Codie Sanchez: They're Lying To You About How To Get Rich! How To Turn $1,000 Into $1M! Hard Work Doesn't Build Wealth!
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Okay, step

And by the way, it sucks.

But the best advice for a 20-year-old is to realize that your 20s do suck. But everybody focuses on how much money you make and start doing entrepreneurship too early. Oh, you can be a 20-year-old and drive a Bugatti and play around with crypto. Huge mistake. Focus on learning. And you're going to have no time for anything except what your boss asks of you. But if you want to win and be successful in life, upfront pain always leads to long-term gain. How can I manipulate or motivate you into giving me a shot? If you want to get in front of a rich, powerful person, start with...

Where'd you go from there? Make as much money as humanly possible from your salary and invest in other side deals, such as what I call gateway drug businesses. The business so simple that you can run it even if you've never run a business before. But how can I buy a business? I'm going to have to wait till I'm rich. Well, there's actually way more opportunity than anybody realizes because there's three ways to buy a business. One is...

This is a sentence I never thought I'd say in my life. We've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube. And I want to say a huge thank you to all of you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations. From the bottom of my heart, but also on behalf of my team, who you don't always get to meet, there's

almost 50 people now behind the Daira Vaseo that worked to put this together. So from all of us, thank you so much. We did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for people that subscribed to the show up until 7 million subscribers. And you guys loved that raffle so much that we're going to continue it. So every single month we're giving away Money Can't Buy prizes, including meetings with me, invites to our events and £1,000 gift vouchers

to anyone that subscribes to the Diary of a CEO. There's now more than 7 million of you. So if you make the decision to subscribe today, you can be one of those lucky people. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Let's get to the conversation. Cody, if you could encapsulate your message into a sentence, what would that sentence be? But also, who exactly would that sentence be for? It would be the only way to have freedom is through ownership and the world...

doesn't want to give it to you. And that message is for every human who's felt disenfranchised and is a little bit of tired of other people directing their lives and wishes that they had their hand on the helm instead. And I think in today's day and age, ownership is something that people on high say is bad. You know, fuck the big guys, the rich people, the owners. And in reality, that's just them saying they want to be in charge instead of you.

Who isn't your message for? Who will it just not resonate with and work for? BlackRock, Blackstone, most billionaires who already know this. I mean, I think that is the answer, though. The message will not resonate with people who think that they should own everything and other people should ask for permission. It won't resonate with people who...

Don't want to work kind of hard. It sucks to be an owner. Anybody who's ever run a business has felt inside that horrible feeling on Friday when you don't have enough cash and payrolls come in and you've got to figure out what to sell or what to give up in order to pay your employees. That's an awful feeling. So it's not for people that aren't willing to do the hard thing. But, you know, it kind of goes back to what we know to be true. It sucks being broke just as much as it sucks working hard. And so choose your heart.

Your message has resonated really profoundly with millions and millions and millions and millions of people. You've got an audience of millions of people across all of your social media channels. It appears that you've hit culture and the zeitgeist with a particular message at a particular time. Do you spend much time reflecting on why your message is so resonant right now? That's interesting.

It's hard right now to not think about politics in some way, shape or form. And so I think when I think about politics today, what I really think about is who's in charge, right? And so I do think about why does one politician hit a chord? Why does one not? And I think when I think about my message, what hits me closest to home

is that for some reason, a message right now is feeling true for many people in the world that there's a lack of trust, like trust in institutions, trust in governments and big corporations, in the media. You know, I saw yesterday an article about CNN. This is fascinating. How many views do you think CNN got in prime time for one week, three-hour segments every day, prime time for one week in May?

What do you think? One show. One show, three hours for a week. The cumulative of three out of three hour show. Correct. Five million maybe, I don't know. 83,000. That's crazy. Lowest level of all time. Fox at the highest was 186,000.

Think about what is happening right in front of us. The media is no longer actually reaching the masses because they've lost complete trust with them. In fact, 30-year-olds right now, for the first time ever, 30-year-olds have more trust in you, social media influencers, than they do the mainstream media. It's not the same for all age groups. But that is what I am seeing right in front of us is we're like, show me what's real because I do not trust puppets who parrot things from teleprompters.

They know that you and I are having a real conversation. There's no teleprompter in sight. When you look at your notes, you look at your notes. It's real. And I think that is what I'm realizing with our message. We have to be honest because nobody trusts anybody right now. So if someone's just clicked onto this conversation for whatever reason, maybe they don't know who you are. Maybe they, you know, they're just clicking because it's the routine that they have.

By the end of this conversation, what do you hope they come away with? What do you hope they're going to be able to implement into their lives following this conversation? How to make more money and why it matters that you make more money. That's really it. Because I think money is just a tool. It's a tool in your toolbox for you to be able to have more freedom to do more things and to say no more often. And to say, actually, I don't want to do that at all. And because I don't want to do that, I need money to push back.

And so by the end of this conversation, I think you should have a few ideas to be a little bit richer and a little bit more free. And can everybody do that? Do you genuinely believe that everything about everybody you've ever, you know, and everybody you've ever met? Does the advice that you offer fit all of them? Is it accessible and actionable for all of them? My gut says yes.

It's only not accessible to you if you're a lazy piece of shit that wants to do nothing. You know, if you really want only to be given things, you want to ask permission all the time and you aren't willing to work a little bit earlier in the morning and work a little bit later in the evening, then you should turn this off.

Just like, I don't know what, they're probably not watching you anyway, if that's this type of human. That's not you guys. But for that type of human, this isn't going to work because nothing that I offer is get rich quick or go buy this stock. That's not going to work. But it is things that I think we knew early on somehow. We got maybe lucky with a few mentors, but none of this is rocket science, which should be really free for people to listen to. And who are you? Who?

Existential question. You know, I'm a former finance investor for 15 plus years, investment banking, asset management, who finally, because COVID happened, took a little breather, realized that I didn't want to be like the managing directors that I saw all around me and started writing stuff online.

Because I wasn't doing roadshows, selling investments and investing people's money for a year or whatever that was. And because of that, I started writing about the things that I do. And I kind of thought nobody liked the idea of owning laundromats and car washes and all of that. And it turns out a lot of people thought that was interesting. And I do think we kind of hit this zeitgeist of...

You know, you saw it during COVID people left to big cities, right? They bought houses in Cape Town or somewhere out in rural areas, right? They got away from the corporate job in office in suits and realized, God, I don't want a 75-minute commute.

I maybe want a little bit of fresh air. I'm into chicken coops, a lot of chicken coops these days. And so because of that, they got interested in these small businesses, these community businesses. And so I think I got a little bit lucky in the fact that that was interesting to me. I've done it for years. I've invested in those things forever. I started writing about it on the internet. And then we got a lot of views. And now all of a sudden, there are millions of people that talk about buying these small businesses or what we call boring businesses.

I want to get into that, but I want to start with something that I saw the other day. On your Instagram, you wrote a post about your 20s and your earlier life. You said you think that your 20s suck and that no one tells you that when you hit 30, you become happier. And you offered sort of 32 pieces of advice for people that are in that phase of life.

Focusing in on your 20s, with the benefit of hindsight now, when you think about how you played your 20s and how you'd suggest that maybe a child you have someday or a friend that is 20 years old should play their 20s, what is the best advice for a 20-year-old?

The best advice for a 20-year-old is to realize that your 20s do suck, that you are probably drinking too much. You're hanging out with people that aren't the best versions of themselves. Neither are you. You've got crazy hormones going on. You're going to bars and hanging out with people, having a few too many drinks, and then going to a job you kind of hate because you're brand new into the workforce. And so, of course, you're doing the worst thing humanly possible. And that's going to continue for like five to 10 years. Right.

Like you are going to do a $65,000 a year job for two or three years and it sucks. And you're going to have no time for anything except what your boss asks of you. And I wish people had told me that because if you see the light at the end of the tunnel, you're like, oh, okay. Like I can do this for two or three years. I can learn, I can grow and I can suck it up for two to three years. And then after that, I get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better. And so the advice would be when you have a foot in your nail, which is what it's like when you start your first job being 20,

Don't, you know, try to ignore the fact that it's painful. It's there. Like, it's there. It's real. It sucks. And I wish somebody had told me that because these days everybody's like, oh, you can be a 20-year-old and drive a Bugatti and, you know, I don't know, play around with crypto. Not real. Not real. And then once I learned like, okay, this sucks and I can deal with it, then the next thing would be everybody focuses on how much money you make when you're in your 20s. Huge mistake.

The only thing you should focus on is learning. How can I think about my salary like putting pieces of cash into my brain? How can I learn as much as possible? How can I come and work an apprentice for somebody that I think I might want their life one day?

And I'll take the minimum amount of cash that I need in order to fill my brain so that my next step can be to make more money. But in the beginning, too many people obsess on money. And I wish I hadn't thought that way. I'd rather learn than earn when I'm young. Do you think there's a different...

amount of work and work ethic required in different seasons of life. So when you're 20, should you be working harder than when you're say 30, 40, 50? 100%. You can't have the same stamina. I mean, I was weightlifting the other day and I was showing my less strong friend next to me like, this is how you do a deadlift. And here's what I put another plate on there. And the

You know, blew out my hip, you know, and I'm like, now I'm in like back pain. And, you know, I'm 37. I do not have the same stamina I had when I was 25. Physically, you decline. Mentally, you decline. And I think your work ethic declines too. And so, you know, it's really hard to keep going for 20 years at...

12 hour long days. You can do it, but it's much easier when you're 20. And so if you know that, then no, let's front load the pain so that in my 30s, we can have a lot of fun. You know, my husband who you met is former Navy SEAL. And we always talk about how I think the only reason we're kind of successful is we just said, what are the worst jobs we can take when we're young, where we can learn the most?

We can hopefully, I think, have something that's a resume builder. And then once we're in our mid-20s to late-20s, we can start reaping the fruits of our labor. But, you know, being a Navy SEAL sucks. You do it when you're young. You do all the worst things when you're young. But then for the rest of your life, you're a fucking former Navy SEAL. You're set because you front-loaded the pain. When you look back over your career, can you identify any sort of lightbulb moments where you were exposed to

information that caused a bit of a paradigm shift as it relates to how you think about wealth. Because I've had a couple of moments, and, you know, to varying degrees, but some real standout moments where I saw someone operate, I was exposed to how they made their money and how they built their wealth. And I thought, fuck, nobody told me this. And I had the game wrong. Yeah.

Has there been those moments in your life? For sure. I think the well, there's there's actually studies showing something called economic interconnectedness, which basically shows that, say, you have a poor neighborhood to the left and a poor neighborhood to the right.

same socioeconomic status. So they both make around the same amount of money. If this neighborhood just has a few rich people in it, even though on average the neighborhoods are the same and people in the poor neighborhood interact with rich people a little bit more on the left than they do on the right. If you go 30 years down the line, the kids that just had a few more interactions with rich people are

are going to be richer on average by 35% than the people in the same neighborhood to the right, except with less economic interconnectedness. And so what that tells me is as often as possible, you want to be around people who are richer than you. Sounds obvious, kind of.

But I don't think it's that obvious. You don't have to live next to them. You don't have to have their money. You just want to be around them because it is contagious in some ways. Ideas are contagious. And this ability to see into the future, I think, is contagious. You know, if you think about it like you're driving in a car.

The faster the car is going, the farther the headlights have to be able to peer into the future. Otherwise, you're going to blow off a cliff. And so I think when people are moving really fast, they have a lot of money and they have big risk to the things they do. Their headlights are just a little bit farther than the rest of us. And so I got really lucky because I chose finance. Finance is full of people who are obsessed with money. I think there's a lot of ethical issues in that industry. But all around me were rich people. So I remember one instance where

really, really well. And that was, I was in Chicago at the time, I was working at Goldman Sachs. And the head of the Chicago office was a guy by the name of Bruce. And Bruce was a good guy. He ran the fixed income division. And after I left Goldman Sachs, I kind of stay in touch with a few people there, including Bruce. Well, one day I find out Bruce becomes the ambassador to Canada. I was like, Canada? I don't even know if Bruce had been to Canada. How did that happen?

And so I started talking to a few other people and I realized, oh, you buy ambassadorships in the U.S. And so you could Google right now and see what the average ambassadorship in the U.S. costs. The answer is about a million dollars directly donated to a president plus a couple million dollars donated in a pack. So Bruce bought the ambassadorship.

which I thought was fascinating. And I was like, shit, I didn't realize that was for sale. Like that's it. You just buy those things. That's so bizarre. And that flipped my perspective entirely to realize, oh man, money really just is power. And can you imagine how wide open your ability must be for abundance? If you're like, oh yeah, I'm going to buy a position of authority in the world. Never even would enter my equation.

When a lot of people think about money and they hear conversations about wealth, I think some people kind of cringe because they think of money as being quite an ugly thing. And some people think it's quite an evil thing. The desire to accumulate more of it they see as being, I don't know, selfish or some maybe even manipulative or I don't know, you know, so how do you square that for those people?

I mean, first of all, I would just say you're never going to attract it if you don't like it. If you think it's evil, you're certainly not going to make much of it. And that sounds touchy-feely, and I'm from Austin, and I kind of like crystals, so maybe that is a little touchy-feely, but it's the truth of the matter. It's just like women these days who say...

all men are bad. I can't find a man. I don't like men anywhere. Do you think you're going to find one that way? You know, if you say things like that, are you going to be in partnership? Of course not. You're going to repel them because you don't even like them. It's the same thing with money. It's very common sense when you think about it. And so I always like to think about money as it's just that, it's that tool in your toolbox. It's like, so do I want somebody else to have the chainsaw or do I want it? Well,

Well, I'd rather have it because I think I'm a good person and I think that I could help more people with it. And so people really need to lose the emotional attachment to money, especially if it's negative. I think there's a lot bigger issue with too many people thinking money is bad than too many people thinking money is good. And that's weird if you think about it, because the opposite is usually what we're told, right? And in that analogy of it being like a woman looking for a man, but saying that men are bad, etc.,

does the woman in that analogy but also the analogy of money also need to feel like she's deserving of a good man i.e do you need to feel like you're deserving of money in order to attract it i mean this maybe strays into things like manifestation and whatever else but you know do you have to feel like you deserve to be rich do you think in order to attract more money into your life does it change how you make your decisions how you show up negotiate certainly i mean i think um

I think the truth of the matter is that if you want to attract things, the best way to get them is to be great yourself. So if you want a great partner, be a great partner. You know, if you want to be rich, you need to start doing things where you're acting rich. And I don't mean by spending, but like what would a rich person do if they wanted to achieve X, Y, and Z? Well, they probably work harder. They surround themselves with different types of people. But then I realized there's so many people that do not believe in themselves and

and do have negative stories, they have to break before they can take one tactic and do anything. So I think you're right. First, you got to believe it. It does feel like it's really the crux of all of this stuff because the evidence you have or don't have, I guess, forms what we call self-belief. And some people who...

you know, with all the will in the world, they just can't believe in themselves because they have deeper systemic sort of self-esteem issues. And I guess this ties into the conversation around like feeling like an imposter. And the reason I reference this is because I remember many years ago as you were talking, a friend of mine saying that when he finally got some money, he just had a huge sense of guilt because his father had worked really, really, really, really hard and been paid a fraction of what he had, the money he'd made. So he always had this sense of sort of guilt with his money, like he didn't deserve it.

like he was an imposter potentially. And a lot of people struggle with that, you know? Yeah. I think it's for other people. Yeah. I mean, I do think like where your body goes is,

your belief follows. And so I was at this event for women and it was pretty high up people in finance and only females in the crowd. And it was the first time that I realized that a lot of people have a negative relationship with women because the facilitator asked everybody to close their eyes. With money? With money. Okay. So the facilitator said, I want you to picture money

put your eyes closed, picture money, and then have a visual representation with your body of how you feel when you hear the word money. Right? So in my mind, I hear the word money. I go, money. Like, yeah, give me more of that. Like it. Big V. Right? And yet when I looked into the house, she said, freeze, open your eyes. And so then we opened our eyes and we looked around. Could you imagine what most of these high-powered women looked like? It was like,

fetal position or like money or like money or like money, just very small. And that's when I realized, oh, of course they're not going to get a ton of it because that's their feeling with money. And so what she recommended that I have since done with a lot of the women that I've engaged with is say, when you think about money, all I want you to do, just make a big expressive movement with your body.

Like, am I going to get that salary? Yes, I am. You know, do I want more of it? Give it to me. And I do think your body ends up really determining how your brain functions. And Tony's talked about this and a lot of other people that have. So maybe if you don't think you deserve money,

I don't know how to fix your brain right away, but I do know how to fix your body, which is just make a big movement that tells your body that money is good for you. Don't make a protective small movement that makes you in fear. Make a big movement that gives you into abundance. And so that stuck with me for a long time.

I find it interesting as well, thinking about who talks about money. Because men talk about money a lot. And I don't know if women talk about money in private, but I know my male friends are all talking about their money, their investments, et cetera. And I wondered if there's any sort of gender difference you've observed because you speak to so many people about gender differences as it relates to money. Well, perfect example is our audience across socials is about 60 to 65% men. And I'm a woman. And yet it's actually quite hard to get women involved

interested and engaged on these issues. And so, you know, I think a lot of women, first of all, they think it's a little cringed.

You know, there's not normalization of it. So, you know, there's never a group where women are getting together on the 19th hole at a golf course and talking about the deals that they did that week. That's very normal for men, right? Where would women all get together to talk about their business aspects? I don't think there exists a container for that.

And so I'm big on this belief that everybody should learn how to get money, especially if you're a woman. You don't have to go be a girl boss. And if you want to stay home and take care of the kids and be a trad wife, that's amazing. But understand where your money is located. Understand how it's made in your family. Understand how much things cost, what you spend. And it is there's nothing more fun than making your first dollar on your own. It's very liberating. Do you think money is seen as a masculine thing?

investing, wealth creation, do you think those are all seen as masculine?

I mean, investment banking is 87.6% male. Oh, really? Yeah. The finance industry in general is 65% plus male. So that would tell me yes. It feels like a real inequality in society that the people that are working in finance are heavily male, but also finance and money is power. Right. Well, I mean, time in career, right? I mean, they just have had longer careers.

to have access to that industry. And so I don't think there's some big conspiracy theory happening. I think what happened is women haven't had the right to work for as long. Finance is the highest paid industry of all industries that you could go into. It's also one of the most competitive. It also has one of the highest barriers to entry in number of licensing, graduate degrees, et cetera. It's also one of the most competitive to get into those positions. And so of

course it's going to be dominated by those who have you know an unfair advantage from more time attempting to do this i think if history shows us anything recently there's going to be more women in it going forward so if i took you back then if i took you back to your first dollar and i took away everything that you have but also i take away all of your contacts yeah you can keep your brain but you can't keep your contacts and i set you the challenge in 2024 of building

building your wealth from scratch? What's, what are the first things that come to mind to get you going? So you're in a studio apartment, you are broke, you have all the information you have, you have no contacts. What do you do? Am I allowed to be 20 again or do I have to be 30? You can be 20. Okay. If I'm, if I'm young. Why did you ask that? Well, I think it's easier when you're young, if we're honest. When you're young, people who have money, they see themselves in you at

at an earlier date. If you got that hunger, I mean, one of our rules in hiring is hire people so hungry, you're scared they might bite you. And so when you're young, you know, you've had this happen. You meet a young man who's just got that fire, right? He doesn't know anything, but you can just see in him that he will do whatever it takes. He's here before you. He's here after you. He's coming up with ideas. He's doing jobs to the point where you're like, chill, bro. Like, that's not even your job.

Right. A couple of them in here. Right. And what do you do with those guys? You're like, I'm going to help you. Why? Because actually you see yourself in them. It's like a weird, selfish father, mother thing we have. We're like, I see you. I remember being you. I'm going to help you. And so if you're young, what I think you do is you get with the biggest, baddest guy you can find or gal you can find and who's already successful, who you think has the life that you want and you do everything possible to provide value to them.

And that's probably a bunch of sweat equity stuff. That's probably a bunch of bullshit in the beginning. But it's so rare, like intense competence is so rare.

And when you're young, I think you throw it away with these ideas of like quiet quitting and not engaging. Like that is your moment to show that fire. And then what happens is you're only going to need to do that for like a year or two with a few players. And you're going to move quickly because if you are with people who have a ton of resources, what is your biggest constraint in your business right now? Is it money? Do you not have enough money? Could you raise more if you needed it? Of course. Do you need more attention? No, you get hundreds of millions of views. Do you need more ideas? Yes.

Probably not. You got a lot of them. What do you need? People. You need people. You need hungry little ankle biters that are willing to do whatever it takes. And so people don't like this answer, but it's not like I would do real estate. I would do podcasting. It's go find a person who is so rich, but willing to give you a shot for as long as you can.

Okay, so let's zoom in on that then. Because someone's going to hear that now and they're going to go, cool, got it, Cody. And they're going to go on LinkedIn and they're just going to start peppering Bill Gates and Elon Musk, etc. You know what I mean? Let's make this a little bit... They're like, this didn't work, Cody. Elon didn't text me back. Yeah. So when I'm thinking about reaching out to these individuals that are powerful, and I guess we could frame it in the context of you. You're a very powerful woman. You've got lots of opportunities and probably less time than opportunities. So...

How would I get to Cody? Yeah. How could I manipulate you or motivate you into giving me a shot? Yeah. Let's talk about two things. One, if you want to get in front of a rich, powerful person, start with concentric circles. So start with what's closest to you. So for instance, who's the richest guy on your block?

Who's the richest guy in your community? Who's the richest guy that you can get to or gal you can get to? Start there. There's no one there. There's no way. First of all, you're like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? So what I would say is it's just a number gives game. There's somebody, maybe they're only making a couple hundred K a year, but that's like way more than you could ever imagine. Start there. Mm-hmm.

So that would be my first point. And I think about that like, you know, for instance, you go to school. So everybody goes to school in some way, shape or form. Who do you know who also goes to your school? Who is the richest kid at your school? Can you get to their dad or their mom? Right? So try to get to who's closest to you that you can physically touch and you can actually engage with that human.

I would start there because it's lower stakes. So one, if the richest guy on your block or in your college that's a friend of your, you know, that's a dad of one of your friends owns a big sprinkler company that makes a couple million dollars a year, start working with that. And while you're there, give yourself a deadline, six months or a year, learning at this level and then level up. Who's now the richest person times 2X you can get to? I think the biggest problem is people confuse fame with wealth.

with being rich. They go after you and I. We're not the richest people. I mean, we do pretty good, but like we're not the richest. And by the way, who has more competition?

everybody's in your and my email inboxes just because we have a lot of followers. I would never go to an influencer and try to play this game. I would go to the guy who runs a sprinkler company that nobody is talking to at all, but he makes a ton of money. And then you cozy up to this guy and you go, this is incredible. What do you do? You did this with sprinklers? How much does your company make? Whoa, I want to be like you one day. Can I intern for you or apprentice for you? I'll do whatever you want.

Do you know what that is going to feel like to a guy like that, as opposed to me or you? Or we're going to be like, I don't have time. I have too many interns. So go where the water is the shallowest is what I would start with. It's so true because I...

I'm sure both of us get just hundreds and thousands of messages a year of people, and literally will stop me outside my office and say, I remember this kid the other day, about a week ago, stopped me outside of our new office and said, he was still outside there and he had his CV in a little binder. And he was like, I will come in and I will just clean the floor. And that's...

That's not a great pitch because I obviously I can't do that. I can't have someone come into my company unpaid, which is going to cause a whole PR disaster when that leaks out into the press, et cetera. But I wouldn't anyway. And I don't know what it was about that, but that doesn't necessarily make me think that you are tremendously valuable if you're coming in and offering to make the tea and clean the floor personally. So I'm so compelled by what it is in that initial message that sometimes in your case will just get you to say,

pause a second and maybe reply to the person in a sea of DMs and messages? Is there something in particular that spikes you? The only thing that spikes is some sort of expertise. You and I are only interested really in one thing. We are interested in somebody who has a understanding of the world that we don't, that can take us one step further, right? You don't need another floor cleaner. You don't need another driver. But if a young kid reached out to you and they said, hey,

hey, I've analyzed 542 YouTube videos of yours. Here are the thumbnails that actually work the best. Here's a bunch that you have lately that I don't actually think work. Here's the data driven behind this. I actually put together a few mock-ups of it for you. And I reached out to these three people that I think would be great to have on your podcast. Here's why. And they've already agreed to it. If this is interesting, I just wanted to forward along this packet to you. You

That's interesting. Okay. What about that last line you used there? I just wanted to forward this on to you. Why is... Oh, yeah. You never want to expect something for a gift given. I call it the 10X rule. So I try to never ask for something unless I have given 10X to a person. And we have that across our business too. I think you should do that with young people. So when I was younger, I have a lot of people that I thought of as mentors.

they would never know that they were a mentor of mine. And all I would do is I would ask them one question. So I wouldn't go to famous people, but I might go to a normal, you know, kind of high-powered exec in finance or something and say like, hey, I was wondering, I saw you did this deal over here. I was wondering why you chose to invest in that company versus this company. You know, if you had time for a one-sentence reply, that'd be amazing.

And they might reply me one sentence, maybe one out of 10 people would. And then I would say, thank you. No need to respond further. This was really helpful. I'm going to go implement this in some way. And then I would reach out to them in a couple of weeks. And I'd be like, hey, that piece of information you gave me, I just did X, Y, and Z with it. Really helpful. Thank you. No need to reply. Just letting you know that you made an impact.

And that no need to reply and me following up is so rare. I wish people realized that today, that if you want something, follow through is worth its weight in gold.

I mean, one of the other things that we do is when people reach out to us and say stuff like we'd like to do X, Y, Z for you, I say, read this book and I'll give them a random book. And I say, come back to me with a few X, Y, Z questions or things. How many people do you think actually come back? I think I've had five maybe. And so follow through is so rare. And what would happen with these people, and I still do it to this day. I had one guy who was, what was his role?

He was quite high up at a company called State Street and I can't remember what his role was. But he said to me one day, I was in New York, I had played that game with him for probably years. Like, hey, tiny little thing, one sentence of advice, great, thank you. Here's how I implemented it again and again and again, maybe 20 times over the course of two years. And finally, I was in New York and he was in New York and I pinged him and said, I'd love to take you to dinner. I want to talk to you about a few things. And it was so funny because as we sat down, he goes, this is the weirdest thing. And I thought, oh, now what? And he said...

I don't really know you, but I feel invested in your success. I was like, I know you do. Because I'm dripping on you for two years, showing you that a tiny little action, which felt like nothing to you, actually made a material impact on my life. And most people don't get to feel that way.

So I'm a young person. I'm Cody Sanchez. Without anything, you've managed to get yourself nice and cozy with someone rich and powerful. You're now in there in a circle. You're learning from them. Where do you go from there? Yeah. Well, the first thing that I would do is if you look back at my resume, I think I stayed at most jobs for like a year and a half, two years max.

until I was at one called First Trust where I was there for five years because I had ownership in the business and I felt like I had skin in the game. I had control of my outcome. But before then, I really only stayed in jobs about a year and a half. The second that they told me I couldn't progress anymore or I couldn't have an option to make more money, I left.

And so in my opinion, the young generation does have it right that you should not stay at a job for 20 years unless that job continues to allow you to earn more and to learn more. So the second I wasn't earning more and the second I didn't feel like I could learn more exponentially, I left. So that's what I think they should do. And you basically are, you're kind of monkey barring both how much you earn and what you can learn to your next position. And I think that people, too many people start doing entrepreneurship too early.

In my opinion, because you can learn on somebody else's dime as opposed to going out and doing the brutal, awful thing that could put you 10 years behind because you lose all your money and you don't actually have enough knowledge to do the job right.

Go and work for a bunch of entrepreneurs for five or seven years. And then once you've been sure that you really want to be in the game and be an entrepreneur, then go do it. But that's what I would do. I would leapfrog to positions of higher power. And then eventually I might become an entrepreneur. And in finance, they have a really cool thing that I think more companies should do. And that if you leave your company, you should try and we should play it with you. So

When I left First Trust, the first person who wanted to give me a check was my CEO. So I was like, I'm going to go do something else. I'm going to build something else. And he wanted me out of the firm. He was like, I don't want you running the business how you're running it now. You need to do it my way, not your way. But we left Amlicably. And he said, I want to be your first investment. Like when you go looking for investors, I want to be it. And I think that is what employees should strive for. Try to get your boss to give you your first capital. And if you're a great employee, they're going to be happy too.

In order to leapfrog, you're going to have to do a lot of interviews. So I just wanted to pause there and ask, you know, when you're interviewing people, what are the red flags? And if I was interviewing to join Cody Sanchez's business empire, what's the best things that I could say and do? And what's the best behavior that I could exhibit in that moment? Yeah. People will give you things when they think you know them more than they know you. And so what do I mean by that? I mean,

Nobody, I mean, our favorite word is our name, right? For every single one of us. And we all like to talk about ourselves more than we like to ask questions. It's just kind of true for most humans.

So if we know that to be true, what do you want to do in an interview? You want to go in and say, here's all the things I think I know about your company. I'm not sure because I'm not you. I'm on the outside. But this is what I think I know about it. I'm really impressed by this. I think this is great over here. I'm curious about this. Can you tell me why you guys made this decision? The interview should be showing the interviewer that you know almost everything that there is to know about their company.

And it should be done with a lot of humility. Like, I think that even if you're certain, I think is important. And the second that happens, our ego gets to us and I go, huh, this guy's pretty smart. You're right. That was a good move that we did over there. And so that's what I think a lot of people don't do. Too many people do shotgun rounds, which is really wide going after a ton of different jobs as opposed to sniper shots.

Go after the three positions you want aggressively knowing everything about that company and that boss. You're much more likely to get it than just to apply on Indeed. Is there anything else that is an immediate turn off for you in an interview? Like an immediate red flag if someone says something or does something? Oh, yeah. There's so many. Immediate, not going to hire you if you talk badly about your last boss because the way you treated your last person is probably going to be the way you treat me. Immediately not going to hire you.

Second immediate not going to hire you is if you talk about all the reasons why something didn't work and it's not your fault. So if your victim mentality at all, well, this didn't work because of this. This didn't work because of this. Third in the interview is if you at all start talking about, this one's a little inappropriate, but if you come into my companies and you say, talk to me about work-life balance. I'm not the place for you.

Our companies are hardcore. There's not a lot of work-life balance. We work hard. So I'm not going to hire you if you talk about how much time off. Are you texting on the weekends? The answer is yes. The second point to that is I always make the job seem worse than it is.

And so a lot of people who hire try to sell the person. This is why it's so great. You should come here. My interview usually goes like this. Hey, I want to ask you a bunch of questions about your background. Then I'm going to tell you all the things that are really tough about this job. So you get the honest truth about it one way or the other. And then I'll wrap up with you asking any questions you want. Does that sound good? They go, yep. I kind of pepper them with questions about them. They go, here's all the things that suck about this job. Here's all the things that are hard. Here's all the reasons why it hasn't worked to date.

Any questions on that? And the reason why is because I don't want anybody coming into my company and going, God, I thought it was going to be better than this. I want them coming in and going, oh, okay, this actually isn't miserable. And at some point from, you know, you leapfrog from one place to another and eventually you have enough, I guess, experience

intelligence to start thinking about becoming an owner at some point. How do I make that transition from being a team member or an employee to becoming an owner if I only have a couple of thousand dollars, let's say? I mean, can I at that point? Do I need to become rich to become an owner? That's a good question. First, I think becoming an owner inside of a business is totally possible. And so you should ask your boss this question, which is,

In this business, if I am one of your top performers consistently and make myself materially important to the business, can I get some ownership in either this business or anything else that we do? And I am willing to earn it or invest in it to do that.

And so, for instance, at my companies, if you're one of the top performers, you can invest alongside me in some of our other companies. That's a finance model that I stole. So in private equity, the reason why people in private equity are so rich is because all the managers of the company have an opportunity to invest in the best deals so they can put some money in. And there's allowances for people who aren't accredited investors but are employees to actually invest even though they're not accredited in the U.S., which is a really unfair advantage.

And so I would ask your employer that question. And then the second thing that I would do is I would try to see if you can earn still. So you can W2 earn. You can make as much money as humanly possible from your salary and then take the money from your salary and invest in other side deals. And I would do that before I ever jumped into my own business overall. The problem, I think...

that came straight to mind when I think about that is when you start investing in side deals, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and you're going to lose a lot of money because seed investing is tough anyway. But especially if you have poor deal flow, i.e. you're not getting a lot of deals, it's just your mate, Kevin, who has this idea for an app. Kevin.

and he asked for 25k yeah so you know i say this because i had a fairly famous actor come up to me the other day who's very young in his career made a lot of money and he said steve i don't know what to do with my money etc i don't know where to invest it and he goes my mate has this app idea and i go oh but he that's that's the only deal he has on his plate so he's giving his friend 25 or 50k for an app idea so

Is that smart to do? Yeah, it's a great question. No, I think until you're rich, and let's define rich as until you're a millionaire, I would do zero startup investing. I mean, zero, because it's a 90% failure rate.

rate. You only invest in startups when you want to get pretty rich because you can burn some capital in order to have a few home runs. So instead, I might go to something like, we're an investor in this company, so full disclosure, but there's a company called Percent where they allow you to invest in bond deals that cash flow for small businesses. You could also do equity deals in businesses that cash flow. So I would stay away from anything that isn't already profitable, that doesn't already make money.

And I think once you have your first million, you can play that game. But until then, you only want to do deals where you're cash flow. And so that's where I would start. You can start with something like percent. You could also start by talking to your employer, like I was talking about, and say, hey, in this business that we have now, how could I earn some equity? And the answer might be you can't. Like I don't give equity and contrarian thinking in my media company.

Because I want to own my name forever. I don't ever think I'm going to sell this thing. But if we have cash flowing laundromats and car washes, yeah, you guys can invest in that if you're seen as a marquee member of the team. So maybe find companies where that's allowed to. Just on that point, just curious, and this is kind of a bit of a tangent, but if I'm a team member of yours, and because you said, if you're a marquee member of the team,

So what if I come to you and I say, Cody, can I get a piece of that laundry mat? You turn to me and go, no, you're not a marquee member of this team. Oh, yeah, for sure. That's what you'd say to me. Yeah, I would. Yeah, I would say at this point, people who are allowed to have equity in the company are people that I think we're going to travel through time together. That means years or decades. So you don't think I'm going to travel in time with you? I'm not sure yet. I don't know you well enough yet. You've been here for a year.

You know, you run our social media accounts. You've hit goals, but you haven't absolutely blown them out of the park yet. You know, do you think that if you left the company right now, we would be unable to function without you? And the answer is usually like, no, probably not. Okay. So at this point, you're not a partner in the business yet. You're still on employee status.

But if you keep taking on more responsibility and you keep beating goals overall and you show me that the business is better and would lose steam without you, then absolutely you can invest. But I learned this from Jim Bowen at First Trust. He did this beautifully. You had to pay into the partnership to become a partner. And that kind of sucked because you also have to pay taxes on partnership. Right.

And so not only do you not get money right away, but you have to spend money every year because your partnership value goes up and you have to pay taxes on it. But Jim made this big, this big feeling at the company about the chance when he offers somebody partnership. It was like a celebration. And that is, I think, what we want to do in our companies.

Same thing Warren Buffett does. You know, he allows his employees to have equity in his companies, but only those that he thinks he's going to travel through time with. And Warren Buffett has had the same 37 employees, I think, for like 20 years. You can go look at their Christmas cards and nobody changes year after year after year. Can I get rich if I just have a salary, do you think? Yeah, you can. You can't get on the Forbes 100 list if you just have a salary.

But if you want to make a couple million dollars, 100%. I mean, Bruce, Brucey Bruce, back at Goldman Sachs, bought an ambassadorship and he was only ever a salaried employee. Got bonus too, of course, climbed the corporate ladder and is probably worth 100 million plus now. So why do I need to buy a boring business? You don't. You don't need to. The problem is, what if Bruce gets fired? What if your job doesn't exist? What if you're an attorney now and you make great wages or hours, but AI does take your jobs? What's your backup plan?

So my backup plan might just be, I don't know, I own some Airbnbs and I rent them out or something. Could do that too. Airbnb is pretty volatile market. We've seen that now. And I think I like, I don't like risk. And so I think if you want to get rich, how do you get rich? You try to not lose money over time.

And you try to have enough bets where you can have an outsized return at some point. So you could just own Airbnbs. You could just do real estate. I don't really care how people do it. I don't think everybody should own a laundromat or a car wash, but I do think you should have a backup plan. So one day when you want to retire too, you got some extra income coming in. So if I've got tens of thousands of dollars or pounds, what would you do with it? I was playing this game yesterday. There's three businesses I really like right now.

I really like senior care centers. Senior care centers, okay. Which is interesting because you'd go, Cody, I said tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. But senior care centers are interesting because there's all these government grants and allowances for the fact that we do not have enough of them in the U.S. And you can turn a house with the right licensing and zoning into a senior care center.

And so I won't get too technical on it, but demographics show we have a huge aging population. We need more areas to take care of them. And you can start smaller by having an independent living house that has a rotating nurse. You make three to five X the rent on that as you do a regular midterm or long-term rental. So I like the demographics of that one. Plus it's not super capital intensive because you could rent the house out from somebody else and then just layer this assisted living center on top of it.

Um, we had, we had to put my grandparents in, in one of these, uh, at one point because they need 24 seven care. Did you buy it? No, but I should have. I should have. Um, I think my, my family, their families are already like crazy. I could only imagine if I said, the thing is I'd like to cashflow on this. You're like, Cody, get out of here. I also really like, um,

I like businesses today that are service-based but don't require a ton of upfront capital. So for instance, window cleaning businesses. I just bought one of these. It's called Pinks with this company called Resi Brands. But I love it because I did it. We have a YouTube video that's going to come out. And I was like, am I full of shit? Let's try this and see if I could actually do it. So you need to make $384 a day in order to have a business that does $100,000 a year if you only work five days a week.

So I was like, can we make $384 pre-selling window cleaning services to somebody in order to start this business? And we tried it and we did it. And so I might start like a window cleaning business, a pressure washing business, a painting business. You could also buy one of those.

Those are trade services businesses. And then the third type of business that I always talk about are what I call gateway drug businesses or semi-autonomous businesses like laundromats or car washes. The problem with those are they're slightly more expensive. I just want to take a pause here and just sort of get perspective on what you're talking about for someone that has no understanding of business. So my name is Nigel and I am...

I've never ran a business before. I don't know anything about businesses or investing or anything like that. What is it you're telling me to do? Hmm.

And so and Nigel wants to make more money. Nigel wants to make more money. He wants to be an owner. He wants to be a millionaire in 10 years time. And Nigel's willing to work hard. He's willing to work the hardest. He just doesn't really know what to do because there's so many options and so many conflicting things. He gets told all the time. He's hearing all these words, resi brands. He's hearing like window cleaning power. He's like, what's she doing with a power washer? So if I was Nigel, here's the question I would be asking myself.

I would be saying, one, do I want to keep my job that I have currently? Or do I want to not keep my job? That's really important because it's like, am I going to go work on something 24-7 or not? I'm not making enough money to completely walk away from my job yet. Okay, perfect. So that means you kind of- I have a little bit of savings. Yeah, you want a little side hustle that you think could be your full-time hustle. Yes. Right? So in that case, what I would start doing is asking myself, we have something called

your unfair advantage Venn diagram. And what your unfair advantage Venn diagram is, is your skill set. So what is Nigel good at? And that's as simple as like, maybe Nigel's in marketing. So he's actually pretty good at marketing. Maybe Nigel drives an Uber or a car service. So he's really good at working super long hours. He's just got the workhorse in him. Then I add my network. Who

Who does Nigel know that could help him? So that might be like Nigel's brother is actually a plumber. He works inside of a plumbing business. So if Nigel figured out how to buy a business, he could partner with his plumber brother-in-law or whatever, and they could do it together. And then finally, it's like, what gets you excited?

And by what gets you excited, I don't mean an industry. I mean, Nigel loves sales. Nigel loves it. He wants to sell people stuff. Okay. And the reason I talk about this Venn diagram like this is it's a little bit more complex than saying you should go buy a franchise, you should go buy a window cleaning business or start those, is because I think the biggest reason why people struggle with what to do next is they don't actually know themselves. And so if I was Nigel, I would say to you,

Find what your Venn diagram is of the things that you think you're good at, your network is good at, that you could actually go either start or buy a business on. Because the fastest path to wealth is having some type of ownership.

So I would start there. Before I knew what I know now about business, if I'd heard you say when I was 18 years old, just go buy a business, I'd go, Cody, listen, I've got $700 left from my call center job a month. How can I buy a business that's making millions or hundreds of thousands? I'm going to have to wait till I'm rich. Yeah.

Well, yeah, you can't buy it with your 700 extra bucks, but you could buy it with your sweat and your time. So there's three ways to buy a business. You can either use cash, you can use expertise, or you can use time or what I call sweat equity. So think about it right now. I buy a bunch of businesses. I have a ton of cash. You know what I don't have a lot of? Operators. I don't have a lot of people who can go actually run the business that I want them to run.

But if I had a young guy who was super hungry and I could give him $100,000 to go operate the business that I was going to go run, I would probably do that. And people do that every day in our community. And so for this young gun, you're not going to go buy the business outright yourself with your own capital. You're going to say, I'm working 12 hours in a call center right now.

I am relentless. If you pair me with somebody that knows how to run a plumbing company and I just have to learn and do a bunch of the bullshit to start the company and grow the company or continue the company, would you partner with me? And they're not going to be able to partner with a Steven or a Cody probably at first, but they might be able to partner with, you know, somebody's dad that they know. And so like, for instance, we had a young guy in our group

I'll change his name to Adam since I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it or not. But let's say, so Adam was 19 years old. Adam worked inside of a marketing company.

And he had never run a business before, didn't have a lot of cash. Adam went to the senior partner of his marketing company that he worked for and said, like, we have this vendor over here that we do some stuff with. They do all of our graphic design work. They're really good. The guy's kind of done with running this business. Like, I don't think he wants to keep doing it. I was talking to him about the other day. What if we bought this business and I ran it?

Like all integrate it for us, all bring it into this company. And I think we can buy it with just the percentage of future profits we bring in, which is called seller financing. And the marketing head was like, if you think you can get that deal done, yeah, sure. And the guy was like, okay. Adam says, well, if I do that, can I have part of the company for bringing it over?

And he said, well, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't have to put in capital to the deal or I have to put in a very small amount of capital. You're going to run it. And we basically have like a risk-free trade because we just have to pay them a percentage of future revenue or future profit. Sure. And so now Adam owns a business that he's about to sell because he basically partnered with his owner. And so, I mean, you can even think about that with your business today. If you're a young person working with Steven and you're like, hey,

Stephen.

We're in this studio right now. I saw like a sign out front that says that they're actually, they want to sell this studio space. I thought we could rent out this whole thing and we could probably cashflow and make this a profit center instead of a loss center for us. If I could like a negotiated deal that was basically a seller financed real estate deal for us, would you want to do something like that? I could help us run the rental of it. Now you might say no to that first deal, but you're probably going to look different at that employee.

A hundred percent. And also I just want to explain what seller financing is for someone that doesn't know. Seller financing is how 60% of all businesses get sold when they're small businesses. So it's very normal. Seller financing just means this, that the seller uses a percentage of future profits to let somebody else buy the business. And instead of you having a loan or a mortgage for a house, they're basically saying, hey, my business right now makes $100,000 a year profit.

I want to sell it to you for $300,000. You go, sounds good. I don't have $300,000. And they go, okay, well, why don't I sell it to you for $300,000 over five years and you pay me each year from that $100,000 profit that we have? Could we do a deal that way? You might be like, yeah, we could do that. They've just got to believe that you're going to be able to grow the business. Yeah. Or not royally fuck it up. Yeah. 100%.

which is, you know, selling anything is a trust trade, right? So these days we have to do less trust when we sell something because we have immediate trust in like a credit card or money. This is almost going back to bartering days where it's like, I'm going to sell you this with the idea that you're going to give me that. It's a harder trade, but it's totally doable. It's funny because at the heart of all of your messages, Cody, is this sort of deep trust.

of optimism and belief that one can just kind of bend the world. And I say this because, you know, whenever we're talking about this hypothetical young person, everything is kind of just, yeah, just go ask this person to do this. And I was just, as you're saying that, I was thinking, I resonate with that because I was that 18 year old kid that was just sending off the emails and asking people to help me and whatever else. But I don't think the vast majority of people have a deep internal belief that they can kind of just mold the world.

That's so true. Do you know what I mean? Just like bend it in this direction. They think it is how it is and you play a role within it. Not that you can just like, yeah, just go to a guy and knock on his door and offer him this. You're actually so right. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's true. It's a bias that I think you and me have because we've been exposed to the fact that you can actually just bend the world around. Yeah, you just got to watch one person do it and then you go, oh, I'm a wizard too. You know, we're all wizards.

Is this your banister effect idea that I heard you talk about? Oh, yeah, that's right. So, well, there's two things I want to talk about. One is you've heard of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Loosely. Yeah. So Steve Jobs was known for having this energy that basically made other people around him believe that they could change the world, that they were...

And so he would talk, people would talk afterwards after he died about how he'd come into their office and he'd be like, we're going to ship this product in 24 hours. I know we're going to do it in three weeks, but we're going to do it in 24 hours. He would get them all riled up.

And then they would ship it in 24 hours. And after the 24 hours were done, they would kind of be like, you know, coming out from a blackout. Like what just happened? How did he talk me into that? That's his reality distortion field, which I think is fascinating because we all actually have that ability. His was really strong. But for nerds, Star Wars nerds like I am out there, it's like the force, you know? It's if you actually believe that you are capable of something, it's weird what you can accomplish. Amen. I think so.

Amen. Yeah. You know? Um, so I like to read, you know, if, if you want to get a reality distortion field, reading the biographies of billionaires is really powerful. I'd rather read 10, uh, billionaires biographies than 200 self-help books because they've actually done it. And so, uh, I think it's, who's the guy that wrote Steve Jobs book? Is it Abramoff? Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson. Yeah. Incredible book to even listen to, to see that reality distortion field.

Elon Musk is the same. I mean, I spoke to Walter and he told me that Elon has this just obsessive ability to just assume that everything is,

He's being told it's basically not true. I if someone says something takes eight, eight months or something, he he seems to just reject that idea on site. And he immediately asks about the core components of the challenge. So he'll immediately go right down to the roots of the problem. And from there, he'll figure out that in fact, it can get done in eight days.

And I just don't think people understand the advantage of saving that amount of time on any challenge you have in your life, on figuring out a way to make it happen faster. Because one of the great currencies of all of our lives is just the time that we have. And some people are like, some people will take three to four years to start a business that with your information and that you're understanding and your bias would probably take you 90 days. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a three, like a three year, nine months saving on life. Just because you have this sort of urgent bias, you have this bias towards believing that all these deadlines are actually just, I don't know, bullshit. Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite mentors told me a line that changed my life, which was, it was Bill Perkins. I asked him why he's so successful in so many aspects of his life, damn near a billionaire. And, and he said,

The only reason that I'm successful is I'm faster than everybody else. By the time they have thought about an idea, taken it to a meeting and started to move, I have already made three mistakes and found a faster way. And so his bias on speed is fascinating. If you ever hang out with the guy, it's wild. You know, I'll be like, can we schedule a meeting? He's like, I'm calling you right now. And so he just moves quicker. So in our companies, we implemented something called the 24-hour rule, which was this idea that

If we want to win, we have to have a bias towards action. We have to decrease our time between thinking about a thing and doing the thing. And so most people say, well, I'll get back to you on that next week, right? Get back to you on that next week. Hate that line. That is where dreams and money goes to die. Instead, I say, can you get it to me tomorrow?

If all we do different than our competitors is they take a week to do things and we get it done in a day, I don't have to be richer, smarter, or better. I'm just faster. And it drives my team crazy many times, but I'm not smarter. I'm really not. I'm just very fast at a few things and I ignore a shit ton of stuff that I don't think is going to move us forward. You're the same. I've seen it with your team.

You know, we've gone back and forth with your team and then you'll be like, let's just do this one thing right now instead. I'm like, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. And so I think speed is the consistency. It's, Chris and I were just talking about this. I got annoyed the other day because I was, you know, what happens is people overthink things. And in this day and age, it happens more and more. They think about the thing and they confuse thinking with work.

And more often than not, thinking is not working.

And this is where people will yell at me on the internet and go, well, if I just don't think about anything and I move really fast, I could move fast in the wrong direction. Yeah, you could, but just iterate. Move fast and iterate. And that's what most people don't do. And so I'll tell my team all the time, you're thinking about this way too much. Make a decision in 30 seconds. What's the decision? I'll tell you if I like it, yes or no. I like the decision, move forward. And so ask yourself that in life. It's like Mel Robbins, one, two, three, four, five, get out of bed. Mine is 30 seconds to decision.

I was, it reminds me of a, I think it was an SAS, former SAS soldier that I was speaking to. And he said his friend was going through a lot of problems in his life, going through a divorce, et cetera, et cetera. And he asked, he called him and asked him for advice. He said, you're an SAS, you know, soldier, what should I do? And he said, when you're in the middle of the woods and you're feeling lost, start walking.

And it's a nice metaphor for life, which is you could, you'll die of starvation just stood there overthinking about your problems lost in the middle of the woods. But if you start walking, you'll gain some information. You'll gain your bearings. And I think especially in my earlier career, I was certainly a victim of like procrastinating myself into a hole with a big business problem. But even this morning, I had something...

This morning, my team in the UK was speaking to me about quite a critical business decision that I had to make. And it's now in my old age that I realized, I realized, I almost said like a flash, I was like, an older version of me would spend three months trying to get this decision right.

But a more mature version of me knows that there is no perfect outcome. There's pain on all sides of this decision. So I have to write this long ass like essay memo this morning and sent it into a person in one of my offices in Europe saying,

And it's so crazy that they responded, this person responded within, because I was so concerned about what they might say and how it might end. And they responded within four and a half minutes. And I'm like, yeah, cool, got it. I actually agree. And no need to call me because I completely understand.

And I thought, fucking hell, that could have taken three months of us all in a boardroom deliberating how to break this news. 100%. It's interesting. It's funny because the people that are most experienced in business seem to be the most intense. And I think this kind of gives the clue as to why. Yeah. You know, one thing I've also realized, if you want to get higher level positions, one of the other things you can do to get there faster, I think, is your speed of communication.

It's not even your speed of action. So if you're in an interview, don't bumblefuck your way through the interview. Think about exactly what you want to say with as few words as possible and be as direct as possible in it. And I've realized there's a huge correlation in our executives we hire between those who are good, they speak fast, they are clear, and they don't waste other people's times.

You know, there are a couple of executives I still have at some of my companies. And there are two that I know I have to move on because they're not fast enough and they're not fast enough in their communication. I should have seen that up front. And I think the way that you communicate is often the way you work. And it doesn't mean that you have, for instance, I don't respond to all text messages. You know, I don't think that every single thing that comes in front of me needs to be handled. I probably let 40% of things go unanswered.

And 20% of things I am on top of it, like Sauron's eye in Lord of the Rings. I'm just watching. If I was to look at your business, do you think that your highest performers, is there sort of a correlation between how much they talk and how much they don't?

There is a correlation between having no patience for wasted time. Interesting. Tell me. So for instance, one of my guys here, Tanner, he's like, oh man, I can't engage with this human because they're always talking to me and I don't really have time to do that. And that is what I have found with high performers. They do not like when you waste their time.

And so, you know, if you think about the typical office life, why do we not like typical office life? Because people come in and it's like water cooler bullshit talk where nobody really says anything. You ask about the kids. You don't know the kids' names. What happened this weekend? You don't really care. High performers are not interested in that.

Why? Because you want to perform. You want to talk about interesting things that move you forward. And then you want to go live your life. You want out of the office. I've found low level performers. They actually want to waste time during the day because they're not trying to execute. They're trying to just show that they are there. And there's a big difference between the two. And every time I hire a low performer, it's because I ignore that point, you know?

Which point? The urgency, the lack of urgency and time wasting. Yes. Yes. I forget about it in the interview, you know, and it's really important to pay attention to those types of people in your life. Who are the people that just are okay wasting your time? Because what does that mean? If they're okay wasting your time, they're definitely wasting their time.

There was a phrase that I read in your work where you use the phrase obsessed, not interested. Oh, yeah. I really love that. I actually screenshotted it on the way over here today and I sent it to some of my team members that I talk about this a lot too, about this idea of obsession and specifically the team members that are on the forefront of really hiring people because there is a big correlation between the outcome of someone who is obsessed versus someone who isn't.

Yeah. And the obsessed people are just always the best. They win. You know, I was with Karl Rove again, who's like not a popular figure, but he was chief of staff, deputy chief of staff to George W. Bush. And he's like one of, they call him the architect because he architects most of the Republican races in this country. And so whether you like it or not, I don't really care. I don't need to like somebody to learn from them. Doesn't matter to me.

And so I had him on the podcast to hear like, what does it mean to like architect the centers of power? That's fascinating. And when I was talking to him, what stood out to me, I'd been in meetings with him multiple times and at his house a few times for fundraising events. And I would watch him and somebody would ask a question that was like, hey, why did Bob Sanders in Pennsylvania lose this senatorial race?

And his response would be like, well, we lost it by, you know, 1200 votes on the third Friday on like December 4th, 2012. And the reason is because we didn't have this segment of the population come out. And then he would do that for like five locations across the country. And I remember I asked him, I was like, do you have a photographic memory? And he's like, absolutely not. I only have one about the things I'm obsessed with.

And I think we all actually have that. Like you've met friends where like they know every score of a football game for Manchester United ever. Do they have a photographic memory? No, they're obsessed.

And so if you can find people who are obsessed with the thing that you're doing, it just means they don't work hard. They're just like, they think of it as hardly working because they're so intense on it and they can't help themselves. Well, I was thinking of that as well as career advice as you're saying it, because if I'm trying to figure out where to place myself to end up in the best place in 10 years from now, I should be placing myself against my true obsessions. And you can't have fake obsessions.

You can't have a fake obsession. You can't be obsessed about something you're not. Because it's like, what are you doing? What video are you watching on YouTube at 3am that's keeping you from sleeping?

is my sense check of what I'm actually obsessed about. That's a great point. Presumably that's what's going to take me the furthest in my career. I think that's right. And how do you teach yourself to become obsessed with the aspects of your business or whatever that you need to? For instance, I think a lot of people think of obsession like passion and hobbies. I'm obsessed with Manchester United and that's where my obsession goes.

Well, are you obsessed with it? You know, or could you figure out that you're obsessed with, you're obsessed with the way that you feel when you're in an environment that is kinetic?

Like, you know, you love that feeling of the crazy songs you guys sing at the match. So like, where else could you be where there's a kinetic energy like that all the time? Well, maybe actually you like live events. Maybe you like live events and conferences. You know, maybe you actually just want to have a crazy team, almost cult-like environment. Can you become obsessed with that? And then I do think that you can catch being obsessed with winning.

You can catch that. Because if you get a few little tastes of winning in something, it's really easy to go, ooh, I want a little bit more of that. And that's definitely my addiction. Speaking of addictions, gateway drug businesses. Oh, yeah. You mentioned the term earlier. What does that mean? Gateway drug business is a business that is so simple that you can explain it to your grandmother. And also you can probably run it even if you've never run a business before. And those are things like laundromats,

I talk about those two in particular because if you can't understand cleaning clothes and if you can't understand cleaning cars, probably don't do any business. There's the 1% that just like, you know, go work for somebody else. Don't worry about it.

But most people can understand how those businesses work. And why I like simple businesses like that, not a lot of employees, not a lot of moving parts, not a lot of change, is because then you can get a little taste of winning. You can get addicted to the game of business. And then your next business can be something better than a laundromat, better than a car wash. But you can learn on a smaller playing field. But you're presumably not going to make much money if everybody can do it.

No, you're not going to make much money. But I don't think your first deal is never going to be your last deal, which is, I think, important for people to realize in buying businesses in life, just like your first job isn't either. But man, if you're working in a W-2 right now, let's say, and on the side you go buy an Airbnb business or you buy a laundromat or a car wash that are

not very intense on the number of people that you have to have run them, not that expensive for you to do, you're going to learn how to run a P&L. You're going to learn how to market. You're going to learn how to make money. Every single business has these same characteristics. And so you learn in this small one and then you sell the business because that's the beautiful part about a business is you can sell it to somebody else. And then you're like, oh, I'm a

I always think about it as in private equity, we say level one to 10 games, level one to 10 operators. So 10 being the best game you could play, 10 being the best operator you could have. The best operator in the world, Elon Musk, with probably some SaaS companies like he has, a rocket ship company, a marketplace. He's a level 10 operator playing a level 10 game. But in the beginning, he didn't do that. He was trying to figure it out, just like the rest of us.

So you'll start with your level one business and then you'll scale up to better and better and better games. Is there any age group that I should be thinking about buying these boring businesses off? Oh, yeah. Baby boomers right now are retiring across this country in levels that we have never seen.

This is a generational wealth creation event really across the world post baby boom generation, which happened after World War II. And so one thing that's fascinating about the baby boomer generation is they own most of the businesses. So more than 50% of small businesses are owned by baby boomers. They are reaching retirement, are already there. And 65% of them do not have a transition plan.

So their plan is, I'm going to live forever. No, you're not. They need to do something with that business. Most of them will just shut down the business. There's something like 11 million small businesses right now for sale in the U.S. Most of those small businesses, something like 70% of them, will never sell, whether because they aren't good enough businesses, quote unquote, traditionally sell, or because they never find a buyer.

And this phenomenon is going to happen all over the U.S. Here's the problem. If we don't buy these businesses, they say that there are trillions of dollars in the baby boomer generation that are going to be transferred to the next generation. We've all heard those numbers. The problem is people are thinking bank accounts, money being handed down. All the money is in business.

When you are a small business owner, 90% of your net worth is wrapped up in your business. That's the average. So that means 90% of the trillions is in small businesses. And if we don't buy those businesses and take them over, that wealth evaporates. And what happens then? BlackRock and Blackstone go in, they buy all those businesses, they get richer, they own our communities, and we don't.

So you should be targeting people who are 65 plus looking for the next move, probably open to seller financing, probably have a business that's a little hairy, might even be more like a job than a business, but you have an opportunity to buy that business or be an apprentice into the business and take it over.

And when I'm thinking about which business to buy, do I have to reflect on what I'm good at or where my sort of leverage is in terms of being able to take that laundry mat and make it 5x in revenue over the next couple of years? Are there certain businesses that are right for certain people based on their experience? For sure. I think so. One, yes, if you want to play a bigger game.

If you want to be a top performer, if you want to be one of those level 10 operators, you should find a business that is uniquely suited for you. The problem is I think a lot of people don't know how to do that. We have something called the deal clarity worksheet where we basically take people through where do you want the business to be located? What are you good at uniquely? You know, what, how much money does the business need to make for you? How much money can you put into the business? What type of businesses do you absolutely not want to do? You know, what seemed interesting to you?

But I think the bigger issue for people is trying to take the first move as opposed to obsess on what industry or sector. And think about it in three to five year increments, just like you would a job. You get a job, you think I'm going to do this thing for two to three years. Think the same thing with the business. And the only rule in buying businesses, in my opinion, is that you never want to do a bad first deal because then you won't do another one. So you want to do one where you can decrease your risk to bankruptcy.

What do you mean by that? How do I stop myself doing a bad first deal? Yeah, lots of one, you should spend more time learning how to do a deal than actually doing the deal. This is where I always get nervous talking about this publicly because people are like, sweet, I'm gonna go buy a laundromat and talk to Cody. You know, she seems like she tells me that everybody should own laundromats.

And I'm like, no, take a minute. You know, we teach at Contrarian Thinking, we teach basically a 90-day period where for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes a day, you're learning about how to buy businesses. It's like your little 90-day M&A MBA, right? Right.

And I want you to learn how to do a deal first. One, because you'll be able to negotiate anything you want for the rest of your life. You'll speak the language of money, which is equity and ownership. And two, because if you just go buy a business, you're not going to know how do I negotiate it correctly? What is the valuation of the business? How do I determine this guy's not lying to me? Those are what's called due diligence. And so I like people to learn that part.

And then once you've learned that part, you can go out and you start to date just like you would on Tinder or anywhere else. Let me look at this business. Let me look at that business. Call it the 100 to 1 relationship.

So typically you want to kind of, kind of like you're on Zillow, you're probably going to look at a hundred houses on Zillow, right? Kind of like, oh, I like this. I don't like this. You figure out exactly what is important to you and then you filter it down to your one, the one that looks right for you at this moment that you're going to stay in for the next two to three years. And where do you find these businesses to buy?

Is there a website? Yeah, there's lots. We have one that's coming out that'll be really cool, but I don't think it'll be out by the time this podcast is there. So basically the problem right now in buying small businesses is there's no good way to find them online. There's no Zillow. There's no MLS. There's something called Biz by Sell, but it's shitty. It's got all this trash on it. So we basically are building something that's the opposite of that. Because the two biggest questions I get are what type of business I should buy.

Where is it? Where do I find it? Can you give me the business? So we're building something to that regard. But right now you could go to Biz by Sell. You could go to bizscout.com. That's the one that we own. It'll be a waiting page. You won't be able to see anything on it yet. You could go to...

e-commerce flippers. You could go to Flippa. Those are online business sites. Stop promoting all your competition. I know. Well, the truth of the matter is we're so good at this. Like there's nowhere better to learn M&A than us, which is cool. I'm really, you know, I want to invest in this BizScout thing. Oh, actually you should.

I can't believe I didn't ask you for that, actually. Are you raising investment? We raised a couple million dollars for BizScout. And in it is Sean Rad, so the founder of Tinder, Bill Perkins, Bology, CTO of Coinbase, me, Andrew Wilkinson.

from Tiny Capital and three guys, it's called Carmen Ventures, their former founders fund and Uber, PayPal guys. And so we did a really small round because I think we can run it profitably.

So I don't want this to be like a, you know, we need to raise $200 million. I don't think we need to do that. I think with my audience, because we'll already have distribution on lock, we basically can funnel all the buyers and sellers to this site and then create a better mousetrap. So I hired the former head of marketplace at SeatGeek who took it from 5% market share to 40%. He's an animal. And that's my billion dollar bet.

How do you monetize that? I guess you take a cut on the deal. Lots of different ways. So we're going to try to not get too tied to one individual way to monetize. But the idea is there's really like three things that suck about finding a business to buy. One is if you're the seller, you get all these novices reaching out to you who don't really want to buy your business and they're super distracting. Like they're not capable, they're not able.

So we're going to create all these mechanisms to screen who's reaching out to you. You're going to be able to see, do they have funds cleared already? What's their LinkedIn? You know, do they have credit history? Are the SBA pre-approved? Like all this stuff that should be common sense doesn't exist. We're going to have that screening.

Then we also have for buyers, we'll have businesses that are seller financing open. So we'll have a whole screening of businesses where it's like, hey, you don't have financing? Well, these people are open to seller financing. We're also going to have businesses

We're using AI to basically curate the selection. Right now there's all these like fake franchises and stuff on these sites. And it would be like if you went to Zillow and they're like, you like this house? Buy this house. It doesn't exist, but you could build it. You'd be very annoyed, right? And that's what it is in business buy and land right now. So we're going to charge for all series of that. We'll probably charge brokers for leads too. But if I don't have that right now. Yeah. Then you got to go to BizBuySell. Okay. Yeah.

And what about just like knocking on my local laundry mat door and having a chat? Well, the best way to find deals, we have something at BizCout that's called an off-market deal searcher.

And so there's two ways to buy deals, buy businesses, just like real estate, right? On market would be Zillow or BizScout. Off market would be door knocking, right? You're going around door knocking. People don't do that in real estate really anymore. But in small business land, we teach 12 different strategies. But one of the best strategies, I think, is called your personal P&L review. So if you're a business owner, this is a no brainer.

If you're a business owner right now, you should look at all the places that you spend money where you can actually get to the owner. So not Amazon, right? And you're going to look at all your expenses on your credit card statement and figure out, are any of my vendors small enough and good enough that I might be able to own part of that business or the whole business? And so, you know, you would just go down the list and go, oh, we spend all this money with these people. Why don't I own part of this business?

And then if you're an individual, you can do the same thing. A fun one that we teach people who've never bought businesses before, never run anything before. I could never buy a business. I have no money. We teach them the Venmo challenge.

which is basically you open up your Venmo or PayPal because that means you're doing cash transactions. So it's a small business. And you look through them all and you're like, huh, my landscaper, my cleaning lady maybe, my, you know, the farmer's market that I just bought some cheese from. I'm going to go to all of these people where I could get to the owner and say, hey,

could I buy into part of your business maybe? And you cleaned my house, do you need more customers? Maybe I could help you get 20 more customers and I could own part of your business if I help you grow it. Would you be open to that?

And so we do a Venmo challenge with people who've never owned a business because then you get a partial shot at a business. Is there a bit of a generational opportunity in the sense that the younger generations are native to social media, so they have their own leverage when they're brokering those conversations? They can go to the baby boomer and say, listen, you're running a great laundry mat, but there's this thing called TikTok.

And I can make you bang on TikTok. And so if you give me, I don't know, 30%, 50%, 100% of your business, we're going to, with my unique leverage, because I know how to make content on TikTok, I'm going to send this thing to the moon. Grandpa. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think all you have to do to understand this is understand how much a business makes. So in order for you to ask for equity, you've got to figure out what it's worth, right? And there's a very easy way to do that. You go online and you go, what is the average laundromat in...

Charleston, South Carolina make per year? Oh, it's about $200,000. Okay. What's the average profit margin of a laundromat? 15%. Okay. So I know that this business is probably making something like $30,000 a year because that's the profit off of 200K in Charleston.

So what does that mean? Well, if I could double the profit of the business from $30,000 to $60,000, could I ask for half of the business? Maybe. Or maybe you ask for 20% to double it and it's a no-brainer offer for them. You're already making $30,000 a year. I'm not going to touch that $30,000. But if I double it, can I have 15%, 20% of the business? If I don't double it, I get nothing. Don't worry about it.

Great trade. How do you figure out if it's a good product? Because I've just finished wrapping Dragon's Den, which is like Shark Tank over here. And the single most frequently expressed reason why someone's business hasn't taken off yet when they're pitching to me in Dragon's Den is we just need some marketing help. So, you know, I'm the dragon that's most associated with marketing. So often that's directed towards me. They're thinking that I can come in and just...

press the button that I have in my backpack and things going to pop. What do you think about that? You never have a marketing or leads problem. You have a shitty product problem and nobody wants to believe this truth, but it's true. Here's how you know. Here's how you know if you have a shitty product or if you have a marketing problem. Do you have 20 to 30% referrals or reviews to your product?

If you don't, you have a bad product and you have a leaky bucket and you are trying to say, Stephen, please bail me out from my leaky bucket ship with your marketing help. But what's the truth of the matter is, and I see this with our companies and small businesses all the time, they're like, I have a leads problem. I have a leads problem. If I could just get more eyeballs, my company would grow. No. No.

Act like your first customer is going to be the only customer you will ever get. Get them to refer other people to you. Get them to write reviews where they say nice things about your business and treat the current customers like they are your marketing and sales. I think that is the biggest issue with startups is that they think that they just need more attention because they can't actually see that what's happening is when the attention comes in, it's falling out of the leaky bucket.

And it's falling out of the leaky bucket. So fix your problem, fix your product and you'll fix your sales. So that would be the first thing I would ask them. I would say, what's your referral rate? What's your review rate? And then they're going to go like, I don't know. And you need to find that answer. And if they say, well, actually for every person that buys one product,

What would be a perfect example? Remember that squeegee face product, Mr. Clean? Is that what that's called? Oh, Scrub Daddy. Scrub Daddy. There we go. Okay. That's like a Dragon's Den but Shark Tank product. Okay. So Scrub Daddy. Scrub Daddy was perfect. Why? It's a scouring pad for anybody that doesn't know, like a little scouring pad to wash dishes with. Yeah, like a sponge. Yeah. Anyway, so it was kind of cute looking. It looked different and it really worked. And so what would happen with Scrub Daddy? Well, Scrub Daddy, you would buy it and...

And then you would use it. It would work great. And so you would tell your friends, there's this new thing. It never gets dirty. It doesn't have any issues with like all that gross stuff that gets on a sponge. You can squeeze it all the way out. It doesn't scratch your dishes. You should totally buy this thing. And so you instantly know you have a good product because other people are sharing it. And those are network loops. It's very much like, you know, Chamath Paliapatiya, right? Billionaire from one idea.

One idea. And every business has this idea and nobody looks for it. And the idea at Facebook was called seven friends in 10 days. They could tell with 99% predictive certainty that if you came to Facebook and you interacted with or brought seven friends in 10 days, you would stay at Facebook forever.

So all they had to do was make sure that when they came to your city or school, you had density enough where you had seven friends in 10 days. And if you got those seven friends on your phone, you're like, whew, I'm going to stay. What is that in your business?

I have about 50 different companies in my portfolio at Flight Group now, some of which I've invested in and some of which I've co-founded or founded myself. One thing I've noticed is that most companies don't put enough effort into the hiring process. In my mind, the first and most critical thing in business is assembling your group of people because the definition of the word company is group of people. And throughout all of my companies, whenever I'm looking to hire someone, my first port of call is LinkedIn Jobs, who I'm happy to say are also a sponsor of this podcast.

They've helped us source professionals who we truly can't find anywhere else, even those who aren't actively searching for a new job, but who might be open to a perfect role. In fact, over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're probably looking in the wrong place. So today, I'm giving the Diary of a CEO community a free LinkedIn job post. Head to linkedin.com slash DOAC now and let me know how you get on. Terms and conditions apply.

What you're speaking to there is this idea of retention. So a great product is retentive. And if it retains its customer, then the customer is going to sit around and evangelize and bring other people with them like they're throwing fishing rods into their network. And the example you gave of Chamath, who was one of the early executives at Facebook, is the same thing. If you bring seven people with you, you're going to stick around for the party. Stick around for the party long enough. These network effects build. Now Chamath's here so that, you know, when these network effects get bigger, retention increases. Yeah.

And this is why it's so important to focus on the product, right? Because we're talking about this term LTV, lifetime value. We're talking about

If we make a really good thing, people are going to tell their friends, they're going to continue to use it, and then they're going to market it for me. But most people will focus on just trying to get a TikTok video to go viral versus making something truly great. Elon's an example, isn't he, of that? Oh, yeah. It's much harder to obsess on making a great product because it's slower, right?

You know, you're like, well, I have one person and they're only going to, you know, refer 0.3 of a person. You know, I can't grow fast enough with that. And so what do we do? We top a funnel, top a funnel, top a funnel. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. But the problem is you can either spend a bunch of time creating an incredible product once.

Or you can spend the rest of your life marketing and doing sales. So it's again, it kind of goes back to this idea. If you want to win and be successful in life, upfront pain always leads to long-term gain. And people do not want to hurt upfront. So they hurt for the rest of their life. And I think that's the same thing with products. They try and skip a step. They skip a step. And by the way, I'm guilty of it too. Like we have one company right now where our referral rate is basically zero and we're a

slamming these ad dollars and all this marketing budget. And I looked at myself the other day and was like, Cody, you're an idiot. You're doing the thing that you tell other people not to do, which is we have to fix referrals and reviews. Why? Because they fix, there's three R's, referrals, reviews, and retention. If your business doesn't have the three R's, you will spend your life marketing. And marketing is actually quite hard and expensive. And then you also have

People that you don't even realize, you think that they're proponents of your brand. You know, they pay you every single month for a service or a product, but they're actually detractors. They just haven't found a better product. And so that's what often happens to business. You're like, no, no, no, these people love us. No, they don't. Have they referred anybody to you? Have they left you a positive review?

That's the only way you know. It's super interesting because there's a bit of a paradox in what we're saying here. Because on one hand, we were talking about intensity and urgency and going fast and these kind of people that just kind of, you know, shorten deadlines and stuff like that. But then on the other hand, we're saying that you need to go slow and build the thing right because the slow way is the only way in the long term. I was hugely inspired by the story

the story of Tesla and Elon Musk for this very reason, because if you look at their stock price, there's about, I don't know, six, seven, eight, maybe 10 years where they're completely flat. Um,

they, Elon's not, you know, made a significant amount of money from it. And he's just going through absolute pain. And then all of a sudden, the company just explodes. And actually, the most inspiring thing for me, having been a person who built a business that scaled hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but was really built on unsustainable foundations. I know what Elon did in that 10 years when the stock price was completely flat. He laid every foundational brick and

of Tesla perfectly. And he was doing it basically in silence. And it's so tempting in business, I think, to take shortcuts when you're laying those sort of initial, like building a house, like when you're putting the foundations down. But he said, you know what, we're going to completely make a new battery. We're going to build the entire supercharging network so that all of our cars can go to 15,000 charging locations around the country. We're going to build a brand new factory. In fact, we're going to build every single piece of this car. And it's going to take 10 years, but

But the patience, I think, is really the thing that leads to perfection in the long term. And it's a big thesis that I've been playing with a lot recently because there's a part of my heart that just wants everything to happen quick. But as I've gotten older, I start to think that slowing down in the big things, like laying the bricks, is actually the most important thing.

I'm throwing this at you as just a point to see if it resonates in any way. Well, I think you're right. The thing that I think is the problem is when you're young and starting...

we're usually, you're not as smart as Elon. Like you wouldn't, if you gave a 20 something, 10 years to build what Elon has built in silence, they wouldn't know what to build. They wouldn't know what a strong foundation looks like. So I always optimize for urgency upfront because you have to have all these shots on goals to realize, oh, whoops, wrong goal, wrong goal, wrong goal, wrong goal. And then I do think you get to a certain level where then you become Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, where, you know, Warren Buffett says, I'm not going to do this.

once in a lifetime opportunities come around about twice a year. And so you basically do nothing else except those two each year. The problem is he can recognize that because he had decades of shot on goal, shot on goal, shot on goal. So I think it's this balance of, yes, once you understand what good or great looks like, it is your moral imperative to work as fast as possible towards good or great. But in the beginning, since you don't know, just do more faster.

It's interesting because the thing I was thinking about when I passed the floor to you there was I should have probably said what I'm actually referring to here, much of it is actually hiring. Because, you know, when I'm starting a new company now, I could, because we, you know, we get tens of thousands of applications coming to the inbox. I could resource that company with people in two weeks. Yeah. But in fact, one of the biggest pain points across all of my businesses is we hire so agonizingly slow. Yeah, same.

Because we know that that's when we talk about laying the foundational bricks of a good of a good company. It's all about those initial hires. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, every business is a people business before it's a product business before it's a profit business.

And the beautiful part about that is if you don't have a business right now and you're listening to all this, you should feel very empowered. Like exceptional people are in such high demand. And the sky is the limit on what you can make both as your own owner or working for other people until you become your own owner if you're great. And great is largely just I say I'm going to do a thing. I do the thing. Repeat. Right.

And if the bar's that low, man, I think there's way more opportunity than anybody realizes, which maybe gets back to what you said before, which is this ability to bend the world that I think both you and I see is really because we see how easy it is. It's like, like, have you ever seen, have you seen like how people will take one of those iron rods, you know, really strong iron rod and you heat it up.

And it just like, bink, it just bends immediately. Right. But if you were going to try to brute force it, it never would. But once you see them heat it up and then bend real easy, you go, oh, well, I'm never going to try to brute force that again because look how easy that is if you just heat it up. And I think that's part of the hack of life is just figuring it out.

heat and time and what those two ingredients are. That's really, I always think about the bloody like, what do you call it? That big hole in the ground you have at the Grand Canyon. You always think about the big hole in the ground? It's just such a nice analogy because I'm like, how did that get there? Well, actually, it was just water trickling through there for a long enough period of time. You didn't need to brute force it. It wasn't like a meteor or an asteroid hit the earth. It was just consistency of a very gentle force over a long period of time. And that's really how all rivers and how earth is literally carved is

It's interesting because I was also thinking as you were speaking about this idea that at all times throughout your 20s and your 30s,

You are actually, without knowing it, interviewing and being interviewed by your future potential business partners. Oh, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Because I was 18 years old when I went to San Francisco. No, I was 19 years old when I went to San Francisco. And funnily enough, I just sent a cold email to a billionaire. I said, I just saw you bought a company. It was a funny email that said, here are five reasons why girls call me back in bars and here's five reasons why they don't. It was basically my CV, but in that format. I love that.

And he called me within 24 hours when I was in the UK and was like, hey, love this. I'm going to set you a challenge. How would you get us to 10 million users? I thought, fine, made a deck, sent it to him. This is how I get this new company you've bought to 10 million users. He goes, cool, I'm going to give you $10,000 a month. I was in the UK, just sat at my parents' house. I'm going to give you $10,000 a month. I'm going to fly you out to San Francisco and you're going to help us build this company. And while I was there, I was around some really, really smart people. One of those very smart people was,

10 years later, when I had a new idea, he was the first person I hit up through his Instagram DMs, through his Twitter DMs, hadn't spoke to him for 10 years. Turns out he'd bought a $50 billion company that had IPO'd and he was the CTO. And I said, hey, there's this new thing called the blockchain. I'm really interested in it. Do you want to build a company with me in it? And he goes, yeah, cool. And I just reflected on the fact that throughout my 20s,

there are so many people that I met that in my 30s, I then leveraged. So what I was actually doing is I was being interviewed by them without knowing it. You know what I mean? Because- A thousand percent. Actually, I won't say his name, but we have a mutual friend that knew you from back in the day then. And what is fascinating to me is watching the two of you, because you're slightly younger than him, I believe. And he's been successful, but your success is like

Way more. And so when I was looking at the two of you and thinking, what was the difference between the two? He's also smart, also driven, in the same ecosystem, had the same network. What was the difference between 20-year-old Steven and 20-year-old X? And I think part of the difference is grit and time and consistency. You chose a few things. You stuck with them for quite a while, as you have with this podcast. I mean, how many podcast episodes have you done now? I'm going to have to look at Jack, 400? Yeah.

- Yeah, the average podcast is like what, 11 episodes or something like that and then they cancel. And then you also chose bigger games, like bigger and bigger and bigger as you scaled. And this other guy that I know that I think really highly of too, just like didn't wanna work that hard for that long on that big of things. And so I think if you can just have time, consistency, grit, and then try to solve bigger problems because they pay better,

you're probably worth 100x of that guy, net worth-wise, because of those four things. So interesting. One of the things I've thought a lot about over the last couple of years is that I basically have one skill set. I have a very narrow skill set, and I essentially applied it to different markets in my life. And I think we all...

of need to start thinking through this lens let me make this make really specific sense so my skill set the start of my career my main skill set was in social media at the very start of my career now what can you do with that skill set you can sell dresses for boohoo.com which i did and the impact of me doing that for boohoo.com their sales increasing is x right not a huge amount but also there's a lot of people that have that skill set of social media so that drives down my potential to charge high numbers

When I was 26 or 27 years old, I moved that same skill set of social media, same skill set. I moved it to a different market, which was companies before they IPO.

Now, if a company, and this was during that sort of Reddit Wall Street bets moment where like Reddit took down a massive hedge fund in America and they pumped GameStop. I thought to myself, I have this skill set. Companies before they IPO now really care about retail investors, the average person liking their stock. So if I go and use that same social media skill set that I used to sell fizzy drinks and dresses online,

with companies that are in the biotech industry, they know nothing about social media. They think it's witchcraft. Right before they IPO,

What would my returns look like? And honestly, the same skillset just moved to a different industry where it's scarce. And the person paying me stands to make potentially one to two billion if their IPO is successful, delivers a thousand times the value of selling the dresses for boohoo.com. And I just think people often they're thinking, I need a promotion. I need whatever. Much of the time, I'm like, just move your skillset to a better market where it's scarce. And the person that's paying you stands to make more.

You know what I mean? It's like a different way to think about career progression. Yeah. And it's, it's, I think it's so brilliant because it's a little bit asymmetric. It's like hard to put your fingers around it. What people like, what people like that will never make you rich is this. Here's steps one through four to get into real estate. And if you do this now, you too will be a millionaire. Listen, you're never going to get rich that way.

The way that you get rich is actually putting together multiple ideas that don't seem like they go together. And that cross-pollination is what gives you outsized returns. You're like social media, biotech, IPO, what? And so when you have that weird cross-pollination, that's where massive growth happens. And I think, you know, it was the same with me. I was like, I remember with my CEO at the time when I wanted, I was making a lot of money. Let's say I was making seven figures a year.

working for somebody else. I was actually happy. I would have stayed there for probably ever at this investment firm. But I saw the future of social media and newsletters in particular. And I was like, why am I going, why am I on the road every single day doing steak dinners, trying to sell pensions and sovereign wealth funds or investment vehicles? I could be doing this all with the internet. Like we don't need to be meeting in person anywhere to the degree that we are. And so I went and told the CEO of my company that, and he was basically like,

If you want to row left and I want to row right, you need a new boat. And I was like, okay, fine. So I couldn't convince him. And so he kind of gave me his blessing and said, like, go do it somewhere else because we're not doing it here. And I was really mad at the time. I had built up a billion dollar business for this guy in Latin America where a business didn't exist like three years before, four years before.

And so I was mad. I'm like, I am your best international, you know, Salesforce. I was total victim mindset about it. I was like, it's because I'm a woman, you know, all these dudes, they don't get it. I was, I was mad. So I left and he did me a huge favor by pushing me out actually, because then I went and said, you know what? Newsletters plus private equity, plus social media, plus laundromats and car washes. I don't know, but I think.

And together, they now are responsible for us having a business that has 26 businesses in it, businesses that do tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Some of the venture ones do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And we don't even have to have third party investors. It's a lot of our own money because we've bought profitable businesses using totally unfair deals because of our social media presence. And so you've looked back and connected dots there. Right. So someone that's, you know, at the start. Yeah.

How do they get enough dots to connect? Like what's the strategy to even be able to look back someday and connect these dots? Interesting to think about. If I wanted right now to figure out how could I find my cross-pollination of ideas, I'd need three things. I need a whiteboard, I need a whiteboard pen, and I need a smart buddy. Okay. I can get you a whiteboard pen. Yeah, exactly. Well, all I would do is I would put it up on the wall. Okay.

And I would try to find my smartest, most brainstormy, open-minded friend. And I would write down everything I think I'm good at. Do you want to do it on here? Yeah. I mean, so let's say it's for you right now. Let me screen record it so that I can see what you've done and put it on the screen for everyone at home to watch. What a fun idea. And what was the question again? So the question is, if right now you want to find where is your unfair bet that can make you your millions with your skill set,

that nobody else in the world can replicate except you. Here's what I need. I would need a whiteboard. I would need a pen, which I would do if I was you. And I would need a smart friend. Perfect. Like, so I've got Steven here. And at the top of the whiteboard, I would write on this side, skills. Oh my God, you're going to see my handwriting like a doctor. And on this side, I would write money.

And I would start writing down all the things that we're brilliant at. So let's pretend it's Stephen here. And we'll pretend like you don't have all the things that you have, but your core skill set. You can put your hand on the screen, by the way. It makes me nervous. Am I doing this like a boomer? I am. The handwriting is a little bit, it's giving doctors. Okay. Oh yeah, look at that. Okay. So embarrassing. Okay. So social media, right? You're incredible at social media. What else are you probably good at? Well, you know, a lot of people, you've got a network.

What else? Well, it's not just social media though. It's actually a few particular things. It's like YouTube and I think you're one of the best in the world at short form video, right? You're also one of the best in the world at like a data driven social media strategy. So you can kind of say upfront, hey, we think this is going to go viral because the data says this thing over here. What else is Steven good at? He's charismatic. He

He can probably get people to agree to things just by talking to them. You know, what else? British accent, you know, so probably you want more in-person interaction because we've got, you know, a very charismatic person. What else is Stephen really good at? Well, he asks a lot of questions.

This is my Hinge profile, by the way. I'm totally just going to copy and paste all this stuff over. Yeah, good looking, funny. Thank you so much. Yeah, exactly. So we'll just say these. There's a lot more deal flow, but let's just pretend that all you're good at is social media.

You're good at getting to people, which is a network. You don't even have to know rich people. Just can you get to them? You're charismatic. You're data driven. Okay, great. We've got all these skills. Now, how could we apply these skills to get the most money humanly possible? And I would do exactly what you said. So how do you figure out most money humanly possible? It's two things. It's the, how would I do this? It's the size of the problem. It is the value of the solution. Okay.

Interesting. Okay. And so if I'm thinking about this for you, if I go and I give your social media skills to a trade or service business, I'm not going to make that much money. How do I know I'm not going to make that much money? Because I'm going to go look up online, what is the average revenue of this business and the average profit margin? Yeah. Now, you probably didn't even think this way when you were thinking about it, but you're

But you guys look online right now, what's the average profit margin of a biotech company in average revenue? Let me tell you what it is. It's going to be like 50 to 80 percent and it's going to be hundreds of millions that you could potentially get. Trade services business, a lot less. And so that's where I would start. Skills plus money really equals to three things, which is like sector, size of the business,

And profitability of the business. And I would play this game. And what that might look like is you go, okay, I know that I have some friends in, let's go to the places that we know have the most cash in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street. If they could make a lot more money, if they had a lot more attention, because what I'm selling is attention, I want to get to the people who can make the most money with the most attention. And that means that I'm not going to go to Walmart, only has 6% margins. I'm going to go to the highest level.

person that I could get to and it'd be fun if anybody's listening to this right now try it like tag Stephen and I in your stories on Instagram of your little charts and let's see and I'll give feedback anybody that tags me in it if you're like here's the here's what I think my skill is here's what I think the industry is I'll tell you one way or another and it can be fun you can see other people's examples live so people for people that are only listening on audio and then that can't see what the um this uh chicken scratch chicken scratch you've just drawn on this ipad

On one hand, you list your skills. And then on the second side, you're listing the ways you believe you could make the most money from those skills based on the size of the problem you'd be solving with them and the value of the solution. So for example, let me try and play this game with you then. So, okay, so I am a writer. So I'm going to do my skills on the left hand. I'm a writer. And on the right, I'm going to write money. I'm a writer. I'm really good at writing stuff. That's it.

And I kind of get the internet. So I kind of understand LinkedIn blogs and stuff like that. But that's it. I'm a writer. Let's go with what would be the worst. What would be the worst thing you could do if you're a writer? To make no money? To make no money. Because sometimes it's easier to do the negative. Okay. Working for a local newspaper. Yeah, local. I was thinking like fantasy books.

Like you could write like fiction, you know, really hard to make money in. You could write for a local newspaper. That's an even worse idea. So I like that. So now you've got your bottom tier, right? Which is like 14 bucks an hour or something like that.

Now, if you look about, I mean, you could Google this. What is the highest paying jobs for writers? I bet the thing you'd find on top, copywriter. Why? I got a better one. Oh, what's the better one? Do you know why I know this? Because when I was working in biotech, we could hire one, which is a medical writer. Oh, so smart. Hyper specialized. Honestly, we, so a typical copywriter, when I was working in my social media company, we might pay entry level £25,000, which is probably about $35,000. Okay.

A medical writer, someone that can write about the psilocybin compound in my psychedelics business would get paid $150,000 or more. We just couldn't find some. We found loads of people that could write. Yeah. But nobody that had within their skill stack, even though it's quite easy to teach, the ability to write using medical words, slightly medical words, doesn't mean you need a medical degree.

You could probably learn how to write, become a medical writer in a month if you really committed yourself to it. So that's the top end. That's so true. And same with finance. We go to the things we know. So you know biotech, so you know there's a niche there. I know finance and I know that, again, it's one of the highest paying industries. So a financial writer. What would that look like? It would look like somebody who knows how to write probably an investor update. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So...

hugely lucrative. And then the other thing you could do is, I guess I didn't even think about this before, it would be like size of the problem, it would be value of the solution, and then it would also be structure of your job. So like if you're a copywriter, I wouldn't take a job for 35k, what would I do? I would say, hey, pay me, what is the salary you want to offer? 35,000? I'll take 10,000 so I can eat because I'm hungry. But can I have a percentage of the upside?

that I drive above and beyond goal. So if I'm going to write copy that converts into revenue, like I'm going to write a funnel for your biotech company, or I'm going to write a funnel to get investors for you. If right now per month you get $100,000 through that funnel,

How about you just pay me an extra 10% of everything I drive above your 100K? So I think that's another way you can make more money is getting smarter on deal structuring. Well, that's actually when I moved into biotech, how I got paid. And when I talked about being paid a thousand times more than I would have previously, it's because...

The way I got paid was in options in the IPO. Brilliant. So I got given, in that particular company, I got given 400,000 shares effectively in the company at a certain price. And so when the company IPO-ed at $3.2 billion on the NASDAQ in July 20, I don't know, 21 or something, even though I'd only worked in the company for about six months, just helping them build out the marketing team, I think my net return was unbelievable.

on the equity value at the time was quite close to 10 million. So six months work, 10 million return, because I, you know, and the really, really, really, the reason I did it was because I'm so interested in psychedelics, but it just opened my eyes to the fact that any kid with social media skills and that knew how to structure a deal with these people could have walked in there and said, give me some stock in this IPO and I'll run your social media for six months. You're so right. Could have changed your life. Yeah. And it's, it's something I'm struggling with trying to get people to understand right now is that even if you never buy a business, which is what people fixate on,

well, I haven't bought a business yet. I haven't bought a business yet. It's like, you're never going to regret learning how to do deals. You're never going to. I think that is the most valuable skill set in the world. I completely agree. And it's so unfair that people don't know about it. It's so unfair, but it's also your fault if you don't know about it because nobody's gatekeeping this information anymore. It used to be gatekept.

Like when I first started off in private equity, I wasn't allowed in the rooms where they were actually doing the deals and the terms. And if I wanted to see what the final terms were, like I had to kind of sweet talk my way into figuring out how they structured it. But it's an unknown unknown. So before I knew, I didn't know that I didn't know. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's very true. But now I think there's enough people out there talking about it where you're like, I mean, if you think about whether you like Donald Trump or not.

What is he really good at? Deals. The art of the deal. Like, that's it. And that is what, I mean, Elon Musk. How does Tesla actually make money? They make money through credits, through credits for solar. So he was able to survive for those 10 years of building that company because he has some of the best solar tax credits in the world that he negotiated with the government. So where does one go then? Where does a 25-year-old kid listening to this go to learn how to make deals? Well...

I have a book coming out called Main Street Millionaire. Yes. Exciting. I know. And we have stuff we can tell them about that later too. Well, I'm going to link Main Street Millionaire below so everyone can pre-order it. I've pre-ordered, I think, 10 or 20 copies of it, maybe a couple more. But that's like 30 bucks and you learn...

almost everything you need to know about doing deal to start. And that book is only what you need to know. I made it on purpose, not really long, not overly intense. It is exactly what you need to know. And then if you like learning dealmaking and you like that book, then you go to contrarianthinking.com and we have courses and free newsletters and a community all about buying businesses.

But that's where you should start. I think I agree because the way that you break down information is so accessible and it really appreciates the naivety of the person on the other end. You have a remarkable way of communicating in a way that's really...

Yeah, inviting versus excluding. And a lot of people, when they're talking about these subjects, they exclude you. And they don't even know that they're doing it because they're so smart and they're so advanced. But I've been lucky enough to take a look at the initial copy of your book, the sort of first draft of it. And it was exactly what I think 99% of people that are listening to this right now need to

It's the gap that they have in their thinking. So I'd highly recommend everyone go and pre-order it. I'm going to link it below. I really, really highly recommend it. And if I'm wrong about that, please do send me abuse in my DMs. Yeah, exactly. Well, and I spent three years writing it and that was always the part I was nervous about. It's like when I get it to all my smart friends, what are they going to think? So when I showed it to you and like Andrew Wilkinson, all these people who had done deals, I was like, fuck.

You know, are they going to like it? So there's that means a lot, basically, is what I'm trying to say. It's heavily, heavily anticipated. A lot of people are talking about it. So I'm very, very excited. And one of the one thing I do want to talk to you about before I just go to the last question here is prejudice, because I don't think people talk about it enough. Obviously, you and I and really everybody experience prejudice in business and in life and wealth and everything, investing, whatever it might be.

What is your perspective on that? When I say prejudice, I mean, you're a woman in business. I was a young black guy at one point that had a big afro and was very, very poor trying to make it in life. What relationship should we have with the prejudice we face? I had a woman ask me the other day, how do I show up as a woman in a male-dominated industry? Because you've done that, Cody. And she said, I've had struggles with it. And my feeling and response on that is this, that prejudice

What do you think the universe gives you when you tell the universe that I struggle because I am a woman in business? It's going to give you struggle.

What do you think the universe would give you if instead you said, I have such incredible opportunity because I look different than everybody here. And if I am good, I am so much more memorable than every Tom, Dick and Larry in a blue suit that looks just like everybody else. What if the thing that you think is your biggest weakness and the thing that makes you feel excluded and less than is actually your biggest strength? And if you could flip your mindset on that, how much more money and opportunity would you have? And how much more interesting would you be

for other people who are wealthy and successful to be around. Do you want to be around somebody who is labeling themselves as a victim and complaining all the time? Or do you want to be around somebody who thinks that the world is full of opportunity?

And it's a hard lesson to learn because the truth of it is business is hard. You will be shit on. People will keep you out. People will judge you for your skin color and being a woman or a man or not for sure. But don't let that into your psyche. Instead, choose the opposite and watch what happens. So interesting. So, um,

It's so difficult to say that because you're not denying the reality that prejudice is real. No. You're giving people the most optimal, productive way to move forward in spite of it. Exactly. Yeah. It's like, what serves you? They don't like it. No, no. People don't want to say that. Some people want to be victims of their prejudice. It's true. I think the tide is turning. I mean, for the first time ever...

You know, I posted the other week and I was like, well, we might get something interesting on here. Like, for instance, I believe that the word, I call it Latinx because I think it's funny, but Latinx is the most ridiculous thing you could ever call a Latino. Why? Because it doesn't exist in our language. Spanish, the word Latinx, it makes no sense to anybody.

So I think it was made up by a bunch of white people at Berkeley is my joke. And that in fact, if you went to Latin America and you said, you know, how does it feel to be a Latinx person? They would laugh you out of the room. They'd have no idea what you're talking about. And I said that on social media. And I thought I was going to get so much hate that I would like have to not look at it for a while. And what happened? A bunch of people were like, you know what? Yeah, I agree. So I actually think that if you want to beat the curve today, do not be woke.

Do not be annoying and victimized and woke. Instead, watch what happens when you start being a little based today, when you start saying the quiet part out loud. And for the first time in like probably since pre-COVID, I think the world is changing. And I don't think that means you should be a jerk or be divisive. And I think we should like protect comedy at all costs, especially in dark times. But yeah,

I do think that that type of person is no longer interesting. And if I'm right, that means that a lot of young people have to change our perspective because for a long time, we have been able to get away with things like saying, because I am a woman, because I am a Latino, because of this, you should give me that. And I think the world right now is starting to say, I don't fucking care. We're all human. And that's uninteresting to me.

So we'll see if I'm right. Or you can tell me in the YouTube comments if I'm just a privileged asshole. No, it's interesting because you said something earlier. And I remember thinking most people wouldn't have the guts to say that. It was when you were referring to your working culture, your company, where you're saying if you talk to me about work life balance in an interview, you're not going to get the job. Yeah. Even saying that a couple of years ago.

would have sparked outrage. Cody says that if you mentioned work-life balance in an interview, but what you're actually being is honest. Honest. You're being honest. Yeah. And people don't like honest. They'd rather you lied and did some virtue signaling than just be really honest about how you feel. Yeah, that's true. And maybe you're toxic, but at least you're honest about it. Do you know what I mean? It's so true. I think the worst thing that you could do is pretend to be something that you're not, especially in this age of no trust on the internet. All that means is that you're going to get canceled. It's like what we saw happen with Ellen, right? Yeah.

Like everybody was like, Ellen's the nicest person in the world. And Ellen is probably like the rest of us human. We're 20% of the time she's crazy or rude or mean or having a bad day or gets on her high horse because she's super successful or gets out of touch. And then, but what happens? Because Ellen said that she was nice all the time. She was perfect. She was whatever. When somebody finds that out about you, then they cancel you because you were a liar.

And so instead, I think the better thing to do is be like, I'm human. I'm flawed. I'm really intense. I'm kind of hard to work for sometimes. But I also help make my people make more money than they could anywhere else. And if you want to be exceptional and in a group where we pride ourselves on being the most productive people in the world, then they're going to love it at my company. And let's just be honest about it. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next. The question that's been left for you.

is what is one business idea you've always wanted to try but never seem to get to what's held you back it's almost like they knew you were coming it is almost like they knew um god that's a good question i'm really good at taking my interests to the finish line

Um, I think when I get to my tombstone, there's not going to be much that I regret at the end of my days because I've tried just about everything that I wanted to. Um, and I feel very privileged to have been able to do that thus far. Ooh, I do have one though. You know what I've always want to do that maybe at some point I'll get to is what's the most powerful book that's ever lived? The Bible, arguably, right? If we just say by total viewers over time.

And I think the reason why is because it's a story. It's like truth and guidance in a story. And one thing that I've always wanted to do is write a book that was a story that told people some truths. Fiction. Yeah. And so I think at some point in my life, I'd like to do, I suppose, a parable. Be.

be the word that I'd use. I would like to write a book that's a fiction story, that's beautiful, that transcends, that lets people escape. And like secretly, you don't even realize it, it's getting into your brain and it's teaching you things. And I don't know if that's a business, but that is one thing that I have not done yet.

Cody, thank you so much. You're a real beacon of wisdom and inspiration and hope and optimism in a world that needs it so, so much. And you're also a wonderful human on and off camera. So thank you so much for just being a wonderful person and doing so much for so many people that will never get to say thank you to you, but they come up to me all the time in the gym and

the chads and they tell me how much they appreciate you so oh stop it you're gonna give me allergies and then people are gonna not you know i have a black heart and they're gonna see the truth that i'm kind of nice you don't have a black heart thank you so much thank you