Unlock Financial Freedom: Secrets From A $50 Million Portfolio - Codie Sanchez
01:37:10 Share

Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

If you want to know what the key to happiness is, it's struggle. This is the thing that I'm not sure about. Hey friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with authors, entrepreneurs, creators, academics, and other inspiring people, and we find out how they got to where they are and what strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. What you're about to hear is an interview between me and the wonderful Cody Sanchez. Now, Cody has an incredibly inspiring story. She started her career as a journalist covering human trafficking.

And she was confronted with extreme violence and the worst of humanity on a daily basis. And then after a few years of that, she made a hard pivot into the world of finance. I saw things that that

that I don't think most people in the UK or the US see. I wanted to understand money. I didn't come from it, but I thought maybe if I understand money, then I could understand this thing called power and I could help more people have it, but I could also protect myself too. And since entering the world of finance, she's become a partner at a private equity firm and she's the founder of Contrarian Thinking and Unconventional Acquisitions. I buy bar in businesses. And what I mean by that is that I buy mom and pop businesses all around the US and then I talk about it on the internet.

In the conversation, we talk about how most of us, including Cody, don't really have linear career paths and actually trying different things early on and skill stacking will get you into the best position to be successful, however you define that further on in life. We talk a lot about hustle culture and this idea between sort of working hard and working smart. And Cody shares her advice for women in the workplace as well. I've found it to be a huge benefit

that I'm a woman in the workplace. One of my mentors told me something that I thought was kind of true. He's like, the men that work with you typically either want to father you, friend you, or they want to fuck you.

Now, before we get into this episode, I've got a very quick announcement, which is that I'm launching a Telegram community for the podcast. Now, I'm going to be honest. Initially, the reason for starting this podcast was quite a selfish one in that I wanted to learn from cool and interesting people and apply their insights to my own life. And it's just generally easier to hang out with people if you invite them onto your podcast rather than if you just want to have a chat with them.

But over the last 18 months of running this podcast, it's grown ridiculously fast. And actually, we've had so many messages and YouTube comments and emails and Instagram DMs and stuff from people talking about how much value that you guys have gotten from the episodes as well. And so we're planning to change direction a little bit in that instead of me just treating these conversations as a personal therapy session with the guests, which we might still do a little bit of, I actually want to learn more about you guys who are listening to the podcast or watching the podcast and understand what are the things that you would like to see from the podcast.

And I really want to better understand what challenges you're going through, what struggles you're going through, so that we can then kind of tailor the guests and tailor the questions to that. So that's why we're starting up this completely free Telegram community. If you hit the link in the show notes or in the video description, wherever you're watching or listening to this, you'll be able to sign up completely for free. It's always going to be free. You will never have to pay.

pay a penny. The group is called the Deep Divers, which I think is kind of funny. And it's basically a group where I'll be posting some of the behind the scenes stuff from the podcast. But also as we get new guests coming on, I'll be asking in that group if you guys have any specific questions for the guest so that can help inform the direction of the interview. I'm also going to be posting a few polls and questionnaires and surveys in that group. So if you're interested in kind of sharing more about you and about your life,

then you can do it through that group. And then again, that'll just help us figure out how do we best make this podcast as value add for you guys as possible. And we're also gonna be using the Telegram group to give away some freebies. Like for example, often authors on the podcast will come and they'll gift us like 50 of their books, for example. I don't need 50 copies of an author's book, but it's the sort of thing that we can absolutely send to people around the world completely for free. Anyway, if that sounds good and you'd like to join the community, then do hit the link in the podcast show notes or in the video description, wherever you're seeing this or listening to this. And now let's get on with the episode.

Cody, welcome to the show. Thank you. How would you describe what you do to people who might not know you? I buy boring businesses is usually what I say, unless I'm sitting next to somebody on an airplane, then I just tell them I'm like a salesperson so that they, you know, nobody wants to talk on airplanes, right? Yeah. So that would be my go-to there. But otherwise I say I buy boring businesses. And what I mean by that is that I buy mom and pop businesses all around the US.

And then I talk about it on the internet. And apparently people find that interesting these days. Nice. How did you get here? How did you end up winding from starting out as a journalist, is my understanding, to ending up buying boring businesses? Yeah.

I don't believe that humans have linear paths ever. Anyone who has had an interesting career, in my opinion, has had a complete divergent set of experiences. Like I was sitting next to yesterday, so recency bias, this guy Jeffrey Kent who started Abercrombie & Kent.

And he was telling me about, you know, his first business. He ran a safari and then he sold shoes and he did all of these unique things that end up skill stacking you to some position where nobody else can be better at it than you. And so thankfully that was mine. I started off as a journalist, human trafficking coverage along the US-Mexico border. So the cool part about that is it really teaches you context. You know, I saw things that

that I don't think most people in the UK or the US see, right? Like real death and despair and horror and struggle. And I did that for a year when I was still in college. And that taught me one, that I didn't want to live in that world, that I have a lot of empathy for journalists now, because when you are confronted with extreme violence and the worst of humanity, what do you end up doing often? Believe that humans can do the worst. And so I wanted a little bit more of a light instead of to live in the darkness.

And so I moved as one naturally would to finance. But really that came because I was going to go into law and politics similar to you. You were going to do the doctor thing, immigrant, of course. My family is immigrants as well. So a lawyer could be reputable. But I realized very quickly that I didn't want to fight for a living either. And so I was starting to think, what are the second and third order effects of choosing a job? Hmm.

And I had an incredible professor, international torts, and we sat down one night and he said, you know, why do you think that these people you're covering along the US border live such a different life than you? And the immediate reaction is, well, I'm American and they're Mexican. He's like, well, let's stress test that. He's like, do you know Mexicans who live incredible and better lives than you? Of course. Yeah, sure, I do. So what's the difference? Your last name is Sanchez. Their last name is Sanchez.

You have brown hair, they do too. And what we came to is that the difference between humans who have a lot of power and have incredible lives and those who don't is really one thing. It's green and it's money. And so I wanted to understand money. I didn't come from it. I didn't have a lot of it. I didn't know anything about it. But I thought maybe if I understand money, then I could understand this thing called power and I could help more people have it, but I could also protect myself too. So that's when I started climbing up the rings of finance.

But I think without journalism to ask a lot of questions, without the difficulty of seeing real struggle, I wouldn't have wanted to work, you know, 70 hour weeks at Goldman. And so without all of those things, I couldn't have gotten here. Was there one specific moment that made you realize that the journalism thing wasn't for you? Yeah. There's this woman, her name was Carmelita. She's since passed. But I covered her in a project called Los Abandonados, The Abandoned.

And, um, she was elderly and was left behind on the border, which is a very normal happening in the U S because they cross as families, they get separated, the coyotes separate them. And so she had been by herself for like 10 years. And Ali, if you could imagine like the most derelict, you know, multi-story flat in London, just awful location, um, old neglected sort of like

frumpy beds that she was laying in, bed sores, and it's full with like hundreds of these elderly people. And so I wrote this story on Carmelita and she was so cute. She had like three teeth. She always wore this little pink beanie. She had a bear. I can't remember what the bear's name was. Now, a little teddy bear that she kept with her that was from her grandson.

And, um, we covered her story and she got all this press. We won the Howard F. Buffett award for print journalism. I got a bunch of job offers and I went back to go give her, we won some prize money. So I gave the prize money to the clinic. She, she wasn't really in her right mind enough to take the money direct. And, uh, and I showed her the prizes and she was like, carino, which means like dear, like

Now that America knows, this is amazing. Like, you're going to connect us with our families. You're going to fix it. And I was like, oh, shit. No. Like, America doesn't care. You know? Like, Kim Kardashian did something. Britney Spears shaved her head. And you're forgotten. And so that's when I realized, oh, man, I don't want to just tell people stories. I want to try to help people write different ones. And I don't think journalism is always the best way to do that. Nice. So then the switch to finance, how did that go? Yeah.

Well, that really came from a late night conversation with my professor where, you know, I realized that I wanted to have some impact. It was like my little quarter life crisis, you know, at 21, I'm feeling high and mighty, like one person could change the world. Right.

And, and I'm sitting down to speak with him after we had taken one of our tests. And he was one of those rare teachers, you know, that actually sit down with their students, really want to know you. I went to Arizona State University, huge school. You know, my classes were 300, 500 people. But this one was small. It was in the Honors College.

And I told him, well, I think I should go into politics because politics will change things. And he was like, who do you think pays the politicians? Who do you think – if you can go down to the basis level –

Who is the string puller? And his belief, and I think mine was too over many of these conversations, is that the people with money rule the world. And you can see it. I mean, even if you want to get crazy conspiracy theorists on either side of the aisle, you can see that the big backers are the ones that put candidates in office. And so I thought maybe we just need to get as much money as possible and help other people get money as possible. Because then...

If you have money, you're a lot harder to kill. You're a lot harder to do things to. You're a lot harder to push around because you have options. And so that's what brought me to finance. And I thought, well, first I just have to go understand it. So what was the finance journey and how did that culminate in, I guess, leaving finance to be an entrepreneur slash investor? Yeah. Well, I knew nothing about finance. So getting into finance was kind of hard. But I have a theory called get in the game.

And basically, I think if you want to go play a game, you need to go where it's played. Like, it's not that confusing or difficult. Most people say they want to make a career change, and then they send out their resume to a bunch of different sites, and they hope that they get a job. And the best way to do it, in my opinion, is go where people who are experts in the field are playing. So what I did is I ended up going to a bunch of events and conferences. I went to every finance and

and money and wealth and investing conference and event I could find. And as a student, there are a bunch that are free, right? So I don't know, I must have gone to 30 of them, 40 of them. And most of them, nothing really happened, but I learned a few things. I got the right words, right? Because every industry has the vernacular, you know that in medicine.

And, um, and then one day I went to an event that I really didn't want to go to. It was like, I had a long day of classes and I was late. And then I, I ended up going no matter what. Um, my mom has, has a saying, which is, um, always show up and then look for the exit. So you can go.

Note the exit. At any time you can leave, but just step your foot in the door because that's when magic happens. Kind of like that line in Tolkien, right? You know, it's an amazing thing what happens or it's a dangerous thing what happens when you step one foot outside your door. That was from The Hobbit for you nerds like me who like that. Ollie and I were talking Harry Potter, so I was going to see if I could be cool like him.

So I went and I listened to this event and I didn't know anything about anything, but I was curious as a journalist. So I asked a lot of questions and the woman who sat next to me ended up being a recruiter for a company called Vanguard, which is one of the largest investment firms in the world. And so she, because of all my pestering her, I guess thought that was unique. Everybody loves to hear their own voice.

And so asked me to interview for their rotational development program. And if you're young, these days everybody tells you to go be an entrepreneur. I actually think you should do the opposite. I think you should go learn on somebody else's dime because Vanguard puts in on average $100,000 worth of training into every new hire. I would never stay at Vanguard. I didn't like the place. But I loved starting there.

because they train you, I got licensed, and I got to learn on somebody else's dime. When you come out of college, typically, and especially if you don't go to college, I feel like you have a lot of rough edges. You know, you make faux pas constantly in business. You don't know the language or the context.

and going to a corporation I think actually teaches you a ton. So I'm a big advocate for starting and then go do your own thing. But these days I feel like everybody wants to be a YouTube star right away and you've met a lot of young YouTube stars too. Half the time I'm like, you guys couldn't fucking exist out in the real world for four seconds because you don't have a lot of context for what else works in this world of ours. On that note, so the whole what to do with your career when you're young, one view is

If you want to be an entrepreneur, just go straight into it. Yeah. Well, another view is if you want to be an entrepreneur, you can learn on someone else's dime. I was interviewing someone else on the pod, Dan Priestley, and his view was if you want to be an entrepreneur, learn on someone else's dime, but try and get a job in a company that has fewer than 10 people. Because if you work for a big corporate, you just learn a lot less about the whole business than you would if you're working in like eight man, whatever company.

team where you actually have visibility over revenues, profits, all that kind of stuff. What's your take on that? I think I'm of two minds. One, I don't think there's only one right path. Do either. I think the smart thing, though, is if you can learn on other people's dime, that's really helpful because you'll never bankrupt yourself while working a salary, right?

And so that is a really big safeguard. Because what I like to make sure people don't do is there's a lot of like hustle porn out there, right? Like sleep on your couch for 47 years and only eat ramen noodles. And that's okay, but I'm not sure it's necessary. And I also think it's a dangerous road to think that way because, you know...

In America, for instance, people on average have less than two weeks of cash on hand. So if we're out there telling people all the time to go risk it all, not everybody makes it. So let's give them like a little buffer, you know? And it's okay to have a little buffer. Don't let anybody tell you that you have to hustle and focus on the one thing and Gary V your way to success. I don't think you have to, even though I like the guy. So I think you can do either. The one thing I liked about the corporate structure was

is they have so much extra capital that they can spend a lot on you. You know in startups, me too, I have like three dimes to rub together. Training, when somebody asks me do I get training if I come on board, I'm like, next company.

There's no training here. We're too young. We're too small. We don't have time. It's like, get in, do whatever you can do. The other thing about startups that's dangerous is they grow so fast if you're at a good one, that if you are not a self-grower, you will be quickly outgrown in a startup. And so I'm sure you've experienced it too. In most of my startups, we've 3X'd every year. And so if somebody cannot 3X themselves in a year, they can't stay in the startup because we're moving too fast. Yeah.

And so you have to be careful, I think, if you go to a startup and you think, well, I'm just going to like learn a little bit as I go. This is like death by fire hose. And so, yes, you can do the eight to 10 company. But if you're the type of person where you need a little bit more time and you want to give yourself a bigger barrier between, you know, your ability to have to level up immediately in a startup, then I like the corporate route. And I'm not saying it's fun. It's awful. I hated working in corporations. It's not fun. But

just because it's not fun doesn't mean it's not good. What were some of the lessons that you took away from those early days at Vanguard? Well, Vanguard...

I mean, here goes any chance they ever sponsor us as anything, but Vanguard was the worst. I hated that place. But the reason why is it just wasn't a good culture fit for me. I like meritocracies. I want to be somewhere where the cream rises to the top. If I am working harder than everybody, I can make more money, I can progress. And Vanguard's a little bit like the military. It's like...

Every three years, you can move. You can be an individual contributor or you can be a leader. There's not a lot of cross-pollination. They're super rigid. And so for some people, that's amazing. It was awful for me. But the lesson I learned there is there was this one time I was brand new to the job. So I was like a year in and I was right out of college. And I was killing myself for this job because I didn't know anything about finance.

And so every day I went in there thinking they're going to find out that I don't know what I'm doing and then they're going to kick me out of this place. And everybody else that was part of the program had these fancy degrees. I went to a party school basically. And so I had this idea, Ali, I really believe in whatever you're bringing. You talked about the fact that you're Pakistani and a doctor and now you do this stuff online as well. You have this unique perspective.

amalgamation of skills, right? That not very many other people have. And so I had that at the time in a different way. I was in finance and I also spoke Spanish and was Latino. And they were trying to break into Latin America. And I had this idea for them on how to do that. And so I went and pitched it to my boss because at the end of our rotational program, you got put in different spots. So I was trying to come up with my own job, basically, which is a great way to make more money and do what you like to do is make your boss's job easy, come up with a solution that you can solve.

And I came up with this idea. And he was like, this is actually pretty good. Let me pitch it up the ladder. So we did. They were like, great. We're going to do it. Would you be able to move to do this job? Yes, I'm in. I'm breaking my lease. I'm telling my parents. I'm doing all this stuff. Three hours later, he calls me back to his office and he sits me down kind of like this in a little room and one of the little glass rooms. And he's like, I'm all excited. I think I'm fucking moving to Latin America. This is going to be amazing. And he's like, what do you think your peers think about you? And I was like,

No idea. I thought we were talking. I don't know. What do you mean? And he's like, well, you know, your peers think you would leave dead bodies behind you to get ahead. And I was like, and I'm, you know, 21. So I'm like trying not to cry. You know, I don't even know what emotions are going through me. And I'm like, you're going to, I need you to explain a little bit more, Ron. I don't understand what you're saying. And he's like, you know, we went to run you up the ladder and this is the feedback, you know, from your peers. Yeah.

And so I just kind of, I was like, can you explain to me why? Like, do they mean physically? I'm kind of little, like, I don't think I could be murdering anybody anytime soon, but okay. And he's like, well, for instance, you know, when you're at work, you don't plan any of the lunch parties or the outings like some of the other people do. When they come to your desk, you're very focused. You're not talkative. Like you don't help them solve their problems.

And basically, you know, that duck, how they show the duck like gliding, but underneath he's like this, you know, that was me. And so I was just trying to keep up. But what they saw was closed, selfish, self-interested, focused. What it really was is I was just, I was barely treading water. And that taught me that I never want to be at a place again.

Where somebody else's perception of me could be the thing that holds me back. It had to be my performance. And he said that line to me, which is, what is that line everybody always says? It's like, perception is reality.

And I remember he looked at me and said that, and I said, that's so ridiculous. It's absolutely not reality. But that is true. And so if you're in a big corporation, perception is reality. It is politics gamified. And so you have to play the game, which is something I always was bad at doing. So what happened next? So then he gave the job actually to somebody. So he took my idea and he gave it to somebody else in the program, which was crippling for me at the time.

And I continued to work for Vanguard, but I immediately put my resume out. I was like, nope, not doing this again. And I looked for the opposite of Vanguard, which was Goldman Sachs. I was like, where is there a place that couldn't be more of a meritocracy?

anywhere else in the world and it was Goldman. And that was right pre-crisis. So I didn't know the world was about to end and I was going to go to the place that everybody hated, but that's what I ended up doing. And I did, I don't know, 12 or 15 interviews to get into Goldman and then ended up becoming one of their youngest analysts, which was cool, female analysts. And I went and moved there. The interesting part is like maybe seven years or eight years later, I ended up the woman who took that job that

that I created ended up coming to work for me was my COO at my company two companies ago. And, uh, and then when I exited that company, she became the CEO. So, yeah, so it worked out great. And, uh, and then I, you know, and, and I had some like vengeful feelings for the manager for some time. Um,

But then I realized, man, the reason that I am where I am at in the world and he is where he's at in the world, which are very different places, are because of your ability to lean in and do the right thing. Like what he should have done as a manager is like coached me through that and explained how we could get the job and figure it out, whatever. And instead he crippled to other people's pressure, which is what happens at corporations.

So now he's still a middle manager at Vanguard and I'm wherever I am now. And I think that's because you have to make the hard choices. And thankfully, he gave me an opportunity to do that. One of the things that we've been talking a lot about recently internally within our team is kind of women in the workplace and unconscious biases and all this stuff. And I recently read Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, which I thought was really good. Yeah.

If someone is listening to this who either is a woman in the workplace or is working with women in the workplace, what advice would you share based on your experiences? Well, a couple of things. First and foremost, choose being the victor over being the victim always.

And I found it to be a huge benefit that I'm a woman in the workplace. Huge. Because I look different than everybody else, especially in finance. I'm much more memorable. You know, I have a different way to engage with people. And so I liked Cheryl's book a lot too. And I like this idea of like, you know,

I don't know. What if you change the story? What if your story is not the man's out to get me and men are X, Y, Z, and we have this conflict in the workforce? What if the story is instead, I'm incredibly powerful as a woman. I look a little different than everybody else. And because of that, I'm going to have massive success. And what if all these men could be my advocates? One of my mentors told me something that I thought was kind of true. He's like, the men that work with you typically either want to, they want to father you,

They want to friend you or they want to fuck you, right? There's like three types. And you've got to figure out pretty quickly which one of those three they fall into. And then you use that to your advantage. And, you know, I did that pretty specifically. If there's a guy who wants to father you, that's amazing. That's a mentor figure, right? And you can lean into that, you know, feeling of like, oh, my daughter or, you know, I want to help a young woman get along. Great. If they want to be friends with you, then great. You know, you work that angle.

And the third are the ones you have to be careful of, but there's also power in that too. And I think a lot of people today, we want to like kill our sexuality in the workforce. And I don't really think that's necessary, actually. I think you can be...

You can flirt. You can use the natural chemistry that happens between men and women to your advantage. And you can do it in a way that's ethical, and you can do it in a way that's moral, and you can do it within your own personal code and the code of the company. But don't wrap up your power. I mean, I remember when I first started at Vanguard, I cut my hair really short. I have a lot of hair, so I just look like a mushroom. It's not good for anybody involved. And I barely wore any makeup, and I wore these awful boxy suits with

And I thought that I had to become a man to get into the workforce. And it couldn't have been more opposite. I could have been exactly who I wanted to be. And that probably would have been more powerful. But it was a lesson I had to learn. Now that I guess you're running all these companies, investing in all these businesses, how does being a woman feed into that, if at all? Does it change your approach compared to if you were, let's say, Hormozy, for example? Yeah. I mean, I think...

I think as a woman, there are some truisms. Like, I try to smile a little bit more. You know, I can come off as a little aggressive or too intimidating as a woman. So for instance, we have this sign in my studio, which is kind of funny, that just says, smile, bitch.

really big, like right in front of the camera, because I get serious and I think about it. And then I realized, oh my God, in all my videos, it's like I'm yelling at everybody all the time. And so I do think that we have to be honest about where we came from as men and women and our natural evolution, which is we were often thought of as nurturing. It's not as normalized for women to be aggressive and whatever. And so lean into that as opposed to be pissed off about it.

because the world doesn't care either way. And so why would you be mad about something that will have no effect? And so now I think, you know, for instance, if I was going to buy your business, Ali, and I was a man, I might buddy up to you. You know, we'd go to the 19th hole and play some golf. We might smoke a cigar. We'd hang out and do Harry Pottery things. Like you would have like a natural thing you're comfortable doing with men. And when I'm a woman, I have to come at it from a little bit different of an angle. So instead of doing that, I might

I might reach out to you and do something in like the safe zone, right? So like coffee or lunch, but I would be fun about it. I'd be like, tell me about you. Like, what's going on? That's cool. What are you wearing? Like, I'd make jokes. I kind of feel more familiar than I think at Alex Hormozy. If you've met Alex, he's kind of like, yes, great. You know, and he's big and he's actually got a great sense of humor, but

That would not be great coming from me. You would be like, she doesn't really like me. What's happening there? That would be a weird interaction. And so recognizing that it's not flirting, but it's like familial, right? And so I find with owners, especially most owners are 65 plus years old. So they're of a different generation, right? And so my conversations with them end up falling often into the father category. So it's like,

Tell me about your history. How many years have you been running this? 40? That's incredible. What was the moment like when you opened it up? When was the last time that you almost felt like you had to give up on this business because it was so miserable? Did you ever go bankrupt? And so-

Being really curious with them, I think as a woman you can do. And if you did that as a man often, it's almost hard. They're like, no, I've never gone bankrupt. You got bankrupt. So like use your ability as a female to be more empathetic. Nice. Love it. This is great advice. So you joined Goldman. What was the story at Goldman Sachs? I actually loved Goldman in a lot of ways. Goldman has an incredible culture because they know who they are and they attract the people that they should and they

What's the opposite of track? They repel those that should not be there. And I think that is a hack in business. I'm sure you found it with employees too. You kind of know an archetype of, I don't mean gender or race or any of that. I mean the thinking of a human that will fit well in Ali Abdaal.

You know, you need somebody that you can trust in your home, right? You need somebody that has like a kind of a kindness to them. You probably couldn't have somebody that was really sharp elbows in here, bowling everybody around, right? If they only wanted to wear suits, they're not going to fit for you. And so you have to actually repel the people that would be miserable at your job. And Goldman's great at that. And so I really liked Goldman for that reason. They cut 20% of the workforce every year.

So that's hard. So every year you would, I mean, every day at that place, I think I didn't see the sun for like seven months because I started in Chicago. And so you would get in the office at seven, you'd stay, you'd work out at the office, you'd eat at the office. And it was an incredibly intense culture. But I learned so much from it. One of my favorite frameworks from

Goldman that I took is, you know, basically, uh, they have a couple of different levels of humans at Goldman, but when you're an analyst, you're, you're doing everything right. There's no, no is not in your vocabulary at that level. And, um, and I had a, a boss, uh, James Yount,

who was very intense, former military. And he came in one day and gave me a few minutes when he was walking into the office because I was one of the first people in. And he doesn't usually give anybody a few minutes. That's very rare. And so I said to him, hey, I'm new, you know, 30 seconds, can I walk you to your office? Yeah, sure, great.

Said, I'm new. I don't have a crazy background. I didn't go to Cambridge or whatever. You're sort of similar. You seem like you really pulled up yourself by your bootstraps. Like two or three things that you think I could do in the first 30 days to differentiate myself, anything. And he was like, no, it's one thing. I'm like, okay, great. He's like, be here earlier, stay later. That's it.

And I was like, really? Okay. So I just did that for a year. I was just in before anybody else. And I stayed later than anybody else. And I got promoted faster than anybody else. And I made more money faster than anybody else. And so what I liked about Goldman is they told you, and it was just like, how much pain can you tolerate?

And that tolerating pain for a period up front led to a lifetime of now I don't have to tolerate much pain at all. Like we get to do this during the day. I have a full staff. You know, I get to hang out a lot. You know, we make YouTubes. Like what a, what a, it's unbelievable that we make money doing this. And that was because I took, I took a lot of pain early.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by Huel. I've been using Huel, I've been a paying customer of Huel since 2017, since my fifth year of medical school when I first discovered it. And basically what it is, if you haven't heard of it, is that it is a meal in a shake. It's got the perfect balance of carbs and fiber and proteins and fat, and it contains 26 different vitamins and minerals. All you do is add water or milk to the powder, usually I use water, you can shake it up or you can blend it, a

prefer to blend and then it becomes a fantastic option if you're like me and you're kind of busy and so you don't really have time for breakfast or lunch. My favorite version is the Huel Black Edition. It's absolutely sick. 400 calories, 40 grams of protein for 400 calories. I'm trying to get hench and it's actually pretty hard to find something that has such a high protein content for such a low calorie

trade-off. And so I really like using the Huel Black Edition to start my mornings off. It's vegan, it's gluten-free, it's lactose-free. The Black Edition is available in nine flavors. My favorite is salted caramel. And I wouldn't recommend having every single meal Huel because that gets a bit annoying after a while, but it's absolutely fantastic as like one of the meals of the day, especially if you're busy and you're going to kind of

default to something unhealthy otherwise. It's also very affordable. So it actually works out to £1.68 per meal for a 400 calorie meal, which is just incredible value and actually way cheaper than other generic protein shakes on the market. And it saves a bunch of time because it's so quick and easy to make. And so it's particularly exciting that they're sponsoring the podcast. And actually we had the founder of Huel, Julian Hearn, who was on the very first season of the podcast. That was a sick episode that got so many rave reviews as well.

Anyway, if you're interested in trying out Huel, then head over to Huel.com forward slash deep dive. And if you use that URL, A, it really helps me out. But B, you also get a free t-shirt and also a free shaker that comes with your order. So go to Huel.com forward slash deep dive. That'll also be linked down in the video description or the show notes. And thank you so much Huel for sponsoring this episode.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by Trading212. Now people ask me all the time for advice about investing because I've made a bunch of videos about it on the YouTube channel. And my advice for most people is generally invest in broad stock market index funds, which is exactly what you can do completely for free with Trading212. It's a great app that lets you trade stocks and funds and ETFs and foreign exchange if you really want to. And one of the great things about the app is that if you're new to the world of investing, you can actually invest with fake money. You don't have to

put real money in, they've got a practice mode where you invest fake money and then it actually tracks what the market is doing in real time. So you can see had I invested £100 into this thing, what would my return have been X weeks or X months further down the line. Once you've got some comfort with that, then it's super easy to deposit money into your Trading212 account. You can use Apple Pay like I do initially, or you can use a direct bank transfer. And then once the money is in your Trading212 account, then you can invest it in basically whatever you want.

The other really cool feature about Trading212 is their pies feature. So what you can do is you can follow people who've created investing pies. For example, someone might have a pie where, I don't know, 30% of it's Apple and 20% is Tesla and 10% is the S&P 500. And you can follow people on the app and see what pies they've created. And you can see the performance of those pies. And then you can just copy and paste a particular pie into your own account.

And so that means like, let's say you've got a hundred pounds to invest and you've put 50 of it into the S&P 500, but you want to be a little bit more experimental with the other 50 pounds. You can invest it into a pie where someone else who's generally a pro or someone in their bedroom who just loves the markets has already done all the homework for you. Also, very excitingly, there's a new feature that they've added to the app, which is a daily interest on your uninvested cash.

These interest rates may go up or down over time as the economic environment changes, but the cool thing is that you get paid out every single day if you're into that sort of thing. And so if you haven't yet started with investing and you want to give it a go, then you can download the app on the App Store. And if you use the coupon code ALI, A-L-I, that will give you a totally free share worth up to £100. It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in TRADING212 into your respective App Store. So thank you so much, TRADING212, for sponsoring this episode.

Do you think it's necessary to take that pain early? Or if in an alternate universe, could you have enjoyed that process while also getting all the benefits from it?

- Good question. Like, I think I did enjoy the process. I think I learned to love pain and struggle. And there were days, the only thing that was the hard for me is being really, really tired. I can see why that's a torture tactic because there were days where you had to focus and I would be like,

You know, I'm like, I'm barely here right now. That was really tough. But actually the long hours working on an interesting problem set is not a problem. But I think it is a, and I was just thinking about this this week. I had a tough week this week. Stuff going on in the companies, lots of work, no sleeping.

And I was writing about reminding myself, why do I keep doing this? I don't technically need to keep doing this. You probably don't technically need to keep doing this. So why? And the reason is because I think that the struggle is a bit of an honor. And I think...

If you want to know what the key to happiness is, it's struggle. If you want to know what the key to wealth is, it's struggle. If you want to know what the key to making a lot of money is, it's struggle. And the more that you can realize that iron actually does sharpen iron, and the more sort of difficult things you can champion and do, the more likely you are to have a successful life. I...

I think it's a life hack. It's a secret that these days we don't want to hear. Now everybody wants, you know, I want to do the least and make the most. I want to hire the least amount of people and have the biggest company. I'm a solo entrepreneur that will never employ anybody that makes millions on the internet. You can do it too without any work and four hours a week.

Like that's the thing that we've said we want. And then I think about it for a second. I stand back and I'm like, is that really what we want? Like what happened to building empires? What happened to leaving legacies? What are you going to do in the other 52 hours of your week? And so I don't think you have to struggle forever. But I think periods of struggle make the periods of relaxation really poignant. And one without the other is like a day without a night. Nobody wants to live in complete silence.

pleasure and happiness always because it diminishes. And so I do think you need it. I mean, what do you think? Because you went through worse sleep deprivation in medical school than I did. Yeah, this is the thing that I'm not sure about. Like, I've been looking a lot into this in the process of writing my book where...

You know, there's that quote from Muhammad Ali, which is, you know, I thought about quitting, but I said, you know, don't quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion. And this whole thing of like, I suffered for 10 years and then it was worth it at the end of it because I held up a trophy kind of vibe. Yeah. And that has never really sit right with me because if, you know, when I was talking to Alex Ramosi, he said something which I think about quite a lot, which is that

You know, when I was 20, I would have given everything to be a millionaire. And when I was a millionaire, I would have given everything to be 20 again. And so usually I feel like these periods of struggle when we're young in particular, like if we look at the regrets of the dying on the deathbed, basically everyone says, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. And I think for people who are very driven...

there is kind of a default tendency to over invest in work and under invest in relationships and health. And I know a few people for whom that has screwed them up because they've gotten to their, let's say mid thirties, forties, whatever they've chased the corporate ladder or success in entrepreneurship or whatever the might think that thing might be their whole life. And then they look around and they're like, Oh crap. All my friends are married with kids. And I, and I've just been chasing, chasing the green dollars. And I, I wonder if,

Like the way I've always tried to approach it is, you know, when I was going through med school, building YouTube channel, working as a doctor, it was always around how can I make this process enjoyable and energizing for myself so that it doesn't feel as if I am struggling or grinding and stuff. And maybe that's that kind of millennial, like wanting to have their cake and eat it too kind of situation. But when you said struggle is happiness, that's where I was like, oh, I'm not sure. I would venture that balance is happiness.

And there are periods of struggle, certainly, because growth comes from struggle, almost certainly. But then there's the other side of it, which is,

Happiness comes from, you know, having friends to hang out with and taking care of your health and all those things as well. So, yeah, what do you think? Well, I think you're right. I think it's important not to assume that struggle can only be in work. So I think you're right about that. We talk about something called a third degree human, basically like a third degree black belt. And so we have a triad at contrarian thinking that's civilize the mind, make savage the body, build the bank account.

So the idea is the civilize the mind, make savage the body as an ancient Chinese proverb translated. But basically that...

Yeah, you want to... How do you civilize the mind? You read incredible things, right? You have interesting conversations. You question things. You struggle with that voice inside of your head that's always telling you negative perceptions, right? And you try to not tame the beast, but understand it. And that's like one type of struggle, right? And then you have make savage the body, which is a different type of struggle. It's like the struggle to...

eat well, you know, the, the, like, I don't know, like, do you find joy? I find a lot of joy in an incredibly hard workout, like a yoga session where you're just dripping sweat, but the music's incredibly difficult. And I, so maybe there are different types of humans too, but I find that when I kind of take it to the edge, that there's this, there's beauty in it. There's like beauty in

How far can you push your body? You know, how far can you push your mind? How much can you create? And then maybe that is where happiness kind of strides. The bigger issue I think I see today is that so many people, so many people seem like they don't have a purpose anymore. And like we're a nation of people who their deathbed, they say that because they chose a job.

Because of outside memetic reasons that they stuck with for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, or they looked for fast cash and fast rewards and never found it, as opposed to

I don't know about you, but I get so lost in the moments where I'm doing the thing I should be doing. You know, when I'm writing really deeply, when I'm thinking really deeply, when I'm having an engaging conversation. But I'm struggling. Even right now, I'm like, I'm struggling to think of how do I say this exactly? But there's like, I'm finding it very interesting. You know what would not be interesting? Us talking about the weather, which would be super easy. Us watching a mindless TV show.

That is so uninteresting to me. So maybe we need a better definition of struggle. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's it. Because, yeah, as you were describing that, the whole, you know, sharpening the mind, the body thing, I think...

One example I often think of is, you know, during lockdown, I got a PS5. I started to play Horizon Zero Dawn and I switched to very hard difficulty. It wasn't quite ultra hard, which is just a bit torturous, but very hard was like a good sweet spot where my housemate would see me just like trying to clear the same bandit camp for about three hours because it was on very hard difficulty and you had to get the right like headshots and make sure that they don't notice you and all this kind of stuff.

And at the end of it, it would be like, oh, yes, I'm glad I spent the last three hours on very hard difficulty. I could have breezed through in five seconds on story mode difficulty. But like, what would be the point of that? Exactly. There is joy to be found in the challenge itself. But at the same time, if that's I think where I think about this idea of balance.

You know, that's three hours from like, I don't know, 8 to 11 p.m. while it's locked down. But, you know, if that was four hours, five hours, six hours, seven hours and the rest of my life is suffering, now I might be struggling on very hard difficulty on Horizon Zero Dawn or even ultra hard, but I'm unlikely to be particularly happy because the rest of life is not quite in balance. Totally. And so I kind of think of it as these moments of challenge, right?

In the book, we've got a chapter around play. Like if you can find a way to approach your work in the spirit of play, which is often with a sense of wonder and curiosity, but a decent sprinkle of challenge as well. That's what makes it fun. And that's kind of been my approach for, well, since medical school. How do I...

take this challenge and find a way to make it fun? Or if I'm doing something really boring, how do I apply a challenge to it to make it more fun than it currently is? Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think we forget sometimes that most humans, if you go to Ask, it's one of my favorite games. I do it a lot to Uber drivers. Like I'll say something like, you know, what was your day like today? Like, what did you, I just want to see a different perspective. So here in London, I think that's interesting. Like how many hours you've been driving? What's going on? And then I like to ask them, when was the last time that you did something so hard you could barely stand it?

And the reason I like to ask that is because every time I ask myself that, I realize, oh, shoot, it's been a little bit longer than I anticipate. You know, when was the last time you stayed up all night working on something because you couldn't help but do it, right? And when you ask yourself that question, then it makes you push yourself slightly to find those things. And in moments where I haven't done that in six months, let's say I'll realize, oh, I have been grinding. I've not been struggling. I've just been

sort of on a low level grind, which I think is soul killing. And oftentimes they'll tell me something really interesting. Like I just had a baby, you know, three months ago and I never thought I could survive in that moment what was happening. And that was really cool. There's actually this great book called The Men, The Mission and Me. It's about a Green Beret, so a special forces in the US. And he has a line in there that basically says, there is nothing more motivating than a mission you're unsure you can solve. Right.

And I think that's why we're put here as humans. But who knows? At the end of the day, it might just make me feel better on long nights. So you said one of the problems might be that people don't have a purpose. What's your purpose? What's the thing that's driving you to do all this stuff? Yeah, a couple things. One time, you know, I think it's really useful if you're wondering what your purpose is, if you're struggling with, am I doing the right thing day in and day out?

I like to think about a tombstone and mine. And I remember one time I had a crazy dream. And in the dream, I basically walked in the cemetery as one does. And my tombstone came up in front of me. And at the time, I was in private equity. And it just said, like, managing director Cody Sanchez. And I was like, oh, gross. What? That's going to be the legacy? I'm like a managing director at a private equity firm? Kill me. Yeah.

And so I think sort of looking at your tombstone, and it doesn't have to be work-related, it could be, you know, father. That might be an incredible thing to have a new tombstone, right? And so that made me change my perspective. And now I hope the legacy is that we bring more humans into ownership. That's the second idea I'm playing around with, which is I think more humans need skin in the game in some way, shape, or form. It's the only way to feel like you have...

You have ownership in this world. You have something that you are striving for and building. And most people rent their apartments these days or their houses. Most people work at jobs where they don't have equity in it. Only 15% of humans actually own stocks, which would be equity in companies. By and large, we're becoming a nation or a world of renters when we started over the last century, just finally becoming owners after years of serfdom.

And so that is my mission, is I want more human beings to have their little plot of land figuratively or physically, because I think that that changes the way we look at the world. Then we start to become stewards of it. Then we start to become stewards of our country. You don't burn down the building that you own, right? You fix it. You renovate it. You build on it.

So that's what I hope our mission is. I hope when I'm dead, I hope there's a bunch of people that would never have owned anything and now own something and they get to pass that on to the next generation. Because otherwise, just the guys at the top own everything. I mean, one out of four houses last year got bought by three companies in the US. Single family houses. We don't even own our homes anymore. And so that I think needs to change.

So how much is that the thing that drives you versus, you know, I struggle with this myself, figuring out, is it purpose or is it actually money or status or power that are the other? Or likes on the Instagrams? Yeah, which we have status. And I can convince myself that, yeah, you know, there's likes on Instagram. It's important for my parasocial relationship with my audience, which translates to bottom line profit. But like, you know, who am I kidding? I sometimes ask myself. Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to KPIs are just

You know, they're the milestones on a map, right? That get you to a final destination. And so a KPI would be something like likes on your Instagram or social media followers. It's very easy for me to get caught up in the daily or weekly numbers because I'm a numbers person. And so I have to be really, really careful that I zoom out. We do something every week at my company called the weekly what's up.

And basically I zoom out for a 10-minute segment of our company meeting where I will talk about something really high level. So I'll share a quote from a book like Jocko Willink's about the honor of leadership and how it sucks to be a leader, but it's also incredible. And then I'll talk about a testimonial from somebody who we helped

And so we'll highlight that. And maybe that testimonial is about like somebody specifically on the team. So I try to zoom out once a week, but for sure, I think, you know, at the end of the day, we're selfish, self-interested beings that are trying to continue to survive. You know, if you look at evolution like that, we need to procreate and we need to survive a certain amount of time.

So I think you have to rewire your brain a little bit to not just only focus on you. Um, but there's no doubt about it. I mean, I like the ego of it. Uh, I think it's super fun seeing our videos go viral. I think it's super fun making money. It's a giant scoreboard. And I think that's what money is at the end of the day. The rich, I don't think continue to do things for the money. The rich do things because it's a game and they want to win on the scoreboard. Um,

That's my take for now. There's a book I've been reading or started reading called, I think it's called The Road to Character. Where David Brooks, I think, where he talks about. I like David. Like there are resume virtues and then there are eulogy virtues. The things that you would write on your resume. And then there are the things that people would say at your funeral. Yeah.

And his argument in the book seems to be that the money stuff tends to be not the thing that people would say at your funeral. So how do you think about this balance? Like, again, I'm asking because this is something that I genuinely think about every day, like this, this balance between striving for the numbers to go up versus, I don't know, the other things that make up a balance.

a holistic and well-lived life? Yeah. Well, my husband and I do, we do biannual bucket list trips, and those are typically something difficult. So we're going to, for instance, go to Mongolia on horseback for 12 days, and we want to meet with this one tribe, a friend of ours. It's one of the last tribes that rides reindeers, like caribous, in Mongolia. And so we're going to do a thing that's

which I think is really important. And I think when we do like one or two of those kind of things a year, so I hiked Mount Baker, we're also going to go do this exploration with whale sharks with a friend of mine who does National Geographic whale shark tagging. And I imagine that if somebody was to give a eulogy of us at some point, there will be hopefully that we're 70, 80 years old doing bizarre things like that. And so I think...

I don't know how to live a really sporadic, spontaneous life. Like I get so wrapped up in work and doing the daily grind, maybe like a lot of people do. It's hard for me to go do the wild things continuously. So there's a very simple thing that seems to work for me, which is just

I sort of schedule the ridiculous. And that sounds like you shouldn't do it. But, you know, some of my favorite stories to write or read about are like Ernest Shackleton, right? Like best. Oh, so good. He wrote the best job description of all time, which was you've definitely seen it. It's a little paper cut out and it basically says, yeah.

uh, men needed for a dangerous mission. And it says things like, uh, survival, unlikely, uh, return questionable, you know, pain, absolute. Um, and he received thousands of people that applied for this job. And I think the reason is because we want that crazy mission, right? Like we want to be the Indiana Jones in the next film in some way, shape or form. And so, um,

I don't know how to live a big, huge life except to have experiences. And so I don't know, do you do anything like that where you try to go on one or two wild adventures a year? Less so wild adventures, but more so I'm also a big fan of scheduling the bucket list items. But my version of a wild adventure was I was like, oh, it's on the bucket list to go on a fishing trip. So I went on a fishing trip two weeks ago and that was very nice. Yeah, I love that. But it's not been as wild. What do you want on your eulogy?

I think I also thought about the tombstone thing a couple of years ago and I landed on good father, good husband and inspirational teacher. And I realized that for me, if I could teach people, that's a thing that I think I would love for people to say at my funeral. Yeah, he was a nice guy and all that. Nice to his family and friends, blah, blah, blah. But like, yeah, helped. You know, if...

If I could have the sort of impact on someone that Tim Ferriss had on me through his stuff, where it nudged me on a completely different kind of life path that I would have been otherwise.

then I think that would be pretty sick. Like if someone leaves their job to start a business because they vibed with my staff or someone starts a YouTube channel that takes off because they vibed with my staff, like, you know, things like that. Or even someone, you know, does better in their exams because they vibed with my staff and that helps them kind of live their dreams. That to me is like the thing that I want to do for now. So. Wait, I have two questions. One, do you care if people perceive you as a nice guy? Is that important to you? Yeah. Why? Oh, good question. Why? Yeah.

Why is it important that people perceive me as a nice guy? Probably because I have a fundamental need to be liked and admired and appreciated and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I always, I like to double tap on the nice thing because I think, I think it's lovely to want to be nice because a world full of assholes doesn't sound good for anybody. Nobody wants that. But I've always rather been, I would rather be respected than liked. I would rather, um,

My best teachers weren't just nice, right? They like push you a little bit, which maybe you could do in a nice way. So I'm always curious if people... Now, it's hard to not always be perceived as nice because you get a lot of pushback on it. And maybe it's a story I'm telling myself too, but I'm always curious on that idea of nice and does it really matter? Maybe you could be kind.

But you have to be nice. Yeah. But I think by nice, I mean, I mean, kind rather than like nice has a lot of like other things brought up in like being a doormat and all that kind of stuff associated with nice. Yeah.

But yeah, when I say nice, I mean it as like a, just a sum of like kind, good person, thoughtful, considerate kind of stuff. Yeah. I mean, I could work on all of those things more for sure. I don't know. I think you come across as pretty nice. I also was hugely influenced by Tim Ferriss. We're actually in the same group chat with him. And I remember when, you know, our mutual friend Sri put us into that, put me into that group chat and I saw that Tim was in it. I was like,

I went and texted him. I'm like, I'm not going to do anything weird, but I am so excited because Tim Ferriss was, I think, one of the first people for a lot of us that made us feel like we could actually architect our lives. You know, nobody told me that before Tim. Everybody was like, no, no, here's how you do it. And you wear the suit and you do the thing. And then I think he was the first one. It wasn't necessarily that I only wanted to work four hours. It was like, oh, wait, but I could choose. So I think that's incredible. And so I think the other thing to ponder too, which I think about too, is what do you want to become next?

Known for and also doesn't matter because at the end of the day will be dust completely unremembered just like the greatest emperors of all time And so I mean you can't even remember the last name of most of the greatest people who ever ruled the planet Um, and so at some point I think perhaps none of it matters, but do it anyway. Yeah finding yeah, I I kind of think um

you know finding finding joy in the journey yeah and having a destination in mind sure but recognizing that like you know from all of the people i spoke to all the stuff i read it's just like

No one ever finds happiness at the end of the journey. They find it en route. And so great. Let's try and, you know, coming back to that point of enjoy the present day while we're working towards that destination. I agree. Totally. So we're in Goldman Sachs right now. What happened next in the career? Yeah. So after Goldman, we...

Well, basically, so I'm divorced and remarried. But at that time, I was dating somebody at Goldman. And he was leaving to go to a job in Dallas. So I wanted to really continue the investment banking thing and go to New York and go international. But he was moving. And so I ended up moving with him, which maybe is one of the things I regret at some point. But it ended up working out. So I was leaving Goldman. The only option at Goldman was – I'm sorry. Can I just double tap on that? Please, tell me.

Uprooting your life for the sake of a relationship. Yeah. What are your thoughts? Well, I have a bias there, right? Because it didn't work out great. So take that with a grain of salt. But I think more important, if you uproot your life for somebody into another life that you want to live, incredible.

But I think be really careful about uprooting yourself for another into a life you don't want to live. And so in this instance, I had always wanted to work internationally and I had wanted to build big businesses. And instead, I moved to Dallas, Texas. I get a huge house with a white picket fence and a country club membership. You know, poor guy didn't stand a chance, right? Like that was just not part of the vision of my future that I wanted. And I think he thought I would change and I thought that he was okay with who I was.

And the disconnect lay in there. So now when I think about a relationship like with my husband now, we're very big on...

What is the vision we both want out of life? It's not just are we compatible as humans and do we like each other, but do we want the same big things? Because if you, Ollie, really want kids and to live in London and to do X, Y, Z, and your person is tied to Bangladesh and wants no children, then it kind of doesn't matter how in love the two of you are because the lives that you want will continue to pull at the seams. Yeah.

And so I think be really cautious about this idea of, you know, I'm just really compatible and I'll drop everything for this other human, which leads to resentment. At least it did for me. So I wouldn't do that again. Okay.

And yet I've moved many times for my husband and we go through cycles. So we'll talk about them. Like for this, for the three year period we're in right now, this is my cycle. You know, I'm building this business that requires a lot of travel. He travels with me often and we're building it together. For the three year cycle prior, he was in the military. And so we had to be based wherever he was based.

And so we had this vision of the future that was combined. And even now we work a lot and we try to not use the word sacrifice ever. We say like we make decisions or we prioritize. And we prioritize for the ultimate vision, which is we want to live this big life and leave this big empire behind us. And we want to build something so big that our kids can come into it

I'm hiring my father now. I hire a bunch of my friends into the business and I want to fold our work and our life into one. So we're willing to do things to achieve that. So you moved to Dallas. What happened next? So I moved to Dallas. And then if you are listening, for instance, and you want a job really bad, maybe this is a case study for you. So at that time I was at Goldman and, um,

I wasn't that high up. I think I was an associate at the time. And so I wanted to go and run a bigger company and I wanted to do it inside the investment realm and largely I wanted to do it in what's called institutional. So I wanted to sell to big companies, pensions, sovereign wealth funds, whatever.

And to get that job, basically, I had to fly to three different continents to interview on my own dime. I got to know every single hiring manager at this company called State Street. I sent like a custom ball signed because I figured out that the manager really liked this one baseball player. I basically, I like smothered.

them. I just smothered them to a point which the guy finally was just like, Jesus Christ, like, okay, fine. We'll hire you for something. It's not exactly what you wanted, but we'll hire you. But I got turned down something like four or five times by this company for a ton of different roles. But I think what people don't realize is relentless persistence is so rare that if you really want a particular job in a particular company,

if you can relentlessly pursue it in a way that feels a little uncomfortable, that would be inappropriate and borderline stalking if you were to do it to a significant other, you can largely get it. And so I got this job at State Street where I headed up one segment of the country and I was selling investments, cash investments.

to big companies. And then I left there to go to a company called First... Oh, no, no, no. I wanted to leave there to go to Credit Suisse, which these days, maybe not so much, but back then it was good. And I did the same thing. I basically applied for this job flying to New York and I flew to London to meet with them. I flew to San Francisco and I got turned down twice for the job. I got really, really close and

And then they said no. And then I got really, really close again and they said no and gave it to another woman. But the third time they came back to me and they offered me the job. And at that point I was like, nope, because I got another one at this company called First Trust. But I have never just been given or offered the job or just given or offered the opportunity. It's always been relatively painful. And so-

I think if a lot of people could take more permission in the fact that we think that that's okay in entrepreneurship these days, like, yes, just keep going for the clients, keep getting after it. But if you want a traditional job too, you will be in, I mean, I was making millions of dollars a year with no risk because I was doing it on a company time, traveling around the world, learning and engaging with presidents of countries. And I was able to do it because nobody else was that relentless in their pursuit. I was much too young to have that job.

Nice. Yeah, this is something that, you know, in Lean In, he calls it something about like tiara complex or something like that, where in particular, apparently women in the workplace feel like if I just put my head down and do a good job, someone will put a tiara on my head and will give me a promotion. And what she says in the book is that like,

It would be amazing if that were to happen in the real world. No one has any time and everyone is like just doing a zillion different things. So you have to put yourself out there. And it sounds like that's like sort of to an insane degree. That's what you did. Yes. I like the idea of the tiara complex. I think it's a fine line. You know, these days people will say things like always ask for what you want.

You need to temper the always asking. The way that I asked made it a win-win for everybody, right? I would find problems within the companies and say, I think I can solve this for you. You know, what are you paying somebody right now? Pay me half. Like I was always trying to give them such a win that a no would feel wrong. Yeah, like a grand slam offer. Right. Yeah.

And that I think is what is missing from a lot of the asks today. You must get them too. I get DMs constantly. Can I learn from you? Can I do this? They're very sweet, but they're very selfish actually. And so if you wanted to do a good ask, it would have to be something where you have obsessed on that person so much, you know so much about them, that the thing you're going to offer is so valuable that they would be crazy not to take you up on it.

And we actually, we have a YouTube video that's coming out. I wonder if it'll be out by then. Maybe Christian's back there. And it's about this. We basically came up with this idea of we think that you're one degree away from basically almost any mentor you want in the world. And that they are much easier to get than you could ever imagine. Just everybody does it wrong because they take a shotgun approach, right? So it's DM, DM, DM, DM, DM, DM. Low level, un-discriminatory.

specific, non-tailored, non-value-added outreach. And they wonder why it doesn't work. When you want to get a high-value target, what do you do? Do you ever shoot at them with a shotgun? No. You have a sniper rifle. You spend a ton of time on the preparation for it. It's called prepping the environment. And you would want to make sure that the wind direction is correct. You'd want to make sure the sun is correct. And it's the same thing, I think, when you want something out of life, including mentorship. And so in this instance, we...

We basically showed three different ways that we take an idea to get in front of somebody and we make it a reality. And we actually got Christian in front of like somebody that he looks up to, a big podcaster. And we did it without money and we did it without networks and they had to reach out independently. So it is much easier than ever to get a mentor. You just have to treat it like a sniper rifle, never like a shotgun. What do you mean by mentor? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't like that word that much. But-

I think most of the mentors in your life come from like one small engagement, right? You sit next to somebody on a plane by accident. I meet you somewhere randomly. We started engaging in DMs on the internet, right? And now I learn from you actually on many different things. Yeah.

And so, right. And so, and how did it start? It was really low level. So I think it's a bit like, it's like a Tinder swipe, right? Or a Bumble swipe. You start by just like, oh, yep, I'm going to swipe left on you. I'm going to make a very small engagement. That might be at a conference. I'm going to walk up to Ali Abda. I'm going to introduce myself and I'm going to say, hi, I'm Cody Sanchez. I love your stuff. I'm going to DM you. I think something might be interesting for you later. And you'd go, okay, whatever. Cool. Thanks. Nice to meet you.

That's your Tinder swipe. You've shown engagement. Then your second level is going to be when you reach out to them, it should be something really value-added with no ask. Hey, Ali, I saw that you have these videos coming up. I pulled the top 10 best products

videos for small accounts, but huge viral videos. And I just sent it to you here. I hope it's interesting. You'd be like, Oh, great. Thanks. And then you have a tiny opening and then you basically are like opening the window, opening the window, opening the window until finally you have a relationship and then the relationship can become a mentorship.

But it starts with actually you giving something to that person. And I think there's very easy ways to do that. But people don't want to spend that much time on one person because they're scared. What if Ollie, who I look up to so much, and I try to do this thing and then it doesn't work? But that's a terrible way to think about it. It's what if I could give Ollie some value? And wouldn't that be incredible for all the value he gave for me? And if you do that a couple different times, one of them will eventually return it. But you don't have the expectation. Yeah.

Yeah, why do you think people get this so wrong? It's easy. You know, it's so easy to do the little DM outreach and it's scary. I really give people credit for that. You know, sometimes I like to ask when I meet like famous people and I know they know another famous person that I actually really look up to, I'll say like,

What do you think? Do you really like this person? Are they a good person? And the reason why is because if they're not, I don't really want to meet them. I don't want to have that hero fall from high, right? I would rather just read the book, learn the stuff. Great. Like if I met Tim Ferriss and now I've engaged with him, he's a very nice guy. But if I met him and he was terrible, oh, that'd be so sad, wouldn't it? And I think that's how they feel about a lot of us. They're like, what if I get this thing and I didn't really, you know, and it doesn't make me happy.

What if I reach out to Ollie and he's awful to me? And so I think it's scary and people are lazy. So you got this job with First Trust. And how did that end up transitioning into what you're now doing? That was incredible. So the CEO of that company, he hates being on the internet, so he's not going to let me talk about this. But he's a billionaire multiple times over. It's an incredible company with a cult-like reputation.

I actually don't like the environment very much. It's very bro-y finance, you know, strippers and whatever. But he himself is probably the best public speaker I've ever seen. And he did a great thing with me. So I met him early on.

And I was running a company at the time that was much bigger, like billions and billions of dollars in revenue, my division at State Street. And he was just starting in Latin America. He wanted to grow the Latin American business.

And I met him and he's like, I really would like you to come work for me. And I was like, well, like how big is it? What's happening? He's like, no, there's nothing there. And I was like, Jim, you know, no, I run this huge thing. I don't want to come over here and build this little thing for you. Who are you guys anyways? You're only based in the US. No, thanks. And he was like, I'm going to tell you what's going to happen. I was like, okay. He's like, you're going to say no, you're going to say no, you're going to say no. Then you're finally going to say yes. And it's going to be the best decision of your life. And I was like, that's confident. Yeah.

And then we started engaging, but I'll never forget that. You're going to say no, you're going to say no, you're going to say no, you're going to say yes. And he was right. And so he basically taught me the power of building a culture, which I'm sure you felt it too. Before I ran a business, I thought, I would never have read a book about culture. Yeah, no, absolutely not. I would never actually have read a book about leadership, to be honest. I thought like, I don't know, I'm over here. I don't know. And the more money I've made, the more I realize,

If you can lead and if you can create culture, you are limitless. If you cannot do those two things, you are very limited. And so actually we should spend all the time on culture and leadership. There's a great quote that says, if you need to build a boat, do not teach your men to go and build planks and build rope. Teach them instead to yearn for the vast and endless sea, right? And it's so true.

If you want to be a successful leader, you actually need to teach your people to yearn for the thing that you want. You need to teach them that the mission of getting 3 million followers on social and the lives are going to change is so big that they should be thinking about it nonstop because the difference between an individual contributor who does okay things in life and a leader...

is really, can you sell a dream so big you replace somebody else's? That's what it means for somebody to come work for you. A dream so big that it replaces somebody else's. And so that's what Jim did to me at First Trust. He sold me a dream so big, even though at that moment it was not big. It was nothing.

That he replaced my current reality, actually. And I went to work for him. And I'll never regret that. Because despite me not really liking the culture and a lot of the managers there, I respect the hell out of him. Because I learned a lot about, there's this line in Dune. Have you read Dune?

Oh, Olly, you have to read it. I think I'm about three hours into the audio book at the moment. Oh, yeah. The audio book. Yeah, well. So there's a line in there that says something about like the day is so sweet when the sound of your bees hum.

And it's one of the dictators. And he's basically talking about at this moment, he has his team of people out searching for this guy. But I always liked that line because it makes you realize the full power of having a hive of people who are out spreading your gospel or your sermon or your dream. If you actually want to leave this legacy of leadership, it's not going to be very big if you just do it by yourself. You have to have these bees surrounding you out buzzing. And so he taught me that at First Trust. And I stayed there for...

The longest I've ever stayed at a company, five years before I started my own private equity firm. One thing that I was intrigued by was a tweet thread that you did at the end of 2022. You said, after 13 years in finance and managing hundreds of millions, here are 21 truths that will make you more money than any business degree. And I wonder if I can just feed you some of these things and if you can just riff on them and we'll just see where that takes us. So number one, if no one thinks you're crazy, you're too late.

Yes, true. Actually, I have a guy who's become a mentor of mine. His name is Bill Perkins. And he's a sort of a well-known, he wrote Die Was Zero. Yeah, quite a bit. I love it. He's a great guy. And he actually reached out to me a few times on the internet. And then we invested in a company together. And so I went to his house. And he has this huge compound. It's beautiful in Austin. And we're walking along the lake.

And he sat down with me and he was like, you know, I really respect everything you're doing. The small business stuff is super interesting. He's like, but do you think that you have been around small for so long that small has infected your thinking? And I was like, oh, Bill, that was tough. Yeah.

And he said, you know, with the amount of views that you guys have and the mission that you guys have, you should be investing in building. You should be bigger than Blackstone. That should be how big your dream is. And he literally texted me. I was in France yesterday and I was working on a bunch of different stuff. And he texted me. He'll text me randomly these little things. But basically it was exactly that. It was if...

You're sharing what you're doing and somebody doesn't roll their eyes or think you're crazy. You're doing it wrong. And this was obviously way after I did that tweet thread. But I think he's right. Something shifts when you hang out with billionaires. They just have more zeros and so their aperture is bigger. They realize that a lot more is possible than you do because they've bended the world to their will in a lot of ways. And so I try to live by that.

even though sometimes it's painful. Nice. The market isn't saturated. Your business just sucks.

A lot of these are lessons to myself. And that one's true. I've had multiple businesses. Actually, we had a product at Contrarian Thinking called Cashflow. And it just wasn't a good product. It was trying to be something to everybody, which makes it nothing to no one. And so if you're struggling in your business, often we say we need more sales. We need more X. If only I had attention. But I try to ask myself, what if it was easy? What would the product look like then?

And when I do that, I typically realize, oh, I just have the wrong product or I have the wrong person or I have the wrong team. The right relationships are better leveraged than money. True. Especially in this day and age. I was...

I was with one of my friends who is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And I was asking him, because we both invest in startups, I was saying, well, what should we do with our investments? We want to go this way, we want to go that way, and we were going back and forth. And I said, could we invest a little bit in Andreessen Horowitz so we could learn about it? And he said something funny to me. He's like, money is such a commodity, you couldn't pay me to take yours. And I was like...

Really? I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, do you know Sequoia only takes nonprofit dollars now? One of the biggest venture capital funds in the world will only take nonprofit money. They literally limit the amount of capital that they have. And instead, what matters to them is access, which is really what people mean. Access and ideas. Those are the things that actually move the world. What do you mean? Access. So you can have a lot of money, right? Yeah.

I know a lot of people that do, but I would rather trade. Once you've hit a base level of cash, I would spend as much as possible investing in growing your skillset and getting access. Because if you can get in a room with, if you can get in a room with, well, people like you and some of the people we're talking about before, if you can get in a room with a bunch of creators,

and you become friends with them, and you, Ali Abdel, talk about my product, Bellewater, on your podcast, that is worth how many millions of dollars in ad spend that I probably wouldn't have. But my access to you turns into millions of dollars because the economy of today is eyeballs.

It's actually not capital. Increasingly, money is going to become more commoditized and attention will be the commodity. And so that's what I mean by access. Yeah, I was having dinner with a friend who's a very successful author. And we were talking about like book sales strategies and all that kind of stuff. And he said, you know, the single biggest thing that has ever moved the needle for my book sales is random relationships I made like five years ago.

And it's just like someone you meet at a conference, someone you strike a friendship with. And because you've had that conversation, you now know the person. Turns out that person happens to grow into a massive YouTuber, a massive podcaster. And now when you message them saying, hey, I've got a new book out, they are delighted to make a video about your book. And it just completely, it's, that's the sort of thing that you can't actually buy with cash. You buy it with, I guess, relationship equity and just being generally pleasant to hang out with and

Taking the time to like fly places to meet people and all that stuff. Yeah. Well, I think in this day and age, we have a declining trust with institutions. We don't trust institutions by and large, and we have an increasing trust with individuals. We've become more tribal than ever, and we've become less institutional than ever.

And because of that, our relationships with individual humans are worth more. And if you actually look at the International Trust Index, which is a real thing, you can do it by varying countries, you see overall countries are declining on their trust indices. And so I think the ability for you to connect one-on-one with a human will be one of the few things that differentiates the fact that AI can now create an Ali Abdaal or can create a Cody Sanchez. And we're going to

really have to question the things that we see with our eyes and only be able to believe the things we can feel with our hands. At least that's where I could imagine it goes. Nice. Growth is the small things magnified. I went to another one of my friends' headquarters who runs a very big company and I went to the bathroom.

I went to go wash my hands. As I was washing my hands in the bathroom, an employee came up and she washed her hands and then took the paper towel, cleaned the inside of the sink, cleaned the countertop. I thought, what a nice employee. That's super nice. I was putting on lipstick or something. Another person came in, grabbed a paper towel, cleaned the inside of the sink, cleaned the countertop. So I stopped this like low level marketing person. And I was like, what are you doing? Like, what's going on there? Why are you cleaning that all up that way?

And she was like, "How you do anything is how you do everything, right?" And just kind of like looks at me like, "Don't you know that?" And then walks out. And I thought, "Wow, I just got schooled by a low-level marketer." And now my team is so tired of me saying that, I'm sure. But the small details really do turn into the big things. And so often in our life we let them slip. It doesn't mean you have to be obsessed with every detail.

But to create a culture where your employees, who maybe even make minimum wage, actually clean up the sink around them, clean up messes that are not their own, that are not part of their job description, is a superpower. And so we're working on how do we get everybody to want to clean up the kitchen sink? How do you square that with 80-20? There are an infinite number of things to do. Let's focus on the few needle-moving things. Cleaning the sinks is probably not needle-moving. So, yeah. What if it is, though? And so I think...

You think about Disney CEO, right? Bob Iger. Famously, what did he do every time he walked into a park?

He stopped and he picked up a piece of trash somewhere. He went out of his way, he would pick up a piece of trash, and then he would go throw it in the trash can. Now, why would Bob Iger do that? His time for doing that is worth infinitely more than mine because it's a signal in a world of noise to say, we clean up around here. We have such respect for this place that we do the small things and we make sure that we clean up messes that aren't ours. So...

It goes down to, for instance, I had to let somebody go a couple weeks ago. And the reason why I let that person go is because they sent out an email to people who engage with us. And inside of that email, the email was done so sloppily and with a lot of stuff that would be helpful for us, but not the individual, that I realized, oh, you haven't accepted our culture, which is that we help humans. We don't get helped by humans.

And that was a very small thing, theoretically. But every time somebody from my team engages with people in the real world, they're one of my tentacles, right? They're a representation of me. And so I have to make sure that when I send out the email, it's lovely. It's helpful for another person. We're giving before we're taking. Hopefully you felt that in our engagements. And that's what I want my team to represent too. And so I do think those little things actually matter. Now, the real question is, you don't have to do everything.

So that's the difference. So you don't have to do it all, but the things that you do, you should do well. And that's another thing Bill Perkins taught me is he was like, if you are focusing on all the small things, you'll never do the big things. And so how does that relate to the two? That seems like that would conflict. But what it really means is hire somebody incredibly well to take care of your travel planning and to take care of your emails in your inbox, but teach them the way to do it right. Then you don't have to do it, but if you're going to do something, do it right. Mm-hmm.

It's painful and I'm not great at it all the time, believe me. My husband also loves to then say these things back to me later, which is very obnoxious. So be careful what you put out in the universe.

Nice. Give free value with zero expectations and you'll get 10x returns down the road. Yeah. Give, give, give. Always. You know this, the law of reciprocity, right? We humans feel like we have to give something back if we are given something. And so I think if I could leave one thing for humans listening, it would be give first and be curious. If you could do those two things...

I think you'll go so much farther than you could anticipate. A lot of people in this day and age think that in a world of scarcity and that a lot of people take, take, take, take. Um, I have a friend actually, loose friend who, um, he's notorious for, uh,

asking for introductions and things and always ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. And in some ways he's gotten far, but he's also gotten known in our community as a person who will always ask you for things. And so you become very careful about giving things and asking for him. I never ask for anything from him because I know it's going to have like this three X return on the other side. And that's what you don't want to have in life. It'll get you quick, pretty far, but those people always come back down again. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think about this a lot. Like the ROI on free is way higher than the ROI on almost anything transactional or anything paid. And yeah, there are so many instances in my life where I mean, I guess building a content business is just basically all about that. Yeah. Well, I mean, we have a mutual friend, Alex, and him and I talk about this a lot. What do you think the mafia does first to indoctrinate people to bring people into the mafia circle?

they give something. That's why like the mob bosses go around and they make sure, you know, the kid has food who doesn't have food on his table. And they make sure the people that they come in, they give them cash up front. Now that's a dark side of it. But the reason why they do that is because then when you've taken something, you've taken a favor.

And when you've taken a favor, you have this little bit of a debt, right? And again, you don't want to take it from a dark perspective, but there's a reason why that's often how sort of these tribes and cults are created is immediately they give something to you because they know that they're going to ask you for something later. It's that famous like, one day I'm going to call you and ask you for a favor thing, right? And so it's real in the world. Your first $100,000 comes faster if you earn before you invest. Right.

Too many people want to take a dollar and invest it in the stock market and have a Robinhood trade do well for them or a Bitcoin go up or down or an NFT. And I think it's completely wrong. You should optimize first. We have a strategy called learn, which is basically we want you to focus first on earning money before you do anything. And the reason why is because you can't – if you have money, it's always easier to make money. Rule number one.

In order to make money, you have to first do the thing that is easiest and highest ROI. That's typically not going to be that you put a dollar into the stock market and it makes you $100,000. But what you could do is you could negotiate a salary increase of 5% to 20% each year or buy annually, and you're much more likely to then be able to invest that money intelligently. But a lot of people...

you know, instead of first earning and then learning and then investing, they go invest, learn, earn. And I think that's the opposite of what we want to do. Too many people have seen people make a lot of money in investing and it's a long game. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's so true. It's like, sometimes I'll get friends asking me like, hey, you know, you're into investing, like what should I invest my money in? And I'm like,

hmm the easy answer is S&P 500 but yeah I think that's not actually the answer like what's the goal here let's figure this out and then you know find out that oh they'd love to become financially independent or they'd love to have an extra few thousand dollars a month to kind of I don't know go on holiday or whatever the thing might be and I'm like okay so if we if we if you continue investing in the S&P 500 you'll get there maybe 30 years from now it's

Is that what you want? And ultimately what it comes down to is increasing your own ability to earn money, whether through investing in your own business or investing in your own skills. It's just way higher ROI than the 7% returns you'll get by investing in the top 500 companies in the US. 100%. The ROI of you is infinite. The ROI of an investment is capped. And so I think...

You want to invest to beat inflation. I mean, that's originally why we have investing is that the price of money decreases every single year due to the government. And so we have to have some sort of investing so that our money doesn't get eaten away by inflation. That's what we should expect. 7% to 10% per year would be great if we could do that continuously. Anything above and beyond it, unless you're actively involved in the investment, which changes the game, isn't going to make you rich. It's just going to make you beat inflation. Yeah.

Okay. So buying boring businesses, buying the local dry cleaner restaurant cafe kind of thing seems interesting, but what sort of people would you recommend that to, I guess, compared to starting your own business versus investing in the S&P versus buying houses for real estate rental type stuff? How does that work? Yes. One startup. If you have a dream so big, you can't sleep for the want of it, then do that. That should be your startup.

If you just want cash flow, this is the path for you, I think. And here's a couple of thoughts. One, real estate, on average in the US at least, one rental property makes about $476 a month in profit. That's not enough. Yeah, mine make less than that in profit. You have to buy a ton of them. And how much cash do you have to put down? An annoyingly huge amount. Huge amount. Not to mention you have giant risks from the loans. Yeah.

So I think real estate by and large is a great way to keep wealth and to invest so that your wealth grows slowly over time. It's not a great way to make wealth. Now, buying a business is a lot more work and it's a lot more risk theoretically because your building is probably not going to burn down. You have insurance anyways and it can't go to zero very easily. Business, if you do it wrong, theoretically could. So there's pros and cons.

But a small business, I like owning a bunch of them, especially if you can do it in things that you want to play in a little bit. Like, for instance, if you're an accountant, I might buy an accounting firm, right? Why just work in one when you could own one? If you...

are like me and you're in content and you actually really like what you do, like I want to spend my time doing this, maybe I buy a laundromat and my mom runs the laundromat, right? Or maybe I buy a property management company and my brother runs that property management company, which is in fact what I've done. And so I like to do deals like that where you don't have to be the one running them. It could be your friend that, you know, your friend that you've worked with for a long time wants to operate one of these companies and you are just the one putting the deal together. Yeah.

And you want to continue to do your own thing. So buying a business is really because one, you want the cash flow. And two, maybe you want to get closer to your local community, which is big for me. What advice would you give to 16 year old Cody, who maybe she's got $1,000 through mowing the lawn and through tutoring maths or something, and she's got $1,000 and she's like, I want to invest this $1,000. How would you approach that conversation with your younger self?

Well, I'll tell you what I tell my cousins now who are right about that age. So to my 16, 18-year-old cousins, I say take the big risk now while you have no responsibility. The more responsibility you get, the scarier the risk becomes. When you have kids, when you have a mortgage, when you have a big paycheck that you could lose, it's scary to go,

start a business, to think about buying a business, to think about being the operator in a business. But when you're young, you should take all the risk humanly possible because failure doesn't really matter when you're young.

I don't think you should take $1,000 and invest it in anything when you're young unless you're investing it in yourself or you're investing it in a big risk like trying to potentially turn $1,000 into a $100,000 business purchase. Interesting. But not Bitcoin or NFTs? Not Bitcoin. No, no, no, no. I mean, in investing, we say-

We say that those people are speculators, not investors. And there's a whole generation of people that have been taught speculation, not investing. Anytime you have the last man fallacy, which is that the person who comes in next that you're going to sell to is the dumb one that's going to be holding the bag, you should know that you should run away from that because you're the last man.

We don't want to be a nation of people who are trying to kind of dupe people into being the next person to buy it at a higher valuation than we did. We want to have assets that are so good that you think like Warren Buffett and you want to hold them for 30 years. You have to pry that business out of my cold, dead hands because it's a great business. And I think because we had that fast money run of NFTs and Bitcoin and stocks, people...

You're confused. And the other thing that's so true is really good finance people who trade stocks are

have something called a black box. They don't even tell their salespeople that go and rep their product what's inside of their algorithms. It's firewalled. You can't see inside. Why? Because I would never tell somebody my unfair advantage that everybody else could go replicate immediately if trading is the way that I make money. So anybody that teaches trading online is totally full of it, in my opinion, because if they had great secrets, they would never share them. They'd just pile as much money as humanly possible into it and buy a bunch of Bentleys.

And so I'm really cautious on speculators and I'm really bullish on ownership. So how might said 16-year-old or said cousin actually invest that $1,000?

You invested in yourself. I think you need to learn at that point. You have to learn, then you increase your earnings, then you invest. No 16-year-old should be taking their $1,000 and putting it in the S&P, in my opinion. They will make so much more money by taking that $1,000 and going and learning how to create a bunch of YouTube videos, or going and learning how to buy businesses, or going and learning how to talk to people and negotiate. Whatever the case may be, I would take the $1,000 and I would consider it your little MBA money.

And I think spend like that until you can start putting, you can do the S&P 500 putting 10% of your savings in. I've done that for a long, long time, but that won't make you rich. It'll just potentially beat inflation. How do you feel about these days, the balance of you can learn anything for free on the internet, therefore you don't have to pay for it versus the value of paying for things?

There's a lot of research that supports the fact that if we do not pay for things, we do not appreciate them. It's why we have products that have costs at my business, because your likelihood to accomplish something if you put skin in the game is

Right.

We give away 90% of our content for free with the hope that people will take their own action. But if you actually want to take action, put skin in the game. I mean, my husband and I like to do little bets. So if I want to go right now, I want a six pack. So I'm working on

working on that. And so like, we'll have a little bet. So we'll have a thousand bucks in and whoever does X thing related to fitness first gets the thousand bucks. And it's just enough painful where you're focused on executing on it. And so that's why we charge for our products. And I think if you have a product, you should always charge for it because people will value it more. How does that vibe with do things for free?

Do things for free. But if you want to do things to accomplish them, pay for them. It's the same thing as like accountability buddy. I mean, if you really wanted to accomplish something, you'd do two things. You'd get an accountability buddy to hold you to a higher standard and you'd pay for help to get it done. I have a personal trainer. I have a nutritionist I work with because I want to get there faster. And I will go to the gym if I'm going to lose 100 bucks later.

uh, if I miss my training session, whereas often I will not go to the gym if I don't pay for it because it's easy to not. Yeah. I think it's like in, in fields, like, you know, if you, if you want to learn, if you want to learn how to play tennis better, it's just kind of assumed that of course you would hire a tennis coach. But I think one of the, one of the good things about information being free on the internet is also one of the downsides of information being free on the internet that people think, oh, great. The fact that there is a

eight hour long YouTube video on how to code in Python means that I should not pay for this bootcamp. But actually, you know, paying for the thing gives you accountability, skin in the game, gives you a community, gets you out there. And yes, there are a lot of self starters who absolutely can learn stuff for free on the internet.

But I found this as well, like with my YouTuber academy, I'll have friends messaging me like, hey, can I get on this course? And in the very first cohort, I would be like, yeah, of course. And not a single person even ever logged in to make their account. No. But now, so now what I do is, yeah, I say pay the $5,000. And if you complete the homework, I will refund you the $5,000.

And they all do it. And some of them have started YouTube channels off the back of it and have now quit their jobs because they had that skin in the game. Others have done the six videos and said, you know what? It's not for me. Can I have my 5K back? And I'm like, yeah, sure. Here you go. But at least they've done the work. And it kind of forces some level of accountability. Right. Well, it also shows that you value yourself as the creator. Because oftentimes what I've found is my friends...

My friend's friend's friend's family will want to have a phone call, right? About buying a business. And the reason that I started on the internet creating content, uh, was basically, I didn't want to answer the same question a million times. I'm not as nice as you, right? So I was like, no, no phone calls, no coffees. Dear God help you if you ask to pick my brain. Like also gross visual. Like I don't want any part of that. And so, um,

So I started creating the content because I was like, I don't want to have the same conversation 372 times. And so I think it shows that you value yourself when you start to charge for the services that you render. It's really actually an important transfer of value. And also, I have a big proponent that you shouldn't ask friends for discounts. You should pay premiums.

And in fact, if you want to support your friend's business, share it and pay for it. And most people forget those things. I would never ask a friend for a discount. And I never have, even when I didn't have a lot of money, because I want the honor of getting to pay for their hard work. What a beautiful thing. You want to give to charity. You want to be known as a charitable person, but you don't want to pay for the things that your friends spent their precious hours creating.

It's actually a little bit of an insult, so I'm very big on that. And I think...

Our information is so good that what we charge for it is so cheap that you are crazy to not pay for it. Because if you went to Harvard, first of all, you couldn't get this information. They don't teach private equity in this way. And I had to spend seven months with a vitamin D deficiency at Goldman so that I could learn this stuff and work 70 hours a week. And now you get it in a compressed way. I'm so thankful that there are humans now on the internet that create and share and I can pay for it. Could you imagine that?

If you could get a supply chain class from Jeff Bezos, I would pay so much money for that. But most people do the selfish thing, which is they don't share the information. Now we've kind of gotten it weird and twisted because there's a bunch of fraudsters on the internet who didn't do anything, who are creating things sounding like they did, and they've tainted the whole thing.

But in actuality, most humans in finance, the saying is we get rich quietly. We don't share our practices. It's a black box. And now there are humans that will actually tell me how they did all of this and give me the information I get to pay for it. That's incredible. And so I think...

you have a moral prerogative to charge for it because more people will actually take action. And if what we care about is legacy and humans taking action, and that's what feeds our ego or our tombstone or whatever, then I just follow the numbers. And that's what the numbers say.

Nice. Cody, this has been absolutely wonderful. We'll definitely do a part two. Let's do it. All of the things, content, all the more about the business stuff, maybe in Austin, want to come visit? Sounds like a plan. Any final piece of advice for anyone who's vibed with the maybe two hours for this interview so far, who likes what you have to say and who kind of vibes with your way of thinking? Any pieces of advice? Maybe just that a capable optimist is worth everything.

six times more than a brilliant pessimist. There's a whole world of people who want to tell you why you can't do things. It's actually very cheap and easy. It's super easy to tell somebody why something's not possible. It's actually quite hard to convince somebody that they can. And

And so I think listening to things like this and getting people to believe that they're capable is hugely powerful. So I think it's really cool, the platform that you've built. And I know you've influenced lots of people, including me. Oh, thanks very much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast

are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.