How to Become a Top Performer (ft. Codie Sanchez)

In 1935, the acclaimed historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel set about one of the most auspicious undertakings in the history of, well, history. They set out to write a series of books telling the complete story of human civilization, from ancient Egypt all the way up to modern Europe. The project would take them 40 years, and in the end, their 11-volume series would span over 13,000 pages. Now, towards the end of this project, the couple wrote a similar, yet much smaller book. The 100-page book was called The Lessons of History, and it chronicled the most interesting patterns and takeaways that they had learned from spending their entire lives studying the span of human civilization. Now, that book is a treasure trove of insights into humanity and the natural tendencies of human societies. And one of those takeaways has stuck with me my entire life. The Durants said something like this. As technology advances, it promises greater equality, but always creates greater inequality. And this is because it disproportionately rewards people of higher skill and effort. Basically, the highest performers leverage the benefits of new technology before everyone else, gaining most of the benefits. This has been true throughout the millennia, on every continent, in every culture, from the invention of the wheel all the way to the microprocessor. Today, we live in another age of insane technological advancement, and, as always, the highly skilled and most driven are being disproportionately emotionally rewarded. But on top of everything else, I'd argue we also live in an age of lowered expectations. Between quiet quitting, the burnout epidemic, work-life balance, the record low employment participation, grade inflation in schools, and the lack of standardized testing, the trend throughout society and pop culture is to work less, try less, push yourself less, and go ahead, take that mental health day, blow a bunch of money at the spa. I mean, it's self-care, right? Ah, go on, you deserve it. Between technological advancement and lower expectations, we live in one of the best times in history to be a high performer. You have more to gain and less competition to gain it than ever before. Now, today's guest, Codie Sanchez, is a high performer. She started her career as an award-winning journalist covering the drug cartels along the Mexican border. Horrified by what she saw, she realized that nothing was going to change until large amounts of money got involved. So she went into finance, climbed the ranks of the banks, and got access to some of the most powerful people in the world. But it turned out they didn't give a shit, and large institutions kind of suck. So then she decided she would go straight to the people, starting a newsletter, later a social media following, and finally a podcast. Since then, she's amassed millions of followers and now educates people on the basics of finance, business operations, investing, and how to buy and run what she calls boring businesses. Codie herself owns at least part of 40 businesses. Most of them are boring businesses, stuff like car washes and laundromats. Within these businesses, she looks for and pushes people to become high performers because she understands this is the best time alive if you are willing to be a high performer. In this episode, Codie and I talk about why money in business is the international language and why we all need to know how to speak it, how to enjoy the struggle of learning something new, and why being pushed by others is so important, why being good at something anything and feeling useful is a core component of human happiness and why we are no longer being pushed or celebrated for hard work. We also talk about how the definitions of hard work and work-life balance has changed and how that has repercussions in the work world. And finally, we talk about why there are not more women business leaders and why she thinks we're approaching the gender question entirely incorrectly. But before we begin, if you like the show, please follow, please subscribe, please leave a review. That way we can tell the world that I'm a high performer and my ego will be satiated just for another week. Okay, onward. This is The Conversation with Codie Sanchez. The podcast that's saving the world one fewer fuck at a time. It's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck Podcast with your host, Mark Manson. So you're most well known for promoting boring businesses.

Yeah.

Contrarian thinking. I'm curious, why did you start writing?

Because the world shut down in 2020. So at the time I was supposed to be doing a road show going out and investing in different companies and raising capital for our fund. And I couldn't do it 'cause, you know, they told me to stay in my house and shut my mouth. And so I did and I got really bored. And because of that, I started writing a little newsletter and I thought that little newsletter would be fun, like a fun side project. And then it took on a life of its own. And I really started obsessing about this idea that it could really be a business. And I started writing Contrarian Thinking, the newsletter, with this idea that the world was losing its mind. The ability to question something I think is like the most central part of being a human. And so that bothered me. And I started writing about it from that perspective. And then I realized everybody actually thinks that they think quite well. And so I was like, well, that's not gonna work. People don't actually want better frameworks for thinking because they think they're by and large right. And so I said, well, what does everybody want? And everybody doesn't want want money. Just, I mean, you know this, it's like everybody wants to be loved, right? They want to be respected, they want money, they want health to be sexy, or is that part of love?

It was Ben Franklin had 3 categories.

Yeah, what are they?

The health, wealth, and love.

Health, wealth, and love. And I know a lot about money just from my industry stolen fragments. And so I said, I think the Trojan horse to thinking might be to get people caring about money because money typically comes with some form of ownership. Like, you're not going to just get money for nothing. Unless you have a trust fund.

So this actually, this is actually an interesting issue that shows up in a lot of psychology, sociology, economic research, because you can go out and survey people saying like, what do you think about X? And people will come back and say, oh, we love X. But if you say, what do you spend your money on? They're like, oh no, no, no, we don't spend our money on it. You know, we spend our money over here on this. And it's called revealed preferences. And it's actually a huge problem in psychology because people don't behave the way they tell you. Like, they, they will say one thing and go do another. And so a lot of people believe, and I agree, that the way to actually see what people value and care about is to see what they're willing to spend money on or where they're willing to invest, uh, their dollars.

I think you're right. Well, and also, I don't think it's that they don't, it's that we don't actually do the things we even think we do. Oh, for sure.

We're lying to ourselves.

Oh, even if we don't realize it, I think humans are incredible self-rationalizing machines with the ability to actually believe our own bullshit. And so, I joke with this about my husband all the time. It's like, have you ever gotten in a fight with your wife? Never, I'm sure. But let's say that you had. Then I imagine at some point you're like, you said X. And she's like, no, no, no, I said Y. And you both are living in an experience in which you think you're 1,000% correct. And yet neither of you are probably crazy, otherwise you wouldn't have stayed married for so long. And so I always laugh with him. I'm like, I never liked when the hippies said things like, well, this was my lived experience, except that I'm like, I think it's true.

My truth, yeah.

It might be more real than the truth.

There is no my truth. There is the truth.

Yeah, and the problem is that we humans aren't very good at finding it.

Yeah, for sure. What do you give a fuck about that most people don't?

I have a burning need for feeling like at the end of the day, if I die, I've done enough. There's this Emma Bombbeck quote The quote is basically that when I stand before God at the end of my days, I will have not one drop of talent left. I will have given you everything that I had. And I always liked that idea of like at the end of the day, you're just like wrinkled and wringed out and there's nothing left. Yeah.

You know?

And so maybe if there's nothing after this, at least you can leave it all on the field. And so that's what drives me and what I actually really care about. And sometimes I think, man, wouldn't the world be so interesting if more people thought that way? If they were like, What if I just reached inside and tried to pull out every single thing inside of me that could deliver some value to the world? And I think it's really sad that instead of doing that, we distract ourselves so much and we spend so much time living other people's lives. And if you were on a team at any of my companies, that's what I talk about all the time. I'm like, there is such a unique honor in being around a bunch of other people who want to achieve something great because it's totally contagious. And we were talking about this today, and I forget what the effect is. I can never remember the name, but it's something like chameleon but Pygmalion. Might be the Pygmalion effect. Wasn't that it, Tanner? We can never decide how to pronounce the name.

We'll look it up. Yeah, we'll put it on screen.

Codie Sanchez, Georgetown grad, can't pronounce anything. But moral of the story is basically that you rise to the level of the highest standards placed on you, often.

Yes.

And so How sad that we're placing all of these low standards and low abilities on people. We think that that's doing them a solid. Like, you don't have to achieve much. You should quiet quit. You need work-life balance. And it's like, actually, in fact, you probably need the opposite of that. And so I sit up some nights talking with my husband about that. And that is what makes me saddest about the world and that I care about it. Maybe lots of people don't.

Do you see any drawbacks of that?

I think the drawback would be if I had unhealthy habits that couldn't let me have enjoyment in life. Like, if I wasn't also healthy and I didn't have a great relationship with my husband and friends and family, you could take that to the pure extreme for sure. But I actually think that's pretty rare. Yeah, I think it's very, very rare that somebody finds something that they're obsessed with doing and then does it to the point of personal detriment. What I found instead is if you do things to personal detriment, it's usually ego, you know? Yeah, it's like, I just want a billion dollars and so I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get there, as opposed to like, what am I capable of and can I keep squeezing it out?

I find that a lot of people have a lot of motivation and drive. They just don't know where to point it.

Yeah.

They feel like they don't know what's worth pursuing. And I think this is particularly an issue with our generation and Gen Z with all the distractions and the devices and everything. Like there's so much noise that it's hard to know what is actually valuable. Hell, it's hard to know what's actually true to a certain extent. And so I, sympathize. I mean, I'm very much the same way. There's a Bukowski quote where he's like, I want to slide in the home plate like broken, burned, destroyed.

You know, it's a great quote. I think it might be Hemingway.

Was it Hemingway? It's one of those, one of those old alcoholics.

Yeah, both fucking great. Bukowski was a second level type of alcoholic. Have you ever listened to his weird one-off, uh, poem readings on Spotify? Like caution to the internet before you do it. They're wild.

Dude, he would verbally abuse his audience.

I've never heard anything like it. I really, I read some of his favorites, like the poem, "So You Want to Be a Writer?" I love that Bukowski poem. But then I went down a rabbit hole and was like, "Huh, I don't know if I should tell people I like this guy." He's a dark guy.

Coming back to that drive to push yourself to get the home plate, having given everything, what does that look like for you? What are those missions or causes in your life?

Well, it does, I'm sure, come from a place of some ego that I think I could actually affect the outcome of things that exist in the world, which I'm not entirely sure on, but it'd be fun to try.

Sure.

But first and foremost, the whole reason we call the company Contrarian Thinking, because it's awful to spell, it's way too many vowels, like it's a terrible name, is actually because I sort of believed in this mission. Like, how can we get people to question everything, including me, including all of us? I started off as a journalist a million years ago along the US-Mexico border, and I was covering human trafficking and drug smuggling and saw a lot of dark things. And I also saw what happened when we don't have a group of humans questioning things on all sides. And so one of my big missions is, can we try to just not even tell people what to think or how to think, but just get them thinking? And that is a huge mission for me. And the second thing that I've been obsessed on lately, because we'd like to have kids sometime in the near future, is what are we leaving for them? You know, I'm sure you and I will be fine and maybe even our kids will be too. But I look at what's out there right now for like young women and young men. I don't have the lived men experience, but it's like, who's the role model here? You know, are you nip-tucking your way to 13 different body styles à la the Kardashians? You know, are you listening to people who have sex-specific podcasts and thinking that that's going to turn out well for decades? So my newest phenomenon is I think I'm going to host a little event here in Austin, kind of trying to figure out what is this generation dealing with, because we got damn lucky. We didn't have iPhones and social media like they did when we were in formative years. And I don't think anybody can say it's not fucking people up immensely. And we have to push back on it. And the only way to push back on it might be social media, which is wild to think about.

What was your biggest lesson from covering the human trafficking at the border?

That money is the ultimate equalizer. That it's not actually, you know, my last name is Sanchez, the women who were being brutalized last name were often Sanchez or Juarez or things very close to that. And it wasn't that I was American and they were Mexican. It was just I had resources, like middle-class American, nothing crazy resources. Yeah. But I had it. And that meant that I would never go into a shallow grave with no headstone on it.

And did that influence your decision to go into finance?

Yep. Otherwise, I would have stayed in journalism. I was very set on— I went to the Walter Cronkite School for Journalism at ASU because it was one of the top schools. When I covered one particular story about elderly members of society getting left along the US-Mexico border 'cause they couldn't cross with their family. You know, they were getting caught, right? And their younger members weren't. And so, and they lived in these hovels, like the senior care centers along the border were atrocious. And we covered one, and I remember vividly, her name was Carmelita, and she wore this little beanie, and she lived on this like cot, couldn't really get up. I mean, no doors or screens on the windows, just an awful place. And she lost her family like 10 years ago. She'd been there forever. She's kind of starting to lose her wits about her. And I wrote a story about her and it got a bunch of press. And then I went back to give her the awards and some of the cash and this like teddy bear and whatever. And she was like, "This is amazing. Now that America knows, you guys are gonna help, right? You're gonna fix it." And I was like a 21-year-old idiot. And so I had no idea what to say to her. And so that, I couldn't rectify that. And it was like the only thing that would've actually helped her wasn't awareness, it was cash. And, you know, I didn't have it, and she was never going to have that in her lifetime, and she's since passed. So I think that moment stuck with me.

So I, I feel like I'm connecting the dots now. You know, it's this— money's the great equalizer, go into finance. Oh wait, Goldman Sachs doesn't give a shit about poor Mexicans at the border.

A lot of direct correlation, really.

Uh, let's go straight to the people.

Yeah.

Is that, is that the, the path?

Yeah, I think I needed to understand. I believe the quote, I think it's like, it might be Jordan Peterson where he's like, you know, go get money before you change the world. And I think that's right because money is literally the international language that we all speak. And if you wanna make a real difference, it's gonna be very hard for you to do it counter to somebody who has resources more than you to the tune of 100, 200, you know, 3,000x. And so that was my thought. I was like, well, I'm gonna go figure out money because if I have enough of it, then I can assert my will on the world. And I think that's what money allows you to do.. It's just an ability for you to push back when somebody pushes on you or vice versa. So I wanted to climb up the rings of corporate finance to understand that. And I'm not naturally math inclined. I was a little peon when I was at Goldman. It wasn't like I was some big, I didn't go that far there. I was there for like less than 2 years, but I got to see a lot behind the scenes, which eventually led me to believe that actually none of that stuff is that hard.

Yeah.

It's that they create a barrier and a totally different language in order for you and I to not be able to participate. And because of that, We give them all of our money. They take a percentage of it for managing it. And the cycle continues of like the few owning everything increasingly. And so I don't think anybody is inherently evil there at all. I just think perverse incentives lead to perversity.

Those institutions were also built at a time where education wasn't easily available, right? Like you needed middlemen and you needed like a big conglomerate to to manage everything for you and of course siphon off some for themselves.

Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, but, but I do think you have to at some point, you know, if you can't take control of your financial ownership and you don't actually speak the language of money and you don't understand how it works, how do you ever expect to get rich? And I'm like, that's like when people go on YouTube and they're like, dropshipping, you know, make me $100,000 in a month. I'm like, it's the totally wrong question. Yeah. You know, instead you have to actually go understand the whole financial landscape and what all your options are and become super highly skilled in the thing that seems easiest to you but is harder to other people. And then go see who will pay you the most for the skills. And after they have paid you a certain amount of money, see if you understand enough to go recreate the skills for yourself somewhere else or invest the money that you've now learned how to make.

Yeah, it's funny because the first, say, 4 years of my career were so scrappy and hard. I distinctly remember, actually, I used to work in— I— my ex-girlfriend supported me. We had this tiny, like, 2-bedroom apartment with a roommate, and I would work in bed all day. And there were times where I'd fall asleep with my laptop, like, on my stomach, and then I'd wake up in the middle of the night and just, like, just keep going. But I remember, you know, having conversations with her, and I was completely broke. I was always scrounging to, like, give her money for rent and buy a burger. You know, it was really rough. But I remember telling her, I'm like, I like this. Like, I would rather— so fun fact, you and I both worked at State Street.

Um, really? In Boston?

Yeah.

Oh, that was a weird place, huh?

Oh, I hated it. Yeah, I lasted a month. I was like, I gotta get out of here. But yeah, I mean, I, I had done this like short stint in the corporate world, absolutely hated my life, and then I was broke for months and months and months. And I was like, I like this. I really like this. And it's funny because after Subtle Art came out and blew up and, you know, all this stuff happened, there was a dissatisfaction that wasn't there before. And it was really weird because I didn't feel free to express that. You know, it's like, this is objectively, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. So I'm not really allowed to be dissatisfied. And it took me years to figure out that I like the scrappiness. Like, I like doing YouTube and not knowing what I'm doing. I like fucking up edits and videos. I like stressing over this podcast and being like, do we have the right format? Is this really like, is the branding right? Could we change something? Like, I like that. I like feeling like I'm doing something wrong. And it took me a long time to accept that. A long time. I think if you asked young Mark, he would say, he'd say, yeah, I like this, but it's only because I think it's gonna pay off in the future. I'm gonna get successful and all this stuff. Whereas old Wisemark understands it. It's just how I'm wired. Like, I need to feel like an underdog. It's where I operate optimally.

Interesting. That's actually a little bit of a superpower, I think. And realizing it, because everybody always says, you know, it's not the destination, it's the journey.

Sure.

But everybody focuses on the destination. So if you realize that you're wired to actually enjoy the journey, fucking Buddha over here with curly hair, you know. But also, I think that's something a lot a lot of us aspire to. Like I find myself 1,000% falling into the, ugh, you know, this video only got that. And then I have to pull myself back and go, what is wrong with you? You know, you are a woman in your 30s, like happily married, worrying about TikTok views. I don't actually worry about TikTok, but YouTube, which is a much higher brow, you know. Yeah, right. But I still find myself falling into that sort of hedonic treadmill for sure.

I do too, but I realized I like it.

Yeah. Well, I do. Yeah, I do too.

I like it. Like, I like being like, oh, that video bombed. Why? Let's figure out why.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, let's figure out why. Let's get better.

Yeah.

And have you seen "The Last Dance," the documentary about Michael Jordan?

Yeah.

So, you know, he has this almost like psychopathic ability to like take things personally. But, you know, one of the things they talk about is like he would irrationally interpret things as like personal slights to motivate himself. I think I have a little bit of that. It's not a personal thing. It's not like, you know, oh, Codie said this thing and like I took that personally. You know, it's not like that, but it's, you know, it's like we'll work on a piece of content and it'll do well, but it won't do as well as I hoped or it won't do well as like this other guy's video. And I'm like, fuck that shit. We're gonna do better. You know, like—

100%.

And the conventional wisdom would be like, ah, don't compare yourself. Like be happy as you are. It's like, no, I like that. It feels good. I don't get swept up in it. I don't attach my ego to it. It's a game, and it's like my favorite game to play.

I don't know where the world went where we decided that we couldn't have fun doing the thing that we wanted to do for a living. Yeah, like, when did that narrative even start? I think that is such a bizarre idea.

Fun struggling.

Yeah, exactly.

I think that's it. That's it. It's like this, this kind of obsession of removing struggle and challenge from people without realizing that it's like, it's, it's the appropriate struggle or challenge that like makes you feel most alive.

Oh, it's so true. We were looking at a graph today that was showing from the— I mean, World Economic Forum, but anyway, the numbers were basically showing, uh, happiness indicators for people who are employed and choose to be employed. Yeah. Employed but don't choose to be like, wouldn't choose to be employed.

Right.

Then unemployed by choice, and then unemployed not by choice. And no No surprise, the two groups that are least happy are the two unemployed groups, even if they were there by choice. And so, you know, one study doesn't a truth make, but I thought that was so obvious and yet not common sense at all.

Schwarzenegger just came out with a book called "Be Useful," and it actually, it was the thing that his father told him throughout his life. And I just, I remember I saw that, I was like, there's so much wisdom in that. And it's also coming from all like the psych research that I've done. In psychology, they call it like self-efficacy, self-efficacy, internal locus of control. Like there's a bunch of different terms of it, but it's basically just like people who feel like they're capable of something. Like you are doing something, you are able to change your environment in a way that is creating value in some way. And it's such a key component of our happiness and well-being. It can be as simple as I don't know, being a garbage man or whatever, but it makes sense to me that employment is so tied to it.

Yeah. Have you read Arthur Brooks' new book with Oprah?

I have not.

So I was at a little dinner with Arthur last week, and I've been a fan of his for just years. And it's very seldom do you get somebody who could both be at the head of a conservative Republican movement and best friends with the Dalai Lama and Oprah. Those triangles don't mesh. And yet if you've ever met the guy, it makes all the sense in the world. And so anyway, he was talking last week about how the 3 things that we're missing for this generation, or the 3 things that lead to happiness in his research that he's done at Harvard, are basically friends, family, faith, and then a 4th, which is work that serves people in some ways. And I thought that was so interesting. He's like, so why are young people unhappy these days? We have 30% of the youth who thinks that nobody actually knows them. So we have less true friendships than ever. We have the family nuclear unit sort of under attack with more people having, not even for any reason that they don't like their family, but left the city or state in which their family lives. And then less people determining to have a family than ever. And then we have obviously a crisis of faith, lowest traditional secular religious institutions and following of them in decades. And now this sort of idea that you shouldn't actually spend that much time at work, that you need work-life balance, that work is just a means to an end, not an end of itself. And so I thought that was fascinating. I'm like, actually, that makes all the sense in the world why we're more anxious, depressed, unhappy.

This is one of those stats that people just don't believe because it kind of goes against their intuition. But if you look you look at the average hours worked by the American people, it's the lowest it's been in a century.

Is it really?

Yeah, it's— people work less today than ever before. I think it doesn't feel that way for two reasons. One is commutes are longer than ever, and two, because of devices and email and everything, people are still checking email at home, they're getting on email before bed, they're like checking Slack after dinner, so they don't feel like they're checking out, but if you actually look at how many hours are being technically on the clock, it's the lowest it's ever been.

That's fascinating, but actually tracks. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's funny at one of the companies, one of the managers came to me the other day and was like, you know, I'm concerned about delegating this 'cause I feel like a lot of the team is overworked. And I'm like, pause, why? And he's like, well, you know, I think they have a lot going on. There's a lot of work. I'm like, let's categorize 'cause words are important. Words mean things.

Sure.

Like definitions, it seems like we've forgotten definitions for words. And so then we get confused. So I'm like, okay, I'm like, "What do you mean they're overworked?" He's like, "Well, they seem like they have a lot going on and they're overwhelmed." I'm like, "Is anybody in the office before 8:00 AM or after 6:00? When was the last time you saw that?" He's like, "Well, not exactly, but they're working from here." I'm like, "Let's look at vacation days taken." Oh, it's healthy 2 to 4 weeks on average from people. I'm like, "Let's work at work. Are we putting more on individuals than we ever have before, or do we actually have more people spread out?" And by the end of it, he was like, "Oh, I guess." By all categorical measures, there is not this problem. I'm thoughtful about that lately. Like not even letting your team say the words, "I'm overwhelmed." It's like, "Have you properly prioritized?" Like, and how do we work through that as opposed to labeling yourself as an emotional state?

Yeah, so this is, I see this topic is coming up a lot more. So in psychology, it's called the prevalence inflation effect. Which, and it's particularly important in relation to mental health. So there are a couple new studies that just came out in the last year. The big one that happened was in Australia. They took 1,000 teens, they gave them something called DBT therapy, which basically teaches you a bunch of good psychological concepts, helps you deal with struggles, anxieties, et cetera. And then they took 1,000 teens and just let them, you know, control group, let them be be whatever. The teens that were exposed to the DBT, which is a well-studied protocol, like it's got decades and decades of data behind that it helps people, the teens that were exposed to the DBT actually turned up with worse mental health afterwards. And the theory is that, you know, it's like your knee hurts, so you like Google knee pain, and it's like, oh my God, I have cancer. Like you start reading stuff, you're like, I have that. Oh my God, I have that. Oh Jesus, no, I have that. The human mind has this tendency of like whatever you're exposed to, you relate it to yourself. And the theory is that the more we tell young people, "Oh, you're struggling with anxiety. Oh, you have self-worth issues. Oh, you're neurodivergent. You're all these things," they start looking for experiences that justify that definition of themselves, which it's just naturally human, right? But then once you identify with that, once you start telling yourself, "Oh, I am an anxious person," or, "I do have low self-worth," your experience matches to justify that belief. Like, you start looking for experiences to continue to justify that self-definition. So it actually backfires. There's almost like such a thing as too much awareness of mental health. There's like a threat, there's like a Goldilocks zone of you want to be aware enough to not just be oblivious to your problems, but you also don't want to dwell on your problems so that you don't accidentally look for mental health issues without realizing it.

That makes so much sense. Yeah, I don't have any of the psychological underpinnings for it, but you can see it.

I imagine the work-life balance thing makes sense to me because it is such a hot topic. It's everywhere. There's on social media, there's stuff going viral all the time of people being like, "I'm overworked," and blah, blah, blah. Yet you go to the data and it's like average work hours are at worst, they're the same, if not lower than they used to be.

Well, you know what the good part about all of this is? If you are a performer, there is no better time in history, I think, than right now to perform because the bar is set so incredibly low.

Yeah.

I mean, if you say you're gonna do a thing, you do the thing. If you ask for feedback when you mess up and then change according to said feedback and then continue to try to learn more so that you can succeed, you're the top of the food chain. I saw the stat the other day that there's never been more companies created than since 2020 on a total basis, but also per population basis. So we've had this massive inflation in the number of companies created. Simultaneously, it's never been harder to create a profitable business, probably because proliferation of the internet, right? There's so much less of a moat to starting a business, but also because I think we We're starting to lose that ability to be resilient, to keep going through a really difficult time and succeed despite the odds. But if you're like a hard charger out there wanting things out of life, if you can limit distractions and you can continue to get a little bit better continuously and execute, man, you are ahead of the curve.

For sure. Why aren't there more women like you? You in the business world out there, I guess, being a role model, but also just being there. I mean, like, I mean, you worked at Goldman Sachs. I imagine there were not a whole lot of women there.

Yeah.

Um, in the creator space, especially in the make money kind of business advice space, you're the only woman that I'm aware of. Why is that, do you think?

Something I'd like to change. Yeah. I mean, like, 65% of our audience is men.. And I'm agnostic. I don't care what you got between your legs. I hope if you're a good person, you make more money. That's awesome. I don't know. I do know that there's this weird phenomenon that a lot of the women that I see that are talking about business are talking about touchy-feely nonsense. It's like manifest your way to your first million, which I don't know, maybe. Never worked for me. I don't know.

If only it were that easy.

It's just not great. Maybe we're at the beginning of it. There was that whole movement there for a while, which was sort of like the girl boss movement, which like Sophia Amorosa sort of—

That's true, yes.

Like commercialized. But I think what happened with that is it became like, why is it called girl boss? Like, why does it matter what your sex is? And so I think almost women, we shot ourselves in the foot because we made it about the fact that we were women. You don't hear, you're not like, Mark Moss, dude, You know, you're just like, "No, I'm Mark." I think the biggest issue that I keep coming back to is that women just need to be talking about how to win and succeed no matter what, as opposed to that we are female. Because I think that actually de-credentializes us. And I think it makes men shut down too. I don't think men want to hear about why you won because you were a female or didn't win because you were— we're a little tired of that narrative.

Well, it also shuts us out.

Out.

Like, I remember my wife was a member of a— there was a group in New York that was like for like female business owners. Yeah. And she joined it and she was really excited about it, and it fell into that trap a little bit where every time she went to an event there, it was all about women's empowerment and equality and, you know, all this stuff. And she's like, I just want to talk about business, you know, like I've I've got business problems and I really like, I wanna talk to other smart business people. And she ended up leaving the group and I believe that the group ended up failing eventually. But yeah, I think it's, there's something as a man, I mean, obviously I support her and I support women in general in business, but like there's something that there's like a turnoff about that. It's like, well, I don't know. It feels like it's about something else. It's not about the money or the work anymore.

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you ever went, I remember I went to one, remember that thing, The Wing? Did you ever— it was like, yeah, it's like WeWork for women, like, right, ultra destined to die. You know, WeWork didn't work and it was open for everybody. Like, you open one just for women and cut out half the customer base. Great idea, let me give you $100 million in funding.

Yeah, right.

And I remember I went to one of them and it was so ludicrous. The whole thing was pink, and I like pink, pink's cool, but like, come on. And then the second thing is there was like a room over to the side and they were like, feel free if you would like to go into the crochet room. At any point. I'm like, get out of fucking town. Why is there a crochet room in here? This is so silly. And so I do think there's gonna be a next generation of women who are just trying to win and hopefully do it in a way where, you know, I turn down speaking gigs if they say, we're looking for a female CEO to speak. I go, I don't, you know, listen, if it's that you need a CEO to speak and you think I'm the fit, awesome. But like, I don't do the whole talking about how, me having one type of genitalia led to some different outcome in my business. I don't actually think it's relevant. And I think it's super victim mentality. I've had a huge benefit to being a woman in a lot of situations. Sure, was there the ass grab? Did I get shut out of the 19th hole sometimes? Did I have inappropriate behaviors at work? Certainly. But also I didn't look like every other Tom, Dick, and Larry. So I had to win that way too. I don't know what the answer is, but you know what's fascinating? I've been obsessing on this lately. How to get more women interested in business in a way that still allows them to be a wife and a mom and feminine. I don't think we have to divorce those two things.

Totally.

I don't think you have to be filled with testosterone. You could just happen to be in business too. And then I was looking at creator sizes. And if you look at the biggest creators out there, there's a huge cap at business overall. Some of the biggest creators in business, I don't know, let's say Instagram or like 5, maybe 8 million subscribers. You could say like Jay Shetty, which is like 16, but he's not really business. So like the biggest business creators are like 5 or 8 million on Instagram.

Gary Vee or something like that. Yeah.

And I think he's maybe like 8 million or something like that. So, and then you look at what I'll call mainstream businesses. So things like, or mainstream creators. So like the Kardashians, like what, I don't know, 300 million or something like that.

For sure.

And then you look at beauty creators and they're like tens and tens and tens of millions. And then fashion creators, tens and tens. Fitness creators, tens and tens and tens. And so I think the other thing may just be business is actually a tiny little sector that very few people care about, actually.

Yeah.

And I think it's because, like, what's more entertaining to watch, like a really funny little comedic video or like one on a P&L? You know?

Yeah.

And I think the same thing with beauty as well. It's like a lot of these people think that business is the product. So they're like, I want to have a beauty business. So they're like talking about lipstick or whatever. They don't realize the product isn't actually the business. Like, you could substitute lipstick for Liquid Death, for jeans, and if you understood the underlying business, you speak the same language. Yeah. So I'm curious to see if there's a way to connect the mainstream between the two.

The interesting thing about that is that Gary Vee probably has more money than all those people, right?

Yeah.

And has a bigger business than all those people.

Yeah.

Minus the Kardashians.

But yeah, they're pretty big.

One of the things that I've noticed lately and concerns me a little bit, you know, in my space, the kind of the personal development world, it used to be back in the day, like '80s and '90s, women and men consume very different personal development content. So women, it was more the touchy-feely woo-woo relationship stuff.

Like Dear Sally or something? Yeah.

Or if you think about like The Secret and Oprah and things like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Whereas men, it was more, you know, it was more like make more money and be more successful and power and all this stuff. In the 2000s and 2010s, the audiences kind of merged. I actually think people like me and James Clear and a couple others, like, kind of caught a special moment where I remember going into my publisher and they asked me for the demographics of my audience, and I was like, oh, it's 50/50. And they were like, what? And I was like, yeah, it's 50/50 men, women. And like, their jaws dropped. They said nobody in self-help has 50/50. Like, that's just absolutely unheard of. There was like 10 years maybe where men and women were kind of consuming the same thing. It was all you know, I guess the early days of social media or something. We were like the first movers. But what I'm noticing is that they're splitting again and I'm slowly seeing my audience become more male-dominated.

Yeah.

And there are people in the space that I talk to all the time and they're slowly seeing their audiences become more female-dominated.

Are those people typically women?

No.

Men with— interesting.

And it's like they are drifting and as a response, they're starting to to hammer more on relationship content. They're starting to talk about manifesting. I'm kind of like, bro, what are you doing? And it's like, I don't know. It's the audience.

Just light my candles up. Yeah.

And so, and I think this is happening kind of on a broader cultural level. There was like a recent survey that came out. It was a little bit worrying that showed political beliefs between the two genders and how—

That was wild. Who put, I saw that. That was like American, the American Enterprise Society or something.

Something like that. And it's just completely completely divergent, especially at the lower—

Like sub-30.

Yeah, yeah. It's like men are becoming, young men are becoming way more conservative and young women are becoming way more liberal. And that is bad. Like I don't even know where that takes us, but maybe it's something, something with the algorithms, but the technology is getting so good at serving us up things that we relate to that it, I think maybe it's unintentionally closing us off into these demographic bubbles. In a way that didn't happen before. You know, before it happened with like ideological bubbles. Now it's getting so good, it's like demographic bubbles. And like, that's even worse in a lot of ways because it's, you know, like if you're a Latina woman, now you're just being exposed to Latina women. And if you're like a white dude, you're just being exposed to white dudes. And like, that, that's not good for anybody. And so yeah, I worry about that. I don't know where that's going.

Yeah, it's, it's also so shallow. Can you imagine if the most defining characteristic about you is how you choose to have sex, what skin color you are, and whether you have something that protrudes or inverts between your legs? Like, so uninteresting.

Yeah.

And so I find that— I think you have to self-select and push back, and I'm not sure what the answer is to that.

Social media is really bad at handling complexity, and it's really bad at handling ambiguity. Yeah. I think in-person interactions, like, we are naturally adapted to handle those things, right? So it's like if we're having a conversation and we kind of disagree about something, or I say something that's a little weird, like, we can read each other's body language, we can sense each other's emotions, you can kind of figure out like, oh, well, he probably didn't mean it that way, you know, he's, he's a good guy, you know, let's just change the subject or whatever. It's— we kind of naturally default to recognizing that people are multifaceted and one little uncomfortable thing doesn't necessarily demolish the entire interaction. Whereas online, it's the opposite. It's like the second somebody says something that makes you uncomfortable or that you don't like, you're like, "Well, fuck that person." And it's like mute, block, delete. And of course, those little microcommunications, facial expressions, body language, tonality, those don't get conveyed either. People are viewing you out of context. And so they're projecting their own personal context onto you when they watch you or read you. And oftentimes their personal context is not a charitable one. And so we tend to easily see the worst of people or assume the worst of people online. And I don't know what we do about that. You know, it's a genie, you can't put it back in the bottle. I've just kind of defaulted to like talking about this as much as possible, like just educating people as much as possible so that we can kind of adapt ourselves. You know, I see stuff on Twitter, it pisses me off, and I just try to remind myself these people are complicated. They're complex. This is literally two sentences. Like, these two sentences are my only exposure to this person, you know? So let's just try not to jump to conclusions or make assumptions.

I think that's right. I think, you know, if you want to win in today's society, you have to limit distractions. And what's the ultimate distraction? Emotional hijacking. Because you really can't do anything else when you're emotionally hyped.

Yeah.

And so where's the best place to get emotionally hyped? Well, on the internet where people are posting things without really much reciprocal effect, often anonymously.

Yep.

And so Twitter is an amazing place to go get super distracted, upset, and then project that onto the rest of society and lose your day.

Yeah.

I do think there's a real benefit in being able to say, I just shall not allow myself to be triggered while everyone else on the internet is allowing themselves to get upset by somebody, unless some human says to my face "you are a fucking piece of shit and I'm gonna kick you in the leg." If you won't say it to my face, how am I gonna let that bother me? Because it takes actually such an amount of imagination to put together a series of events about what a person thinks of you based on something that's happening on the internet. Now I think it's really hard when it's directed at you. You've had this many times in your career where you say something and somebody comes at you and you can't have done this for 16 years and not have people pretty much say everything bad about you ever, I think. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You. Yeah. And I think that's a good mental exercise. It's also very hard to do.

Like, you know what I always told my husband? Do you get mad when you're driving, like, and somebody cuts you off? Yeah, sometimes. Yeah, it doesn't really bother me for some reason. I think it's like my husband, same, like, he just assumes that person— I don't know, biggest piece of shit in the world, total disrespect, also hates him, you know. And, and so, you know, and he gets so annoyed because I just always go, I just assume that they're they're birthing a child in the backseat every single time. And that's the old adage, but for some reason it helps me. I'm like, eh, they're probably super late. They're birthing a child in the backseat. They've just found out they got cancer. I don't know. And so if I think that way, it never really bothers me. I'm like, I kind of expect everybody on the street to drive like an asshole. And if they don't, I'm relatively happy about it. And so maybe there's a way for us to do that on the internet too, as opposed to what we're doing right now, which even our team has kind kind of done it a few times. Like, we've seen something crazy on the internet, and then we've gone, let's have a reaction to the crazy. Yeah. And then that reaction to the crazy kind of hypes something that is probably super fringe anyways and normalizes it in some way. And then there's a reaction on the other side about, how could you think this is crazy? Because in fact, we think this is super normal, right? And so instead of me countering it, I've just added noise instead of signal.

Yeah, I interviewed Ryan Holiday yesterday. We talked about this quite a bit, about avoiding the, the temptation of the clickbait, the low-hanging fruit, not platforming certain ideas or people because you know it's going to get a ton of clicks. And he and I both feel very strongly about that. And I also think that there's something to both of our longevity, because I've been around long enough to see the big new thing turn into the big horrible thing and watch people torpedo their own careers, you know, dying on a hill that does not deserve to be died on. So I just try to remember that, like, in this business that we're in, you really need to pick your battles carefully. And it's funny because you'll even get hate for that. Like, I will get angry emails, be like, why aren't you talking about this political issue? Why aren't you angry about, you know, this politician said this thing? And I'm like, because in 2 weeks the other guy's gonna say something else and then the whole narrative's gonna change and new info's gonna come out and everything's gonna be different. And like, I'm not gonna fall into that trap. I try to stay with stuff that's like very timeless, the stuff that's not gonna change.

It is funny to see the cycles too, isn't it? Like I even saw it with boring businesses. So when I first started talking about them, people were like, this is dumb. Like this is super dumb. Why would you? Car wash? What the fuck? Yeah, exactly. Laundromat? Those things don't make any money. Nobody uses them anymore. I'm like, I don't know what, like, do you wanna see my tax return? And then it really started to pick up. I think not just because of me, but it just got sort of normalized. Then there started to be lots of case studies about people succeeding with it. Then perfect inflection point, we had sort of the Silicon Valley implosion over the last 2 years where they're not funding as many companies anymore. And so now, then it just hit like peak boring business time where like there's memes everywhere you can find about Harvard grads going out and trying to buy a plumbing company and then, you know, hating their lives. And so I think it'll come down again. And I don't know what the next thing will be, but I can definitely start to tell when the main thing is starting to become a meme. Right. You know, it's just moved a little bit past it. And now it doesn't matter for me and my portfolio because car washes don't care how you feel about them on the internet. Yes. They still make money, which is why I like them. But I do think important to not tie yourself to those, to those trends.

You have to be careful, and you also want some flexibility and the ability to pivot, you know, when things do change or when the zeitgeist shifts. One thing that I definitely feel or have noticed is that the, the make money spaces online tend to blow up during economic hardship. Yeah. And they tend to not go away, but they recede a lot during boom times. And we are definitely in a time, you know, pandemic, post-pandemic, a lot of economic hardship, a lot of layoffs over the last few years, particularly layoffs in sectors where there are really smart, educated people who are ambitious. And so I personally believe that there's a correlation there of, you know, you've got all these like smart Stanford grads who used to work for Google or Facebook sitting around being like, fuck, how am I going to make money? And eventually, you know, the market will correct or equilibrium will hit and we'll move on to the next thing. So, you know, it's kind of like surfing. Like you just always got to keep an eye on like where the wave's going and make sure like position yourself accordingly. Yeah. Last question. What do you give too many fucks about and you wish you gave fewer?

I mean, there's the standard answer, which is I probably care care more than I should about what people I respect think of me. Not generally, but I do, I do very much care if people that I think are smart and thoughtful and strategic see something that I'm doing and think, you know, it's unethical, or I don't agree with it, or it's beneath you. That bothers me. And has that happened?

Oh, for sure.

I mean, in the beginning of, of when I was a creator— it's less common now— but when they were like, isn't this kind of beneath you doing this stuff on the internet? Like, if you had really— yeah, if you had really leaned into— you could have built your own huge private equity company as opposed to talking about it on the internet with all of these people, right? And so that, that does still bother me somehow. I still am in a search for credentials from the people that I care about. And I think it's a little bit of a female thing and an immigrant thing. It's like, well, let's make sure I get the MBA from Georgetown. Let's to Goldman, let's get the certification, build the resume. Yeah, right, it's very silly. And so I remember I met once Astro Teller, the head of Google X's program. So he, you know, fascinating guy and was tasked with coming up with crazy ideas for Google, right? And he had this idea that I don't know if he still does, but he did it years ago where he said one of the most impactful things I've done in my career is outside of my office, and thus a bunch of other people picked it up around the office, I have a resume me, not of all the things that I've done, but all the things I've failed at. And so I've tried to— I keep a list. I don't— I'm, I'm not quite as evolved as Astro is, but I, I keep a list of all my failures to remind me that, that they're not going to kill me. Yeah. And that in fact, people probably think about me so much less than I could ever even imagine. They do. Yeah, exactly. So like, nobody cares, and we'll forget your name. Sure. You know, 2 to 10 to definitely 50 years. And so that's the truth. You know, if I was to look back to young Codie again or anybody out there in their 20s or 30s, it's like, man, nobody actually really cares that much. It seems so important. It's probably not. And last I checked, you and I aren't curing cancer or saving the world. And so like, it'll be fine. And the worst thing that we can do will probably never take a life or, you know, cost us our life. And my husband, 'cause he's a former military guy, that's always his line when I'm stressed about something. Is like, "Is anybody gonna die?" And I'm like, "No, nobody's gonna die. I'm in a spreadsheet. It's formatted incorrectly." Like, so silly. But that's where my fucks lay. Interesting.

The irony there is that when people are thinking that what you're doing is not a good idea, they're like, "Oh, that seems, YouTube, what?" The irony is all the big opportunities are like that. That. Most people don't see them. And so most people are going to think you're a little bit crazy for going all in on them, which sometimes they're right. Yeah. You know, but— What's yours?

Too many fucks these days.

My too many fucks? I am having trouble relinquishing control and delegating. It's really hard for me. I'm slowly getting better. But yeah, I don't know. It's— I recognize too that it's completely irrational. I mean, in some cases people on my team can do it better than I can, but it's— there's just something of like if I don't see it and know how it's being done, then it's, I'm not gonna like be able to sleep at night or something. And I definitely need to get over that.

Yeah, that's a really good one though. Yeah. That's a, I feel like that's a common one for creatives too. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it's your name and it's your face on it. Absolutely. You know, and there's very few things that are like this in the world. It's also sometimes useful to just say to that part of yourself, that's reasonable actually.

Yeah.

That's reasonable. Like I don't want somebody to edit a video and then all of a sudden there's something in there that I would never ever do, right? I think that I did, right? So it's rational but, um, definitely limited. Yeah, for sure. Cool. Thank you, Codie Sanchez Sanchez Sanchez. My pleasure.

This is fun. Thanks, dude. Great.