- In 1935, the acclaimed
historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel set about one of the most auspicious undertakings in the history of... Well, history. They set out to write a series of books telling the complete story of human civilization from ancient Egypt all the way up to modern Europe. The project would take them 40 years. And in the end, their 11-volume series would
span over 13,000 pages. Now, towards the end of this project, the couple wrote a similar
yet much smaller book. The 100- page book was called
"The Lessons of History." And it chronicled the
most interesting patterns and takeaways that they had learned from spending their entire
lives studying the span of human civilization. Now, that book is a treasure
trove of insights into humanity and the natural tendencies
of human societies. And one of those takeaways has
stuck with me my entire life. The Durant said something like this, "As technology advances, it promises greater equality, but always creates greater inequality, and this is because it
disproportionately rewards people of higher skill and effort." Basically, the highest
performers leverage the benefits of new technology before everyone else, gaining most of the benefits. This has been true
throughout the millennia on every continent, in every culture, from the invention of the wheel, all the way to the microprocessor. Today, we live in another age of insane technological advancement. And as always, the highly skilled and most driven are being
disproportionately rewarded. But on top of everything else, I'd argue we also live in an
age of lowered expectations between quiet quitting, the burnout epidemic, work-life balance, the record low employment participation, great inflation in schools and the lack of standardized testing. The trend throughout society and pop culture is to work less, try less, push yourself less, and go ahead, take that mental health day, blow a bunch of money at the spa. I mean, it's self-care, right? Ugh, go on. You deserve it. Between technological advancement and lower expectations, we live in one of the
best times in history to be a high performer. You have more to gain and less competition to gain it than ever before. Now, today's guest, Codie
Sanchez, is a high performer. She started her career as
an award-winning journalist, covering the drug cartels
along the Mexican border. Horrified by what she saw, she realized that nothing was gonna change until large amounts of money got involved. So she went into finance, climbed the ranks of the banks, and got access to some of
the most powerful people in the world. But it turned out they didn't give a shit and large institutions kind of suck. So then she decided she would
go straight to the people, starting in a newsletter, later a social media following, and finally a podcast. Since then, she's amassed
millions of followers and now educates people
on the basics of finance, business operations, investing, and how to buy and run what
she calls boring businesses. Codie herself owns at least
part of 40 businesses. Most of them are boring businesses, stuff like car washes and laundromats. Within these businesses, she looks for and pushes people
to become high performers because she understands
this is the best time alive if you are willing to be a high performer. In this episode, Codie and I talk about why money and business is the international language and why we all need to
know how to speak it, how to enjoy the struggle
of learning something new, and why being pushed by
others is so important, why being good at something, anything and feeling
useful is a core component of human happiness, and why we are no longer being pushed or celebrated for hard work. We also talk about how the
definitions of hard work and work-life balance has changed and how that has repercussions
in the work world. And finally, we talk
about why there are not more women business leaders and why she thinks we're
approaching the gender question entirely incorrectly. But before we begin, if you like the show, please follow, please subscribe, please leave a review. That way we can tell the world
that I'm a high performer and my ego will be satiated
just for another week. Okay. Onward. This is the conversation
with Codie Sanchez. - [Narrator] The podcast
that's saving the world one fewer fuck at a time. It's the "Subtle Art of
Not Giving a F*ck Podcast" with your host Mark Manson. - So you're most well known for promoting boring businesses- - [Codie] Yeah. - Contrarian thinking. I'm curious, why did you start writing? - Because the world shut down in 2020. So at the time, I was supposed to be doing
a road show going out and investing in different companies and raising capital for our fund. And I couldn't do it 'cause they told me to stay
in my house and shut my mouth and so I did. And I got really bored. And because of that, I started writing a little newsletter. And I thought that little
newsletter would be fun, like a fun side project. And then it took on a life of its own. And I really started
obsessing about this idea that it could really be a business. And I started writing contrarian
thinking the newsletter, with this idea that the
world was losing its mind. The ability to question
something, I think, is like the most central
part of being a human. And so that bothered me, and I started writing about
it from that perspective. And then I realized
everybody actually thinks that they think quite well. And so I was like, "Well,
that's not gonna work. People don't actually want
better frameworks for thinking because they think they're by and large." And so I said, "Well,
what does everybody want? And everybody does want money." I mean, you know this, it's like everybody wants
to be loved loved, right? They want to be respected. They want money. They want health to be sexy or is that part of love? - Ben Franklin had three categories. - Yeah, what are they? - The health, wealth, and love. - Health, wealth, and love. And I know a lot about
money just from my industry, stolen fragments. And so I said, "I think the Trojan horse to thinking might be to get
people caring about money because money typically comes
with some form of ownership. Like you're not gonna just get money for nothing unless you have a trust fund." - This is actually an interesting issue that shows up in a lot
of psychology, sociology, economic research because you can go out and survey people, saying, like, what do you think about X? And people will come back
and say, "Oh, we love X." But if you say, "What do you spend your money on?" They're like, "Oh, no, no, no. We don't spend money on it. We spend our money over here on this." It's called revealed preferences. And it's actually a huge
problem in psychology because people don't behave
the way they tell you. They will say one thing and go do another. And so a lot of people
believe and I agree, that the way to actually
see what people value and care about is to
see what they're willing to spend money on or where they're willing
to invest their dollars. - I think you're right. Well, and also I don't
think it's that they don't; it's that we don't actually do the things we even think we do. - Oh, for sure. We're lying to ourselves. - Oh. Even if we don't realize it, I think humans are incredible
self rationalizing machines with the innate ability to actually believe our own bullshit. And so I joke with this about
my husband all the time. It's like, have you ever gotten
in a fight with your wife? Never, I'm sure. But let's say that you had. - [Mark] Sure. - Then I imagine at some point, you're like, "You said X," and she's like, "No, no, no, I said Y." And you both are living in an experience in which you think you're
a thousand percent correct. - Yes. - And yet neither of
you are probably crazy, otherwise you wouldn't have
stayed married for so long. - Yeah. - And so I always laugh with him. I never liked when the
hippies said things like, "Well, this was my lived experience," except that I think it's true. - My truth. - Yeah. It might be more real than we think.
- There is my truth. There is the truth. - Yeah. And the problem is that we humans aren't
very good at finding it. - Yeah, for sure. What do you give a fuck
about that most people don't? - I have a burning need for feeling like at the end of the day, if I die, I've done enough. There's this Erma Bombeck quote. The quote is basically that when I stand before God at the end of my days, I'll have not one drop of talent left. I will have given you
everything that I had. And I always liked that idea
of like at the end of the day, you're just like wrinkled and ringed out and there's nothing left. And so maybe if there's
nothing after this. At least you can leave
it all on the field. And so that's what drives me and what I actually really care about. And sometimes I think, man, wouldn't the world be so interesting if more people thought that way? If they were like, what if I just like reached inside and tried to pull out every
single thing inside of me that could deliver some
value to the world? And I think it's really sad
that instead of doing that, we distract ourselves so much, and we spend so much time
living other people's lives. And if you are on a team
at any of my companies, that's what I talk about all the time. I'm like "There is such a unique honor in being around a bunch of other people who wanna achieve something great 'cause it's totally contagious." And we were talking about this today, and I forget what the effect is. I can never remember the name, but it's something like chameleon, but Pygmalion. Might be the Pygmalion effect. Wasn't that it, Tanner? We can never decide how
to pronounce the name. - We'll look it up. - [Codie] Yeah. - We'll put it on screen. - Codie, Georgetown grad, can't pronounce anything. But moral of the story is
basically that you rise to the level of the highest
standards placed on you often. And so how sad that we're placing all of these low standards and
low abilities on people. We think that that's doing them a solid, like, you don't have to achieve much. You should quiet quit. You need work-life balance. And it's like, actually, in fact, you probably need the opposite of that. And so I sit up some nights, talk with my husband about that, and that is what makes me saddest about the world and that I care about and maybe lots of people don't. - Do you see any drawbacks of that? - I think the drawback would
be if I had unhealthy habits that couldn't let me
have enjoyment in life, like if I wasn't also healthy and I didn't have a great relationship with my husband and friends and family, you could take that to
the pure extreme for sure. But I actually think that's pretty rare. I think it's very, very rare
that somebody finds something that they're obsessed with doing and then does it to the
point of personal detriment. What I found instead is if you do things to personal detriment, it's usually ego. It's like I just want a billion dollars and so I'm gonna do whatever
it takes to get there as opposed to like, what am I capable of and can I keep squeezing it out? - I find that a lot of people have a lot of motivation and drive. They just don't know where to point it. - Yeah. - They feel like they don't
know what's worth pursuing. And I think this is particularly an issue with our generation in Gen
Z with all the distractions and the devices and everything. There's so much noise
that it's hard to know what is actually valuable. Hell, it's hard to know
what's actually true to a certain extent. And so I sympathize. I mean, I'm very much the same way. There's a Bukowski quote where he's like, "I want to slide in the home plate broken,
burned, destroyed." - That's a great quote. I think it might be Hemingway. - Was it Hemingway? It's one of those old alcoholics. - Yeah. Both fucking great. Bukowski was a second
level type of alcoholic. Have you ever listened to his weird one-off
poem readings on Spotify? Like caution to the
internet before you do it? - Yeah. - They're wild. - Dude, he would like
verbally abuse his audience. - I've never heard anything like it. I read some of his
favorites like the poem, "So You Want To Be A Writer." I love that Bukowski poem. But then I went down a rabbit hole and was like, "Huh, I don't
know if I should tell people I like this guy." - He's a dark guy. Coming back to that drive to like push yourself
to get the home plate, having given everything, what does that look like for you? What are those missions
or causes in your life? - Well, it does, I'm sure,
come from a place of some ego that I think I could actually
affect the outcome of things that exist in the world, which I'm not entirely sure on, but it'd be fun to try. - Sure. - But first and foremost, the whole reason we call the
company contrarian thinking because it's awful to spell, it's way too many vowels, like it's a terrible name, is actually because I sort
of believed in this mission, like how can we get people
to question everything? Including me, including all of us. I started off as a journalist
a million years ago along the US Mexico border, and I was covering human trafficking and drug smuggling and
saw a lot of dark things. And I also saw what happened
when we don't have a group of humans questioning things on all sides. And so one of my big missions is, can we try to just not even
tell people what to think or how to think, but just get them thinking? And that is a huge mission for me. And the second thing that
I've been obsessed on lately, because we'd like to have kids
sometime in the near future, is what are we leaving for them? I'm sure you and I will be fine and maybe even our kids will be too. But I look at what's out there right now for like young women and young men. I don't have the lived men experience, but it's like, who's the role model here? Are you nip tucking your way to 13 different body styles, all of the Kardashians? Are you listening to people who have sex-specific podcasts and thinking that that's going
to turn out well for decades? My newest phenomenon is,
I think, I'm gonna host a little event here in Austin, kind of trying to figure out what is this generation dealing with? Because we got damn lucky. We didn't have iPhones and
social media like they did when we were in formative years. And I don't think anybody can say it's not fucking people up immensely. And we have to push back on it. And the only way to push back
on it might be social media, which is wild to think about. - What was your biggest lesson from covering the human
trafficking at the border? - That money is the ultimate equalizer. My last name is Sanchez. The women who were being brutalized, last name were often Sanchez or Juarez or things very close to that. And it wasn't that I was American and they were Mexican. It was just I had resources
like middle class American, nothing crazy resources. - Yeah. - But I had it. And that meant that I would
never go into a shallow grave with no headstone on it. - And did that influence your
decision to go into finance? - Yep. Otherwise I would've stayed in journalism. I was very set on. I went to the Walter Cronkite School for journalism at ASU because it was one of the top schools. And then when I covered
one particular story about elderly members
of society getting left along the US Mexico border 'cause they couldn't
cross with their family. They were getting caught and their younger members weren't. And they lived in these hovels, like the senior care centers along the border were atrocious and we covered one. And I remember vividly, her name was Carmelita. And she wore this little beanie, and she lived on this like cot, couldn't really get up. I mean, no doors or
screens on the windows, just an awful place. And she had lost her
family like 10 years ago. She'd been there forever. She kind of started to
lose her wits about her. And I wrote a story about her, and I got a bunch of press. And then I went back
to give her the awards and some of the cash and this like teddy bear and whatever. And she was like, "This is amazing. Now that America knows, you are gonna help, right? You are gonna fix it." And I was like a 21-year-old idiot and so I had no idea what to say to her. And so that I couldn't rectify that. And it was like the only thing that actually helped her wasn't awareness. It was cash. And I didn't have it. And she was never gonna
have that in her lifetime and she since passed. So I think that moment stuck with me. - So I feel like I'm
connecting the dots now. It's this money's the great equalizer. Go in the finance. Oh wait, Goldman Sachs doesn't
give a about poor Mexicans at the boarder. - Not a direct correlation, really. - Let's go straight to the people. Is that the path? - Yeah, I think I needed to understand. I believe the quote, I think it might be Jordan Peterson where he is like, "Go get money before you change the world." And I think that's right because money is literally
the international language that we all speak. And if you wanna make a real difference, it's gonna be very hard for you to do it, counter to somebody who
has resources more than you to the tune of a 100, 200, 3,000 acts. And so that was my thought. I was like, "Well, I'm
gonna go figure out money because if I have enough of it, then I can assert my will on the world." And I think that's what
money allows you to do. It's just an ability for you to push back when somebody
pushes on you or vice versa. So I wanted to climb up the rings of corporate finance to understand that. And I'm not naturally math inclined. I was a little peon when I was at Goldman. It wasn't like I was some big... I didn't go that far there. I was there for like less than two years. But I got to see a lot behind the scenes, which eventually led me to
believe that actually none of that stuff is that hard. It's that they create a barrier and a totally different language in order for you and I to
not be able to participate. And because of that, we give them all of our money. They take a percentage
of it for managing it, and the cycle continues of like the few owning
everything increasingly. And so I don't think anybody's
inherently evil there at all. I just think perverse
incentives lead to perversity. - Those institutions
were also built at a time where education wasn't easily available. Like you needed middlemen and you needed like a big conglomerate to manage everything for you. And of course, siphon
off some for themselves. - Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. But I do think you have to... At some point, if you can't take control
of your financial ownership and you don't actually
speak the language of money and you don't understand how it works, how do you ever expect to get rich? And I'm like that's like
when people go on YouTube and they're like drop shipping, make me a hundred thousand
dollars in a month. I'm like, "It's the
totally wrong question." Instead you have to actually go understand the whole financial landscape and what all your options are and become super highly skilled and the thing that seems easiest to you but is harder to other people. And then go see who will pay
you the most for the skills. And after they have paid you
a certain amount of money, see if you understand enough to go recreate the skills for yourself somewhere else, or invest the money that you've now learned how to make. - Yeah. This episode is brought
to you by Manscaped because if you like me, your balls are hairier
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code IDGAF at manscaped.com. It's funny because the first, say, four years of my career were so scrappy and hard. I distinctly remember, actually, I used to work in... My ex-girlfriend supported me. We had this tiny two-bedroom
apartment with a roommate. And I would work in bed all day. And there were times where I'd fall asleep with my laptop on my stomach, and then I'd wake up in
the middle of the night and just like just keep going. - Wow. - But I remember having
conversations with her and I was completely broke. I was always scrounging to
like give her money for rent and buy a burger. It was really rough. But I remember telling her, I'm like, "I like this." So fun fact, you and I both worked at State Street. - Really? In Boston? - Yeah. - Oh, that was a weird place, huh? - I hated it. - Yeah, me too. - I lasted a month. I was like, "I gotta get out of here." But yeah, I mean, I had
done this like short stint in the corporate world, absolutely hated my life. And then I was broke for
months and months and months, and I was like, "I like this. I really like this." And it's funny 'cause after Subtle Art
came out and blew up and all this stuff happened. There was a dissatisfaction
that wasn't there before. And it was really weird because I didn't feel
free to express that. Objectively, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me, so I'm not really allowed
to be dissatisfied. And it took me years to figure out that I like the scrappiness. I like doing YouTube and
not knowing what I'm doing. I like fucking up edits and videos. I like stressing over this podcast and being like, do we
have the right format? Is the branding right? Could we change something? I like that. I like feeling like I'm
doing something wrong. And it took me a long time
to accept that a long time. I think if you asked Young Mark, he'd say, "Yeah, I like this, but it's only because I
think it's gonna pay off in the future. I'm gonna get successful on all this stuff." Whereas old wise Mark understands it. It's just how I'm wired. I need to feel like an underdog. It's where I operate optimally. - Interesting. That's actually a little bit
of a superpower, I think, and realizing it because everybody always says
it's not the destination, it's the journey. - Sure. - But everybody focuses
on the destination. So if you've realized that you're wired to actually enjoy the journey, fucking Buddha over here with curly hair, but also I think that's
something a lot of us aspire to. I find myself a thousand percent falling into the, ugh, this video only got that. And then I have to pull myself back and go, what is wrong with you? You are a woman in your thirties, like happily married, worrying about TikTok views. I don't actually worry about TikTok, but YouTube which is a much higher brow. - Yeah, right.
- Anyway. But I still find myself falling into that sort of hedonic
treadmill for sure. - I do too, but I realized I like it. - Yeah. Well, I do. Yeah, I do too. - I like it. I like being like, oh, that video bombed. Let's figure out why. Let's figure out why, let's get better. And have you seen "The Last Dance," the documentary about Michael Jordan? - [Codie] Yeah. - So he has this almost
like psychopathic ability to take things personally. But one of the things they talk about is like he would
irrationally interpret things as like personal slights
to motivate himself. I think I have a little bit of that. It's not a personal thing. It's not like, oh, Codie said this thing, I took that personally. It's not like that, but it's it's like we'll
work on a piece of content and it'll do well, but it won't do as well as I hoped, or it won't do well as like
this other guy's video. And I'm like, "Fuck that shit. We're gonna do better." - A hundred percent. - And the conventional
wisdom would be, like, don't compare yourself, like be happy as you are. But it's like, no, I like that. It feels good. I don't get swept up in it. I don't attach my ego to it. It's a game. And it's like my favorite game to play. - I don't know where the
world went where we decided that we couldn't have fun doing the thing that we wanted to do for a living. Like when did that narrative even start? I think that is such a bizarre idea. - Or have fun struggling. - Yeah, exactly. - I think that's it. That's it. It's like this kind of obsession of removing struggle and challenge from people without realizing that it's the appropriate struggle or challenge that makes
you feel most alive. - Oh, it's so true. We were looking at a graph today that was showing from the... I mean, World Economic Forum. But anyway, the numbers
were basically showing happiness indicators for
people who are employed and choose to be employed, employed but don't choose to be employed. Wouldn't choose to be employed? Then unemployed by choice and then unemployed, not by choice. And no surprise, the two groups that are least happy are
the two unemployed groups, even if they were there by choice. And so one study doesn't a truth make, but I thought that was so obvious and yet not common sense at all. - Schwarzenegger just came out with a book called "Be Useful" and it was the thing that his father told him throughout life. I remember I saw that and I was like, "There's
so much wisdom in that." And it's also coming from
all like the psych research that I've done. In psychology, they call it like self-efficacy, self-efficacy of internal
locus of control. There's a bunch of different terms of it, but it's basically just like people who feel like they're
capable of something. Like you are doing something, you are able to change your environment in a way that is creating
value in some way. And it's such a key component of our happiness and wellbeing. It can be as simple as, I don't know, being a garbage man or whatever. But it makes sense to me that employment is so tied to it. - Yeah. Have you read Arthur
Brook's new book with Oprah? - I have not. - So I was at a little
dinner with Arthur last week and I've been a fan of his for just years. And it's very seldom do you get somebody who could both be at the head of a conservative Republican movement and best friends with
the Dalai Lama and Oprah. Those triangles don't mesh. - Sure. - And yet if you've ever met the guy, it makes all the sense in the world. And so anyway, he was talking last week about how the three
things that we're missing for this generation or the three things that lead to happiness in his research that he's done at Harvard are
basically friends, family, faith, and then a fourth, which is work that serves
people in some ways. I thought that was so interesting. He is like, "So why are young
people unhappy these days?" He's like, "Well, we have 30% of the youth who thinks that nobody
actually knows them. So we have like less true
friendships than ever. We have the family nuclear
unit sort of under attack with more people having
not even for any reason that they don't like their family, but left the city or state
in which their family lives. And then less people determining to have a family than ever. And then we have obviously
a crisis of faith, lowest traditional, secular
religious institutions and following of them in decades. And now this sort of idea that you shouldn't actually
spend that much time at work, that you need work-life balance, that work is just a means to an end, not an end of itself." And so I thought that was fascinating. I'm like, actually,
that makes all the sense in the world why we're more
anxious, depressed, unhappy. - This is one of those stats
that people just don't believe 'cause it kind of goes
against their intuition. But if you look at the
average hours worked by the American people, it's the lowest it's been in a century. Is it really? - Yeah. People work less today than ever before. I think it doesn't feel
that way for two reasons. One is commutes are
longer than ever and two, because of devices and
email and everything. People are still checking email at home. They're getting on an email before bed. They're like checking Slack after dinner. So they don't feel like
they're checking out. But if you actually look at how many hours are being
technically on the clock, it's the lowest it's ever been. - That's fascinating but actually tracks. - Yeah. - Yeah. It's funny at one of the companies, one of the managers
came to me the other day and was like, "I'm concerned
about delegating this 'cause I feel like a lot
of the team is overworked," and I'm like, "Pause, why?" And he's like, "Well, I think
they have a lot going on. There's a lot of work." I'm like, "Let's categorize 'cause words are important,
words mean things. - Sure. - Like definitions, it seems like we've forgotten
definitions for words. And so then we get confused." So I'm like, "Okay, what do
you mean they're overworked?" He's like, "Well, they seem
like they have a lot going on and they're overwhelmed." I'm like, "Is anybody in the office before 8:00 AM or after 6:00? When was the last time you saw that?" He's like, "Well, not exactly but they're working from here." I'm like, "Let's look
at vacation days taken. Oh, it's like healthy, two to four weeks on average from people." I'm like, "Let's work at work. Are we putting more on individuals
than we ever have before? Or do we actually have
more people spread out?" And by the end of it, he was like, "Oh, I guess
by all categorical measures, there is not this problem." I'm thoughtful about that lately. Not even letting your team say
the words, I'm overwhelmed. It's like, have you properly prioritized? And how do we work through that as opposed to labeling yourself
as an emotional state? - Yeah. I see this topic is coming up a lot more. So in psychology, it's called the prevalence
inflation effect, and it's particularly important in relation to mental health. So there are a couple new studies that just came out in the last year. The big one that happened
was in Australia. They took a thousand teens. They gave them something
called DBT therapy, which basically teaches you a bunch of good psychological concepts, helps you deal with struggles,
anxieties, et cetera. And then they took a thousand teens and just let them control group, let them be whatever. The teens that were exposed to the DBT, which is a well-studied
protocol like got decades and decades of data behind that. It helps people. The teens that were exposed to the DBT actually turned up with worse mental health afterwards. And the theory is that
it's like your knee hurts, so you Google knee pain and it's like, oh my God, I have cancer. You start reading stuff, you're like, "I have that. Oh my God, I have that. Oh Jesus. No, I have that." The human mind has this tendency of like whatever you're exposed to, you relate it to yourself. And the theory is that the
more we tell young people, "Oh, you're struggling with anxiety. Oh, you have self-worth issues. Oh, you're neurodivergent. You're all these things," they start looking for
experiences that justify that definition of themselves, which it's just naturally human. But then once you identify with that, once you start telling yourself, oh, I am an anxious person, or I do have low self-worth, your experience matches
to justify that belief. Like you start looking for
experiences to continue to justify that self-definition. So it actually backfires. There's almost like such a thing as too much awareness of mental health. There's like a threat. There's like a goldilocks zone of you wanna be aware enough to not just be oblivious to your problems, but you also don't wanna
dwell in your problems so that you don't accidentally look for mental health issues
without realizing it. - That makes so much sense. Yeah, I don't have any of the psychological underpinnings for it, but you could see it. - I imagine the work-life
balance thing makes sense to me because it's such a hot topic. It's everywhere. On social media, there's stuff going viral all the time of people being like, "I'm overworked," and blah, blah, blah. Yet you go to the data and it's like average
work hours are at worse. They're the same if not
lower than they used to be. - Well, you know what
the good part about all of this is if you are a performer, there is no better time
in history, I think, than right now to perform because the bar is set so incredibly low. I mean, if you say
you're gonna do a thing, you do the thing, if you ask for feedback when you mess up and then change according
to said feedback, and then continue to try to learn more so that you can succeed, you're the top of the food chain. I saw the stat the other day that there's never been
more companies created than since 2020 on a total basis, but also like per population basis. So we've had this massive inflation in the number of companies created. Simultaneously, it's never been harder to create a profitable business. Probably because
proliferation of the internet. There's so much less of a moat to starting a business. But also because I think we we're starting to lose that ability to be resilient, to keep going through
a really difficult time and succeed despite the odds. But if you're like a hard
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at shopify.com/idgaf. That is shopify.com/idgaf. I don't give a fuck? - Why aren't there more women like you in the business world out there? I guess being a role model, but also just being there. I mean, you worked at Goldman Sachs, I imagine there were not a
whole lot of women there. In the creator space, especially in the make money
kind of business advice space, you're the only woman that I'm aware of. Why is that do you think? - Something I'd like to change. I mean, 65% of our audience is men. And I'm agnostic. I don't care what you
got between your legs. I hope if you're a good person, you make more money. That's awesome. I don't know. I mean I do know that
there's this weird phenomenon that a lot of the women that I see that are talking about
business are talking about like touchy-feely nonsense. It's like manifest your
way to your first million, which, like, I don't know. Maybe never works for me. I don't know. - If all me, it were not easy. - Yeah. It's just not great. Maybe we're at the beginning of it. There was that whole
movement there for a while, which was sort of like
the Girl Boss movement, which like Sophia Amoruso sort of- - That's true, yes. - Like commercialized. But I think what happened
with that is it became... Why is it called Girl Boss? Why does it matter what your sex is? And so I think women, we shot ourselves in the foot because we made it about
the fact that we were women. You're not like Mark Moss dude. You're just like, "No, I'm Mark." I think the biggest issue
that I keep coming back to is that women just need to be
talking about how to win and succeed no matter what as opposed to that we are are female 'cause I think that actually
decredentializes us. And I think it makes men shut down too. I don't think men want
to hear about why you won because you were a female or didn't win because we're a little
tired of that narrative. - Well, it also shuts us out. - Right. - I remember my wife was a member of a... There was a group in New York that was like for like
female business owners. And she joined it, and she was really excited about it. And it fell into that trap a little bit where every time she
went to an event there, it was all about women's
empowerment and equality and all this stuff. And she's like, "I just
wanna talk about business. I've got business problems. I wanna talk to other
smart business people." And she ended up leaving the group and I believe that the group
ended up failing eventually. I think there's something as a man... I mean, obviously, I support her and I support women in
general in business, but like there's something that there's like a turnoff about that. It's like, well, I don't know. It feels like it's about something else. It's not about about the
money or the work anymore. - Yeah. Well, I mean, if you ever went... I remember I went to one... Remember that thing The Wing? Did you ever... It was like-
- Yeah. - It was like WeWork for women, like ultra destined to die. WeWork didn't work and it was open for everybody. Like you opened one just for women. - WeWork and cut out
half the customer base. - Great idea. Let me give you a hundred
million dollars in funding. And I remember I went to one of them and it was so ludicrous. The whole thing was pink. And I like pink, pink's cool. But like, come on.
- Sure. - And then the second thing is there was like a room over to the side and they were like, "Feel
free if you would like to go into the crochet room at any point." I'm like, "Get out of fucking town. Why is there a crochet room over here? This is so silly." - Oh my gosh. - I do think there's
gonna be a next generation of women who are just trying to win and hopefully do it in a way where... I turn down speaking gigs
if they say we're looking for a female CEO to speak. I go, "Listen, if it's that
you need a CEO to speak and you think I'm the fit, awesome. But I don't do the whole talking about how me having one
type of genitalia led to some different outcome in my business. I don't actually think it's relevant." - Sure. - And I think it's super victim mentality. I've had a huge benefit to being a woman in a lot of situations. Sure. Was there the ass grab? Did I get shut out of
the 19th hole sometimes? Did I have inappropriate
behaviors at work? Certainly. But also I didn't look like every other Tom, Dick, and Larry. So like I had to win that way too. I don't know what the answer is. But you know what's fascinating, I've been obsessing on this lately, like how to get more women
interested in business in a way that like still
allows them to be a wife and a mom and feminine. I don't think we have to
divorce those two things. - Totally. - I don't think you have to
be filled with testosterone. You could just like happen
to be in business too. And then I was looking at creator sizes. And if you look at the
biggest creators out there, there's a huge cap at business overall. Some of the biggest creators in business, I don't know, let's say like Instagram are like 5, maybe 8 million subscriber. You could say like Jay Shetty, which is like 16, but he's not really business. So like the biggest
business creators are like 5 or 8 million on Instagram. - It's probably like Gary
Vee or something like that. - [Codie] Yeah. And I think he's maybe like 8 million or something like that. - Probably. - And then you look at what
I'll call mainstream businesses or mainstream creators. So like the Kardashians, like 300 million or something like that. - [Mark] For sure. - And then you look at beauty creators, and they're like tens and
tens and tens of millions. And then fashion creators, tens and tens. And then fitness creators, tens and tens and tens. And so I think the other
thing may just be business is actually a tiny little sector that very few people care about, actually. And I think it's because, like, what's more entertaining to watch? Like a really funny little comedic video or like one on a P&L? And I think the same
thing with beauty as well. It's like a lot of these people think that business is the product so they're like, "I wanna
have a beauty business." So they're like talking
about lipstick or whatever. They don't realize the product
isn't actually the business. You could substitute lipstick
for liquid death, for genes. And if you understood
the underlying business, you speak the same language. So I'm curious to see if there's a way to connect the mainstream between the two. - The interesting thing
about that is that Gary Vee probably has more money
than all those people and has a bigger business
than all those people, minus the Kardashians. - They're pretty big. (Mark laughs) Pretty big. - One of the things
that I've noticed lately and concerns me a little bit in my space, the kind of the personal
development world. It used to be back in the day, like eighties and nineties, women and men consume very different personal development content. So women, it was more
the touchy-feely woowoo relationship stuff. - Like "Dear Sally" or something? - Yeah. Or if you think about like the "Secret" and "Oprah."
- Oh yeah, yeah. - Things like that.
- Totally, yeah, yeah. - Whereas men, it was
more like make more money and be more successful, power and all this stuff. In the 2000s and 2010s, the audiences kind of merged. I actually think people
like me and James Clear and a couple others kind
of caught a special moment where I remember going into my publisher and they asked me for the
demographics of my audience. And I was like, "Oh, it's 50/50." And they were like, "What?" And I was like, "Yeah,
it's 50/50 men women." And like their jaws dropped. They said nobody in self-help has 50/50. That's just absolutely unheard of. There was like 10 years maybe where men and women were kind
of consuming the same thing. It was all, I guess, the
early days of social media or something, we were like the first movers. But what I'm noticing is
that they're splitting again. And I am slowly seeing my audience become more male-dominated. And there are people in the space that I talk to all the time, and they're slowly seeing
their audiences become more female-dominated. - Are those people typically women? - No. - Men, interesting. - And it's like they are drifting. And as a response, they're starting to hammer up
more on relationship content; they're starting to
talk about manifesting. I'm kind of like, "Bro,
what are you doing? And it is like, I don't know, - It's just the audience. - My candles. (both laughing) - And I think this is happening kind of on a broader cultural level. There was like a recent
survey that came out. It was a little bit worrying. That showed political beliefs between the two genders and how- - That was why. I saw that. That was like the American
Enterprise Society or something. - Something like that. And it's just completely divergent, especially at the lower- - Like sub 30. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like young, men are
becoming way more conservative and young women are
becoming way more liberal. And that is bad. I don't even know where that takes us. but maybe it's something
with the algorithms, but the technology's getting so good at serving us up things that we relate to that I think maybe it's
unintentionally closing us off into these demographic bubbles in a way that didn't happen before. Before it happened with
like ideological bubbles, now it's getting so good. It's like demographic bubbles and that's even worse in a lot of ways. 'cause it's like if you're a Latino woman, now you're just being
exposed to Latino women. And if you're like a White dude, you're just being exposed to White dudes. That's not good for anybody. - No. - And so, yeah, I worry about that. I don't where that's going. - Yeah, it's also so shallow. Can you imagine if the most
defining characteristic about you is how you choose to have sex, what skin color you are, and whether you have
something that protrudes or inverts between your legs? Like so uninteresting. - Yeah. - I think you have to
self-select and push back. And I'm not sure what
the answer is to that. - Social media is really
bad at handling complexity and it's really bad at handling ambiguity, and I think in-person interactions. We are naturally adapted
to handle those things. So it's like if we're
having a conversation and we kind of disagree about something, or I say something that's a little weird, we can read each other's body language, we can sense each other's emotions. You can kind of figure out like, oh, well, he probably
didn't mean it that way. He's a good guy. Let's just change the subject or whatever. We kind of naturally default to recognizing that
people are multifaceted and one little uncomfortable
thing doesn't necessarily like demolish the entire interaction. Whereas online it's the opposite. It's like the second
somebody says something that makes you uncomfortable or that you don't like, you're like, "Well, fuck that person." And you know, it's like
mute, block, delete. And of course, those little
micro communications, facial expressions,
body language, tonality, like those don't get conveyed either. People are viewing you out of context and so they're projecting
their own personal context onto you when they watch you or read you. And oftentimes, their personal context
is not a charitable one. And so we tend to easily
see the worst of people or assume the worst of people online. And I don't know what we do about that. You know, it's a genie. You can't put it back in the bottle. I've just kind of defaulted to talking about this as much as possible, like just educating
people as much as possible so that we can kind of adapt ourselves. I see stuff on Twitter. It pisses me off, and I just try to remind myself, these people are complicated, they're complex. This is literally two sentences. These two sentences are my only exposure to this person. So let's just try not
to jump to conclusions or make assumptions. - I think that's right. I think if you wanna
win in today's society, you have to limit distractions. And what's the ultimate distraction? Emotional hijacking 'cause you really can't do anything else when you're emotionally hyped. And so where's the best place
to get emotionally hyped? Well, on the internet where people are posting things without really much reciprocal effect, often anonymously. And so Twitter is an amazing place to go get super distracted, upset, and then project that onto the rest of society and lose your day. I do think there's a real benefit in being able to say, I just shall not allow
myself to be triggered while everyone else on the
internet is allowing themselves to get upset by somebody. Unless some human says to my face, you are a fucking piece of shit and I'm gonna kick you in the leg. If you won't say it to my face, how am I gonna let that bother me? - Right. - Because it takes actually such an amount of like imagination to
put together a series of events about what a person thinks of you based on something that's happening on the internet. Now, I think it's really hard
when it's directed at you. Like you've had this many times in your career-
- Of course. - Where you say something
and somebody comes at you. You can't have done this for 16 years and not have people pretty
much say everything bad about you ever, I think. Are you ever surprised anymore? - No. - No. Right? Like everything under the
sun has been said to me and I've only been doing
this for like three years. So let's bring it on. But I think for the average person, like what a fun experiment. Could you just have an
anti-trigger experiment where every time you do that, you just go and watch a little snippet of your favorite Disney movie instead and try not to get amped? - Yeah. Or even try to imagine the
most charitable interpretation of the thing that just triggered you. And I think that's a good mental exercise. It's also very hard to do. - You know what I was
always told my husband? Do you get mad when you're driving and somebody cuts you off? - Mm, yeah. Sometimes, yeah. - It doesn't really
bother me for some reason. I think it's like my husband's same. He just assumes that person, I don't know. - He's a biggest piece shit in the world. - Total disrespect, also hates him. And he gets so annoyed because I just always go, "I just assume that
they're birthing a child in the backseat every single time." And that's the old adage, but for some reason it helps me. I'm like, "Eh, they're
probably super late. They're birthing a child in the backseat. They've just found out they got cancer." I don't know. And so if I think that way, it never really bothers me. I'm like, no, I kind of expect everybody on the street to drive like an asshole. And if they don't, I'm happy about it. And so maybe there's a way for us to do that on the internet too as opposed to what we're doing right now, which our team has kind
of done it a few times. Like we've seen something
crazy on the internet and then we've gone, "Let's have a reaction to the crazy." And then that reaction to the crazy kind of hypes something that is
probably super fringe anyways and normalizes it in some way. And then there's a
reaction on the other side about how could you think this is crazy because in fact we think
this is super normal. And so instead of me countering it, I've just added noise instead of signal. - Yeah. I interviewed Ryan Holiday yesterday. We talked about this quite a bit about avoiding the
temptation of the clickbait, the low-hanging fruit, not platforming certain ideas or people 'cause it's gonna get a ton of clicks. And he and I both feel
very strongly about that. And I also think that there's something to both of our longevity because I've been around long enough to see the big new thing turn into the big horrible thing and watch people torpedo
their own careers, dying on a hill that does
not deserve to be died on. So I just try to remember that. Like in this business that we're in, you really need to pick
your battles carefully. And it's funny 'cause you'll even get hate for that. I will get angry emails, be like, "Why aren't you talking
about this political issue? Why aren't you angry about... This politician said this thing. And I'm like, "Because in two weeks, the other guy's gonna say something else and then the whole
narrative's gonna change, and new info's gonna come out and everything's gonna be different." I'm not gonna fall into that trap. I try to stay with stuff
that's like very timeless, the stuff that's not gonna change. - It is funny to see the
cycles too, isn't it? I even saw it with boring businesses. So when I first started
talking about them, people were like, "This is dumb. This is super dumb." Why would you- - Car wash? What the fuck. - Yeah, exactly. Laundromat? Those things don't make any money. Nobody uses them anymore. I'm like, "I don't know, do you wanna see my tax return?" And then it really started to pick up, I think not just because of me, but it just got sort of normalized. Then there started to
be lots of case studies about people succeeding with it. Then perfect inflection point. We had sort of the
Silicon Valley implosion over the last two years where they're not funding
as many companies anymore. And so now then it just hit
like peak boring business time where like there's memes
everywhere you can find about Harvard grads going out and trying to buy a plumbing company and then hating their lives. And so I think it'll come down again. And I don't know what
the next thing will be, but I can definitely start to tell when the main thing is
starting to become a meme. - Right, totally. - It's just moved a little bit past it. And now it doesn't matter
for me and my portfolio because car washes don't care how you feel about them on the internet. They still make money, which is why I like them. But I do think it's
important to not tie yourself to those trends. - You have to be careful and you also want some flexibility in the ability to pivot
when things do change or when the zeitgeist shifts. One thing that I definitely feel or have noticed is that the
make money spaces online tend to blow up during economic hardship, and they tend to not go away, but they recede a lot during boom times. And we are definitely in a time, pandemic, post-pandemic, lot of economic hardship, a lot of layoffs over the last few years, particularly layoffs in sectors where they're really
smart, educated people who are ambitious. And so I personally believe that there's a correlation there of you've got all these
like smart stand for grads who used to work for Google or Facebook sitting around being like, "Fuck, how am I gonna make money?" And eventually, the market will correct or equilibrium will hit, and we'll move on to the next thing. So it's kind of like surfing. You just always gotta keep an eye on like where the wave's going and make sure, like, position
yourself accordingly. - Yeah. - Last question. What do you give too many fucks about than you wish you gave fewer? - I mean, there's the standard answer, which is I probably
care more than I should about what people I respect think of me. Not generally, but I do very much care if people that I think
are smart, and thoughtful, and strategic, see something that I'm doing and think, hmm, it's unethical or
I don't agree with it, or it's beneath you. That bothers me. - And has that happened? - Oh, for sure. I mean, in the beginning
of when I was a creator, it's less common now, but when they were like, isn't this kind of beneath
you doing this stuff on the internet? You could have built your own
huge private equity company as opposed to talking
about it on the internet with all of these people. And so that does still bother me somehow. I still am in a search for credentials from the
people that I care about. I think it's a little
bit of a female thing and an immigrant thing. It's like, well, let's
make sure I get the MBA from Georgetown. Let's go to Goldman. Let's get the certifications. - Build the resume, yeah. - Right. It's very silly. And so I remember I met once Astro Teller, the head of Google X's program. Fascinating guy and was tasked with coming up
with crazy ideas for Google. And he had this idea and that I don't know if he still does, but he did it years ago where he said, "One of the
most impactful things I've done in my career is outside of my office." And thus a bunch of
other people picked it up around the office. I have a resume, not of all the things that I've done, but all the things I've failed at. I keep a list. I'm not quite as evolved as Astro is, but I keep a list of all
my failures to remind me that they're not gonna kill me. And that in fact, people probably think about me so much less than
I could ever even imagine. - They do. - Yeah, exactly. So nobody cares and
we'll forget your name- - Sure. - In 2 to 10 to definitely 50 years. - Sure. - And so that's the truth. If I was to look back to young Codie again or anybody out there in their
twenties or or thirties, it's like, man, nobody actually
really cares that much. It seems so important. It's probably not. And the last I checked, you and I aren't curing
cancer or saving the world and so, like, it'll be fine. - Yeah. - And the worst thing that we can do will
probably never take a life or cost us our life. And my husband, 'cause he's a former military guy, that's always his line when I'm stressed about something. He is like, "Is anybody gonna die?" And I'm like, "No, nobody's gonna die. I'm in a spreadsheet. It's formatted incorrectly." Like so silly. But that's where my fucks lay. - Interesting. The irony there is that
when people are thinking that what you're doing is not a good idea, they're like, "Oh, that seems that... YouTube, what?" The irony is, all the big opportunities are like that. Most people don't see them. And so most people are gonna
think you're a little bit crazy for going all in on them, which sometimes they're right. - Yeah. What's yours too many fucks these days? - My too many fucks, I am having trouble relinquishing
control and delegating. It's really hard for me. I am slowly getting better. But yeah, I don't know. I recognize too that it's
completely irrational. I mean, in some cases, people on my team can
do it better than I can. But there's just something of like if I don't see it and know how it's being done, then I'm not gonna be able to
sleep at night or something. And I definitely need to get over that. - Yeah. That's a really good one, though. I feel like that's a common
one for creatives too because at the end of the day, it's your name and it's your face on it. - Absolutely. - And there's very few
things that are like this in the world. It's also sometimes useful
to just say to that part of yourself that's reasonable, actually. That's reasonable. I don't want somebody to edit a video and then all of a sudden
there's something in there that I would never, ever do and they think that I did. So it's rational, but definitely limiting. - Yeah, for sure. Cool. Thank you, Codie. - My pleasure. This is fun. Thanks, dude.
- It's great. (upbeat music)
