A Coming Recession Worse Than 2008? - Once In A Lifetime Chance To Build Wealth | Codie Sanchez

the hard truth about money is that if you don't invest it you will lose it to inflation that forces all of us to become degenerate gamblers and I have a growing thesis that hard money that can't be seized or inflated ought to be an inalienable human right but currently that's not the case so you have to invest in something as a way to beat the hidden theft that is money printing today's guest is Cody Sanchez and she has one of the most unique solutions to this problem I've ever seen I want to start with a quote from Cody Sanchez if you game for it yeah here we go we're about to have one of the most difficult markets of our careers I was at Goldman Sachs in 2007 and 2008 when the world was falling apart I saw what happened to retail investors then and I think it will be worse this goor round between interest rates commercial real estate and the fact that we also have to battle inflation we are going to come into one of the most difficult markets in our history of investing why do you think this time is going to be different why isn't the government going to come in print more money and either stop us from having a recession at all or if we do have one that we won't just bounce back I think guns only have so many bullets right and the government in some ways at the federal level operates like a gun and they've used their bullets you know they've used quantitative Ean which was a massive money printer for a long time longer than they should have from QE to then tarp uh which the temporary asset relief program actually Contin continued far past when it was supposed to um and then they did it with uh interest rates and then they're going to have to try to figure out how to manage a burgeoning deficit that is getting slightly out of control 34.4 trillion doll as of the time of this recording which now has higher interest rates on it and will continue to have higher interest rates on it which they didn't extend longer terms for and they should have when interest rates were at the lowest amount uh you know during our lifetimes and so I think the government is out of bullets and we you know when when you're out of bullets what do you do next I mean you have to go to like bigger ammunition and so I think the thing that scares me the most about this recession is because the government doesn't know what else to do that is within their normal arms they're going to have to come and do something a little bit crazy or let the market really really fall and I think political will right now does not want to let the market Fall and big corporates do not want to let the market Fall and so for that reason I worry about the economy you and me both I don't see a way around printing they especially in an election year there's no Universe in which they will let that happen they have also proven every time there's a problem every time there's a problem since 2008 they whip out the money printer and that's everybody Democrats Republicans does not matter print print print print print and I keep asking people about this and the only so what I ask people is the debt is increasing every 100 days we add a trillion dollar in debt as you said the interest rates are high interest rate payments are now the third biggest line item that the government has that's going to keep growing if you lower interest rates then inflation is going to rear its ugly head again if you print money inflation is going to rear its ugly head and so to your point about being out of bullets yes but I think the analogy ends up breaking down because they will fire the bullets they'll just kill the wrong people and so what ends up happening is the dollar begins to struggle now I don't think we're going to have rapid dollarization or hyperinflation or anything like that but it's going to be a super weird economy where everybody is turned into a gambler yeah I mean I think your points on inflation are really well taken too what concerns me with inflation is you know if you go out right now on the market everybody says inflation's coming down we're more around a 2% level we're not at the four to 5 to 8% inflation that may be depending on how you measure it we at in the past but then you go and buy groceries right and you feel the difference in groceries bought in 2020 versus groceries bought in 20124 and so I looked at some sample baskets both economically and from an individual person and you could see that if you bought $10 in groceries in 2020 and $10 in groceries in 2024 you basically got 50% Less in 2024 so you went from $10 to $5 for the same amount now what's fascinating is you go well how's that possible because inflation's down and you know we're trending at a at a better level well how it's possible is once you have a permanent price increase that settles along small businesses they actually don't pull those down on a commodity basis just because the commodity prices have come down if they already know that they can charge XYZ amount businesses typically don't wheel back their prices once they raise them now baskets like um you know oil for instance those definitely change but small businesses across the us are going to normalize prices and so I think the bigger issue too is people are not making more inflations come down but they feel like they have to spend more and they're right they do and actually the way that we measure inflation doesn't make a lot of sense for the normal average Joe who really has most of their costs and things like everyday food utilities rent I heard a stat I don't remember exactly where this comes from but it sounds intuitively correct and somebody in the comments will uh bang me if I'm uh off but uh that while it is true that the stock market which is basically the only place that the most people invest in they're not Savvy investors they have no idea what they're doing so they just do a basic fund uh that most even though the stock market returns roughly 10% on average that isn't what the average investor gets the average investor ends up losing to inflation and so that I think speaks to a lot of what's going on in crypto and I know you're not a big crypto person but so I'm I'm uh I'm a part of a meme about sitting on two chairs because I very much Michael sailor who has literally bet the farm and then some on bitcoin uh there's no Universe in which I would do that so I'm just I don't trust anything that much so I don't think the future is a guarantee and so just too many weird things can happen so anyway uh I'm taking a far broader uh approach to this but when I start talking about like hey we have a debt crisis what's the solution I don't see a way to unwind this like every that I run every scenario that I run you end up with a debt Jubilee now a debt Jubilee sounds awesome but it usually comes when people are getting shot and blown up so uh historically the button that says debt Jubilee is war so as somebody who'd really like to avoid that anyway when I bring this up that I don't see a solution people always like bro Bitcoin okay first of all let me say I'm a huge believer in Bitcoin and that is my largest single holding crypto in general for sure is by far my largest holding however that is what I'll call a life raft because the people that know to get in it sure you now have a protection from inflation but that isn't additional uh productivity and so you're not going to be able to escape the debt crisis that we're in now it may avoid the next debt crisis from happening but it doesn't help us with the one that we're in now so when you look at at that you see something I'm missing well you know I think no I don't see anything that you're missing I think the federal government has turned into a transfer service and they are essentially they used to provide services to uh to all of us to Citizens and now if you actually look at the amount of money and where they spend it they spend most of their money transferring money from those who have made it to those uh who say that they need it um and like there's actually a graph that's fascinating that I sent to you that we can put on here and people can can disagree with it in the comments but it basically shows that federal spending is at all-time high levels with transference which is things like um you know Social Security Medicare Medicaid and um and so I think the problem even bigger than the debt crisis is we have systemic issues in this country that the government has no incentive to change because what are they doing when they transfer your dollars to somebody else times 20 um they're buying votes and so you know of course they're going to be able to stay in office and continue to have systemic issues like this if they keep transferring money in this way and so I think it's not everybody's focused on government spending that is problematic very much so how much they're spending but it's also where they're spending it it's the fact that we've turned into this you know this funnel system and that's the thing that I think scares me more than anything else because you are not increasing productivity of those dollars when you transfer it from one person to another based on need not output capability uh you know additional spending that they're going to do to push the economy forward and so it would be much better if we were spending on even things like defense infrastructure Innovation and we're just not that's nice and distressing so when I saw that graph I'd never seen that before and uh for people listening we will have this up on screen but what I found very interesting so the it starts tracking in like the 1940s and obviously defense is massive it's like 80 plus% of what the government spends on as you expect because we were in the middle of World War II y um then that pretty precipitously falls off in the 50s and you get this sort of normalization but what's interesting is you see that line fall really low and then the what I think the graph calls individual payments what you were just describing starts rocketing up in like the 50s and 60s and what's really interesting and oh man this is this is one of those things that to really talk about you have to get into the nitty-gritty of why people want to do this so it's the sense of nobody left behind right so we see that somebody has need we want to make sure that they're taken care of I love that the most but what ends up happening to your point is you're taking efficient Capital dollars yeah and you're turning them into inefficient Capital dollars simply because some people are good at allocating capital and some are not and so you are literally siphoning money from people who made that money because they're good Capital allocating they're good at building businesses just to not use fancy words they know how to build a business they know how to build things that people want people are willing to pay money and so hey it greases the wheels of the economy GDP goes up we're able to make more with less and the people that are able to make more with less one would think you would want to keep the money in their hands but what we're doing Instead at an ever increasing rate is we're moving that capital from the people who have demonstrated an ability to do something to the people that don't know how certainly have not yet demonstrated an ability to do that yeah that's exactly right well I think also you know if you think about what's happening here I think you individually get overwhelmed when you know you think what do I do about these huge things okay so the debt ceiling's happening you know I mean so we have this massive uh debt problem Cody says we're out of bullets Tom says they're going to shoot us anyway you know what do I do about all of this right and what I'm just a normal person trying to get by trying to afford a two we vacation during the summer and a smaller house than I had before maybe and less cars and the government keeps getting bigger but I have less what am I supposed to do about this I I'm not I'm not calling up Senators I have no access to this sort of change that you two are talking about and I think if that's how you feel in my mind it's one knowledge is power so now you get to know what is happening and when somebody says something idiotic to you like it's good to transfer the money from the rich to the poor you go wait a second why because it turns out we are very Collective individuals as opposed to individualistic this Collective Society if you live in the US you can't get away from the repercussions of those on high so I think everybody listening you should you should feel like man I want to understand this so badly because I want to explain to all of my friends why the government's decisions today can be more impactful than what my boss does in some instances or how much money I make you know I had one business that was eradicated because the government changed one regulation and because of that everybody got laid off in the business I actually ended up leaving the business and it was because they changed this one little rule about Mark to Mark Accounting in 2008 that we talked about previously and money market funds and variable nav like very Tech techy things in the finance space and because of that people lost their jobs and so I think it's really important to like get to the numbers through the narrative and so you know as I was thinking about this today I'm like what do the numbers say uh versus what do the politicians say well right now the politicians are telling us tax the rich tax the billionaires that's the solution let's take all their money it's those guys fault and let me tell you why I think that's so dumb is because when you look at the math if we took all of the Forbes one uh all of the Forbes 400 richest people in the world and we clawed back all their wealth something like $4 trillion that would run the US government for seven months okay that's not going to do enough then what if we took 100% of their earnings every year about a million people's earnings and we took all their earnings how long would that run the government well it' be about like $500 billion and that would be 34 days so oh that's really helpful Mr politician when you talk about let's tax the rich show me what that gets me and what it gets me is 34 days of your salary no thanks we don't have a revenue problem in the US we have a spending problem and it turns out the politicians just need to know how to use a [ __ ] calculator and they don't or they do and it's even worse and more mancal than that yeah I mean for now I'll assume that there's no uh evil intent behind it um which I trust me I understand that's playing naive a little bit but I think if people start there they're going to Blind themselves to what's really going on um okay so we don't have a revenue problem I don't actually think that's true so anybody with a managing a household budget if you come to me because I get asked this question a lot uh Tom I just cannot like make ends meat or I'm struggling in my business I want to scale what do I need to do the answer is always you have two options you can lower your expenses or you can make more money so you could look at this and say we do have a revenue problem cool I'm here for that conversation the problem is we've already covered this in this conversation which is you've got you're pointing your finger at the quote unquote rich people I forget the stat but most wealthy people did not inherit their money certainly more than 50% might be more than 70% it's pretty high like it's really hard to retain wealth really hard and they don't stay there no within your own life you go up and down in and out of classes so uh but the narrative is not that but so you have these people that are proven I'm very good at at generating money I know how to increase that y um and I increase it by doing more with less so meaning I can get you that stereo that you want it's a better stereo for less money or a better stereo for the same money TV car whatever it's just more efficiency uh take Amazon is my favorite story I canot believe that people hate on Jeff Bezos because Amazon changed our lives now if you are willing to trade and I don't want things that quickly I'd much rather have Mom and Pop shops everywhere okay fair we can at least have that argument but you can't deny that he's been way more efficient with the capital and when you talk about and look let's put the elephant in the room this is to wealthy people having this conversation this is also to self-made wealthy people which I'd like to remind people so so if you are overt taxing the rich what you're doing is saying I'm taking Revenue as a solution off the table because I'm now going to handicap them because that Revenue that they would have used to become even more efficient to scale their business or to start the next business or whatever that's not you don't have that ability because especially if you're talking um taking the tax rate up and up and up and people will say oh there was a time where the tax rate was 90% or whatever we did just fine there was a time where the tax rate was briefly 90% and you will notice they brought that down real fast because you were going to get Capital flight massively people are just not going to put up with that so anyway it could be solved with Revenue but it won't be solved with Revenue if the answer is just go tax the life out of people and to your point it just doesn't go long enough so you end up taxing the life out of the middle class anyway okay so if you remove Revenue now you're left with how do we reduce expenses and and nobody will vote for that you need to only look at all the burning cars in France every time somebody proposes like raising the retirement age or whatever even here people will twig out if you talk about raising the retirement age so what do we do with that well I think a couple things are already happening if you don't like the taxation system that you're under you leave and so if you want to be around winners the best thing that you do is you go where there's more winners than anywhere else and you seeing in your state right here in California you called my state a fail State exactly sorry it's beautiful it's a beautiful nightmare of a regulatory environment yeah uh you know I I was looking up these interesting statistics and uh so I was like so what how would I Define a failed State why would I say that California is a failed State well let's do a fun metric which is let's see where the U-Haul prices are more expensive versus not more expensive when people are moving in and out and what you basically see is my friends at First Trust did this analysis where they showed that a U-Haul going from you know San Francisco to I can't maybe it was Arizona or Texas is 6.42 times more expensive out of California as it is into California so what does that tell you that basically people are voting with their feed and they're saying I'm not going to stay here and be taxed to high heaven and if I by some chance turn my little plumbing company into a big plumbing company I buy a nice house now it's a mansion because what we don't think about today that is real is the real trickle down economics are that governments think the word Rich trickles all the way down until it gets to you every single one of you including you and me and so you know when we when we talk about a thing and we hate on it we're never going to become it right and so when you say you hate the rich you should tax the rich you should realize that you will never be rich you're never going to achieve it then and so if you want to think about what to do differently it's actually hey do the opposite of what most politicians are saying and maybe do what they're doing which is look at their stock portfolios they're investing like crazy they're picking the really efficient Capital allocators to put their own dollars behind they're leaving political St uh positions and going to lobbying firms where they get paid a ton of money um and so I think we need to push back on the fact that we need a big brother we don't need one like I think everybody's had a bad boss that's why you leave jobs nothing worse than an insufferable boss also nothing better for you to achieve than that chip on your shoulder and that's what the government is the government's become a bad boss that is trying to tell you all the time what to do one way or the other and they're saying oh by the way instead of me being your bad boss and still paying you you're going to pay pay me for being a bad boss and I think about that constantly I'm like could you imagine a job in which you don't make money instead you pay money and that boss is awful nobody would stay in that job and yet we do stay in those tax Havens those cities those States and in the future I don't think we'll do that why not what what's happening in the future that's going to make that it's just easier it's easier to leave it's easier to go to new country countes and cities and states it's easier to change your regulatory structure to be located somewhere else the global pool of talent is huge I mean people don't like to talk about this but you know the the talent pool that you have to compete with today is global it's not communal it's not Statewide and it's not National you know we are not only having to compete with people located in India Indonesia Europe I have people in my teams in all of those locations but now we also have to compete with with robots right we have to compete with AI we have to compete with actual robots like the company figure that we invested in and so I think people are just moving and that will continue and the government is not noticing that and we have a mutual friend bology that we're both in a chat with and I I love talking to bology because his brain is fascinating to watch live um he's an AI yeah he might be he might be an alien dude that kid if he isn't an alien he's AI for sure he is a very nice very smart alien AI I love him to death probably he is a single mind yeah he really is and you know last I was chatting with him I'm like you need you have a moral imperative I think to explain the network state to more people so that they can understand how to become independent centers of gravity that aren't reliant on many other things in order to succeed but in order to do that we have to do what you talked about which is like simplify things I think that's how people take money from us they make it seem complex they make it seem like oh you couldn't understand it's too it's too much for like poor normal humans let me help you and uh and if we can break down those you know that verbage like in finance we use a bunch of big confusing words in order to keep your money and so I think we have to push back on that we have to start saying no I'm smarter than you say that I am explain it to me if I don't understand it I'm capable of that and by the way I do not need the government to stand in for me because I'm a perfectly individual Sovereign human and I think most people are yeah we're I'm sure we'll get into that at some point I the that whole thing the government is not going to take that kindly yeah and we have lost a sense of the government works for us mentality like there's the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn't exist and the thing that scares me about the government is that they are riding on and Fanning uh the wave of I need to be taken care of Nanny State protect me um safetyism if you want to scale your business you absolutely have to have the right data in order to understand what's really going on if you want to do that well I highly recommend that you check out netsuite by Oracle netsuite is the number one Cloud Financial system bringing accounting financial management inventory HR all of it into one platform for one source of Truth with netw Suite you reduce it costs and you can cut the cost of having to maintain multiple systems you improve efficiency by bringing all of your major business processes into one platform slashing manual tasks and eliminating errors it is no wonder over 37,000 companies have already made the move see how you can cut cost and boost performance at the same time with netw Suite now through April 15th netsuite is offering a one-of-a-kind flexible financing program head to netsuite.com Theory go today and make sure you have the information you need to really scale your business again that's netsuite / Theory I don't think the book is out yet but Jonathan hey I know is working on a new book or just published a new book about that where his first take the coddling of the American mind was about amazing uh was about hey social media came and cobber at everybody and we now have a problem yeah and now he's realizing it's more than just that it's the fact that parents became extremely paranoid about letting their kids out and taking a risk and getting hurt abducted and so as the world got safer and safer parents got more and more paranoid and now you have a world where people actually believe words are violence and so when I grew up it was sticks and stones may hurt May um break my bones but names will never hurt me and so that is what your parents would say when you were like yo I was getting bullied people were making fun of me do the number of times Cody that I got called Dumbo I can't even tell you yes now I like them oh well that makes one of us uh but here's here's the reality my cousins were so cruel to me about my ears that by the time I got to school I was just like whatever you have this whole thing like I I think my response was cuz everybody went straight to Dumbo hey Dumbo I was like at least Dumbo Can Fly good BL yes young Tom so my mom wasn't like oh my God poor you she was like what's your comeback what do you got like you can't just go in and uh let people you know make fun of you now it be like yo somebody goes into the school you've got to stop that we can't let people speak and so the expectation on me was you have to get tough like you've got to be tough enough to deal with your cousins you've got to be tough enough to deal with the kids on the playground and now it's very much the opposite and so I can see the government leveraging that to say yeah we are going to take care of you uh no kid Left Behind do you know the the mckin vento law I don't know if this is just in Washington state where I grew up so my mom worked in transportation she's now retired but they will literally literally drive a school bus two and a half hours one way to pick up a single child think about the math on that yeah no it doesn't look good no no so anyway all of that that's why the spend is going up up up up up and things are getting worse and you have my own team Millennials coming up to me and saying I'm just getting Savaged like I don't know how to get on the property I don't know how to invest I feel like I can't get ahead I've got student debt that's just drowning me like basically nihilism I just want to give up and then that pushes him further into the bosom of CLA Schwab yeah and his idea of you will own nothing I like it you will like it you will like it which was then retracted as never said what do you think about like that whole we things are going just fine don't worry don't worry no I mean I think I think you could try this on which is you know take some risks try to sell something every single day get up at 6: a.m. continuously uh ask for feedback relentlessly in what you're doing and continue to repeat for somewhere around one to two years I'm sorry Kim Kardashian did you just tell me to work harder yeah I think that's I think you're going to surprise yourself about how many people are going to call you lucky and you're actually going to just say there was a recipe and I think there actually is a recipe but it's it's much easier for all of us to say there's no recipe everything is against me than it is to say what would happen if I followed these few steps and so um one's just really empowering and one's disempowering but um you know there's a bunch of Statistics that are fascinating today I was reading a study the other day that said uh Millennials and jenzy on average take 25% less risk than the previous generation and how is risk demonstrated they start less businesses they get married later they have less intercourse risky in some ways good bad or otherwise um they have less relationships um and they buy less property uh because they're living at home to to agree I've never seen before 45% or something like that for Jen what 45% up to what age it's a good question the internet will tell us um but 25% less risk what does that mean well that means that you're probably going to make 25% less per year that you have that activity right at least because you're not putting yourself out there at all so how does that compound over time if you're taking less and less risk you know I talk about this all the time with my team I think you should be at companies that allow you to have an ability for you to continue to earn more if you drive more Revenue to the company and so you know I don't think any one of my employees has ever come to me and said hey if I drive more Revenue if I close this deal for you if we hit this metric and it makes us X can I can I get why from it now I might not like their why I might say no you don't get 25% but you could get five um but the thing is this generation doesn't want to take the risk of asking trying none of it and so you have to change that mentality or you're never going to win you and I aren't that much smarter than anybody else we just took a lot of risks continuously and we compounded every time we learned that we were bad at something and made a mistake and change direction and that's sort of it yeah we're not that much smarter than people that I really want that to land for people um to me this is not look intelligence matters a lot I'm not downplaying that Jordan Peterson has made it very clear if you meet a magic Genie just ask for more intelligence like just simple as the the number one predictor of ability and success is IQ now it's a UR it is yeah Angela Duckworth study on grit that shows that being the number one predictor how about this I'm going to guess that grit is going to be tied to intellect none of us are going to like that but there's almost certainly some truth that I'm making that up I don't know that that's true but life has taught me that intelligence is like height on a roller coaster yeah that if you're below a certain level when you go upside down you fly off and die yeah that's true and if you are too tall then you're going to get your head walloped when you go under a piece of scaffolding so there there's a goldilock zone of intelligence to be sure I remember at one point the smartest person in America had like a 220 IQ Einstein is estimated to be at 160 was at 160 to give you an idea uh and they were a bouncer at a bar yeah I was going to say but they weren't successful they can't actually empathize with most other people right they're alien which is partly why bology seems like an alien he's just so much smarter than me yes um so look intelligence matters I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't but it's more of a minimum requirements thing if you minimum requirements it's what I always tell people if you meet minimum requirements and if you're listening to this point in the podcast I'm going to guess you meet minimum requirements then it becomes grit determination and the ideas that you live by and those ideas so you were saying that people are taking 25% less risk and what that got me thinking is going back to Jonathan Height's idea of safetyism becoming safety isn't potentially being the big problem of the generations right now because they're reject reting ideas that they think are quote unquote dangerous Y and if you reject an idea out of hand because you think it's dangerous um then you're you are closing your mind off there's actually God I don't even I'm going to bring it up because it is true but H God this is going to get me in trouble probably there is a Jewish Times article about me because years ago the thing is I still believe this uh years ago where before I knew about safe ISM or anything I had no idea this was going to trigger people uh and I was like bro I don't understand why people are looking for reasons not to hear somebody out I was like you should be this person might be a total psychopath but if they have one idea that's useful like take that idea so I was like I'd have musolini on the show if he had a good idea that I could learn from and so the article says he said it he really said it like you can go look it up he actually said the words view it for yourself so anyway I'm just saying if you're looking to reject ideas I'm not saying I want to invite him to a family bar I'm just saying if you're afraid of ideas then you will never find the best most efficient most effective idea and therefore you will get stuck could you imagine how poor you would be if you only took ideas from people you liked I poor never get anywhere yeah the correlation between uh do I like this person and is this something that could function and work in society it could be zero it actually doesn't matter at all I mean this this idea of moral absolute ISM lately that we have which is if a single human did anything at any point in time that we consider bad by today's standards we have to wipe their name off of the face of the planet and we could no longer say that we might be able to learn something from them is a huge disservice to anybody who is in learning and growth phase because you there's no perfect human we've never met one I've never met one and so every one of us has some dark thing in our closet every one of us has done things that we've been embarrassed about or grown past at some point and so the idea that you can only take ideas from people you like is a great way for you to stay poor um and so I don't really believe in anything that doesn't have an outcome that I like so why would I why would I only listen to people that I like it's such a bizarre philosophy that somehow has been normalized I'll even push it farther uh I will take a good idea from somebody even if they are despicable of course uh I think there's even something in the Bible about this that the luciferian intellect I don't know if that's Jordan Peterson phrase if that's actually in the Bible but that uh I know in the Bible there's something that sometimes uh the evil Among Us have the better idea oh God I'm paraphrasing but like that's the idea that there are times where you can actually learn something from somebody even if they are just outright evil yeah uh I think that's wise I think the way that people should live their life and I'd be very curious to get your take on this this is how I advise everybody to think and that is from first principles for first principles to work you have to understand what your goal is where am I trying to get to and I think a big part of what's breaking down in dialogue today is people don't understand like where are we trying to get and then they don't have an explicit stated Philosophy by which they decide what things they will and won't do in order to achieve said goal and so what people end up arguing about are the quote unquote facts of the situation now the problem is your worldview which is made of your belief Bel and your values they will change how you interpret the quote unquote facts and until people can say stated this is my goal the these are the the value systems or philosophical underpinnings that I use to get to that goal or to navigate the world and then here's how I can track back my thinking based on those beliefs assumptions values and this is why I've come to this conclusion but if you are just winging it then usually the values are blind to you you have them but you don't know what they are your beliefs you confuse for objective reality which they most certainly are not um and so people end up thinking oh I am just approaching this from objective truth and objective reality and so the fact that you view things different than me just means you're a lunatic versus going oh that's a useful idea I'm going to take that and so yeah taking a useful idea from wherever it comes seems wise very I mean I think it's quite useful to hold up a mirror in front of yourself and ask you who you think you are we were talking about this to some degree and so what what would I do if I was going to ask who am I as a person and what outcomes and actions would I like to have according to my own philosophy and the only way I've been able to do it well and consistently is in every company we have a Creed we have some sort of guiding principles that we one for every company uh no but I do one for every company now there are like three companies that have a same set of core principles but some companies necessitate something else and the CEO gets to be the captain of that ship and so they should get to set those principles um but the principles that I have for our contrarian thinking grouping of companies are are 13 because we like this idea of trying to make our own luck and uh and they you know and there are some that are very core and helpful when you're thinking about what action should I take I like to fall back on making my brain be as lazy as humanly possible so decision fatigue is real it's really hard to continue to make good decisions all day any parent knows this and so how do you decrease the fatigue that comes from making decisions you have principles that you get to revert back to and so like our very first one is those who say it those who say it can't be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it very first one you know one of the other core ones is that we clean up the sink we do the Dirty Work and so that's based off of a company where they got rid of their entire cleaning staff and the company all the employees take care of cleaning up the building by themselves continuously and so if you believe that another one of ours which is how you do anything is how you do everything and like you pause on that for a second that's really impactful but the thing is most of us we might have had a family crest a million years ago but we certainly didn't have a family crest we didn't have a personal Creed we a lot of us don't have company cedes and so you don't have a set of aligned values and I think values are so much more important even than what your company does does because they mimic your daily actions and so you know if I was listening today my husband and I have family values that are mimicked off of contrarian thinking values and and it goes back to little things like one of ours is uh do you want to be a good white shark or do you want to be a great white shark and it's tongue and cheek it's cute but that way every time we're like in the gym and we don't want to do it every time we could eat poorly but we don't want to we just kind of joke each other like what kind of shark you and those little things can just remind you of the type of human you want to be I love that how do you think through these incredibly intractable problems like do you if so if my methodology is first principles goal uh beliefs values they're stated boom boom think up to get there what's the framework that you use what is the framework that I use so I uh the other weekend I met with a daughter of one of the richest billionaires in the US old old money uh in the energy space and and she's incredible which is rare for Billionaire's daughters right and so I said to her hey um weird question but uh you turned out really normal why and uh and she said you know what my father always taught me that uh our family name means something and we have to stand up for what that family name means for and he made us repeat back to him what the family name meant to him and then the second thing he always said is that uh the only thing you can control is how hard you work that's the only thing you can control we can't control how smart you are we can't control what happens in the world but you can control your belief and what this family name means and your ability to work really hard and so when I think about my actions I think about the same thing I think I want my name to mean something I want to remember that I'm here on this planet for some particular reason and that the only thing I really have in my control is hard work and so it's not enough but it is a lot and that's what I revert back to every single time I really think it's hard to beat somebody who works an hour longer than everybody else in their industry you know it's on average pretty hard now you're going to have outliers but like hard work's one of the easiest things to actually do which seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense given the word hard in there I am a hardwork junkie every time you say um do the thing that you're obsessed with and it's going to be hard to beat Obsession I'm that's like my pornography like I'm very much the hustle culture kind of person however um obviously I want people to live a life that that they're joyful about so I'm I I'm not the psychopath that's like work and that's all that matters yeah um but I do want to push back and say okay if if I like to think about this a lot because I worked in the inner cities I can't remember how much of my backstory yeah you told me that incredible so you're working with people and you're really seeing what Poverty Looks like up close and one it's interesting how they will oftentimes like as a family unit come together there's some beautiful things to it anyway setting that aside because there's way more horror than there is Beauty and I just got obsessed with okay I've got whatever a month with this guy how am I going to train them to actually get escape velocity and get out of the hood and hard work for sure foundational layer but it isn't everything and so the thing there are two things that add to hard work tell me what you think uh one is skill acquisition you have to be a sociopath for acquiring skills because ultimately if you're working hard but stupidly you won't go anywhere and what I find is people confuse hard work with morality it's like this Puritan underlying thing like I worked really hard and therefore I deserve to do well no you don't [ __ ] if you did the right thing the market will reward you because you did a thing that other people can't do and so getting people to understand the whole reason that you acquire skills is so that you can do a thing that other people can't do and if you can do a thing that the world values better than other people can you will always be employed always and then the other one would be emotional control like if you can't control your own emotions like you are going to be in a very dark place and so hard work Relentless skill acquisition doing the effective thing and then being able to control your emotions that feels closer to like I'm still like that's such a thumbnail sketch and of course it's beyond complicated in each one of those three things yeah um how does that sit I think it sits I mean I think here's the thing that everybody should do if they want to get rich but nobody wants to listen to which is fascinating to me is that amateurs do lots of things and Pros do the few right things and how is that possible it's because Pros teach other amateurs how to do all of those little things that they don't need to do and so they have leverage right so Pros don't have to be busy amateurs do have to be busy because they can't differentiate what is right and effective yet so I think there's this portion of your life where you have to you have to do incredible amounts of hard work because you can't delineate what is good versus what is busy work and every one of us just needs to realize that some point and the only way you start to realize what is good versus busy work is through skill acquisition one of the skills of which is what is effective versus what is just filler and so you know you don't even you don't even have to pick up numerous skills you can be like what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett talk about which is making three to five really high signal to noise bets over your entire career and sitting lazily on your asses for the rest of the time I mean Munger talks about all the time that in fact their strategy is only one thing which is when they see big risk they go in huge if they think that risk can be rewarded and they do not go in if they do not see a huge risk reward so they just are professional nosers and that's because they learn to differentiate the difference between busy busy work and good work and I think that is where most people should strive can you strive to actually determine what actions to take that will make movements or change and it's really really easy to say but hard to do I mean think about it in your business in my business every single day there's a too to-do list so big I will never ever finish it and I have to determine every single day what is the one thing that if I do it becomes the fulcrum on which I get to place lever that moves a giant boulder and if I can't continuously get closer to that one thing the business will fail and I think that's how most of us are is we have to be able to figure out what does a fulcrum look like what does a lever look like and what do just a bunch of pebbles look like that are going to do nothing for me and that's actually quite hard okay skill acquisition matters a lot yeah getting that leverage matters a lot we've painted uh a dark picture about where we're going but I don't think I neither of us are afraid paranoid yes uh because only the paranoids survive but when I say I'm paranoid what I mean is I'm trying to see the angles yeah I'm not taking that it's going to happen easily for granted yeah so I my channel can be rightly accused of quote unquote Doom and Gloom but I'll just blame all of you [ __ ] cuz that's all you click on in a headline uh but the what I hold myself accountable to is every word out of my mouth is something I actually believe so I believe all the things that I'm saying I just don't have uh crippling fear the only thing that that maybe unnerves me even though I'm a huge proponent of it is AI we'll get to that later so anyway uh potentially quote unquote dark period coming from a recession standpoint I say dark because a lot of people who aren't paranoid who either don't have the intellect or have not put the time in or just don't have the right set of ideas whatever they're going to get blindsided I love too many of those people so it it it does appear as a dark time to me however you have a quote from Baron Rothchild uh that I think Bears bringing up yeah buy when there's blood in the streets even if the blood is your own maybe especially when it's your own and he became a Titan of Industry uh probably one of the richest men ever on an inflation adjusted basis so I think he did okay and uh you know I was thinking I I pulled some some data for us uh for this conversation today because here's the thing if you haven't been if you haven't been through a recession yet uh you're going to survive this next one too I mean if you look historically and we can show this graph too we we survived 90 99 two you know 2020 2008 those were just the recessions during my working years and if you look at what happened after all of those recessionary periods not all of them bounced back in a v-shaped recovery but all of them have bounced back and so the best predictor of the future is the past it's not perfect but it's likely that we will continue to sur survive as a country and as individuals just like we have historic and so I think even though it's scary out there realizing a sale is coming can also be really really powerful what do you mean sale when the market goes down everything becomes cheaper you already seen that Austin's one of the worst hit real estate cities in the country so if you're looking to buy real estate in a market that has Tesla moving to it that has Dell that has a bunch of Google headquarters uh moving to it a bunch of Facebook employees move to it a bunch of AI it's like one of the defense AI um centers of the country but it's you know the average uh house in Austin's down somewhere between 20 to 30% and so what does that mean well interest rates are coming down and houses are 20 to 30% cheaper and so you can buy a house for less money at less interest rates than you could a year ago and probably your pay hasn't gone down by 20 to 30% and so in this market you're going to have a bunch of opportunities to buy things at sale and most people get their money I sort of think about it like the unprepared transfer their money to the prepared during downturns and so if you do not listen to channels that are Doom and Gloom about what might come then when it comes one you won't recognize it two you won't act on it and three you will actually lose from it because somebody also take advantage of your panic and so one of my biggest missions is just getting people to see the pattern because once you see oh look this happened in 2008 it happened in 2020 it happened in 99 it happened in 90 and by the way signals right now that show the same thing well then you might be prepared for what's coming and it might not scare you when you see that you know auto loans are at the highest level since the last recession uh auto loan uh defaults that you might not see that credit card delinquencies are at alltime highs and that might not scare you you might instead go okay well something's coming on sale so how can I make sure I have enough cash to do something with how can I Circle up a couple friends so we could make a smart investment in property during this period because the other thing that's interesting those big scary people we talk about all the time Black Rock Blackstone all the big companies they get a credit crunch too you know they they cannot get as much access to Capital as they can during normal markets so that's another one there's very few times where the poor get to steal from the rich and one of them is in a downturn if the poor are actually thoughtful enough about preparing for it and you can't do it in a big way but you know most of America will die broke alone and fat and so if that's the case one smart house acquisition one smart multif family acquisition is enough to set up a family for generations and it's just continuing to take those small steps in a period where most people are acting emotionally walk us through so you are um I've heard you speak to people before like this this is the time you need to be ready as you were just saying but you also need to act so what is your very unique br rrt uh strategy for not only getting through a recession but really taking advantage of it yeah so we have a a strategy about how to buy businesses during a recession and we talk about you buy a recession resistant business so think a plumbing company a landscaping company a company that you work in you could even buy part of it during a down period where maybe your boss needs a little bit of capital or your boss needs you to go out and bring in more clients for them and you do that in a recession resistant sector you raise price because most small businesses are underpriced somewhere from 30 to 300% and you add technology and this generation in particular like if you are young and hungry you are 10 to 20 to 100x more Tech competent than the average small business owner and so your ability to work alongside one or take over a small business and add technology that makes things cheaper faster better is probably quite High I mean in fact I was with this cleaning company this week that we met might invest into and all these guys did they're they're window cleaning they're a window cleaning company they went from uh unemployed laid off during covid uh from pretty good jobs and uh no money you know trying to figure life out they're first year in business in a window cleaning company they did $200,000 in Revenue the next year they did $500,000 in Revenue this year they'll do somewhere between $700,000 and a million dollar in revenue and these are two kids that are both sub 28 years old one with a newbor baby on the way and how did they do it they added incredible social media marketing so they do really funky videos they added really incredible branding and Merchandising because can you name one window cleaning company of course not nobody can so how could you as a young person get on board with a business that's very simple but hasn't been sex up by the internet and hasn't been sexed up by adding technology and I think those are all around it's just on the internet I think people look down on those types of businesses because we were told for so long let's go become a doctor a lawyer let's go to school let's go to college what if you're actually happier with a little dirt under your fingernails in a company that you own where you get to get out of your house occasionally away from a screen and get to know your neighbors and your community turns out you might be happier than working at Mackenzie or Bane for 60 hours a week under somebody else's thumb and that is something that not enough young people I think know yet it's really interesting I think you've got your finger on something that is that is going to be a cultural shift of massive proportions I had a friend over last night um shout out to Dean who was walking me through his new thesis so he's he's done everything in from um helping Finance films creative producing to spcs to traditional investing I mean just all all over the place and he was like hey I've got a new thesis and um he was like like we're going through this really interesting transitional time you're can to have a ton of baby boomers retiring but they're not going to have anyone to pass their business on to you've got a lot of people frustrated this is going to start to sound familiar here uh working traditional jobs they don't want to be in Investment Banking and so the new play is going to be skip College buy a business and I said my friend I have somebody you need to talk to um but I imagine a lot of people listening to this if they're new to your world that is going to sound ridiculous especially in a time where we're going into a recession so if they don't have access to money they've never bought a business never run a business why would this be a good idea how do you um for a second just you're here to persuade you're here to help make that Revolution actually come true what do you tell people first I say don't do it if you don't like pain because owning a small business is painful owning any business is pain owning any business is painful and there will be nights that you will regret it but here's the flip side the second that somebody tells you you shouldn't do it and yet they are an owner or they run their own business you ask them why didn't you go back to being an employee for somebody else and they won't have a good answer they'll say well I'm unemployable well I had no other choice and the best don't listen to what people say listen to what people do and what people do is when they get a taste of Freedom they either want to partner with other people on more deals and businesses or they want to work for companies that they're obsessed with they don't want to have to work for companies that they don't like doing things that they don't want to do for money anymore and so I will say it's painful but it is worth it and that for most people running a small business is not rocket science especially today I think it's never been easier to start a small business uh as evidenced by the amount of businesses that have been started somewhere between like 2 to 5x the number of businesses that were created over the last three years as the past 10 years and that's just determined by like LLC and entity creation but it's never been harder to have a pro uh profitable business so most small businesses 90% of them never even hit the $1 million Mark oh and so with that out there I've always had this idea of well it's really hard to figure out product Market fit in a small business right like most businesses somewhere between 30 to 40% of them die because they couldn't find product Market fit just they had an idea and nobody wanted their idea right and so I'm kind of like that I don't I don't know that I have a crazy idea that somebody's going to want to buy I never had that and so instead I'm like why don't I just buy a couple of these small businesses and I can partner with the founder of the small business and I know that somebody already wants it because they have revenue and it's profitable and I could just help it grow and so we see that again and again and again but nobody taught us this in school because it's there's risk right you when you go and get a job at Mackenzie or Bane there's no risk of you losing money you know they're going to pay you a salary which is largely guaranteed unless you get fired And yet when you go and buy a small business you could lose money and you could not make money and you could owe money from debt and so I think people are so scared of that they're they're terrified of failing and my point is like the US actually has an incredible system called bankruptcy which a lot of of of countries don't have this is an ability for you to wipe the Slate if a business doesn't work out for you well what's the best time to wipe the Slate when you really don't have anything anyway so when you're young and you don't have a lot going on I don't know why you wouldn't take a huge risk and try to buy into a business try to earn into a business because you're because you're a general contractor and you work in a construction business and you can't progress any further in the construction business so you go to a competitor that you realize a 65 years old plus and you say to him hey what are you doing with your business are you going to sell it at some point are you going to run it forever you going to give it to your son no you're not well maybe somebody like me could buy into part of your business and I could could earn into it using the profits and pay you out over time like would you ever consider something like that and it turns out small business owners don't have other options if they're under $10 million in revenue for the most part and so there's a lot of these small businesses that will just close as opposed to get transferred and I think I think you know by now we've taught I don't know five six thousand people how to buy businesses across our courses and um and our Mastermind they bought something like $262 million in Revenue wow yeah and these are people who are like former teachers Engineers um they're doing seller financing they're doing SBA Loans and what I've realized I can almost tell immediately if somebody will be successful at it or not like if they'll buy a business or not and the way I can tell if they will be successful or not is do they complain about how much work it is and if they say this is a lot of work you know I just kind of want the deal to fall in my lap you're probably not going to be successful buying a business the ones that say that they're willing to do the work it's fascinating I haven't seen one of them go sideways yet we've seen three people's deals go sideways and all of those were because they didn't want to keep working on the business and so I think I think hard work is really an underrated an underrated thing in a society that wants nobody to work and everybody to take do you have a mental model for why that is why everybody wants that these days not necessarily why they want it though maybe that's part part of the answer but why you're I think you're rounding hard work to something yeah um I don't think you literally just mean work hard but since we've already gone into detail on that so whatever that thing is that you're rounding it to do you have a mental model for why that's so important I see what you mean well one of my favorite questions to ask when I interview people is when was the last time you worked all night on something by your choice and what was it what did you do literally for me like well yeah for you I know what it was for you though I bet uh uh the last time I worked through the night it's a good question I think that was for the comics that was the last time because we had a deadline to pitch yeah and so I had to hit that deadline yeah yeah that was the last time it through the night and you know what it would be a fun thing is there are many people I bet listening to this that would say I have never worked through the night for something I've never wanted something so bad that I was willing to sacrifice sleep for one night which like Brian Johnson is not going to like you know he wants us to sleep which I it from a health perspective but there is such a joy in working on something that is really hard but really fun and you know my husband is uh former military and and a Navy SEAL and when I look at his relationships I'm in awe of them his friendships from that time you know they've become my best friends they stay with us we stay with them we're great you know we're God Parents to his kids we have this this tight-knit community that's almost impossible to break if I needed to bury a body they would just ask asked me the coordinates and they would be there and um and the reason that he has that is because they went through something really hard together and people wonder why they I mean the youth I read this quote the other day the youth today especially young women sub30 say that uh not a single person really knows them not one single person we have a crisis of of friendship and family in the US and Faith lowest levels of that across the board and I was talking to Arthur Brooks the other day who just wrote a book with Oprah who's one of I think the great thinkers on happiness Oprah or Arthur Arthur and and Arthur said said there's four things that determine happiness and that is Faith Family friendships meaningful friendships uh and work that serves and he's like we've done Decades of research on this at both Harvard and at AI where he was previously and he's like and so it's no surprise the people are more unhappy than they've ever been because they feel more disconnected than they ever have because they have no purpose in their life and nobody to share it with all right so that was a response to me asking the thing you call hard work is the under appreciated thing and we ended up talking about faith and family and friendship that's really interesting so um I'm gonna see if I can tease AP part the way that you think yeah okay so part of this is you have a base assumption that working hard is in and of itself if tied to a thing that you love is the reward in and of itself yeah is it love first hard work second or is hard work in your mind an inescapable need that's a good question I know this that everyone has had a moment where they're so miserable working on the thing that they're working on that they almost can't stand it any longer they just want to quit they do quit they make irrational decisions because their their misery gauge at work is so high and I've felt that before and if I go back and think about why did that hard work not make me happy what what was the root cause of that I think it is at the moment in which you feel like you have nothing else that you're learning so I coordinate hard work with learning I'm usually learning something if I'm working hard at something I coordinate that with working on something that matters so if I if I've lost my why for why I'm working and then lastly if I'm working with people that I don't aspire to be or don't want to be around so it's sort of this like people purpose and this learning component that if I have those three things the hard work is really fun but if I don't have those three things then perhaps the hard work feels futile unnecessary and more like labor than work I'll be curious to hear if this resonates with you there's a spiritual component to your mission to get people to consider buying small businesses that now I'm I've always known that was true but I didn't know why it was true um now teasing that stuff out so some of this is a an aspect of a life well-lived for you yeah I think that's true like did you ever work in a cubicle yes yeah did you work in a cubba when you didn't work for yourself yes have you seen the Tucker Carlson response to um oh gosh postmodernist architecture uh I've no but I've seen the headlines now you make me wish that I had clicked beautiful I can send you the clip afterwards if people are curious but but basically um he's in an interview with somebody can't remember and he says postmodernist architecture is a um I'm gonna simplify meant to suck your soul out yeah it's basically like it's it's um yeah meant to demise Humanity you know postmodernism is a direct affront to humanity it wants to suck the human out of us and how he ends it is he basically says and no privacy at all and then he says very intensely it is because they do not value you they do not value you as a human you are a number nothing else to them and that is why po modernist and cubicles demoralize humans because they are showing you with their actions that you mean nothing you mean nothing to them and when I watched that I thought God as a creator of things which is how I think about building and what we do here too everything that I put my name on is like a little piece of me right the things that I'm creating with my hands there's a reason that I'm doing it I only have so many seconds and minutes and hours in my life in fact we have very few of them and so why would we put our workers in these instances that show that we don't care about them at all that it's like copy repeat copy repeat copy repeat and I'm a capitalist so I understand the idea of of profits and losses and needing to be Capital efficient but I also really believe in humans and I believe in our ability to elevate one another and that if I find Tom in his zone of Genius in a place that has power for for Tom I believe in the power of place then I will have a Tom that outperforms on an incredible level and I don't mean distractions which is where I think Google and all of them got it wrong foosball and nap chairs and whatever we don't need to be children that when we stop working we have to go play around with something else in order to distract ourselves from our work we don't need that but we do need to see beauty around us because we're capable of it and why wouldn't we and so I think you're right there is part of this that I think is almost spiritual and the place where I found the most Flow State just like athletes do when they when they do their craft I find the same thing when I'm caught in work that means something and I think for people to say you should have work like balance you should not work all the time you know that that is is bad for your mental health it's like what the [ __ ] do you know about what flow is is flow netflixing and drinking on Friday evenings because it doesn't have to be but if it's if that's for you let it be you and I'll do yeah that's not Flo um Flo I will say has a definition but uh that won't be met by that anyway probably not the important part of that um the spirituality so I can feel you trying to make the world a better place which I love it is very much why I do what I do as I said earlier I think we are in a battle for ideas yeah uh one of the ideas so everything is Downstream of ideas so they grip us at the individual level they grip people at the collective level and so it really matters what we push and promote um you have a very unique stance on hey there's a thing that you're probably not thinking about that's not currently in the Zeitgeist as the cool thing to buy the boring business the Gateway business that will make you realize that these are being run by people no smarter than you to sort of Co-op the Steve Jobs quote um I think that's really important and I think that marrying that back to your message is going to be really important so that people understand hey I'm trying to me Cody Sanchez I'm trying to reach out into your soul and help you find that path to the thing you secretly want which I Tom Bilu will round to fulfillment I think that's what everybody wants and so I have a mental framework for why hard work is so important I think we have an evolutionary algorithm that runs in our mind that absolutely mandates that we work hard and that nature only has two levers Pleasure and Pain nature over God knows how many hundreds of thousands millions of years has been shaping us from amoeba to now uh saying surviving is going to be hard and my job as nature is to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids so there are going to be certain things that I'm going to incentivize and if you get a tremendous dopamine rush or whatever when you work really hard and make progress towards a goal now all of a sudden you're going to want to do that because man if you ever watch the TV show alone no I need to like start getting a a kickback from Amazon who I think hosts the show I talk about this so much that gives a real glimpse into what all of humanity was like until like a thousand years ago I mean it it is hysterical how hard it is to stay alive to just like find enough calories to live it's bananas you don't have to go I read so much history you don't have to go much more than a hundred years back in time to hear where it was like oh we were just trying to get from here to Oregon uh you know and we were suddenly eating slugs oh and then we ran out of those and so we had to eat each other as we died it's like yo so we all play that game didn't we yeah organ Trail uh so life is a level of hard that we don't understand so Evolution had to make doing hard things internally rewarding so that we just have this algorithm that says oh you work really hard well done good on you and if you aren't working hard it's going to feel wrong that's part one part two is entropy and if I could come up with a simpler word but that that really is the right word yeah meaning that all things are fighting against you uh if you want to jump high gravity Yanks you back down if you want to start a business other people are going to start a similar business if you're doing well people are going to copy you one of my favorite stories from our time at Quest so when we launch Quest We Looked ridiculous compared to all the other um companies in the health and nutrition space they all looked what we call veins and chains so it was all aimed at bodybuilders nobody was using food porn it was just all tough guys big muscles veins bulging literally chains draped around their neck red and black I mean taking a page out of Hitler's Playbook which if you've never read minec conf I'm really doubling up on my uh learning from the Psychopaths day here uh but he just lays out like oh this has a certain psychological reaction so we're like we're going to be everything that that's not we're going to be uh blue because it Peaks creativity we're going to be food porn we want to feel like welcoming and inviting and we did so well three years later I walked to somebody else's booth at a trade show because I thought it was ours and I was like these [ __ ] like they've literally just copied everything that we're doing yep so anyway you get everything is fighting against you and if you don't get real pleasure out of working hard you just won't ever be able to overcome entropy it it will there just so many things fighting against you and so to to be able to run a business is really what you've said hard work and what I call the physics of progress which is just it's iteration you you it it's very important that you do the steps but if you can work hard and run the physics of progress you really can pull this off but I think people need to contextualize oh this is a spiritual journey I'm doing this as somebody who's pursuing fulfillment I'm doing this as somebody who looks out at this particular moment which I certainly do I think you share and we're at a Tipping Point for the wrong ideas taking a hold of people and so we're talking about business recession etc etc but this is really about what ideas should win and hard work recognizing you can buy a business if you so choose if autonomy is a major driver for you it could be a real path out but I I think if people fail if people just hear the cha-ching of the cash register and they don't understand that you're speaking to their soul as much as you're speaking to their pocketbook they'll get lost yeah I mean I think one of the best books of all time for that is atas Shrugged which has had some political connotation which I don't know why um because it really is about this idea of the joy in finding the thing that you are uniquely built to create on this planet and um you know there's one quote I love from it that's to summarize it's basically like what a tragedy to let your spark go out Spark by Irreplaceable spark in the shadows of the could bees the wha ifs the Mayes and and that always stuck with me of this idea of and at the end of the day I hope I show up at the Pearly Gates rung dry saying to God I had not one drop left which was a paraphrase from an Emma Emma Bombeck quote that I is one of the quotes I go back to a lot who was just like what else is in there like having this curiosity for yourself about what else are you capable of doing is so powerful you know every time I was just at at lunch with with one of my team members and my husband and we were talking about what was the hardest thing you've ever done like the hardest thing you've ever done think about that like one instance and you know we talked first physically and so I remember one of mine it was like hiking a mountain I was super miserable it was blizzarding it was a very high mountain there were creases you know whatever and it turns out I don't like hiking I don't like the cold and I don't like heights right and so it was just like it was miserable you had to poop in a bag you know it was just like not fun multiple days you lost me at pooping but I'm glad I did it because I need to have more of those hard moments to realize how lucky we have it in life and I do think we're kind of as humans we we kind of forget how lucky we have it we have such short-term memory to history which we do not study enough and even to our own history remembering what we've been through before and thus are probably capable of doing in the future you know but I I remember we have a company called Main Street holding company where we own all of our small businesses and that's where we buy other people's businesses or invest in other people's businesses and you know I remember almost every single one of those businesses at some point having a moment where I thought we were going to lose everything you know I remember one company approachment where you know we got all of our money stolen from from a guy that we thought we were best buds with you know um and then was like kind of public about it and how how much that hurt you know I remember when we had our first car wash deals go through and we thought we were going to sell for a huge amount of money and then the whole thing fell through and then you know we almost didn't have the we didn't have the grit to like keep going we were so close to the Finish Line it's like seeing the marathon right in front of you end and then all of a sudden they're like just get in 10 more miles you know and we weren't ready for that and so I remember all of those hard moments and I think those Build You Up and enable you to kind of keep going and you build up these calluses right it's just like weights at the gym at some point like you don't feel them as much and anytime I feel it too much I go to a book from a great like we were talking before I'm reading Ted Turner's book call me Ted right now and it's incredible because he goes through like the things that uh bother you know he he goes through his difficulty like it's Tuesday they know he's like well then we lost a100 million dollars on the games over there and that he literally says it like that moves to the next line and I like rewound it a couple times and I said to myself I want to be so big and have created so much wealth and prosperity that I can say we lost 100 million on that you know think about that but there's a guy out there who that is the way that he thinks and then for all those people who are like crunchy granola hate making money you know think the world's going to end all about climate change what did he do with his billions he owns now the biggest bison Preserve in the world and has single-handedly brought back almost the level of bison in his area which I think is is Wyoming um so guess what money can do a lot of good too no doubt um what is the single hardest thing you've done the single hardest thing I ever did was get divorced when I went through that previously um so that was emotionally the hardest thing I've ever done you know you make a promise to somebody you say you're going to be together for life and then you break that promise and I I tend to try to keep my promises and so that was really hard for me and did you initiate I did yeah and and realizing that you know when you're young and your prefrontal cortex is not fully developed and you listen to what everybody else says your life should be as opposed to having your own internal guiding Frameworks Creed uh vision for life then it's very easy for somebody else to supersede theirs on top of you and I think that's what I allowed to happen to me I superseded my families on top of me my moms you know his and I tried to be uh a painting that somebody else painted as opposed to my own and and I think that happens to a lot of young people because we don't spend that much time asking ourselves like who do we want to be what do we stand for what does our name it mean and uh what do we actually want to work towards and we would we would be time would be better spent in universities if we spent more time on that as opposed to amibas and Pythagorean theorems how do you come to know thyself I honestly I don't know another way besides doing things so hard that it feels comfortable constantly and then deciding if you want to keep doing those things or not you I've only ever learned about myself through negation I don't like this because I tried it and that wasn't great I don't like this because I tried it and that wasn't great I'm not smart enough to go I like that and I want to go after that I kind of have to trial the things and realize I don't like them and then I sort of ping pong my way to finally something that I think is me and so um I think that's a lot of us too and it's okay to have varied career paths it's okay to make a lot of mistakes you just just try to not make ones that are lifetime early and so you know I'm a big proponent of marriage being married is the best thing that ever happened to me this go around and the strongest partner I have by far has ever been Chris in any sense of the word um but I probably wouldn't have made that decision that early without fully knowing myself through having gone through a lot of hard things and realizing what I was willing or not willing to continue what do you think the answer is to that how do you know yourself okay how would I have five minutes and I have to explain to somebody how to figure themselves out okay number one what is this is all going to reveal who you are I've never thought through this before so good do uh this is the problem with interviewing people that are used to being on camera they end up flipping things on you uh one what's your goal what are you trying to achieve yeah I don't care what it is just tell me um so in life what is your life goal yeah yeah so if you almost certainly you will say I don't know right um or you're going to give me a really terrible answer like um I want to be rich or even worse because it's even less specific I want to help people yeah so uh because the money thing isn't bad because chasing money is bad it's bad because fulfillment is my nor star so when somebody's asking me a question that is looming in the background that I everything I operate on in my life assumes that you're trying try to increase human flourishing and decrease human suffering so whether that's at the individual level or the population level uh and I don't want to do things that sound good I want to do things that actually work so uh I ran the experiment for people and chasing money will not fulfill you yeah so anyway uh nail that down and once you have that that's already going to tell you a lot but you then need to know how am I going to get there yeah if you want to help people in what way if you want to get rich what are you going to sell make do whatever um that's going to take you there so that is the big thing and then I would ask yourself if you were in extreme pain what is the thing that would allow you to double the amount of time that you could stay in that pain uh and so this is the um the question sort of posed by um man search for meaning Victor Frank FR so he was saying the Nichi quote a man with a strong enough y can endure almost anyhow so he said you could predict when somebody would die this is in a concentration camp for people that don't know them um you could predict within 72 hours when somebody would die from because it was the moment they gave up 72 hours later they'd be dead and I just thought that was so interesting so what you're really trying to figure out is what are those things that drive you whether they should or they shouldn't to get there you want to start with the big gross what of it all the big gross why of it all but ultimately if you don't track back to your beliefs and your value system you'll be lost and this is what I see happen all the time so if I were you and I were talking and I said I have a pathological inability to be a brand um but I'm I'm really trying and I think that over time especially if I'm right about what I think my brand is right now my brand is I want to teach people how to think from first principles in order to arrive at fulfillment and so that will be in comic books that will be in interviews um I could do a mindset interview I could do an interview now where we're talking about um buying businesses in a recession it could be what is money all of it but it's all the same thing to do that you have to understand how the world works so we are all beholden to the physics of the situation the reason I say that is to think from first principles you have to get down to to physics you have to get as close as possible to things that are not in any way shape or form subjective yeah um so anyway that I think that's finally going to be the thing that's broad enough that everything will fall under that umbrella um it it bifurcates in people's mind so it probably doesn't matter that that's my governing principle to the outside world it'll still seem like I'm all over the place but um that is me working backwards to get to my beliefs my values my base assumptions now if you can do that now we can make real progress so i' I've been talking about this a lot lately and I want to be very clear I I am very impressed by Lex Freedman very impressed I don't know him never met him no encounters whatsoever but uh he did that debate on Israel Palestine and I wanted to basically punch everybody in that debate uh because they were doing my pep peeve which is they arguing at the level of facts instead of at the level of philosophy now philosophy in a modern context is taking on a really stupid connotation which is like it's aidite it's detached from reality false it is getting to the beliefs and values that actually drive the way that you think and so that debate can be summarized as one side believes Israel should not exist and the other side believes Israel should exist now if you don't argue that point everything else is pointless and so they're all arguing about well uh the definition of genocide is this out or the hold on that that's not none of you actually care about that what you care about is should is Israel exist or not and to have that conversation you have to say this is the moral scaffolding on which I'm building my arguments now we're at least arguing about the real thing so this is what my wife and I call don't argue about the Tea yeah the biggest fight we ever got into was over a cup of tea and it was like into like hour three of this screaming match where I was like there's no way I'm this mad about a cup of tea it's just not possible and so what am I actually mad about and then you drill in and you get to the real issues so anyway I think I went over my five minutes here that you're going to start with this sort of gross big planetary stuff but timately you're trying to work your way back to the philosophy that guides your entire life once you get there you'll know who you actually are yeah and a big part of that by the way is your genetic makeup like what do you respond to yeah I think I can tell you why um Atlas Shrugged is political so here's the thing that I find really interesting about the political system it it is born of a truism of the condition which is that you have a social creature that over evolutionary time scales is going to realize that there needs to be dynamic tension between two personality types this is obviously very blunt force trauma here to talk about things in a hypers simplistic way but on the left you have people that are no men Left Behind hyper compassionate um make sure that we have group cohesion everybody come together there's a really interesting reason for that so when I realize the following statement is true it was one of those mic drop oh my god do you know what the best way to store calories for the longterm is fat on somebody else's body oh God so think about this I can only eat so much I can only store so much my stomach will get full so now if I've got meat that's going to go bad I am way better off giving you some an animal with reciprocal Tendencies and now I'm going to feed you even though why would I do that I should just take it all for myself but instead of doing that CU I know I will max out I will eat so much will start vomiting or uh I won't be able to store any more fat and so I'm just defecating it out so way smarter to be like hey I'm going to store some of my fat on your body and then I'm gonna eat you no okay that s there are tribes that do that no but then the next time when you're the one that gets the kill and I don't you're going to be thinking oh I want to store some fat in your body and so it becomes this reciprocal relationship where we're all like Hey we're spreading things around so that there's more of us more likelihood to get the next kill the next kill the next kill and if we share we're good to go and they see this all the way down to um uh vampire bats so you can take a vampire bat and they'll like give a little bit of blood to other people's children not just their own and they they figure this out they can inject the bat's cheeks with air so it looks like they have blood but the bat knows it doesn't have blood so it doesn't go to give them to anybody and the bats will shun that bat's children and not they're like you're not helping our kids we're not going to help yours okay that's the right so the right's like Hey we're not going to do freeloaders because what happens is if you have a system where it's like oh my God no man Left Behind no matter what I'm going to help you then the problem is you get one person in the group that's a narcissist they'll take over everything they will literally just run rough shod so you have to have this balance what I like to call Dynamic tension between the two sides because they're not me to convince the other side I repeat as a PSA they're not meant to convince the other side they're meant to live in this Dynamic tension so that you don't get pathological compassion AKA authoritarian rule I saw this amazing meme it shows uh Care Bears with love shooting out of their hearts and it says what authoritarians claim they're doing yeah and then it shows a real photo of somebody with an AK 47 behind a woman's head and says what they actually do and that's pathological compassion like we're not going to leave anybody behind even if I have to kill all of you to get you in line that I think we all lived through a little bit of that not too long ago and then on the right it's so hardcore like pick yourself up by your bootstraps I don't care if it's a 90-year-old dying in the streets in fact I heard you talk about uh you don't buy retirement homes because you're not going to kick a 90-year-old out who can't pay their rent right that's that Dynamic tension you you need both sides and the problem is we're living through this really wacky moment where we're saying No Other Side bad and so uh an Ran's Atlas Shrugged is very much from the rights perspective I think we can be very honest about that and she's like putting capitalists up on uh a hill and I think that all makes sense when you think about when she wrote it and that she fleed a communist country and so of course she's going to be like hey this goes really wrong when you have this pathological compassion and you should not I mean this goes back to where we started you should not be robbing from the people that are good with their capital and giving it to people that are not it doesn't make sense it actually ends up breaking the whole system down and she's not wrong because you need that Dynamic tension but that's why that book has such a like people on the left are going to have such a negative reaction to that in a modern context in more sane times where people actually extended a hand across the aisle it might have still been like oh that's not my vibe but a little less controversial yeah it's such a good point I mean I grew up in a household where my mom was on one side and my dad was on the other side really are they still together yeah wow happily married for decades and they still sort of air that way and um and I thought that was normal you know we we I have something called the four chairs framework which is basically if you want to become really close as a family and used to Dynamic argument which I think is one of the best things you can do uh as a human is is really beat up ideas I mean AI a think tin that I'm a part of the AEI yeah American Enterprise Institute their motto is the competition Brooks yes this is Arthur Brooks I love him I know me too hi Arthur the competition of ideas H kind of like you were talking about you have to beat up ideas to find which one is best and so we used to sit in these four chairs as a family in the dining room and we would debate for hours sort of what do you think about that no I don't like that idea how could you say that and by the end of it we' be like okay good night you know see you guys later words are violence yeah and so that we just had none of that you know and there was no shame to having a certain opinion if you could back it up now if you couldn't back up the opinion then uh you felt some pain surrounding how would you back it up you'd have to I mean we are I I think numbers always beat narrative but numbers can turn into narrative and so as much as possible actually talk about that yeah yeah for sure I mean my mother was a 30-year special education teacher so she was a teacher by Nature um she liked us to think for ourselves and my father um was an entrepreneur came from nothing you know didn't get a chance to go to college you know raised and and ate his own animals went hunting with his father you know to bring back food for the family like you know just totally different than me you know my dad worked in a slaughterous when he was younger in order to pay uh his way whoa you know he's yeah he's kind of seen it all and um and then started multiple businesses but would probably never call himself an entrepreneur or a Founder he would just say like I sell marble you know very humble and uh and we would talk about that because um how much more interesting one are those conversations you know I think some of the reason that we've gotten away from family values in some way is because you we we talk at such a surface level with people so when you come and back and you talk to your parents how often is the conversation like hey Mom hey Dad how's it going what's up with you yeah Life's good with me it takes a lot of energy to go a little bit deeper with people I think that's why people are so obsessed with podcasts because we are actually having less of these conversations in real life we don't have people who will debate us on our ideas it's not something that's okay for you to push back intensely on your friends's opinions uh it's not okay to ask where they got that data point or what they could support that with or why they believe that because most people cannot back up the statements that they have without emotional pleas and so I think people are craving podcast because they're actually just craving real conversation can somebody tell me something that is true and can two people argue you know like I said well I don't really know about that are you sure you're like well let's look it up later neither of us determine that our worth is based on whether our individual idea is right or wrong and these days I think we've lost our identity in ideology and so we have individuals who say my ideas are me and thus if you say my ideas are wrong I am wrong and that is a very dangerous path to tread on and so how much more freeing is it to say I have an idea at this moment I think it's true with everything that I know but if you show me something that I don't know I'm very happy to change it because I am in no way shape or form my individual idea how often are you checking your credit score afraid of identity theft or account breaches we all use the internet every single day for important things like Personal Banking and remote work so why not protect yourself with our sponsor Aura Aura is an all-in-one cyber security service that keeps you safe online Aura identifies data Brokers exposing your info and submits opt out requests on your behalf Ora also monitors your credit tracks your passwords for data breaches and secures your online activity with VPN and anti malware protection you can try Aura for free for 2 weeks by clicking the link in the description or scanning the QR code I think the big problem is that people don't know I'm going to use a gross word but so it'll stick in people's heads they don't know what their God is and utility is my God yeah now if you are pursuing something stupid you will pursue the utility of stupid things but if you're pursuing something honorable and it's the meaning and purpose for your life how could you be focused on anything other than utility that's the thing that drives me crazy Thomas soul is um he just has one of my favorite quotes and he says the last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what worked with what sounds good yeah and that is blasphemy in my worldview because you are now abandoning utility actual usefulness actually moving in the direction of the thing that you want and this is why again I'm just going to beat this drum to death people need to understand what motivates their reasoning everybody's reasoning is motivated it's motivated towards something uh we were looking at the Tucker Carlson thing postmodernism motivated by power um so you get to your point I I've never thought about it before so I certainly reserve the right to change my opinion about anything at any time but um that the brutalism of the structures which if anybody's never looked up brutalist architecture it's actually a style of architecture that is brutal yeah uh heavy concrete very few Windows nasty nasty Soviet Eastern blnar uh and ironically one of them was just built in La which there was like a whole huge backlash which I'm not surprised anyway and the fluorescent lights and all that if your assessment is right about why they're doing that and my assessment is right that postmodernism really is about power and nothing else uh then it becomes a statement of power we are bigger better stronger than you you work for us you do as you're told um and that when you force somebody to pull into the light what drives their thinking like in fact did you ever see the documentary what is a woman yeah okay it fascinating glad they did it however it would have been more like it becomes just a dunk on the lunacy and it really did come across as lunacy to me but we could pulled it back out of lunacy if you just start asking what are the base assumptions that are driving your rationale yeah and when you make people State like this is why I believe that and one and this I learned this in business so the physics of progress you come up with a hypothesis about what you would need to do to achieve your goal okay what does a hypothesis do a hypothesis makes predictions so when you're talking to somebody what you want to do is say okay the things you're saying are the end result of of a prediction you're making that's invisible to me because you're not saying it out loud you're just telling me the outcome but if I think of that as a prediction then I'm like okay this for that to be true the following base assumption has to be true and so I'll just ask people okay because you're saying that the following statement must be true so for instance um if uh you want to give puberty blockers to a young child um that makes a prediction that you believe that self-professed identity is the most important thing in their life and that you're even willing to put them through a medical procedure that has some risk of complication and death uh is that accurate and they're going to say yes that's true or they're going to say no that's not accurate but I believe If you deny them the ability to express their gender through a physiological change that the rate of suicide goes up okay so the prediction that that makes is that um they are more likely to die die if they don't do this surgery is that accurate yes okay cool that's a testable hypothesis it makes a prediction I can now look at the data and find out is that really true now the problem becomes if that's a red herring and that's not really what's motivating their thinking then it will all fall apart because I will present them with the data and I actually don't know the answer to that but let's say just for the sake of argument that it comes back and no there actually is an increase in likelihood of suicide postsurgery I'm just I don't know that's true I'm just saying if it were if in that moment they go okay word like what we're seeing in England where they've they've now banned the use not just Tav a stock closing down they've now banned the use of puberty blockers on miners okay so they look at the data and they change word I'm here for that but if somebody looks at the data and then they say oh no no no we still need to do it for this reason and you'll get this all the time with uh in business where somebody will say this is why I couldn't get that thing done and you're like okay why didn't you do this well no that's not really the reason it was because of this okay why didn't you do that well no no no it's not really that it's this I will say you're making me Chase you don't make me Chase you just tell me the reason and then we will and if there's four reasons give me all four and then we'll go through them one by one but this is a knowable set of things right the problem is again people they argue with the level of fact they're just two ships passing in the night instead of getting down to what are your base assumptions what predictions do they make and do those pred come true and if people start thinking through that so rather than trying to be right or pass judgment which is what I could feel in that documentary instead of that like it's what I call trapping people in their own values you just tell me your values and then we'll see is the thing you're doing leading to your value or not and if your value is madness then we can at least I now know what your value is right like Hitler that [ __ ] just told everybody what he was going to do uh need somebody to blame Jews are going to work they've worked all throughout history so we for sure uh blaming the Jews and then we're going to take over Russia sh don't tell them yet but we're going to take it over because we want that to be the new version of what America was you know whatever 7500 years ago where everybody just flooded into America for opportunity and land he was like that's going to be what we do with Russia is it will be Europe's America I he literally just said this [ __ ] and so he had a value system where it's like uh the lives of the German people the Aran race whatever words he would have used are superior yeah okay so that's a pretty ugly uh prediction that that makes uh that also predicts that you're going to do all the things that he ends up doing but you're now pulling it out into the Forefront nothing's hidden everything's out on the table and now we can say uh do we think that human life is equally valuable or not and you start getting people saying this stuff and it's like whoa now we you can just follow things out to their natural conclusion and you find the place where it breaks because what I what I'm always encouraging people to do is you need to reflect somebody's beliefs values back to them in a way that they would recognize so that they wouldn't be like no you're twisting my words or whatever now it's out on the table now you can make progress yeah it's really you know I think if people want to understand what is happening in the world around them and be able to influence it quickly efficiently and without emotion they should read a book like statistics for dummies because I actually think a lot of what you're talking about are two things first is we don't understand statistics we don't understand probabilities we don't actually understand how to look at the numbers presented to us in a worldview and statistics Drive business they drive wealth they drive the economy and then the other H half is the the um being able to follow the scientific method so I think X hypothesis I want to test that hypothesis here's how the scientific method works and those two things we learned in school but not they were not the focus of lots of what we did I recall learning much more calculus than I did statistics and in fact statistics do not have to be super um deep mathematical learnings they can be understanding assumptions and how to read uh the math that is happening behind the scenes and I think a lot of the reasons why we get sold a bunch of Lies is because we don't actually understand statistics and scientific methods so we end up going with what feels good and sounds good as opposed to what actually works and Thomas soul is is a genius at this for many many different reasons but you know if people haven't read economic facts and fallacies from him Incredible Book if people haven't read statistics for dummies good if you don't have a basis for how to understand when they show you the you know I always love that uh example of sometimes when I go on the news they'll ask me you know what is the average XYZ what is the average averages really bother me on average because because there it's a really poor way to measure right especially monetarily it's like what does the average American make well really depends how you determine average because you have a few outliers in there you have a bar everybody makes 100K Bill Gates walks into the bar all of a sudden the average income goes from 100K to $10 million or whatever that would be why is that it's because you should have used median a not average and that's not actually mathematically difficult to understand we could start there we don't have to go to super complex biology understanding cryptology and deep understanding of the network State we could just start with Statistics and scientific method as opposed to emotions and narrative I hear a lot lately that like he who holds the best story wins and I do think that is true but the reason that is true is because people don't understand how to poke holes in arguments and if you really want to win be rich be successful you have to understand is somebody lying to me about something that I can verify one way or another which would be Stacks statistics or scientific method all right now let's see if we can agree on why that matters so much why does it matter to you well let's take it from multiple different angles one from a business perspective every business is a constrained business nobody has unlimited resources right so if you just started out starting out and you're doing the $100 startup method and you don't have much money and you don't know how to make a business work very well you have very little dollars so you have to understand statistics to understand where if I put $1 will it be most likely to go out and bring back friends back with me that's just probabilities and statistics and so in business everything you're doing every decision you make is really just a determination of should I do this or this and which one of those is going to make me more money or more opportunity or more options or better decision making something and so business is really just a complex game of statistics that ends in dollar signs right and I think the scientific method is so important because we think about it just in science but all it is is what you're talking about it's like turtles all the way down you know you're just you're trying to figure out what lies underneath the things people tell you so for instance in our content business because I come from Finance I push back really hard on ideas so they'll say well this is we had this argument the other day like words mean things words mean specific things and if we don't agree on the definition of a word we can't actually have a conversation and so what is a good video well lots of people might have different definitions of good so I said okay at this company a good video is one that gets the most views let's just Baseline it a good video at our company is the one that gets the most views is everybody on understanding about that and we had to debate they were like well what if it's a you know this type of video where you're naked or this type of video where somebody's getting shot or like something awful and I go well because we have our Creed and and our values we would never make that video because we understand our values and beliefs so because we understand our values and beliefs then we can decide on a quantitative determination of the word good in the video sense which means views okay fine if we don't do that you have a huge problem because then you go well I think this video is great I think this video is great I don't know what to do with that that's like your personal taste in a video and taste as we all know from the fact that when we go out to a restaurant very seldom do all of us order the exact same thing every single time why because our taste is different and so I think a lot of business is getting really definitional what does taste mean oo taste is difficult to Define so that is a bad word instead we should use a word like does it convert do I make money off of this thing if I make money then it is in taste with this company as long as it follows our Creed does this video get views if this video gets views then it is tasteful according to us and so a lot of people these days don't like definitions they want to be really wobbly with them but that's a huge problem because then you cannot have a conversation and you cannot agree on what a good outcome or a bad outcome looks like but I that's why they do it yeah but I I [ __ ] you not Tom the other day I was like they're like can we please stop talking about this and I was like no we have to like have a argument about what an individual word means and we need to do that continuously across the company and I need you guys to do that individually because otherwise we all feel good because we're agreeing but because our foundation is not the same we're not agreeing at all but what I found with this generation again and again and I fall into it too because I'm a people pleaser sometimes is like nobody wants to have those tough conversations how silly does it feel about arguing over what is one individual word good and yet it's so necessary right the infamous Christmas argument uh on my side so yeah we got in a huge debate as a company and it was me against everybody else and I was like I know I'm burning relationship Capital right now because you all think I'm a psychopath but I'm like it was I don't even remember what the specific thing was anymore but it was like that it was a single word and we're not moving on until we all agree that this is for that very reason now I you described exactly the way that I think about this I use slightly different words exact same idea for me the reason that because it's all started started with why does it matter to detect a lie and are we being lied to by people the whole point of my channel is to say the world Works in a certain way the vast majority of it is behind a curtain that you've never looked behind and so the whole goal of my life which I just happened to make a show about is that I am trying to figure out what's behind the curtain and what I want people to understand is it is I've actually never watched the video with um Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris where they debate truth but the reality is that finding truth is really really difficult now the reason is difficult is because we all wear What I Call Whole Life beer goggles and we cannot see what's really there we're interpreting what's there and so two people can look at the exact same thing and see something completely different I can spend time explaining how this happens from an evolutionary standpoint but just for now we'll say there are algorithms running in your brain and they will control how you perceive the inputs that are coming in yeah okay so if the world Works in a certain way and words matter and narrative matters and even data can become narrative at some point your life is controlled by how you interpret the things that are before you what narrative you're telling yourself and if your narrative doesn't make accurate predictions it's broken so the reason identifying a lie matters is because it breaks your prediction engine and if you want to make money in business statistics are going to be your best friend because you have to understand do I do this or do I do this which is going to have the bigger impact you're asking yourself a question of predictive ability I predict that based on what I know if I do this one I'm going to get the outcome that I want and that's why you do it but if your worldview is messed up if there's something you don't understand you will choose the wrong thing and of course it's never one or two there's usually a thousand options before you and so people just have no idea how to choose because they don't know how they think they don't know where they're being lied to they don't know how to dissect uh the information that's coming in they don't know how to test hypotheses they don't understand that when somebody puts something forward it makes a [ __ ] prediction and if you ask people if you stop and go okay hold on a second what prediction does that statement make and then I'm just going to ask you is this true and if in that moment you're worried about looking stupid then you're just going to nod and smile when they give you some [ __ ] answer which they will almost always do because they probably don't know what's driving this they probably have never thought about the prediction that it makes but man if you really are unafraid to look stupid and you say to somebody okay for what you just said to be true the following base assumption also has to be true and I'll just say it to them is is that true or this makes that prediction is that accurate and if they say no one of two things is true either they're wrong which happens more than you would think and I'm talking from experts the brightest Minds in the world or you don't understand something and if you don't understand something and you're not afraid to look stupid then just keep asking and asking and asking you understand somebody's worldview statement whatever when you go ah it makes this prediction is that accurate and they say yes then it's like okay cool I understand what you're saying and now that I understand I can't be Bamboozled and that is the only way to get good at business and this is why okay I think I may have learned this from you so forgive me Specialists generalists the reason that your business content is so good and your business content is so good thank you is because you're a specialist you buy businesses all day long MH I'm a generalist so I launched a course called business decision making that that is the greatest course I'm gonna I really believe this that is the greatest course on entrepreneurship ever taught and all I did was say to whatever the small group of people uh bring me your hardest business problem and we're going to solve it in real time and then I would just walk people through this is how you do it I don't need to know your industry none of that like I'm going to think from first principles I'm going to ask you questions about what you said makes a prediction I mean literally all the things I'm just talking about but in real time hey and you're going to come back week after week and we're just going to keep going okay now you made progress what's the next problem boom boom boom we go through it and live fire and what I would say to people is I know you think you want copywriting or you want funnel marketing or all of that but you can hire somebody to do that because it's very finite and it's very teachable the real thing that makes an entrepreneur great is the ability to solve novel problems is a problem not only have you not seen before nobody's seen before and so now you have to be able to build up from first principles to think through it but that [ __ ] hardest thing in the world to sell because people know this is your painkillers versus vitamins that [ __ ] is a vitamin and people want painkillers they know they have a problem and if you Market it as I'm going to take you from zero dollar in Revenue to $3 million in Revenue that shit'll sell all day long you're exactly right God damn it it isn't all weather it it will work for one thing in that one moment but it doesn't translate because it's not a framework 100 100% I mean I think a couple things there one is the real definition of a CEO is a scary one so if you say you want to be a CEO here's what a CEO is it's your you go out you hire the smartest people you can possibly find you tell them to fix problems then they find the problems that are so hard even the smartest people you can't find can't solve them they bring them back to you and you have one job only which is to deal with the worst problems that the smartest people that you know can't solve that's all a CEO is and so if you think you are anything more than a firefighter in the most complex fires of all time you're crazy the CEO is not a fun easy breezy position I've never met a CEO that felt that way um that's why they moved to Chairman after a while because they let somebody else deal with it and so I think that's exactly right the other thing that I find fascinating there is um so I started contrarian thinking in 2020 with this idea that people have lost their minds they are no longer able to think because they can't question anything and I believe that I will give like you will make more cash if you are curious than if you are a genius and the reason why is because you can use the collective genius if you are curious and you are limited by your own genius if you are not and so especially with the world of chat GTP if you are a genius but unwilling to ask questions because of your own Brilliance you have just lost the world of knowledge and so I believe our ability to question things is integral to our individual success and uh and yet I thought people were losing that ability and they were smothering it and they were saying it was wrong to question things and I thought that was criminal so I started contrarian thinking and I was like we are going to teach you to question things to be contrarian not for the sake of it but in order to learn and then it was crickets and people were like I think just fine this Noggin is pretty smart I don't need your help thinking better like nobody really goes around and says I wish I could think better except those at the very very very very top it's like a 1% problem most people think that they think fine they just haven't found the deal the money the next job the girl the whatever they don't think there's anything wrong with the way their brain functions and unless it's a pill that can make them like super human intelligence um and so I quickly realized that okay if I want people to think differently how could I get them to do that what would be the Trojan Horse to think in and I was like well what do all humans want they want love in some degree they're greedy they want like some sort of personal wealth right uh and they want maybe relevancy in some way shape or form you could also say they want Health right and so if we have wealth health sex grid uh which do I know a lot about well I I don't really know that much about health uh I don't really want to talk about sex on the internet wouldn't say I'm an expert there either um but what about wealth or gred well yeah I know a lot about that I've been in finance for a long time so what if I could Trojan Horse my way into thinking by getting people to talk about money I'll tell them how to make more money but in the process of telling them how to make more money I'm actually going to get them to think about something more important which is ownership and what do ownerships have they have personal responsibility for outcomes when you have personal responsibility for outcomes you have incentive alignment when you have incentive alignment then when somebody breaks something that you own you feel it when somebody lifts up something that you own you feel it you have the pleasure pain uh you know cycle happening within you and so that is why we eventually started talking about money and contrarian thinking because I realized it's a trojan horse to getting people to care about decision- making because they actually have skin in the game and ownership ownership is the key to freedom and that in fact if you do not have control over your life uh through Financial Freedom it's very hard to have other levels of ownership and I think that is true yeah no doubt um man ownership is such a part of your message and I think it's so so so important um how one why don't people have that like push now that's not the cool thing that it once was yeah it's not is it yeah it's interesting the other day uh we had an employee um you know decide that they wanted to leave to go into a meditation Community like a monastery not really sure and um and I thought about that at first a really good employee by the way great employee and I thought well what is that decision- making and I went back to the to the quote I can't remember who it's from but that the the purpose of Faith or religion is to live it in life that you you know are you truly a it's why the Dal Lama doesn't stay in Tibet right his purpose is to go spread this faith that he has while living life because life is hard and difficult it's very easy to stay peaceful if you're in 247 meditation States and yet I think this generation they presuppose that if they find the perfect circumstance that that will lead to Bliss instead of realizing that actually Bliss is found in the difficulty and so I don't know about this personal situation with this individual but I thought about this a lot because I thought what would make somebody like put their life on pause that way and and you know stay in this one one situation and I think the reason is because we have not been conditioned in this generation to um to find joy in difficulty instead we want to find joy in in extreme pleasure I mean look at what we've done to this generation I mean this is wild and even to parents today we told them we said parents you know uh run your kids around 247 to all of these activities if they get upset in any way shape or form run to the principal you know talk to the parent on their behalf don't let them handle it um if something is wrong with them and they are sad or anxious they are probably depressed or maybe they have ADHD we're going to label them and pathologize them as opposed to tell them they're having a momentary issue we're going to get them into the most expensive colleges or any college we can but then they will have a massive amount of student debt and then on top of that we're going to tell them that uh you know no it it's it's okay about every single feeling that you're having and that is all of this trauma and yes you know your cat died 15 years ago and you are still carrying that inside of your hips and that's why they're tight right because that's where you hold the trauma from you know fluffy and and so this is what we've told parents and kids and so of course they're confused you know they're confused and they don't know what real Joy is and they've checked all the boxes they've done all the things that they thought they were supposed to do and it's led to them being like in debt not that happy not with a partner um you know and so what's next so I do as much as I kind of give my generation Our Generation and the Next Generation a little bit of a hard time I really get it because I was told all those same things too and had to come out on the other side and realize no no I'm the only one responsible for my happiness and that there's actually a lot of joy in the journey and there is no destination that you can reach and by the way you can never stay for the rest of your life in perfect meditation the point of meditation is not that it is to be in life you know I heard this thing the other day that I really liked I think it was Mel Robbins and Mel Robbins was saying uh the eye of the hurricane is what she tries to be so you know the if there's a hurricane and there's chaos and there's tumult and there's broken windows and danger and floods on the exterior of the hurricane in the middle of it it's silent and Serene and so her goal is no matter what's happening out here that she wants to stay silent inside and I was I was thinking about that I was like I like that that philosophy and I was like but you know what's even more interesting the bigger the hurricane the bigger the eye right the more silence inside of it so if you put yourself in bigger more intense situations are you able to find a deeper level of silence and quiet and contemplation and I think the answer is yes you are which goes back to the Ted Turner we lost 100 million bucks on that and so if we all will die and it may be painful at some time and the only truth in life is that we will experience pain we will die and all of our loved ones will die and they will probably not remember us much sooner than we would ever like then we should probably prepare ourselves for that with a bigger hurricane so that as we look the true difficulty of life that is eventual death and difficulty on the path of it it doesn't daunt us because we've lived in difficulty too and so I come closer and closer to that you know that Buddhist idea of you know that life has suffering life is suffering um but that's sort of the point of it all and that you can find joy in that and it's way too deep you know Tanner would go that's deep um but uh but I think it might be true the storm destroys most everyone that it touches that's the the problem how do you I mean do you think about that like the like creating hurricanes for no reason no do you lament to God wail from your gut at the fact that you can create an eye in the middle of the largest storm but that most of the people you know and love will get Torn to Pieces I think I don't think that I have that individual power I think I think all of us are like um I get really careful about like overstating what I think I'm capable of and so I don't think I am capable of destroying the ones around me no no no not you I'm saying that uh I am very distressed that most people will not be able to do most people won't be able to be a CEO most survive their own hurricane they create yeah exactly like this is one of those where I don't want it to be true I've just seen it play out too many times yeah that and you and I have both said the same thing so I know that you see what I'm about to say which is Step number one of being a CEO is ask yourself do you really want to be a CEO yeah because all I hear when someone says I want to be a CEO is that you want to get punched in the face over and over and over no it really like really really really and the longer I do it the more punches I take yeah and you do start going huh I routinely am asking myself why am I doing this and in fact it's really interesting to compare my wife and I okay so I have married my equal my wife is UN unimaginable and and she has helped me become the person that I am and I I really don't even know who I would be without her because of how gifted she is and how smart she is and all that she can't do what I can do yeah so and she will be the first to tell you I mean she did tell you literally before we started rolling she was like I don't don't want to be CEO I see what he has to deal with and I don't want it Y and um that like it is so exciting for me and I can give the spe I I can be the dancing bear that you uh poke fun at I can be the dancing bear of motivation and be very performative around like just living in that personality of the person that can create the calm and that you can do anything you set your mind to um and and then I've seen it up close and the reality is that most people don't have the skill yeah emotional management that that's what being the eye of the storm is is can everything be burning down around you and you're not panicking yeah you're concerned you're taking decisive action but you're not panicking yeah and what I have found is that the person you lost to the monastery like Place uh they're the norm yeah what's interesting is they to give to steal men their argument I keep in my back pocket that life choice MH I studied Eastern philosophy a lot when I was younger at one point I actually called myself a Dost and I meant it I was a Dost said and I always contended with the idea of becoming a monk of some kind and I thought I really believe that the um the Wellspring of all suffering is desire that makes sense to me and but what I found was that that felt like a choice between engaging with life and disengaging from life and you could say that you're engaging with the pursuit of non-attachment but it just isn't how it felt to me yeah and I'm perfectly willing to accept that maybe that's just the part of my spiritual journey that I'm on and one day I'll be start laughing at my myself that you know Detachment was the right answer all along yeah but I decided I'm I'm going to fully engage with life but for my sanity I keep in my back pocket that I could just stop wanting any of this yeah and the second I sto wanting to grow my YouTube channel to make more Revenue to be an entrepreneur for the ages to build the next Disney I could just let go of all of that and if I actually let go of it all of a sudden those punches Don't Hurt Anymore they don't matter it's you just let it go now you do have to contend with freedom coming from Financial Freedom but one way to do that is to beg for food and live in either a monastery or a cave and come out every now and then with your Rice Bowl it's uh I don't pass judgment on that lifestyle I just don't currently want it for myself but it's in my back pocket yeah I like the back pocket idea I think I think it's really important and I don't have a good definition for it so I have to work on this but this idea of ownership I do not think has to mean owner I think there needs to be a difference between the two and ownership uh in my opinion there's like four levels to Rich I think about monetarily and so you have the first level is like a spender you make money you spend it the second level is a saver right you make money you save some of it the third level is an owner in my opinion that you take the money and you apply it towards your Pursuits so you invest in you working more your business Etc and the fourth level is an investor and that's you take your exess and you invest it in other people and their Pursuits and the the levels you know you you can't really go from a spender all the way to an investor I don't believe I think you kind of have to like climb the rungs and I've thought a lot about what does ownership mean because I do not think everybody should be an entrepreneur or a CEO in any way shape or form but do think that they should have some skin in the game for what they're doing and they should have a way where they can continue to earn even if something catastrophic happens to them so that could be that they have additional income streams that could be Investments that could be that they help their wife or husband learn a new skill and thus the family has multiple income streams and what they do that could mean you know sovereignty in that they live on the land and they like subsidize part of their you know income that they would need by growing things or having agricultural tax credits but I think it's really important that we don't become like you talked about people who own nothing and like it I think we can be people who want less material things because our neighbors have them but simultaneously have more ownership of the things that can protect us from negative consequences like a health event where you need money like an authoritarian regime that tells you they want you to do x y and z money is like it's an option that you get to either use or not use and so I need to narrow down this idea of ownership but I do think you're right not everybody should be a CEO and and what what trouble would we be in if everybody was one who would work with us right I think the job of a CEO also is to have a dream so big that your umbrella has room enough for many people and to sell them that dream and to show them that your dream is bigger than anything that they could create individually and is going to uplift them in a way that is bigger than what they could do by themselves it might be more fun and might be more interesting um because high high performing teams are a joy to be in um I actually think one of the worst things that ever happened to us was that we sold this lie that remote work was better for us I think it was actually really detrimental and me mental health numbers seem to to show that and that you know I say online a lot you know our our teams we make them as much as possible come back to to the office and it doesn't mean they have to be there every day we don't put them under fluorescent lights and and cubicles um but we do require them to now all be in Austin for contrarian thinking we bought a studio there we bought a headquarters we're hiring like crazy my other company Biz Scout is located there too contr and thinking Capital based there so it's Main Street holding company and so I'm bringing all the people back into the office because I see what happens when they're on an island and I think it's really really negative but I have to get closer on that idea of of ownership in order to to explain it like even how you know it used to be that the people who owned companies were not unaligned shareholders that just gave them money for their stock right that really have no ability to affect the outcome you and I both anybody who owns stocks you have a percentage of Google you have a percentage of Amazon but you are not really aligned with the employees and the people inside of Google or Amazon you just want as much money as you can get for that stock and there's actually really perverse short-term incentives that happen with that really perverse and so I think as an employee part of your game should be I want to make as much money as I can to a certain degree and then I want to invest it in things that are oi to me and I want to find ways to skill stack to become so valuable that the people I work with will give me some percentage of a company a deal you know uh an opportunity to invest in another company along onside them and that's where I think we went a little bit wrong like my employees don't have Equity at contrarian thinking well one does now but two of them just got Equity at one of my other companies um and so they're now they're now Partners they're owners in that business even though they're also employees and I think we should be able to do that a lot with our top performers and just like people shouldn't stay at minimum wage they should aspire to grow into more you know I agree aggressively what do you think about Black Rock and big companies buying everything so Main Street holding company is where we own all of these companies right we have like 26 companies in the portfolio right now and not so long ago my goal was I want to create the next KKR carile I was like I saw how this these guys operate I want to create a private Equity Fund that's just as big I've already raised a billion dollar fund at at First Trust and yeah I can do this again but let's do it in a better asset class which would be uh private companies and so I went was on my mar way buying these companies and then I kind of started seeing what was happening with a lot of these private equity-owned companies and it's stripping the employees turning it into post-modernist buildings with fluorescent lights and cubicles it's uh nobody knows your name when you go to the corner store it's that they have perverse incentives because they want to strip it and flip it to somebody else and then that next person wants to strip it and flip it and a lot of these companies you know get sold by three or four private Equity companies before they go public and they've lost kind of their soul and so I realized man I want to build a billion doll company maybe multiple billion doll companies but I don't want to own all of America's small businesses I want Americans to own those businesses and if I can create value by building something that hasn't existed before that's cool but do I have to go gobble up all the things that other people could own within their communities no and so I am very much pushing back against the big guys everything and we have to work for them I think and D I mean I don't know if we talked last time but for those economic nerds on here like if you don't understand the unfair advantage that black rock and Blackstone has it will scare the hell out of you like if you think about it this way they have immense data right because they've been doing this for a long time they have most of their former Executives having at some point or the other worked in the FED been consultants for the FED been in itical positions um been the chairman of of the FED uh they have also by the way all been at varying companies like the CEO of Black Rock and Blackstone who have both uh you know one's been an owner of the other company before and they get rates to buy these companies and houses and assets and anything that you want to talk about that are like one half to one3 to 1/4 of the rates that we have if we want to buy these individual companies and why do do they have that because they have all our money because you and I have our investments at Black Rock in their ETFs which means that they get to use those assets on the balance sheet to have lower rates to buy things that then increase the prices of single family homes in the US with our dollars and I think that is Criminal and I'm I don't love the government regulating many things but I think they should at least get their neck off the little guy get their foot off the neck of the little guy get their neck off the foot of the little guy yeah get their foot off the neck of the little guy there go dyslexia live you know what's interesting though I've heard you talk about that before there is some crazy stat about the highest paid CEOs or Founders I forget uh like onethird of them have dyslexia oh is that true it is true yeah so I'm going to guess that there's something about the way that what reads is oh I have a hard time keeping these things straight yeah is a blurring of the lines so there's less rigidity in the categorization I'm guessing here but this really feels like it'll be true there's a blurring of the lines of categorization of different things so like a be and a do they don't have like a distinct categorization between them but that allows you to make more sort of unique connections between things so people with that like Richard Branson I know is dyslexia there's a ton of them um that would make a lot of sense to me yeah there's also this this is like a fake pathology like so many are today but there's one that's um basically you can't get analogies right and so my my husband always jokes with me that I must be a Russian agent because I'll be like the thing is dogs and horses it's raining today and he's like what is wrong with you and I just for some reason I can't keep them right and so I mess them up in my head all the time so I could never be a politician because there' just be meme after mem of me just fine just fine he's a groundbreaker actually they you know what's funny they both are in a way like Biden has shown you don't have to be eloquent at all to be the president and you could mess up all the numbers always be shy of dementia yeah you could trip often and be a president and then Trump has shown that you could have every bad thing you know like you could have lawsuits against you you could say a bunch of crazy things and just be like nah anyway we're going to keep going and there's like good and bads to both sides sometimes I look at Trump and I'm just like God how do you keep putting up with this cuz I would have I would have given up by now bro yeah uh I'm not loving our choices at that level um I have Joo willink on tomorrow so many people have asked so I'm not even going to waste my time asking him if he'll run yeah um but man would I prefer somebody like that now you do a lot of political fundraising tell me more what's your how do you think through that problem so I know some of the origin story is what you told us earlier regulation gets changed business goes poof gone um so you care do you think more at the local level at the federal level yeah I think all politics is really local politics and that's how it should be and so you know if you actually want to sh if you want to see firsthand the impact you can have uh go to your local community because nobody cares I mean I went to one um Community uh city council meeting in Austin and it was the most fascinating thing I've ever seen uh that the room is entirely empty until like the very end because the entirety of the meeting is like meaningless meaningless meaningless meaningless and at the very last 10 minutes when they know like everybody's going to be asleep and they're kind of done they try to push through like really aggressive legislation and then a crazy thing happens which is both sides pay people to come in so whichever sides you're on and like Heckle them and say crazy things on both sides and what I realized by watching that is like God there's actually not 50 people on both sides of this debate there's like three people here and four people here and they're sort of trying to play each side against each other and Austin is very contentious at the city council level and so I saw that and thought huh that's really interesting like I could I don't know if I could do anything federally I don't know if I could have any change there but in my local community I certainly could and you know so we supported some things that helped with ensuring that homeless in the city of Austin uh you know were actually tracked that uh housing was available that the you know multiple hundreds of millions of dollars that they allocated to homeless housing and uh and movement was actually used uh and not just studies that they pay to Bane and McKenzie to push it down the line three to five years out which is what a lot of those that money goes to and so um so I think the local level is really interesting and you can have uh a lot of change there and then I watched you know we lived in in multiple cities where I watched just I watched what happens when those of us who have succeeded in some way shape or form just go I don't really like politics I'm just going to do business I don't want to deal with all that of course who wants to deal with it Psychopaths nobody besides Psychopaths runs for office for the most part you know it's like a lot of narcissists it's a lot of people who have not been very successful because if you've been successful they come after you like crazy and why would you put yourself through that when you already have relevance power you community and so if those of us who don't want to lean in don't lean in then the crazies do and so I always have a plea with people like get involved on a local level to understand what's going on if you can and if you have resources commit them um so that's that's what started it but then I you know the other part that's interesting is you get a chance if you want to be involved politically people are actually quite easy to get to and so when they're trying to get votes you know I became friends with uh Vivic ramaswami I mean last weekend you know I was at a thing with uh with RFK you know I've I've met Trump I haven't met Biden yet um you know but I've met a ton of senators and congressmen and it's because if you call up your local Congressman or senator they by and large need to get back to you especially your congressman and so we don't even think about the power that we actually have to evoke change for some reason but on the local level you can do a lot is your standard rubric Pro business what's the thing you're really angling for rationality I have like a low bar you know the bars but what would drive like how would you define rationality right each side thinks they're right um that's a really good point how would I determine who I give money to well the best predictor of future behavior is past Behavior right so I typically would look at how has this person voted before and has that led to Pro business and pro- freedom initiatives so I really believe in like personal sovereignty and I believe in to a Libertarian level I I do think we need systems in place so to your point I don't think if somebody starving on the street we should leave them there and they need to figure it out I do think we need social safety nets I do think that there's a huge benefit to helping others both like mentally societally um but I believe in optimizing for this idea that the individual might be the one who is best suited to know what they need need except if they infringe on the rights of others so if they're violent or they break the law and so I do tend to vote you know and focus on things that are more economic uh from a business perspective can we create more GDP growth can we have less reg regulation less Taxation and then can we allow for more freedoms and those span both lines like Reproductive Rights gay rights you know ability for individuals to determine if they want to work as a trctor or not like things that span both sides very interesting um when you talk about people not wanting to leave them on the street wanting to make sure that they get helped uh if I were to put the sort of really traditionalist hat on I would say do we want the government doing that or do we want to push that to um churches um neighborhood groups things like that in a perfect like I think you and I and anybody watching we want um we basically want whatever is the fastest outcome to success so like people like I want a six-pack as fast as possible with as least pain as possible right yeah right terrible idea PS yeah right like we that's what we want and so I think what we have to to think about is two things one what is the most efficient and effective way to get it done whatever it is which is likely if we do scientific uh methodology and also statistically probably not usually the government it is probably more effective for an individual for-profit group to solve an issue because of incentive alignment than it is for the government um but we'd want to you know we'd want to figure out the actual truth of that statement so I'm not like a a purist I think we've seen a lot of things go poorly that are PR that are private and profit driven prison system it's a great great example like huge private Equity owned segment of of our country that has terrible repercussions from optimizing for profit and you know think about it what what do we love in finance recurring Revenue you know what do we also love in finance we love a customer that can never leave us you know and so I do think we have to ponder for a moment whether things like for-profit prison systems are right uh but we might be better served by allowing free market activities for helping somebody in a tough situation inside of our community it's really interesting the prison thing so let's take that head-on it's not something I've thought a ton about uh but first principle should always do so my initial reaction would be that it isn't a having profit isn't inherently incorrect however as Charlie Munger said show me the incent incentives and I'll show you the outcome so if they're incentivized to keep people there if they're incentivized to um see people return then that's what you're going to get so you'd have to be exceedingly thoughtful about what the incentive structure is now that really may be one where you just don't want um profit to even factor into it but it does feel like if you got the right incentive so for instance if um if you were judged by recidivism rate and judged by how well that person was able to integrate into society and you were paid like very substantive bonuses based on those two things now all of a sudden I'm like okay what does it take to get somebody integrated back okay I'm GNA have to get them off drugs 100% 100% like that's just going to be number one number two I need to figure out what is a marketable skill so that they're able to integrate back into society and if I get bonuses based on how long they hold job for how much they make in that job like now all of a sudden I mean look I even as I say it I you have to start thinking through the second and third order consequences because now people might be like well I don't want that person in my prison because they don't have future prospects so you do have to be really really thoughtful but anybody that thinks oh this is a failed Endeavor because I can't come up with it in nine seconds on a podcast that's foolish but if if people are really attacking this from first principles what what's the outcome that we want to get right so our objective and then what are the the things that I believe and know about uh drug I mean this I'm almost certain the following statement is true that drugs drive just some absurd north of 70% of all convictions uh that somebody was either drunk when they committed manslaughter murder what I forget the number of people that are drunk when they either get murdered or murder somebody it's ridiculous yeah I believe uh so anyway drugs alcohol is going to drive a lot of this stuff uh but being thoughtful about the downstream effects I I just don't think that simply stripping money out of the equation and making it a government run thing is going to be the answer because it isn't efficient you're not able to attract the best and the brightest because the best and the brightest are going to ask how do I get the biggest Roi oftentimes from a lifestyle perspective um in my Pursuits so yeah it's a it's a good Counterpoint I do think most things can be changed with incentives and then you'd have the you know because the counter argument could be well if we get you know you could go makavelian and say all right we're g to we're going to judge them based on low recidivism rates so let's just do what we've done in New York and California not put people back in jail for X dollar amounts we don't actually say you would have to have the their success has another metric so that they're not just incentivized to boot them out yeah but at the end of the day I do believe that I mean if you think about like Ponder this for a second you run a business and that business at the end of the year all your managers get less money the following year from you in their budget if they didn't spend everything that you allotted to them no matter what their outcome was like you would have a failed business right but that is what the government is right so at the end of the year if you run a division within the government and you don't use up the full budget that the government gave you that you were allocated that year then they will give you less next year regardless of out come so we have a perverse incentive from a spending perspective inside of the government which is why I remember once I invested in a lanyard company like like you get it uh badges like conferences right and uh we would get crazy orders at the end of the government's fiscal year from like the dod and a bunch of different because they would spend like hundreds of thousands of dollars on whatever we could get them quickly so that their budget wouldn't be taken because your budget is a sign of your power in DC and so it's not it's not outcome driven it's power driven and then interestingly enough when I ran a business internationally and I was in China I remember it fascinating I was they had had massive economic growth when I was there which would have been like 2009 2010 so Peak years and I remember talking to some members of the of the Communist party there about um how they how do they run their uh their they don't call them Mayors or Governor ships but something similar to that and they were saying here's what's really unique about us everybody is tracked from their ability to drive increase in GDP they actually had a score card for the uh their their elected leaders to um whether they uh hit more or less GDP numbers and that would be like us it would be like okay did you make me more money or less money in my business if you made me more money I'm going to give you more money okay great that's like what they did and the fascinating part about that is it led to huge GDP growth really smart but it's also led to huge uh climate issues and environmental issues interesting and so they had to offset their scorecard a little bit but think about in the US do you know how to score a single politician like we don't have scores for politicians you could have scores of or do they vote Democrat do they vote Republican but we don't have any scores about like how are they doing whereas you have a score every day Tim Cook how you doing at Apple you know Elon Musk how you doing how's the Tesla stock doing score and so I think it's really important like and even for yourself individually give yourself an ability to quantify whether you're winning or losing a personal scorecard is really really valuable for that most people let their bosses set their scorecard how much more powerful if you go this year I want to drive a 100 million views in my job as a cinematographer or videographer this year I want to make a million dollars in this division for the company because I know if I do that I will make X I have my own scorecard fine rate me however you want but like I'm an owner because I decide how I'm going to be scored like that's not just up to you and that's very very rare yeah I think this is um the metric that people use for the presidential election as far as I can tell is basically just the economy if things are going well in the economy you're going to be golden if things are going bad in the economy you're going to be toast and so certainly pulling that to the forfront and saying this is the scorecard that we're going to judge people on even just having that even even if it were an independent organization that just campaigned and campaigned and campaigned here's the scorecard and they show every year this is what the score was for this um Administration something like that I think would be really effective so uh could be economy infrastructure education like you know what I mean International standing those kind of things and just here's the 15o scorecard they'll want to make it 200 but that would be stupid but you come up with some limited number of things get everybody to just agree okay cool these are going to be the metrics that we judge people right now without having that I've heard you say this and I certainly agree that if you're trying to run a company and you don't have kpis if people don't know the standard to which they're being held like you you don't know what they're going to aim at and so everything becomes rudderless and this is why I'm always telling entrepreneurs the number one thing what is your goal and so if the goal is get reelected which is the only real goal for a first term person uh and if it's Congress or Senate then really just reelect reelect then that's what they're going to optimize for show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome and if the incentive is should just get reelected money printer go Burr because the real thing people are paying attention to is the economy and so right now we just print and print and print our way out of every problem because one people are like I'm not going to get reelected which is really my goal and it's the world's slowest motion train wreck right so oh we hit the debt ceiling again we're going to saber Rattle and say we're going to raise it of course you're going to raise it cuz the US government is the US government is not going to let the US government default on its debts y it's just not going to because who's going to be hurt and this is where people don't understand the economy which look I love you all if you don't understand the economy a I don't understand it as well as I will a year from now certainly not as well as I will 10 years from now and three years ago I knew literally nothing about it so but the more you understand it the more the curtain is peeled back and you realize that your if you own bonds and treasuries you're the one that gets defaulted on so yeah it's just the US government is not going to betray its own citizens by bouncing that and the only way to avoid it is to print money and as they print money they are taking your buying power yeah like it the printing money feels good but it is socializing the losses yeah and because people don't understand how it all works they can just do it in plain sight it's bananas you're right I I do think so I don't think this will happen but I do think there's a way they could get out of this which would be you get in this isn't that different to what Vic said which is GDP growth grow grow your way out of this have in uh interest rates come down restructure the debt so that your debt is at fixed low cost longterm so do what Mexico did do 50-year uh bonds as opposed to right now you know 1 three 510 and uh so you could do those two things Focus aggressively on GDP growth which would mean Cuts in regulation overall it would mean Innovation bonuses it would mean probably allowing for a little bit better job than we've been doing lately of doing International Trade probably signing up for some things like TPP um and uh so we could do that and then we could add on top of that what would be extremely painful but maybe we could do it if we were growing like crazy GDP growth uh and the economy was really good for people which would be systemic changes in our um in our Medicare Medicaid and Social Security and if we did those things we could change this country and this country could be on a very positive trajectory but without without a structural change in our debt without a structural change in our GDP growth and without a structural change in our um Medicare Medicaid and Social Security this country is in definitely trouble at least for the long term maybe not in the next couple of years because they might keep printing money but longterm it's just math you can't keep spending more than you make continuously and compounding it for the rest of time a trillion dollars in debt every 100 days an extra trillion dollars yeah that's Insanity yeah uh you need only run the math on the interest it will just it will become more than our GDP in I forget how many years it's not a lot of years it's absolute Insanity um do you so when I hear that when I hear anybody throw productivity in the mix my only hope is AI yeah what do you think is is AI going to bring the needed amount of productivity or do you see Innovation credits spring us on enough I mean it's hard I'm just by no means an expert in this um so I don't know and all I can tell is like qualitative examples and stories you know we invested in a company called figure which is now backed by a bunch of big names which is you know humanoid looking robots uh for manufacturing and warehouses predominantly so very like single use case robots um which I think is the right way to do it as opposed to like anthropomorph or like turning a robot into a full spectrum human that can do everything right and so um so in this company I can see a future in which we have massive productivity leaps because it's already really hard to get Workers inside of uh warehouses continuously for example um and so I do think there's a world in which we have massive like you know gain of function uh productivity changes due to AI I'm not intelligent enough to to understand that but um you know my husband he works in AI for the government uh anyway and so he sees all these fast fting use cases for AI and they're incredible and I'm sure you see it here you're friends with a bunch of people in the in the sphere so I think there will be some version of it but my my bigger point is like you individually as a human have to prepare for the worst without being able to affect the outcome and so I think for most human beings the best way that I see to prep for this is to have some sort of business where you can raise prices as Things become more expensive over time and for you to have multiple income streams in case one of them gets annihilated by a new technology or regulation and for you to increase your skill stack so that no matter what you continue to stay relevant and some of that might even be just becoming more knowledgeable with AI like if I was young today and I didn't have a lot of skills I would have told you a few years ago that the only thing I would have focused on was sales I would have said just get really good at sales everything else you can figure out become incredibly charismatic learn how to get what you want from people to learn what they want and you'll be able to go far and I think that but plus an ability to understand usage of AI not even creation of AI um I think that next generation is going to Mint a lot of millionaires and billionaires so I might focus on that but I think in the interim it's unlikely that somebody's who's like 45 56070 is going to become an expert in AI now and so what would be your best case scenario invest in things that become more valuable as the world gets tougher and things like that are assets for instance which when inflation happens your assets grow in value and that's also how you steal from the poor poor I mean the government steals from you because assets inflate the rich own Assets in inflationary periods and wages don't inflate and so that is how the government steals money from the poor and gives it to the rich yeah so I have a for people that don't understand what you just said that's very terrifying and I hope that they will take a second to um walk through that I have a growing hypothesis that I would love to run by you yeah tell me if you think I'm crazy great uh that hard money the ability to save in a hard money ought to be a inalienable human right and what I mean by that is if you have money that inflates and and let's not use fancy words if the government is allowed to counterfeit money by printing it which which is literally just legal counterfeiting yeah so they get to make more in their back office but you can't uh so if they're allowed to legally counterfeit um your money loses buying power over time and so the true flation calculator shows that over the last four years it's 23.8% I think y um so your dollar four years ago used to buy a dollar worth of stuff y now four years later it buys roughly 75 cents worth of stuff that's brutality yeah and that's not a a function it's not a law of nature which is what I thought inflation was just never looked at it so I just thought things inflate I never stopped to wonder why uh it's not it's born of printing money the legal counterfeiting that the government does um and that means if you're a good boy or girl and you save your money that the government is using an invisible tax to take more of your money away yep but in a way that it doesn't look like it of course so it's like if I went in and ate the inside of your cake but I didn't disturb the outside frosting you be like I still have my cake but then when you cut it and eat it it does not go as far calorically as you had hoped so that really feels nasty and we've just gotten used to it and so everybody's like okay I guess in the last four years I've lost almost 25 cents per dollar that's insane okay so it as I look at that and feel the trauma of that over and over I'm like look I'm basically trying to teach people how to think through how to become a wise Gambler the fact that I have to tell PE that's investing by the way when I say wise Gambler I mean invest because it is a gamble you are hoping that the stock market goes up you are hoping that the US economy continues to grow you're hoping that Bitcoin moons whatever investment you choose you are making a gamble because I assure you it is not guaranteed even if you buy gold uh you're gambling on the future of that M you must gamble on the future of that in my opinion because otherwise you will just continue to get eaten alive by inflation if there was some thing whether it's gold whether it's Bitcoin whether it's whatever what whether it's sea shells whatever we can prove has a limited amount it cannot be inflated no matter how badly they want to even in case of emergency it just it cannot be inflated therefore you make money you Sav in that thing and since I have a a very crypto friendly audience who heard me talk about this a thousand times to me it's gold or Bitcoin like that that's the thing that you're going to move over into now technically gold does inflate a little bit but it's a pretty knowable amount of inflation so you can plan for that Bitcoin cannot inflate but is a bigger question mark no matter what anybody tells you y you get potential bigger upside so that's why it's attractive to me but nonetheless just be real about what it is but we need to give people a noninflatable like it can't be inflated way to save their money so they can just work a 9 to-5 and they don't have to be a genius and they don't have to be looking at charts and they don't have to listen to their friends and they don't have to put everything at risk they can just be like I'm going to buy this thing and it's going to give me a really boring return maybe even no return but it isn't going to go down in purchasing power over time now I don't know how close we can get people to that if gold gold has been used since Roman times so we certainly have something that holds its value reasonably well but even that I think back in the80s was like $35 now it's like $1,000 so there's volatility which you want to get this thing as close to who was it that said the ounce of gold is always worth about the price of an ice suit that's interesting which I about right because I think $35 back then might have been a nice suit today from the maybe yeah exactly depends on when but um I mean I think that it is criminal that over 16 years you lose a 100% of a dollar that you had 16 years in the future you know or in the past is that really true well I mean 23% over four years if you take it out and extrapolate inflation is down just so everybody knows but theoretically I think that's criminal and I I think um I think our government has lost its mandate in that completely in utterly and I buy into the idea of uh taking away government power to remove money from our hands and put it into theirs I think the problem as we both know is it's the same with my solution which is once somebody has power it's very hard to take it back the government never gives back power to the people or very rarely gives back power to the people and so I'm curious to see what happens you know I was talking with bology about this the other day and he gets on these long Rants and I listen and I I watch him actually do deductive reasoning as we're we're talking and uh and you know when I talk to him about it I say I'm still fighting here you know like I still think the US is redeemable and that there are enough of us who see what's happening and people's eyes are opening and they're saying no more and I I can like Sense little wriggling of it andology would say wrong actually the US has passed the point of no return in the future they will come after your assets as every failed State eventually does and the only Counterpoint to that is some form of off off uh platform Bitcoin or cryptocurrency potentially and if that's the case like that's tough that's a real real problem but I think that there's a big argument in the next however many years as we become more Tech Advanced your thesis might actually play really well in the 25th Century sort of similar to how Brian Johnson talks about it he's like I'm not worried about my trolls today I want to I want people in the 25th Century to think well of me because I understood things today that they knew for sure that they know for sure now and I think yours is similar I think in the future there may be a future where people say you guys let your government do what to your dollars that's Madness how could you do that at least that's a future that I'd rather live in yeah it is definitely a future I would rather live in as well but I think that the chasm that we have to cross between where we are today and there is one of Bloodshed and horror uh just as a student of History it's interesting um I cannot help myself but talk about this how do I really think it will play out it probably won't be as bad as I fear yeah but I'm going to walk you through a story that really unnerved me it was both exciting and I can't shake it out of my mind so I go to Dubai for the first time and I'm about to go on stage at a conference and I come into the The Green Room in the back and Ray diio what are you doing here and he was like oh I come to the Middle East a lot and I'm like oh really why why do you come come to the Middle East a lot and he's you know starts going down like how many of the major hedge funds are there and um and he was also uh you know it really comes down to how we are with each other I was like yeah I've heard you say that a lot Ray what do you mean and he was like well you know you just you want to go where people are are treating each other well where there's not a lot of political strife and you know we're talking and he's and I was like um like a friend of his or something came in that had one of the white robes on and Ry was like oh I you know I thought about wearing mine but I didn't think any and I was like Ray you have one of these oh yeah you know like I said I'm here a lot I'm like so hold on time out how much time do you spend outside of the US right and so he's Pro us obviously loves it the most but he just keeps saying it all comes down to how we are with each other hey Ray what percentage do you give there being a civil war in the US I think last check he said 50% so I'm like uh you think there's a 50% chance that we escalate to a hot War within our own country and you spend a lot of time outside of the country I was just like oh God like is this one of those things where um that's somebody who's and again this is not what he said but it just made me be like should I be preparing for something so I don't know I feel like people are a little Cavalier about when they look at the debt how fast it's growing like if you see ited out it looks like a cliff it's unbelievable it isn't a straight line but it's almost a straight line and so I'm just like okay wait it's The Chart you want to see in Silicon Valley but the opposite yes you know you're like dude it's so crazy it's so crazy and I'm just like maybe there's something I don't know and we're like oh no you can have something that's 500 times worse than this so it's bad but like you can just keep getting way worse and you know hyperinflation doesn't happen until way further down yeah um I don't know I don't know is the honest answer and I heard uh chth poopaa say this whole debt thing's a nothing burger and shth I'll make one more appeal bro come on the show like I want to understand how it's nothing Burger nothing would make me happier than to realize oh I have a flawed assumption yeah and all my predictive engine breaks right here and he has the thing that he understands that I'm missing and okay cool I can relax that would be amazing because I zero a good enough argument for him I mean obviously very smart smart man but you know all of us are human and flawed you know I watched what a lot of those guys did with spaxs a few years back and having been in the Cannabis World when they were doing a lot of spcs I remember looking at the underlying deal documents and thinking this is so perverse for the last investors in which would be the retail investors that come on when it actually goes public and the historic nature of how these things have performed uh shows that most of them lose money and the people that lose money are not those who create the backc they aren't the people who fund the spec because they both make their money up front it's typically the retail guy left with the bag and by and large you know none of his spacks panned out and so you know again I always watch for like not what do people say but what are their actions obviously some genius moves with with tech but anybody who looks at mark fs and thinks with such certainty as opposed to humility concerns me I think you should you should you should approach irrational things like Mar markets with extreme levels of humility and that's a good sign in somebody that you want to partner with and work with that if in fact they can be charismatic and confident and they decide instead to be hum to have humility in a place where they might be wrong and almost certainly could be wrong with a high degree of of probability and so I have a problem uh sometimes with indiv ual like that who are so certain because we all have a historical bias right he's had some huge success and so when you've had huge success it's a lot easier to buy our own [ __ ] right it's much harder for somebody to argue with me who hasn't had my level of success and when you get into the billionaires Club how many of them have had other people argue with them I I saw it firsthand we were at this little event at this private place with all these leaders of the Free World and some of the richest people in the world and you're not allowed to talk about specifics happening there and it was fascinating to watch the questions that they asked the certainty that they had um and the assumption that everybody else thought the same that's that's the thing that kills me almost more than anything else you say with a lot of humility I'm testing a hypothesis what do you think about that which is a brilliant way to communicate if you want to actually get somebody on board much higher likelihood of success for me agreeing with you actually to go hey what do you think about this it's like the old adage I remember when I was first raising money for a startup we were raising a couple million bucks and uh one of my mentors said let me tell you what to do he's like he gave me money and then he goes but the way you pitched me don't ever do that again and I was like oh my God what did I do and I had just given him like a PowerPoint I thought it was really good I thought i' crushed the meeting he goes don't ever do that again and I'm like why and he's like because if you want money you ask for advice and if you want advice you ask for money he goes because those who you go to advice for feel like they're bought in they've like sort of gotten on your side of the table and of course it doesn't always work that way but I think it's it's rather intelligent so I worry about individuals that feel that level of certainty and especially I think you have to be careful with the charismatic ones because oftentimes they're hard to refute and I found myself I mean I had a partner where I thought he was killing it in this one business and every time I talked to him about it he he would have such strong convictions about why this would work and it would go forward and then a series of missed deadlines and opportunities quickly told taught me that confidence is not always a predictor for performance um and so I hope he comes on here I think that'd be great to go deep but I think you'd have to push hard on his assumptions and the other thing that's tough about those people is they bring a mountain of data and so in order to have a real argument you'd almost have to say please present your data ahead of time I will present my data ahead of time and let us both analyze it and see what the underlying base assumptions are and if we agree with them because I can make numbers sing if I present them in a certain way and certainly a man with that intellectual horsepower too can too by the way what are chim's incentives chth runs a company that is VC backed right he many of them so he wants the money printer on he also is a big investor in public markets so what else does he want the money printer on because that keeps the stock market going up so would he want them to aggressively Tamp down interest rates which would immediately dive the stock market of course not do I care as much about that because I have private companies that won't have one toone return with interest rates uh less so like my my incentives are actually better than Chamas even though chth has more history of doing this and a bigger bank account than I have so you have to balance the two very interesting all right give us some hope yeah we um you and I are both optimistic you and I I think believe you can succeed in any environment as long as you have accurately mapped what the moment is um look forward a year to two years we've got an election coming up is it going to matter um how does somebody approach an all-weather strategy if they're going to buy something how do they make sure that they're doing it in the right um recession resistance space as you mentioned earlier you can't control the election so I wouldn't worry about it very much I would try to find the most information that I could on each candidate in order to make the decision that I think is right my bias would be a decision that is right leads to more freedom less regulation and your ability to be the master of your life as opposed to others and a belief in yourself and individuals as opposed to the state um but you should do your homework and choose your candidate um but the election you know I've never had a presidential election be the impetus for massive change in my careers the only thing that I've had is a regulatory issue which was me not understanding the risk of my business so what did that actually mean I didn't have the sufficient skills so I think in an environment like this you need to do a couple things you need to obsess on this idea of how can I become almost Chris and I my husband joke about how to become hard to kill like physically so we you know we shoot we do Muay Thai we do Jiu-Jitsu we lift weights we eat healthy because he's a former Navy Sealand so he's like you know that is a principle for him is that we are harder to kill than the average person and one of my principles is to be hard to kill financially and so there's a reason not all my businesses are listed online it's because I don't want everybody to know everything that I own you know there's there's safety in that and I think that is where people should obsess on today is like I don't know that there's a better time than right now for Freedom of Information and if you can kill distractions and focus on the things that drive you towards your goal which in my mind should be some form of financial Freedom like there is more permissionless profit than has ever existed in the world you know even when I went if I go back 10 years to the beginning of my career you had to get permission to do things you know you had to if you were in finance you had to be you know under certain regulatory regimes only then could you do something you had to go up to a very few number of banks who would Bank you one way or the other there wasn't crowdfunding there wasn't Venture Capital to the to the normalized degree that there is now you couldn't go to friends and family to raise money you know that wasn't like normal then like it is now and I think we now have access to more Capital than ever more potential profit than ever and more business model than ever because of the internet and so anybody who's telling you that you can't is really just saying they can't and that they don't know how and so you should probably make it your mission in this environment to go figure out the highest Roi in how to your goal all right who would give us more freedom Trump Biden or RFK Jr that's a good question uh I think I'm going to go with Trump I think the problem with RFK is I I couldn't get him to annunciate his economic views interesting he's the one I know the least about yeah I I actually think that he has really interesting views about food safety I think he has interesting views about medical safety and allowances I think he has interesting views about um you know like individuals as Sovereign uh even psychedelics um but if I had to choose between you know two candidates I would choose Trump and that is a very unpopular thing to say today but I think we all have to start making some unpopular decisions if we want to make changes I mean I I did a a post the other day on Twitter that I really would rather have not done which was you know about what was happening in the Border you know we talked about this before but when I was a journalist I covered the US Mexican border I'm Latina and I've crossed the border illegally multiple times when I was a journalist covering stories right so I'd seen it and uh you know my friends my family's from Arizona my friends who are still along the the Arizona US border or the Arizona Mexico border and the Texas Mexico border you know it's inundating and uh another way that they can steal our money is by creating a much bigger transference of our money as Citizens to individuals that have not gone gone through the legal immigration process and I think that is you can't have a country Without Borders we need a better immigration policy but it cannot be free for all and in fact it's really unfair to them you know we have a friend who's who was brought over when she was 10 and she's here illegally and she didn't apply for DACA because she was too scared when it was going down and she thought it might get revoked and you know so she's still here in the US she's a upstanding member of society and she can't get legal immigration and we this is not that difficult of a problem to solve if our govern government actually wanted to solve it they could come up with a system to allow legal immigration to happen for those who are actually contributing to our society in a big way because hey we actually need the productivity and people here and they could come up with a way to stop people from coming along the border not perfectly but definitely better than we're doing right now so that's my take it's a good take yeah I uh the thing about the border that and admittedly I've not looked closely at this problem at all but right now we're trying to um hire some that needs an H1B Visa yeah uh and I'm like this is grueling it's hard and the fact that we've got so many people coming over the border illegally I'm just like that's crazy like if you're going to have effectively an open border uh then let me just have this person yeah like this is crazy town I have a friend actually uh who you know too and they flew back uh on a private plane from Mexico to the US and they' had some work done so the face and the ID look different right and uh as they get off the plane they're getting like hammered by the uh you know whatever Customs or immigration and uh you know we're laughing about it later about how like yeah it would have been better if I just said I didn't have documentation and I'm just here right and so it's just anytime you have those things that make absolutely no sense I get concerned that there's something deeper happening and I'm like at the end of the day remember Mike wrote Dirty Jobs yes never saw the show but I know who he is yeah so his idea was to bring dignity back to Everyday workers in America and I think my my mission is similar I want to bring dignity back to Everyday workers in America but I also want to turn them into owners in some way shape or form owners of their house or a little side hustle or a little bit of their business or a big business and I think Americans are one of the hardest working group of humans on this planet as measured by productivity um and gross GDP and as a percentage of total gr uh Global GDP and so I think that we have a lot of work to do to help the people that are here and that to me is really important because if we can raise up all of you know Americans as we do and have through multiple poverty Cycles to a degree that's like never before seen anywhere on this planet at scale like America has capitalism's actually been incredible for that um then I think we can have a better immigration policy because we'll have more immigration or we'll have more Innovation and right now we're just we're not uplifting the American worker we're beating them down with deaths of Despair and fentol normaliz normalization and calling it a pill not a poison and inflating away people's salary and giving universities money that puts our children in debt as the only type of debt that you can't call off from bankruptcy then it's [ __ ] wrong and I think there's a lot we can do about it I love it where can people follow you as you write these wrongs yeah uh it's like let me tell me what you really think Cody um contrarian thinking. Co is our free newsletter where we talk about that the most and then Cody Sanchez on all the socials we're going to be starting this new series on YouTube that I think will be really meaningful and so we're Cody Sanchez on YouTube and what's the new series can't tell you yet it's going to be a secret we're working on it though and uh and the idea is it's not just a show it's going to come with something else like when we win we have something called when I get a deal you get a deal which means we only take money from sponsors if they give money back to our people and then we take that money and I don't take any profits from any of of this business and so it just goes back into the content and I have an idea for that with our show overall so we're we're working on that and it'll come out this summer can't wait to see it yay thanks for having all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more there's people who are really rich who wake up really late and work really late and there's people really rich who wake up really really early and there's people who are really rich who eat really healthy and there's people really rich who drink Coca-Cola and eat french fries every day and so there's all these things that we want to make is truth

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 614,346

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Codie Sanchez, Impact Theory, interview show, podcast, mindset, success, motivation, personal development, empowerment, transformation, growth mindset, self improvement, leadership, Cultural shift, buying businesses, small business ownership, profitability, bankruptcy, growth strategy, fear of failure, work ethic, government efficiency, for-profit solutions, recidivism rates, Contrarianthinking Co., intelligence and success, political strife, hyperinflation

Id: 6U2goTmqo3Y

Length: 184min 42sec (11082 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024