The Money Expert: From $0 to Millions In 2 Years Without Any Hard Work!: Codie Sanchez

Why do you think most people don't ever reach financial freedom in their lives? This is where people get it so wrong. One of the secrets to success is Cody Sanchez. He's an entrepreneur who's invested in over 100 companies. Turning over millions a year. After spending 15 years on Wall Street, he's now sharing her secrets to the world. On how to make money. I think that is the question everyone's asking themselves.

I think every human should understand the language of money. It's not that complex. We just make it sound complex because the less people speak our language, the more we can charge them. For the first time in 25 years, the richest 1% will control more than half of the world's wealth by next year. The gap is huge. This is why only one in 10 people dies wealthy. If you understand the language, you can become an expert and an expertise leads to a bunch of cash. But what have you come to learn about what holds us back in that moment?

The people who love you, they want what's best for them, which is that you're safe, you're secure, everything's okay. My loved ones were super supportive, but they were always saying things like, is the grass always greener, Cody? And so we've become a generation of vitamin D deficient alternative milk drinking softies.

So I had a job I shouldn't have been at. The guy I shouldn't have been with in a place I shouldn't live. But I was too scared. I'm not one of those entrepreneurs that just burn the bridges or sleep on the couch. And so I needed something where I could stare step my way out of a corporate job. And then I realized this could be way bigger than what anybody else could pay me. Please, Jimin, on that moment, what would you recommend my first step B, Cody? First you have to... Cody.

Who are you speaking to? And what is the message that you're trying to send them?

I think that every man and woman, maybe people like you and I, when we were younger, before we had any zeros or businesses, and the message is very simple. It's that I think by and large, and maybe they could feel this inside them too, we've slowly gone from a nation of owners or a country of owners or a world of owners to a nation of renters or serfs in another word. And the idea is, what if we could take that back?

And that's the whole premise of everything we do is getting people into the owner's chair into ownership as opposed to letting other people be the architects of their lives. And it took me way too long to do that. And so I'm hoping that it will take other people less time if we share. Give me the persona then of someone that you believe will find value in this conversation. Like, where are they, are they in their life? What are they thinking day to day? What are their aspirations?

Yeah, I think there's sort of three humans that I picture. There's one that I call working John. And he is basically or she, but I just have a male avatar for this one, is sitting in a job right now that they don't really like doing things they don't want to do for people they don't like and building their dream and their castle.

They're mad about it, although your choice to be there, but they're mad about that decision. They want a way out, but they have either golden handcuffs or they make too much money or they have responsibility. Bills that have to be paid. They don't really feel like they have a solution except going to find the next best but kind of still worst company.

And then the second avatar is there's an aging population that by and large in the workforce, we say, you're over 50 or 60, like you're not getting as many job looks as you were before, but now we live until we're 90. So what are they supposed to do for 30, 40 years? And I think their evolution can be also buying a business, taking over something, becoming an owner and maybe something not aggressive, as aggressive as they were before.

And then I think the third avatar are humans who kind of got sold pipe dreams over the last couple years. Like if I buy 472 houses that pay me a hundred bucks a month profit, I'll finally become financially free. Well, it takes a lot of cash to do that.

Or if I have NFTs on the side, or if I go into the stock market on the side, all of which aren't rigged games exactly, but are meant to just beat inflation. And so that third group of people might like what they're doing. They just need something else on the side that's a little bit of a safety net, because I don't think our safety nets will be around by the time we need them. And you've been through your own journey from the corporate world to working in finance, working as a journalist to where you are now, which one of those avatars did you represent?

Well, I was definitely a working John, so that would have been the first one. When I was in finance, I was doing well, but I definitely felt trapped. I mean, I was all those things. I was, should have been happy and content with where I was, but felt.

like the 60 hour work weeks were too much. And I didn't really like the culture of the company that I was working for. I had a lot of respect for the CEO, but I didn't really fit. And, uh, but I was too scared. I'm like a little bit of a scaredy cat. I'm not one of those entrepreneurs, like our mutual friend, Alex, who just was like, I'm burned the bridges. I'll sleep on the couch. You know, I'll, I'll sell it all. That's just not me. It's too scary. And so I needed something where I could have like a soft landing. I could stare, step my way out.

of a corporate job, so I started buying these small businesses with the idea that maybe one day they could just meet my costs, and then I realized, oh god, I'm thinking so small, this could be way bigger than what anybody else could pay me. But I was a work in John, for sure.

We zoom in on that moment, because I think most people listening to this now can relate to that moment of maybe hearing you speak and hearing your content online or hearing an Alex Amozi or whatever, hearing Gary Vaynerchuk, whoever it might be, talk about starting that business, pursuing that side hustle. But there's this psychological

barrier to overcome, which most of us can't overcome. We call it fear. We say, you know, that I'm waiting for the perfect time. I don't have the confidence. If you zoom in on that, now you've started this new journey in your life where you're creating content and you're advising people on how they can pursue the paths that you've pursued it yourself. What have you come to learn about what holds us back in that moment? And the, and the maybe the falseness of the stories we tell ourselves, you described it as being a scaredy cat.

Yeah, I, at least for myself, what I'll say is, you know, daughter of immigrants, who thought that what I had achieved was the pinnacle, you know, people that I love more than anybody in the world, and maybe that's similar for a lot of people listening, that people who love you, they want what's best for them, typically, which is that you're safe, you're secure, everything's okay.

They don't really want what's quote unquote best for you because that's actually the scary thing. Real growth happens when you take huge risks and you potentially fail and you realize that you're not going to die. And so I realized that my loved ones were some of the reasons that were actually holding me back. Super supportive, but they were always saying things like, is the grass always greener, Cody? What about this next thing? Is that really going to make you happy? Are you sure it's not you? Is it them?

In some cases, they're right. I just have that ridiculous urge to keep growing and doing more, but that made me jump from one, two, three, four, five, five finance companies in like 10 years or something like that.

Because I thought it was the individual company and I didn't realize, oh no, I'm just like unemployable. I want to work for myself. I'm not going to be great at being at somebody else's employee. But it was the stories that I heard again and again from my family because they wanted to keep me safe, very kind, but not right for me.

So in your life, there comes a moment where you make this kind of peculiar decision. And I say peculiar because most people don't make the decision to start off ramping from the corporate world, essentially. You buy your first business, right? So you're in a job and while you're in the job, you decide to buy a business. Did you have loads of cash when you did that? No, no, no. In fact. And why did you do it? What was the thought process that made you go, do you know what? That's a good idea.

I think it's usually triggered from some sort of pain. At that time, I was fighting a little bit with the CEO of the company that I was working in. They wanted me to run this business that I had taken from zero to a couple billion in assets under management.

And they wanted me to continue running it, but I started getting press and stuff started happening because we had had this growth and they wanted me to do it really quietly and not as much the CEO, but some of the other managing directors. I was by far the youngest. I was the only female and, you know,

That company was wild, but they basically in many ways were like, um, you need to do it our way. And I was like, well, your way didn't get you to this couple of billion dollars on a management. Works great for you guys over here, but it didn't over there. So no, I'm going to run the business this way.

And, uh, and so we were kind of arguing a little bit. And I think I saw the writing on the wall that it wasn't my casino. They weren't my chips. I was working for somebody else. And at the end of the day, they were writing the rules as is fair. It was their business. And I knew that at some point I was either going to get pushed out or leave. And so at that point I started buying these businesses on the side because I wasn't sure I wanted to work for somebody ever again.

I'm fascinated by the first step people take because the first step seems to be the hardest. That first step to buying that first business and you're stepping out into uncertainty and the unknown there. And that's really like that.

You know, if I could give one thing to the audiences that have listened to me for the last 10 years on social media and on this podcast, it would just be the answer to taking that first step, like out into, like you did at 2930 to buy that first business. Talk to me, talk to me about specifically that first one. What were you looking for? What was your thesis? And, um, I guess, how did you learn? How did you learn about buying, as you call them, boring businesses?

Yeah. Well, I had a benefit, which is as a journalist, I sort of infiltrated finance. I'm not technically as intelligent. I'm not a financial modeling guru. I'm not a lot of things that people are in finance. But I'm pretty decent at asking questions and then figuring out who are the right people that could get me the answers. And so what I realized pretty quickly is we were doing a bunch of deals. I was doing deals that were tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and billion dollar deals.

And I don't know why it took me so long, but I realized there's no difference, materially, between a billion dollar, a hundred million dollar, a ten million dollar deal, and a one million dollar deal. And if that's the case that I bet if I have a couple hundred thousand or ten thousand dollars, I could do a much smaller deal. Wouldn't I be able to do the exact same thing? So I saw behind the curtain, like at the Wizard of Oz, and realized that the wizard was actually pretty short.

Because I saw that, then I just said, well, now we just work backwards. Just like you would buy a $100 million condo unit or condo building, you could see how you could go all the way back and buy your first studio. It's the same thing with businesses. It's just stair-stepping real estate.

And so I, at the time, my biggest constraint was not knowledge. I knew how to do deals. It was time. You know, I was working 60, 70 hours a week. And so one of the first deals I did was a laundromat deal because I figured, well, you don't need somebody to run it full time. And it was a hundred K transaction. And so that wouldn't bankrupt me. And, you know, I could buy a little business like this and that business could keep running even while I wasn't there.

and I could have an operator that could probably help me with anything that went sideways. Where did you find a laundry mat to buy for 100k? Was that a website? Did you know the guy? No, the guy. So basically what happened for my first deals, I didn't have a framework. So it was just, hey, I do these really big deals. Could I do a smaller deal? And if I could do a smaller deal, what would be the easiest small deal to do that would be the least risk?

And so at the time, I knew a guy that was running a couple of laundromats. So I basically said to him, hey, if I find one for you, will you help me operate it? And he knew how to do that. So the very first one we had was in California. And that's one of the secrets to this is two things.

First, you have to learn how to do deals, which is not really that complex. We just make it sound complex in finance because financial lingo is like the moat around how we make money, right? The less people speak our language, the more we can charge them, which is the secret. And then the second aspect was how to run a laundromat, right? Like, I don't know, machine breaks. What am I going to do? And so then I had this guy who knew how to run these and I could just find the deal for him, close the deal for him and be the cash for him. Why did they sell to you?

old. These are 68-year-old owners of a business that have been running this laundromat plus a bunch of other small businesses in the vicinity for 20, 30 years. Can you imagine running your podcast for 30 years? Probably be fun, but by the end, you might be open to selling. Imagine you had a laundromat for 30 years. You're dealing with broken machines or there's somebody who's homeless messing around with some stuff. At a certain point, you don't even want to continue with a profitable business.

And this is where people get it so wrong. All the time on the internet, people love to tell me, no way would anybody sell a business. That business made $67,000 in profit. So I bought it for $100,000 a year, did $67,000. And people on the internet do one of two things to that. They go, no fucking way it didn't happen. And why would somebody sell and like, did you give them a bad deal? And the second group of people go, that's a terrible deal. I'd never do that deal because you don't have enough profit in that for that to be a business, not a job.

Those are the two things. The first one I'd say, in the US right now, there are tens of millions of small businesses for sale that will never sell. I tell a story about my uncle, who had a small business that was exactly that, that he closed down, which, by the way, costs you money.

as opposed to selling because he had no idea his business was sellable. Like many businesses that I had before I did this, I shut down instead of selling them. I didn't even realize that even though I was in finance. And then to the second group, I'd say, you start with a small business that probably isn't the greatest business for you to own long term, but businesses are like real estate. You can turn around and sell them after you get in the game. But I think of these businesses, I call them gateway drug businesses.

Once you learn how to do a deal, you'll never see the world the same again. It will change your entire perspective on everything. You will walk in everywhere and you will realize that business is full of masochists like you and me who do this despite it being awful many times, but we love it in some way.

But at some point, we're going to want to sell our thing and move on to the next. And so everywhere around you, right now, wherever you are, somebody sitting next to you wants to sell their business. And what if you could figure out how to buy that business, put it in an operator in it and then do it again and again and again. And that's the only difference between you and Warren Buffett or Blackstone or these big huge companies.

Is it important to have competence in the area and the industry that you're trying to buy these small businesses in in your point of view? Not really, no. Not at all. But it helps, right? Oh, of course it helps. More important than anything is it's sort of like real estate. It's really about the deal. Can you understand? Can you read a balance sheet? Can you understand profit and loss, which is not that difficult to understand?

And then can you figure out how to get to the person that can get you answers? So for instance, I didn't know anything about laundromats, but I knew a guy knew laundromats. Often what I tell people these days is I'm more old school, like I would go knock on doors and I would shake business owners' hands, but you could also go to Reddit where there are platforms with 100,000 electricians on them.

And so if you wanted to buy an HVAC company, which is like heating, air conditioning, and often electric electricity, I would go on there and I would try to find electricians in my local area and I would ask them questions and I would pay them for an hour consult to figure out how to run this business.

I think we forget in this day and age how easy it is to get the information that we want. And so we listen to the fear of the fact that we don't know what we're doing. And I actually think that's irrational. I think it's really easy for somebody to tell you why things won't work. It's actually quite hard to convince somebody that they're capable of doing something.

What if I don't have 100K? You had 100K, right? Yeah. Say, I'm working a job, I've saved up only $5,000. Yeah. Well, I've bought a business for $3,000. I've bought a business for $8,000, and I've bought many, many, many businesses for $0. And I'm not saying this in a way that's clickbaity. Will you go out right now, talk to somebody tomorrow and be able to buy a business for $0? You're going to need to do a little work.

Just on the structuring of the deal, right? Just on the structuring of the deal. So they get paid on performance? Exactly. Or they get paid on what's called seller financing. So you can go and most businesses, most small businesses, below $10 million in revenue, 60% of them sell with some component of seller financing, which just means if, let's say, you know,

Somebody manages your property here. Let's say that that property manager makes a hundred K a year profit. They want to sell their business. You're a terrible tenant that can't handle it anymore. And they sell that business. They want to sell that business typically for two to five X profit. That's what these small businesses go for. And the, the typically there aren't enough buyers. Like there's not a bunch of people running around trying to buy property management companies. So what do they do instead? Well, you would come to them and say, all right, I'll buy out your property management company, but

You're going to be my loan. I'm going to pay you a percent interest rate. Plus, I'm going to defer your tax burdens. You pay less than taxes. They'll be like that. I'm going to buy the business by giving you $300,000 over five years. I'm going to keep a percentage of the profits and I'm going to give the rest to you. It's not really that complex. It's really what happened to real estate before we had Zillow and Redfin and all of these sites that made it super normalized to sell real estate.

As you said a second ago, the real key here is knowing the art of the possibilizer relates to deals, the way you construct your deals so that you win. Yeah, 100%. Basically. Well, and I think the truth of deal making that people forget about is that it is one of the very few things where it's never a zero-sum game. So if I go to sell a stock, I hope that when I sold the stock, I sold at the right time and you bought at the wrong time, right? Like that's what we hope.

And buying and selling small businesses, that doesn't have to be the case. I could sell my property management company to you. You could pay me 3X profits. And I could say, but if the company increases revenue by X amount, which I think it will with these tweaks, and I kind of help you a little bit, how about you pay me 400,000 instead of 300,000?

And you would go, great. If you hit those metrics, no problem. That'd be an awesome deal for me. So there's plenty of ways to make sure it's a win-win. But to your point, this is why people are poor, because nobody teaches us the language of deals. And if somebody taught us not how to negotiate our salary, that's fine, but how to negotiate for equity and ownership, the world will look a whole lot different. But that's not in the big pictures incentive. It's really good for the little guy, not so good for the big guy.

The other thing when you're approaching a business and trying to get them to knowing how to structure deal is one thing, but then there's an element of persuasion and sales, women's ship involved in this. How important is learning to sell and how can we be better sales people in your view? What is the key to being a great salesperson? Because you must be to be buying businesses. You must be able to figure out what someone wants and present it to them.

I truly believe that sales is a fallacy. I don't think sales exists. I think you find people who are already predisposed to want what you are, quote unquote, selling. And I learned that very early on from one of my mentors, actually at Goldman, that you don't sell anybody on anything. You're never going to change somebody's mind. And if you think I'm wrong, go try to convince a Republican to become a Democrat, right? Or a Tory to become, I don't know. What's the other side?

Okay. It doesn't really go very well, usually. And so my belief is actually what you're looking for is just who are the people who are, you're finding trigger moments. Like, if I was to have a conversation with Steve at about selling your business, I would try, I would be asking questions like, you know, how's it going running? Wow, 20 years, that's a long time. If their answer is, fucking love this business, I am never selling. This is amazing. You're like, cool. Awesome. No problem. So lovely meeting you. But if you meet the person that's like,

Yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready to retire. I've got this vision of a ranch in my head out in the countryside, and my kid doesn't want to take over the business. You're not going to get them to think something different. You're purely discovering what they truly feel. And then you are going to be the person that enables them to have a retirement.

in a way that no government can, like you are the retirement plan. And so that's maybe what you need to learn is just curiosity for another human. And then you need to understand what a motivated seller looks like. And a motivated seller looks like somebody who's ready for their next adventure, whatever that may be. And if you can find those two things, then you find the people that actually, yes, they want what you're selling. Now, what you actually do have to convince somebody of, and I hope you're true about it,

is that you are going to be a good shepherd. If you are going to be their retirement plan, you better not go broke, right? You better actually be able to take this business and run with it. And so that is one part where you have to convince, like, why should I sell this business to you, Steven? How are you going to take care of my business? And that part really, again, comes down to curiosity, making sure that you're setting yourself up and the seller for success, not rocket science.

If I'm gonna play the role of a 25-year-old, I'm working in a job. I've got a little bit of disposal in income, but not a ton. I'm listening to you, Kerry, and I'm going, I want some of that. You've got a holding company, right? Yeah. You've got a fund as well. Yeah. How much roughly the revenue of the holding company? 70 million. 70 million. So you're holding company does about 70 million revenue. You've got a fund as well. Yep. How big's the fund? Small, 10.

Okay. So 80 million combined. Um, I want to get to where you're, you are, but I'm currently working in a job. I'm 25 years old. I've got, I know, $7,000 in the bank, 7,000 pounds in the bank, whatever. What would you recommend my first step B Cody? How do I get out of this job?

Yeah, well the first step, if you're gonna do it like a pro, I'd say this, which is- I'm not a pro. Tell me what you do for a living. I do content. Perfect. So if you do content for a living,

What I'd say is, don't buy a laundromat. I talk about laundromats. I actually need to change that. I need to tell somebody I bought a different first business because it's a terrible business to buy. It just was my first one. It's very easy to understand. I'm like, if you can't understand quarter, machine, clothes, clean, don't buy a business, any business, just forget you heard me talk about anything. That's why I talk about laundromats.

But if I was going to do it the pro way, I would say, you should use your unfair advantage. And if you're in the content business, don't buy a boring business in the traditional sense. Look around you. It's something I call my personal P&L review. So I basically look at.

What do I spend money on already? If you're in content, you probably spend money on ad purchasing, right? You probably spend money on video production. You probably spend money on maybe you rent a set space. Do you have all these expenses around you? And what if you could turn one or two of those expenses into an asset, not a liability thing that makes you money, not a thing that costs you money?

And so I did a deal back when I was doing more video production in my last company where I bought a podcast and video production company. And I did that deal basically for $0. I think I put $10,000 down for that deal that ended up doing about $300,000, $400,000 a year because I just said, I know like five or six other people that could use your service. I'm going to like double your revenue by introducing you to these people.

And I pay you, let's say $3,000 a month now, what if we're just going to wipe that out? If I can hire these other people and you're going to give me 25% of the company or whatever percentage it was, that's what I would do if I was you. So if you're young and hungry, look around you and see what you pay for and what you currently utilize already and then try to get a percentage of that business if not buying the whole thing. And that's sort of the pro way to do it as opposed to car wash need to go learn totally different market.

You can do the second. It's just a little bit riskier. So I'm, I'm working in content 25 years old, $7,000 in the bank. Um, I realize what you've just said and I go, you know, I'm at marketing agency. We book a lot of studios. Yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to approach a studio space, try and do a deal with them. And then I'm going to send clients their way.

Yeah, you could totally do that. That'd be a sweat equity deal or a rev equity deal, revenue equity deal. So for a studio space, I mean, I think the probably pro way to do that would be one, you'd approach them and you'd kind of get an understanding for their business. You'd be like, how much revenue do you make? Like how big is this?

You'd figure out if you were material to their business. So me doing 3K a year with my video production guy, I was material to his business. He was only doing, I don't know, you know, $100,000 a year or something like that. And so if my 3K went away, that was, you know, that's like 20% of his business right there over a yearly basis. So if you go to a studio production company and they're like, yeah, we're doing $7 million a year and you're paying them 3K. You're like, all right, cool. Anyway, nice to chat with you.

Or you could say, you know, who's the owner? How long you've been doing this? And you could dive into it. And the other side of the coin is you might find out that the owner is 70 and you become buds with the owner. And the owner loves when you come in because you're kind of like young and you learn about what he does. And then you ask, who's going to take over the business?

And then you might say, hey, you know, I did this other thing, but I would love to sort of be an apprentice to you in a way and potentially buy your business using future profits. And you can sort of like stay on and we can stair step our way into this. But would you be open to that like leaving your legacy to somebody like me?

And so you could do it that way too. But I think it is, it goes back to kind of the smart question you asked, which is like the two avatars are, who's listening to this right now? And then that's the same question to the people listening that you're going to ask the owner, what sort of avatar is the owner? And how can you become the solution to what that avatar is looking for? How can you become the son to the father? You know, how can you become the buyer to a really anxious seller? And then you can get your deal done.

Why do you think most people don't ever reach financial freedom in their lives? Do you think it's a psychology thing, a mindset thing? Obviously, let's take, you know, the very practical elements out of the equation. So, you know, severe hardship, poverty, all of those kinds of things. But people that are in that sort of middle layer that are comfortable. Why do they never, some of those people never really reach a point of financial freedom?

I think humans defer to the paths they've seen before them. I think so often we follow in our fathers or our mothers footsteps. And that's why I think the internet's really powerful is you have an opportunity to now choose the family footsteps you want to follow into. So, one, I used to think it was just a knowledge gap.

But then I went to this event and I was talking to my friend about it and she said that the facilitators did something really cool. It was a group of women, imagine like 40 women in a room, right? And they're there to talk about finances. And in this room, they said, okay, everybody close your eyes.

And I want you to picture money, picture money right now. And then I want you to turn your body into the shape you feel when you hear the word money, right? And so 30 women, all eyes closed, they take whatever shape. And she goes, now open your eyes and look around. And you know, my friend was explaining to me how most people in the room were like fetal position. They were like holding, they were like really close somewhere on the ground, you know, some recovering their eyes. So in a room of 30 relatively successful women, their reaction was like,

attack, shame, guilt for money. She was standing there with her arms open wide, like, you know, give me the money. And when I think about my relationship with money, it's the same thing. I'm like, if I think about money, I'm like, yeah, it's over here. My hands are up. I am here for it. But most people have this weird emotional attachment to money.

And so I used to think that people on the internet like, not I like Tony Robbins, but like Tony Robbins or whatever, who do a lot of the motivational stuff, I kind of didn't get it. I'm like, just give me the tactics, skip the other thing. And then I realized that most people have really bad stories that they tell themselves about money. And you could tell, I mean, to be interesting, your next speech, you could try it, but I try to want to mine, same thing, men and women.

holding each other like they're being beaten when somebody talks about money. The average human feels that way. And so I think it all comes down to what we believe, which is hard for somebody in finance like me to say, you know? Typically, I would think, well, if you knew what to do, you could just do it.

But that's not the case. It's you have to believe that you can do it. And the only way I can figure out to get more people to believe that they can do it is to show more people who are super normal or in fact below average doing the damn thing. But if I had the answer to that, that'd be the million dollar question. I read a stat in the US that only one in 10 people dies wealthy in the US, that most people die broke and young.

And I thought that was fascinating because we're at economic high times, like lower poverty levels than ever before, but still, most people die, at least without extra cash to pass on to the next generation. Why do you think people don't reach financial freedom, or most people die without a lot of cash?

I think, obviously, it's a very complex topic, but I think I really resonate with the emotional psychological side of things that you described. It's the same reason why most people don't go to the gym or eat healthy. Money is inherently emotional. When I had no money, I was reckless with money. All the gambling shops are in the areas where people don't have money.

There's something deeply psychological about money. So I would, if I, when I was working in those call centers, if I got paid a thousand pounds at the end of the month, I would the same day go and buy a TV or an Xbox, like a PlayStation.

for about six, seven hundred pounds. I would not pay my rent to go and buy that PlayStation. And sometimes I buy the PlayStation without having a TV. There was just something psychologically attached to the, I don't know, the dopamine rush or the sense of self worth that I got from owning the shiny thing. When I got money,

My relationship with money became amazing. I stopped buying designer things. I stopped wasting it. I didn't feel the need to show off or buy Rolex or whatever. So I was able to preserve wealth more. There's a really interesting relationship with money on both ends of the spectrum. When you have less of it, it's hard. It's often because of certain psychological things and certain people. I was one of them. It's harder to hold on to. And when you have more of it, it feels easier to hoard and people, you know,

And more broadly on the subject of why people don't reach financial freedom, I think the modern world tells us that we can get rich quick. And when you think about how people build wealth, we think about the war and buffets of the world. It's so boring and slow. And who's going to buy that book? You know, be a billionaire at 87. Fuck what?

I'm not going to be able to, you know, dance in the nightclub at 87. So why do I want a billion then? That's why the NFT thing and the crypto scam, this, whatever, is also appealing to people because it's quick. Yeah, it's true. Well, you know, I actually was reading somewhere a story about in South Africa, in the slums, they have the highest concentration of the largest televisions.

per square foot of the house. If you've been there, and I've actually never been, so I can't validate, but you will see very small little rooms with huge televisions. I thought that was interesting, but it actually makes sense because maybe it comes down to a belief that people don't think they're ever going to get out. They think the only chance of getting out is going into

whatever the short-term pleasure is. It's like if you never think you're going to escape your everyday reality, which is actually kind of miserable, then you're going to buy the PlayStation because why wouldn't you? Why would you save and try to get out when you've never seen anybody else get out?

But what does the PlayStation mean so much more to you in that moment than a PlayStation? It means it's your, it's self-worth. It's one tiny token that you are successful, that you can show your friends or that you can just even fear and self-esteem. It's so much more than a PlayStation.

The thing that invalidates you, in this case, money, will be the thing that has the greatest chance of making you feel valid. And so if in my house, the lack of money was always the thing that caused my shame. So the minute I got any of it, I would overcompensate by trying to buy some shit to show people. And then when I had loads of it, I gave a fuck.

That void is always filled, say. Yeah, it's true. I also think it's hard. I remember many times where I remember checking accounts always being overdrawn and seeing the little negative pin on my email and cell phone that there was nothing else in there. When I was in college and trying to figure it out before I made any money, I think I made like 37K in my first job.

at a college. So I definitely remember all that. But I think if you can have this belief and you can get around other humans who have had success or are striving for success, your aperture just opens in a different way. And then maybe the commercials and the ads and the things that make you feel like you want to buy all the everyday stuff go away. Like I don't really like, I kind of viscerally get mad when I see people who have wealth.

Showing images of them in their Bentley's or Rolls Royces or I mean I have a nice watch but like you don't see me show that shit anywhere I like when people are showed themselves in their private planes or whatever I just think they're missing the whole boat and then what they're doing is they're perpetuating the PlayStation situation they're doing it again and again, and they're doing it because

It doesn't make them happy anymore to have it. That's not enough. I have to show a bunch of people I got it. And what they should actually be showing is, man, I just invested in my first stock. That's fucking cool. Look at my, I mean, if you look at my stuff, it's like I've laundromats and car washes behind me all the time in them. Cause that's the stuff that you should try to strive for. You can actually pass it down. It can pay you back. You can buy as many playstations as you want. But I think to your point, the other thing is we are all

You know, have you ever felt like when you're around other people and they're sort of negative or they want to talk about people the whole time and like how that energy feels? That's like it's draining, right? Even if you kind of get caught up and it's fun for a second, at the end you're like, I feel kind of gross for having a combo. I think it's the same with ads and stuff that we take into us. And so they're basically creating our stories for us in social media by showing all this fancy stuff.

And then we start to have this mimetic desire, this external desire and belief that we actually, that we want it, that we need it, but we don't. We're just becoming a replica of the people that we're surrounding ourselves with, which are now social media.

There's no, even growing up, there's no laundry mats and 50 cents videos. Yeah, there should be. It's all sports cars and mansions and stuff. So that was my North Star as a young black man. It was like, how do I get a mansion and a sports car? And in the first page of my diary, 18 years old, it says, four things I want to achieve before I'm 25. Bear in mind, I was shoplifting pizzas at the time. And I was a university dropout not speaking to my parents with two CCJs, which is like when the court is coming for you for debts. I wrote, a Range Rover Sport will be my first car.

I didn't have a driver in license 1223. I'll make a million pounds. I'll work on my body image again because I'm a very small kid and I'll get a girlfriend. Those are my full goals in life and they were totally influenced by the outside world. That's why my book is called Happy Sexy Millionaire because I thought if I became a sexy millionaire, then I would become everything I needed to be.

And I was so wrong. I mean, I don't regret the decisions I made because you can't really in hindsight, but I wish I had better influences to say the least.

Yeah, I think that's why content's so important. I think about Warren Buffett's annual shareholders' meeting, which you can go and attend if you own stock and you don't have to own much of it. And I think people made fun of me when I started creating content online because they were like, oh, big, successful private equity person. Now you're taking your own money. And if you really had companies that made $80 million in revenue, that means you're worth a couple hundred million bucks.

And if that's the case, why would you be making Instagrams and TikToks? And that doesn't make much sense, right? And my reaction at the time was, I think we should make it just as entertaining talking about stuff that makes us money as we do stuff that costs us money. I think probably that'd be good. And if we could do that, that'd be a worthy mission. And also, it'd be fun to try to do it. I don't know if we could do it.

But yeah, maybe the next rap videos, I mean, and now, now, honestly, my favorite deals to break down are the celebrity deals, because they're fascinating. Like, the rock, have you ever looked at the rock's content from a product perspective?

Brilliant. So the rock, if you look at his content, so let's just talk Instagram. If you go to the rock's Instagram, I want you to count how many pieces of content he has that have product placement in them of companies he owns. And the answer is close to 80%. So almost every single post the rock does is an ad.

But what do we really see? We see sexy tequila, we see abs, we see who have this beautiful wife. We see these other things, but we don't realize that every single one of them is an ad. And so what if we could flip that around? Wouldn't it be cool if the Rock talked about the deals he did too and how he did that? Now he goes back and he talks about how he stole Stickers bars similar to you with pizza. But I think even for celebrities, they don't want to talk about the deals that they did. They just want to talk about all the money that they have.

It almost seems like faux pas somehow to talk about the deals and how good a deal making they are. Like Reese Witherspoon, billionaire now. Why? Because Reese Witherspoon, little sweet Susie Sunshine and Pink basically took a book club and said to authors, I'll give you part of my platform for you to talk about your book because I'm lovely. It's free. You're going to sell a bunch of books.

It's tiny in significant detail. I'd like the future rights to turn your book into a movie and I'll pay you some some or I'll have a right of first refusal, aka I get the right to buy it before anybody else and I'll pay you then for it. The author goes amazing. Reese, of course, perfect.

They come on, Reese basically AB tests, so tests out which books do best, and depending on which books do best, Reese buys their movie rights and makes movies that create, you know, tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But Reese doesn't tell that story. Reese tells the Susie Sunshine story of her selling the books. I think the other story is more interesting and more people can learn from it. So when I hear these deals, and when I

see these big success stories. We've got Kylie, we've got the Rihanna's of the world, we've got Ryan Reynolds, The Rock, Reese Witherspoon. The question that we must always be asking ourselves, I certainly ask it is, was that them? Or did they just have a great advisor? A financial advisor that came along at some point and went, by the way, you do it like this and you'll make fucking shit loads. Yeah. Well, my question is, who cares? I still want to know the secret sauce. Yeah. And so she's, none of them are that dumb.

where they don't know what the deal was, right? Even if somebody was smarter than them, which could be, Reese may have a genius behind her, the rock too, probably Danny Garcia, his wife, his manager. Kylie, yeah, the goat, which is weird to say about the Kardashians, but behind them, the mom, for sure. But they're smart enough. When you create that much wealth and you do it continuously multiple times, like Reese is done with Draper James too, you definitely know what's going on. So I think sharing those secrets

would be cool. But that's usually where people go. People go, well, they're famous, so it's easy for them. Or, you know, who did the deal? And I'm like, yeah, maybe it's Scooter Braun behind the scenes, but I'd like to know how they structured that.

The reason they don't tell you, though, is because it feels like it's the opposite of the authenticity that they're trying to maintain. So if they came out and went, listen, the way we did you on that whiskey deal, I got 50%. My job was to post it with the abs every week, and you guys fucking bought it, and now it's worth a billion dollars. It's the how to. They can't do that deal again, because everything they touch, I'm going to think, oh, it's a deal.

Well, I think you could do it in a way that was real. Like you could be like, we did this business and maybe you could give some of it away. Like you could be like, you know, if the rock makes a billion dollars off of TerraMana, couldn't he then say, we would never have done a billion dollar deal unless you guys bought it. And because you bought it, we're going to give you some equity. We're going to allow people to buy into equity at the company at a lower valuation and have access to it. I mean, that's kind of what venture capital and crowdfunding does, right?

So, I mean, they can do whatever they want to do, but I think there's so many ways to get around it. And maybe there's nothing but downside, because people these days get mad when people make money, and so maybe people would hate that. But God, I think it'd make a lot more humans rich for people to be honest about how they got there, you know? I reflect, as you were speaking, on a conversation I had with a cab driver in the UK. He said to me, you know, I know that there ever see you go. I listen to a podcast in the cabs, and, you know, I'm working three jobs. This is one of them, and I'm trying to

What he was saying was I'm trying to find financial freedom. I'm working this car job. I'm doing this other little thing on the side, but I'm trying to find the way. I'm trying to find the way to get out of this life. And he was scrambling around. He was saying to me, you know, my friend does some stuff in Africa and Ethiopia and he's got something there with property. So I might go there and there's this other thing I might do. Those people, those are the ones that I'm trying to speak to today. Those ones that are like looking for the way out.

Well, first of all, cab drivers and Uber drivers are my people. I always, yeah, I always chat with them. Well, and they always listen to my stuff because they know small business. Like they have a friend that owns a laundromat or they have a friend that works inside of a car wash or owns a car wash. These are like blue collar businesses, right?

But usually what I would say to them is something I actually said to one of the guys that's with me today. I'd say, try to break your frame entirely. Most people look for individual next tactics. So they're like, what can I do over the next one, two, or three years to get here? One thing I think is really helpful to do is say, okay, you have a three-year goal, break the frame. How could you achieve that goal in six months? What would be something so different

So out of the box, so big that the goal that was going to take you three to six years is now going to take you six months. And I want you to spend some time on that. Spend a week, spend a weekend deeply thinking about that idea because what you're going to do is you're going to come up with ideas for the person that could be the impetus for your financial freedom or for the business risk that's super smart, but you haven't been wanting to take it. And I think most people, they like, they weighed in the shallows of life and you cannot.

have massive change by going shallow. And so I like to say, when people want an answer, I like to ask them a question, because I think they know. I think they know deep down inside, but they get scared just like I did. And so they wait years to do the thing that they knew they should have done earlier. And I don't think you need a guru or a podcast to tell you that. I think you've got to break your frame and say, I'm super capable.

If I was going to do this crazy thing in six months, if anything was possible, if I really believed in myself, what could I do? Who could I go to that could make an unfair advantage for me? Then I do think that book, Who Not How, people usually read it as leaders because it's a lot about hiring, but I think it's actually about life.

And I think usually your answer to freedom is a who, not a how. Because often for hustlers and people who are going to work hard, you know one or two people who are very wealthy or who run big businesses. There are a few people in your ecosystem that you could go to and become their hustler for them. And that can lead to fantastic financial reward because most people are not relentless in the pursuit of the things that they want. If you can be relentless, you can accomplish way more than the average person.

And most of us, you used a phrase earlier on in this conversation which really stuck with me because I've used this phrase with my friends over and over again. You said you got to see behind the curtain.

And I remember the first moment in my life where I really felt like I got to see behind a curtain that I didn't even know was there. For anyone listening to this podcast, there's a curtain on my right. For anyone watching, you can see the curtain on my right behind that curtain. There is actually a room in there. And there's actually another studio in there where we record some content, kind of like a standing up studio. We've got some backdrops and stuff like that. But the analogy that I'd give you is in life.

You never know how many other rooms there are behind the wall. And there was a point in my life where I started understanding deals and the public markets and how

certain high net worth individuals were playing what I call money games. They were basically not doing much work, but they understood the laws of money so they could buy things at an arbitrage or flip things at an arbitrage and put them on the public markets and all of these crazy money games that no one had ever told me about in life. I thought the way you build wealth is by working.

And these fuckers, the richest people I know do very little working, and they do a lot of money games. And they live behind the curtain that I didn't even know was there. And I was thinking about the cab driver there. What is behind the curtain? Behind the curtain is a bunch of information. That's essentially what it is. You know, a bunch of people that have a bunch of information. What I might say to that cab driver is like, who can take you behind the curtain? Even if you have to go get a shit job for six months.

Like, you are alluding to it there. Like, is there a guy or a woman that I could go just shadow? Just make the fucking tea and get behind the curtain and figure out how they do it? Like, if you wanted to be the best podcast in the world, or you wanted to be a good podcaster,

You can go host a rogue and if you can go clean the floors. A hundred percent. You know what I mean? A lot of people don't want to do that. They want to work their way there. But so much in life is about information, right? And the information you don't even know that you don't have. Oh, yeah. When did you see behind the curtain? Well, you worked in finance. That's unfair.

Yeah, I think it is a hack. I saw behind the curtain for the first time when I had managers and bosses who were making tens of millions of dollars a year, and I realized how little they worked, like you said, but also how average they were.

I saw these largely middle-aged dudes who were no more impressive than I was, and they were crushing it. And instead of having envy or hate for that, I was super curious. I'm like, ah, this guy can do it. That means I can do it. And I think that's a huge unlock, actually. I was talking with another friend the other week, and I think one of the secrets to success might be when you see somebody who has more, who is doing better, who has more money,

Realizing that means that you can get it as opposed to I hate them because they have it. If you can flip that mindset on the other side of that lives nothing but opportunity. And it keeps, I keep finding new rooms in the house, new curtains behind it. And I'm not sure that will ever stop. I mean, I was talking to my friend Bill Perkins the other day who's a hedge fund manager.

Bill is very successful, huge compound house we're walking around at. I'm like, this place is pretty nice. He said to me, Cody, because you've been around small business for so long, small has infected your thinking. I was like,

I don't know. But then I realized to him it had, because he's got way more zeroes than I do. Those zeroes become unlocks to the curtain. The other day I was flying here yesterday, and I sat next to Jeffrey Kent, the CEO and founder of Abercrombie & Kent.

And he built that business up to multiple billions of dollars before selling it. He played polo with the king, is quite close with King Charles, and also has traveled the world, came from nothing in South Africa, was in a town in South Africa where there were only 100 white people, which is fascinating. Like mostly was barefoot all throughout his childhood, and created the luxury travel market, essentially.

And I was just sitting next to him on the airplane and I kind of looked at his watch and I was like, that's a nice watch. And I sort of looked at his mannerisms and I was like, I just have a feeling this guy is worth a lot of money. And so I started chatting with him. I just said, you know, hi, like I'm Cody. You know, why were you in town? What were you doing in Cannes? And he lives now in Monaco.

And what I thought was so interesting is when I talked to him, I said, what do you think the secret is? Like, you're a billionaire? Like, what is that? How do you become that? And he said, there's really one ingredient to success. And that ingredient is the thing that everybody has, but everybody wastes.

Time. Time. Time. He's like, I ran my company for 61 years. 61 years running one company. He goes, can you imagine what the compounding looks like in 61 years focused on one thing? He goes, this generation cannot imagine. And then we went a little deeper. And I said, what do you think is the biggest difference between entrepreneurs today and entrepreneurs when you were really in the game? Because he's in his 80s now.

And he said, well, back then, we...

We were explorers of the only frontier that still existed, which was business. They were the privateers asking money for the king and queen to buy a ship to go to the new land, except he was doing it in a business sense. He went to China in 76 and was the first person to open up the Chinese market to travel. He broke so many bones playing polo that he had to retire at a young age. They were hard men.

And I think about it with us today. I think that we've become a generation of vitamin D deficient, all birds wearing, computer programming, alternative milk drinking, softies in many ways.

And some of my most successful friends who are worth so much monetarily, their health is not very strong. They don't adventure and they don't have true difficulty. And I think that's the difference between his generation and ours and between true success and not is this idea that I'm sort of playing with like a third degree human, somebody who has a strong mind, a strong bank account, a strong body, those three things all together.

And where we don't just take other people's risk, meaning take other people's money to run our business, but we take the risk ourselves. And I think his generation really did many things wrong. I don't want to glorify it, but I think they did that right. And how much more interesting is it to do these big, huge things? And maybe if you do that, you break the frame entirely.

Every time I meet with a billionaire, my mind expands a little bit more. I think it's the same way. The first time you met, my parents weren't millionaires when I was growing up. The first time I met a millionaire, I thought, what is this? Magic land. This person has so much money, they don't know what to do with it.

And then you meet the first deck a millionaire, and then you meet the first hundred millionaire. And at each level, not that we want to worship money or that money is all there is, but it is a scoreboard for a game that a lot of people are playing in this society. And I think it's interesting to try to get in those rooms. And these days, those rooms are open, you know, back when we were first doing our businesses, a billionaire didn't write a book, you know, or do a podcast or tweet or go shake your hand at a conference that was unheard of.

And now they're all around. What have you noticed in billionaires? What's the trend? You know, people, I've met quite a lot of billionaires now and there tends to be some similarities. They all get there by different roots and different paths, but similarities in character and philosophy. Yeah.

One is I've found most billionaires I've met have a mission so big it dwarfs the pain that comes with building because I do think it's more comfortable by and large. It's more it's like the low dull pain.

is being in a job. That's like having a little ache constantly being in a job. Being an owner, an entrepreneur, or trying to strive for billionaire status is a roller coaster ride of extreme pain at some points, or maybe you'd say extreme pain at some points, extreme pleasure, and you go like this. You have to be able to wade through that.

And so I find that most of them are the opposite of what I thought they'd be. I thought they'd just be like Scrooge McDuck, like swimming around in their riches. They'd be kind of shallow. Maybe, you know, maybe they'd be super self-interested. They'd only be focused on their own thing. They wouldn't be nice. I wouldn't want to meet them. And actually what I find, they're in, this is going to sound like a gross generalization, but most of them really want to help you up when they realize that you're hungry. Like when they see the hunger paired with the ability and willingness to take action,

They want to help you. It's so rare. Like if you're listening and you have that desire, but you actually do the hard things, you're rare. You're actually really rare because everybody says they want it, but nobody really wants to do it. I mean, I knew I had to fire one of my employees back in the day, which made me really sad. The second that that person told me that they had a bunch of debt.

They were working in the business with me, obviously. They had a bunch of upside in the business, but they decided to take some of their cash and they were going to invest in a day trading thing in the stock market. I said, I really don't think you should do that. I think if you want to take that cash and buy a business,

We should talk about that. I can help you if you want to focus more on a secondary business that increases your income. But if you want to day trade, which you're telling me, so that you want to get rich fast and you want to speculate, that you want to get lucky, you don't want to earn it. Anyway, they kind of laughed and then they did the thing.

And that was in that moment, I knew you don't have what it takes at this level. Maybe you could change. But if you're going to make that decision, now you're telling me you're a short-term player. And long-term games with long-term people, like Naval Ravakant said, is the goal. So that's what billionaires have. They think long-term. I was actually just talking with a member of my team on the taxi on the way over here. And there's a close to a billionaire that I've become friends with here.

And I was like, why do you think he's invited us to do this stuff? You know who this is? And I was like, I'm not a big enough name for this. Like, there are other people, you know, what's the thought here? And then what I think I realized is that this guy is taking a bet.

that I might keep growing my social platform and I might keep spending on it. And in two to three to five years, I might be a really big name. And because he associates with me now, when he needs something in two to three to five years, I'll be really big and he'll have like a remember when moment here. And he could go get a Damien John, right? And pay to do something with a Damien John. But then he doesn't have the remember when moment because Damien's already at the top, right? And so that billionaire, almost billionaire is thinking,

three to five years out with a potential call option, aka a maybe possibility. How often do we do that? I don't even do that enough. And so that's where I think they're different. It's just this different scope because probably they see many curtains. With that long term view, they want to water some seeds, right?

I can totally relate to that. I often say I've been perplexed in my life by why extremely rich people wanted to give me a hand, especially when I was like 18, kid with an idea, all the enthusiasm in the world, you know, but, you know, you almost don't trust it.

Right? It was so weird. Yeah. I've described it as being so unusual over and over again every year for the last 10 years that when I was 18, 19 years old and I stood on those stages and I went around, again, stealing the Chicago town pizzas in my spare time to feed myself, but all of these really successful people wanted to give me a hand, like wanted to introduce me to someone, you know, give, invest in my business, even though I had no credentials. They just saw something in me that I never understood.

And that would be an interesting thing to try to break down. What is it that you see in another human? I mean, one of the things that comes to mind for me is how many people reach out to you every single day, a DM, you know, I'd love to meet you, Stephen. Could you help me with this? Could you? I would get a guess a lot.

None. I'm thinking. I was going to say that seems like that doesn't track, but okay. So probably a lot. But what I found is interesting is in the beginning, when I was starting to be a little public, I would respond to almost all of them. Almost every single one I would respond, but I would respond like this. I would say, happy to help, read this book, and then do XYZ thing for me. Something very small. I'm like, read this book first, do this small thing. Do you know how many people did that?

Fuck all. That's a great saying. I'm going to use that. Fuck all. Not a single person actually did that. And then if you compare that with, I think I've hired five team members now who all reached out to me with value. They gave right away. One of them did this deep analysis on my business. Another one basically wrote up this whole piece like she was me. And it was incredible. And for those individuals who actually asked nothing of me, I gave them a job and opportunity and many of them make six figures plus.

And so there might be a secret there that just the humans who do are the ones who follow up. The DM tells me everything I need to know about the person. Yeah. And I can give you every example of every DM that I ever get and how I filter them, how I know from the first DM, whether they are someone that I should be connecting with. Let me give you the one side of the spectrum. The one side of the spectrum, which I often get is any jobs going,

In that, you've told me everything I need to know. Because not only could you have checked if we had jobs available on our many websites where we list our vacancies, you didn't even have enough effort to go check out the job site. Didn't say hello, poorly structured message. You think that we hire over DM on the basis of no pitch at all. That's the extreme example, but it happens you wouldn't delete. I will get any jobs going once a day without fail on one of my inboxes.

And sometimes, and I've never said this before, on the very rare occasion, I'm saying once a year, I'll click on the person's profile, and I'll

about them so much that I'll send them a voice note because I look I click on their profile I remember this one kid and he kind of looked like me and he was a young kid and I remember thinking I really you know I could just ignore it's easy thing to do the hard thing to do was try and give them some feedback on like please don't do that to more people please don't send them any jobs go in question mark so I remember sending one particular kid like a voice note saying right listen buddy I'm on your side here here's some advice

And then on the extreme end, the good end. What happened with that? What happened? The response was, he was thankful. Oh, that's good. But when he responded, I realized why he was the type of person that would send any jobs going. Maybe a bit of a maturity issue there. Sure.

And then on the other end, you have the perfect reach out, where someone realizes that they can't give you what they're asking to take from you. So someone wants maybe an hour of your time. They know they can't give you anything worth an hour. They can't give me 50k, they can't nothing. Nothing they can give me worth that hour of my time. But they do two things maybe. The first is they realize that.

And so they realized that they should offer something of value. Even I'm never going to take it. But the gesture itself, it's like someone pulling out their card to pay. The gesture itself matters. The third thing is they realize the world that I live in and that I have no time and they acknowledge that. So they might say, listen, you get thousands of messages like this. I know how busy you are.

So just by them saying that, I go, OK, you understand. Could I just sit? So I see it as an equation. Ask for as little as possible and give whatever you can. Could I just sit in the room one day when you work? Means a lot to me. The third point there is research the person because that's a huge show of care. I know you're a big Manchester United fan. I know your dog called Pablo.

In exchange, I will, I don't know, fucking, I will, I've made this jacket for Pablo. I've sewn it myself. If someone said that to me and people are going to do this, Pablo does not need a jacket. We're coming into summer. He likes being naked. But just showing you, you made an effort. Oh my God, it's the keys to my heart. Yeah, that's true.

And then egos a great thing is what everyone has an ego. So just acknowledging you've done your research on someone is another huge way. Yeah. And I think the sneak to if you're listening is like skip the famous people. They get enough. Like forget it. Yeah, just skip them all. You know, even like sort of famous people like skip all that and go to the people with money because often they're quiet. People can't find them. They don't get a lot of reach out. And so if I was young and hungry,

I would skip the flash, skip the Bentley's, skip the Rolex's, skip the fame, and I would go straight to like, who's the richest sprinkler owner you know? Like, who's the guy on your block that has the biggest house that does something that sounds so boring to you?

You also learn the most from like the level like closest to you. And if you can kind of like level up a little bit, you know, if you go from you right now to billionaire and billionaire goes, the thing is you got to work hard, kid. You're like, fuck, I don't know what that means. You know, but if you go to the next person and you're like, no, the thing is you have to send this exact email, which is what I sent to this person. There's so much closer to your climb. You know, they remember the steps.

And they want someone to mentor. They do, yeah. They'd be most flattered by, you know that I have 300 sprinklers around London. They would be blown away by someone taking such amount of effort and care to research them. Exactly, yeah. And they probably had to do really interesting things to create their wealth that weren't single events. If you reach out to somebody who is, now I know about the show, on Love Island, what are they going to teach you? Like, yeah, kid, be charismatic, kind of hot, and get on a TV show.

He's application form. Yeah, exactly. That's not okay. And then to have a bunch of money and get famous. But if you reach out to somebody who built a toilet business here, there's probably a lot they had to do continuously over time that you could learn from. But it's not that sexy, so people don't do it.

Why is it important for you now? The last two years you've started making content. Why is it? Why do you think everybody should make content? What are all the upsides you've seen in your life? Some of the unexpected ones too, please, that have resulted from you becoming a content creator. What's the most unexpected one?

I wanted every single person that I wanted to reach out to to pick up my phone call. Like, I don't ever want to be the person standing in line at the club. I want to own the club. I want to get the invite. I'm actually another good example. I was just with my friends in Cannes and they were like, let's try to get into this party or this party. I'm like, I was invited to this one. I'm going to go to this one because I don't like doing the hustling to try to get into this. I don't like it. I've never liked it. It's probably like, I should get better at it. I should get over myself. Who cares?

But I was like, I'm not going to try to finagle my way in. That's the short-term game, right? Right. And it feels gross and it feels thirsty. And I want to be thirsty. And so creating content is a way for you to have unfair access in a world. These days, how do I become friends with billionaires? Because they watch my weird content on laundromats and car washes, and they see something in it. And so if we truly believe that money

is power. I think the way you get money is usually people, which is like a theme we've kept coming back to. Most people on the internet, I think, try to explain how smart they are. And what I hope to express is like, I'm not that smart. I just found people, you know? And I think we can all do that. So that was one. I don't want to be standing in line in the club trying to, like, finagle my way in. I want to find that. What's the backdoor that nobody's talking about where they invite you into it? That's one.

You know, the second is... Let's pause on that. Yeah, tell me. That's not just a nightclub analogy. That is a philosophy towards every facet of your life being

the magnet or the peacock instead of the daughter or sales person. Like, you know what I mean? Like all my companies have grown on this basis. All of my companies have grown on the basis. This is maybe my biggest, one of my least shared business secrets is that all of my companies don't have outbound sales teams because we make content. And we know, I know that 99% of my competitors are gonna go the daughter or salesman route. They're gonna go network events. You will, in the last 10 years,

You have never seen me swanning around a network event. Content is networking. You will never catch me. I won't have a business card. I'm not going to hand it to you. I won't even be there on stage out the back. Meet people. Hello. Hello. Hello. Out the back door, straight back on to LinkedIn to start making content. People don't realize that. And it's much easier. It's a much more sustainable, more cost efficient, long term strategy. If you know how to do it.

Yeah, well, I mean, if you actually want to see me like sweat, it would be having to go network, small talk, can't like, oh, God, I want to die. And I had to do sales for so long in finance. You know, finance is just all sales. We used to at Goldman, we had like a spreadsheet that they would track every single day, how many cold calls you made when we were trying to sell a deal. And it was awful. You know, I remember one time I was like pretending like I understood golf. And so I'm like, oh, that was great. Like, how was the game yesterday? Did you?

Do you get the gall and they're like, what the fuck are you talking about? I don't know anything about it. Miserable. It's like a fishing rod versus a net, isn't it? The fishing rod can only catch one fish.

Yeah, it's true. But if I throw that fucking net out, which is making a banging video about the subject matter of the industry, I could catch 300 fish. That's exactly right. It takes the amount of time. Yeah. I mean, it's push-first pull. Yeah. Do you want to have, do you want to pull people to you? Or do you want to have to push and, you know, scream? I just am not interested in that. So that's why I think content's so powerful. The other thing about content is you find your humans. I mean, it can get,

It can get a little lonely, you know, having built a bunch of stuff and had some success. And I've had many times where over the years, the person that I've become is not the person that the people I love loved, you know. And so I had to, I had to move past that. Yeah. And it's, it sounds, you know, everybody, I will often tweet things that are things to myself. It's like notes to me. And that happens to be in a tweet form.

And one of them is like, you know, you get in a room with people who are smarter than you, and then you leave when that's no longer the case. And that's not saying that you get rid of friends, but typically they'll get rid of you. Like when you're outgrowing people, it's uncomfortable for the people that you've outgrown. They don't like to see that you are moving forward at such a fast progression, which I wish it wasn't that way. But you know, I had a girlfriend that I was friends with for fucking, you know, now I'm feeling old, but like, you know,

almost 20 years, like 18 years. And when I started getting like kind of notoriety on the internet, I didn't realize it bothered her, you know, but it did. And so, you know, at one point, she's like, you're posting about all your other friends and not me. And I was like, oh, I only post business stuff. You know, I didn't, I didn't, my parents aren't on, there's no personal stuff on there. I keep that pretty private. So I didn't realize that was important to you. And this was a rift that just like never healed.

And so I think that happens continuously, but I like content because then I find the humans who actually want you to win, who like get super inspired by that. And when you find those people, I think it's worth more than the win ends.

Amen. Amen. There is a shedding. People don't talk about this enough that when you start putting yourself out there, especially when you start becoming a quote unquote thought leader, the people that knew you before, look at you and think, the fuck does he think he is? You think you think you're Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Steve? Yeah. Like come back down here with us. Right. That must have happened to you in a big way.

Yeah, I think definitely. I almost think of my life as being in school, leaving to go to university, dropping out of university, being pretty much alone and having a chance to reinvent myself and then emerging as who I really was. Yeah. And I have no current friends that from school still, no one that I speak to from my school days. And I have no one really even from that university phase. Everybody has been since because, you know, this is what I'm into. And so it's a new person to resonate with or not resonate with.

It's, it's, I think that's actually very, very true. I think can't like, if you had friends that were super excited for you still at this point and we're curious and growing and they don't have to be monetarily growing. It could be totally different. They could be obsessed with MMA. And all they want to do is, is do do jitsu, but that's, that's their area of, of expertise.

You would respect that and value that. And you guys could stay friends. But what typically happens is when you grow a lot, it's like holding a mirror in front of somebody else and saying all the time, why aren't you doing the things that you can and the things that you could be capable of? And when people see that mirror nonstop, they start to look at you and think, I don't like what I'm looking at.

And so I've really had to come to terms with that too. What my path is is not perfect. It's not right. I mean, sometimes don't you wish you could just like actually Netflix and chill like you didn't want to achieve all the time? I certainly do. I'm addicted to achieving. I love it. I wish I could slow down sometimes. There's a big difference here actually because you said you started on this path at 30.

Yeah. So maybe the reason I didn't experience it as much as I started at 18. I hadn't built a career and I hadn't built social circles around me when I started to make content and started these businesses and started, you know, talking on the TV about business and whatever else. So I didn't have as much to shed as much of a built-up identity to shed. But I do, I meet people all the time that are, you know, 40, 50 that are thinking about

making an identity pivot that are like trapped by the identity and social circle they've built. Yeah. And the expectations that comes with that. It's a good point. Yeah. It's harder the bigger the walls you've built in terms of identity and the more established your identity is. I think that's a really good point. Yeah. I mean, I think I had to get divorced, quit a job, move a city and change a lot of things that weren't who I felt like I was.

Are you happier now? Way happier now. Yeah. But it's a miserable thing leaving another human behind. I don't wish divorce on anybody. Whenever I meet somebody who's divorced, I always say, I'm sorry and congratulations because it's kind of both. Was your decision?

It was my decision. We just wanted different lives. He was very happy in a white picket fence country club life and wanted a couple of kids and wanted to stay really locally based and wanted me to not work.

And so when I thought about my life, I was like, I want to live all around the world. And I want to build something so big that I can't sleep because I need to create it. And I want to leave a legacy that is not managing director at a private equity firm. And I'm not ready for kids. And I'm not sure I want to have kids with you.

And he really wanted me to change, and I'm not sure that we should ever try to change somebody that we're with. There's going to be thousands of people that have heard you say what you just said and think, fuck, that's me. Yeah.

I'm in that job with that partner in that city and I just know I'm unhappy. I can just feel it. There's this like sense of, you know, there's a signal inside me telling me that I shouldn't be here and I can hear it. Sometimes I, I justify it away or I try and drown it out. But I know what would you whisper to that person? What did you, what would have been words helpful words to this Cody at 36 to whisper to that Cody at 29?

Two words my dad said to me, which is exit tax. So when I left, it was expensive and both physically and emotionally. And I told my dad about it and he said there's always an exit tax to freedom.

And that stuck with me because I was like, oh, this is just a toll. It's just a payment. But once it gets paid, what's on the other side? That word freedom. And one thing that really helped me actually when I was going through this, which all this is funny because I don't ever talk about this stuff, but I got a little place. I had the big house, all this stuff, whatever before.

And I got this little tiny townhouse right afterwards. Actually, at one point, I couldn't get into my bank accounts and stuff. And so I didn't have much, but I got this tiny little townhouse that I rented. And that tiny townhouse nesting in a place that was just my own that felt really safe was one of the weirdest unlocks that I've ever had. And now think about it as the power of place. If you can just have somewhere else that you go to that is just yours,

That's my biggest recommendation for people that go through, let's say, a divorce or a really tumultuous change in partner, is there's something about like a glass of, you know, I would have like a little glass of wine or a cup of tea in this tiny little townhouse, but it was mine. It was like nobody else's. I didn't have to share it. I didn't have to compromise. I could just be me. And from there, I could sort of recreate

Again, and I've heard that now from many many many women at least who have been divorced that like that next little tiny place is really important and I and I think if I could do it again I go back and buy that place and I'd like maybe I'll buy a few and I'd give it to women like or men right after they get out of their thing because It's almost like you need to stand on your own two feet again. You forget how to So I would just remember there's an exit tax to freedom and then on the other side

You know, I like to say like, you know, I don't think you shouldn't strive for divorce, you know, I think marriage is tough and relationships are tough and there's a huge benefit to working through things with one human for life. I take that very seriously. But if you are in fact in something that is unhealthy and that you should not be in realizing that the other side

is so much better than I ever could have imagined. I mean, I would not have the life that I live right now, which is a pretty fucking great life if I had stayed on the side of easy. And now, when I told my mom, she cried for days and questioned it and was like, how are you going to do this? And now, she's the opposite. She's like, you know,

Yeah, it was such the right decision. I'm so happy for you. And we'll say things to me like you were so brave, which is weird for me to say out loud, but that you did that because most people would stay. So that's what I would say. There's definitely freedom on the other side. You said goals. Yeah, definitely.

How did you set your goals and what goals do you have? Well, one of the ways that I figured out how to get divorced was actually I set a date on my calendar. So I was like, I'm going to commit to fixing this and therapy and all of this stuff. But here's what we're going to do and here's a plan. And if we can't fix it, then this is like my drop dead date because I was such a wuss, I couldn't do it unless I put on a calendar.

So, I'm a big calendar person. I really like having a deadline when I started writing this book, my due dates in like four weeks or something like that. And it's not like I look at it frequently, but it's just out there. Yeah, it's just this thing that gets put in your psyche and somehow you can work backwards so much easier from the date.

So it sounds so silly, but most humans will say, well, in one year or three years or five years, I'm like, put it on your calendar, like whatever that actual timeline is, and then try to work backwards. And then for most goals, I believe in short term goals, 100%, maybe daily, weekly, monthly, annually, but three or five year goals, who knows? I mean, you wouldn't have thought you were doing this two years ago.

I wouldn't have thought so either. So like, I might have a really big vision for 10 years or 20 years. But as I get closer, I might realize, oh god, actually, nope, that's not what I want. So allowing yourself that freedom to not want to be the hot, sexy, rich millionaire with Bentley's and instead say, oh no, what I actually want to do is I want to talk about what I want to talk about with whom I want to talk about owning companies I want to and having no master. That's what rich looks like for me.

And if you had stuck with your original goals, that wouldn't have been the case. You got team members. Yeah. Employees. Yeah. Some of them are here listening, Brian.

And does it not feel like it's a bit of a contradictory message in some ways where you're trying to get them to stay? But part of their job is to get produced content with you, to get other people to leave their jobs. Yeah. So I have a really important differentiator between equity and ownership in a business and skin in the game. I do not think everybody wants to be a founder of a business. I don't think everybody wants to be an outright owner of a business. I think everybody should have ownership.

Always. And so the way that looks in our business is basically every single person who works from me, even all the way down to my admin, gets skin in the game. So that means that if they do X and Y and Z, they see how they can make more money directly. If they come onto my team, they can all source us deals and get a percentage of the carry, which means equity in the underlying companies. I know you know that, but for anybody listening.

Um, everybody on my teams always has had that. And then, you know, the, the other members of my team and businesses before, like my last, uh, number two, I then left the business to her. She became the CEO of the business. So she has ownership of the business. I don't like, I should be really careful about the fact that if anybody on my team, and they already know this, we just sent a mention this yesterday, somebody asked for like a testimonial from me about work that they had done.

But their work wasn't very good. So I wasn't going to give them a testimonial. And I said to the team, any one of our high performers, if you ever want to leave this company and you're great at this company, one, of course, I'll open every door for you and I'll write any testimonial or whatever you need. And in fact, if you want to start your own business, I hope I'm the first phone call because I would like to invest in you. I want to be that guy that saw that in you.

No doubt every single time, but that's not for every human. Some humans want to be in a business like my number two, my CMO. Chris, he doesn't want to run a business himself, but he does want ownership. So he has skin in the game from both a revenue perspective and from a followership perspective, same with my head of content, same with Christian and our AdSense and our YouTube channel. So I think it's really important that you make sure when you continue to work harder, you make more, no matter what.

So many people have philosophies towards money. You know, people will say, oh, you got to save more than you spend. You've got to have the Starbucks coffee. That's how you'll get rich. What is your overarching philosophy to building wealth and money? Do you have something like a philosophy, a mantra?

Well, first, I think you should have the fucking coffee. I think that is terrible advice. So I like Dave Ramsey. I get where he's going with it. But I think you cannot save your way to wealth. You can only earn your way to wealth. But my mantra overall is that I think every human on the planet should understand the language of money, which is finance. And if you understand the language, then you can speak it fluently. And when you can speak it fluently, you can become an expert. And an expertise leads to a bunch of cash.

So, everything we do is to try to normalize deal making or the language of finance. We're like the duo lingo to finance on the internet. We have a goal if we want to create 100,000 small business owners and 1 million financially free people. We track how many people tell us they bought a business and how much revenue and profit they earned.

And so my goal is before we're done with this, however long that's going to be, I want to hit those two goals. And I think we'll hit them in the next five years, maybe seven. But that is the gold star for me. That and my new mantra, which you might appreciate, which is my 2023 mantra is like no more B players. No more gold.

Because that was my twenty twenty one one term. I think I'll be my twenty twenty four mantra. Have you seen those stats where it shows about sitting next to be so good. My friend Vanessa van Edwards showed this to me. So there's a study done across

Hundreds of individuals might be hundreds of companies. It's a big study. Essentially, it shows if you sit next to a high performer, so if you have your team sitting next to a high performer, you do, you will outperform by 15%. So a high performer just in your proximity will increase your performance by 15%. If you sit next to a low performer, under performer, it will decrease your productivity by 30%.

So every B player you bring on board is not just decreasing their productivity by 30%. It is that energy transfer, which is that everybody around them becomes a little bit less productive. And I think one of the reasons people want to be owners of companies is because they feel that people want to stay at companies where there's a bunch of winners. That's why I liked Goldman. I was like,

These guys are so smart. I'm learning so much. I want to keep going. When I was at Vanguard, I was like, oh my God, these schleps are just schlepping around the office not doing anything. I'm not learning anything. And they're by design sort of pulling you back and down. And so I keep that number on notepad next to my computer for me to one, not be the underperformer and two,

It's not just about getting rid of underperformers for you as a CEO. It's not good to do to your team. We've definitely have had them in varying companies of mine, but we push relentlessly to either make people better or help them find the thing that they can be an a performer at. Do you know who's very sticky in companies?

Who? B players. Oh, God, I know. C players will get fired. B players will hang around. That's exactly right. And A players will probably leave. Yeah. And A players will leave if you keep B and C players. They're gone. They're not interested. B players will hang and they will think that you owe them more is what I found. Yes.

They are the ones that ask for the most, they're the most entitled and they're the most dangerous in a company. It's like a cancer that you need to cut before it spreads, which sounds like, okay, really? But it's actually true because your employees are choosing to spend their life and their time with you. And so every B player that you associate next to them is actually decreasing their time. And that's not a fair thing to do to somebody in a company. It doesn't make firing people easier. It's never easy. It's never easy.

But it's important. Yeah. What's the most important thing you think we haven't talked about? You know, we talked to the start of this conversation about who's listening and you gave me the three personas and we talked about that person that's maybe in that job and they're trying to find their way out. What is the most important thing for that person that we haven't made?

Maybe just one of my team members was saying this on the way over. They're big fans of yours. They're listening to all your stuff. Are the A players and looking for jobs? Yeah. Actually, one of them lives here and is freelance. So he can work for you. If you touch my other one, I have to go be over. Which one's the A player? They're both A players. No, we're pretty good. I definitely wouldn't travel around with B players. No chance.

And he said something that I thought was really good, which was, he was listening to your podcast and he liked one in particular, where you talked about all the failings of people who are successful. And so the only thing that we haven't talked about is the fact that

You know, we say all this stuff, like, don't keep players around. Get rid of them. You know, do this. Get better. And on the flip side of that, like, there are many mornings where I'm up at eight or nine and not five in the morning. And there are many mornings where I'm stuck in a TikTok, you know, Instagram, K-hole, and I'm not doing the thing that I'm supposed to be doing.

And I think normalizing the fact that people who have achieved things also are awful fuck up. Don't do the right thing every single day is important to me because sometimes I get on these and I'm like, I don't want people to perceive that I'm on some high horse that's incredibly capable and productive. That's not always the case at all. I have many periods where I have not done the right thing where I've messed up on business deals where I am

the worst in the room. And I think that's okay. It's natural, we're human, we're going to mess up. So just making sure people know that, listening, you don't have to be perfect to do any of this. And in fact, I'm sure you would agree, we're both so flawed that if I can figure this stuff out, I think any working John can figure this stuff out too. I'm no smarter than anybody else. I went to a party school, I didn't go to Harvard.

probably did more beer bongs than I did, you know, honors classes in college, and I still figured it out. And it took me until I was, you know, 29 or 30, but that's still pretty young. So we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest. I love this question. They said, when was the moment you were most afraid if they don't want to answer it? Who's your favorite member of one direction?

great but you don't tell them who the person was that's fine. I couldn't even name that so I'm gonna have to answer the question when was I most afraid. Actually they are a comedian I'm gonna give it away. Okay so when was I last most afraid or when was I most afraid ever? This is sort of silly but

I hiked a mountain called Mount Baker, and it is a technical climb, so you use ice axes and crampons, and it's freezing. And I didn't really know what I was getting into, and I don't like the cold, and I don't like heights, and I don't like camping. And so three days, hiking in a glacial mountain that's very high, it was probably not my best idea.

But I, but I did it and, um, I hated it. Like for three days, I was with all these other women and they kind of liked it. And I, to be fair, I like kind of thought I was tougher than them, you know, and they know this so they can hear it. But, you know, a lot of them, I have this big career. I, I come off as tough. I can, you know, get out there and go do it. And then here I was on this mountain. I'm fucking miserable.

I'm scared of the heights that I'm going to fall off and tumble to my death. I'm freezing. I have to sleep on top of a glacier. I can't sleep. You're carrying your feces in a bag for three days, which is another fun little side note. We get up on the second day. It's so vertical that you have to be roped in to each other on the climb.

And I'm at the end of it, too, which is awful. So I all like, you know, I'm the one that sees behind us the guides in front. There's like six of us or four of us on a rope or something like that. And we get up after climbing for two days. I'm so miserable and mad that I said yes to this. And we're on this crater because there's a volcanic crater before we climb up what's called the wall, which is an ice wall before you get to the top.

where you have to step like this with your ice axe to get up the wall. And I'm like, I almost want to cry. I can't think of anything I want to do less than this. And everybody's preparing to go up. And I'm just like,

I don't think I'm going to, I'm not going to go up anymore. And I had all these ideas in my head, like, but if you don't summit, like, then you're not tough and you got to get up there because these other women are going to do it and then you're going to feel bad and whatever. And as I sat there, I was just like, what am I trying to prove? Like, I'm pretty happy. Life's good.

I don't have on my bucket list that I want to summit Mount Baker. I just kind of said yes to this trip. And it wasn't even the heights that was so scary or the cold. It was like, am I like a failure by not doing this tough thing that everybody else is going to do? Am I going to be the one person that says like, I'm out. I'm going down. I'm tapping out. I'm done. And I like have this whole dialogue with myself.

And then I told the guide and there were a few of them. I was like, yeah, the thing is, I'm going to go back down. I'm going to chill at base camp. I'm not going to summit. And my girlfriends came over and they were like, let's talk about this. Let's get motivational. And I'm like, no, totally fine. I just realized up here that most of my life, I've been trying to like please a bunch of people to goals I don't care about with things I don't really want in order to achieve some ridiculous thing. And like, I don't want to climb up there. I might be pissed if I fall and break my neck doing this thing I don't even want to do.

And so I tell the guide, he's like, cool. I've never run faster down the side of a mountain. I get down to the bottom. I'm happy as a fucking clam. At that point, I realize I have altitude sickness. So I'm like tripping balls in the tent, which is really good that I realize that. Cause then when I was climbing the wall, I might've gotten dizzy and that wouldn't have been good. And I didn't realize when you got altitude sickness, it's hallucinogenic. So the tent's like moving as I'm laying in it, but I'm great. Cause I'm back in the tent on the second peak area.

And then on the way down, like two other women blew out their knees. It was like a six hour evolution. And I just remember thinking, fuck, like, what if I had done that thing I was so scared of just because everybody else told me that I should have done it. And I felt like it took more courage for me to not do the thing than do the thing. So many people are right now climbing a mountain where they don't even care about seeing the view. Right. You know?

So yeah, I think sometimes, you know, they say everything you want is on the other side of fear. And it's like, if the thing that you want is the thing on the other side of fear, it's not every fear we have to charge into. And so I guess choose your mountain wisely, right? Amen. Thank you, Cody. Thank you for your time, your wisdom and your entertaining captivating storytelling and

and insights. It's really, really valuable to our audience. There's not many people like you out there, so it's so wonderful to get to speak to someone. And the mission that you're on is such an important one. I love it for so many reasons. I love it because you glamorize the unglamorous. And I often think in so many facets of our life, the easiest way is in fact the boring way. It's the way that isn't going to get the likes and the applause on Instagram. And there's not a market for that, right? There's a market for the quick, shiny,

six pack abs in three minutes. All that stuff. There's a market for that. All the NFTs, the cryptos, the get rich quick schemes. You present the important counter narrative and you do it as an incredibly powerful, honest, willing to be vulnerable woman in business. And we need more of that because

Business and the creator world, the entrepreneurship community is heavily dominated by men right now. And that is not a bridge that many people can relate to, those stories and where they've come from and the battles that they face. So you present the counter narrative, and it's a very important one. So I also bet on you, like our mutual friend does in a big way, and I can't wait to see your evolution as you climb that worthy mountain over the next couple of years. Well, thank you for having me. This was a pleasure, totally different podcasts. I can see why so many people listened to you. So thank you for having me today.

You're very kind.