right? Because you don't have to look very far online to find on this side of the spectrum, you have the mega productivity gurus that teach you how to eat another 18 seconds out of your morning routine and do this and listen to audiobooks while you do your cold plunge and all this stuff. And then on this side, you have the Bali priestess float through life. If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life. I think both of those are not exactly true, but in the middle, what you have is we all have a calendar. This podcast was in your calendar. It was in my calendar. People say, I don't want to be a slave to my calendar. I think you should be a slave to your calendar, but nobody else gets right access, nobody else gets to edit it. You control your calendar and put it on there. Jesse Itzler is a good example of this. He puts on his calendar what he wants. If you wipe everything off your calendar and then only put back on what you need to do. I've done this with a bunch of people. And they put it back on, I do want to go to the gym three times a week, or I want to lift, or I want to play pickleball, or I want to do whatever, pick my kids up from school, do this, do that. There's always more than enough time when they put all the stuff back on the calendar, because they don't put it on the calendar. Every Wednesday I want to scroll Instagram for two hours, right? So there's plenty of time to do what we want to do, and it's pretty interesting a few people have teared up doing it, where they look at this calendar that they define, I don't have any opinion as to what they should do. I want to take my wife to Europe for two weeks. There's always enough time. And if you can just do that exercise, really simply design the life you want. And in that you put your business stuff, whatever that is. And like we talked about the surfer, he may not have the skills or anything to do, a podcast or whatever, but his perfect calendar is organizing that bonfire on the beach in San Diego. So you gotta figure out what it means. And the easy hard part, and what's the hard-hard part of turning your passion into a business. You've built so many different businesses. And you knew it all started with the passion and idea you had, and you've got a lot coming in the pike and you've got some really cool new stuff coming out and you figured out, okay, now we're past the really cool idea and now we're getting to the nuts and bolts and the hard part. But you know what that is. This is what Seth Godin calls the dip. The dip is if you're looking at someone who wants to be a doctor in college, the dip is organic chemistry. It's one class. If you want to become a doctor, that's the filter class. That's the class that you're going to. Be pre med until you take organic chemistry and then half of the people fail out or decide they don't want to be a doctor anymore. So the point is, look at that ahead of time. What is the dip in the new project? Is it going to be the website? Is it going to be getting new customers? What's the hard part to find that ahead of time so that you can skate towards it with enough momentum to get up the hill? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, so there's two parts that I want to touch on. One, just going back to the calendar. Everybody says all the time, I have to do this. I have to go to this wedding. No, you don't. You don't have to go this way. I have to go to this. I have to go. You don't even have to go to work like literally you could choose a different path and maybe that would be difficult. There's very few things that you have to do sometimes. I have to go to this court hearing or like, I have to show up to jail or I'm going to like there's serious consequences, but it's so rare that you actually have to. So what does that mean? It means you want to based upon the field of circumstances that you're in.

CLAY HEBERT: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: But to reclaim that, like, Oh yeah, I want to go to this wedding. And so that's why I can't go out and have drinks with you or go on this boy's trip. I want to do this. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like to reclaim the one, or I want to go to work today. I can't do that. I want to go to work today. Like to just even say that and to recognize the agency that we have, the choice, like that's an unbelievably powerful thing that people can reclaim, but almost none of us do. Even I forget it sometimes. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. There's a great little story about that. Woody Allen, won an Academy award. I'm sure he's won a bunch, but one of the years he won an Academy award the night that he was supposed to accept it. You're supposed to put on a talk and go to the big show with everybody else. And he declined and they're like, well, what big important event do you have? He goes, well, every Thursday night, I'm in a little musical foursome and I play the clarinet. So he made a commitment to those guys. And also he was like, I just want to do that. Like, I'm glad that I won the award, but I'm not going to go to stand in front of everybody and watch the award or whatever. So to your point, that's a good example. You literally win an Academy Award, which is the ultimate award in that industry. And he's like, nah, I got my clarinet. I want to do it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And if he said, I have to go to this clarinet thing, people have been like, right, what? 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: But it was, clearly, he was understanding that these things are a choice. And so many people are like when they're talking about starting a new business, like, Oh, I gotta pay the bills. I got but really there's usually. A lot of other options of downshifting their life as they actually figure out how to do this. There's some friend's couch they can sleep on. They can move back into their parent's spare room or whatever. And that's humbling and uncomfortable, but actually sometimes you gotta pay the blood sacrifice. You gotta pay the price. You gotta take the risk to actually salto mortale to leap into the void, and sometimes it requires a cost. And a lot of people are afraid of that cost and pretend that they just can't do it, but really actually, if you had to, you could. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, you hit on it exactly what it is. It's setting aside your ego enough to do that. And because you're going to need to set aside your ego a hundred times as you build the business. So you might as well start with crashing on your friend's couch or whatever. Sebastian Younger was one of my first clients when I left consulting and an amazing guy. Written a bunch of books. He did the perfect storm and war movies called tribe was one of the best. His literary agent is a guy named Stuart Krashefsky and Stuart was like, I really want to be a literary agent but I need, whatever it was something like that, like be closer to New York City and Seth Godin said is that what you need? Is that the block because you can stay at my place, you can crash on my couch, you can stay at my apartment. And he was calling him out and saying if that's the block that you think, to become this. And he took him up on it and he said, yes. And now he's a literary agent, big time, New York City, the whole thing. And you're right. It was sort of a made up block. Seth called us bluff and said, okay, like handed him the keys and said, let's go. And it all worked out. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I'm going to go to your second point, which is there's so much, creation energy that comes at the beginning and it's the funnest part. Like the funnest part of everything is like ideation creation. And I'm a little bit of an ideation creation junkie. And that's one of the things you had to kind of sober me up about. And the world's been sobering me up about, because they got all these resources from the sale of Onnit. And then I was like, I can do anything. It was like a Disney song. Like you might as well have started playing the characters. And like, I could have been out there. I can't sing. Otherwise I'd have to do an improv rendition, but it was basically like I can do anything song. You know, like I have all the resources in the world. I can do anything. And then it was like, Oh shit, no, I can't. I only have a certain amount of time and attention that I can give to things. And anything that's going to be good requires devotion and time and tension and sweat and the grinds and every aspect of it. And so I spread myself super thin and started to like, feel some losses come in and understandably so in hindsight, of course I didn't have the time and attention, but I was addicted to that creation process. Oh, I can, I can do it. Yeah. Well, like, but I couldn't see it through. I couldn't make it through the dip of what it actually takes to really get things moving in every business has that. And some may start real fast. That's uncommon, but it can happen. Others may start real slow and it's that flywheel effect of just adding a little bit of water to the downward part of the wheel that's keeping it kind of moving.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. Like you're an amazing athlete and you play a lot of basketball. We hooped together in your brain, you know that you can't win the championship for a certain league and another league on the same night and across town or in two different cities. There's only one Aubrey and you can't be in both places. And if both teams only have five players and you leave one with four players, even if they're pretty good, they're going to lose four on five every time, ight? So, in a thing like that, you see the missing resource, but all of us, when we're in that fun creation mode, we feel like it's a crap state. It's not a basketball game. It's a craps table. And we can sit here and place a bunch of different bets, right? It's just getting ridiculously sober, honest about what the pieces are. Then you look at someone like Elon or Jack Dorsey, who is legitimately CEO of multiple huge businesses, but then you have insane teams below hundreds and thousands of people. I think it's just getting really honest about what pieces have to go through, what is your magic and where your magic can add to these things. And then when you say resources, there's money and there's team and there's time and there's everything. But there's times where you have to say I'm going to light the fire and walk away, but I've got a guy who's really good at kindling and gasoline and he's going to do like what takes all of you and what you can sort of sub in and have the team for, because if you're on that basketball team, if you're like, guys, I'm going to practice, I'm going to play with you. I'm going to get you better. I'm going to run a bunch of plays, but I got this other league. I got to win. You're going to have eight players on the team and I'm going to have coached you all and you're good to go. And I'm bringing in this other ringer. Now you can win both leagues on the same night.

AUBREY MARCUS: There's very few of those shark tank people, like a Mark Cuban who can own the Dallas Mavericks and probably run a pickleball team and also run all of his shark tank businesses because he has this gigantic organization. That can help him navigate all that. And really what he's doing is just fine tuning small things at the top and whatever matriculates to him eventually at a certain point he has to make executive decisions on, but there's so much infrastructure and so much resource and capital that he has, but most of us are not anywhere near that position. So I think one of these tenants that we're distilling is, even if you have a bunch of creative ideas, like focus on the one that you're the most passionate about. And also you think has the strongest ability to set you up to the life that you want and the resources and whatever you're looking for and just go all in, like devote everything into that because lasers go really far and make an impact, but lanterns, they're fun. We're just casting a little light everywhere, but it's much more difficult to be a lantern and be successful than it is to be a laser and really focus all of your energy and effort into one thing. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. And I think for a lot of people listening to this, it's okay to have a day job. We talked about the surfer and the roofing and whatever, whatever your day job is and you can do the one thing I very much agree with Gary is nights and weekends. You gotta make it happen. If it means you gotta leave your day job at 5 PM and you don't love it, maybe you're a manager at state farm and then you come home and you open a different laptop and you're working on your thing and building it up. I like that concept. Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn has a quote that I don't really like. He said, entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building the plane on the way down. And you and I have both been there and sometimes it can feel like that, but that quote doesn't encourage many people to be entrepreneurs. That's like, stay at State Farm. I think nights and weekends build it up, one, 10, a hundred, a thousand customers, and then build it up to the level where you're not jumping off a clip, you're stepping up, not jumping off a cliff, you're stepping off a curb and it's six inches and you're good to go because your side hustle is paying three quarters of your bills and now you're safe to leave the safe corporate job. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You mentioned the escalation one to ten to a hundred to a thousand. These are all significant milestones actually. And the difficulty of getting zero to one, one to 10, 10 to a hundred, a hundred to a thousand, they're actually almost equivalent difficulties, even though the numbers start to escalate dramatically. So, well explain to people what you mean by that and what some reasonable kind of metrics and milestones are. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. Every business is different, but it's worth remembering that you see Airbnb, right? They're a multi billion dollar company now. At one point, Airbnb, it's interesting to follow them because at one point when they started it was guys who were sitting around in a rented shared apartment in San Francisco. There was a big design conference in town and they were seeing on Twitter that there were no hotels available. Hotels went from 300, 400, 500, 600 people were paying 1,000 dollars because there were too many people and no hotels. So they said, what if we just let people stay here on our floor? And people don't realize Airbnb, the air came from the air mattress, as in an air mattress thrown on the floor right next to the couch. And the B and B part obviously is like the traditional B and B, but bed and breakfast. So the iteration of that, obviously that sort of worked. Then they did some arbitrage on Craigslist, got some money, built it up, but it was years into Airbnb. It's a funny story. Neil Diamond's drummer is the one that emailed Brian Chesky at Airbnb. And he asked an interesting question. He said, guys, I'm going on tour with Neil Diamond. Because he's Neil Diamond's drummer. Would it be okay if I'm not there when people stay at my Airbnb? So from when Airbnb started up until when Neil Diamond sent this email, the mode was you rent somebody's room. And they're there and they cook you breakfast. Breakfast was part of the deal. And Neil Diamond's drummer said, would it be okay if I'm not there? And Brian Chesky and the team had a meeting about it. And they literally said, guys, what do we think? Is this okay? Will this work? And now obviously that's, what, 90 percent of Airbnb is you rent it and the person's not there. And so these businesses evolve. And to your point about 1, 10, 100, 1,000, I think people should really look at that. When you're starting a business, when you're starting an idea, think for the first phase of zero to one, right? Peter Thiel wrote a great book called zero to one, but getting that first customer, that's not your mom, not your girlfriend, not your friend. That doesn't count. Those customers don't count. Who is the first person where you told a story in the marketplace, they understood the story and they purchased that's phase one, that's like celebrate that pop the champagne. Next phase seems small and maybe it'll happen quickly, but 1 to 10, nine more strangers, nine more emails you don't recognize, and then from 10 to a hundred and a hundred to a thousand. Once you've got a thousand, you have figured out you've gotten an MBA in your own business. Once you have a thousand customers thinking when you guys started fit for service, zero to a thousand different people that attended some level of fit for service was what a couple of years probably. Yeah. So that growth that then you figured out and you've done all the moves, but what people do is they start a business and they try to get 15,000 customers in the first month and you can't skip that. At one point, Airbnb had one room to rent and then 10. I bet from 1 to 1, was months in their business, right? And then 10 to 100, eventually it scales. Almost all things have this exponential growth, whether it's YouTube subscribers, podcast subscribers. We have a lot of friends who did the grind for a long time, Mr. Beast, right? He did the grind forever. And then now he's on this part of the exponential growth curve. That's what almost all businesses look like. And everyone wants the shortcut. Everyone wants the one weird trick to six pack abs. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right, right. And sometimes people, especially people with experience, can try and raise a bunch of money, get a bunch of resources and hit the ground big or they have those resources and that's sufficient attention. I was just out in Puerto Rico with Jake Paul. He just launched his brand W. He has such an amazing marketing engine and so much attention gathered, and he built the whole team and he's got his own fund backing it and they had the most successful launch in Walmart history. They focused everything on that one store and they've just been killing it. And then they're going to move from that and target's going to be next at some point and whatever Costco is going to be now, however, their plan is going to go from there and Amazon, all the different things, but he really does a good job of having a bunch of resources and then he's able to hit the ground really fast. But that's such an anomaly. Like most of the people listening to this.

CLAY HEBERT: Well, he did it earlier though. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, for sure.

CLAY HEBERT: He built it up for years, his YouTube and everything. His 110, a hundred was a decade ago on YouTube. And then he made the smart chess moves to use the platform that he built to launch other things. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So most people listening to this are probably, in that 500 to 2000 followers on Instagram, they haven't really turned it into a personal brand. It's been mostly them just sharing interesting things about their lifestyle. And there's going to be a variety of spectrum of people. How important do you think in today's world is that kind of personal brand and your ability to have attention that you can kind of utilize, it's one of the few free ways where you can get attention now is your social media following all that the algorithms are brutal, as soon as you start promoting something, it's probably not going to be shown to anybody. So don't imagine that if you have a million followers, all of a sudden you can just start a business and it'll be easy.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah

AUBREY MARCUS: It's not 

CLAY HEBERT: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I can tell you that, that's for damn sure. But how important do you think it is to, and someone like Gary V is definitely be in the camp of like, yeah, just grind hard on this and gather as much attention. And there's certainly a lot of success stories of that. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, for sure. I think of it in terms of at the top level, there's an algorithm, right? These social channels have an algorithm. Then you have an audience and you build a massive audience over the years and then you have an army. So as it goes down, people move from algorithm to audience to army. And what I mean by that is, you mentioned Instagram. I love social media. I remember the days, you remember the days of nailing stuff to telephone poles and newspaper ads. And I mean that is hope. That is publish and pay and hope. I love social media because you can find the people that matter. You can search hashtags. You can find similar accounts. It's like everything is there and everything is exposed. And it really is not that hard to find the people that you want to reach if you understand who they are and the stories you're telling. That said, it's not your playground and what I mean by that is, let's say you and I are both single and we went to a bar and we showed up with six guys, a group of eight girls, we all start talking and then you meet Vy and you're like, well, I'm going deep conversation and to the point where we all leave, you're still there, all her friends still leave, she's still there at the end of the night, you would not say, well Vy, it was great chatting with you for two and a half hours. You might be my soulmate. I hope I run into you at this bar at some point in the future. But that's what we do on social media every single day. The bar is your Instagram, your content that you publish or your dance moves or your game or your Riz at the bar, your followers are people that are paying attention to you at the bar. But what we do in real life, if you want to have a deeper relationship with somebody, you say, Hey, I'm moving the after party to my place, or what's your phone number or let's follow up. And we don't do that on Instagram and sacrifice yourself to the algorithm. I don't blame the bar, right? If you didn't meet Vy ever again, you wouldn't go back to that bar owner and be like, what the hell, bro. But we do that about the algorithm. We complain about the algorithm. Everyone complains about being shadow banned. Talk about taking initiative. Taking initiative is allowing them to move from that algorithm to an audience and what I mean by audience, the audience level is sort of like podcasts, YouTube, where they've sort of subscribed to you at some level. If someone subscribes to the Aubrey Marcus podcast, Spotify is not going to put an algorithm between that. This episode will show up next in their feed. So you've got a certain level of permission with that. But then when you get down to the level of email and SMS, where if you want to send something, HubSpot or ConvertKit does not decide. Whether to show that to them based on algorithms and selling advertising or anything else, you have permission to talk to those people. So I love the platforms. I think people should, to answer your question. I think building a personal brand is one of the most important things anyone can do, but I think doing it only on social platforms where we all know that, and it's like putting notes in a bottle and throwing them in the ocean. Maybe you got a lot of notes and a lot of bottles. That's your followers. So maybe those bottles have a better chance of washing up on shore somewhere and somebody reading it, but wouldn't you rather hold a bonfire or throw a party on shore that's moving them from being a social media follower to podcast and YouTube and then to email and SMS. So, you can't push people where they don't want to go. But I'll give you a simple example. We remember the clubhouse, right? A couple of years ago, the clubhouse was the thing. We're in the middle of COVID. A friend of mine, Leah Lamar was in Los Angeles and she and her friend, Nicole Benham built a very big clubhouse following 400,000 people. And I was just kind of gently messaging them, I'm like, why don't you guys invite them to a newsletter or somewhere else? And they're like, no, Clay, you don't understand. Clubhouse is the new thing. It's the new, whatever, new Instagram. Well, it was. And they had 400,000 followers and then the clubhouse went poof. How many of those people do you think then typed in and manually Googled their name to go find them somewhere else? They didn't, but they would have opted into an email list or an SMS. And then that person could have said, Hey, I'm over here now, as we all know, the clubhouse sort of went away. You joined my newsletter. They could have a business and a platform. So the risk is I love these tools. Just like I love meeting people at bars, that's your dance moves and content's amazing. I think back to the point about Pressfield and creativity and I think one thing it's showed, I think sometimes I think social media gets a bad rap because I think you're seeing every single day, it's such an infinite canvas for creativity, like what people are able to do, how fast memes happen when we see something happen in the culture, and like one hour later, some really funny, clever, and somebody built that in Canva or whatever, and like the pace at which that happens, didn't happen 15, 20 years ago. So that I think is just fascinating. Certainly there's some challenges with algorithms and then people's self worth and suicide. And it's the biggest double edged sword in history, but I think it's on just like it's on someone to manage their health and their diet and their fitness and everything else. It's on them to understand the relationship with this technology and how to use it without getting cut by the other edge of the story.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. When you said moving people from followers to an army, there is one example that I think of somebody who's doing this incredibly well, and it's Dr. Nicola Pera.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And she has this hashtag self healers, and she has a bunch of her followers who have then come into this shared identity as a self healer as someone who's willing to use these psychological truisms and mechanisms and intelligently guided moves to actually start to heal themselves in their own life. And I've watched her just in this exponential growth, even when she was on my podcast, I think she was over a million followers and now she's over 10 million, but a big part of it is that she has this self healers movement and that's something where you could imagine that if someone is feeling like a self healer and all of a sudden they miss a post here or there, they scroll by it and the algorithm stops showing it. They're like, hey, what the hell happened to Nicole's posts? I'm not seeing them because it's part of their identity. And as soon as some problem comes up, they're going to go search back her profile, like the posts that they've missed, retrain the algorithm in their favor. So consistently you see her posts, always do well, like how does her post always do well? Well, it's because she's developed this identity that's created an army and the army will then retrain the algorithm if they've missed it because, hey, wait, why am I not seeing her? I want to see her. I'm going to go, like back to these posts and then it'll actually retrain the algorithm to show you what you want to see.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. That's a perfect example. And her stuff is great. She has a very clear customer. They know the problem. Her content's incredible. Her books, she stayed very consistent. People know what to expect. That's part of brand, brand is, it's a lot of things, but one thing it is people's expectations of what it's going to be like to interact with you. If you go to a particular restaurant and it's a fancy steakhouse with white napkins, you have a vibe in your head as far as what it's going to be like. And if it's misaligned with that, if it's misaligned in a good way, cool, neat experience. But if it lets you down, it's because it didn't meet your expectations as far as what that was. So her personal brand, her content speaks specifically to her audience. She stayed in it, right? She doesn't talk about 20 other things. And you're right, this army that she's built, this kind of gets to what I call the shape of marketing. People think the shape of marketing is seeding the clouds and raining on everybody and hoping people get wet. The shape of marketing is back to the 1, 10, 100, 1000, think of the bullseye. That's your archery in your backyard. How do you tell a story to the 10 people who care? One exercise I sometimes do with people is, if there were an infinite line out the door of your customers, but it had to be one ideal customer. So imagine there's a million of them, but they're all one type of person. Describe that person to me, and that helps them really define who they are, who they're serving, the problem they're solving, etc. And I think Nicole could do that off the top of her head. This amalgamated avatar. Unlike Archery, in marketing, if you focus on the center of that bullseye and you focus on that person, what happens is you attract lots of other people. There's lots of examples of this. And then really great marketing uses what I call portable stories to move from one ring to the next. So James Clear, his book sold 10 million plus copies. Who knows what it's at now? I think with his own personal platform, his email list, he wrote about habits for six years on his blog every Monday and Thursday, and did a huge podcast tour. So he did the real launch marketing plan. I think that sold about a million books using James's own platform, which is insane. Most books don't sell 10,000 copies. But the reason it went from 1 million to 10 million is because his book is one of the most recommendable books in the last decade because it allows readers and people use the portable story of we don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our habits. Well, that's one of those bars to use your word that kind of hits you. It's like, Ooh, wait a minute. Did you just destroy a billion dollar goal setting industry with half of one of the phrases and habits and change your environment? And then the book explains exactly how to do that for people who want to improve their habits, I think when it comes to marketing 

AUBREY MARCUS: And just to stop on that, like everybody wants to have that clever thing that they can share with they're friends, cause it makes you feel good. You feel like you're a value. So your friend is going on rambling about all your goals. I need to set more goals. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It's like, actually, I just read this book and it says, you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your habits. So like, what are your habits? And then your friend goes. Oh, damn, that sounds good. Like, where'd you get that? It's like, oh yeah, books, atomic habits. You should totally read it. 

CLAY HEBERT: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And it's like such an easy way because it gives somebody a little bit of intelligence that they feel is true. Like this resonates, even if they haven't done it, even if they haven't actually changed their habits at all, they can say the thing and the thing sounds right, and then it shares the thing and then that sells the book. And then that person gets the book and then it duplicates to that other friend who's talking about goals, who they may have been talking about with goals too. And like, check this out, we're talking about these goals 

CLAY HEBERT: That are portable stories. And that is the kind of viral that people should shoot for. Too many people are shooting for viral views online, like some meme that goes viral or whatever, viral online on Instagram, the one offs, the weird spikes rarely convert to users. Because it just means it was funny or interesting and a bunch of people shared it. That is the kind of viral loop, meaning someone reads it and you hit on exactly right and kind of the keyword. Actually, the word actually is the needle in the arm of it's a bit contrarian. It's not chicken breast is a healthy protein. It's new. It's interesting. It's different. You and I could drive to Barnes and Noble right now and go to the goal setting section and there's 50 books and James was basically like, maybe that's not the way. Maybe this is the way. And even that quote was a repurposed military quote from a long time ago. He just sort of changed out two words, but understanding what you hit on is, it's not just that that wisdom exists in the book, it's not buried on page 176 in the body copy, because to your point, the person who said it at the party, they never got to page 176, they flipped through it, maybe they didn't even get past chapter 1, but maybe it's in big font, and that's what James talks about on social media or whatever. So build the content around these hooks or these portable stories in a way, again, not just that it's interesting, or it helps the one person, but you nailed it. It helps that one person feel the way they want to feel at a cocktail party or when they're talking about the book. And the other thing I'll say is they don't always say, as I learned from James Clear often to your point, they just say, you know what, Aubrey, they don't say actually or James Clear, they're like, let me tell you, but they got it from there, but it's fine because if enough people do that, enough of it comes back.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, for sure. I remember there's lots of elements of writing on the day where there was a lot of these different pieces and I got them from a variety of different sources. The one that's coming to mind now is Nick Littlehail's book, Sleep. And I read Nick Littlehail's book, Sleep, and he has a contrarian take on the “you need eight hours of uninterrupted sleep and that's the thing that matters. And it matters that you get that every day”. And there was this huge movement about that. And it's not entirely untrue, but he just has a different take on it. And he says, no, each sleep cycle is complete in its own right. Each sleep cycle takes about an hour and a half. There's some variance there. If you have an aura ring, you can actually measure it because it typically goes from deep to REM. And then there's a brief wake up period. And so actually if you wear a whoop or an aura, you can typically see your sleep cycles if they're somewhat normal. And he's like, you just count your sleep cycles. And what you want to aim for is ideally five a day. That's like the most you get, which is seven and a half hours, but which could come in a clip, but he's like, and if he doesn't, then, all right, let's say you get four and a half hours. Well, that's three sleep cycles. So you got three points for that day. You need to pick up two extra points and you can do that with a 30 minute, basically power nap or like a dedicated rest period. Or you can take a full hour and a half nap, but don't ever sleep longer than an hour and a half in a nap because then you're going to be in this kind of inbetween limerence stage of between cycles. So, then you're counting points in the day. And then he goes, not only that, people say you can't make up on sleep. This is all bullshit. He works with like man united and a bunch of pro athlete teams and these athletes, they're going from one game to another game and they sometimes get fucked up on sleep. So this belief that if they didn't get eight hours, they're not going to perform, he's like, don't worry about that. What you ultimately need is to count how many sleep cycles you get in a week. So in a week, the top number you want to get is you want to get 35, but if you can get 28, all right, then that's pretty good. And then you can pick them up on an extra day. So you get your seven and a half and you get your 30 minute nap, and now you got six in this day and it makes up for three the other day and you average it out and it was deeply relaxing for me as someone who struggled with sleep. And it's something that I can share. And of course I put it in my book so I can recommend in my book, but also I always name check. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah

AUBREY MARCUS: Like little hell because it's just out of my integrity because that's where I got it from. But that's a portable story that I've shared so many times when someone's so stressed out, it's like, Oh, I only got four and a half. And I'm like, all right, well, let me tell you how to think about this. That's three cycles. You can pick up one, just with a 30 minute power nap, and then you're up to four and then you're not so far off the ideal. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. And you nailed exactly what like the ingredients of a portable story. Part of it is simple, you were able to recount that easily and you wrote in your book but I bet the first time you heard it you could have walked across the street

AUBREY MARCUS: Totally 

CLAY HEBERT: And told it to somebody else picking up and as long as you hit this many sleep cycles. Now I can repeat that to anyone easily. So as you craft portable stories about yourself or your business, think about that people struggle because they want to sound so smart. You and I have some mutual friends that use 10 dollar words when the market would much more resonate with the five cent word speaking clearly with, try to use as few syllables as possible and you can feel free to use help from this rs.com or chatGPT or whatever. Simplify this, write this for a third grader, getting it clear, but also compelling nowhere in that explanation of sleep cycles and everything else. Did you talk about some crazy deep science of sleep? But smart people jam that in there to show, look, I know the science. But most people don't care about the science and the ones that do will go down the rabbit hole, they will find science. But what you just explained, I could go explain to somebody else. And that's a kind of portable story. But the key thing is contrarian. You're having this problem. Maybe you're not reaching your goals. There's a really powerful frame that kind of permeates all of those, the movie Good Will hunting where Robin Williams characters talking to Matt Damon's character. And he said, it's not your fault. And he goes, I know, I know. He goes, no, it's not your fault. And he keeps repeating it until Matt Damon's crying and they're hugging and everything else. ‘It's not your fault’ is a very powerful frame when it comes to marketing and branding and storytelling. Because part of what you said about the sleep stuff and what you learned from Nick is, it's not your fault. You've been told you need eight hours every single night. And if you get six one night, guess what? The next day you feel back, you feel behind, which guess what? Then affects your sleep. And it's this vicious cycle. So it's not your fault. If your stuff is true and legit, ‘it's not your fault’ can be a really good frame. It's not your fault. You were never taught the right way to eat or the right way to work.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. It's not your fault that everybody was saying that I can't believe it's not butter is better than butter. 

CLAY HEBERT: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And it's like, Nope. Sorry about that. And there's still people looking for, you know, low fat, non fat. And it's like, look, the receipts are in on this. This was all a farce. So that whole concept really flooded through like the market, but still you see people who are not adapting to that and it's interesting, but it's still another one of those advantages where you see someone with like fucking seed oils that are masquerading as butter that don't taste as good and are way more inflammatory and unhealthy for you. And you'd be like, actually, like butter is a healthy food. And they're like, what? 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah

AUBREY MARCUS: Because this thing has been there. But if you're patient enough and you know enough, you can explain. This is where it gets a little bit more difficult because then you can get in conversations about cholesterol and you get in all these things. So

CLAY HEBERT: Sure. 

AUBREY MARCUS: A little bit harder and you actually have to recommend a book, but it is that contrarian thing. It's that thing that like people don't really realize what the reality is and you can share that and then point that back to something else. Even if you can't exactly explain it, you can know the answer and point it back to something that does.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. So that's a great point. And you and I both love words and wordplay and writing, and that's a good example. And a portable story or having that conversation could begin with sort of a simple contrarian statement. So if you're trying to teach and educate somebody in the eighties and the nineties, the word fat, we kind of thought it was one thing and we thought an avocado is the same as transfat. Same as fat on your body or whatever. And the real realization that you're talking about is we realized that like not only is butter better than I can't believe it's not butter, but that fat is not the demon, but it's easy to understand how besides billions of dollars in marketing, how people thought fat was bad because you're fat on your body.

AUBREY MARCUS: Linguistically.

CLAY HEBERT: Linguistically, it's the same thing. So, one way to start that conversation, you let the person say whatever they're going to say about butter and this and that. And you'd be like, so actually, even though fat is three letters, one syllable, it's a pretty simple word, just like the Eskimos have 87 words for snow, humans should have 13 words for fat. And let me tell you what I mean by that, boom, boom, boom. Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's great. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's great. And this applies, of course, to writing in particular, if you're writing a book or crafting a message, but this also applies to the distillation of what your company is offering and what the services, whether it's coaching that you're offering, whatever, like the ability to both understand, and this is something that you kind of walk me through as well. This idea of processing fluency, the ability to understand what the message is, and then ideally convey that message over to somebody else so that they could be like, Oh, okay. I get it. I understand why you're into this thing versus this other thing. And so go help people understand what this kind of processing fluency model looks like, and then how this translates from information you might put in a book to your coaching practice or your physical products, right?

CLAY HEBERT: Right. Yeah. So the analogy I like to think about is back to like dating at a bar, you can talk about a pickup line. You can talk about what's a good opener or whatever. But as we know, the best thing to do is to be competent, to be in shape and things like that. When it comes to messaging and marketing your business, sometimes people want similar hacks. But what I like to start with is start with the customer, always. People usually start with their widget or their service or their product. And they want to force it on the world without really thinking about the customer and their pains. And so the way that I like to think about it, you and I can go to the newsstand on the street and find the latest issue of men's health. I haven't seen it, but I know what's on the cover. It's a black and white picture of a dude with six pack abs. And two of the headlines on the cover are some version of six pack abs might say rock hard abs might say whatever, and some version of more sex. That is going to be on the cover of the next men's health to come out. The one that's not even published. They'll change the words a little bit, but it'll be that, that picture and those two headlines, and then some other headlines about what to eat. That's because guys who buy men's health, that's what they want. When we wake up and we're sort of cloudy gorillas and dreams are fading away, but we're not really online yet. That's what we want. And that's the type of clarity short headline we should think about to start to explain our business. And what I mean about the dating is you talk to somebody, you buy them a drink, you get their number. And now years later, when you're in a relationship with somebody, you can go deep, you can say things you could never have said the first night. So think about that in terms of your business. Everyone should think about who is my customer most importantly, and what do they want? What's the pain? What keeps them up at night and what gets them excited? What's kind of the negative and what's the positive. So I call it the up at night test and the alarm clock test up at night. If they're tossing and turning, what are their problems? Why are they tossing and turning? Literally write it down. And say, is that the problem that my product or service solves? If it does, cool. And in the morning when they wake up, we can give it a positive spin, and say, what are they excited about? What do they want? What's the positive side of that? And does your product or service fit that? That's the simplest way to start. And then copywriting is a whole thing. You and I both love copy and words and crafting the perfect message. Most people are not going to study copywriting for 10 years, but the place I like to start in the little kind of, shortcut framework is verb your noun is a great place to start when talking about your business because the two most important words in the copy of marketing are you and your it's not free. It's not sale. It's not seven figure eight figure nine figure. It's you and your because we are all a you and you are walking around and we have problems and we have pains and we want products and services that solve those and we have stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. And we want products and services to fill those gaps. What verb your noun does is you're being in the middle makes it about the customer not about the company or the brand and then what I mean by verb your noun is what's the noun they want verbed and then what's that verb. So is it live your legend if they want to like do these epic adventures and things like that right someone who is a manager at State Farm might not be living their legend. So maybe to them, live your legend is, or it might be, you can use an adjective in there to unlock your best body. Right? Or build your tribe. If someone wants to, maybe it's community software. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure. 

CLAY HEBERT: No matter what it is, the person you're serving has a noun that they want verbed. When I used to do stuff with Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I didn't say I'm a kickstarter expert that would have made it about me. I said, fund your dream that makes it about them. Because if you're launching a film and someone else is launching a drone and someone else is launching a hoodie, the word dream actually speaks to each of them individually. And in a weird way, they're like, Oh, Clay gets me cause he knows that this is my dream and I want it funded. So the simple kind of exercise for anyone who's doing this, I would say, just write down verb your noun, use thesaurus, use any online tools and say, what is the noun that my customer wants verb? And then what's that verb? They have a dream. They want it funded. They have a best body. They want it unlocked. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, my book was a perfect example of that ‘Own the day, own your life’.

CLAY HEBERT: Literally

AUBREY MARCUS: Verb your noun, verb your noun. 

CLAY HEBERT: Literally. That was a double. I think that was one of the first things you and I talked about basketball at your house was 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right.

CLAY HEBERT: That you nailed it. And the clarity of that, and the cover and the rest of that subtitle is like 10/10 marketing, like the cover and title and subtitle of your book paired with that photo, absolutely perfect. Cause back to when people wake up, in the morning and they're a little cloudy, they want to own the day. And you told them within the title, if they own the day, they have a chance to own their life. That's another thing with words is you'll see this often in book titles and subtitles, Tim Ferriss and lots of others. If you're titling a book and this subtitle is often three steps up, so the first step is feels like something that they can achieve. It doesn't feel too pie in the sky. The second thing feels like something they can achieve if they do the first thing. And the third thing is the big and change your life forever, the big thing. You don't lead with change your life forever by eating hard boiled eggs and doing hill sprints, right?

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. 

CLAY HEBERT: You say a simple 12 step, a simple 12 minute workout to unlock your best body and change your life forever, boom, boom. It builds on it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So, all right. So somebody is in a different stage of their business. Maybe they are getting some sales and they're in this kind of period of stagnation, right? And they want to reach the next level. So we're talking about somebody and all of these principles. Getting back to the fundamentals always helps, but when somebody reaches a stagnant level of growth, what are the levers that you start looking for at this point to actually be accelerant, and maybe it is always just going back to the fundamentals, but what are these like accelerants once you actually start to get a little bit more traction?

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, I think if you've got some traction, some success, you got to take some of those resources and part of it is figuring out what is your unique advantage. What is your positioning in the marketplace? Why does somebody choose you but then going deep on that? In Silicon Valley with venture funded startups, they call it the moat. What's the moat? How can you expand on your moat? It's pretty hard to start Uber now, because Uber already exists and what are you going to have like black or cars like it works. So once you've got a certain amount of traction, you get a double down on what got you there in the first place and then it's a matter of surveying the landscape and saying what's working and how can I do it literally like five times better? How can I tell better stories? There's a guy on twitter named Roberto Nickerson, I think is his name. He's doing short form videos, right? Hormozy came out, the Hormozy captions and then everybody did the Hormozy captions. And now that's table stakes, if anything. And everyone's kind of doing it. There's apps that will make your videos look exactly like Hormozy. So what this guy did is he went 10 X above and he made a video short form, maybe 90 seconds to minutes. It's like a short film about him having a Skype call with his future self and his past self. And he leveraged AI to make himself look younger. And the young kid says, he's in high school and Skype and he's playing old hip hop music and stuff. And he's using Skype to call his friend and call himself in the future. And he said, do we make it, do we get the Lambo, do we get the mansion? And the guy goes, We make it, but not like that. And then you see the wife and the kid, and it's just like epic storytelling. And that's what you do when the market catches up to you or growth stagnates, you gotta figure out, back to what you said earlier, what are your skills and how can you really use those skills, right? You're a big UFC fighter and boxing guy. You know that certain guys like that if it goes to the ground, he's going to win, but if they stay on their feet, the other guy is going to win. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. 

CLAY HEBERT: What is that for your business? And then double down on that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. What about these things that are like really taking a risk? And I know you brought a can in here and you might have, you got it under the table.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: All right. So A lot of people, when they saw liquid death, they were like, that is the stupidest idea that I've ever seen. And it was like, but it got people to laugh and everybody said it with a smile. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah.

AUBREY MARCUS: Right? Like everybody said that with like, look at this, like murder your thirst, you know? And you're like murder your thirst. Liquid death. What is this thing? But all of a sudden they kind of turned the corner on this because it was something that grabbed people's attention in a super crowded, super crowded market for water. They took a bold risk and really like doubled down, doubled down, doubled down, did it with a sense of humor. And now they're what? Fucking billion dollar company or something? 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. Multi billion dollar company. So it's a perfect example. And liquid death is one of my favorite examples because they did everything you said. They captured the attention by being different and extreme, but it was literally based on top of the fundamentals that we're talking about. So years before the founder of liquid death started liquid death, he was at a music festival and there's performance and there's athletes and artists. And he saw a guy crack an energy can and it makes the sound it makes when you open a can and he saw him go like this. And he was one of the artists that's about to go out on stage. And he saw him dumping this blue, I don't know if it was a monster or whatever it was, into the trash can. He's like, that's weird. So part of it. And you're very good at this. Part of it is just walking through the world with your eyes open and being like, wait a minute, what's going on there? Because he could have walked right by like a weirdo. I don't know why he's dumping in the garbage. Be like, wait a minute. Why? Why is he doing that? Noticing things. So he noticed that this guy was dumping it in the thing and then he saw him go over to the Gatorade, just water, fill up the tank or whatever and fill up the can with water. So we dumped out the blue monster, filled it up with water and then he brought it with him out on stage in front of thousands of people and the music and everything else and it makes sense because you're sponsored by monster, but you might not want to be all jittery out there on stage if you have three of them and not finish your set and fall off the stage, whatever. So he goes, huh? So why is that? Why? Why are these cool? Extreme musicians and athletes are not sponsored by poland springs because poland springs is not cool. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

CLAY HEBERT: Bottom line monster is cool. Right? So he just combined those, liquid death is brilliant and they continue to execute on this plan. But all you really did is make water cool. How do you make water cool? Well, it's not about the water. The point about this is the water in the can. It's just water. It's the same as Poland's spring. It's the same as any bottled water. One thing they did lean into one brand story that resonates with people is let's get rid of plastic and save the planet while you murder your thirst. But the big part of their brand is the word 

AUBREY MARCUS: Murder your thirst, not the planet. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's basically a willingness to. First, understand the story. Okay. How many people drink water? Everybody. And what was the last water brand that was different or cooler? Interesting. Fiji with the square bottles and the picture of Fiji, it's like 20 years ago and you get it at fancy resorts, but like the Lollapalooza ACL, now they are the water of ACL because you don't drink the crinkly bottle of Poland Springs. If I come to a barbecue in your backyard, it's just a different vibe to hold this thing. Then to hold a crinkly bottle of Kirkland signature Costco, whatever, and it's even more true when I'm out in the world than in your backyard. In your backyard, I don't care. We just played ball, whatever. Out in the world, it matters. And it's not about tricking someone that it's beer. It's about saying, no, I'm just drinking water today, but it's a different feeling. And so it's cool. But then they turned it up to 11 and did the skull candle with Martha Stewart. And every month they do something interesting. And so they got people drinking water, this cool brand of water, right? That's cooler to be seen with. And then they just lean into that brand and say, we're never not going to be the water brand. That's ridiculously cool. And like, ironically, cool. Do you really need to murder your thirst? No, but do you feel cooler holding this than pulling spring a thousand percent?

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean, also the brand is anything that you have people will judge you subtly based upon what you have. 

CLAY HEBERT: Sure. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like how you wear, what you wear, what products you have. Like I know I get judgy as shit when I go stay in somebody's house and I look in their pantry and they just gotta a bunch of bullshit in them. I'm like, wow, you really just don't give a shit. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And so like one of my directives is to make sure that my pantry is fucking dope. 

CLAY HEBERT: Dialed. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like it's dialed in because I know that confers upon me. Oh, oh, the Onnit guy has a bunch of fucking Kirkland snacks and a bunch of vegetable oil bullshit. And like, this is weird. This is inconsistent with what I know about it. Either he doesn't actually care about what he says he cares about, or he's not taking the time and patience to curate this in a fundamental way. But it's the same with this. Like, so what does the water confer when you're holding it? Well, if you're holding like a Voss, it might actually, if you're trying to be a metal guy, but you got your Voss, it might be like, well, he's really into his health actually. And maybe this whole metal thing is just kind of bullshit. And if he's holding the Poland spring, it's probably like, man, he's coming down from Somalia and he just was thirsty as hell.

CLAY HEBERT: He just needs something

AUBREY MARCUS: He needs something, whatever it takes, but he's not going to put on his rider that he wants something like quality or like legit. And so it's interesting to think like to be able to feel cool when you have that thing, I think that's a big part of building a brand. And it was something we successfully did with Onnit. One of the things we got really right with Onnit is being on it meant something, it meant that you were dedicated to unlocking this kind of primal capacity of human optimization. Like you were on it, you were going for it and that way. And so the brand itself, there's lots of Onnit gear and apparel and all things that came out.

CLAY HEBERT: I mean I love that example. And you guys built one of the coolest brands in the space for sure. Well, some of my favorites are like the gargoyle kettlebells, right? Rogue has their plates. Is there anything more that you just need the commodity part when you need something to be heavy, right? But a gargoyle kettlebell? So cool. And what are they? They're portable stories. What happens? You walk into somebody's garage. They have regular round kettlebells. They don't even say a thing. They have an Onnit gargoyle kettlebell. Dude, where did you get that? Boom. They both, he's selling Onnit for you at that point. So that's what I mean about portable stories. Oh, well, there's a guy named Aubrey, blah, blah, blah. Everything you guys did about the gym, the maces, and it's not like you were the only ones or the first ones to do it, but to package it together in that story, right? It's possible to get fit. Add a planet fitness where they say we don't even like people who lift heavy and use chalk and whatever you can still lift weights there, but it's a very different experience just like liquid death is a different experience. And you guys nailed Onnit from the psychedelic gorilla to the unique machines to just the vibe and the back to the words thing. You're very good at manifestos and like this is how we roll here. Seth has a great phrase that says people like us. Do things like this and you notice that the ‘us’ people get to kind of opt in to that. Burning man is a people like us and Toastmasters is a people like us and very, very different and probably no overlap between those two, but do things like this. This is how we roll here. You guys knocked out of the park.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I mean, one of the important things to think about with brand is like, would people rock your shirts and when people rock your hats and when people really rock that, I mean, every brand knows that they have apparel, but it's rare that you see anybody ever wear that apparel. But you really have to build a strong brand. And I was in the living room, Jake was on a kind of dining table, having a business meeting and he was talking about the brand W and they were going through and they're like, Axe does a few things good, old spice does a few things good. Like we're not going to deny that there's some things that they got right. Some of the art they're using on their packaging is cool. 

CLAY HEBERT: Sure. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Some of the senses they got are cool, but nobody is rocking an old spice hat. Nobody's rocking an ax body spray, hat or shirt or something like that. And they got a sick line of like W apparel, which is Jake's personal care brand. And they really believe, and I think they'll succeed, that they'll actually create this kind of brand about what it means to be going for the W in this category. And it's not an easy category. It's not like an easy category, but they got that aspect about the brand. And so they're trying to create this story about it and these elements that will actually get people to rock their apparel and their apparel is cool. It's like street wear apparel. It's not like go down to your local shop and get the normal blanks that everybody's in that don't fucking fit right, unless you're like short and squat, you're a large, and like they got the gear that actually fits right. Looks cool. And even if you didn't know the brand and be like, actually, that's a dope fit and I wear it. 

CLAY HEBERT: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: But that's a key element of the brand. And also it goes along with this idea of the army. It's something that's part of your identity. And if you can get something to be part of somebody's identity, where they're proud of it and even if it's aspirational, but it's like part of their identity, then like UFC has done a great job of making UFC apparel. And you'll see people wearing UFC apparel. Now they may not be the people that you want to hang out with based on like who might wear, but nonetheless, they've done a great job like branding that because that person is saying like fucking mean business, man. I'm about fighting, right. I'm about fighting, so

CLAY HEBERT: Most branded merch, I own the domain name. Fuck your merch because most people's brand and merch is so terrible. You're right. What he's doing with W is so cool. And it's also an extremely bright yellow, right? You can see it from like a mile away. In the beginning what people want to do is they want to put their logo on their merch, they want to put it huge. Well, here's the thing. Nobody cares about your logo because you don't stand for anything yet. You don't have a brand on day one that doesn't mean you shouldn't print shirts and hoodies to be able to allow the back to 1, 10, a hundred, when you got those 10 strangers, the best people are like, where should I spend my marketing? How do I build my marketing plan? I'm like, build dope merch and then send it unexpectedly to your first 10 customers. And then I'll build that army. Like those 10 that took a chance on you in the beginning. That's the beginning of your army. Send them the coolest, I don't care if it's an 80 dollar hoodie, skip some Facebook ads and get those people, but then don't splash your logo as big as you can across it, because what they're doing is putting it on and walking around and being like, here's this logo or brand you've never heard of. What I would do is either do the logo small and tastefully off to the corner and just make the stuff as dope as possible, or if you're going to put words on there, make the words about your portable stories about your brand, right? Think of like Dave Asprey, right? He talked a lot about, like, Oh, vegetarian fed chickens are bad. And they're locked in cages and you want chickens that are out free range pasture, this and that. So you can make a shirt instead of an orange shirt with a stupid bulletproof logo. Cause there's nothing less bulletproof than a bird. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CLAY HEBERT: I would make a shirt that says, I only eat chickens that eat bugs.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CLAY HEBERT: Right? If you and I are in the TSA line or in clear pre whatever, And you see me wearing a shirt that says, I only eat chickens that eat bugs. You're going to elbow me and be like, well, what's up with that? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Or like a crossed out one of those circles with the line through it. And it says vegan chickens

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. A hundred percent.

AUBREY MARCUS: Like that vegan chicken and then like something like that, like what?

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. So figure out those little, those little nuggets, those little nuances, those little phrases about your brand. And then put that on the merch or like we were talking about with Bobby, are you more worried about throwing away your vote or throwing away your country? Oh shit needle sort of slid off the record there. That's what starts a conversation. Logos of unknown brands don't start a conversation. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and Clay was talking about Bobby Kennedy, which you know we've both been kind of talking about how he can reach an audience and convince them basically that like your vote's going to matter and it matters. And that was an incredible line that you came up with. Are you more worried about throwing away your vote or throwing away your country? And it's like, Oh yeah, yeah, that one hits.

CLAY HEBERT: Right. Because people are worried about throwing away their vote, but what if the alternative is to throw away your country and that fits on a t-shirt? I mean, or the back of a t- shirt or whatever. It's about crafting those in a way that it gives the person that's wearing it, back to portable story, it's the same thing. It gives the person that's wearing it the story and the ammo and the arrows to tell the story and continue on in the world and feel the way they want to feel and look smart. I always used to say portable stories help people look smart, but then I realized, like, Paris Hilton doesn't necessarily want to look smart. She wants to be an early adopter. She wants to know where the hottest new nightclub is or the coolest new product in the world. It's not always smart. It's the way they want to feel. So back to defining your customer, really embodying them, getting to know them. Where do they shop? Who do they trust? What do they listen to? Do they shop at Louis Vuitton or do they shop at Costco or do they send their assistant to get cereal at Costco? Really understanding your customer. Then you can run your marketing through that filter and your messaging through that filter so that you say, Oh, I'm speaking to this person. 

AUBREY MARCUS: How much do you think people should worry about competition in their space? Right? Cause there's not a lot of blue ocean left. There's a lot of fucking hungry, enterprising entrepreneurs out there. There's a lot of content creators. Unbelievable amount of podcasts and life coaches and every kind of 

CLAY HEBERT: There’s more coaches than people 

AUBREY MARCUS: For sure. That's why coaches who coach coaches are like is the best business there is. But ultimately like how much should people be concerned with that or like what would you advise people who are looking out like I really want to start something and but it's just like fuck there's so much competition.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. I'm glad you asked this because I have some strong opinions. What you're talking about is positioning. Positioning is why should I choose you in a crowded marketplace? And there's a book written in the, I think in the early 80s, called positioning the battle for your mind. Great book, but you can skip it because we'll cover it in 30 seconds. What's interesting is they talk about the world that they're walking through and they're like, everywhere you look up, there's a TV and there's a billboard and there's the time square world that we live in. They wrote it in the early 80s before the internet, before social media. So that problem has gotten even worse. But positioning is what are the, I call it opposite adjectives, of why someone would choose you. Pre liquid death, the water world is pretty crowded and you go to a gas station there's 48 choices of just water and they said nobody's making water cool. Before Yeti it wasn't hard, you and I could go camping and it wasn't hard to keep our sandwiches and our drinks cold. The Coleman coolers worked fine but nobody was bragging about baby blue with the plastic hinged lid. Nobody was Aubrey's sick cooler bro. And then Yeti came along and they made it cool. Of course, the product's better. It's three times better, but they charged 10 times as much because of that cool factor. So I actually love this question because I think there's very few industries where if you're willing to commit and this is the commit part, if you're willing to commit like liquid death did, if you're willing to commit like Yeti did and say no, we are 10 times as much. We're not 20 percent more, we're not right next to Coleman at Walmart, we're a completely different brand with our own stores like Apple stuff, right? Apple charges four times five times as much as a PC because they built a brand around it. I think in every industry that people say are crowded my response is, where are the hundred or thousand people that are sort of sick of not getting their needs met. They're not getting their story understood. Who is cracking the energy drink and dumping it in the trash can because nobody's feeling that need. And I think that exists everywhere. And I think we're seeing it everywhere, right? We're seeing it, form factor with cologne. Cologne used to be this thing that you and I remember getting at the mall, you spray a cloud, you walk through it and you go to the club and now there's ways to just touch a little wax, put it on a little more subtle. What is cologne like now? It's more woodsy like products and things change over time, but the story that people tell themselves, those change all the time, right? When like prime, right? When he launched that. Very crowded marketplace and you use this platform for sure, but prime told a different story and at some point fairly quickly within a year or two. If you were drinking anything but prime at your high school, you were sort of almost ostracized. Right? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 100%. We're entering an interesting time where there's a massive tsunami disruption that's just starting to hit. And one of the metaphors I like to use about the coming AI kind of renaissance revolution, whatever you want to call it, is like when a tsunami is about to hit, the tide recedes deep into the ocean. And so right now, everybody's looking around on the beach at all the pretty coral reefs that they haven't been able to see before. And they're like, Oh my God, this is so awesome. Tide pools everywhere. Look at all these things. I can make this fish appear in this fucking tide pool that wasn't available before. But there's a whole tsunami coming. And I think some people are really starting to take advantage of this, but it's just beginning and it feels like it's going to become the next kind of ante to be able to master this. So what do you look at when you see this coming rush of AI? 

CLAY HEBERT: It's a great question and I want to dig into the ante, what you said about you versus anti you. I think with AI, it’s like the sharpest sushi knife in the world, with no effort, it will cut through your sushi sharper and faster than anything that doesn't make anyone a sushi chef. It just means you cut the piece of fish faster. The taste, the fundamentals, the storytelling, the humanity, the opposite of AI, the humanity and understanding the stories. AI is horrible about understanding humans. And it's horrible about storytelling. It's good about stuff that you used to use google and wikipedia for and yes it will do that faster and better and it can do things that google and wikipedia can't do. We could say, write a joke about blueberries and the voice of Bill Burr, and it will do an okay job at that. It's going to replace, if you look at any industry on a spectrum from zero to ten, ten being the true artists, the Rick Ruben of the world. Rick Ruben does not have to worry about AI. If you were doing Canva level graphic design for somebody and charging them more than nothing, it's amazing that Canva didn't put you out of business, but AI is going to a hundred percent. Like anything like the social media platforms we talked about, people should learn the tools, they should at least be aware of them, you don't have to become an expert, but at least be aware of them, and then I like to think of it as like five year headlights, like look out, as far as you can see, understand the tools enough. And there's tons of free YouTube videos. Talk to some people, go down the rabbit hole, tinker with it. They're free. Sometimes the best way to learn is just to tinker, throw some stuff in perplexity to AI, throw some stuff in chatGPT, have somebody teach you a little bit how to tinker with mid journey. There are things like, you've run a bunch of product businesses like on it before to do a photo shoot for alpha brain took 12 people. You had to set aside part of the gym and Onnit, you had to do lighting, it's possible with somebody who's good at AI to bang in a couple of prompts, iterate a couple of times and have the perfect model wearing the perfect thing, holding the right product in a well lit, make the gym darker and chalkier, right? And you can iterate on that really fast. But knowing what the client needs is the part that AI, I don't think is going to be good at for a really, really long time. The higher level strategy, the saying, here's how the whole orchestra needs to be done. AI is good at playing notes, it's not good at building the whole concert, selling tickets and getting people there. So it's a really, really powerful tool. And be honest, look at your industry. If you're doing six and seven and five level work and other people running circles around you. Yeah. The person who's paying you probably too much already is going to just say, sorry, we don't need you anymore. Because AI can do it. Move upstream and do the stuff that AI is not good at.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Yeah. So that's a lot of anything in person. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, in person. Sure.

AUBREY MARCUS: And we are a long way away from any kind of Android robot being able to actually impersonate a human. And I'm skeptical that they ever actually will give the same vibrational frequency that a human does. I think we'll always be able to detect the difference. Now there's some people who may disagree with me. We have plenty of science fiction movies that show that, but I'm going to bet the don't side of that, because I think there's something divinely inspired about a human being that is irreplicable.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah

AUBREY MARCUS: And so like in human experiences and live concerts and you're never gonna go see a kill Tony Cho run by AI and robots. It's gonna be anything like going to actually the mothership and going to watch him perform. It's just not gonna happen 

CLAY HEBERT: Right. The word human in person, human, rewinds the clock back to, I don't know, when music began in the United States, but I like the movie tombstone. And at one point in tombstone, there's kind of a hokey little concert. But imagine we're cowboys in the wild west and we're just hardworking and we got our horse and then we say our first ever concert. Oh my God, music and people playing notes and tunes and this and that. And you say, fast forward to a world where there's an app on your phone. Cause you're going to have this thing called a phone and it's in your pocket. And for 9 dollars a month, you get access to every song ever made by anyone, for nine bucks a month. And it's all right there in your earphones, right? It's easy to imagine and say, well then, this person doing this live concert is out of luck and yet Taylor Swift, Era’s tour, whatever. The digital convenience and the simple zeros and ones bits version of it is never as robust as that in person experience, but if all you're providing is something that can be replaced by that, good luck. I'm not saying everyone has to become Taylor Swift, but what can you do in person? Back to our surfer who hammers shingles and surf in the morning and organize, AI's not gonna organize his thing and nobody would want to

AUBREY MARCUS: Also surfing on augmented reality through a fucking Wii board or some shit like that.

CLAY HEBERT: Nope. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It can't be the same as the ocean. 

CLAY HEBERT: No, no. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sorry, bitch. Never gonna be the same. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like, I can play all of the NBA jam I want. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: But it's not the same as getting the boys together. 

CLAY HEBERT: That's right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And playing ball in the backyard. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And there are many things that are irreplaceable. And I think just being aware that, you know, to start aiming towards those things that cannot be replicated.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. And the flip side is, you're right. Look at it with the five year headlights. In five years from now what is AI going to do and it's on that exponential curve. If you're starting law school soon, fast forward four years to when you're done with law school and then you're a beginning associate because if you're if your job is doing what the guy last year did and moving paper around for a hundred dollars an hour and redlining contracts and scanning and reading that. Sorry, Charlie, that's what AI is really good at. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CLAY  HEBERT: And if you don't think they'll replace you with a better, faster, doesn't get hungover, doesn't come in late, and it's free, good luck. If you're going to argue in court. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It's also interesting too, I'll let you finish that. Obviously, if you're going to argue in court, you got to convince the jury and

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah, then you're good. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Then you're good. But it's funny that like what the old generations advice would be for going to school, be an accountant, be an engineer. And these are actually literally the things that are going to be replaced. And then your child goes and like me gets a philosophy and classical civilization degree and thinks outside the bar, they're like, Oh, I don't ever pay for your fucking living.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah.

AUBREY MARCUS: Well, actually now, it's going to be reversed. It's going to be the people who are actually able to devote to their art and their humanity. In the humanities in an interesting way, right. That is actually going to be the thing that's irreplaceable. It's not the accountants. That's not going to be this, that's no longer the safe job. So if you have parents that are like, ‘why don't you just be an accountant?’. Why don't you just be a lawyer and do that? It's like, oh, well, all right. I mean, maybe a trial lawyer, if you want to go to the very top. But even things like, eventually we're going to have automated, all the planes are going to be automated, even fighter pilots, for the most part are probably, except for a rare top gun type of situations, but for the most part, fuck, I mean, people are going to be driving cars, like cars are going to drive themselves. 

CLAY HEBERT: They do. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Planes are going to fly themselves like, and they're going to be pretty goddamn good at it, you know, like ultimately, and it's already happening. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So these safe things that we used to think are safe. If you're in this, let me get the safe thing. Think again.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. And if you're an artist and the art that you're making is like Canva ask or clip art ask you gotta have that really tough conversation. Say, what are my chops? What are my skills because the same tools, the same digital tools that will replace you if you're five or six are magical. If you're Banksy, if you can create art like Banksy and it's not about the quality of the art, it's about the brand and the mystique and the secrecy and who is he and the identity and everything else. You don't have to be secretive. That's just his positioning. But to get your art out there. There's a guy I'll show you, forget exactly his Instagram handle, but he does the most amazing, you're in my favorite, it's Kobe and the favorite basketball players and rappers. And he just hand draws and he shows his process. That's something you couldn't do 20 years ago, bring people into your work, show your work isn't show them the long division that you're never going to need, it's show them you painting this and giving it to Dr. Dre because he ordered one. And that's what you use social media for. So you gotta uplevel your chops and understand what AI is going to replace, it's not going to replace the bonfire, the basketball game, the handwritten stuff, the in person, the concerts. But the opportunity 

AUBREY MARCUS: Be that motherfucker. That's the one that people are making prompts to copy. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: You know what I mean? My favorite painter is an artist named Hannah Yata. And I have a bunch of her collection in all of my houses. And she's somebody because she has such a defined style. It'll be like, in mid journey, make me something that looks like this in the style of Hanayata. And then it'll be like, okay, I got the style. And like you be that person and you'll be the one training the algorithm yourself. 

CLAY HEBERT: That's it. And be the one they copy. Be so good, they can't ignore you. And the new AI version of that is, be so good that you're the one that they're trying to figure out the prompt to copy. I'm sure there's a bunch of people right now as we sit here trying to prompt AI so that they can do a Banksy. But do you want an AI reproduction of Hanayata? No. Do you want the OG big, signed by her, to cook her dinner? Like, that is the opportunity and you can use these tools. I'm a big fan of social media. I'm not a big fan of sacrificing your audience to the algorithm. Use these tools in a way. There's an interesting chocolate brand called Midday Squares and it's interesting what they call it. I mean, the name of the company Midday Squares, because the whole idea was like, oh, that after lunch, you fade in a little bit, you might want a little caffeine, but man, a little bite of chocolate, sometimes a little chocolate in the afternoon is good. So they just owned it and called the whole company Midday Squares. Of course, people eat it in the morning and the evening, whatever. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure.

CLAY HEBERT: It's not a protein bar and it's not a Hershey's bar. It's kind of in between. It's not the worst thing for you. There's a little bit of sugar, whatever, but they are winning because they are like BTS of them building their company, it's a couple of young kids. They've never done it before. They didn't build and sell Onnit. It's their first rodeo, but it's live and you're seeing all of it and you're seeing, okay, we got this meeting with Walmart and here we go. And it's vlogging as much as they can, recording as much as they can. So people are buying the chocolate because it's good and it's healthy or whatever, but they're really identifying with the brand because they're filming everything. You're watching a DTC brand grow up from zero to whatever they're doing now. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's another great point too. 

CLAY HEBERT: And that's how to use these tools, not be afraid of AI going to whatever, what can you do that someone else is not going to do? And back to positioning and being different. Theirs is, we're doing this live, we're doing it in public and you can watch us even if we fail and they publish their failures just like their successes. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Well, if it's not incredibly obvious as to why I asked you to be a fit for service coach to coach financially fit in the upcoming next trimesters in Sedona and in Malibu. You should get the gist. Your expertise is broad and deep, and I watched you go through and take 35 different people with all kinds of different businesses and radically up level their offerings and their understandings and see how lit up they were on all the calls, just from being able to interface with you, which is something that nobody gets to do. I mean, yeah, sure. If Nike calls you, you'll answer the call and you'll go out there to headquarters and fucking Eugene or wherever they are. And I don't know, I think they're still in Oregon and you'll do that. But other than that, you don't get access to this level of wisdom and expertise. But just grateful for you for saying yes to coach the Fit For Service community and help them become more financially fit so that they can bring those resources, serve their own life, their family and the world. That's what being Fit For Service is about. And I look at finances like resources, like energy, it's just fueling the batteries and the fuel sources so that you can actually go propel whatever message you want to deliver to the world. However, you want to show up and serve the world. So what can people kind of expect if they want to jump in with you and be a part of financially fit at Fit For Service? 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. First of all, I appreciate that so much and it's because of the army that you've built, you published the algorithm and you built a huge audience and you built an army with Fit For Service of people that help each other and all the coaches and everything else. So it's just magical what you built and I was in your funnel long before we played hoops at your house and met. I read the book. I followed you along and I came through that funnel too. So I appreciate that. Yeah. With financial fit, we go through each time in 90 minutes. We go deep on one thing. So the way it's broken down is like the first word deeply going to understand. We start with the fundamentals, John Wooden and the shoelaces, what do you want? And what I call the champagne moment, what's the champagne moment a year from now, if we're poppin champagne, what are we celebrating super specifically and getting clear on that? And then we go into customer positioning 

AUBREY MARCUS: And it's a 13 week online course, 9 weeks of actual coaching and some integrative like kind of group calls leading up to the summit, which is the opportunity. But each one of those is 90, each 90 minute session is like a gym or like a pearl on a string of pearls. 

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. It's like showing up to CrossFit for your business. Like we're going to get sweaty and roll up our sleeves and get after it. And then each week there's an office hours where people get to come. We have no planned curriculum for office hours. It's just come up. The people that get the most out of it. It was funny. There was a guy in spring who said, I'm really interested, but I'm not sure about this group model. I'm not sure if I'm going to get enough one-on-one access to you or whatever. I was like, well, this is how it works. I said, just like a real classroom, the people that get access to the people that raise their hands and this dude took full advantage of that and always first to raise his hand and then somebody else would raise their hand. And he was third in line. He was first, third, fifth, and he got a lot of personal attention. So yeah, the main thing is clarity on your business, clarity on your customer, clarity on how to grow because the individual strategies and tactics don't matter if you're building the wrong thing. That's like being in Chicago, wanting to go to LA, but your car is pointed towards Miami. The faster you go, the further away you are from your thing. So number one is make sure you're doing the right thing. And then we move pretty fast, figure out who's your customer, what do they care about the stories, all this fundamental stuff. It's not about hacks. And I'll tell you the guys on Instagram, they're promising you hacks and followers overnight and all this stuff. None of that's real. None of it matters. It's all a scam. What matters is the 1, 10, a hundred, a thousand, tell the stories that matter. Just like you did with Own The Day, just like you did with Fit For Service and Onnit and everything. I mean, you've done this so much. It's really cool to see. And it's fun to fund a dance in your world, brother. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And it was cool to see how quick you are with people's copy, because they'd be like, what about this copy? And you'd be like, yeah. Or what about that? People would be like, Oh my God. I was like, their whole world would just change in a moment. You're like a great improv comedian that you throw a prompt out there, like our boy Brent Pella and he's just going to fucking crush it. And you have that gift. 

CLAY HEBERT: It's just reps. I mean, it's a gift, a little bit, maybe, but it's honed. I've read all the books. I've studied copywriting for years and years and years. So just like. Brent is funny. I mean, I don't think Brent was a funny six month old, maybe, but like, he studied it. He's done the things. He's done the work. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Funny looking. 

CLAY HEBERT: Funny looking. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right, Brent? 

CLAY HEBERT: That's right, Brent. But like, it's reps. All this stuff is reps. Almost all this stuff is skills. Michael Jordan. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I was leaving your mom's house when you were three years old. You look funny as hell. That's right, Brent. 

CLAY HEBERT: He's here now, right? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, yeah. 

CLAY HEBERT: I can't wait. 

AUBREY MARCUS: He's back in the house. I love you, Brett. Just kidding. 

CLAY HEBERT: We gotta hang. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Didn't know your mom. Sorry. 

CLAY HEBERT: But it's the reps. I mean, think of all the different reps you've done in all these different disciplines, business, personal relationships, fitness and stuff. You pick somebody off the street, you drag them into Onnit gym. And you could put them through a maze progression or whatever. And they'll be like, man, that guy was born with a gift. And you're like, no, the first one didn't look like that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

CLAY HEBERT: 10th one looked a little better, but the thousandth one is pretty good. And now you can do it in your sleep. And that's the Reps part of what we're doing and financially fit is getting people to reps. It showed up. Change some copies, get it out there. Collide with the market, collide with the customers and then iterate and learn. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Right on, man. All right. If y'all are interested, fitforservice.com, check out the financially fit model and join us in Sedona. It's fucking unbelievable. 

CLAY HEBERT: It’s a blast.

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, these summits are absolutely incredible. 

CLAY HEBERT: I never went through any school that had that kind of party at the end. We threw our own parties in the woods, but this is the class and the teachers and the principal and everybody, 

AUBREY MARCUS: Exactly, and it's sober. So leave your medicines at home, please, just for a little while. You can get back to them, I promise. But we throw down and it's fucking awesome.

CLAY HEBERT: Yeah. And if you're wondering what it looks like, anticultfilm.com, beautiful by our brother Max. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, it's a really beautiful look at what it actually is rather than what you might think it is. If you just take the time to watch it, you'll get to see what it really looks like. Clay, thanks for being a brother. Thanks for being a master of what you do. I love you and appreciate you always, man. 

CLAY HEBERT: Thank you, brother. Love you. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Love you guys. See ya.