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

The hard truth about money is that if you don't invest it, you will lose it to inflation. That forces all of us to become degenerate gamblers, and I have a growing thesis that hard money that can't be seized or inflated ought to be an inalienable human right. But currently, that's not the case, so you have to invest in something as a way to beat the hidden theft that is money printing. Today's guest is Cody Sanchez, and she has one of the most unique solutions to this problem I've ever seen. I want to start with a quote from Cody Sanchez, if you game for it. Yeah. Here we go. We're about to have one of the most difficult markets of our careers. I was at Goldman Sachs in 2007 and 2008 when the world was falling apart. I saw what happened to retail investors then, and I think it will be worse this go round. Between interest rates, commercial real estate, and the fact that we also have to battle inflation, we are going to come into one of the most difficult markets in our history of investing. Why do you think this time is going to be different? Why isn't the government going to come in, print more money, and either stop us from having a recession at all, or if we do have one that we won't just bounce back? I think guns only have so many bullets, right? And the government, in some ways, at the federal level, operates like a gun, and they've used their bullets. You know, they've used quantitative easing, which was a massive money printer for a long time, longer than they should have, from QE to then TARP, which the temporary asset relief program actually continued far past when it was supposed to. And then they did it with interest rates. And then they're going to have to try to figure out how to manage a burgeoning deficit that is getting slightly out of control. 34.4 trillion dollars as of the time of this recording. Which now has higher interest rates on it and will continue to have higher interest rates on it, which they didn't extend longer terms for than they should have when interest rates were at the lowest amount, you know, during our lifetimes. And so, I think the government is out of bullets, and we, you know, when when you're out of bullets, what do you do next? I mean, you have to go to like bigger ammunition. And so, I think the thing that scares me the most about this recession is because the government doesn't know what else to do that is within their normal arms, they're going to have to come and do something a little bit crazy, or let the market really really fall. And I think political will right now does not want to let the market fall. And big corporates do not want to let the market fall. And so, for that reason, I worry about the economy. You and me both. I don't see a way around printing. They, especially in an election year, there's no universe in which they will let that happen. They have also proven every time there's a problem, every time there's a problem since 2008, they whip out the money printer, and that's everybody, Democrats, Republicans, does not matter. Print, print, print, print, print. And I keep asking people about this, and the only So, what I ask people is the debt is increasing every 100 days we add a trillion dollars in debt. As you said, the interest rates are high, interest rate payments are now the third biggest line item that the government has. That's going to keep growing. If you lower interest rates, then inflation is going to rear its ugly head again. If you print money, inflation is going to rear its ugly head. And so, to your point about being out of bullets, yes, but I think the analogy ends up breaking down because they will fire the bullets. They'll just kill the wrong people. And so, what ends up happening is the dollar begins to struggle. Now, I don't think we're going to have rapid de-dollarization or hyperinflation or anything like that, but it's going to be a super weird economy where everybody is turned into a gambler. Yeah, I mean, I think your points on inflation are really well taken, too. What concerns me with inflation is, you know, if you go out right now in the market, everybody says inflation's coming down. We're more around a 2% level. We're not at the 4 to 5 to 8% inflation that maybe, depending on how you measure it, we were at in the past. But then you go and buy groceries, right? And you feel the difference in groceries bought in 2020 versus groceries bought in 2024. And so, I looked at some sample baskets, both economically and from an individual person, and you could see that if you bought $10 in groceries in 2020 and $10 in groceries in 2024, you basically got 50% less in 2024. So, you went from 10 to $15 for the same amount. Now, what's fascinating is you go, well, how's that possible? Because inflation's down, and, you know, we're trending at a at at a better level. Well, how it's possible is once you have a permanent price increase that settles along small businesses, they actually don't pull those down on a commodity basis just because the commodity prices have come down. If they already know that they can charge XYZ amount, businesses typically don't wheel back their prices once they raise them. Now, baskets like, you know, oil, for instance, those definitely change, but small businesses across the US are going to normalize prices. And so, I think the bigger issue, too, was people are not making more, inflation's come down, but they feel like they have to spend more, and they're right, they do. And actually, the way that we measure inflation doesn't make a lot of sense for the normal average Joe, who really has most of their costs in things like everyday food, utilities, rent. Mhm. I heard a stat, I don't remember exactly where this comes from, but it sounds intuitively correct, and somebody in the comments will bang me if I'm off, but that while it is true that the stock market, which is basically the only place that the most people invest in, they're not savvy investors, they have no idea what they're doing, so they just do basic fund, that most, even though the stock market returns roughly 10% on average, that isn't what the average investor gets. The average investor ends up losing to inflation. And so, that I think speaks to a lot of what's going on in crypto, and I know you're not a big crypto person, but so I'm I'm I'm a part of a meme about sitting on two chairs because I very much Michael Saylor, who has literally bet the farm and then some on Bitcoin, there's no universe in which I would do that. So, I'm just I don't trust anything that much. So, I don't think the future is a guarantee, and so just too many weird things can happen. So, anyway, I'm taking a far broader approach to this. But when I start talking about like, hey, we have a debt crisis, what's the solution? I don't see a way to unwind this. Like everything that I run, every scenario that I run, you end up with a debt jubilee. Now, a debt jubilee sounds awesome, but it usually comes when people are getting shot and blown up. So, historically, the button that says debt jubilee is war. So, as somebody who would really like to avoid that. Anyway, when I bring this up that I don't see a solution, people are always like, bro, Bitcoin. Okay, first of all, let me say, I'm a huge believer in Bitcoin, and that is my largest single holding. Crypto in general, for sure, is by far my largest holding. However, that is what I'll call a life raft because the people that know to get in it, sure, you now have a protection from inflation, but that isn't additional productivity. And so, you're not going to be able to escape the debt crisis that we're in now. It may avoid the next debt crisis from happening, but it doesn't help us with the one that we're in now. So, when you look at that, you see something I'm missing? Well, you know, I think no, I don't see anything that you're missing. I think the federal government has turned into a transfer service, and they are essentially they used to provide services to to all of us, to citizens. And now, if you actually look at the amount of money and where they spend it, they spend most of their money transferring money from those who have made it to those who say that they need it. And like there's actually a graph that's fascinating that I sent to you that we can put on here, and people can can disagree with it in the comments, but it basically shows that federal spending is at all-time high levels with transfer, which is things like, you know, social security, Medicare, Medicaid. And so, I think the problem, even bigger than the debt crisis, is we have systemic issues in this country that the government has no incentive to change because what are they doing when they transfer your dollars to somebody else times 20? They're buying votes. So, you know, of course they're going to be able to stay in office and continue to have systemic issues like this if they keep transferring money in this way. And so, I think it's not Everybody's focused on government spending, that is problematic, very much so, how much they're spending, but it's also where they're spending it. It's the fact that we've turned into this, you know, this funnel system. And that's the thing that I think scares me more than anything else because you are not increasing productivity of those dollars when you transfer it from one person to another based on need, not output capability, you know, additional spending that they're going to do to push the economy forward. And so, it would be much better if we were spending on even things like defense, infrastructure, innovation, and we're just not. That's nice and distressing. So, when I saw that graph, I'd never seen that before, and for people listening, we will have this up on screen, but what I found very interesting, so the it starts tracking in like the 1940s, and obviously defense is massive, it's like 80-plus percent of what the government spends on, as you would expect, because we were in the middle of World War II. Then that pretty precipitously falls off in the '50s, and you get this sort of normalization, but what's interesting is you see that line fall really low, and then the what I think the graph calls individual payments, what you were just describing, starts rocketing up in like the '50s and '60s. And what's really interesting, and oh man, this is this is one of those things that to really talk about, you have to get into the nitty-gritty of why people want to do this. So, it's the sense of nobody left behind, right? So, we see that somebody has need, we want to make sure that they're taken care of. I love that the most, but what ends up happening, to your point, is you're taking efficient capital dollars Yeah. and you're turning them into inefficient capital dollars simply because some people are good at allocating capital and some are not. And so, you are literally siphoning money from people who made that money because they're good at capital allocating. They're good at building businesses, just to not use fancy words. They know how to build a business, they know how to build things that people want, people willing to pay money, and so, hey, grease is the wheels of the economy, GDP goes up, we're able to make more with less, and the people that are able to make more with less, one would think you would want to keep the money in their hands, but what we're doing instead, at an ever-increasing rate, is we're moving that capital from the people who have demonstrated an ability to do something to the people that don't know how, certainly have not yet demonstrated an ability to do that. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, I think also, you know, if you think about what's happening here, I think you individually get overwhelmed when, you know, you think, "What do I do about these huge things? Okay, so the debt ceiling's happening." You know, I mean, so we have this massive uh debt problem. Cody says we're out of bullets. Tom says they're going to shoot us anyway. You know, what do I do about all of this, right? And what I'm just a normal person trying to get by, trying to afford a 2-week vacation during the summer, and a smaller house than I had before, maybe, and less cars, and the government keeps getting bigger, but I have less. What am I supposed to do about this? I I'm not I'm not calling up senators. I have no access to this sort of change that you two are talking about. And I think if that's how you feel, in my mind, it's one, knowledge is power. So, now you get to know what is happening, and when somebody says something idiotic to you, like, "It's good to transfer the money from the rich to the poor," you go, "Wait a second, why?" Because it turns out we are very collective individuals as opposed to individualistic. This collective society, if you live in the US, you can't get away from the repercussions of those on high. So, I think everybody listening, you should you should feel like, "Man, I want to understand this so badly because I want to explain to all of my friends why the government's decisions today can be more impactful than what my boss does in some instances, or how much money I make." You know, I had one business that was eradicated because the government changed one regulation. And because of that, everybody got laid off in the business. I actually ended up leaving the business, and it was because they changed this one little rule about mark-to-market accounting in 2008 that we talked about previously, and money market funds and variable NAV, like very tech techy things in the finance space. And because of that, people lost their jobs. And so, I think it's really important to like get to the numbers through the narrative. And so, you know, as I was thinking about this today, I'm like, "What do the numbers say uh versus what do the politicians say?" Well, right now, the politicians are telling us "Tax the rich. Tax the billionaires. That's the solution. Let's take all their money. It's those guys' fault." And let me tell you why I think that's so dumb, is because when you look at the math, if we took all of the Forbes one uh all of the Forbes 400 richest people in the world, and we clawed back all their wealth, something like $4 trillion, that would run the US government for 7 months. Okay, that's not going to do enough. Then, what if we took 100% of their earnings every year, about a million people's earnings, and we took all their earnings, how long would that run the government? Well, it'd be about like $500 billion, and that would be 34 days. So, oh, that's really helpful, Mr. Politician, when you talk about let's tax the rich, show me what that gets me. And what it gets me is 34 days of your salary. No, thanks. We don't have a revenue problem in the US. We have a spending problem, and it turns out the politicians just need to know how to use a [ __ ] calculator, and they don't. Or they do, and it's even worse and more maniacal than that. Yeah, I mean, for now, I'll assume that there's no uh evil intent behind it, um which I trust me, I understand that's playing naive a little bit, but I think if people start there, they're going to blind themselves to what's really going on. Mhm. Um okay, so, we don't have a revenue problem. I don't actually think that's true. So, anybody with a managing a household budget, if you come to me, cuz I get asked this question a lot, uh Thomas, just cannot like make ends meet, or I'm struggling in my business, I want to scale, what do I need to do? The answer is always, you have two options. You can lower your expenses, or you can make more money. So, you could look at this and say, "We do have a revenue problem." Cool, I'm here for that conversation. The problem is, we've already covered this in this conversation, which is you've got you're pointing your finger at the quote-unquote rich people. I forget the stat, but most wealthy people did not inherit their money. Certainly more than 50%. It might be more than 70%. It's pretty high. Like, it's really hard to retain wealth, really hard. And they don't stay there. No, people variable charts. Even within your own life, Yeah. you go up and down, in and out of classes. So, uh but the narrative is not that. But so, you have these people that are proven, "I'm very good at at generating money. I know how to increase that." Yep. Um and I increase it by doing more with less. So, meaning, I can get you that stereo that you want. It's a better stereo for less money, or a better stereo for the same money, TV, car, whatever. It's just more efficiency. Uh take Amazon as my favorite story. I cannot believe that people hate on Jeff Bezos because Amazon changed our lives. Now, if you are willing to trade, "No, I don't want things that quickly. I'd much rather have mom-and-pop shops everywhere." Okay, fair, we can at least have that argument. But you can't deny that he's been way more efficient with the capital. And when you talk about, and look, I let's put the elephant in the room, this is two wealthy people having this conversation. This is also two self-made wealthy people, which I'd like to remind people. So, if you are overtaxing the rich, what you're doing is saying, "I'm taking revenue as a solution off the table because I'm now going to handicap them, because that revenue that they would have used to become even more efficient, to scale their business, or to start the next business, or whatever, it that's not you don't have that ability, cuz especially if you're talking um taking the tax rate up and up and up, and people will say, "Oh, there was a time where the tax rate was 90% or whatever, and we did just fine." There was a time where the tax rate was briefly 90%, and you will notice they brought that down real fast because you were going to get capital flight massively. People are just not going to put up with that. So, anyway, it could be solved with revenue, but it won't be solved with revenue if the answer is just go tax the life out of people. And to your point, it just doesn't go long enough, so you end up taxing the life out of the middle class anyway. Okay, so, if you remove revenue, now you're left with how do we reduce expenses? Mhm. And nobody will vote for that. You need only look at all the burning cars in France every time somebody proposes like raising the retirement age or whatever. E- even here, people will twig out if you talk about raising the retirement age. So, what do we do with that? Well, I think a couple things are already happening. If you don't like the taxation system that you're under, you leave. And so, if you want to be around winners, the best thing that you do is you go where there's more winners than anywhere else. And you're seeing it in your state, right here in California. You called my state a failed state, Yeah, exactly. Sorry. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful nightmare of a regulatory environment. Yeah. Uh you know, I I was looking up these interesting statistics, and uh so, I was like, so, what how would I define a failed state? Why would I say that California is a failed state? Well, let's do a fun metric, which is let's see where the U-Haul prices are more expensive versus not more expensive when people are moving in and out. And what you basically see is my friends at First Trust did this analysis, where they showed that a U-Haul going from, you know, San Francisco to I maybe it was Arizona or Texas, is 6.42 times more expensive out of California as it is into California. So, what does that tell you? That basically, people are voting with their feet, and they're saying, "I'm not going to stay here and be taxed to high heaven, and if I by some chance turn my little plumbing company into a big plumbing company, I buy a nice house, now it's a mansion?" Because what we don't think about today that is real, is the real trickle-down economics, are that governments think the word rich trickles all the way down until it gets to you, every single one of you, including you and me. And so, you know, when we when we talk about a thing and we hate on it, we're never going to become it, right? And so, when you say you hate the rich, you should tax the rich, you should realize that you will never be rich. You're never going to achieve it, then. And so, if you want to think about what to do differently, it's actually, "Hey, do the opposite of what most politicians are saying," and maybe do what they're doing, which is look at their stock portfolios. They're investing like crazy. They're picking the really efficient capital allocators to put their own dollars behind. They're leaving political uh positions and going to lobbying firms, where they get paid a ton of money. Um and so, I think we need to push back on the fact that we need a big brother. We don't need one. Like, I think everybody's had a bad boss. That's why you leave jobs. Nothing worse than an insufferable boss. Also, nothing better for you to achieve than that chip on your shoulder. And that's what the government is. The government's become a bad boss that is trying to tell you all the time what to do one way or the other, and they're saying, "Oh, by the way, instead of me being your bad boss and still paying you, you're going to pay pay me for being a bad boss." And I think about that constantly. I'm like, could you imagine a job in which you don't make money, instead you pay money, and that boss is awful. Nobody would stay at that job. And yet, we do stay in those tax havens, those cities, those states. And in the future, I don't think we'll do that. Why not? What what's happening in the future that's going to make that It's just easier. It's easier to leave. It's easier to go to new countries and cities and states. It's easier to change your regulatory structure to be located somewhere else. The global pool of talent is huge. I mean, people don't like to talk about this, but you know, the the talent pool that you have to compete with today is global. It's not communal. It's not statewide and it's not national. You know, we are not only having to compete with people located in India, Indonesia, Europe. I have people on my teams in all of those locations, but now we also have to compete with with robots, right? We have to compete with AI. We have to compete with actual robots like the company Figure that we invested in. And so I think people are just moving and that will continue and the government is not noticing that. And we have a mutual friend Balaji that we're both in a chat with and I I love talking to Balaji because his brain is fascinating to watch live. Um, he's an AI. Yeah, he might be. He might be an alien. Yeah. If he isn't an alien, he's AI for sure. He is a very nice, very smart alien AI. I love him to death. He he is a single mind. Yeah, he really is. And you know, last I was chatting with him, I'm like, you need you have a moral imperative I think to explain the network state to more people so that they can understand how to become independent centers of gravity that aren't reliant on many other things in order to succeed. But in order to do that, we have to do what you talked about which is like simplify things. I think that's how people take money from us. They make it seem complex. They make it seem like, oh you couldn't understand. It's too it's too much for like poor normal humans. Let me help you. And and if we can break down those, you know, that verbage like in finance we use a bunch of big confusing words in order to keep your money. And so I think we have to push back on that. We have to start saying, no, I'm smarter than you say that I am. Explain it to me if I don't understand it. I'm capable of that. And by the way, I do not need the government to stand in for me because I'm a perfectly individual sovereign human and I think most people are. Yeah, we're I'm sure we'll get into that at some point. I the that whole thing, the government is not going to take that kindly. And we have lost a sense of the government works for us mentality. Like there's the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn't exist. And the thing that scares me about the government is that they are riding on and fanning the wave of I need to be taken care of nanny state protect me safetyism. 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I don't think the book is out yet, but Jonathan Haidt I know is working on a new book or just published a new book about that where his first take, The Coddling of the American Mind, was about amazing. Uh, was about, hey, social media came and clobbered everybody and we now have a problem. And now he's realizing it's more than just that. It's the fact that parents became extremely paranoid about letting their kids out and taking a risk and getting hurt or abducted. And so as the world got safer and safer, parents got more and more paranoid. And now you have a world where people actually believe words are violence. And so when I grew up, it was sticks and stones may hurt my break my bones, but names will never hurt me. And so that is what your parents would say when you were like, yo, I was getting bullied. People were making fun of me. Dude, the number of times Cody that I got called Dumbo, I can't even tell you. Yes. Well, that makes one of us. But here's here's the reality. My cousins were so cruel to me about my ears that by the time I got to school, I was just like, whatever. You have this whole thing like I I think my response was cuz everybody went straight to Dumbo. Hey Dumbo. I was like, at least Dumbo can fly. Good one. Yes, young Tom. My mom wasn't like, oh my god, poor you. She was like, what's your comeback? What do you got? Like you can't just go in and let people, you know, make fun of you. Whereas now it'd be like, yo, somebody goes into the school, you've got to stop that. We can't let people speak. And so the expectation on me was you have to get tough. Like you've got to be tough enough to deal with your cousins. You've got to be tough enough to deal with the kids on the playground. And now it's very much the opposite. And so I can see the government leveraging that to say, yeah, we are going to take care of you. No kid left behind. Do you know the McKinney-Vento law? I don't know if this is just in Washington state where I grew up. So my mom worked in transportation. She's now retired. But they will literally literally drive a school bus two and a half hours one way to pick up a single child. Think about the math on that. Yeah, no, it doesn't look good. No, no, no. So anyway, all of that that's why the spend is going up up up up up and things are getting worse and you have my own team, millennials, coming up to me and saying, I'm just getting savaged. Like I don't know how to get on the property ladder. I don't know how to invest. I feel like I can't get ahead. I've got student debt that's just drowning me. Like basically nihilism. I just want to give up. And then that pushes them further into the bosom of Klaus Schwab. Yeah. And his idea of you will own nothing. I don't like it. You will like it. Which was then retracted as never said. What do you think about like that whole WEF things are going just fine. Don't worry. Don't worry. No, I mean I think I think you could try this on which is, you know, take some risks, try to sell something every single day, get up at 6:00 a.m. continuously, ask for feedback relentlessly in what you're doing, and continue to repeat for somewhere around one to two years. I'm sorry, Kim Kardashian, did you just tell me to work harder? Yeah, I think that's I think you're going to surprise yourself about how many people are going to call you lucky and you're actually going to just say there was a recipe. And I think there actually is a recipe, but it's it's much easier for all of us to say, there's no recipe. Everything is against me than it is to say, what would happen if I followed these few steps. And so, one's just really empowering and one's disempowering. But you know, there's a bunch of statistics that are fascinating. I was reading a study the other day that said, millennials and Gen Z on average take 25% less risk than the previous generation. And how is risk demonstrated? They start less businesses. They get married later. They have less intercourse, risky in some ways good, bad or otherwise. They have less relationships and they buy less property because they're living at home to a degree I've never seen before, 45% or something like that for Gen Z. What? 45%. Up to what age? It's a good question. The internet will tell us. But 25% less risk, what does that mean? Well, that means that you're probably going to make 25% less per year that you have that activity, right? At least because you're not putting yourself out there at all. So how does that compound over time if you're taking less and less risk? You know, I talk about this all the time with my team. I think you should be at companies that allow you to have an ability for you to continue to earn more if you drive more revenue to the company. And so, you know, I don't think any one of my employees has ever come to me and said, hey, if I drive more revenue, if I close this deal for you, if we hit this metric and it makes us X, can I get Y from it? Now, I might not like their Y. I might say, no, you don't get 25%, but you could get five. But the thing is, this generation doesn't want to take the risk of asking, trying, none of it. And so you have to change that mentality or you're never going to win. You and I aren't that much smarter than anybody else. We just took a lot of risks continuously and we compounded every time we learned that we were bad at something and made a mistake and changed direction. And that's sort of it. Yeah, we're not that much smarter than people. That I really want that to land for people. To me, this is not Look, intelligence matters a lot. I'm not downplaying that. Jordan Peterson has made it very clear. If you meet a magic genie, just ask for more intelligence. Like just simple as the the number one predictor of ability and success is IQ. Now, if it's you curve, it is, yeah. I think I heard that. That being the number one predictor. How about this? I'm going to guess that grit is going to be tied to intellect. None of us are going to like that, but there's almost certainly some truth to that. I'm making that up. I don't know that that's true, but life has taught me that intelligence is like height on a roller coaster. Yeah. if you're below a certain level, when you go upside down, you fly off and die. Yeah, that's true. And if you are too tall, then you're going to get your head walloped when you go under a piece of scaffolding. So, there there is a Goldilocks zone of intelligence to be sure. I remember at one point the smartest person in America had like a 220 IQ. Einstein is estimated to be at 160, was at 160 to give you an idea. Uh and they were a bouncer at a bar. was going to say but they weren't successful cuz they can't actually empathize with most of the people. Right. They're alien, which is partly why biology seems like an alien. He's just so much smarter than me. Yes. Um so, look, intelligence matters. I'm not going to pretend that it doesn't, but it's more of a minimum requirements thing. If you meet minimum requirements, that's what I always tell people. If you meet minimum requirements and if you're listening to this point in the podcast, I'm going to guess you meet minimum requirements, then it becomes grit, determination, and the ideas that you live by. And those ideas, so you were saying that people were taking 25% less risk. And what that got me thinking is going back to Jonathan Haidt's idea of safetyism becoming safetyism potentially being the big problem of the generations right now because they're rejecting ideas that they think are {quote} dangerous. Yep. And if you reject an idea out of hand because you think it's dangerous, um then you're you are closing your mind off. There's actually God, I don't even I'm going to bring it up because it is true, but God, this is going to get me in trouble probably. There is a Jewish Times article about me because years ago, and thing is I still believe this. Uh years ago where before I knew about safetyism or anything, I had no idea this is going to trigger people. Uh and I was like, "Bro, I don't understand why people are looking for reasons not to hear somebody out." I was like, "You should be This person might be a total psychopath, but if they have one idea that's useful, like take that idea." So, I was like, "I'd have Mussolini on the show if he had a good idea that I could learn from." And so, the article says, "He said it. He really said it." Like you can go look it up. He actually said the words, "View it for yourself." So, anyway, I'm just saying if you're looking to reject ideas, I'm not saying I want to invite him to a family barbecue. I'm just saying if you're afraid of ideas, then you will never find the best, most efficient, most effective idea, and therefore you will get stuck. Could you imagine how poor you would be if you only took ideas from people you liked? I Very poor. Never get anywhere. Yeah, the correlation between uh do I like this person and is this something that could function and work in society? It could be zero. It actually doesn't matter at all. I mean, this this idea of moral absolutism lately that we have, which is if a single human did anything at any point in time that we consider bad by today's standards, we have to wipe their name off of the face of the planet and we could no longer say that we might be able to learn something from them is a huge disservice to anybody who is in learning and growth phase. Because you there's no perfect human. We've never met one. I've never met one. And so, every one of us has some dark thing in our closet. Every one of us has done things that we've been embarrassed about or grown past at some point. And so, the idea that you can only take ideas from people you like is a great way for you to stay poor. Um and so, I don't really believe in anything that doesn't have an outcome that I like. So, why would I Why would I only listen to people that I like? It's such a bizarre philosophy that somehow has been normalized. I'll even push it farther. Uh I will take a good idea from somebody even if they are despicable. Of course. Uh there I think there's even something in the Bible about this that the Luciferian intellect, I don't know if that's Jordan Peterson's phrase or if that's actually in the Bible, but that uh I know in the Bible there's something that sometimes uh the evil among us have the better idea. Oh God, I'm paraphrasing, but like that's the idea that there are times where you can actually learn something from somebody even if they are just outright evil. Yeah. Uh I think that's wise. I think the way that people should live their life, and I'd be very curious to get your take on this. This is how I advise everybody to think, and that is from first principles. Mhm. For first principles to work, you have to understand what your goal is. Where am I trying to get to? And I think a big part of what's breaking down in dialogue today is people don't understand like where are we trying to get? Mhm. And then they don't have an explicit stated philosophy by which they decide what things they will and won't do in order to achieve said goal. And so, what people end up arguing about are the {quote} facts of the situation. Now, the problem is your worldview, which is made of your beliefs and your values, they will change how you interpret the {quote} facts. And until people can say stated, "This is my goal. The These are the the value systems or philosophical underpinnings that I use to get to that goal or to navigate the world. And then, here's how I can track back my thinking based on those beliefs, assumptions, values, and this is why I've come to this conclusion." But if you are just winging it, then usually the values are blind to you. You have them, but you don't know what they are. Your beliefs, you confuse for objective reality, which they most certainly are not. Um and so, people end up thinking, "Oh, I am just approaching this from objective truth and objective reality, and so the fact that you view things differently than me just means you're a lunatic." Versus going, "Oh, that's a useful idea. I'm going to take that." And so, yeah, taking a useful idea from wherever it comes seems wise. very. I mean, I think it's quite useful to hold up a mirror in front of yourself and ask you who you think you are. We were talking about this to some degree. And so, what What would I do if I was going to ask, "Who am I as a person and what outcomes and actions would I like to have according to my own philosophy?" And the only way I've been able to do it well and consistently is in every company we have a creed. We have some sort of guiding principles that we live by. company? Uh no, but I do one for every company. Now, there are like three companies that have a same set of core principles, but some companies necessitate something else and the CEO gets to be the captain of that ship. And so, they should get to set those principles. Um but the principles that I have for our Contrarian of Companies are are 13 because we like this idea of trying to make our own luck. And uh and they you know, and there are some that are very core and helpful when you're thinking about what action should I take. I like to fall back on making my brain be as lazy as humanly possible. So, decision fatigue is real. It's really hard to continue to make good decisions all day. Any parent knows this. And so, how do you decrease the fatigue that comes from making decisions? You have principles that you get to revert back to. And so, like our very first one is "Those who say it Those who say it can't be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it." Very first one. You know, one of the other core ones is that we clean up the sink. We do the dirty work. And so, that's based off of a company where they got rid of their entire cleaning staff and the the company all the employees take care of cleaning up the building by themselves continuously. And so, if you believe that another one of ours, which is how you do anything is how you do everything, and like you pause on that for a second, that's really impactful. But the thing is most of us, we might have had a family crest a million years ago, but we certainly didn't have a family crest. We didn't have a personal creed. We A lot of us don't have company creeds. And so, you don't have a set of aligned values. And I think values are so much more important even than what your company does because they mimic your daily actions. And so, you know, if I was listening today, my husband and I have family values that are mimicked off of Contrarian Thinking values. And and it goes back to little things. Like one of ours is uh do you want to be a good white shark or do you want to be a great white shark? And it's tongue in cheek. It's cute, but that way every time we're like in the gym and we don't want to do it. Every time we could eat poorly, but we don't want to. We just kind of joke each other. I'm like, "What kind of shark you?" And those little things can just remind you of the type of human you want to be. I love that. How do you think through these incredibly intractable problems? Like do you if so if my methodology is first principles, goal, beliefs, values, they're stated, boom boom, think up to get there, what's the framework that you use? Ah, what is the framework that I use? So, I the other weekend I met with daughter of one of the richest billionaires in the US. Old old money uh in the energy space. And she's incredible, which is rare for billionaires' daughters, right? And so, I said to her, "Hey, um weird question, but uh you turned out really normal. Why?" And uh and she said, "You know what? My father always taught me that uh our family name means something, and we have to stand up for what that family name means for. And he made us repeat back to him what the family name meant to him. And then the second thing he always said is that uh the only thing you control is how hard you work. That's the only thing you can control. We can't control how smart you are. We can't control what happens in the world, but you can control your belief in what this family name means and your ability to work really hard. And so, when I think about my actions, I think about the same thing. I think I want my name to mean something. I want to remember that I'm here on this planet for some particular reason, and that the only thing I really have in my control is hard work. And so, it's not enough, but it is a lot. And that's what I revert back to every single time. I really think it's hard to beat somebody who works an hour longer than everybody else in their industry. You know, it's on average pretty hard. Now, you're going to have outliers, but like hard one of the easiest things to actually do, which seems like it doesn't make a lot of sense given the word hard in there. I am a hard work junkie. Uh. Every time you say, um, do the thing that you're obsessed with and it's going to be hard to beat obsession, I'm that's like my pornography. Like I'm very much the hustle culture kind of person. However, um, obviously I want people to live a life that that they're joyful about. So, I'm I I'm not the psychopath that's like, work and that's all that matters. Um, but I do want to push back and say, okay, if if I like to think about this a lot because I worked in the inner cities. I can't remember how much of my backstory Yeah, you told me that. Incredible. So, you're working with people and you're really seeing what poverty looks like up close. And one, it's interesting how they will oftentimes, like as a family unit, come together. There's some beautiful things to it. Anyway, setting that aside cuz there's way more horror than there is beauty. And I just got obsessed with, okay, I've got whatever, a month with this guy. How am I going to train them to actually get escape velocity and get out of the hood? And hard work for sure, foundational layer, but it isn't everything. And so, the thing there two things that I'll add to hard work. Tell me what you think. Uh, one is skill acquisition. You have to be a sociopath for acquiring skills. Because ultimately, if you're working hard but stupidly, you won't go anywhere. And what I find is people confuse hard work with morality. It's like this Puritan underlying thing, like I worked really hard and therefore I deserve to do well. No, you don't, [ __ ] Like if you did the right thing, the market will reward you because you did a thing that other people can't do. And so, getting people to understand the whole reason that you acquire skills is so that you can do a thing that other people can't do. And if you can do a thing that the world values better than other people can, you will always be employed, always. And then, the other one would be emotional control. Like if you can't control your own emotions, like you are going to be in a very dark place. And so, hard work, relentless skill acquisition, doing the effective thing, and then being able to control your emotions. That feels closer to like, I'm still like that's such a thumbnail sketch and of course it's beyond complicated in each one of those three things. Um, how does that sit? I think it sits. I mean, I think here's the thing that everybody should do if they want to get rich, but nobody wants to listen to, which is fascinating to me, is that amateurs do lots of things and pros do the few right things. And how is that possible? It's because pros teach other amateurs how to do all of those little things that they don't need to do and so they have leverage, right? So, pros don't have to be busy. Amateurs do have to be busy because they can't differentiate what is right and effective yet. So, I think there's this portion of your life where you have to you have to do incredible amounts of hard work because you can't delineate what is good versus what is busy work. And every one of us just needs to realize that 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, I you know, you don't even you don't even have to pick up numerous skills. You can be like what Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett talk about, which is making three to five really high signal to noise bets over your entire career and sitting lazily on your asses for the rest of the time. I mean, Munger talks about all the time that in fact their strategy is only one thing, which is when they see big risk, they go in huge if they think that risk can be rewarded and they do not go in if they do not see a huge risk reward. So, they just are professional no sayers. And that's because they learned to differentiate the difference between busy busy work and good work. And I think that is where most people should strive. Can you strive to actually determine what actions to take that will make movements or change. And it's really really easy to say but hard to do. I mean, think about it in your business. In my business every single day, there's a to do to do list so big I will never ever finish it. And I have to determine every single day what is the one thing that if I do, it becomes the fulcrum on which I get to place 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 pebbles look like that are going to 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, uh, a dark picture about where we're going, but I don't think either of us are afraid. Paranoid, yes, uh, because only the paranoid survive. But when I say I'm paranoid, what I mean is I'm trying to see the angles. Yeah. I'm not taking that it's going to happen easily for granted. So, I my channel can be rightly accused of, quote unquote, doom and gloom, but I'll just blame all of you [ __ ] cuz that's all you click on in a headline. Uh, but the what I hold myself accountable to is every word out of my mouth is something I actually believe. So, I believe all the things that I'm saying. I just don't have, uh, crippling fear. The only thing that that maybe unnerves me, even though I'm a huge proponent of it, is AI. We'll get to that later. Yeah. So, anyway, uh, potentially, quote unquote, dark period coming from a recession standpoint. I say dark because a lot of people who aren't paranoid, who either don't have the intellect or have not put the time in or just don't have the right set of ideas, whatever, they're going to get blindsided. I love too many of those people, so it it it does appear as a dark time to me. However, you have a quote from Baron Rothschild, uh, that I think bears bringing up. Yeah. Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own, maybe especially when it's your own. And he became a titan of industry, uh, probably one of the richest men ever on an inflation-adjusted basis. So, I think he did okay. And, uh, you know, I was thinking I I pulled some some data for us, uh, for this conversation today because here's the thing. If you haven't been a if you haven't been through a recession yet, uh, you're going to survive this next one, too. I mean, if you look historically, and we can show this graph, too, we we survived '90, '99, you know, 2020, 2008. Those were just the recessions during my working years. And if you look at what happened after all of those recessionary periods, not all of them bounced back in a V-shape 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're already seeing that. Austin's one of the worst hit real estate cities in the country. So, if you're looking to buy real estate in a market that has Tesla moving to it, that has Dell, that has a bunch of Google headquarters, uh, moving to it, a bunch of Facebook employees moving to it, a bunch of AI, it's like one of the defense AI, um, centers of the country, but it's, you know, the average, uh, house in Austin's down somewhere between 20 to 30%. And so, what does that mean? Well, interest rates are coming down and houses are 20 to 30% cheaper. And so, you can buy a house for less money at less interest rates than you could a year ago and probably your pay hasn't gone down by 20 to 30%. And so, in this market you're going to have a bunch of opportunities to buy things at sale. And most people get their money I just sort of think about it like the unprepared transfer their money to the prepared during downturns. And so, if you do not listen to channels that are doom and gloom about what might come, then when it comes, one, you won't recognize it. Two, you won't act on it. And three, you will actually lose from it because somebody 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. It happened in 2020. It happened in '99. It happened in '90. And by the way, there's signals right now that show the same thing, well, then you might be prepared for what's coming. And it might not scare you when you see that, you know, auto loans are at the highest level since the last recession, uh, auto loan, uh, defaults. That you might not see that credit card delinquencies are at all-time highs. And that might not scare you. You might instead go, okay, well, something's coming on sale. So, how can I make sure I have enough cash to do something with? How could I circle up a couple friends so we could make a smart investment in property during this period? Because the other thing that's interesting, those big scary people we talk about all the time, BlackRock, Blackstone, all the big companies, they get a credit crunch, too. You know, they they cannot get as much access to capital as they can during normal markets. So, that's another one there's very few times where the poor get to steal from the rich. And one of them is in a downturn if the poor are actually thoughtful enough about preparing for it. And you can't do it in a big way, but, you know, most of America will die broke, alone, and fat. And so, if that's the case, one smart house acquisition, one smart multi-family acquisition is enough to set up a family for for And it's just continuing to take those small steps in a period where most people are acting emotionally. Walk us through. So, you are 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 could even buy part of it during a down period where maybe your boss needs a little bit of capital or your boss needs you to go out and bring in more clients for them. And you do that in a recession-resistant sector. You raise prices because most small businesses are underpriced somewhere from 30 to 300% and you add technology. And this generation in particular, like if you are young and hungry, you are 10 to 20 to 100 x 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 their window cleaning. They're a window cleaning company. They went from uh unemployed, laid off during COVID from pretty good jobs and no money, you know, trying to figure life out. Their first year in business in a window cleaning company, they did $200,000 in revenue. The next year, they did $500,000 in revenue. This year, they'll do somewhere between 700,000 and a million dollars in revenue and these are two kids that are both sub-28 years old, one with a newborn baby on the way. And how did they do it? They added incredible social media marketing. So, they do really funky videos. They added really 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 on your fingernails in a company that you own where you get to get out of your house occasionally, away from a screen, and get to know your neighbors and your community? Turns out you might be happier than working at 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. Had a friend over 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 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 they're not going to have anyone to pass their business on to. You've got a lot of people frustrated." This is going to start to sound familiar here. Uh working traditional jobs, they don't want to be in investment banking. And so, the new play is going to be skip college, buy a business. And I said, "My friend, I have somebody you need to talk to." Um but I imagine a lot of people listening to this if they're new to your world, that is going to sound ridiculous, especially in a time where we're going into a recession. So, if they don't have access to money, they've never bought a business, never run a business, why would this be a good idea? How do you for a second just you're here to persuade, you're here to help make that revolution actually come true. What do you tell people? First, I say don't do it if you don't like pain because owning a small business is painful. Owning any business is pain. Owning any business is painful and there will be nights that you will regret it. But here's the flip side. The second that somebody tells you you shouldn't do it and yet they are an owner or they run their own business, you ask them, "Why didn't you go back to being an employee for somebody else?" And they won't have a good answer. They'll say, "Well, I'm unemployable. Well, I had no other choice." And the best don't listen to what people say, listen to what what people do. And what people do is when they get a taste of freedom, they either want to partner with other people on more deals and businesses or they want to work for companies that they're obsessed with. They don't want to have to work for companies that they don't like doing things that they don't want to do for money anymore. And so, I will say it's painful, but it is worth it. And that for most people running a small business is not rocket science, especially today. I think it's never been easier to start a small business as evidenced by the amount of businesses that have been started, somewhere between like two to five x the number of businesses that were created over the last three years as the past 10 years. And that's just determined by like LLC and entity creation. But it's never been harder to have a 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 to 40% of them die because they couldn't find product market fit." Just they had an idea and nobody wanted their idea, right? And so, I'm kind of like that. I don't I don't know that I have a crazy idea that somebody's going to want to buy. I never had that. And so, instead, I'm like, "Why don't I just buy a couple of these small businesses and I can partner with the founder of the small business and I know that somebody already wants it cuz they have revenue and it's profitable and I can just help it grow." And so, we see that again and again and again, but nobody taught us this in school because it's there's risk, right? When you go and get a job at McKinsey or Bain, there's no risk of you losing money, you know, they're going to pay you a salary, which is largely guaranteed unless you get fired. And yet when you go and buy a small business, you could lose money and you could not make money and you could owe money from debt. And so, I think people are so scared of that. They're they're terrified of failing. And my point is like the US actually has an incredible system called bankruptcy, which a lot of countries don't have. This is an ability for you to wipe the slate if a business doesn't work out for you. Well, what's the best time to wipe the slate? When you really don't have anything anyway. So, when you're young and you don't have a lot going on, I don't know why you wouldn't take a huge risk and try to buy into a business, try to earn into a business cuz you're because you're a general contractor and you work in a construction business and you can't progress any further in the construction business, so you go to a competitor that you realize is 65 years old plus and you say to him, "Hey, what are you doing with your business? Are you going to sell it at some point? Are you going to run it forever? Are you going to give it to your son? No, you're not. Well, maybe somebody like me could buy into part of your business and I could 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, 6,000 people how to buy businesses across our courses and um in our mastermind and they bought something like $262 million in revenue. Wow. Yeah. And these are people who are like former teachers, engineers. Um they're doing seller financing, they're doing SBA loans. And what I've realized, I can almost tell immediately if somebody will be successful at it or not, like if they'll buy a business or not. And the way I can tell if they will be successful or not is do they complain about how much work it is? And if they say, "This is a lot of work, you know, I just kind of want the deal to fall in my lap," you're probably not going to be successful buying a business. The ones that say that they're willing to do the work, it's fascinating. I haven't seen one of them go sideways yet. We've seen three people's deals go sideways and all of those were because they didn't want to keep working on the business. And so, I think I think hard work is really an underrated an underrated thing in a society that wants nobody to work and everybody to take. Do you have a mental model for why that is? Why everybody wants that these days? Not necessarily why they wanted though, maybe that's part of the answer, but why your I think you're rounding hard work to something. Yeah. Um I don't think you literally just mean work hard, but since we've already gone into detail on that. So, whatever that thing is that you're rounding it to, do you have a mental model for why that's so important? I see what you mean. Well, one of my favorite questions to ask when I interview people is when was the last time you worked all night on something by your choice? And what was it? What did you do? Literally for me? Like Well, yeah, for you. I know what it was for you though, I bet. Uh 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 cuz we had a deadline to pitch. And so, I had to hit that deadline. Yeah. Yeah. That was the last time I through the night. And you know what would be a fun thing? Is there a many people I bet listening to this that would say, "I have never worked through the night for something. I've never wanted something so bad that I was willing to sacrifice sleep for one night." Which like Brian Johnson is not going to like, you know, he wants us to sleep, which I 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 and a Navy SEAL. And when I look at his relationships, I'm in awe of them. His friendships from that time, you know, they've become my best friends. They stay with us. We stay with them. We're great you know, we're godparents to his kids. We have this this tight-knit community that's almost impossible to break. If I needed to bury a body, they would just ask me the coordinates and they would be there. And um And the reason that he has that is because they went through something really hard together. And people wonder why they I mean I 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 of friendship and family in the US and faith. Lowest levels of that across the board. And I was talking to Arthur Brooks the other day who just wrote a book with Oprah who's one of I think the great thinkers on happiness. Oprah or Arthur? Arthur. And and Arthur said said there's four things that determine happiness and that is faith, family, friendships, meaningful friendships, and work that serves. And he's like, we've done decades of research on this at both Harvard and at AEI where he was previously. And he's like, and so it's no surprise that people are more unhappy than they've ever been because they feel more disconnected than they ever have because they have no purpose in their life and nobody to share it with. All right, so that was a response to me asking the thing you call hard work Mhm. is the underappreciated thing. And we ended up talking about faith and family and friendship that's really interesting. So, um I'm going to see if I can tease apart the way that you think. Yeah. Okay, so part of this is you have a base assumption that working hard is in and of itself, if tied to a thing that you love, is the reward in and of itself. Yeah. Is it love first, hard work second, or is hard work in your mind an inescapable need? Mhm. That's a good question. I know this that everyone has had a moment where they're so miserable working on the thing that they're working on that they almost can't stand it any longer. They just want to quit. They do quit. They make irrational decisions because their their misery gauge at work is so high. And I felt that before. And if I go back and think about why did that hard work not make me happy? What what was the root cause of that? I think it is at the moment in which you feel like you have nothing else that you're learning. So, I coordinate hard work with learning. I'm usually learning something if I'm working hard at something. I coordinate that with working on something that matters. So, if I if I've lost my why for why I'm working. And then lastly, if I'm working with people that I don't aspire to be or don't want to be around. So, it's sort of this like people purpose and this learning component that if I have those three things, the hard work is really fun. But if I don't have those three things, then perhaps the hard work feels futile, unnecessary, and more like labor than work. I'm curious to hear if this resonates with you. There's a spiritual component to your mission to get people to consider buying small businesses that now I'm I've always known that was true, but I didn't know why it was true. Now teasing that stuff out. So, some of this is a an aspect of a life well lived for you. Yeah. I think that's true. Like did you ever work in a cubicle? Yes. Yeah. Did you work in a cubicle when you didn't work for yourself? Yes. Have you seen the Tucker Carlson response to um oh gosh, postmodernist architecture? Uh I've no, but I've seen the headlines. Now you make me wish that I had clicked. I can send you the clip afterwards if people are curious. But but basically um he's in an interview with somebody can't remember. And he says postmodernist architecture is a um I'm going to simplify to suck your soul out. Yeah, it's basically like it's it's um yeah, meant to demise humanity. You know, postmodernism is a direct affront to humanity. It wants to suck the human out of us. And how he ends it is he basically says and no privacy at all. And then he says very intensely, it is because they do not value you. They do not value you as a human. You are a number, nothing else to them and that is why 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, we have very few of them. And so, why would we put our workers in these instances that show that we don't care about them at all? That it's like copy repeat, copy repeat, copy repeat. And I'm a capitalist, so I understand the idea of of profits and losses and needing to be capital efficient. But I also really believe in humans and I believe in our ability to elevate one another. And that if I find Tom in his zone of genius in a place that has power for for Tom, I believe in the power of place, then I will have a Tom that outperforms on an incredible level. And I don't mean distractions, which is where I think Google and all of them got it wrong. Foosball and nap chairs and whatever. We don't need to be children that when we stop working, we have to go play around with something else in order to distract ourselves from our work. We don't need that. But we do need to see beauty around us because we're capable of it and why wouldn't we? And so, I think you're right. There is part of this that I think is almost spiritual and the place where I found the most flow state just like athletes do when they when they do their craft. I find the same thing when I'm caught in work that means something. And I think for people to say you should have work-life balance, you should not work all the time, you know, that that is is bad for your mental health. It's like, what the [ __ ] do you know about what flow is? Is flow Netflixing and drinking on Friday evenings? Cuz it doesn't have to be. But if it's 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 uh that won't be met by that. Anyway, probably not the important part of that. Um the spirituality. So, I can feel you trying to make the world a better place, which I love. It is very much why I do what I do. As I said earlier, I think we are in a battle for ideas. Yeah. Uh one of the ideas so, everything is downstream of ideas. So, they grip us at the individual level, they grip people at the collective level, and so it really matters what we push and promote. Um you have a very unique stance on, "Hey, there's a thing that you're probably not thinking about that's not currently in the zeitgeist as the cool thing to buy the boring business, the gateway business that will make you realize that these are being run by people no smarter than you." To sort of co-opt the Steve Jobs quote. Um I think that's really important and I think that marrying that back to your message is going to be really important so that people understand, "Hey, I'm trying to me, Cody Sanchez, I'm trying to reach out into your soul and help you find that path to the thing you secretly want, which I, Tom Bilyeu, will round to fulfillment." I think that's what everybody wants. And so, I have a mental framework for why hard work is so important. I think we have an evolutionary algorithm that runs in our mind that absolutely mandates that we work hard and that nature only has two levers, pleasure and pain. Nature, over God knows how many hundreds of thousands, millions of years, has been shaping us from amoeba to now uh saying, "Surviving is going to be hard and my job as nature is to keep you alive long enough to have kids that have kids. So, there are going to be certain things that I'm going to incentivize. And if you get a tremendous dopamine rush or whatever when you work really hard and make progress towards a goal, now all of a sudden you're going to want to do that." Because man, if you ever watched the TV show Alone? No. I 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 hysterical how hard it is to stay alive. To just like find enough calories to live. It's bananas. You don't have to go I read so much history. You don't have to go much more than a hundred years back in time to hear where it was like, "Oh, we were just trying to get from here to Oregon, you know, and we were suddenly eating slugs. Oh, and then we ran out of those and so we had to eat each other as we died." It's like, "Yo." So We all played that game, didn't we? Yeah. Oregon Trail. Uh so, life is a level of hard that we don't understand. So, evolution had to make doing hard things internally rewarding so that we just have this algorithm that says, "Oh, you worked really hard. Well done. Good on you." And if you aren't working hard, it's going to feel wrong. That's part one. Part two is entropy. And if I could come up with a simpler word, but that that really is the right word. Meaning that all things are fighting against you. Uh if you want to jump high, gravity yanks you back down. If you want to start a business, other people are going to start a similar business. If you're doing well, people are going to copy you. One of my favorite stories from our time at Quest. So, when we launched Quest, we looked ridiculous compared to all the other um companies in the health and nutrition space. They all looked what we call veins and chains. So, it was all aimed at bodybuilders. Nobody was using food porn. It was just all tough guys, big muscles, veins bulging, literally chains draped around their neck, red and black. I mean, taking a page out of Hitler's playbook, which if you've never read Mein Kampf, I'm really doubling up on my uh learning from the psychopaths day here. Uh but he just lays out like, "Oh, this has a certain psychological reaction." So, we're like, "We're going to be everything that that's not. We're going to be uh blue because it peaks creativity. We're going to be food porn. We want to feel like welcoming and inviting." And we did so well, 3 years later, I walked to somebody else's booth at a trade show because I thought it was ours. And I was like, "These mother [ __ ] like they've literally just copied everything that we're doing." Yep. So, anyway, you get everything is fighting against you. And if you don't get real pleasure out of working hard, you just won't ever be able to overcome entropy. It It will There'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 It's very important that you do the steps, but if you can work hard and run the physics of progress, you really can pull this off. But I think people need to contextualize, "Oh, this is a spiritual journey. I'm doing this as somebody who's pursuing fulfillment. I'm doing this as somebody who looks out at this particular moment, which I certainly do. I think you share." And we're at a tipping point for the wrong ideas taking a hold of people. And so, we're talking about business, recession, etc., etc. But this is really about what ideas should win. Yeah. And hard work, recognizing you can buy a business if you so choose. If autonomy is a major driver for you, it could be a real path out. But I I think if people fail, if people just hear the chiching 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 had some political connotation, which I don't know why. Um because it really is about this idea of the joy in finding the thing that you are uniquely built to create on this planet. And um you know, there's one quote I love from it that's to summarize, it's basically like, "What a tragedy to let your spark go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the shadows of the could-bes, the what-ifs, the maybes?" And and that always stuck with me of this idea of man, at the end of the day, I hope I show up at the pearly gates wrung dry saying to God, "I had not one drop left." Which was a paraphrase from an Emma Emma Bombeck quote that I is one of the quotes I go back to a lot. 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 at lunch with with one of my team members and my husband, and we were talking about what was the hardest thing you've ever done? Like the hardest thing you've ever done. Think about like one instance. And you know, we talked first physically. And so, I remember one of mine, it was like hiking a mountain. I was super miserable. It was blizzarding. It was a very high mountain. There were 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. It was not fun. It was not fun. It was not fun. It was not fun. It was But I'm glad I did it because I need to have more of those hard moments to realize how lucky we have it in life. And I do think we're kind of as humans, we're we kind of forget how lucky we have it. We have such short-term memory to history, which we do not study enough, and even to our own history, remembering what we've been through before and thus are probably capable of doing in the future. You know, but I I remember we have a company called Main Street Holding Company, where we own all of our small businesses. And that's where we buy other people's businesses or invest in other people's businesses. And you know, I remember almost every single one of those businesses at some point having a moment where I thought we were going to lose everything, you know? I remember one company approach meant where, you know, we got all of our money stolen from from a guy that we thought we were best buds with, you know? Um and then was like kind of public about it and how how much that hurt, you know? I remember when we had our first car wash deals go through, and we thought we were going to sell for a huge amount of money, and then the whole thing fell through. And then, you know, we almost didn't have the we didn't have the grit to like keep going. We were so close to the finish line. It's like it's seeing the marathon right in front of you end. And then all of a sudden they're like, "Just get in. 10 more miles." You know? And we weren't ready for that. And so, I remember all of those hard moments, and I think those build you up and enable you to kind of keep going. And you build up these calluses, right? It's just like weights at the gym. At some point, like you don't feel them as much. And anytime I feel it too much, I go to a book from a great. Like we were talking before, I'm reading Ted Turner's book Call Me Ted right now. And it's incredible because he goes through like the things that uh bother, you know, he he goes through his difficulty like it's Tuesday. And then he always like, "Well, then we lost $100 million on the games over there." And then he literally says it like that, moves to the next line. And I like rewound it a couple times, and I said to myself, "I want to be so big and have created so much wealth and prosperity that I can say, 'Uh we lost $100 million on that.'" You know? Think about that. But there's a guy out there who that is the way that he thinks. And then, for all those people who are like crunchy granola, hate making money, you know, think the world's going to end, all about climate change, what did he do with his billions? He owns now the biggest bison preserve in the world and has single-handedly brought back almost the level of bisons in his area, which I think is is Wyoming. Um so, guess what? Money can do a lot of good, too. Mm. No doubt. Um what is the single hardest thing you've done? Mm. The single hardest thing I ever did was get divorced when I went through that previously. Um so, that was emotionally the hardest thing I've ever done. You know, you make a promise to somebody. You say you're going to be together for life, and then you break that promise. And I I tend to try to keep my promises, and so that was really hard for me. 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, uh vision for life, then it's very easy for somebody else to supersede theirs on top of you. And I think that's what I allowed happen to me. I superseded my family's on top of me, my mom's, you know, his. And I tried to be uh a painting that somebody else painted as opposed to 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 it mean?" And uh what do we actually want to work towards? And we would be we would be Time would be 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? Mm. I 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. You I've only ever learned about myself through negation. I don't like this cuz I tried it, and that wasn't great. I don't like this cuz 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 finally something that I think is me. And so, um I think that's a lot of us, too. And it's okay to have varied career paths. It's okay to make a lot of mistakes. You just 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. Um but I probably wouldn't have made that decision that early without fully knowing myself through having gone through a lot of hard things and realizing what I was willing or not willing to continue. What do you think the answer is to that? How do you know yourself? Ooh. Uh okay. How would I have 5 minutes, and I have to explain to somebody how to figure themselves out. Okay, number one, what is This is all going to reveal who you are. Now, I've never thought to this before. This is a Okay, let's do it. Yeah. Uh this is the problem with interviewing people that are used to being on camera. They end up flipping things on you. Uh one, what's your goal? What are you trying to achieve? I don't care what it is, just tell me. Um so, In life? What is your life goal? Yeah, yeah. So, if you almost certainly you will say, "I don't know." Right. Um or you're going to give me a really terrible answer like um I want to be rich. Mm. Or even worse, because even less specific, "I want to help people." Yeah. So, uh because the money thing isn't bad because chasing money is bad, it's bad because fulfillment is my North Star. So, when somebody's asking me a question, that is looming in the background, that I everything I operate on in my life assumes that you're trying to increase human flourishing and decrease human suffering. So, whether that's at the individual level or the population level. And I don't want to do things that sound good, I want to do things that actually work. So, I ran the experiment for people on chasing money will not fulfill you. So, anyway, nail that down. And once you have that, that's already going to tell you a lot. But, you then need to know how am I going to get there? If you want to help people, in what way? If you want to get rich, what are you going to sell, make, do, whatever that's going to take you there. So, that is the big thing. And then, I would ask yourself, if you were in extreme pain, what is the thing that would allow you to double the amount of time that you could stay in that pain? And so, this is the [Music] the question sort of posed by [Music] Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl. So, he was saying that Nietzsche quote, "A man with a strong enough Y can endure almost any how." So, he said you could predict when somebody would die. This is in a concentration camp for people that don't know him. You could predict within 72 hours when somebody would die from because it was the moment they gave up, 72 hours later they'd be dead. And I just thought that was so interesting. So, what you're really trying to figure out is what are those things that drive you, whether they should or they shouldn't. To get there, you want to start with the big gross what of it all, the big gross Y of it all, but ultimately, if you don't track back to your beliefs and your value system, you'll be lost. And this is what I see happen all the time. So, if I were you and I were talking and I said I have a pathological inability to be a brand, but I'm I'm really trying and I think that over time, especially if I'm right about what I think my brand is right now. My brand is I want to teach people how to think from first principles in order to arrive at fulfillment. And so, that will be in comic books, that will be in interviews. I could do a mindset interview, I could do an interview now where we're talking about buying businesses in a recession, it could be what is money, all of it, but it's all the same thing. To do that, you have to understand how the world works. So, we are all beholden to the physics of the situation. The reason I say that is to think from first principles, you have to get down to to physics. You have to get as close as possible to things that are not in any way, shape, or form subjective. So, anyway, that I think that's finally going to be the thing that's broad enough that everything will fall under that umbrella. It bifurcates in people's minds, so it probably doesn't matter that that's my governing principle. To the outside world, it'll still seem like I'm all over the place, but that is me working backwards to get to my beliefs, my values, my base assumptions. Now, if you can do that, now we can make real progress. So, I've I've been talking about this a lot lately and I want to be very clear. I am very impressed by Lex Fridman, very impressed. I don't know him, never met him, no encounters whatsoever. But, he did that debate on Israel-Palestine. And I wanted to And so, that debate can be summarized as one side believes Israel should not exist and the other side believes Israel should exist. Now, if you don't argue that point, everything else is pointless. And so, they're all arguing about, "Well, the definition of genocide is this out of the Hold on. That's not None of you actually care about that. What you care about is should Israel exist or not?" And to have that conversation, you have to say, "This is the moral scaffolding on which I'm building my arguments." Now, we're at least arguing about the real thing. So, this is what my wife and I call don't argue about the tea. The biggest fight we ever got into was over a cup of tea. And it was like into like hour three of this screaming match where I was like, "There's no way I'm this mad about a cup of tea. It's just not possible. And so, what am I actually mad about?" And then, you drill in and you get to the real issues. So, anyway, I think I went over my 5 minutes here. But, that you're going to start with this sort of gross big planetary stuff, but ultimately you're trying to work your way back to the philosophy that guides your entire life. Once you get there, you'll know who you actually are. And a big part of that, by the way, is your genetic makeup. Like, what do you respond to? I think I can tell you why Atlas Shrugged is political. So, here's the thing that I find really interesting about the political system. It it is born of a truism of the human condition, which is that you have a social creature that over evolutionary timescales is going to realize that there needs to be dynamic tension between two personality types. This is obviously very blunt force trauma here to talk about things in a hyper simplistic way. But, on the left, you have people that are no man left behind, hyper compassionate, make sure that we have group cohesion, everybody come together. Really interesting reason for that. So, when I realized the following statement is true, it was one of those mic drop, oh my god. Do you know what the best way to store calories for the long term is? Fat. On somebody else's body. Oh god. So, think about this. I can only eat so much. I can only store so much. My stomach will get full. So, now, if I've got meat that's going to go bad, I am way better off giving you some, an animal with reciprocal tendencies, and now I'm going to feed you even though why would I do that? I should just take it all for myself. But, instead of doing that, cuz I know I will max out, I will eat so much, I'll start vomiting, or I won't be able to store any more fat, so I'm just defecating it out. So, way smarter to be like, "Hey, I'm going to store some of my fat on your body." And then I'm going to eat you. No. There are tribes that do that. No, but then the next time when you're the one that gets the kill and I don't, you're going to be thinking, "I want to store some fat on your body." And so, it becomes this reciprocal relationship where we're all like, "Hey, we're spreading things around so that there's more of us, more likelihood to get the next kill, the next kill, the next kill." And if we share, we're good to go. And they see this all the way down to vampire bats. So, you can take a vampire bat and they'll like give a little bit of blood to other people's children, not just their own. And they've they figured this out. They can inject the bat's cheeks with air, so it looks like they have blood, but the bat knows it doesn't have blood, so it doesn't go to give them to anybody, and the bats will shun that bat's children and not They're like, "You're not helping our kids, we're not going to help yours." Okay, that's the right. So, the right's like, "Hey, we're not going to do freeloaders." Because what happens is, if you have a system where it's like, "Oh my god, no man left behind, no matter what, I'm going to help you." Then the problem is you get one person in the group that's a narcissist, they'll take over everything. They will literally just run roughshod. So, you have to have this balance, what I like to call dynamic tension, between the two sides. Because they're not meant to convince the other side. I repeat, as a PSA, they're not meant to convince the other side. They're meant to live in this dynamic tension so that you don't get pathological compassion, aka authoritarian rule. I saw this amazing meme. It shows Care Bears with love shooting out of their hearts, and it says what authoritarians claim they're doing. And then, it shows a real photo of somebody with an AK-47 behind a woman's head, and says what they actually do. And that's pathological compassion. Like, we're not going to leave anybody behind even if I have to kill all of you to get you in line. That I think we all lived through a little bit of that not too long ago. And then, on the right, it's so hardcore like pick yourself up by your bootstraps. I don't care if it's a 90-year-old dying in the streets. In fact, I heard you talk about you don't buy retirement homes because you're not going to kick a 90-year-old out who can't pay the rent. Right? That's that dynamic tension. You you need both sides. And the problem is we're living through this really wacky moment where we're saying, "No, other side bad." And so, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is very much from the right's perspective. I think we can be very honest about that. And she's like putting capitalists up on a hill, and I think that all makes sense when you think about when she wrote it and that she fled a communist country. And so, of course, she's going to be like, "Hey, this goes really wrong when you have this pathological compassion, and you should not" I mean, this goes back to where we started, "you should not be robbing from the people that are good with their capital and giving it to people that are not." It doesn't make sense. It actually ends up breaking the whole system down. And she's not wrong because you need that dynamic tension. But, that's why that book has such a like people on the left are going to have such a negative reaction to that in a modern context. In more sane times where people actually extended a hand across the aisle, it might have still been like, "Oh, that's not my vibe," but a little less controversial. It's such a good point. I mean, I grew up in a household where my mom was on one side and my dad was on the other side. But, it was still together. Wow. Happily married for decades. And they still sort of air that way. And Um, and I thought that was normal. You know, we we I have something called the four chairs framework, which is basically if you want to become really close as a family and used to dynamic argument, which I think is one of the best things you can do uh as a human is is really beat up ideas. I mean, AEI, a a think tank that I'm a part of The AEI? Yeah, American Enterprise Institute. Their motto is the competition of Yes, this is Arthur Brooks. I love him. I know, me too. Hi Arthur. The competition of ideas. And I kind of like you were talking about. You have to beat up ideas to find which one is best. And so we used to sit in these four chairs as a family in the dining room and we would debate for hours. Sort of what do you think about that? No, I don't like that idea. How could you say that? And by the end of it we'd be like, okay, goodnight, you know, see you guys later. are violence. Yeah. And so that we just had none of that. You know, and there was no shame to having a certain opinion if you could back it up. Now, if you couldn't back up the opinion, then uh you felt some pain surrounded by that. you back it up? You would have to I mean, we all I I think Numbers always beat narrative, but numbers can turn into narrative. And so as much as possible talk about that? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, my mother was a 30-year special education teacher. So she was a teacher by nature. Um, she liked us to think for ourselves. And my father um was an entrepreneur, came from nothing, you know, didn't get a chance to go to college, you know, raised and and ate his own animals, went hunting with his father, you know, to bring back food for the family. Like, you know, just totally different than me. You know, my dad worked in a slaughterhouse when he was younger to in order to pay uh his way. Woah. You know, he's Yeah, he's kind of seen it all. And um and then started multiple businesses, but would probably never call himself an entrepreneur or a founder. He would just say like, I sell marble, you know? Very humble. And uh and we would talk about that because um how much more interesting one are those conversations? You know, I think some of the reason that we've gotten away from family values in some ways because you we we talk at such a surface level with people. So when you comment back and you talk to your parents, how often is the conversation like, hey Mom, hey Dad, how's it going? What's up with you? Yeah, life's good with me. It takes a lot of energy to go a little bit deeper with people. I think that's why people are so obsessed with podcasts because we are actually having less of these conversations in real life. We don't have people who will debate us on our ideas. It's not something that's okay for you to push back intensely on your friends' opinions. Uh it's not okay to ask where they got that data point or what they could support that with or why they believe that because most people cannot back up the statements that they have without emotional pleas. And so I think people are craving podcasts because they're actually just craving real conversation. Can somebody tell me something that is true? And can two people argue? You know, like I said, well, I don't really know about that. Are you sure? You're like, well, let's look it up later. Neither of us determine that our worth is based on whether our individual idea is right or wrong. And these days I think we've lost our identity in ideology. And so we have individuals who say my ideas are me and thus if you say my ideas are wrong, I am wrong. And that is a very dangerous path to tread on. And so how much more freeing is it to say, I have an idea. At this moment I think it's true with everything that I know, but if you show me something that I don't know, I'm very happy to change it because I am in no way, shape or form my individual idea. How often are you checking your credit score, afraid of identity theft or account breaches? We all use the internet every single day for important things like personal banking and remote work. So why not protect yourself with our sponsor Aura. Aura is an all-in-one cybersecurity service that keeps you safe online. Aura identifies data brokers exposing your info and submits opt-out requests on your behalf. Aura also monitors your credit, tracks your passwords for data breaches, and secures your online activity with VPN and anti-malware protection. You can try Aura for free for 2 weeks by clicking the link in the description or scanning the QR code. I think the big problem is that people don't know I'm going to use a gross word, but so it'll stick in people's heads. They don't know what their God is. Mhm. And utility is my God. Yeah. Now, if you are pursuing something stupid, you will pursue the utility of stupid things. But if you're pursuing something honorable and it's the meaning and purpose for your life how could you be focused on anything other than utility? That's the thing that drives me crazy. Thomas Sowell is um he just has one of my favorite quotes and he says, the last 30 years have been marked by exchanging what worked with what sounds good. Yeah. And that is blasphemy in my worldview. Because you are now abandoning utility, actual usefulness, actually moving in the direction of the thing that you want. And this is why again, I'm just going to beat this from to death. People need to understand what motivates their reasoning. Everybody's reasoning is motivated. It's motivated towards something. Uh we were looking at the Tucker Carlson thing. Postmodernism motivated by power. Um so you get to your point. I I've never thought about it before, so I certainly reserve the right to change my opinion about anything at any time, but um that the brutalism of the structures, which if anybody's never looked up brutalist architecture, it's actually a style of architecture that is brutal. Yeah. Uh it's heavy concrete, very few windows, nasty nasty Post-Soviet sort of Eastern Bloc. Yeah. Right. Uh and ironically one of them was just built in LA, which there was like a whole huge backlash, which I'm not surprised. Anyway, and the fluorescent lights and all that. If your assessment is right about why they're doing that and my assessment is right that postmodernism really is about power and nothing else uh then it becomes a statement of power. We are bigger, better, stronger than you. You work for us. You do as you're told. Um and that when you force somebody to pull into the light what drives their thinking. Like in fact, did you ever see the documentary What is a Woman? Yeah. Okay. It fascinating, glad they did it. However it would have been more like it becomes just a dunk on the lunacy and it really did come across as lunacy to me. Yeah. But we could have pulled it back out of lunacy if you just started asking, what are the base assumptions that are driving your rationale? Yeah. And when you make people state like, this is why I believe that. And one and this I learned this in business. So the physics of progress. You come up with a hypothesis about what you would need to do to achieve your goal. Okay, what does a hypothesis do? A hypothesis makes predictions. So when you're talking to somebody, what you want to do is say, okay, the things you're saying are the end result of of a prediction you're making. That's invisible to me because you're not saying it out loud. You're just telling me the outcome. But if I think of that as a prediction, then I'm like, okay, this for that to be true, the following base assumption has to be true. And so I'll just ask people, okay, because you're saying that the following statement must be true. So for instance, um if uh you want to give puberty blockers to a young child, um that makes a prediction that you believe that self-professed identity is the most important thing in their life and that you're even willing to put them through a medical procedure that has some risk of complication and death. Uh is that accurate? And they're going to say, yes, that's true. Or they're going to say, no, that's not accurate, but I believe if you deny them the ability to express their gender through a physiological change that the rate of suicide goes up. Okay, so the prediction that that makes is that um they are more likely to die if they don't do this surgery. Is that accurate? Yes. Okay, cool. That's a testable hypothesis. It makes a prediction. I can now look at the data and find out, is that really true? Now, the problem becomes if that's a red herring and that's not really what's motivating their thinking, then it will all fall apart cuz I will present them with the data I and I actually don't know the answer to that. But let's say just for the sake of argument that it comes back and no, there actually is an increase in likelihood of suicide post-surgery. I'm just I don't know that's true. I'm just saying if it were. If in that moment they go, oh okay, word. Like what we're seeing in England where they've they've now banned the use not just Tavistock closing down. They've now banned the use of puberty blockers on minors. Okay, so they look at the data and they change. Word, I'm here for that. But if somebody looks at the data and then they say oh, no, no, no, we still need to do it for this reason. And and you'll get this all the time with uh in business where somebody will say, this is why I couldn't get that thing done. And you're like, okay, well, why didn't you do this? Well, no, that's not really the reason. It was because of this. Okay, why didn't you do that? Well, no, no, no, it's not really that. It's this. Mhm. I will say, you're making me chase you. Mhm. Don't make me chase you. Just tell me the reason. Mhm. And then we will And if there's four reasons, give me all four and then we'll go through them one by one. But this is a knowable set of things. Right. The problem is again, people they argue with the level of fact. They're just two ships passing in the night instead of getting down to, what are your base assumptions? What predictions do they make? And do those predictions come true? And if people start thinking through that, so rather than trying to be right or pass judgment, which is what I could feel in that documentary. Instead of that, like it's what I call trapping people in their own values. You just tell me your values and then we'll see, is the thing you're doing leading to your value or not? And if your value is madness, then we can at least I now know what your value is, right? Like Hitler. That [ __ ] just told everybody what he was going to do. Uh need somebody to blame. Jews are going to work. They've worked all throughout history. So we're for sure uh blaming the Jews. And then we're going to take over Russia. Don't tell them yet, but we're going to take it over because we want that to be the new version of what America was, you know, whatever 75 500 years ago where everybody just flooded into America for opportunity and land. He was like, "That's going to be what we do with Russia is it will be Europe's America." I mean, literally just said this [ __ ] Mhm. And so he had a value system where it's like uh the lives of the German people, the Aryan race, whatever words he would use, are superior. Yeah. Okay. So that's a pretty ugly uh prediction that that makes. Uh that also predicts that you're going to do all the things he ends up doing. And but you're now pulling it out into the forefront. Nothing's hidden. Everything's out on the table. And now we can say uh do we think that human life is equally valuable or not? And you start getting people saying this stuff and it's like, "Whoa. Now we you can just follow things out to their natural conclusion." And you find the place where it breaks. Cuz what I what I'm always encouraging people to do is you need to reflect somebody's beliefs, values back to them in a way that they would recognize so that they wouldn't be like, "No, you're twisting my words." or whatever. Now it's out on the table. Now you can make progress. Yeah, it's really you know, I think if people want to understand what is happening in the world around them and be able to influence it quickly, efficiently, and without emotion, they should read a book like Statistics for Dummies. Because I actually think a lot of what you're talking about are two things. First is we don't understand statistics. We don't understand probabilities. We don't actually understand how to look at the numbers presented to us in a worldview. Statistics drive business. They drive wealth. They drive the economy. And then the other half half is the the um being able to follow the scientific method. So I think X hypothesis. I want to test that hypothesis. Here's how the scientific method works. And those two things we learned in school, but not they were not the focus of lots of what we did. I recall learning much more calculus than I did statistics. And in fact, statistics do not have to be super um deep mathematical learning. They can be understanding assumptions and how to read uh the math that is happening behind the scenes. And I think a lot of the reasons why we get sold a bunch of lies is because we don't actually understand statistics and scientific method. So we end up going with what feels good and sounds good as opposed to what actually works. And Thomas Sowell is is a genius at this for many many different reasons. But you know, if people haven't read Economic Facts and Fallacies from him, incredible book. If people haven't read Statistics for Dummies, good don't have a basis for how to understand when they show you the you know, I I always love that uh example of sometimes when I go on the news, they'll ask me, you know, what is the average XYZ? What is the average? And averages really bother me on average because because there it's a really poor way to measure, right? Especially monetarily. It's like, "What does the average American make?" Well, really depends how you determine average because you have a few outliers in there. You have a bar. Everybody makes 100k. Bill Gates walks into the bar. All of a sudden the average income goes from 100k to $10 million or whatever that would be. Why is that? It's because you should have used median and not average. And that's not actually mathematically difficult to understand. We could start there. We don't have to go to super complex biology understanding, cryptology, and deep understanding of the network state. We could just start with statistics and scientific method as opposed to emotions and narrative. I hear a lot lately that like he who holds the best story wins. And I do think that is true. But the reason that is true is because people don't understand how to poke holes in arguments. And if you really want to win, be rich, be successful, you have to understand is somebody lying to me about something that I can verify one way or another, which would be stacks, statistics, or scientific method. All right. Now let's see if we can agree on why that matters so much. Why does it matter to you? Well, let's take it from multiple different angles. One from a business perspective. Every business is a constrained business. Nobody has unlimited resources, right? So if you're just starting out starting out and you're doing the $100 startup method and you don't have much money and you don't know how to make a business work very well, you have very little dollars. So you have to understand statistics to understand where if I put $1, will it be most likely to go out and bring back friends back with me? That's just probabilities and statistics. And so in business, everything you're doing, every decision you make is really just a determination of should I do this or this? And which one of those is going to make me more money or more opportunity or more options or better decision-making, something. And so business is really just a complex game of statistics that ends in dollar signs, right? And I think the scientific method is so important because we think about it just in science, but all it is is what you're talking about. It's like turtles all the way down. You know, you're just you're trying to figure out what lies underneath the things people tell you. So for instance, in our content business because I come from finance, I push back really hard on ideas. So they'll say, "Well, this is we had this argument the other day. Like words mean things." Words mean specific things. And if we don't agree on the definition of a word, we can't actually have a conversation. And so what is a good video? Well, lots of people might have different definitions of good. So I said, "Okay. At this company, a good video is one that gets the most views. Let's just baseline it. A good video at our company is the one that gets the most views. Is everybody on understanding about that?" And we had to debate. They were like, "Well, what if it's a you know, this type of video where you're naked or this type of video where somebody's getting shot or like something awful." And I go, "Well, because we have our creed and our values, we would never make that video because we understand our values and beliefs. So because we understand our values and beliefs, then we can decide on a quantitative determination of the word good in the video sense, which means views. Okay, fine. If we don't do that, you have a huge problem cuz then you go, "Well, I think this video is great. I think this video is great." I don't know what to do with that. That's like your personal taste in a video. And taste, as we all know from the fact that we go out to a restaurant, very seldom do all of us order the exact same thing every single time. Why? Because our taste is different. And so I think a lot of business is getting really definitional. What does taste mean? Ooh, taste is difficult to define. So that is a bad word. Instead, we should use a word like does it convert? Do I make money off of this thing? If I make money, then it is in taste with this company as long as it follows our creed. Does this video get views? If this video gets views, then it is tasteful according to us. And so a lot of people these days don't like definitions. They want to be really wobbly with them, but that's a huge problem because then you cannot have a conversation and you cannot agree on what a good outcome or a bad outcome looks like. That's why they do it. Uh yeah, but I I I I [ __ ] you not, Tom. I The other day I was like they're like, "Can we please stop talking about this?" And I was like, "No. We have to like have a argument about what an individual word means. And we need to do that continuously across the company and I need you guys to do that individually because otherwise, we all feel good because we're agreeing, but because our foundation is not the same, we're not agreeing at all. But what I found with this generation again and again and and I fall into it too because I'm a people pleaser sometimes is like nobody wants to have those tough conversations. How silly does it feel about arguing over what is one individual word good? And yet it's so necessary, right? The infamous Christmas argument uh on my side. So yeah, we got in a huge debate as a company. And it was me against everybody else. And I was like, "I know I'm burning relationship capital right now cuz you all think I'm a psychopath." But I'm like it was I don't even remember what the specific thing was anymore, but it was like that. It was a single word. We're not moving on until we all agree that this is for that very reason. Now I you described exactly the way that I think about this. I use slightly different words, exact same idea. For me, the reason that cuz it's all started with why does it matter to detect a lie? Mhm. And are we being lied to by people? The whole point of my channel is to say the world works in a certain way, the vast majority of it is behind a curtain that you've never looked behind. And so the whole goal of my life, which I just happen to make a show about, is that I am trying to figure out what's behind the curtain. And what I want people to understand is it is I've actually never watched the video with um Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris where they debate truth. But the reality is that finding truth is really really difficult. Now the reason it's difficult is because we all wear what I call whole life beer goggles. And we cannot see what's really there. We're interpreting what's there. And so two people can look at the exact same thing and see something completely different. Now I can spend time explaining how this happens from an evolutionary standpoint, but just for now, we'll say there are algorithms running in your brain and they will control how you perceive the inputs that are coming in. Yeah. Okay. So if the world works in a certain way and words matter and narrative matters and even data can become narrative, at some point your life is controlled by how you interpret the things that are before you, what narrative you're telling yourself. And if your narrative doesn't make accurate predictions, it's broken. So, the reason identifying a lie matters is because it breaks your prediction engine. And if you want to make money in business, statistics are going to be your best friend because you have to understand do I do this or do I do this? Which is going to have the bigger impact? You're asking yourself a question of predictive ability. I predict that based on what I know, if I do this one, I'm going to get the outcome that I want. And that's why you do it. But if your worldview is messed up, if there's something you don't understand, you will choose the wrong thing. And of course, it's never one or two. There's usually a thousand options before you. And so, people just have no idea how to choose because they don't know how they think. They don't know where they're being lied to. They don't know how to dissect uh the information that's coming in. They don't know how to test hypotheses. They don't understand that when somebody puts something forward, it makes a [ __ ] prediction. And if you ask people, if you stop and go, "Okay, hold on a second. What prediction does that statement make?" And then I'm just going to ask you, is this true? And if in that moment you're worried about looking stupid, then you're just going to nod and smile when they give you some [ __ ] answer, which they will almost always do because they probably don't know what's driving this. They probably have never thought about the prediction that it makes. But man, if you really are unafraid to look stupid, and you say to somebody, "Okay, for what you just said to be true, the following base assumption also has to be true. And I'll just say it to them. Is is that true? Or this makes that prediction. Is that accurate? And if they say no, one of two things is true. Either they're wrong, which happens more than you would think. And I'm talking from experts, the brightest minds in the world. Or you don't understand something. And if you don't understand something and you're not afraid to look stupid, then just keep asking and asking and asking. You understand somebody's worldview, statement, whatever, when you go, "Ah, it makes this prediction. Is that accurate?" And they say yes. Then it's like, "Okay, cool. I understand what you're saying." And now that I understand, I can't be bamboozled. And that is the only way to get good at business. And this is why, okay, I think I may have learned this from you, so forgive me. Specialists, generalists. The reason that your business content is so good and your business content is so good is because you're a specialist. You buy businesses all day long. I'm a generalist. So, I launched a course called business decision-making. That that is the greatest course I'm going to I really believe this. That is the greatest course on entrepreneurship ever taught. And all I did was say to whatever the small group of people, "Bring me your hardest business problem and we're going to solve it in real time." And then I would just walk people through. This is how you do it. I don't need to know your industry, none of that. Like I'm going to think from first principles. I'm going to ask you questions about what you said, makes a prediction. I mean, literally all the things I'm just talking about. But in real time. Hey, and you're going to come back week after week and we're just going to keep going. Okay, now you made progress. What's the next problem? Boom boom boom, we go through it in live fire. And what I would say to people is, "I know you think you want copywriting or you want funnel marketing or all of that, but you can hire somebody to do that because it's very finite and it's very teachable. The real thing that makes an entrepreneur great is the ability to solve novel problems. It is a problem not only have you not seen before, nobody's seen before. And so now you have to be able to build up from first principles to think through it. But that [ __ ] hardest thing in the world to sell because people know this is your painkillers versus vitamins. That [ __ ] is a vitamin. And people want painkillers. They know they have a problem. And if you market it as, "I'm going to take you from $0 in revenue to $3 in revenue," that [ __ ] will sell all day long. But goddammit, it isn't all weather. It it will work for one thing in that one moment, but it doesn't translate because it's not a framework. 100 100%. I mean, I think a couple things there. One is the real definition of a CEO is a scary one. So, if you say you want to be a CEO, here's what a CEO is. It's your you go out, you hire the smartest people you can possibly find. You tell them to fix problems. Then they find the problems that are so hard even the smartest people you can't find can't solve them. They bring them back to you. And you have one job only, which is to deal with the worst problems that the smartest people that you know can't solve. That's all a CEO is. And so, if you think you are anything more than a firefighter in the most complex fires of all time, you're crazy. The CEO is not a fun, easy, breezy position. I've never met a CEO that felt that way. Um that's why they moved to chairman after a while because they let somebody else deal with it. And so, I think that's exactly right. The other thing that I find fascinating there is um So, I started contrarian thinking in 2020 with this idea that people have lost their minds. They are no longer able to think because they can't question anything. And I believe that I will give like you will make more cash if you are curious than if you are a genius. And the reason why is because you can use the collective genius if you are curious. And you are limited by your own genius if you are not. And so, especially with the world of chat GTP, if you are a genius but unwilling to ask questions because of your own brilliance, you have just lost the world of knowledge. And so, I believe our ability to question things is integral to our individual success. And uh and yet, I thought people were losing that ability. And they were smothering it and they were saying it was wrong to question things. And I thought that was criminal. So, I started contrarian thinking. And I was like, "We are going to teach you to question things, to be contrarian, not for the sake of it, but in order to learn." And then it was crickets. And people were like, "I think just fine. This noggin's pretty smart. I don't need your help thinking better." Like nobody really goes around and says, "I wish I could think better." Except those at the very very very very top. It's like a 1% problem. Most people think that they think fine. They just haven't found the deal, the money, the next job, the girl, the whatever. They don't think there's anything wrong with the way that their brain functions. And unless it's a pill that can make them like superhuman intelligence. Um and so, I quickly realized that, okay, if I want people to think differently, how could I get them to do that? What would be the Trojan horse to think in? I was like, "Well, what do all humans want?" They want love to some degree. They're greedy. They want like some sort of personal wealth, right? Uh and they want maybe relevancy in some way, shape, or form. You could also say they want health, right? And so, if we have wealth, health, sex, greed, uh which do I know a lot about? Well, I I don't really know that much about health. Uh I don't really want to talk about sex on the internet. Wouldn't say I'm an expert there either. Um but what about wealth or greed? Well, yeah, I know a lot about that. I've been in finance for a long time. So, what if I could Trojan horse my way into thinking by getting people to talk about money? I'll tell them how to make more money. But in the process of telling them how to make more money, I'm actually going to get them to think about something more important, which is ownership. And what do ownerships have? They have personal responsibility for outcomes. When you have personal responsibility for outcomes, you have incentive alignment. When you have incentive alignment, then when somebody breaks something that you own, you feel it. When somebody lifts up something that you own, you feel it. You have the pleasure-pain uh you know, cycle happening within you. And so, that is why we eventually started talking about money in contrarian thinking because I realized it's a Trojan horse to getting people to care about decision-making because they actually have skin in the game and ownership. Ownership is the key to freedom. And that in fact, if you do not have control over your life uh through financial freedom, it's very hard to have other levels of ownership. And I think that is true. Yeah, no doubt. Um man, ownership is such a part of your message and I think it's so so so important. Um how one, why don't people have that like push now? That's not the cool thing that it once was. It's not, is it? Yeah, it's interesting. The other day uh we had an employee um you know, decide that they wanted to leave to go into a meditation community. Like a monastery? Not really sure. And um and I thought about that at first. A really good employee, by the way. Great employee. And I thought, well, what is that decision-making? And I went back to the to the quote, I can't remember who it's from, but that the the purpose of uh faith or religion is to live it in life. That you, you know, are you truly a That's why the Dalai Lama doesn't stay in Tibet, right? His purpose is to go spread this faith that he has while living life because life is hard and difficult. It's very easy to stay peaceful if you're in 24/7 meditation states. And yet, I think this generation they presuppose that if they find the perfect circumstance, that that will lead to bliss instead of realizing that actually bliss is found in the difficulty. And so, I don't know about this personal situation with this individual, but I thought about this a lot because I thought, "What would make somebody like put their life on pause that way?" And and you know, stay in this one one situation. And and I think the reason is because we have not been conditioned in this generation to um to find joy in difficulty. Instead, we want to find joy in in extreme pleasure. I mean, look at what we've done to this generation. I mean, this is wild. And even to parents today, we told them we said, "Parents, you know, uh run your kids around 24/7 to all of these activities. If they get upset in any way, shape, or form, run to the principal, you know, talk to the parent on their behalf. Don't let them handle it. If something is wrong with them and they are sad or anxious, they are probably depressed or maybe they have ADHD. We're going to label them and pathologize them as opposed to tell them they're having a momentary issue. We're going to get them into the most expensive colleges or any college we can, but then they will have a massive amount of student debt. And then on top of that, we're going to tell them that you know, no, it it's it's okay about every single feeling that you're having and that is all of this trauma and yes, you know, your cat died 15 years ago and you are still carrying that inside of your hips and that's why they're tight, right? Because that's where you hold the trauma from you know, fluffy. And and so this is what we've told parents and kids. And so of course they're confused. You know, they're confused and they don't know what real joy is and they've checked all the boxes, they've done all the things that they thought they were supposed to do and it's led to them being like in debt, not that happy, not with a partner, you know, and so what's next? So I do as much as I kind of give my generation, our generation and the next generation a little bit of a hard time, I really get it because I was told all those same things too and had to come out on the other side and realize no, no, I'm the only one responsible for my happiness and that there's actually a lot of joy in the journey and there is no destination that you can reach and by the way, you can never stay for the rest of your life in perfect meditation. The point of meditation is not that. It is to be in life. You know, I heard this thing the other day that I really liked. I think it was Mel Robbins and Mel Robbins was saying uh the eye of the hurricane is what she tries to be. So, you know, the eye if there's a hurricane and there's chaos and there's tumult and there's broken windows and danger and floods on the exterior of the hurricane, in the middle of it, it's silent and serene. And so her goal is no matter what's happening out here that she wants to stay silent inside. And I was I was thinking about that. I was like, I like that that philosophy. And I was like, but you know what's even more interesting? The bigger the hurricane, the bigger the eye. Right? The more silence inside of it. So if you put yourself in bigger, more intense situations, are you able to find a deeper level of silence and quiet and contemplation? And I think the answer is yes, you are, which goes back to the Ted Turner, "I will lost 100 million bucks on that." And so if we all will die and it may be painful at some time and the only truth in life is that we will experience pain, we will die and all of our loved ones will die and they will probably not remember us much sooner than we would ever like, then we should probably prepare ourselves for that with a bigger hurricane. So that as we look the true difficulty of life that is eventual death and difficulty on the path of it, it doesn't daunt us because we've lived in difficulty, too. And so I come closer and closer to that, you know, that Buddhist idea of you know, that life has suffering, life is suffering, but that's sort of the point of it all and that you can find joy in that. And it's way too deep, you know, Tanner would go, "That's deep." Um but but I think it might be true. The storm destroys most everyone that it touches. That's the the problem. How do you I mean, do you think about that? Like like creating hurricanes for no reason? No, do you lament to God, wail from your gut at the fact that you can create an eye in the middle of the largest storm, but that most of the people you know and love will get torn to pieces? I think I don't think that I have that individual power. I think I think all of us are like um I get really careful about like overstating what I think I'm capable of. And so I don't think I am capable of destroying the ones around me. No, no, not you. I'm saying that I am very distressed that most people will not be able to do most people won't be able to be a CEO. Most people won't their own hurricane they create. Yeah, exactly. Like this is one of those where I don't want it to be true. I've just seen it play out too many times that and you and I both said the same thing. So I know that you see what I'm about to say, which is step number one of being a CEO is ask yourself, do you really want to be a CEO? Yeah. Because all I hear when someone says I want to be a CEO is that you want to get punched in the face over and over and over. No, it really like really, really, really. And the longer I do it, the more punches I take and you do start going, "Huh, I routinely am asking myself, why am I doing this?" And in fact, it's really interesting to compare my wife and I. Okay, so I have married my equal. My wife is un unmatchable and and she has helped me become the person that I am and I I really don't even know who I'd be without her because of how gifted she is and how smart she is and all that. She can't do what I can do. Yeah. So and she will be the first to tell you. I mean, she did tell you literally before we started rolling. She was like, "I don't want to be CEO. I see what he has to deal with and I don't want it." Yep. And that like it is so exciting for me and I can give the I I can be the dancing bear that you poke fun at. I can be the dancing bear of motivation and be very performative around like just living in that personality of the person that can create the calm and that you can do anything you set your mind to. Um and then I've seen it up close and the reality is most people don't have the skill, emotional management. That that's what being the eye of the storm is. Is can everything be burning down around you and you're not panicking. Yeah. You're concerned, you're taking decisive action, but you're not panicking. Yeah. And what I have found is that the person you lost to the monastery-like place, uh they're the norm. Yeah. What's interesting is they to give to steel man their argument, I keep in my back pocket that life choice. Mhm. I studied Eastern philosophy a lot when I was younger. At one point I actually called myself a Taoist and I meant it. I was a Taoist. Who is your son? And I always contended with the idea of becoming a monk of some kind. And I thought I really believe that the um the wellspring of all suffering is desire. That makes sense to me. And but what I found was that that felt like a choice between engaging with life and disengaging from life. And you could say that you're engaging with the pursuit of non-attachment, but it just isn't how it felt to me. Yeah. And I'm perfectly willing to accept that maybe that's just the part of my spiritual journey that I'm on and one day I'll be start laughing at myself that you know, detachment was the right answer all along. Yeah. But I decided I'm I'm going to fully engage with life. But for my sanity, I keep in my back pocket that I could just stop wanting any of this. Yeah. And the second I stop wanting to grow my YouTube channel, to make more revenue, to be an entrepreneur for the ages, to build the next Disney, I could just let go of all of that. And if I actually let go of it, all of a sudden those punches don't hurt anymore. They don't matter. It's you just let it go. Now you do have to contend with freedom coming from financial freedom, but one way to do that is to beg for food and live in either a monastery or a cave and come out every now and then with your rice bowl. It's I don't pass judgment on that lifestyle. I just don't currently want it for myself, but I it's in my back pocket. Yeah. I like the back pocket idea. I think I think it's really important and I don't have a good definition for it. So I have to work on this. But this idea of ownership, I do not think has to mean owner. I think there needs to be a difference between the two. And ownership in my opinion, there's like four levels to rich, I think, about monetarily. And so you have the first level is like a spender. You make money, you spend it. The second level's a saver, right? You make money, you save some of it. The third level is an owner, in my opinion, that you take the money and you apply it towards your pursuits. So you invest in you working more, your business, etc. And the fourth level is an investor and that's you take your excess and you invest it in other people and their pursuits. And the the levels, you know, you you can't really go from a spender all the way to an investor, I don't believe. I think you kind of have to like climb the rungs. And I thought a lot about what does ownership mean because I do not think everybody should be an entrepreneur or CEO in any way, shape or form. But I do think that they should have some skin in the game for what they're doing and they should have a way where they can continue to earn even if something catastrophic happens to them. So that could be that they have additional income streams, that could be investments, that could be that they help their wife or husband learn a new skill and thus the family has multiple income streams in what they do. That could mean, you know, sovereignty in that they live on the land and they like subsidize part of their, you know, income that they would need by growing things or having agricultural tax credits. But I think it's really important that we don't become like you talked about people who own nothing and like it. I think we can be people who want less material things because our neighbors have them. But simultaneously have more ownership of the things that can protect us from negative consequences. Like a health event where you need money. Like an authoritarian regime that tells you they want you to do X, Y, and Z. Money is like it's an option that you get to either use or not use. And so I need to narrow down this idea of ownership, but I do think you're right. Not everybody should be a CEO. And and what what trouble would we be in if everybody was one? Who would work with us, right? I think the job of a CEO also is to have a dream so big that your umbrella has room enough for many people and to sell them that dream and to show them that your dream is bigger than anything that they could create individually and is going to uplift them in a way that is bigger than what they could do by themselves and might be more fun and might be more interesting um because high high-performing teams are a joy to be in. Um I actually think one of the worst things that ever happened to us was that we sold this lie that remote work was better for us. I think it was actually really detrimental and mental health numbers seem to to show that. And that you know, I say online a lot you know, our our teams we make them as much as possible come back to to the office. And uh it doesn't mean they have to be there every day. We don't put them under fluorescent lights and and cubicles. Um but we do require them to now all be in Austin for Contrarian Thinking. We bought a studio there. We bought a headquarters. We're hiring like crazy. My other company Bizcout is located there too. Contrarian Thinking Capital's based there. So is Mainstreet Holding Company. And so I'm bringing all the people back into the office because I see what happens when they're on an island. And I think it's really really negative. But I have to get closer on that idea of of ownership in order to to explain it. Like even how you know, it used to be that the people who owned companies were not unaligned shareholders that just gave them money for their stock, right? That really have no ability to affect the outcome. You and I both, anybody who owns stocks, you have a percentage of Google. You have a percentage of Amazon. But you are not really aligned with the employees and the people inside of Google or Amazon. You just want as much money as you can get for that stock. And there's actually really perverse short-term incentives that happen with that. Really perverse. And so I think as an employee part of your game should be I want to make as much money as I can to a certain degree and then I want to invest it in things that ROI to me and I want to find ways to skill stack to become so valuable that the people I work with will give me some percentage of a company, a deal, you know, uh an opportunity to invest in another company alongside them. And that's where I think we went a little bit wrong. Like my employees don't have equity at Contrarian Thinking. Well, one does now. But two of them just got equity at one of my other companies. Um and so they're now they're now partners. They're owners in that business even though they're also employees. And I think we should be able to do that a lot with our top performers. And just like people shouldn't stay at minimum wage, they should aspire to grow into more. You know? I agree aggressively. What do you think about BlackRock and other big companies buying everything? So Mainstreet Holding Company is where we own all of these companies, right? We have like 26 companies in the portfolio right now. And not so long ago my goal was I want to create the next KKR Carlyle. I was like I saw how this these guys operate. I want to create a private equity fund that's just as big. I've already raised a billion-dollar fund at at First Trust. Not bad. And yeah, I can do this again. But let's do it in a better asset class, which would be uh private companies. And so I was on my merry way buying these companies. And then I kind of started seeing what was happening with a lot of these private equity-owned companies. And it's stripping the employees turning it into postmodernist buildings with fluorescent lights and cubicles. It's uh nobody knows your name when you go to the corner store. It's that they have perverse incentives because they want to strip it and flip it to somebody else and then that next person wants to strip it and flip it. And a lot of these companies, you know, get sold by three or four private equity companies before they go public and they've lost kind of their soul. And so I realized, man, I want to build a billion-dollar company. Maybe multiple billion-dollar companies. Hey, hey. But I don't want to own all of America's small businesses. I want Americans to own those businesses. And if I can create value by building something that hasn't existed before, that's cool. But do I have to go gobble up all the things that other people could own within their communities? No. And so I am very much pushing back against the big guys owning everything and we have to work for them. I think And dude, I mean I don't know if we talked last time, but for those economic nerds on here, like if you don't understand the unfair advantage that BlackRock and Blackstone has it will scare the hell out of you. Like if you think about it this way. They have immense data, right? Because they've been doing this for a long time. They have most of their former executives having at some point or other or other worked in the Fed, been consultants for the Fed, been in political positions, um been the chairman of of the Fed. Uh they have also, by the way, all been at varying companies like the CEO of BlackRock and Blackstone who have both uh you know, one's been an owner of the other company before. And they get rates to buy these companies and houses and assets and anything that you want to talk about that are like 1/2 to 1/3 to 1/4 of the rates that we have if we want to buy these individual companies. And why do they have that? Because they have all our money. Because you and I have our investments at BlackRock in their ETFs, which means that they get to use those assets on the balance sheet to have lower rates to buy things that then increase the prices of single-family homes in the US with our dollars. And I think that is criminal. And I'm I'm don't love the government regulating many things, but I think they should at least get their neck off the little guy. Get their foot off the neck of the little guy? Get their neck off the foot of the little guy. Yeah. Get their foot off the neck of the little guy. Dyslexia live. You know what's interesting though? I've heard you talk about that before. There is some crazy stat about the highest paid CEOs or founders, I forget. Uh like 1/3 of them have dyslexia. Oh, is that true? It is true, yeah. So I'm going to guess that there's something about the way that what reads as oh, I have a hard time keeping these things straight Yeah. is a blurring of the lines. So there's less rigidity in the categorization. I'm guessing here, but this really feels like it'll be true. There's a blurring of the lines of categorization of different things. So like a B and a D, oh god, they don't have like a distinct categorization between them. But that allows you to make more sort of unique connections between things. So people with that, like Richard Branson I know is dyslexic. There's a ton of them. Um that would make a lot of sense to me. Yeah, there's also this this is like a fake pathology like so many are today, but there's one that's um basically you can't get analogies right. And so my my husband always jokes with me that I must be a Russian agent because I'll be like, the thing is dogs and horses, it's raining today. And he's like, what is wrong with you? And I just for some reason I can't keep them right and so I mess them up in my head all the time. So I could never be a politician cuz there'd just be meme after meme of me Biden's done just fine. He's done just fine. He's a groundbreaker. Actually, they you know what's funny? They both are in a way. Like Biden has shown you don't have to be eloquent at all to be the president and you can mess up all the numbers all day. of dementia. Yeah, you could trip often and be a president. And then Trump has shown that you could have every bad thing, you know, like you could have lawsuits against you, you could say a bunch of crazy things and just be like, nah, anyway, we're going to keep going. And there's like good and bads to both sides. Sometimes I look at Trump and I'm just like, God, how do you keep putting up with this cuz I would have I would have given up by now. Bro. Yeah. Uh I'm not loving our choices at that Yeah. Yeah. Um I have Jocko Willink on tomorrow. So many people have asked, so I'm not even going to waste my time asking him if he'll run. Yeah. Um but man, would I prefer somebody like that. Now, you do a lot of political fundraising. Mhm. Tell me more. Yeah. What's your how do you think through that problem? So I know some of the origin story is what you told us earlier. Regulation gets changed, business goes poof, gone. Um so you care. Do you think more at the local level, at the federal level? Yeah, I think all politics is really local politics and that's how it should be. And so, you know, if you actually want to if you want to see first hand the impact you can have, uh go to your local community because nobody cares. I mean, I went to one um community uh city council meeting in Austin and it was the most fascinating thing I've ever seen. Uh the the room is entirely empty until like the very end because the entirety of the meeting is like meaningless, meaningless, meaningless, meaningless. And at the very last 10 minutes when they know like everybody's going to be asleep and they're kind of done, they try to push through like really aggressive legislation. And then a crazy thing happens, which is both sides pay people to come in, so whichever sides you're on, and like heckle them and say crazy things on both sides. And what I realized by watching that is like, God, there's actually not 50 people on both sides of this debate. There's like three people here and four people here and they're sort of trying to play each side against each other. And Austin is very contentious at the city council level. And so I saw that and thought, huh, that's really interesting. Like I could I don't know if I could do anything federally. I don't know if I could have any change there. But in my local community, I certainly could. And you know, so we supported some things that helped with ensuring that homeless in the city of Austin, uh, you know, were actually tracked. That uh housing was available. That the, you know, multiple hundreds of millions of dollars that they allocated to homeless housing and uh and movement was actually used uh and not just studies that they paid to Bain and McKinsey to push it down the line three to five years out, which is what a lot of those that money goes to. And so um So I think the local level's really interesting and you can have uh a lot of change there. And then I watched, you know, we lived in in multiple cities where I watched just I watched what happens when those of us who have succeeded in some way, shape, or form just go, I don't really like politics. I'm just going to do business. I don't want to deal with all that. Of course, who wants to deal with it? Psychopaths. Nobody besides psychopaths runs for office for the most part. You know, it's like a lot of narcissists. It's a lot of people who have not been very successful because if you've been successful, they come after you like crazy. And why would you put yourself through that when you already have relevance, power, you know, community. And so if those of us who don't want to lean in, don't lean in, then the crazies do. And so I always have a plea with people like get involved on a local level to understand what's going on if you can. And if you have resources, commit them. Um so that's that's what started it. But then I, you know, the other part that's interesting is you get a chance, if you want to be involved politically, people are actually quite easy to get to. And so when they're trying to get votes, you know, I became friends with uh Vivek Ramaswamy. I mean, last weekend, you know, I was at a thing with uh with RFK. You know, I've I've met Trump. I haven't met Biden yet. Um you know, but I've met a ton of senators and congressmen. And it's because if you call up your local congressman or senator, they by and large need to get back to you, especially your congressman. And so we don't even think about the power that we actually have to evoke change for some reason. But on the local level, you can do a lot. Is your standard rubric pro-business? What's the thing you're really angling for? Um rationality. I think I have like a low bar. You know, the bar is But what would drive, like how would you define rationality, right? Each side thinks they're right. Mhm. Um that's a really good point. How would I determine who I give money to? Well, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right? So I typically would look at how has this person voted before and has it led to pro-business and pro-freedom initiatives. So I really believe in like personal sovereignty. And I believe in To a libertarian level? I I do think we need systems in place. So to your point, I don't think if somebody's starving on the street, we should leave them there and they need to figure it out. I do think we need social safety nets. I do think that there's a huge benefit to helping others, both like mentally, societally. Um but I believe in optimizing for this idea that the individual might be the one who is best suited to know what they need, except if they infringe on the rights of others. So if they're violent or they break the law. And so I do tend to vote, you know, and focus on things that are more economic uh from a business perspective. Can we create more GDP growth? Can we have less regulation, less taxation? And then can we allow for more freedoms? And those span both lines, like reproductive rights, gay rights, you know, ability for individuals to determine if they want to work as a contractor or not, like things that span both sides. Very interesting. Um When you talk about people not wanting to leave them on the street, wanting to make sure that they get helped, uh if I were to put this sort of really traditionalist hat on, I would say, do we want the government doing that or do we want to push that to um churches, um neighborhood groups, things like that? In a perfect like I think you and I and anybody watching, we want um we basically want whatever is the fastest outcome to success. So like people like, I want a six-pack as fast as possible with as least pain as possible, right? Right. Terrible idea, PS. Yeah, yeah. Right? Like we that's what we want. And so I think what we have to think about is two things. One, what is the most efficient and effective way to get it done, whatever it is, which is likely, if we do scientific uh methodology and also statistically, probably not usually the government. It is probably more effective for an individual for-profit group to solve an issue because of incentive alignment than it is for the government. Um but we'd want to you know, we'd want to figure out the actual truth of that statement. So I'm not like a a purist. I think we've seen a lot of things go poorly that are that are private and profit-driven. Prison system is a great great example. Like huge private equity-owned segment of of our country that has terrible repercussions from optimizing for profit. And you know, think about it. What what do we love in finance? Recurring revenue, you know? What do we also love in finance? We love a customer that can never leave us, you know? And so I do think we have to ponder for a moment whether things like for-profit prison systems are right. Uh but we might be better served by allowing free market activities for helping somebody in a tough situation inside of our community. It's really interesting, the prison thing. So let's take that head-on. It's not something I've thought a ton about, uh but first principles should always do. So my initial reaction would be that it isn't a having profit isn't inherently incorrect. However, as Charlie Munger said, show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. So if they're incentivized to keep people there, if they're incentivized to um see people return, then that's what you're going to get. So you'd have to be exceedingly thoughtful about what the incentive structure is. Now that really may be one where you just don't want um profit to even factor into it. But it does feel like if you got the right incentives, so for instance, if um if you were judged by recidivism rate and judged by how well that person was able to integrate into society and you were paid like very substantive bonuses based on those two things, now all of a sudden I'm like, okay, what does it take to get somebody integrated back? Okay, I'm going to have to get them off drugs. 100% 100%. Like that's just going to be number one. Number two, I need to figure out what is a marketable skill so that they're able to integrate back into society. And if I get bonuses based on how long they hold a job for, how much they make in that job, like now all of a sudden, I mean, look, uh even as I say it, I you have to start thinking through the second and third-order consequences cuz now people might be like, well, I don't want that person in my prison cuz they don't have future prospects. So you do have to be really really thoughtful. But anybody that thinks, oh, this is a failed endeavor because I can't come up with it in nine seconds on a podcast, that's foolish. But if if people are really attacking this from first principles, what what's the outcome that we want to get, right? So our objective and then what are the things that I believe and know about uh drug I mean, this I'm almost certain the following statement is true. That drugs drive just some absurd north of 70% of all convictions. Uh somebody was either drunk when they committed manslaughter, murder, whatever. I forget the number of people that are drunk when they either get murdered or murder somebody. It's ridiculous. Yeah, I believe that. Uh so anyway, drugs, alcohol is going to drive a lot of this stuff. Uh but being thoughtful about the downstream effects, I I just don't think that simply stripping money out of the equation and making it a government-run thing is going to be the answer because it isn't efficient. You're not able to attract the best and the brightest because the best and the brightest are going to ask, how do I get the biggest ROI, oftentimes from a lifestyle perspective, um in my pursuits. So Yeah, it's it's a good counterpoint. I do think most things can be changed with incentives. And then you'd have the, you know, cuz the counterargument could be, well, if we get you know, you could go Machiavellian and say, all right, we're going to we're going to judge them based on low recidivism rates. So let's just do what we've done in New York and California and not put people back in jail for X dollar amounts. We don't actually you would have to have the their success has another metric so that they're not just incentivized to boot them out. Yeah, but at the end of the day, I do believe that I mean, if you think about like ponder this for a second. You run a business and that business at the end of the year, all your managers get less money the following year from you in their budget if they didn't spend everything that you allotted to them, no matter what their outcome was. Like you would have a failed business, right? But that is what the government is, right? So at the end of the year, if you run a division within the government and you don't use up the full budget that the government gave you, that you were allocated that year, then they will give you less next year, regardless of outcome. So, we have a perverse incentive from a spending perspective inside of the government, which is why I remember once I invested in a lanyard company, like like you get it badges at conferences. Right. And we would get crazy orders at the end of the government's fiscal year from like the DOD and a bunch of different companies because they would spend like hundreds of thousands of dollars on whatever we could get them quickly so that their budget wouldn't be taken because your budget is a sign of your power in DC. And so, it's not it's not outcome-driven, it's power-driven. And then interestingly enough, when I ran a business internationally and I was in China, I remember it's fascinating. I was they had had massive economic growth when I was there, which would have been like 2009 2010. It was still popping. peak years. And I remember talking to some members of the of the Communist Party there about how they how do they run their their they don't call them mayors or governorships, but something similar to that. And they were saying, "Here's what's really unique about us. Everybody is tracked from their ability to drive increase in GDP." They actually had a scorecard for their their elected leaders to whether they hit more or less GDP numbers. And that would be like us. It would be like, "Okay, did you make me more money or less money in my business?" If you made me more money, I'm going to give you more money. Okay, great. That's like what they did. The fascinating part about that is it led to huge GDP growth, really smart, but then it's also led to huge climate issues and environmental issues. Interesting. And so, they had to offset their scorecard a little bit. But think about in the US. Do you know how to score a single politician? Like we don't have scores for politicians. You could have scores of are do they vote Democrat? Do they vote Republican? But we don't have any scores about like how are they doing? Whereas you have a score every day. Tim Cook, how are you doing at Apple? You know, Elon Musk, how are you doing? How's the Tesla stock doing? Score. And so, I think it's really important like and even for yourself individually, give yourself an ability to quantify whether you're winning or losing. A personal scorecard is really really valuable for that. Most people let their bosses set their scorecard. How much more powerful if you go, "This year, I want to drive 100 million views in my job as a cinematographer or videographer. This year, I want to make a million dollars in this division for the company because I know if I do that, I will make X. I have my own scorecard. Fine. Rate me however you want, but like I'm an owner because I decide how I'm going to be scored. Like that's not just up to you. And that's very very rare. Yeah, I think this is um the metric that people use for the presidential election, as far as I can tell, is basically just the economy. If things are going well in the economy, you're going to be golden. If things are going bad in the economy, you're going to be toast. And so, certainly pulling that to the forefront and saying, "This is the scorecard that we're going to judge people on." Even just having that, even if it were an independent organization that just campaigned and campaigned and campaigned, here's the scorecard and they show every year, "This is what the score was for this administration." Something like that, I think would be really effective. So, could be economy, infrastructure, education, like, you know what I mean, international standing, those kind of things and just here's the 15-point scorecard. 200, but that would be stupid. But you come up with some limited number of things, get everybody to just agree, "Okay, cool. These are going to be the metrics that we judge people." Right now, without having that, I've heard you say this and I certainly agree that if you're trying to run a company and you don't have KPIs, if people don't know the standard to which they're being held, like you you don't know what they're going to aim at. And so, everything becomes rudderless. And this is why I'm always telling entrepreneurs, "The number one thing, what is your goal?" Yeah. And so, if the goal is get reelected, which is the only real goal for a first-term person, uh and if it's Congress or Senate, then really just reelect reelect, then that's what they're going to optimize for. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And if the incentive is to just get reelected, money printer go brrr because the real thing people are paying attention to is the economy. And so, right now we just print and print and print our way out of every problem because one, people are like, "I'm not going to get reelected, which is really my goal." And it's the world's slowest-motion train wreck, right? So, "Oh, we hit the debt ceiling." Again, we're going to saber-rattle and say we're not going to raise it. Of course you're going to raise it cuz the US government isn't the US government is not going to let the US government default on its debts. Yep. It's just not going to because who's going to be hurt? And this is where people don't understand the economy. Which look, I love you all. If you don't understand the economy, A, I don't understand it as well as I will a year from now, certainly not as well as I will 10 years from now. Yeah. And 3 years ago, I knew literally nothing about it. So, but the more you understand it, the more the curtain is peeled back and you realize that your if you own bonds and treasuries, you're the one that gets defaulted on. Yeah. So, yeah, it's just the US government is not going to betray its own citizens by bouncing that and the only way to avoid it is to print money. And as they print money, they are taking your buying power. Yeah. Like it the printing money feels good, but it is socializing the losses. Yeah. And because people don't understand how it all works, they can just do it in plain sight. It's bananas. You're right. I I do think so, I don't think this will happen, but I do think there's a way they could get out of this, which would be you get and this isn't that different to what Vivek said, which is GDP growth. Grow. Grow your way out of this. Have interest rates come down. Restructure the debt so that your debt is at fixed, low-cost, long-term. So, do what Mexico did. Do 50-year bonds as opposed to right now, you know, 1 3 5 10. And so, you could do those two things. Focus aggressively on GDP growth, which would mean cuts in regulation overall. It would mean innovation bonuses. It would mean probably allowing for a little bit better job than we've been doing lately of doing international trade, probably signing up for some things like TPP. Um and so, we could do that. And then we could add on top of that what would be extremely painful, but maybe we could do it if we were growing like crazy GDP growth and the economy was really good for people, which would be systemic changes in our um in our Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. And if we did those things, we could change this country. And this country could be on a very positive trajectory. But without without a structural change in our debt, without a structural change in our GDP growth, and without a structural change in our um Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, this country is in definitely trouble, at least for the long term. Maybe not in the next couple of years because they might keep printing money. But long term, it's just math. You can't keep spending more than you make continuously and compounding it for the rest of time. It just doesn't track. in debt every 100 days, an extra trillion dollars. Yeah. That's insanity. You need only run the math on the interest. It it will just it will become more than our GDP Yeah. in I forget how many years. It's not a lot of years. No. It's absolute insanity. Do you so, when I hear that, when I hear anybody throw productivity in the mix, my only hope is AI. Yeah. What do you think? Is is AI going to bring the needed amount of productivity or do you see innovation credits spurring us on enough? I mean, it's hard I'm just by no means an expert in this. Um so, I don't know. And all I can tell is like qualitative examples and stories. You know, we invested in a company called Figure, which is now backed by a bunch of big names, which is, you know, humanoid-looking robots for manufacturing and warehouses predominantly. So, very like single-use case robots. Um which I think is the right way to do it as opposed to like anthropomorphize like turning a robot into a full-spectrum human that can do everything, right? And so, um So, in this company, I can see a future in which we have massive productivity leaps because it's already really hard to get workers inside of warehouses continuously, for example. Um and so, I do think there's a world in which we have massive like, you know, gain-of-function productivity changes due to AI. I'm not intelligent enough to to understand that, but um you know, my husband he works in AI for the government. Uh anyway, and so, he sees all these fascinating use cases for AI. And they're incredible. And I'm sure you see it here. You're friends with a bunch of people in the in the sphere. So, I think there will be some version of it, but my my bigger point is like you individually as a human have to prepare for the worst without being able to affect the outcome. And so, I think for most human beings, the best way that I see to prep for this is to have some sort of business where you can raise prices as things become more expensive over time. And for you to have multiple income streams in case one of them gets annihilated by a new technology or regulation. And for you to increase your skill stack so that no matter what, you continue to stay relevant. And some of that might even be just becoming more knowledgeable with AI. Like if I was young today and I didn't have a lot of skills, I would have told you a few years ago that the only thing I would have focused on was sales. I would have said just get really good at sales, everything else you can figure out. Become incredibly charismatic, learn how to get what you want from people, and to learn what they want, and you'll be able to go far. And I think that, but plus an ability to understand usage of AI, not even creation of AI, um I think that next generation is going to mint a lot of millionaires and billionaires. So, I might focus on that, but I think in the interim, it's unlikely that somebody is who's like 45, 50, 60, 70 is going to become an expert in AI now. And so, what would be your best-case scenario? Invest in things that become more valuable as the world gets tougher. And things like that are assets, for instance, which when inflation happens, your assets grow in value. And that's also how you steal from the poor poor. I mean, the government steals from you because assets inflate. The rich own assets in inflationary periods, and wages don't inflate. And so, that is how the government steals money from the poor and gives it to the rich. Yeah, so I have a For people that don't understand what you just said, this is very terrifying, and I hope that they will take a second to um walk through that. I have a growing hypothesis that I would love to run by you. Tell me if you think I'm crazy. Great. Uh that hard money, the ability to save in a hard money, ought to be a inalienable human right. And what I mean by that is, if you have money that inflates, Mhm. and and let's not use fancy words. If the government is allowed to counterfeit money by printing it, which which is literally just legal counterfeiting, Yeah. so they get to make more in their back office, but you can't. Uh so, if they're allowed to legally counterfeit, um your money loses buying power over time. And so, the trueflation calculator shows that over the last four years, it's 23.8%, I think. Yeah. Uh so, your dollar four years ago used to buy a dollar worth of stuff. Yep. Now, four years later, it buys roughly 75 cents worth of stuff. That's brutality. Yep. And that's not a a function, it's not a law of nature, which is what I thought inflation was. Just never looked at it. So, I just thought things inflate. I never stopped to wonder why. It's not. It's born of printing money, the legal counterfeiting that the government does. Um and that means if you're a good boy or girl and you save your money, that the government is using an invisible tax to take more of your money away. Yep. But in a way that it doesn't look like it. Of course. So, it's like if I went in and ate the inside of your cake, but I didn't disturb the outside frosting. You'd be like, I still have my cake. But then, when you cut it and eat it, it does not go as far calorically as you had hoped. So, that really feels nasty. And we've just gotten used to it. And so, everybody's like, oh, okay, I guess in the last four years I've lost almost 25 cents per dollar. That's insane. Okay, so it as I look at that and feel the trauma of that over and over, I'm like, look, I'm basically trying to teach people how to think through how to become a wise gambler. Mhm. The fact that I have to tell people That's investing, by the way. When I say wise gambler, I mean invest because it is a gamble. You are hoping that the stock market goes up. You are hoping that the US economy continues to grow. You're hoping that Bitcoin moons. Whatever investment you choose, you are making a gamble because I assure you it is not guaranteed, even if you buy gold. Uh you're gambling on the future of that. Mhm. You must gamble on the future of that, in my opinion, because otherwise you will just continue to get eaten alive by inflation. If there was some thing, whether it's gold, whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's whatever whatever whether it's seashells, whatever we can prove has a limited amount, it cannot be inflated, no matter how badly they want to, even in case of emergency, it just it cannot be inflated. Therefore, you make money, you save in that thing, and since I have a a very crypto-friendly audience, they've heard me talk about this a thousand times, to me it's gold or Bitcoin. Like, that that's the thing that you're going to move over into. Now, technically gold does inflate a little bit, but it's a pretty knowable amount of inflation, so you can plan for that. Bitcoin cannot inflate, but is a bigger question mark, no matter what anybody tells you. You get potential bigger upsides, so that's why it's attractive to me. But nonetheless, just be real about what it is. But we need to give people a non-inflatable, like it can't be inflated, way to save their money. So, they can just work a 9-to-5, and they don't have to be a genius, and they don't have to be looking at charts, and they don't have to listen to their friends, and they don't have to put everything at risk. They can just be like, I'm going to buy this thing, and it's going to give me a really boring return, maybe even no return, but it isn't going to go down in purchasing power over time. Now, I don't know how close we can get people to that. If gold Gold has been used since Roman times, so we certainly have something that holds its value reasonably well. But even that, I think back in the '80s was like $35 an ounce, now it's like $1,000 an ounce. So, there's volatility, which you want to get this thing as close to Who was it that said that the ounce of gold is always worth about the price of a nice suit? That's interesting. Which I think is about right, because I think $35 back then might have been a nice suit. Today, it's a thousand bucks. Yeah, exactly. Depends on when. But um I mean, I think that it is criminal that over 16 years you lose 100% of a dollar that you had 16 years in the future, you know? Or in the past. Well, I mean, 23% over four years, if you take it out and extrapolate, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Inflation is down, just so everybody knows. Yeah. But Theoretically, I think that's criminal. And I I think um I think our government has lost its mandate in that completely and utterly. And I buy into the idea of uh taking away government power to remove money from our hands and put it into theirs. I think the problem is, we both know is it's the same with my solution, which is once somebody has power, it's very hard to take it back. And the government never gives back power to the people, or very rarely gives back power to the people. And so, I'm curious to see what happens. You know, I was talking with Balaji about this the other day, and he gets on these long rants, and I listen, and I I watch him actually do deductive reasoning as we're we're talking. And uh and you know, when I talk to him about it, I say I'm still fighting here, you know? Like, I still think the US is redeemable, and that there are enough of us who see what's happening, and people's eyes are opening, and they're saying, no more. And I I can like sense little wrigglings of it. And Balaji would say, wrong. Actually, the US is past the point of no return. In the future, they will come after your assets as every failed state eventually does, and the only counterpoint to that is some form of off off uh platform Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, potentially. And if that's the case, ooh, like that's tough. That's a real real problem. But I think that there's a big argument in the next however many years as we become more tech-advanced, your thesis might actually play really well in the 25th century, sort of similar to how Brian Johnson talks about it. He's like, I'm not worried about my trolls today. I want to I want people in the 25th century to think well of me because I understood things today that they knew for sure, that they know for sure now. And I think yours is similar. I think in the future, there may not be a future where people say, you guys let your government do what to your dollars? That's madness. How could you do that? At least that's a future that I'd rather live in. Yeah, it is definitely a future I would rather live in as well, but I think that the chasm that we have to cross between where we are today and there is one of bloodshed and horror. Uh it just as a student of history, it's interesting. Um I cannot help myself but talk about this. How do I really think it will play out? It probably won't be as bad as I fear, but I'm going to walk you through a story that really unnerved me. It was both exciting, and I can't shake it out of my mind. Mhm. So, I go to Dubai for the first time. Mhm. And I'm about to go on stage at a conference, and I come into the the green room in the back, and Ray Dalio, what are you doing here? Yeah. And he was like, oh, I come to the Middle East a lot. And I'm like, oh, really? Why Why do you come to the Middle East a lot? And he's, you know, starts going down like how many of the major hedge funds are there, and um and he was also uh you know, it really comes down to how we are with each other. I was like, yeah, I've heard you say that a lot, Ray. What do you mean? And he was like, well, you know, you just you want to go where people are are treating each other well, where there's not a lot of political strife, and you know, we're talking, and he's and I was like uh I felt like a friend of his or somebody came in that had one of the white robes on, and Ray was like, ah, I you know, I thought about wearing mine, but I didn't think any And I was like, Ray, you have one of these? Oh, yeah, you know, like I said, I'm here a lot. I'm like, so hold on, time out. How much time do you spend outside of the US, right? And so, he's pro-US, obviously loves it the most, but he just keeps saying, it all comes down to how we are with each other. Hey Ray, what percentage do you give there being a civil war in the US? I think last check he said 50%. So, I'm like, uh you think there's a 50% chance that we escalate to a hot war within our own country and you spend a lot of time outside of the country. I was just like, oh god, like is this one of those things where um that's somebody who's And again, this is not what he said, but it just made me be like should I be preparing for something? So, I don't know. I feel like people are a little cavalier about when they look at the debt how fast it's growing. Like if you see it graphed out, it looks like a cliff. Yeah, it's painful. It isn't a straight line, but it's almost a straight line. Yeah. And so, I'm just like, okay, wait. It's the chart you want to see in Silicon Valley, but the opposite. Yes. You know, you're like Dude, it's so crazy. It's so crazy. And I'm just like, maybe there's something I don't know and we're like, oh no, you can have something that's 500 times worse than this. So, it's bad, but like you can just keep getting way worse and, you know, hyperinflation doesn't happen until way farther down. Yeah. Um I don't know. I don't know is the honest answer. And I heard uh Chamath Palihapitiya say this whole debt thing's a nothing burger. And Chamath will make one more appeal. Bro, come on the show. Like I want to understand how it's nothing burger. Nothing would make me happier than to realize, oh, I have a flawed assumption Yeah. and all my predictive engine breaks right here. And he has the thing that he understands that I'm missing and okay, cool. I can relax. That would be amazing because I have zero desire to good enough argument for him. I mean, obviously very smart smart man, but you know, all of us are human and flawed. You know, I watched what a lot of those guys did with SPACs a few years back and having been in the cannabis world when they were doing a lot of SPACs, I remember looking at the underlying deal documents and thinking, this is so perverse for the last investors in, which would be the retail investors that come on when it actually goes public and the historic nature of how these things have performed shows that most of them lose money. And the people that lose money are not those who create the SPAC. They aren't the people who funded the SPAC because they both make their money up front. It's typically the retail guy left with the bag. Right. And by and large, you know, none of his SPACs panned out. And so, you know, again, I always watch for like not what do people say, but what are their actions? Obviously some genius moves with with tech, but anybody who looks at markets and thinks with such certainty as opposed to humility concerns me. I think you should you should you should approach irrational things like markets with extreme levels of humility. And that's a good sign in somebody that you want to partner with and work with that if in fact they can be charismatic and confident and they decide instead to be to have humility in a place where they might be wrong and almost certainly could be wrong with a high degree of of probability. And so, I have a problem uh sometimes with individuals like that who are so certain because we all have a historical bias, right? He's had some huge success. And so, when you've had huge success, it's a lot easier to buy your own [ __ ] right? It's much harder for somebody to argue with me who hasn't had my level of success. And when you get into the billionaires club, how many of them have had other people argue with them? I mean, I saw it firsthand. We're at this little event at this private place with all these leaders of the free world and some of the richest people in the world and you're not allowed to talk about specifics happening there. And it was fascinating to watch the questions that they asked, the certainty that they had, um and the assumption that everybody else thought the same. That's that's the thing that kills me almost more than anything else. You say with a lot of humility, I'm testing a hypothesis. What do you think about that? Which is a brilliant way to communicate if you want to actually on board. Mhm. Much higher likelihood of success for me agreeing with you actually to go, hey, what do you think about this? It's like the old adage. I remember when I was first raising money for a startup. We were raising a couple million bucks and one of my mentors said, let me tell you what to do. He's like, he gave me money and then he goes, but the way you pitched me, don't ever do that again. And I was like, oh my god, what did I do? And I'd just given him like a PowerPoint. I thought it was really good. I thought I'd crushed the meeting. He goes, don't ever do that again. And I'm like, why? And he's like, because if you want money, you ask for advice. And if you want advice, you ask for money. He goes, because those who you go to advice for feel like they're bought in. They've like sort of gotten on your side of the table. Mhm. And of course, it doesn't always work that way, but I think it's it's rather intelligent. So, I worry about individuals that feel that level of certainty. And especially I think you have to be careful with the charismatic ones because oftentimes they're hard to refute. And yet I found myself I mean, I had a partner where I thought he was killing it in this one business. And every time I talked to him about it, he he would have such strong convictions about why this would work and it would go forward. And then a series of missed deadlines and opportunities quickly told taught me that confidence is not always a a predictor for performance. Um And so, I hope he comes on here. I think that'd be great to go deep, but I think you'd have to push hard on his assumptions. And the other thing that's tough about those people is they bring a mountain of data. And so, in order to have a real argument, you would almost have to say, please present your data ahead of time. I will present my data ahead of time. And let us both analyze it and see what the underlying base assumptions are and if we agree with them. Because I can make numbers sing if I present them in a certain way. And certainly a man with that intellectual horsepower, too, can, too. By the way, what are Chamath's incentives? Chamath runs a company that is VC-backed, right? He many of them. So, he wants the money printer on. He also is a big investor in public markets. So, what else does he want? The money printer on because that keeps the stock market going up. So, would he want them to aggressively tamp down interest rates, which would immediately dive the stock market? Of course not. Do I care as much about that cuz I have private companies that won't have one-to-one return with interest rates? Uh less. So, like my my incentives are actually better than Chamath's even though Chamath has more history of doing this and a bigger bank account than I have. So, you have to balance the two. Mhm. Very interesting. All right, give us some hope. We You and I are both optimistic. You and I I think believe you can succeed in any environment as long as you have accurately mapped what the moment is. Mhm. Um look forward a year to two years. We've got an election coming up. Is it going to matter? Um how does somebody approach a an all-weather strategy? If they're going to buy something, how do they make sure that they're Mhm. doing it in the right um recession-resistance basis as you mentioned earlier. Mhm. You can't control the election, so I wouldn't worry about it very much. I would try to find the most information that I could on each candidate in order to make the decision that I think is right. My bias would be a decision that is right leads to more freedom, less regulation, and your ability to be the master of your life as opposed to others and a belief in yourself and individuals as opposed to the state. Um but you should do your homework and choose your candidate. Um but the election, you know, I've never had a presidential election be the impetus for massive change in my careers. The only thing that I've had is a regulatory issue, which was me not understanding the risk of my business. So, what did that actually mean? I didn't have the sufficient skills. So, I think in an environment like this, you need to do a couple things. You need to obsess on this idea of how can I become almost Chris and I, my husband, joke about how to become hard to kill, like physically. So, we, you know, we shoot, we do Muay Thai, we do jujitsu, we lift weights, we eat healthy because he's a former Navy SEAL. And so, he's like, you know, that is a principle for him is that we are harder to kill than the average person. And one of my principles is to be hard to kill financially. And so, there's a reason not all my businesses are listed online. It's because I don't want everybody to know everything that I own. You know, there's there's safety in that. And I think that is where people should obsess on today is like, I don't know that there's a better time than right now for freedom of information. And if you can kill distractions and focus on the things that drive you towards your goal, which in my mind should be some form of financial freedom, like there is more permissionless profit than has ever existed in the world. You know, even when I went if I go back 10 years to the beginning of my career, you had to get permission to do things. You know, you had to if you were in finance, you had to be, you know, under certain regulatory regimes. Only then could you do something. You had to go up to a very few number of banks who would bank you one way or the other. There wasn't crowdfunding. There wasn't venture capital to the to the normalized degree that there is now. You couldn't go to friends and family to raise money. You know, that wasn't like normal then like it is now. And I think we now have access to more capital than ever, more potential profit than ever, and more business models than ever because of the internet. And so, anybody who's telling you that you can't is really just saying they can't and that they don't know how. And so, you should probably make it your mission in this environment to go figure out the highest ROI in how to your goal. All right, who would give us more freedom? Trump, Biden, or RFK Jr.? Mhm. That's a good question. Uh I think I'm going to go with Trump. I think the problem with RFK is I I couldn't get him to enunciate his economic views. Interesting. He's the one I know the least about. Yeah, I I actually think that he has really interesting views about food safety. I think he has interesting views about medical safety and allowances. I think he has interesting views about you know, like individuals as sovereign even psychedelics. But if I had to choose between you know, two candidates I would choose Trump and that is a very un popular thing to say today. But I think we all have to start making some unpopular decisions if we want to make changes. I mean I I did a post the other day on Twitter that I really would rather have not done which was you know, about what was happening at the border. You know, we talked about this before but when I was a journalist I covered the US Mexico border. I'm Latina. And I've crossed the border illegally multiple times when I was a journalist covering stories, right? So I'd seen it. And you know, my friends my family's from Arizona my friends who are still along the the Arizona US border or the Arizona Mexico border and the Texas Mexico border. You know, it's inundating and another way that they can steal our money is by creating a much bigger transference of our money as citizens to individuals that have not gone gone through the legal immigration process. And I think that is you can't have a country without borders. We need a better immigration policy but it cannot be free for all and in fact it's really unfair to them. You know, we have a friend who's who was brought over when she was 10 and she's here illegally and she didn't apply for DACA because she was too scared when it was going down and she thought it might get revoked and you know, so she's still here in the US. She's a upstanding member of society and she can't get legal immigration. And we this is not that difficult of a problem to solve. If our government actually wanted to solve it they could come up with a system to allow legal immigration to happen for those who are actually contributing to our society in a big way because hey, we actually need the productivity and people here. And they could come up with a way to stop people from coming along the border. Not perfectly but definitely better than we're doing right now. So that's my take. It's a good take. Yeah, I the thing about the border that and admittedly I've not looked closely at this problem at all but right now we're trying to hire somebody that needs an H 1B visa. Yeah. And I'm like this is grueling. It's hard. And the fact that we've got so many people coming over the border illegally. I'm just like that's crazy. Like if you're going to have effectively an open border then let me just have this person. Yeah, like this is crazy town. I have a friend actually who you know, too and they flew back on a private plane from Mexico to the US and they'd had some work done. So the face and the ID looked different, right? And as they get off the plane they're getting like hammered by the uh you know, whatever customs or immigration and you know, we're laughing about it later about how like yeah, it would have been better if I just said I didn't have documentation and I'm just here, right? And so it just anytime you have those things that make absolutely no sense I get concerned that there's something deeper happening and I'm like at the end of the day remember Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs? Yes. Never saw the show but I know who he is. Yeah, so his idea was to bring dignity back to everyday workers in America. And I think my my mission is similar. I want to bring dignity back to everyday workers in America but I also want to turn them into owners in some way shape or form. Owners of their house or a little side hustle or a little bit of their business or a big business and I think Americans are one of the hardest working groups of humans on this planet as measured by productivity and gross GDP. And as a percentage of total global global GDP and so I think that we have a lot of work to do to help the people that are here. And that to me is really important because if we can raise up all of you know, Americans as we do and have through multiple poverty cycles to a degree that's like never before seen anywhere on this planet at scale like America has capitalism's actually been incredible for that. Um then I think we can have a better immigration policy because we'll have more immigration or we'll have more innovation and right now we're just we're not uplifting the American worker. We're beating them down with deaths of despair and fentanyl normal is it normalization and calling it a pill not a poison and inflating away people's salary and giving universities money that puts our children in debt as the only type of debt that you can't call off from bankruptcy. Then it's [ __ ] wrong and I think there's a lot we can do about it. I love it. Where can people follow you as you write these wrongs? Yeah, it's like let me tell me what you really think Cody. Contrarian thinking.co is our free newsletter where we talk about that the most and then Cody Sanchez on all the socials. We're going to be starting this new series on YouTube that I think will be really meaningful and so we're Cody Sanchez on YouTube and What's the new series? Can't tell you yet. It's going to be a secret. We're working on it though. And uh and the idea is it's not just a show. It's going to come with something else like when we win we have something called when I get a deal you get a deal which means we only take money from sponsors if they give money back to our people and then we take that money and I don't take any profits from any of of this business and so it just goes back into the content. And I have an idea for that with our show overall. So we're we're working on that and it'll come out this summer. Can't wait to see it. Yay. Thanks for having me. if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation check out this episode to learn more. There's people who are really rich who wake up really late and work really late and there's people who are really rich who wake up really really early and there's people who are really rich who eat really healthy and there's people who are really rich who drink Coca-Cola and eat french fries every day. And so there's all these things that we want to make as truth