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The Business Advice You Won't Find on YouTube

2026-10-07 · Vlog or day in the life · Ali, Maria Wendt · recording, 20:52 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship (also: YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present, Family, He changed his mind, AI

Vlogging a four-day entrepreneur event in Thailand run by his mentor Taki Moore, Ali argues that paying for coaches, mentors and events beats free advice from ChatGPT, books and YouTube, because it is personal, pushes back and reaches knowledge that is never posted online; he judges the $20,000 event worth it on day one.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Is a business coach worth it? Over $100,000 a year on coaches, mentors and events

  • ★★★ For the last five years Ali has invested over $100,000 every year in business coaches, mentors and events. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — Day one: wins and goals, an offer versus a product nobody wants to leave

  • ★★ Ali vlogs a four-day entrepreneur event in Thailand run by one of his mentors, Taki Moore. — 00:00:29
  • ★ On day one the attendees wrote down their business wins of the last few months and goals for the four months until the next event, in Austin in November. (hedged) — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Where $100M Offers asks how to make an offer people feel stupid refusing, Ali's North Star for the Lifestyle Business Academy is now a product so good that nobody wants to leave: the world's best online business school. — 00:01:16 · Alex Hormozi, Lifestyle Business Academy

00:01:45 — Why pay when ChatGPT is free: generic advice, push-back, paying for learning with money or time

  • ★★★ Free business advice from ChatGPT, books, podcasts and YouTube is generic, Ali says: what it does not give is specific insight for your specific situation. — 00:01:45 · ChatGPT, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali got most of his business knowledge from reading books, applying their insights to his own business and learning from that. — 00:01:45
  • ★★★ Whether a business idea suits your personality, passions, skills and expertise is something books, videos and ChatGPT rarely tell you, Ali says; a paid coach or mentor, or a business event, quite a lot of them free and probably some in your own city, puts you in front of people who have done it. — 00:02:14 · ChatGPT
  • ★★★ What a business coach, a mentor or someone who has done the thing gives you that ChatGPT won't, Ali says, is push-back on your ideas, which can save you a lot of time. — 00:02:43 · ChatGPT
  • ★★ Once he saw business as a learnable skill at which others, making more money for longer, are better than him, Ali asks why he wouldn't pay in money, time and energy to attend their events or sign up to a business coach. — 00:03:12

  • ★★★ Quoting a phrase he heard recently, Ali says you always end up paying for learning: with money, learning from other people's experience, or with time, figuring it out yourself. — 00:03:12

    “you always end up paying for learning.”

00:03:53 — The moving mastermind on boats and the Lifestyle Business Academy's problems of scale

  • ★★ At Taki Moore's moving mastermind, groups of six give each person about ten minutes to present their most pressing business challenge and ten minutes of advice; this one was held on boats, the previous one in California on hot air balloons. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ At the previous mastermind the Lifestyle Business Academy was just getting off the ground, with many problems in its curriculum and product, since fixed; its challenges now are problems of scale. — 00:04:22 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★★ Ali's questions at the moving mastermind: how to make the Lifestyle Business Academy so valuable that students stay for years rather than months, and how to help its coaches coach better and spend less time on admin and billing. — 00:05:28 · Lifestyle Business Academy
  • ★ At the mastermind Rachel and Shay shared their experience of building teams of more than 100 people and of aligning each team member's values with the business's. — 00:05:28

00:06:07 — Sponsor read: Stan

00:07:44 — Day two: his daughter at the clinic, his talk on YouTube for coaches

  • ★ Ali's daughter, with them in Thailand, had diarrhoea and got a bit dehydrated; at a local clinic she revived with electrolytes. — 00:07:44
  • ★★ Ali gave a talk at the event about YouTube systems, giving the coaches in the room permission to make YouTube videos, a small step from teaching over Zoom since they already have expertise. — 00:08:27 · YouTube, Zoom
  • ★★★ For a business owner, Ali says, YouTube, especially with today's algorithm, is less about building a big following and more about videos on the pain points your existing clients have, which you already know how to talk about. — 00:08:57 · YouTube

00:09:18 — Podcast with Maria Wendt: 10 things for 10 grand or 10,000 things for $10

  • ★★ Putting it to Maria Wendt, Ali states his view that revenue is price times volume and that it is easier to sell 10 things for $10,000 than 10,000 things for $10. — 00:09:30
  • ★★★ Maria Wendt thinks it is literally easier to sell 10,000 things at $10 than 10 things at $10,000. — 00:09:30
  • ★★ Maria Wendt makes about $10 million a year selling very cheap things in huge volumes. — 00:09:30
  • ★★★ Maria Wendt made a pretty good case for the low-ticket business model, Ali says, and maybe he is beginning to change his mind about the value of low-ticket products. (hedged) — 00:10:10

00:10:40 — Jason Fladlien's webinar workshop

  • ★★ Jason Fladlien ran a workshop at the event on how to do a really good webinar, which gave Ali many insights. — 00:10:40
  • ★★ Ali kicks himself for never taking the structure of his selling workshops seriously; Jason Fladlien, who has done it for about 20 years and consulted for Alex Hormozi and Tony Robbins, taught a method that would bring Ali's products far more students. — 00:11:10 · Alex Hormozi
  • ★★ Ali's workshops have sold a couple of hundred thousand dollars' worth of products, Jason Fladlien's $10 million at a single event; the only difference, Ali says, is skill, and skills can be learned. — 00:11:39

00:12:05 — Taki's "reducer" session: deleting rather than adding

  • ★★ Taki Moore ran a session called the reducer, inspired by the music producer Rick Rubin, who wrote "reduced by" rather than "produced by" Rick Rubin on one of his albums. — 00:12:05
  • ★★★ As a business grows, Ali says, the default is to add products, clients and features until it overwhelms founder, team and clients; ask what you could delete instead, since an event tempts you to add every new idea. — 00:12:35
  • ★★ At the event Ali spent about three hours with Simon, a former corporate sales leader whose consulting business helps companies codify their intellectual property into a visual model of their process. — 00:13:17

00:13:24 — Simon and a model of the Lifestyle Business Academy journey

  • ★★★ The Lifestyle Business Academy takes complete beginners to a first sale, $10,000, $100,000 a year and eventually a million; for now it focuses on the first $100,000, and Ali wants a better model of that journey for students. — 00:13:46 · Lifestyle Business Academy

00:14:49 — The advice that isn't on the internet: community, closed circles, coaches of farmers and magicians

  • ★★★ Every business event, Ali says, surrounds him with people doing the same thing, who speak the same language and share the same problems, challenges and goals; networking is a bit of a dirty word, but such a community is great. — 00:14:53
  • ★★ People Ali has met at this event over the last year and at similar business events have become friends, who stay at his place in Hong Kong, host him in their countries and go on holiday with him. — 00:14:53 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ In the right group, Ali says, people see each other as friends, collaborators and colleagues rather than competition, and share wisdom you cannot get from ChatGPT. — 00:15:32 · ChatGPT
  • ★★★ Beyond beginner level, Ali says, you acquire business knowledge, skills and strategy by talking to people doing the thing, not by researching online: people at the highest levels share it in closed circles, with no incentive to post it unless they are business coaches. — 00:16:08
  • ★★ This is why, Ali says, business advice on the internet seems to come only from people trying to sell you a business course. — 00:16:08
  • ★★ At the event are coaches of farmers, of magicians and of auto repair shop owners in Australia, none of whom talk about growing a business online because their audiences do not care. — 00:16:37
  • ★★ Once you are in the business world, Ali says, you realise how generic, unpersonalised and incomplete most advice on the internet is compared with the real thing on the ground, another reason to go to an event. — 00:17:18

00:17:48 — Day four and the boardroom: was the $20,000 event worth it?

  • ★★ Taki Moore's event gives three days to all members and a fourth day to the boardroom, members whose businesses make at least a million a year, which Ali attends. — 00:17:48
  • ★★★ Membership of Taki Moore's group costs $60,000 a year; Ali hardly uses its features beyond its three events a year, so each event costs his business about $20,000. — 00:18:53
  • ★★★ Ali calls the $20,000 event worth it by an absolute mile: from a lunch his team member Angus had on day one came an idea that will immediately add far more than $20,000 to the business, so it paid off on day one. — 00:18:53 · Angus (general manager)
  • ★★ Ali hopes to work with Simon on his business's genius model, and has made friends with the webinar specialist Jason Fladlien, whose WhatsApp he now has; he expects his team's next webinar to be much better. (hedged) — 00:19:28 · WhatsApp

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: ChatGPT · Jason Fladlien · Lifestyle Business Academy · Maria Wendt · Simon · Taki Moore

Also: People: Alex Hormozi · Ali Abdaal's daughter · Angus (general manager) · Rick Rubin · Tony Robbins

Works: $100M Offers

Organizations: YouTube

Places: Austin · Australia · California · Hong Kong · Thailand

Products: WhatsApp · Zoom

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