I'm Tom Bilyeu, and this is Impact Theory. If you've been coasting on your intellect thinking that genius alone is going to get you to the top, today's episode is going to hit you right in the face. Success isn't just about raw talent or innate genius. It's about harnessing the power of being relentlessly curious.
Today's guest is not just another talking head. She is a powerhouse who's mastered the art of turning financial woes into defining moments of growth and opportunity. Cody Sanchez is a living testament to how curiosity can lead to not just financial wealth, but a richer, more fulfilling life. We're talking about radically transforming how you make decisions, own your outcomes, and harness the power of contrarian thinking to find joy in life's most difficult challenges.
If you tired of playing small and ready to take control of your life's narrative, gear up. This episode is going to revolutionize your approach to wealth, leadership, and personal mastery. Now I bring you Cody Sanchez. 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 at 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 have to pick up numerous skills. You can be like what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett talk about, which is making 3 to 5 really high single 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 no sayers.
And that's because they learn to differentiate the difference between 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? It's really, really easy to say the hard to do and think about in your business.
In my business, every single day there's a to do list so big I'll never ever finish it. And I have to determine every single day what is the thing that if I do, it becomes the fulcrum on which I get to place a 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 pedals look like?
They're gonna do nothing for me. And that's actually quite hard. Okay. Skill acquisition matters a lot.
Getting that leverage matters a lot. We've painted a dark picture about where we're going, but I don't think either of us are afraid. Paranoid, yes, because only the paranoid survive. But when I say I'm paranoid, what I mean is I'm trying to see the angles.
I'm not taking that it's going to happen easily for granted. So I my channel can be rightly accused of quote, unquote doom and gloom, but I'll just blame all of you motherfuckers if that's all you click on in a headline. But what I hold myself accountable to, every word out of my mouth, is something I actually believe. So I believe all the things I'm saying.
I just don't have a crippling fear. The only thing that maybe unnerves me, even though I'm a huge proponent of it, is AI. We'll get to that later. So anyway, potentially quote unquote dark period coming from a recession standpoint.
I see dark because a lot of people who aren't paranoid who either don't have the intellect or are not put the time in or just don't have the right side ideas, whatever, they're gonna get blindsided. I love too many of those people. So it does appear as a dark time to me. However, you have a quote from Baron Rothschild that I think bears bringing up.
Yeah. Buy when there's blood in the streets. Even if the blows your own, maybe especially when it's your own. And he became a tight industry.
Probably one of the richest men ever on an inflation Adjusted basis. So I think he did okay. And you know, I was thinking, I pulled some data for us for this conversation today, because here's the thing. If you haven't been through a recession yet, you're going to survive this next one too.
And if you look historically, we can show this graph too. We survived 90, 99, 20, 20, 2008. Those are just the recessions during my working years. And if you look at what happened after all those recessionary periods, not all of them bounced back in 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 survive as a country and as individuals, just like we have historically. 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've 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, it has a bunch of Google headquarters moving to it, a bunch of Facebook employees moving to it, a bunch of AI, it's like one of the defense centers of the country. But it's, you know, the average house in Austin town 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 or 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 like the unprepared transfer their money to the prepared during downturns. And so if you do not listen to channels that are doing 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 else will 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, happened in 2020, it happened in 99, it happened in 90. And by the way, there's signals right now that show the same. You might be prepared for what's coming and it might not scare you.
You see that, you know, auto loans are the highest level since the last recession, auto loan defaults that you might not see that credit card delinquencies are at all time highs. And it might not scare you, you might 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 can make a smart investment in property during this period?
Because the other thing is interesting, those big scary people we talk about all the time, blackrock, Blackstone, all the big companies, they get a credit crunch too. You know, 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 gets steal from the rich and one of them is in a downturn.
If the poor are actually thoughtful enough about preparing for it, you can't do it in a big way. But you know, most of America will die broke alone in fact. And so if that's the case, one smart house acquisition, one smart multifamily acquisition is enough to set up a family for generations. And it's just continuing to take those small steps and period when most people are acting emotionally.
Walk us through. So you are, 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 BRRT strategy for not only getting through a recession, but really taking advantage of it?
Yeah, so we have 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 can 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 resistance sector. You raise prices. Most small businesses are underpriced somewhere from 30 to 300% and you add technology and this generation in particular, 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 might invest into and all these guys did their window cleaning. They're a window cleaning company. They went from unemployed layoff during COVID from pretty good jobs and no money, you know, trying to figure life out their first year in business, 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 dollars in revenue. And these are two kids that are both sub 28 years old, one with a newborn baby on the way. How do they do 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 sexed 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 in your community? Turns out you might be happier than working out McKinsey or Bain 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. Out of friend of her last night shout out to Dean, who was walking me through his new thesis.
So he's, he's done everything in from helping finance films, creative producing to SPACs to traditional investing, I mean, just all over the place. And he was like, hey, I've got a new thesis. And he was like, we're going through this really interesting transitional time. You can have a ton of baby boomers retiring, but not going to have anyone to pass their business onto.
You've got a lot of people frustrated. This is gonna start. Sound familiar here. Working traditional jobs, they don't wanna be in investment banking.
And so the new play is gonna be skip college, buy a business. And I said, my friend, I have somebody you need to talk to. But I imagine a lot of people listening to this. If they're new to your world, that is gonna 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, 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.
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 have 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 ordeals 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 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 never been easier to start a small business, 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 T Creation. But it's never been hard to have a profitable business. So most small businesses, 90% of them never even hit the $1 million mark.
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, 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 know that I have a crazy idea that somebody's going to want to buy. I never had that. And so instead of 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 I have revenue that's profitable and I can just help it grow. And so we see that again and again.
And nobody taught us this in School, because there's risk, right? When you go and get a job in Kinsey Urban, 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 buy school 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 terrified of failing. And my point is, like, the US Actually has incredible system called bankruptcy, which a lot of countries don't have. This is an ability for you to wipe the slate if the 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 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 is 65 years old plus, and you say to him, hey, doing with your business? Are you going to sell it? Somebody you're going to run forever?
You're 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 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 our mastermind, they bought something like $262 million in revenue.
Wow. Yeah. And these are people who are, like, former teachers, engineers. They're doing seller financing, they're doing SBA loans.
And what I've realized almost immediately, somebody will be successful at or not, like, if they'll buy a business or not. And the way I can tell if they'll 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 gonna 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 the people who win, they're not smarter. They just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now in business, psychology, leadership books that have already changed how the best operators think. And everyone you haven't read is a gap between you and the people who have.
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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 of the answer.
But why you're. I think you're rounding hard work to something. Yeah. I don't think you literally just mean work harder, since we've already gone into detail on that.
So whatever that thing is around you, do you have a mental model for why that's so important? Well, one of my favorite questions asked 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 it was for you, though, 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 and so I had to hit that deadline. Yeah. Yeah, that was the last time. It's through the night.
And you know what would be a fun thing is there are many people about 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 Ryan Johnson sounded like he wants us to sleep, which I get 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 former military and the 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. You know, we're godparents of his kids. We have this tight knit community that's almost impossible to break. If I needed to bury a body, they would just ask me the coordinates and they would be there.
And. 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 sub 30, say that not a single person really knows them.
Not one single person. We have a crisis 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.
Arthur and Arthur Fett said there's four things that determine happiness and that is faith, family, friendships, meaningful friendships, and work that serves. And he's like, we've done decades of research on this at both Harvard and AI, where he was previously. And he's like. And so it's no surprise that people are more unhappy than they' 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 underappreciated thing. And we ended up talking about faith and family and friendship. That's really interesting. So I'm going to see if I can tease apart the way that you think.
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. 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 misery gauge at work is so high. And I felt that before. And if I go back and think about why did that hard work not make me happy, 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'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've always known that was true, but I didn't know why it was true. Now, teasing that stuff out. So some of this is an aspect of a life well lived for you.
Yeah. Did you ever work at Google? Yes. Yeah.
Did you work on cubicle when you didn't work for yourself? Yes. Have you seen the Tucker Carlson response to oh, gosh, postmodernist architecture? No, but I've seen the headlines now you made me wish that I had clicked.
That's beautiful. I can send you the clip afterwards if people are curious. But basically he's in an interview with somebody, can't remember, and he says postmodernist architecture is a. I'm going to simplify.
Meant to suck your soul out. Yeah, it's basically like it's. 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 postmodernist 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, 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 profits and losses and need 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 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. 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 bad for your mental health.
It's like, what the fuck do you know about what flow is? Is flow Netflixing and drinking on Friday evenings because it doesn't have to be. But if that's for you, let it be you and I'll do me. Yeah, that's not flow.
Flow, I will say has a definition, but that won't be met by that anyway. Probably not. The important part of that, 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're in a battle for ideas, 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, promote. You have a very unique stance on, hey, there's a thing you're probably not thinking about that's not currently in the zeitgeist is the cool thing to buy. The boring business, the gateway business that will make you realize that these being run by people that's smarter than you to sort of co op the Steve Jobs quote. I think that's really important.
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. The thing you secretly want, which I tumble, you, 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. Saying, surviving is going to be hard.
And my job as nature is to keep you alive long enough to have kids and 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 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 is.
Ha, Sarah. 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 have to go much more than 100 years back in time to hear where it was like, oh, we were just trying to get from here to Oregon, you know, and we suddenly eating slugs. Oh, and then we ran out of those. So we had each other as we died.
It's like, yo. So we all play that game, didn't we? Yeah. Working trail.
So life is a level of hard that we don't understand. So evolution had to make doing hard things internally rewarding. So 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 gonna feel wrong. That's part one. Part two is entropy.
And if I can come up with a simpler word, but that really is the right word, meaning that all things are fighting against you. If you want to jump high, grab a Yangtze back down. If you want to start a business, other people are gonna start a similar business. If you're doing well, people are gonna copy you.
One of my favorite stories from our time at Quest. So when we launched Quest, we looked ridiculous compared to all the other 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. Just all tough guys. Big muscles, veins bulging, literally. Chains draped around the neck, red and black.
I mean, taking a page out of Hitler's playbook, which, if you've never read Mein Kampf, I'm really doubling up on my learning from the psychopaths day here. But he just lays out like, oh, this has a certain psychological reaction. So we're like, we're everything that that's not. We're gonna be blue because it peaks creativity.
We're gonna be food porn. We wanna 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 motherfuckers, like, they've literally just copied everything that we're doing. 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 will.
There's 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'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 are talking about business, recession, et cetera, et cetera. But this is really about what idea should win and hard work. Recognize you can buy business if you so choose.
If autonomy is a major driver for you, it could be a real path out. But 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 Atlas Shrugged, which has some political connotation, which I don't know why, because it really is about this idea of the joy in finding the thing that you're uniquely built to create on this planet. And there's one quote I love from it.
It'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 be's, the what ifs, the maybes. 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 Bombach quote. That is one of the quotes I go back to a lot, which is 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 lunch 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 like one instance. And you know, we talked first physically. So I remember one of mine, it was like hiking a mountain that was super miserable.
It was blizzarding, it was a very high mountain, there were crevasses, 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. But I'm glad I did it because I need to have more of those hard moments to realize how lucky we have in life. And I do think we're kind of as humans work, we kind of forget how lucky we have it. We have such short term memory to history, which we do not study enough even to our own history, remembering what we've been through before and that's what we're capable of doing in the future, you know.
But 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'll 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, and then was like kind of public about it and how much that hurt, you know, I remember when we had our first car wash deals go through and we thought we'd 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.
They're so close to the finish line. It's like, see 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 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 it 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 bother, you know, he goes through his difficulty like it's Tuesday. Then I was like, well, then we lost a hundred million dollars on the games over there. And he literally says, 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. What's that? You know, think about that. But there's a guy out there who.
That is the way they do things. And then for all those people who are like, crunchy granola, I 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 brought back almost the level of bisons in his area, which I think is Wyoming.
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The single hardest thing I ever did was get divorced when I went through that previously. So that was emotionally the hardest thing I've ever done. You know, you make a promise to somebody, you say you're gonna be together for life, and then you break that promise. And I tend to try to keep my promises.
And so that was really hard for me. And did you initiate? I did, yeah. 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 vision for life, it's very easy for somebody else to supersede theirs on top of you.
And I think that's what I allowed happened to me. I superseded my family is on top of me, my mom's, you know, his. And I tried to be a painting that somebody else painted as well as my own. 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 mean? And what do we actually want to work towards? And we would be tiny, better spent in universities if we spent more time on that as opposed to amoebas and Pythagorean theorems.
How do you come to know thyself? Honestly, I don't know another way besides doing things so hard that it feels uncomfortable constantly. And then deciding if you want to keep doing those things or not. 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 try all the things and realize I don't like them. And then I sort of ping pong my way to find something that I think is me. And so I think that's a lot of us too. It's okay to have varied career paths.
It's okay to make a lot of mistakes. You 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 round.
And the strongest partner I have by far has ever been Chris in any sense of the word. But I probably would have made that decision utterly without fully knowing myself through having gone through a lot of hard things and realizing what I was willing or not willing to continue. You've got to get your calendar right. Like if you don't make maintain if your calendar doesn't reflect your actual priorities and real trouble.
So I keep a list that I call important things. And the important things are what is the most important thing that I could be working on right now? And I'll just tell any, any stage entrepreneur, certainly beginning stage entrepreneurs, you're gonna have trouble prioritizing. And the reason you're trouble prioritizing is because you think you're dumb.
But in reality, the problem is no one's gonna prioritize until they've done it a lot. And then you can get a sense of, okay, this is the quotes in Paris. This is the lead domino. If I do this thing, it'll make everything that comes after easier.
So you start to identify those things and you're gonna do those until you can't do them anymore, either from fatigue or there's just nothing more to do. And now you're waiting for somebody to come back to you, whatever. Then you move on to the second thing. But I find everybody gets paralyzed by I don't know what's in first place.
And so now you have seven things in first place place. And so I, and I constantly fight with my team about this. You stop being weak. Like, what's number one?
Like you're allowing yourself to be emotionally paralyzed because you're like, oh, it's all important. Yes. But you can only ask you one thing at a time. So what's that one thing?
And so I'm just ruthless about that. So the beginning of my day, so I'm up usually at 4:30 in the morning. I don't let anybody on my schedule until 9:00am, 9:30, if I can push it. And then I don't let anybody on my schedule after 1pm so there's a narrow window where I've already gotten 45 hours worth of work.
In the beginning, my most important, all execution. Then I take meetings. I'm sure everybody's moving and they have whatever questions I need answered. And then I'm in it.
I'm in product and I'm in marketing. Those are the two things I'm just like obsessively focused about. And so I'm available, I'm with the team. Which by the way, I'm going to guess because how many businesses you own, you operate like, that.
This. During COVID I was like, word, go wherever you want. You can move away. No big deal.
Now I'm like, you better get in the office. Like, we are back in a big way. It is so inefficient to not have people here. Yeah.
We just bought an office in Austin for the same reason. I've especially found, you know, I have incredible team because they'll tell me. They'll be really honest about it. Like, one of the guys on my team who runs part of the creative thing.
It's like, yeah, I'm just. I just don't work as hard when I'm not in the office. Like, I can't believe you just said, that's my face. But also, thank you.
And. And I think it's true, because most all of us have willpower issues, and all of us can benefit from a little eye over the shoulder. And the reason why we can really benefit is because I remember when I was at Golden Sax, and they were watching us like crazy. I was never on social media.
I was never taken off because I wanted to get out of that office. I knew I was gonna have to do long hours, and I wanted to get out of there when I was done. I never understood the Silicon Valley foosball, make them stay here all the time thing. I'm like, come here, here.
Give it intense. Maybe do a workout break or a walk in between. Come back to intense, and then go live your life, you know? And if you're like me, you're gonna work way more than that.
But, like, be here when you're gonna be here. Like, think about work. Like, meditation. You should be so singularly focused and that all distraction sort of fades away.
And if you do that, then you actually have to. You have to work less because you're so much more effective. But I remember early on in my career, you know, that's why I couldn't stay at Vanguard, actually, because I was sitting at a desk and I was trying. I was like, you know those ducks where underneath the surface are paddling like crazy, but on top there, smooth.
That was me. I was drowning. I didn't know anything about finance. I come from journalism.
I. Everybody was smarter than me. Everybody went. Harvard and Stanford, etc.
I went to Arizona State, Harvard to West, as you said. And. And I remember one of the. My teammates came up and started talking to me about lunch planning stuff, and I was like, cci, I'm focused.
I don't have time to talk about any of this. I'm here, man. We Talk, like, after work, but, like, I'm here right now, and it happened, like, a few times, and I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I just couldn't be distracted, because then I lost my focus entirely.
And I probably have a little ADHD, and so it would derail me for, like, 30, 40 minutes. And I remember that happened. And then my boss at one point was like, your team thinks that you would leave dead bodies behind you. And I was like, huh?
Really? Why? They're like, well, you don't pay attention to when they come up your desk. You don't do party planning.
I was like, guy, I am here to do a job, and I'm going to. I would never, like, run over somebody, do the job, but I will be similarly focused to get it done. And so that is, I think. Or are you?
Because now as a CEO, I have to imagine you got to make people feel a little more warm and fuzzy. Or have you found a way to be like, yo, I have good people who are more warm and fuzzy than I am. So I found in life, like, you are who you are, kind of. And every time I try to become somebody that I'm not, first of all, comes off as inauthentic.
And second of all, it doesn't really work. So if I come in and I'm too warm and fuzzy, nobody's gonna buy it. I am fun. I think.
Like, I'm aggressive, but I'm fun. So I'll make jokes. And I do something every Monday called the Compass. And basically, it's just a little PowerPoint 10 minutes that I give to the whole team.
And in it are a few things, like our culture code. Every single week, I go through what the 13 values are. I pick, like, one one person who wins, like, something for one of our values, and that'll be some funky, fun stuff for each of them. And so I will, like, I will cheerleade the shit out of the company during that period.
But when somebody needs a hug, they know not to come to me about it for sure. Now, I think the counterpoint to that is I've always taken care of my people. Like, as long as you are good to your teammates and to the company, like, have your back. Like, if you need a new job and this isn't the place for you, I will help you find a new job.
I will fire you. Like, I will handhold you. You know, if you have a health issue, I'm gonna take care of you. But, like, I don't think you have to be warm and fuzzy.
I also hire, like, a lot of. We're really honest about who we are in interviews, which I think is really, really. If you. You know, I was a terrible employee at Vanguard because they're super touchy feely, you know, kind of socialists.
And I liked Goldman. I liked capitalist kind of jerks, but they're really smart. And so I liked that. I wanted the pressure.
And so now when people come interview with us, I'm like, hey, like, talk to me about, like, your favorite moment of pressure. Talk to me about when you did the thing that felt unreasonable to get the goal. And I tell them up front. Our interviews start with all things are terrible about the company and why I'm awful to work for.
And if they still like it after that, then they might be a win. But otherwise, I wasted. We know, you know, we have a very similar thing. So it's our culture doc.
You can't come to the interview unless you've read it. And. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
And the funny thing is, I've had multiple people say, hey, we've lost a lot of candidates when they read the culture doc. And I'm like, that's the point, because I want them to know who we are. And if you're not about that life, then this is not the place for you. I am trying to win a championship, nothing short.
I'm not trying to be an also Rand. I'm not trying to play and get a participation trophy. I'm flat out. I'm trying to beat Disney.
And that. That is a big task, and the odds of success are very low. And so I want to have fun, but I also want to be surrounded by hardcore motherfuckers that are here to win. And the document says exactly that.
And it is very aggressive. And so, yeah, we have weeded people out. But what I always say to people saying, like, hey, are we sure? Like, this thing's really aggressive.
I'm like, I found you. I'm like, what's your favorite thing about this company? The people. Exactly.
Exactly. Like, we are a very specific flavor. And if you like our flavor, I like to think for, like, black licorice, which I love. Now, I know for some people, that is the most disgusting thing in the universe.
And so I'm like, but we're that kind of specific. For the right person, like, we will be the favorite place you've ever worked. And for the wrong person, we will be trash. So for any of my entrepreneurs out there, let me tell you right now, culture is one of the most important things.
Product, market, fit, More important, make more money than you spend. More important. But then, like, culture is going to be a huge deal for retention for employees. Enjoying what they do for you, getting things done in a way that you're proud of.
Like, as I always say to people, hey, Lisa and I ran the experiment of what it looks like when you don't have the right culture and it's ass. And we hated it as much as anybody else. And not liking being at your own company, that's really lame. And so when we found the impact, we were like, never again.
Like, culture is going to be a main thing that we hire against, that we hold people accountable to. We have something. Do you know Radalio? Yeah.
Oh, God, I love this guy. So for people who don't know, he built the largest hedge fund in the world. Amazing. And he has this thing, this culture that he calls dots.
So everybody can give everybody else, like a score on whatever, 30 different criteria. And so we have a bunch of those criteria that are part of our culture, Doc. Like, are people being hardcore, et cetera, et cetera, so we can all rank each other. I love that.
You know what I find fascinating is the stuff when I was poor or not, where I wanted, that I ignored is the stuff that makes you millions and then tens of millions of dollars. Like culture, like leadership. I used to think, what? Like, I'm just here, I get a job done, I want to get rich, I want to do the thing.
That's how it goes. And so, you know, I think it's really interesting, whenever I'm with builders who have filtered, they all want to talk about the same stuff. It's like, how do you get more humans to want to do the things you want them to do? Culture, leadership.
And if people want to have real success and you want to do it in a way where you're not killing yourself all day. Those two words are like two of the most important words in the English language. What's funny is, I'm sure if we did a YouTube video and the title was how to Build a Hard Million Dollar Culture, people be like, snooze. But if you're like, how to make a million dollars worth of vending machines in 30 days.
Fucking millions of views. But guess what? The one on the Left, the first $100 million culture is so much more valuable than the vending machine video. And so if you can push through what the world wants you to listen to, which is literally the candy, the vending machine, the sweets, and you can actually want to eat the broccoli oh my gosh.
That's where all the magic is. It's actually funny because I was sitting with this the other day. I went to team three of the Navy Seals, 40th anniversary of being in existence. Right.
School. So this was the team that my husband was at. And we go on to the new base. It's incredible.
Like we take a tour through, you know, these halls where like our friends, their gear when they were, you know, guild in action is sitting there and my husband flag with his name written on it that was like taken away from ISIS and showed our. Yeah, it was just incredible. Right? That's heavy.
It was really cool. It was cool to see the steps that land from people that you've known before. But what stuck with me from a business perspective is we're sitting, we're looking out at the ocean, it's beautiful. And we're sitting listening to five people speak.
Admiral Graven, who's probably one of the most, you know, well respected living team guys. Is it Johnny Kim? Anyway, both a Navy SEAL and an astronaut and a doctor. I mean, total underperformer.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the current head of team three. What's fascinating is you had Admiral McRaven, he gave this incredible speech, right?
Like best selling author, one of the most senior guys in the military. You had the head of the team, you had overachiever, Johnny Kim, astronaut, doctor, et cetera. But then the very end you had what's called the CEO, I think, excuse me, the military system probably he's like the head enlisted guy. So there's officers and then there's the enlisted guys and they work hand in hand.