Codie Sanchez: They're Lying To You About How To Get Rich!

How could conscious capitalism exist if everyone in the world was financially free?

I think everyone in the world will be financially free one day. If you look at the amount of people that capitalism has pulled out of poverty as measured by countries that have actually instituted it, as opposed to taking it away, the numbers don't lie. We need to export more people into ownership. It's four magical words, skin in the game. For a lot of humans, they're acting without skin in the game because they don't have equity, they don't have upside in their job, they don't own any assets, they don't have things to lose. And so that becomes the tragedy of the commons, which is when everybody is responsible for somebody, nobody takes care of it. And so that's why conscious capitalism will work is if we can get more people slices of ownership. But what we do want to figure out is how can we get more people to have knowledge, which I think is the great equalizer.

I saw this on your ig. You said, my first encounter with death changed me. It was the indifference to the brown eyed, brown haired woman like me that really made me cry. When you went in for the inventory of the women that were deceased, you said, that's why I built a business that empowers proving that what you build is more important than where you donate. I think at first audible people might get it, but they don't really get it. Like, can you allow us to really get your motivation for this because this is super early in your career.

Very. Yeah. I had my quarter life crisis at 20 years old. And, and at the time I was working in journalism, I was still going to school. I graduated a year early from the Sterling institution of Arizona State, mostly hanging out, partying. But towards the last like two and a half years of that, I got over that and I was trying to figure out where I could make my little mark on the world.

Yeah.

And so I got a grant from the Howard Buffett foundation, which is Warren Buffett's son, to go and write stories about 10 tension along borders. He was really interested in what do man made borders mean for humans. And so I, I got a grant to write two stories, one called Las des Parecidas the Disappeared and another called Generation Abandoned. And Las des Parecidas was about this wild phenomenon that at the time really hadn't been covered very much, that in this little town of, of Juarez, which is right across from El Paso, Texas, so not from too far from where we are here, there are every year thousands of women murdered and mutilated and found in the desert. And this has been going on for decades, right? And so at the time, as a young journalist, I just thought this is a fascinating story and I want to, I want to tell this story. And so I went down there, I brought my photographer, Courtney Sargent, and we started interviewing people about what do we think's happening here? Why are these women being killed? Is there a serial killer on the loose? Is this cultural, you know, sort of down there, they would call it machismo, but like this, this toxic culture of male dominance, Is it the narco traffickers? Is it the cartels? Is it the government? And the real answer, as far as we can tell, is yes, yes, all of that. It's all of that. And when there is no rule of law, then they're the, the most easily victimized are often taken advantage of. And so what was wild is what we realized along the border in particular is if you were look to look at the border as a age population map. So like a hot zone, right? You'd see along the border there were two phenomenon. There was really, really elderly because they were being left behind along the border they couldn't cross. And there was pretty, pretty youthful. And that was because all these people were coming from south and Central America to the border, to the maquiladores, the, the big factories there, like Lowe' Depot blinds. Everything that you think of in the US is either predominantly made in China or in Mexico. And so these women would get bused into these factories every single day. And. But they didn't have any family structure. They had no protective structure. And so they were often, you know, taken advantage of or brutalized in one way or the other. And the wild part was when I was down there, I had a job for writing a paper for the Associated Press, I believe at the time. And there were two newspapers. There was the cartel run newspaper, which would have been the Sonoran Cartel that ran that. And then there was the government run newspaper, both of which were quite corrupt for different reasons. And every single day in the desert they would give. They would find women and they would. There would typically be in, somewhere in the newspapers a body count. And what would be wild is the cartel newspaper would have one number and the government newspaper would have another number. And so part of our job was trying to triangulate between the two who was doing this. Was it the government? Was it the cartels? And we were kind of trying to triangulate by who was under, representing the numbers, right? And so you would go in there and actually try to identify, which wasn't always easy as bodies weren't always whole. You would try to identify how many women there actually were and where were they from and where their through lines. And we were children. And then I remember specifically one day that was the hardest for me is we were crossing over the border, which is across the Rio Grande that separates Texas and Mexico. And I wonder if it's still there. But there was a huge wooden cross in the middle of the highway. And as you crossed over the border and got closer to the cross, you saw that the cross was littered with pink ribbons and mementos and photos. And it was a representation of all the desaparecidas, all the lost women. And so that for me, hit really hard because as I got closer and I looked at those photos, I was like, wait a second. Long hair, long brown hair, brown eyes, like they look like me, you know, and if, if I was to be lost as a US citizen or somebody of these socioeconomic class that I'm in, there would be a lot more happening than just a poster taped on this cross. And so it made me start to question, kind of like your journey. What, what creates the worth of a life? Yeah, what defines power? And I don't actually think it's whether you're Latino or not. My last name is Sanchez. There are many Sanchez, is there? I don't actually think it's that they're in Mexico and not the U.S. i think it's that they didn't have the one form of power that's universal, which these days is called money. And so that's when I started my little journey of I want to figure out what it means to, to control money. Because I think that means power. And with power comes freedom. Maybe for me and, and maybe for others.

The, the. It sounds like it was a well of pain and sadness and grief that you like, were not expecting. How old were you? You're in your young 20s then.

Yeah, I remember I couldn't drink yet. So how. Okay, probably 20.

Okay, so you're 20 years old. Like for the psyche of a 20 year old. I can't even imagine how intense that might have been. And what drove you then, in some ways, I'm sure still drives you now a little bit, but not the same. Like in other words, in the beginning, what drove you to master money and master this power, this energy was your own control and also the sadness of what you had seen. But now it's probably a little bit different, maybe a lot different. Like how does that still, like, do you still reflect on that on a daily basis, a monthly basis. Does that still inform you in some way?

I think that tragedy has to be reoccurred to be not lost contextually. And so the farther we are away from a really difficult moment, the harder it is to still have it sit with us. Right. And I actually think it's really good to carry tragedy with you because it makes everything that happens in life so small by comparison. And so I would certainly say I'm not as touched today as I was then because seeing bodies and seeing violence is very different. And humans, we learn to evolve over time to forget some of that, so we get to keep going. But what I will say is once you've seen things like that, you never forget. And as much as I am so saddened that that happens, I wish every human, especially Americans, could have an experience like that. Because then you don't really have very easy hate for one another, you know, then you quickly sort of realize how important it is to do a hand up. Right?

Yeah.

And so these days I'm certainly motivated by freedom still. And I think that is the underlying current. It's not necessarily that I see those brown haired women everywhere, it's that I see humans everywhere being held down by the fact that they cannot survive in a modern economy in a way that feels free. And so my goal is first I want freedom for me and mine. You know, don't get it twisted. I want freedom for my loved ones, then the community, then our city, then our country, and then, you know, sort of the world. And it's in that order.

Yeah. Well, the only way that we can actually live free because we all signed up to be here on planet Earth, otherwise it wouldn't be happening, is to master this game of money is something that I fought for a long ass time. So many people have a wound around money and I'm sure you've explored this quite a bit in many different platforms. Maybe you've even been asked this on a stage at some point in your life where someone was like, look, I have all the skills, I have all the relationships, I have all the deals, all the opportunities. But like there's some kind of subconscious block or there's some kind of wound in me that literally I hit a glass ceiling when I try to make over 100k or a million or 10 million. Like you see that quite a bit, I'm sure, because I know it's within me in some way. I think it's within a lot of entrepreneurs. And if we're being Fucking honest about it. We bring light to it by speaking about it. So have you ever experienced that yourself in any way? And how do you see that playing out in all these people that you reach across the world?

Yeah, it's fascinating. A friend of mine, Claire, told me about this experiment that she saw. And so I replicated it. And basically the experiment was this. It was at an event with a couple hundred people. And I said, I want you to visualize money and your relationship to money. What does that feel like, sound like, smell like to you? And then I want you to, I want you to physically represent it. And we had everybody close their eyes and I stole this, but I can't remember who I stole it from. So apologies, whoever that is. I want you to physically represent how you feel about money. And so if you can imagine a room full of hundred people, their eyes are all closed. And I said, okay, now sort of represent. Nobody's looking at you, nobody cares. However you feel about money, do it. And of course my feeling for money, it's kind of like this, you know, hands are up, big. I'm like grabbing it. I kind of got a grin on my face and that's my natural state. I'm like, give it to me. Yes. And as I look around the room, this was predominantly women in the crowd. So be interesting to see what it was for men. What do you think they did?

Small.

Yeah, very small. Almost. You know, I looked around and it was almost like people were beating them. You know, there was. Everybody was really small or like kind of sad or a little scared or maybe like a little bit, you know, tiny hands up, up. And that was the first time I realized, oh man, you can't start with tactics with people. Actually, most humans, to your point, have some sort of wound that has to be felt.

Yeah.

And if you don't start there, then all of the tactics I tell people, because I'm very tactical, will not do anything because they're, they're built on a, on a house of, of sand. And so that's why I think I've become more comfortable over the years with people who help with mental blocks and emotional blocks and spiritual blocks. Whereas historically, quite honestly, I was like, get the fucking work. Like, what are we doing here? You know, I thought it was unnecessary. I thought everybody should just work through it. And then seeing this and a few other instances made me realize, oh, no, no, we have to get people really to increase their self confidence level before we can really tell them how to make it to the next level.

Yeah. So you imbued yourself along the way with this. But like, you were not born into a wealthy family. Like, this is a kind Americana, middle class fam. So where do you feel like you got that spark for the entrepreneurship or just spark for this relationship with money? Like, it wasn't just in Arizona at school. It was something else.

I think it's my father. I would give him probably most of the credit. And you said that you have a son or a daughter.

I have a son. And we have a mystery baby on the way.

How exciting.

The gender yet, y'?

All. Early.

Congrats.

Yeah, so we. I think it was my father. My father was the type of father who never called you a princess, who instead always said you could be president, who helped me learn how to shoot guns, go into the wilderness, play softball, play volleyball. He was never the sort of dad that thought that that was for girls. And so he couldn't do it. He would wear those ridiculous little softball shorts and white high socks right. With us as a. As a coach of the team. And so. And he's like a hairy sort of Latino looking dude, so you can just get the full visual.

Yeah.

You know.

Did you have a mustache?

Yeah.

Okay, he does.

Yeah. You nailed it just like a little.

Bit on the screen right now.

In the middle. Yeah, exactly. So. So anyway, so he, he was just a huge champion for me. And. And I think that made all the difference in the world. And then, you know, not to dissuade my mother at all, she was certainly, um, certainly the same kind, nurturing. But I almost feel like we women, you know, we either are hard on them or we put them on pedestals for our fathers, but usually it's a lot of pedestaling. And then a lot of times for. For mothers, we're hard on them. You know, we kind of. We see ourselves in them, I think, in the future. And so anyway, between the two of them, that is why I think I was comfortable enough to kind of go out and get them. Although my brother's completely different. So I do think there's some force within each of us that is our choice.

Younger bro. Older.

Younger.

Younger.

So you're seven years.

So you're big sis.

Ye. Okay. Yes.

So the responsibility. It's always interesting because we've had people on the show that have sold millions of copies of books around how the psyche works and the space between the head and the heart, emotional intelligence and finance. They're not as far apart as people think they are. And maybe there was a point in your career where you really had to go into the emotional side of what makes you you, because it was potentially holding you back from making more money or holding you back from being more successful. Maybe it was a selfish desire like, okay, I'll get this emotional intelligence figured out so that then I can make more money. Or it could have just been something intuitive from you. Because when I look at your media and I see how you show up and the way that you speak and you teach others, you can't get to that kind of a place of articulation unless you've done enough work on yourself to be confident and to have a base level or a big level of self love. How did that work out for you?

I would take a curious, confident human over a high iq, non curious human just about any day of the week. And so when I think about the type of people that are in finance, we over index on intelligence and iq, which is actually I think a real problem because curiosity is usually where you find the answers. And so as a journalist you really have one job. The one job is to ask the right questions. And everything else is a byproduct of that. As long as you can wrap those answers in story, then you can win. And so I actually found a lot of similarity between journalism and finance that was unexpected. Especially I remember when I was in private equity, I was at, let's see, one of the very first firms that I worked at. And I didn't realize that there's this unwritten rule in high finance and maybe in a lot of higher level positions, which is that we don't ask questions that make us look dumb. You know, it's like, don't ask that question because it shows you don't know what you're talking about. This is really, really normal in big corporations and in high finance. And I didn't know that that was a sign of lack of intelligence. And so I would ask questions like, hey, I do not understand anything you just said at all. Can you back up and explain that to me? Like I'm a 6 year old and I had no expectation that that meant I was dumber. It just meant that this particular thing wasn't well explained for it to fit into my brain unrelated to my intelligence.

Yeah.

And so I think that helped me grow quickly within finance because most people aren't willing to do that. You will never make as much money or grow as fast as somebody else who is willing to ask questions and shut up and take in the answers. And so oftentimes my partners, when we would look at our historical record of investing. These were guys who had had huge exits, and they were 30 or 20 years older than me, and they were highly condescending all the time. And what was fascinating is, in the beginning, I correlated how strongly somebody spoke with their likelihood of being right. Turns out those two things are not that correlated.

Yeah, no doubt.

And beautiful thing about investing is it's a scoreboard. You either win or you lose. And so the one nice thing about it is I was like, God, I don't like that deal. We would sign our name at the bottom of the deal, and I would say, yeah, like, I think that's a 4 out of 10 deal. You know, I won't block your deal, but I don't love it. And so I got to start ranking all of my investments and realizing, oh, wait a second. I actually have a gut for some of this stuff, even though I'm not the one pounding on the table about a deal to do. And so that's a big push I have for people in general is just ask more questions. Who cares if you seem dumb? Because your ability to ask questions will mean you get to the answers faster.

I can't tell you how many times on this podcast I've asked the guests, what does that word mean? Yeah, I don't give a shit. Yeah, I mean, really, it's the vulnerability, I think, around money that scares people, because money is this subject where you're supposed to not talk about it or politics or religion at the table. It's such a fucking duality we live in here on planet Earth because money is literally the controller of most things. One could even argue that it's the controller of almost all things. Although love, you can't purchase it. You can try to purchase it, but you ain't going to buy it. But money is not the root of all evil. I don't believe in this. And I wonder if we can go into this a little bit, since we're on this energetic tip, before we get into the structural stuff, because I do, of course, I want to get into the structure and. And, you know, how we can actually build our lives for freedom. And Maslow's hierarchy, like, that's a really big one that we. That I focus on myself, too. So on an energetic level, there's got to be some way that we can figure out the old stories about money being the root of all evil, or money doesn't grow on trees, or money is made by rich people, and rich people take advantage of others. Did you ever have to unpack any of that in Your life in any way?

Yeah, I mean, the first thing to do to unpack stories is to prove that they're wrong. Right. If I can prove that a story isn't true all the time, then that means that it doesn't have to be true for me. And what's the fastest way to do that? If it's about money, it's to make sure you're not hanging around a bunch of people that don't have it. Because then you think, oh, money's hard to get. Money makes people bad because you're with a group of people that believe that and that are that. And so we believe the things that surround us. And so what I did, one of the very first things I did was I sought out people that were the opposite of me, who had money, who had big careers, who had sold companies, who understood much more than I did about the world. And I would create my own little virtual, they didn't even know about it, board of directors. And I would seek them out pretty religiously and I would quickly realize, wow, not only are these people really interesting, they're really kind. They're pretty giving for the most part. They're really intelligent, but they're not that intelligent. Like, yeah, I could be just as smart as this guy. And so that just removal of yourself from unfertile soil to so soil that's already fertilized is incredibly powerful. So I think that's the first step. And what does that mean tactically? That means get in. I know you run some of these get in masterminds, go to universities that are higher grade, go to a corporation that's more aggressive, whatever the case may be, where you get in a room with a bunch of people that look nothing like the negative stories that you're telling yourself. And you'll quickly realize these people aren't evil. Actually, they're pretty fantastic for the most part. And you'll find the right room for you. And so I think that was the first thing I did to remove that story.

How old were you then? Was that still when you were in school or.

Well, yeah, I think that probably started when. Actually, it started when I was at Vanguard. So my very first job out of school, I didn't understand what money was. I thought a 401k was called a 401. I had no idea what a mutual fund is. I remember I thought it was a mutual fund, like we could all have fun together. And so I knew nothing about finance. And then I got an opportunity to go to this Women in Business conference and I didn't want to go and I was late. I was on the phone with my mom and she's like, you need to go to this conference. I'm like, I'm late, it's going to be embarrassing. I should just go back. And she's like, go anyway, show up. And so I sit down at this conference table in the back. I'm kind of quiet. I think I'm eating cake or something because I was in college so I had no money. And I end up sitting next to this recruiter for this company, Vanguard, one of the largest financial institutions. And what did I do? I knew nothing about anything. But I just started asking her questions. I'm like, tell me about you. What do you do? Oh, that's interesting. What does that mean? How did you start there? Why do you like that company versus this company? By the end of it, she was like, you know what? I think you should come interview at our company. And I was like, tara, I don't know anything about anything you just talked about, but okay, I like you. That seems interesting. So then I went home, I poured through a bunch of books and I had this opportunity to go and interview at Vanguard. And at Vanguard there was, I was part of something called an accelerated development program. So basically what that meant is there were 24 of us competing for eight or 12 spots, I can't remember. And everybody else competing had already been in this program for six months. They had already been pre selected. They went to Harvard and Stanford and blah blah, blah school. They knew all about finance, they were accounting majors or marketing, etc. I was a journalism and public public relations major. I had just come from living in Mexico for most of the year. And I remember I sat down on the first day, it was like a one week evaluation process for this. And I didn't think I was going to get the gig. And I sat it down at the very first day and they started asking us all of these questions and I didn't know any of the answers. So I went home, stayed up all night, studied for the next day, whatever. I finally get the job. But what I realized in that moment is, oh, these people, they're totally different than anybody I've met before. You know, they're not the struggling journalist who's a little bit jaded, who, you know, smokes a little bit and talks about the problems in the world but never does anything about it right. They're not my college friends that are all partying and going to frat parties and sororities parties and you know, club Promoters, which was sort of the crew I hung out with. I thought these people are really different. And I wasn't sure I liked them then, but I knew that I wanted some of their knowledge. And I think it was that moment where I realized, oh, wait a second, like, there's an opportunity to level up here and I think I want to try.

Yeah. There is a lot to be said about being in friend groups that hold you down unconsciously, because we've all heard this phrase thousands of times. You are the byproduct of the five people you hang out with the most. And I think we all feel that we all get that on some level. But what I heard from you that was really interesting is you actually had to do a gut check of like, do I want to hang out with these people that I'm not exactly sure if I like them or not, but they have something that I want that is an interesting road. Because there's a lot of relationships in my life where I've just been fully open and honest about that. Like, hey, I know we're just getting to know each other, but like, I really respect what you've created here, or I really like what you're about here. And I think there's some real gravitas about that. Like, just did you do that? How did you bridge conversations like that? Because what you're saying is exactly where someone is right now on their journey, going through the maybe conundrum of what money is or judging people that might have money. And like Vanguard, that's like a multitrillion dollar, I believe fund. Vanguard owns pretty much the world. And BlackRock, they're kind of like the top duo. Yeah, maybe we can talk about that later. So how did you bridge that gap? How do you have that conversation with people that have essentially knowledge and success that you want, but you're not exactly sure if you like them yet?

I think there's magic in cross pollination of experiences. And so I was not the most intelligent person in finance by far. But what I was is I was rather interesting. So if you want to meet interesting people, you have to be interesting yourself. And the fact that I have the story to tell about being in Juarez and my experiences there was completely different than somebody who went to school at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge. Right. So they just thought, huh, this thing doesn't look like all the others and that's incredibly powerful. And so let's say that somebody listening to this knows a lot about quantum regeneration machines and crystals and energy and whatever that is a really Unique perspective. If you were to drop yourself into a finance conference in New York and you were just, you were just to say to a group of very high performing people, energy in here seems like kind of intense. You know, I have this spray that is like, it's a sort of a downregulator and it's based on this sort of physical property. And would you guys like to try it? And they probably would have never had that singular experience before. And because of that, you've essentially opened this little chasm for them and they're instantly more interested in you. Now if you did that in Austin, Texas, downtown, not that interesting. Relatively normal.

Some guy would open up a necklace and be like, brother, I already have the other version.

Yeah, exactly. Not that interesting. So it's kind of like I figured out where did I have some unique experience that this other person didn't that I could share with them, and then where could I simultaneously lean into theirs? Because everybody actually wants to be heard more than they want to listen.

That's so good. One thing I love too, it's funny how the universe works. Yesterday Carrie asked me, what's the definition of contrary? And I was like, oh, interesting. So we looked it up. Your entire business is contrarian, contrarian thinking, contrarian investment. And really to be in. Look at the grain in this, to go against the grain, to be in contrast, to be contrary to normal opinion or normal sway. That usually is where most people have fun. They get success, they do fun things, they travel the world, but they have to get there by really going into areas that most people are afraid to go into, either because of a mental story they've been telling themselves, or some kind of fear in their family lineage. Like, when did you first come across this, like branding and the etymology and the essence of being a contrarian?

Yeah. I read a book when I was young, a Letter to Young Contrarians, and it's by Christopher Hitchens. And Christopher Hitchens was a very famous activist. He was at one point a communist, he was at one point a socialist, then he ended as a capitalist and was an aggressive atheist before finding God. And so he has pretty incredible readings over the course of his life. But this Letters to Young Contrarians is all about how do you learn to think for yourself as a human? Which to me is one of the most underrated abilities ever. In fact, if you were to go out to a group of a hundred people and ask them, do you think that you think. Well, the answer with most people would be like, of course, yes. And that's why we're crazy on Twitter and we're crazy on Facebook and we're crazy on Instagram because we don't actually question our ability to frame our own individual thoughts, which is a huge mistake. The smartest, richest, happiest people I know question everything, including themselves. And they question maybe most themselves. And so I read Christopher Hitchens when I was really, really young, and that made a profound impact on me. And then I went down this rabbit hole of who are the contrarians of our time? Because I find them the most interesting. If you think about Steve Jobs, think different. Right. The Orwellian 1984 campaign he ran at Apple I think is one of the best ads of all time. And it's, you know, this. This runner, if you recall, with her huge Hammer TV smashing, throws it down to the big brother.

We're just like, what is this?

Right? And it was because he was able to see where most of the world was black, and if he put a speck of. Of white on it, that would be what stood out.

Yeah.

And so I think if you could spend most of your life figuring out the contrast, you're probably much more likely to be richer, wealthier, and happier. Because humans, I don't really think, for the most part, like following the crowd, we just end up doing it.

Yeah. I've never been one that enjoys asking for permission or taking orders. I saw that in one of your blogs this week. Actually, I just remembered it now. There's a difference between being a rebel without a cause and being a rebel with a cause. So I'm a rebel with the cause of freedom. And I get that vibe from you. Maybe that's what brought you to Texas in some way. Where were you before Texas?

All over the place, but dc, San Diego, Chile. So, yeah, we. We definitely came here for three reasons. One was looser regulations and taxes. 100%.

Yeah, yeah.

Which I'm just a believer in. And then two was the innovation that's happening in Austin. I think any time you want to play a game at a high level, you should go where the game is played the most. It's not rocket science. And yet we don't do it. And so if you have a startup and you're in tech, I don't know why you're not in Austin, New York or San Francisco. You know, if you want to be the best country western singer out there, you probably should get your butt to Nashville. And yet we don't do that one easy thing. And so that was the second reason. And the third was because we thought Humans here were more interesting. You know, in San Diego, we joke about being a great place for the young people to go to retirement. And. And it's beautiful, but there isn't that frenetic energy of creation, which I think most of us want. You feel it when you're around somebody who's a builder. You feel it. And the interesting part is it draws in people who aren't builders, and it draws in other builders. And so most people don't question if they have that. And I think that would be something really good to cultivate 40 years of.

My life in San Diego.

Oh, yeah.

Broke my heart to leave.

Yeah.

But I knew that my own maturation was process was calling me here. And wouldn't you know it, when we got here, everything doubled. Some things tripled just from being here a couple years. So, like, the proof is in the numbers. Like, numbers don't lie, which is something that I fought against. And maybe y' all can relate to this. When you look at your bank account, it's going to tell you energetically and also sometimes physiologically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in all ways. This is why we added spirituality to the Pentagon and finance, which is right at the top of the roof. Unless I am honest with myself about what's my debts, what's my income, what is my own personal P and L as a human being.

Not.

Not. And maybe not just even in money. Like, what are my relationship profits? What are my relationship losses? Like, the P and L is the ultimate, I guess you could say, decoder of truth. You can't lie. And if you do, it'll come out in the numbers. You can't just, like, wash it away. Can you share? Like, when you first started to really apply. Obviously the P L is a business term, right? Profit and loss. But have you ever looked at people and relationships and your life and plug that into your own kind of esoteric or spiritual P L?

Well, you know what I. This made me think of is I remember the first time I realized that money is a cruel mistress and she likes to be paid attention to. And that was that.

That's. That's good.

It's true.

It's good.

And it was. I was walking with one of my mentors, David Osborne, who's worth a couple hundred million bucks, and he was grilling me and my friend Matt Acheson on our cash. Like, how much money you have? What's your net worth? What's in your bank account right now? All questions that I found, one, a little rude. Two, I wasn't prepared for you know, and. And he said something at the end, which is he basically said, if you don't know where your money is, you'll never be rich. You'll never be rich. He said, categorically, if you do not know where your money is, you will not be rich. And I, you know, kind of thought about that for a minute, and then I started thinking, well, there's really no downside. I track many things. Why don't I track this as well? And the second I really started tracking total net worth, there was an explosion. And. And I attribute a lot of that to. To David, because I do think money is a cruel mistress, and she likes to be paid attention to. And if you do not pay attention to her, somebody else will. And it doesn't mean that you have to obsess on money, just means that you have to be thoughtful about it. And I do think there's a real. There's a real tragedy in humans who strive after money for the sake of money. But to your point about Rebel Without a Cause, humans who strive out money for the sake of the tool that it is, that's a completely different game, because then you get to be an architect as opposed to a renter. And that's a big motivation for me.

Yeah, there's a. There's a key difference in my life now that I'm a father. And I don't know if everyone out there is destined to have children. Some people are, some people aren't. Right. But when you start shepherding other life, the money game changes completely, because then there's this external locus of control, and you talk about it with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which is really cool. And I have been down the route in behavior change and interviewing people like the Charles Duhiggs of the world and, like, understanding, like, how do we actually change who we are on a cellular, fundamental level? Like, what does it take for true neuroplasticity to stick? Like, habits to stick? And I wonder, you know, sometimes for. For some personalities, the external locus of control or the external motivation, it is a driver. Like, it makes us burst through thresholds that we would have never bursted through. It makes us approach people in dating that we would have never, you know, been with if we didn't cross the fear gap. And then there's that internal stuff. And the internal stuff, it's such a mystery, you know, And I don't know if you're a religious or a spiritual person. You're wearing a necklace that has a crystal in it, so you must be Somewhat spiritual. You came to Austin. There's an essence of spirituality to you. But how do you. You. How do you explain that in maybe. Maybe even in a financial way? How would you explain. Or also in a personal way, because they're essentially the same.

Yeah, I mean, I remember, you know, my father is. I think he would call himself an atheist or agnostic. And. And I remember I would ask him when I was young, like, why didn't you go to church with us? Why don't you go to church? Because, you know, we're. We're Catholic.

Your mom would go, but he wouldn't go, of course.

Yeah, he wouldn't go. And I remember he. When my mom and him had to get married. If you go to Catholic church, there's a process where you have to. You don't have to become Catholic, but you need to go through a. I don't know, it's like a marriage weekend, basically. And basically, it's making sure that you really want to commit to this human. And so my mother wanted to get married in a Catholic church. You had to do this to do it. So my father went with her for that weekend. And at the end of the weekend, the. The priest said to my father, will you now accept, you know, the Lord and Savior as your Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? And my father, you know, kind of said, well, you know, I'm not sure about that, but I'll. I'll consider it. And the priest didn't love that story, love that comment. Then he said, well, will you commit to coming to church every Sunday? And my dad said, I don't like to lie. So, no. And. And I remember my mom was furious, at least that's what she told me, because she really wanted to get married in this church. But my father said, you know, I can't start a marriage on a lie. And he's like, I wasn't sure after a weekend about Jesus, and I didn't think it was likely that I was going to go to church every single Sunday. In fact, he's like, I don't know if I've ever met anybody that goes to church every single day on Sunday. So it doesn't seem to be a fair question. And what I thought was fascinating about that is I have never met a, like, more honest and straightforward man than my father, and yet he wouldn't describe himself as overly religious or spiritual. He would say, do the right thing and don't lie, because it's easier to remember. And so my little moral compass is A little bit old school. It's the golden rule. Do unto others as you want to be done unto yourself. And maybe do things even if it doesn't mean you go to heaven, even if it doesn't mean that, you know, you're more energetically aligned. Do it just because it's right. And I think that's more interesting anyway. And so I don't have a strong spiritual practice besides going outside for walks, communing with nature a little bit and believing that if I do the right thing, the world gets a little bit better.

Yeah. Well, I can sense from you that that might be a spiritual framework without the esoteric language.

Yeah.

Like, it makes sense to me. At least I can. I can experience that from you, and especially with the world you came from. The financial world is not a place where you're putting crystals on the table during board meetings. That ain't happening.

No, maybe it'd be better for it. I like it.

It might honestly probably do them a world of good. Maybe they could have the Leela Quantum on their table or something. But I think about this question of, like, what drives me and what makes me really want to stick to the changes? And essentially the promises, the freaking promises that I make to myself and the promises I make to myself depend on really, like, my energy and my opinion of oneself. That's an intrinsic view of who I am in the world, like my identity. But the end, the extrinsic is interesting because I can see other people doing well and I get excited. And in the past, I might not have gotten excited. I might have, like, compared myself to them. You know, comparison is the thief of joy. So to go back to this, like, how would you explain this model of success? Let's talk about it. Like, personal and financial success through this lens of internal and external motivation.

Yeah. Have you. There's a great book on mimetic theory, and basically it's that. It's that most of the things that we want are due to external stimulus that tells us that we should want this thing, AKA extrinsic motivation, which basically means. I see that you have a beautiful table here that we're podcasting on. I have a cardboard one. I think that I need this beautiful table. Right. And as opposed to intrinsic motivation, which means that somewhere inside of me, for some reason, I want this thing, even if nobody else has it or nobody else wants it. And what's very hard to determine as a human because of our. All of our societal programming is which one's which. And. But yet what I found Is that when you can. Let's take it from a hiring perspective, just so you could see it in another human outside of you. When you hire somebody and they find joy in the journey and they think it's fun to do it, as opposed to they want a lot of money, even if they're good at it. This fun to do it, Enjoying the journey beats somebody who's incredible but just wants money almost every day of the week. And it's because that it goes back to that curiosity thing. When you're really curious about something and when it's really interesting, you can't help but become obsessed and go down a rabbit hole. And you will beat those who are really grinding themselves against a gear continuously. It's kind of like yoga, you know? You know when you get in a yoga position and it's really hard, like the first time you do crow or something, and you. You get in it and you're like, there's no way I can force my body to do this. I'm not. But then you have one little tweak that makes you realize there's a leverage point and it's not very heavy at all. And so that is intrinsic motivation is when you use leverage because it's what you're uniquely skilled to do anyway. And so when I think about my life, if I wanted to just make a ton of money, the most money humanly possible, I probably would have stayed in finance and grown a couple more funds. We managed billions of dollars. We made hundreds of millions of dollars a year. I would continue to do that. I probably wouldn't be on the Internet with a newsletter. And yet I kept coming back to wanting to write because of that intrinsic need. Even though when I left my last partnership, I remember two things so vividly that really pissed me off from my partners. One is, they said, well, if you talk about money online, you might as well call yourself Grant Cardone. I was like, I'm sure he's fine, but fuck that. That's not my style. And two was like, good luck on your little blog. I remember those, like, just sat with me. And then I was like, ugh, if I talk on the Internet, does that mean I'm a guru? And, ugh, if I have this little newsletter, is it always going to be little? Is this a tiny business? Am I playing small? And then I realized, like, it didn't really matter. It was the thing that I wanted to do. And then, lo and behold, I'm a lot bigger now than those individuals and my net worth is bigger. And Yet I no longer feel the need to compare between the two, because I found my leverage point as opposed to grinding through private equity like I think so many people do. And so that's how I measure success now, is if it's not a fuck yes, it's a no. If I don't think that it's intrinsic motivation, I try to question it.

Yes.

And then I redirect, because often I'm wrong.

I wonder you. You. The way you articulate things, like, there's a. There's a fierceness, but there's also, like a. A calmness. And a lot of times when people articulate in that world, they're just kind of, like, stuck in a hardcore masculine phase where they're like, well, this is just how it is. And, like, that's cool. Like, that works somehow. But too much of that, even for us as men and definitely for women, it can exhaust the nervous system so hard. And I remember we even had to, you know, wait for the perfect, divine timing of this podcast because you had said, yeah, I'm actually, like, getting through some health journey on myself. And so it'll be a couple months before we can meet. And I was like, cool. You know, I've been through health journeys too. Who hasn't? So did you ever feel like, that edge of. Of masculine energy where it's. It would at some point serve you so greatly with success, and then other times it would feast upon your nervous system? How did you balance that?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I still feel it today when. If you go look at my feed on Instagram right now, for instance, I was realizing, as I scrolled through it, I was like, huh, I feel a certain way when I'm watching this. And then I realized I wasn't smiling. You know, I was like, this is how you buy a small business. This is what you do. And I was very serious in all of them because typically, I don't script anything. So I'm thinking through, how do I buy a business? What's the easiest way to say this? I'm very left brain as I'm going through it.

Yeah.

And so my team made me this big sign out of wood that just says smile, bitch on it, and it gets lit up right behind me. And so, you know, I think often I slip into the masculine because of my finance background. Sure, it's very standard. But the flip side to that is I remember it all starts kind of with your programming, and then you have to deprogram yourself. And the really successful people are the ones that had some Sort of programming. They usually went through struggle, they had some realization and then they reprogrammed themselves to be who they were, who they actually are intrinsically. And mine was when I came into finance, which I'm not that old, but back in the day, I mean, we had to wear pantyhose and like a suit every day to work at Vanguard. I don't know if we had to wear shoulder pads, but that's a look. And so, so, you know, we, it was very masculine. I was like wearing a, you know, same suit every day with like this pantyhose and a button up shirt and, and I cut my hair really short and I have very thick hair, so I looked like a mushroom.

Why do you have to wear pantyhose.

Mandated by the company Vanguard? Wow, that was 2008 too. That was not too long ago.

That is truly old school. Yeah, continue.

And so I think they got rid of it and like 2008 or 2009, I'm sure the Internet will tell me, but, but so I cut my hair really short and I didn't wear a lot of makeup because I thought that to be successful you had to be kind of masculine. That's what I saw represented. And then at a certain point I realized, wait a second, I got Chad, I got Brad, I got, you know, Tom. Like they all look the same, they're all in the same suits. I have a weird opportunity to be slightly different and just by being who I am. And so then I, you know, it's like, let's grow it out. Let's wear the clothes I would naturally wear. I'm feminine, I'm gonna wear the clothes that, you know, I think are interesting. But even today you'll find, and I'm sure it's the same for, for men in different ways too. You know, if you're too built, let's say, or too stylish, then people might not think that you are a very good tech CEO. They might think, oh, this guy's obviously the sales guy, he's not the engineer. Right. And for a woman, if you're too good looking, let's say, or too voluptuous or, or wear too much makeup, people also often assume the same thing. It's a weird societal index that you have. And so I think you just have to figure out what's your, what's the balance. And I think a lot of people make, make themselves out to be victims out of it. So woe is me, I can't be like this as opposed to what's the game that we have to play and how do I earn the respect that I want but also still be true to who I want to be? Yeah, and you just calibrate it over many, many years. But there were certainly points where, where that was really difficult for me.

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I've always found that when you focus on the the outcome and what you want, a lot of that little stuff floats away. And it might come from the idea that I always go back to context and so when I was first at Goldman, let's say in 2008 and 2009, when the world was sort of collapsing back then, I remember I was the youngest analyst at the time. And I was. There were a few women, but I was probably one of the few women and definitely one of the only, like, female Latinas. And this was like, before diversity was a thing. And now I think there's a lot of toxicity in it. But. But back then, it really wasn't that much of a focus. And I remember struggling with the fact that we never saw the sun. So, like, let's see. So I would have been there for two years, like a year and seven months or something. And I was located in either New York or Chicago. And the weather during the winter months in Chicago in particular, the winter lasts for like, 17 years. Yeah. And you work at Goldman from like 7am Till. And sometimes until 11 at night or 8 or 9 at night. So I didn't see the sun for like, six or seven months. And that was really hard. And you would eat, like, in the cafeteria there, whatever they had. The gym was also located there. So maybe you go to the gym, if you got lucky that day, and you'd sit at your desk and you'd make a ton of calls or you do your PowerPoints and you wouldn't see the sun. And that was probably one of the more difficult times, like, from a health perspective. And when I finally realized we were making good money, but I was like, oh, yeah, it's not worth it. And so I was like, we need to move south, so move to Dallas at the time. And I really do think there's a. There's truth in a couple things. One, almost anybody who's been successful has some version of the. I slept on my couch, I didn't see the sun for seven months. Some version of that.

Yeah.

And so if you want something really badly realizing, all right, let me do a terrible six to 12 months and realize that I'm still going to survive and be strong from that. And then two, awake up from it, that you probably want something slightly different from what you were doing that day and you were working harder and not smarter. But I'm not sure that you can get to that harder, not smarter point without working really dumbly for a while. And I did that.

Yeah, I think everybody's done that. That's created almost anything. There's that struggle phase, almost like, you know, the. The imaginal cells that are created inside of the chrysalis when the caterpillar turns into the butterfly. We kind of have to liquefy sometimes. That shit's hard. It's really. Maybe it's designed that way. Otherwise, literally everybody would be doing it. I think what separates, and I think I've heard you talk about this in some way, what separates truly successful people? And I define success as somebody that has true balance in all those areas. In the Pentagon, you know, someone's bank account could have eight figures in it, but if they're lonely and depressed and sad and their life isn't robust, then is that truly success? I think that the people that are really successful, and I wonder how you feel, they have this essence to them. They have this confidence to them that they have this true mastery, or they're in the process of mastery of those five areas. And they also just have a secret ingredient. I don't exactly know what that secret ingredient is. I wonder how you might explain it. But to me, it feels like it's just perseverance and grit, because without that, literally anything that's hard could knock you down, even if you truly loved it. What do you think about that?

Yeah. Well, one, I think your whole human perspective is really important now. We sort of judge our friendships and the people we determine are going to be partners or people that we choose to do life with by a couple of different things. And one is, at the end of the day, I never really see your bank account, so I want some monetary success there because that tells me that you also have a life view that's similar to mine. Like, I want money so that I can make impact on the world. But also, you know, our closest friends usually are people who are. If they're in a relationship, they think really highly of their significant other. They bring them around. We're not around a lot of people that talk poorly about their significant other. I think that's weird, but that is very normal in finance, for instance.

Interesting.

And especially I found for, like, a lot of the. The men that I'm friends with, you know, I'm like, if you're. If you're not bringing your wife around and you have negative things to say about her ever, we're not friends, not interested. And then. And my husband's very similar, sort of, sort of the same vein. And then the second thing is, my husband and I have this thing we talk about called will they hide us? Which is, you know, during the pandemic when everything was under lockdown and people were crazy, you know, we were sort of laughing about, well, what if, you know, what if people get really nuts and we disagree with everything that they're doing? And who would be our friends that we would hide and who would be the ones that would hide us wow. And. And I think that's a cool thing to ponder because you only have so many moments in the day. So who are the people that you're going to choose to go? They're a level 10 friend as opposed to a level 1 acquaintance. And so we kind of look for people who put themselves out for other people. We also talk about this thing called those who serve and those who like to be served. I think there are a lot of people out there who like to be served. You know, they want to achieve big things, but then they want people to take care of them as opposed to if you see somebody on the side of the road and they have a flat tire, you're going to help them out, not just talk about how you would on a podcast. My husband's better at that than I am. He's very self aware. And so those are the type of humans I want to be around. And also I think, you know, you find it's an Austin a lot more, but it's not that interesting to me to be around people that are one dimensional. So, like, how can you have three or four frames? So if you are previously a fitness trainer and then now you have a focus on podcasting and media and growth, and you also have a focus on spirituality and maybe you have a focus on health. Like, oh, okay, this guy has a tripod over here that's pretty stable, but if you have a singular leg to a tripod and a little wind comes, you're in trouble. Right. And so we look for those whole humans who have multi dimensions to them, because I think they're usually, you know, healthier, happier humans, and that's who I want to surround myself with.

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, as you were speaking that I was like, yes, yeah, I was taking a mental checklist. Like, those are the. Those are the types of people that we love to hang out with too. And also it's like this shared experience where you know that someone's been on a road that you've been on, if they've been doing something that you love for 10 years or even 5 years or more. I tend to resonate more with like other podcasters because they understand the sacrifice that it takes to truly scale, to truly grow. And I wonder for you, like, you know, I even saw in a talk you did with Anthony Pompliano, which was amazing. We'll link that in the show notes. You guys need to watch this. You said, my math teacher in high school told me Helen Keller would be more successful winning an archery contest than Succeeding in finance. At some point you had to just say, yes, I love that I've been successful because of what I was told. By the way, math teachers are assholes. Frank Foogiano, Grossmont High School, 1998. You suck, dude. The way that you call me out in class, like, it literally made me think, like, wow, I hate mathematics because of you. So, teachers, y' all need to be careful. Anyways, going back to Helen Keller. So when you're on stage and you're speaking about that, it seemed like it was a real moment for you. Like, you. You hadn't scripted that. It just came to you. Right? Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I remember him. I won't say his name because I think he's still a teacher out there.

And I'm sure I'm calling out Frank.

Yeah, you should fuck Frank. That's what I have to say. I remember one of my first speeches I ever gave when I was very nervous about public speaking. I was still working in a big corporation. It was before I started my first company or ever invest done anything meaningfully. And I had been asked to give a speech by a friend who was hosting a little event in Chicago at the time. And I think I called it the Armor of Nose. And I haven't thought about it in a long time, but I should revisit it because basically I've have. I have this belief that in order for us to succeed through life, which can feel like a battle, often, that we need to put on an armor. And the armor, in my case, is often the exact opposite of what people think it is. It's often all the no's that I've been told. It's my math teacher that said that. It's my partners that said that. It's exes that feel a certain way, and I don't feel it or wear it in a vengeful manner. I wear it because it's a reminder of all the things that I've been able to overcome over the years. And I think when difficult things happen to you, if you can alter those or alchemize those to be fodder or fuel as opposed to something that brings you down, you can really move forward in a way where nothing really hurts anymore. It's very hard for me now to have something hurt me that somebody says on the Internet. The only time I get upset about something somebody says about me on the Internet is if there's a kernel of truth in it. Yeah. If there's a kernel of truth, I'm like, You know what that title was? A little clickbaity. You know what? They're right. Then it hurts. But if there's no kernel of truth in it and it's just, you know, it's just more noise than I've built up that armor. And so I think. Who was it? It was the Yahoo CEO. No, no, no, it was Reddit. The two CEOs. The CEO of Reddit. I think it was Reddit. Anyway, one of the big tech companies basically went to go get their company acquired by Yahoo or another big tech company, and they called them a rounding error. They said, you will never be as big as we are. You are a rounding error. And so they put up on the wall of their office and that those words, you'll never be anything more than a rounding error. And that drove the company forward. And I think one of the most underutilized tactics for success in life and also in business is a villain. You know, think about a story that you relate to intensely that doesn't have some sort of villain versus hero and underdog story that overcomes. Sure, it doesn't exist. It's the holy trinity of story writing, and we are all characters in our own story. And so whether you lead a company and you create a villain or you create a villain in your own life, it's helpful to push against it doesn't mean you have to do it from a negative place. It just means it can be a little chip on your shoulder, and that chip can be useful.

I mean, you just encapsulated my question so perfectly about what is it perseverance and grit that makes people successful? It's literally a mental reframing from a conscious power of choice that you just make something that's hard work out for you.

Yeah.

And some people could call it spiritually bypassing. I don't agree. I think spiritually bypassing is when you have these people that go, good vibes only, which is the biggest low horseshit I've ever seen. Like, that's spiritual bypassing. There's no such thing as good vibes only. It doesn't fucking exist. But what I, what I do think exists is the agency, the power of choice that you flex in that moment. Like you said when the founders put on the wall the message that they were told when, you know, Helen Keller Cena archery was going to be more advantageous than you being successful in finance or, or even I'm trying to, like, reflect in my own life. Like, I think the math teacher said, like, wow, you really have a hard time Figuring things out, don't you? I think he said something like that. And I'm like, shit, I spent the last 25 years figuring things out pretty well.

Exactly.

So thank you very much for that contrast. You know, the hero's journey, the separation initiation, the hard thing, and then the return with the wisdom.

Totally.

That's what I got from you.

Well, and I think, you know, if you're listening to this now and you're not where you want to be, write down your villain. Write down the 1 liners or 2 liners or 10 liners of what people have said against you, throw it up on a mirror and get after it. And every time you don't want to do the next, sit up to get rid of the extra fat, you don't want, or you don't want to make the next cold call to close the client, that you need to go back at that picture, that human, sit in it for a second and let that be a fuel to you. And then you build up these calluses, and calluses allow you to lift bigger and bigger weight. And so it's not as hard, I think, as people make it out to be.

Or if you're doing yoga and you said if you adjust, also if you breathe. This is why we have like a thousand students in our breathe program. Because without breath work, I don't know where I would be. Like, if I don't remind myself to when things get hard, my physiology shuts down. And when our physiology shuts down, everything else tends to shut down as well. So I wonder, like, from that place of you taking care of yourself and now actually the model that you've created is about free thinkers. The free thinkers that really remove their emotion from. From the rationality of the responsibilities that are coming their way. In order for them to do that, they have to tend to their physicality. Like, do you implement any physical practices when you experience really hard stuff? Do you have a breathwork practice, like, or do you just have the calluses mentally that you've trained over time when the hard stuff comes, that challenge your freedom of thinking.

Sometimes I use sort of the irony complex, which is when something is really hard that I don't want to do, I just do something harder. And so instead of, I don't want to do this, so I'm going to take a bath or a walk or something, I'm like, I don't want to do this, so that means you're going to do this other thing that's even worse. And that works for me. But humans are Funny, right? And so I think every human has the unique calibration that they need. I use. Okay, you don't like this one pain, that means you're gonna do 20. But I think on the flip side, I do a lot of things daily, not necessarily when I'm in a tough moment. I've learned to sit in tough moments and realize that I'm probably about to learn something and do it anyway. And when things are scary, that's probably the exact thing that you need to do. But I do have a practice of every single day. I work out pretty much every single day, even if it's not that intense. I. My husband, for instance, he. He goes hard. He looks like he's about to die. He's sweating in the gym. I mean, he has a 37 pack. I'm not that way. I go, I go hard, but I don't go that hard. And so I do that every single day. And I'm really big on walks. And so quite a few years ago, before I think Steve Jobs had sort of talked about his walking meetings. One of my mentors was an iron man. And actually this was at Vanguard, his name was Rob. And Rob would take our one on one meetings, which we had every other week, and we would walk and talk the whole time. And so he normalized for me really early. I mean, this was 2000 and this was 2008, probably he normalized for me really early. The power of just moving your body when you're thinking and how the. The thing that we do wrong so often now is this. You know, we're sitting in chairs, we're hunched over, we're at a keyboard bored, and we don't sit up outside, get some sun and stroll. And I think often things in life are simple, they're not easy. And we will mistake the fact that they're simple but not easy with the fact that they're hard. They're not. And so I instituted not taking phone calls before 10am or taking meetings before 10am probably like two years before I became my own boss. So I was an employee. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't make a proclamation. But I just scheduled my calendar. So I never took a meeting at that time. And I remember telling one of my colleagues and they were like, there's no way you could do that. How could you ever just, you know, not take phone calls before 10am lo and behold, I did it. I got all my best work in that time. And then I started realizing, oh, I'm going to take at least One meeting a day, walking. And so where in your life do you have more false narratives and can you find somebody else who has the life that you actually would like to mimic and then copy it?

Mm, yeah. Those things you learned, I guess you could say the easier way because you did them and then you didn't receive any rebuke. There wasn't like people saying, why aren't you at the phone at 9:30 like you, you made the choice. And it seemed like it was an almost effortless return on the choice in some way.

Yeah, it usually I try to take a lot of times the path of least resistance to things. So I would find now if I said that I wanted to, to not be on the phone from 3 to 5 in my job, that wouldn't have worked at that time. That was a really busy time. Yes, but in the morning hours I could actually do that. I got in really early before people and, and I would stay later and so that was fine. But I think these days there's so many practices that people have. I just try to like eat relatively clean, work out once a day, you know, do a little bit of walking and add things as they feel good to my life. But everything is about 60% of the time every time.

So I feel like I've heard that in a movie somewhere.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Okay, so let's go back to the emotion and rationality. Because people that are hyper emotional or even hyper vigilant there, there can be a blockage in the pfc, like all the, all the blood drains out of the prefrontal cortex. When some people that have had hyper vigilance or trauma or even TBI or even just in corporate situations where there's teams that aren't being managed effectively and bosses don't know how to coach and just really traumatic experiences. There's the financial freedom, there's the personal freedom, and then there's also the philosophical freedom in order for somebody to truly be free. And you've spoken about this quite a bit like there has to be this base layer of financial intelligence because one could say that they're a free thinker, but if they're in a job they hate, if they're in a relationship they hate, they don't like their body. How free are they? How much of a free thinker are they really when they haven't addressed really what we all signed up for here and that is finance.

Yeah, I think you're right. Surprisingly, the number one thing that usually changes everything else in my opinion, is your body. Like, if you start working out every single day and lifting heavy things and eating a little bit better, you're going to miraculously get richer, have more fun, have better energy, have better friends, have a better network. It's a total tragedy to me that we have so many people who struggle with health overall, because I think that is the biggest limiter on wealth. Because when you don't feel good, it's really hard to go out and do the things you need to.

Go close a deal, go have a financial conversation when you're feeling horrible.

Right? And so. So I almost always start there, just, like, lift something heavy every single day and eat a little bit better than you did the day before. We have something in my, all my businesses called the 1% rule, which basically means everybody, the company is responsible for making the company 1% better every day. So 365 days later, our company's not 365% better, it's thousands of percent better because we have multiple people that work at these companies. And so I try to think about that the same with myself as a human. I don't have to go and work out every single day for an hour immediately. I just need to do, like, 1% better. So that might mean I just, like, increase my step count by 200. And as long as I'm doing that, there's this beautiful thing called compounding, compound investing, compound learning, and compound living. And if you can do those three things, those tiny little changes accumulate to something massive. And, you know, it goes back to that old adage of we really do underestimate how much we can do inside of 3, 5, and 10 years and overestimate how much we can do in one.

I have. Who is the person that said that? I have heard that wisdom so many times, and every time I hear it, I'm like, yes, it's so true.

It's easy to. It's easy to forget. And so we. We also instill, you know, we do the one thing principle, which is basically inside of the company every single week, we have something that's called our rocket ship. And so. And you could do this in your personal life, too, but in business, it's really, really powerful because you, as a leader are like the captain for your. For your ship. And if you steer it off course by just a few degrees, but everybody is rowing by a few degrees off course, you're in trouble pretty quickly.

Yeah.

And so we have. I had this idea one day, I was realizing as we do something called the weekly WhatsApp. So on Mondays, we have A. A presentation I do every Monday for. For my main company that I'm working on now. And in it, it's kind of like, what's going on in the company, what's coming down the pipe? And then a framework. And so my framework for the week was basically, you know, an image of a little kid with a slingshot and a bunch of pebbles. And that's what most of us humans are. We have a to do list that's 57 miles long and it's full of a bunch of pebbles, and we're picking up the slingshot and we're sling him out all day long, and then we're feeling pretty good if we get pretty far down on that to do list. But instead, what you really want in a business and in your life is you want to have, you know, the bazooka. You want to have the grenade launcher, the rocket ship, whatever visual you want where you are standing alongside a bunch of children with pebbles and slingshots, and you have a grenade launcher. And it's unfair. And I always want to play games where I have an unfair advantage. And so the team, each week, it's like, what's the one thing you do that can be your rocket that will disregard all the pebbles thrown by anyone else alongside you? And if you do that each week and you get 1% better every day, you're going to have a really hard time not having massive success.

So what is y'? All? Bazooka. What is your bazooka? And that could be in anything. Like, that could be in if somebody wants to be a speaker or a business owner or even a media person. Like, when you started your channel, which, by the way, your TikTok is at a million people, I'm like, that's amazing. I don't know how people do that beyond just, like, getting after it in a certain way. Did you have a bazooka that allowed you to grow that to that big?

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever read the book who, not how, who's it by? Don't remember. Okay. But it's an incredible book and you probably don't actually have to read it. Here's the summary. The summary is every time you ask yourself a question, how do I do this? How do I get there? Instead, you should ask, who could get me there? A person is always the answer. And so every time in my business, we're stuck. I realized somebody else has the answer to this, and I could beat my head against the wall and try to figure it out myself. Or I could find them. And finding people these days is actually incredibly easy because of social media. Yeah, you could type into Twitter TikTok expert and you're going to find 452 of them. And so my goal in life is always to get to the who. Who is going to make the how irrelevant. And that's what we did with social media. We basically hired experts for each platform and we hired them as consultants. So when I started, I don't like to fund businesses at a deficit. I like the business to make money, day one. I mean, who doesn't? But this is a philosophy I have. I don't like to burn capital. And so I was like, I want to spend the least amount of money possible on this business.

And.

And so I hired consultants. I'd pay them for a couple hours here and there to tell me that their 10,000 hours distilled. And so I did that for TikTok, I did that for Instagram, I did that for Twitter. And then every quarter, we do it again for all of those different platforms. And we do it for marketing, if we're into that. And we're doing it for webinars, if we're doing that. And we're doing it for buying car washes if we're doing that. Yeah, always who.

But your ultimate goal isn't just to create this empire where you're seen as the oracle who's bringing financial wisdom to the world. Or is it? Because when I look at your programs and by the way, we'll link it right now, where can people get the programs to purchase for financial intelligence and business purchasing and contrary and thinking co.

Is where everything is. And sign up for the free newsletter first. Like, get into the community and the idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then see if you like the idea of buying boring businesses or running, you know, your own finances in a different way. But there's plenty of stuff that we do for free.

Cool. Because the reason I asked you that is going back to this, this Free thinkers to remove emotion from rationality. In order to be free, we have to have that financial chasm filled that has to be really secure for us. And I wish that if I could go back and change one thing, I would plant a little seed in my pocket in my young 20s and I would say, go and learn about financial intelligence. It's really important. And it's not important because you're going to become rich one day, even though I know you are, you are going to be able to help other people. People that is the core of it. All because, yes, I don't think that I'm here to judge anyone that wants to be wealthy, that maybe doesn't want to share, that doesn't deserve my judgment, but I sure do resonate. And it makes sense to me that if you have done the work to be financially free yourself, which then can come as you talk about the personal and the philosophical freedom, then you can truly be of service to others. And this is like the crowning gem of our conversation here, the Maslow's triangle. The way that you've done this, this three tier explanation of true freedom, when did that first start to come online for you here? Because I assume that's why you do what you do now. You don't have to. Yeah, you're in a place financially where you don't have to do anything you're doing at all. So why are you actually doing in the first place? Like, what does this mean to you?

Well, I started being public in 2020 during the pandemic. And I did it because I saw that we were losing a lot of freedoms and I was concerned that there's this truth about government that is once they take something away, they rarely give it back. And so I was worried about that. And so I started a newsletter with my friends to share my ideas on the subject. And I said, I want to actually have a conversation. I'm not trying to unilaterally speak at you, but we can't get together, we can't communicate in the way that we used to. And so I want to long form my thoughts and then I want us to have a communication on this. And that newsletter was called Contrarian Thinking. And what I quickly realized is that people do not want to be told how to change their mental frameworks. We think that we think really well. And so when I come across a problem like that, what I really wanted to do is I want to push upon people's ideas and I wanted them to see that some of them were inelastic and they were really breakable and their ideas were not their ideas. There were other ideas planted in their heads and left there, but I wasn't getting what I wanted from it. So then I thought about the Trojan horse story from Troy and I thought about how they presented this huge wooden horse right, to the city of Troy as a gift. But inside of it was something else. Right. It was soldiers that ended up sacking the city. And so not for a nefarious reason, but my idea was, what does everybody want? What is the gift that everybody wants? It's Money. Every nobody, when you talk to them, says, I want less of it. I wish I had less. Keep it.

Right, right, right.

We all want more. We want more of it.

Yeah.

And so I realized, okay, I know a lot about money. Why don't I make money the Trojan horse to thinking? And if I can get people to get skin in the game to actually understand that there's a lot of abundance with money. And once you have things, you tend to want to protect them. And a lot of people, I think, have this feeling today that they don't have stuff, that they won't have an ability to get it, that life's unfair. And so we have to take it from other people or we have to give up our freedoms to somebody on high because we can never do it by ourselves because we're so pathetic and we're victims. I thought, wait a second, if we could change that mentality through making people financially free, then we could actually get them to think for themselves. And that was the idea is to build an army of people who are so financially sovereign that they can make decisions based on their own self interest and they can make generous decisions because they're not acting out of a place of scarcity. And that's the goal. That's the goal.

I love the Trojan horse analogy. I use that all the time. That super resonates and I love it because many times the thing that people want is unconscious. They say consciously that they want this, but really, like the Trojan horse, you have to give their conscious mind what they think they want. But what their soul needs or what the deepest part of them actually needs to be free is probably wrapped inside of what they think they want. So I love that. And I wonder too, like from the philosophical lens, if there is a way for everyone on earth to be financially free. How could, how could conscious capitalism, I've never thought of this before. How could conscious capitalism exist if everyone in the world was financially free?

I think everyone in the world will be financially free one day. I'm actually a very big human. I'm very positive on the future of humanity. And I think that we are moving at a trajectory that most people don't want us to know, but is incredibly positive. I mean, if you look at the percentage of the world that is still in extreme poverty and poverty, we're at the lowest level in all of human existence. If you look at the amount of people that capitalism has pulled out of poverty, as measured by countries that have actually instituted it, as opposed to taking it away, the numbers don't Lie. Now, you know, I think it was Churchill who said that, you know, democracy is the best form of government, is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. And I think capitalism is the same thing. It's the worst form of economics, except for all the rest. And so there are huge issues with it, but it is the only one that we can categorically say continues to lift people out of poverty. And. And so I think what we actually need to do is we need to export more people into ownership, which is what we're trying to do. It's four magical words. Skin in the Game. Skin in the Game. And if you haven't read Nicholas Nassim Taleb, his book is thick and hard to read. It's called Skin in the Game, and it's very dense but beautifully written. But he talks about this. The biggest issues we have in our society are because people do not have skin in the game. When an elected official makes a change from a governmental perspective, they don't get fired, they don't have to manage a declining P and L, nor see the.

Results of their decision.

Exactly. There's no positive for them, really. There's no negative.

Yeah.

So they act at will without skin in the game. And I think for a lot of humans, they're acting without skin in the game because they don't have equity, they don't have upside in their job. You know, they. They don't own any assets, they don't have things to lose. And so that becomes the tragedy of the commons, which is when everybody's responsible for somebody, nobody takes care of it. And so that's, I think, why conscious capitalism will work, is if we can get more people slices of ownership. Now, there's a flip side to that, which is we're seeing more and more concentration of wealth across almost every sector, industry and country. So fewer and fewer people are having a bigger, bigger pie. Simultaneously to that happening, more and more people are getting lifted out of poverty. So what we want to be really careful of is we don't want to say because so few people have so much, we want to bring everybody else down because that brings down the lower line, too. We don't want to actually do that, but what we do want to figure out is how can we get more people to have knowledge, which I think is the great equalizer.

Oh, wow, that's. So that was a good cliffhanger right there. I thought you were going to keep going. So when people want to access this knowledge, the newsletter link, you give that one more time for the newsletter?

Yes. It's contrarian thinking Co.

Okay, that's on the screen right now. It's in the show notes. And I cannot let you go unless we go a little bit deeper into Ma's life. Because I studied Maslow for quite some time. There's actually been in the past few years a lot of other behavioral psychologists that have come against his work. And now there, there, there are people like the Doohiggs or the BJ Foggs that are. That are wanting to instill different models of consciousness and different models of hierarchy. But how did you first learn about that? Because I've heard you speak about that and I love it. At the bottom of it all, we have to eat food, we have to be safe, we have to, we have to have shelter. Then we can procreate. Then we can be of service to others. Then we can be more egalitarian and help out the tribe. I do think that most people, unfortunately, are locked in that base layer. They're right there at the root sacral chakra. They don't have the empowerment of financial education or really just literacy in general. And it does make me sad, but it also makes me excited because there's potential. So go into that a little bit, how you found Maslow's work and how you put that maybe into your programs.

Yeah, I, I do think if you want to succeed in life, one of the most powerful things you can do is read great thinkers. And so I was actually considering to go pre law and taking a bunch of courses.

I'm so glad you're not a lawyer.

Yeah, me too. Come on.

Come on, both of us.

Very glad.

That would not have been as much fun.

No, it wouldn't have. Although I might have been an exceptional debater. Maybe I'd be really.

You could throw down with the debating.

Yeah. Yeah. But I don't love it. So I ended up reading a bunch of what I would call great thinkers back in the day.

Yeah.

And. And Maslow was one of them. And I think the reason that one stuck with me is because it's so often disused. You know, everybody knows what it is and yet nobody believes it to be true. Everybody thinks that you can go self actualize while you're trying to pay your rent. No, you can't. And so it's okay that you can't too, you know.

Yeah.

It means that you can work towards that first level. We want to go from the, from floor number one to floor number 57 without connecting the stairs. And so it's human nature. But I think the second that you realize, oh, wait, I'm at level one, I'm going to get to level two, and I'm going to keep motoring up. And you have that belief that you can, everything changes.

Yes.

But most people don't think that you have to progress that way and that it's okay. I also find social media makes this worse for us because we're all a nation of pretenders posing with selfies and filters on top of our images, pretending to be something slightly different than what we are. And we don't think it's okay for us to be at a lower level. And I've certainly fallen prey to this myself. It's why you'll never see me putting cars and houses and planes and nice stuff on there. I like some nice stuff. We have some nice stuff. But actually, that's no measure of success to me whatsoever. And I think it's perfectly okay for you to be at the bottom of the rung from Maslow's perspective, but have a keen mind working its way up.

So then from that space, if somebody does resonate at the bottom and they're like, yep, that's me, I'm there. Is there an on ramp? I mean, that's a whole podcast. We don't have time to go into the depth of that. But is there an on ramp that might be a flick of a light switch? You know, in other words, said it's simple, but it's not easy for them to start. It's simple for them to start, but it's not easy. Is it really just the way that people save money or is it the way that they invest, or is it the way that they do? Another ingredient. Or is it all of it together?

Yeah. No, I think it always starts with learn, Then you earn, then you invest. So the first thing I tell people to do is kind of what we talked about in the beginning, which is you want to get around the right people, you want to learn from the right people. You want. There's a ton of free resources on the Internet these days. You want to consume it all until you feel so stuffed full you can barely handle it. And so you start with learning. That's. You know, I always talk about my first a hundred K that I made. I made it by working in a corporation. It was just from spending a bunch of time and skills on myself.

Yeah.

So your skill stacking to start, then you start optimizing for earnings. So negotiating your salary every year, if not biannually, if you can, getting other side income if you can you want to optimize as much for making money after that second phase of originally building a foundation of learning and then you can invest and have like real wealth. But I think where a lot of people go sideways is they hear about passive income and zero work for $5 million and that's not really real. Yeah, you can only all of that is real once you've learned and you've increased your earnings and then you figured out how to invest. But I would skip the figuring out how to invest early and capitalize a ton on self discovery, skill, stacking and increasing your earnings first, bar none.

Yeah, that seems like extremely practical starting out advice. And that is exactly. If I were to go back, I would do that first. I fell into the trap. And as we say goodbye, I'm cautioning everyone to not fall into this trap. And that is there is no, no spiritual shortcuts. There are no financial shortcuts. Look what happened in crypto where everybody got completely liquidated and destroyed. Many people here in Austin that had to move. And so anytime I ever feel that nervous system response where I make an emotional decision, I'm cautious of that now. And I wonder just from that emotional perspective as we say goodbye, like for people that are dealing with emotions in them around money that are negative, or emotions around gambling, or emotions around money that just purely aren't healthy, could you give them any parting guidance as to how to manage their emotions around money? Because money has become for many people, such an emotional buoy, if you will.

Yeah, I think that's usually because people are being speculators, not investors. And so if you think about the Gold rush, it wasn't the people who went out west to speculate on the price of gold and go try to dig it out of riverbeds that made a lot of money. It was the people who built really boring small businesses around them.

They sold the picks and shovels.

They sold the picks and shovels. And so anytime somebody comes to you with this belief, it's called the last idiot effect. So anytime somebody comes and says, you got in early and somebody else is going to come in after you and pay a higher price for it, and that's where your value comes. That's called speculation. And that is what creates that, that feeling to money. Like, I got it and it's quick and I gotta get it now and then I might lose it, but this other person's gonna do it, that we don't wanna do, that I categorically don't do it. It's why I never did NFTs. It's why I never played around with crypt, with crypto. It's why I've never told people to do day trading. It's why I've never told people to actually trade stocks at all because that is speculation and it's really hard to do well. And anybody who's actually done it at a very professional level will tell you that you don't make real money that way. You make money by playing long term games with long term people. And so what would that look like? It would look like I'm not going to buy Bitcoin because it will appreciate long term. I might buy Bitcoin because I believe in the underlying value that it is a protected asset that can't be inflated. So I will put some, some cash in it for that use case and instead of going in on this next hot stock that I think is amazing, I might buy a multifamily property with a couple of friends all pooled together that we think is going to not only appreciate in value but cash flow over a long period of time. You want to buy things that have real intrinsic use to them. And you know, crypto trading or day trading stocks is just the last idiot theory. It's I'm smarter than you, I got in before you did and I'm going to sell it to you and you're going to then eventually be the one that's holding the bag. We don't want to play zero sum games. We want to play games where everybody can win.

And it's funny because someone watching or listening is like, well, you don't understand, like I can actually go in there and make money. I'm not the last idiot. Which maybe that's where the last idiot.

Says well, and do you want to be that person?

No, no. I, I think there is, there is something to be said about like, you know, we have a mutual friend that introduced us and he does a lot of investing in crypto and I wonder what he might, he might the table with us and you know, challenge you in a respectful way. Right?

Yeah.

But the long term game is the only game that if you look back on charts and data, it's the only game that's won. It's the only one. All these flash in the pan ideas of anything. I had a company just offer me some equity and I was like, okay, I haven't really gone down this route before. So I'm in that phase of like doing the diligence and really figuring out like, is this the right fit and Getting all my friends to give me advice and getting people that have done equity deals before to give me advice, rather than me feeling that emotion and just being the last idiot, which I've. Which I've never heard.

Can I give you a piece of advice?

Let's go.

So if you're going to do an equity deal, here's what I would say. Mo like, 99 out of 100 companies are never going to exit for a serious multiple, which means that you shouldn't take equity in lieu of cash. And so if that's true, then you. But you want to have some upside. I always recommend distributing equity or equity with a cash payment. What that means is you don't ever want to be left holding the bag where you think, God, I'm going to put in all this work. And my expectations weren't met with what I thought I was going to get out of it.

Yeah.

And so instead of taking a straight equity play, maybe I'm going to. We don't have to talk about what the deal is, but let's say you were going to consult with a, you know, with a nootropics company, and you were also going to talk about it on the podcast, and they said, okay, you're going to get 10% equity. For that. I would insert, instead, say, I want to take a percentage of sales in perpetuity. So forever, for those people that I bring on, I want to take a percentage of their lifetime value with you, and I want to take a little bit less equity. I'll take 7% and I want 3% cash payments that come to me monthly from an affiliate deal. Or I might say my typical sponsorship fee for my podcast is $5,000 a podcast. I instead will do $2,000 for you and that 7% of equity. But then no matter what, you're getting some payment now.

Sure.

For the work that you're doing, because the founders take payment for the work that they're doing. You just want to make sure that you don't get stuck sort of with this idea of selling that I think has been falsely sold to all of us. It typically won't happen, and it'll be okay as long as you take cash along the way.

And it's 99% that don't make it.

Oh, it's more than that. 100%.

What do you think that is?

Well, because if you think about it, why do I think that is? Well, first of all, just most companies fail, period. The, you know, the, the failure rate of a company that hasn't done A million dollars in sales is basically 100%. The failure rate of any company over any time period is 100%, because very few companies last forever. And so I think it's just a natural cycle that happens. And then specifically for venture capital, if you think about how the venture capital industry is actually really incredibly small, and those are the companies that actually get sold for big enough multiples for the equity to matter. And then on top of it, you have a lot of. This is a little bit more technical, but you have dilution. Right. So if you take 10% of the company now, but the company has to raise more money because most companies sell something.

Yes.

And then get paid later, your shares get diluted. So then your 10% is actually only worth 5%. And then if most companies, most small businesses that aren't tech or VC backed sell for anywhere from 2 to 5x, so 2 to 5x profits, not revenue, that means that usually the price that they pay that they raise capital at is too high for the price that they will sell at. And so, you know, one of the fun games for this is for you to really think about. If we take that idea of sponsorship, let's say, for you to think about. All right, I charge $5,000 for podcasts I have. I don't know, I'm just going to make this very easy. Four podcasts a month. And so that means that I only have those four slots at 5k. So if I gave two of them to this company because of this equity that I'm going to get, I'm out 10k times 12. That's $120,000 a year. Right. And I might also mention them on my Instagram stories. If I was going to sell that space, that might be another 500. So let's, let's round out and say that's $130,000 a year times the typical length of a company to exit. And private equity is five to seven years. So now we're talking about 600, 700, $800,000 worth of revenue that you would have gotten if you had just taken it as a straight up sponsorship. So then you do that number and you say, and also I had to wait five or seven years, which means inflation happened on that. That money and time value of money, meaning a dollar today is worth much less seven years from now. And so that 800k is now like a million dollars. So unless they're offering you a million dollars in equity day one, for a company that is reasonably valued at a million dollars, you're probably off with the equity amount. And now the founder is going to say to you, what the fuck? A million dollars? You out of your goddamn mind? You're going to talk about me on a few sponsorships, but if you have a mechanism to say, this is just the math. Here's how I'm thinking about this. And so, yeah, I could take some risk. I could take only $200,000 in value from you, but I gotta take some of it up front because time value of money, the risk level of a company like this, and the fact that I'm taking a huge opportunity cost off the table by not being able to talk about my stuff too. And so I like creating models like that that tell me realistically how much am I gonna spend and what could my upside be.

And I'm sure this is why people pay you to consult for them and negotiate deals. Have you ever been a hired gun where a company pays you to negotiate a deal?

I don't do a lot of one on one consulting, but I have done it with like some big private equity funds that I sit on the board of.

Yes. And yet you still choose, you still choose to meet people where they are through a media channel. There's got to be some kind of emotional, spiritual essence in there. I've been sussing it out on the whole conversation. What is it? As we say goodbye, what is it really like? What are you really trying to achieve here with this?

I think it's a really selfish pursuit, actually. I really like it.

I like it just like the feeling of it.

Yeah, I think it's. I think it's really fun to be able to explain these difficult concepts to people. It comes back to like, were you born to be a storyteller or not? And I think the fact that I went to journalism says that I probably was. And so this is a way to do it. But it's always a fine line. Where I felt myself offline sometimes is. So what I just walked you through would, would tank as an Instagram reel. Right. It's like slightly too technical.

Yes.

And if I did a full YouTube video where we broke down exactly what your deal should look like, it also wouldn't do that well. And so we're trying to figure out what are the ways. That's why we have communities that people buy into with skin in the game and invest in. Because inside of there I'm like, you guys paid to get smart. And so we're going to make it smart and really technical. But for most people, I'm just going to make It a lot easier for them to believe the fact that it's not all that hard. I got really pissed the other day because this guy on YouTube did this video. And I talked about this one laundromat deal I did. And this guy, I just get mad thinking about it. This guy.

Does that mean there's a kernel of truth?

Well, this is, this is the question. Okay, so. So he basically was breaking down one of my Laundromat videos and saying that it wasn't correct and here's why. And it was actually a bad deal. And he walked through the whole thing. His video was like, I don't know, let's call it 20 or 30 minutes. And mine was 10. And so, you know, I watched it because I always want to make sure that did we, were we wrong on something? And if we're wrong, then we got to own that publicly. That's a rule. And but as I was listening to it, I was like, gosh, you know what? I realize it's so easy to tell people why something won't work. It's so easy to tell people why they can't. And it's really hard to get people to believe that they can. That's actually really, really hard. It's very easy to say, just take this little pill. And that's the only way that you're not going to be depressed, not you're capable. And there's these other tools that we can have. Our whole society wants to tell you you can't. And I just have to remember that my mission is to tell people that they can. And that that might mean that it's not going to be a 37 minute, really high level video to get the masses in. But we have 600,000 people considering that they might be a business owner watching that video. And then my job is to shepherd them if they decide to actually do it and make it very tactical for how to get there. But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna over sophisticate the message so that people like that can feel like, oh no, we've done this in a way where, you know, it's very professional and we're wearing our suit and everything and we're going through every single number. No, I'm going to get people's attention on it and then I'm going to take them really tactically. And so that's where my alignment gets off sometimes is because where I think is the funnest is teaching people to believe in themselves. And then we get into the tactics and oftentimes people that aren't in the arena want to tell you why what you're talking about is impossible. And then you have to backtrack and say, I got a PhD, I got an MBA, you know, I've done more deals than you've ever even looked at and like, let's play. And so that I think is the mission that I'm on right now is what's the balance between how technical we can get people and leveling people up and getting as many people under the roof as possible. It's hard.

It's real good. Cody, how do you define wellness? You know, it's a question I've asked almost 600 something times now. All this financial literacy is such a huge part of it. You know, it's like the top of the roof. Yeah, but on a real level, like in the deepest part of you, however, that you is going to manifest the rest of your life. You know, imagine yourself 20, 30, 40 years from now. How might you answer this question that I'm about to ask you? What is a life well lived? What is wellness? How would you define a well lived life? The essence of that.

I want my obituary to be pretty interesting. And so I think if I think about a well lived life, it's what's written on the tombstone, what's read in the obituary. Did I do something that 80 year old Cody would be proud of? You know what am I doing something right now that 13 year old Cody would think was pretty cool too? And it tends to be this sort of belief in like the actions that I've taken, the risks I've taken, the adventures. Who was it? It was Hunter S. Thompson who said like when I show up at the pearly gates, I want to show up bruised, battered and breathing heavy and say, what a ride. And so that to me is a well lived life.

Amazing. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

This was a well rounded financial conversation, a lot of financial conversations. They're very heady and I feel like we really explored the gamut of this wheel about what life really is. So thank you for showing up that way.

Same. I know you let me give you live advice on air and we got to talk about spirituality.

I have nothing to hide, y'. All. And I'll tell you who the company is once we do it. How about that?

Yeah.

Okay. So until Cody and I see you on another episode possibly 20 years from now where she can validate what she just shared, we're both wishing you love and wellness. We'll see you next week.

It.