Codie Sanchez: This is How You Get Rich off Your Normal Salary! (Use THIS Easy Formula to Build REAL Wealth NOW)

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If you don't understand money, you're never going to make more of it because understanding money is like speaking a language.

How are you going to speak to somebody in Spanish and communicate and win at that relationship if you guys don't speak the same language?

So I want people to speak the language of money.

Let me tell you like one way to know if you're financially literate today.

Do you really understand the difference between debit and credit cards and why you should really never be using debit cards?

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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed.

Today's guest was one of your favorites of the last 12 months.

Her episode blew up on audio, crushed it on video, and I'm so excited to have have her back because the words you used to describe her were, this is so practical.

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This is so easy.

Thank you.

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That's all I saw in the comments.

We had to bring her back and we're so lucky that we could.

I'm speaking about the one, the only Cody Sanchez, entrepreneur, investor, founder of Contrarian Thinking, a platform that helps people achieve financial freedom by acquiring overlooked cash-flowing businesses.

Formerly a journalist and Wall Street investor, Cody now leads a global community focused on ownership, unconventional investing, and thinking differently about money.

Through her platforms, including the best-selling book, Main Street Millionaire, if you don't have a copy, go and grab one.

Cody has built a community of over 4 million people, teaching them how to think critically, invest wisely, and own their financial future.

Please welcome back to On Purpose, Cody Sanchez.

I'm so excited to be here.

Cody, it's great to have you back.

And you know what's really fun is when you met someone, you hit it off, and then you're hanging out again.

It just feels like normal and easy and all the rest of it.

I want to start with something that I think everything, everyone's thinking about.

And I'm fascinated by it because a lot of us start to believe the media.

And we read articles, we see the news, we see headlines, and we assume that now is not a great time to make money.

And we keep saying things like, when the market's better, when the market shifts, it's a terrible time to buy property.

It's a terrible time.

And the funny thing is, that rhetoric just continues.

So

what should people think about right now when it comes to money?

Yeah.

Well, first, I think you got to be honest about the fact that it's hard out there and that it's real.

Like all the things that you're feeling about money and finance right now are real.

Wages have been the same, really, since, you know, you and I were born.

It hasn't really increased.

Really?

Yeah, I mean, you know, if you go back and you go to, let's say back to Dave Ramsey's days, who is a friend and I think highly of, but if you go back to Dave Ramsey, when Dave was working, he would tell you today that you should buy a house.

That's the number one thing that you should do.

You should own a house.

You should own your property.

Well, the problem with that today is that our wages have increased 2X in his lifetime, but housing prices, well, they've increased by 9X in his lifetime.

And so

you cannot really afford the same things that the previous generation thought of as totally normal.

And so their construct might not work for our generation.

So one, I think it's important to realize that it is hard out there.

Second, though, is I think we got to go back to what Warren Buffett says, which is be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.

And it's really hard to do.

It hurts in our gut.

But today, all around us, things are starting to go on sale.

And what we have to try to do is figure out during this time period, how can I start to get a little piece of it?

Housing prices in Austin are down 30%.

This is really just since I bought a house a year ago.

And so there is actually sales happening all around us.

And I think we got to be prepared for it.

But before we can buy things, we got to have enough money to do it.

And we got to kind of know a little bit about money in order to make more of it.

So I think we should talk about too, yes, it's hard right now.

Yes, things are in sale.

You are not crazy, but you can make money in any market.

And one of my favorite quotes from Baron Rothschild, one of the richest guys in the world, you know, creator of industry in the U.S.

is buy when there's blood in the streets, even and especially when the blood is your own.

And so that is a hard visual way to realize that actually real money is made when the market feels tough.

Yeah.

So actually right now, even though the market is tough, we shouldn't be discouraged and waiting for the market to be good.

This should be the time that we actually double down and listen to your advice.

Yeah, I mean, think about it.

I was looking at an NFT yesterday that was sold for $60 million in the height of the nft land it is worth 19 000 today 60 million to 19 000.

it felt good during that time didn't it everybody was like we're making money we've got all this extra stuff but what actually happened is we bought things at overpriced assets and now we're left with assets that are underpriced the opposite happens in this market and so right now is the time i think to put up your little spidey sense and start saying well everybody else is panicking where can i start to make some smart moves because there's always money and opportunities but definitely you want to buy when things are on sale.

Should people even be dreaming or thinking about wanting to own a home anymore?

I think that owning a home as an investment right now today is mathematically not a smart decision.

For the first time in my lifetime, the numbers say that homes today, well, you have an interest rate of 5% to 8%,

you have a 3 million home shortage in the U.S., you have flat wages, and you have this increase of home prices.

The math just isn't mathin.

And so today, I don't think you should feel like you're not an adult.

You don't live the American dream.

You're a failure if you don't buy a house.

You might actually just be really financially intelligent, rent, and go negotiate your rent prices right now, by the way, because there's a lot of excess in the market and they want to keep you.

And you might actually be making an incredibly smart financial decision.

And so don't let people make you feel bad if you're not doing what the American dream adult thing used to be.

The market's changed.

Yeah, you've already shared some really powerful advice for right now.

Like even the idea that now's a great time to go and negotiate your rent, now's a great time to go and think about finding places to potentially purchase property if you are.

Yep.

What should be people thinking about doing right now when it comes to making money that you couldn't have been doing a year ago that's very different now?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Well, first, what I would think about today is I think you got to first understand some like baseline financial literacy.

And you and I were talking about this.

You know, they say the average American reads at a sixth grade reading level.

They say the average American actually understands finances at about a high school level.

So we're taught, and you remember this in high school, we're taught all the way up to like budgeting.

Like back in our day, probably the kids don't do it this way anymore, but you used to have checkbooks, right?

Now everybody knows how old I was and you have to like balance your checkbook.

And how do you do that?

A little ledger.

That's actually where we're capped.

And so I think first what I want people to do is realize that if you don't understand money, you're never going to make more of it because understanding money is like speaking a language.

How are you going to speak to somebody in Spanish and communicate and win at that relationship if you guys don't speak the same language?

It's very hard, right?

So I want people to speak the language of money.

So I think about this in like small ways.

Let me tell you like one way to know if you're financially literate today.

One way might be, do you really understand the difference between debit and credit cards and why you should really never be using debit cards.

Everybody talks these days about how credit cards are bad, right?

Well, credit cards are bad if you don't pay off your payment every single month, if you allow big interest rates to stockpile, and if you use it as a, I want things as opposed to I need things.

Credit cards are bad.

But debit cards are actually worse.

They don't allow you to build credit and credit, good credit in this country is the underpinning of wealth.

Debit cards do not allow that.

They also don't give you any points or perks or cash back.

And then you're less protected actually with a debit card.

So if somebody steals your debit card and goes and charges things, the bank goes, I don't know, that's your money.

Don't really care.

If you go and you charge a bunch of things on your credit card and there's fraud, what do you do?

Two clicks, they erase it, right?

They ship you a new card.

And so I think this generation was so tormented by credit is bad, debt is bad, don't have it.

Well, the people who are the richest in the world, they all have some debt, just good debt as opposed to bad debt.

So where I want you guys to start is actually before you even think of making more money, let's understand the language of money, right?

I'm so glad we're staying there.

It's brilliant.

And I had personal experience of this.

I grew up in London where it's not not the same setup.

Similar, but it's not exactly the same.

The whole structure is not based on credit as strongly.

And I was trained to believe you only use a debit card.

And so I used that my whole life.

When I came to the US and I moved here, for the first year I lived here, I only lived and I didn't have a lot of money.

So I was living just on a debit card.

And then when I wanted to finally get a car, I was thinking about, you know, having an apartment, whatever it was, I couldn't get anything because I had no credit score.

My credit score was like non-existent and it hit me like a ton of bricks because I couldn't believe it that I'd finally done good with my life, but I couldn't actually exercise any of it.

So, walk me through the myths about credit cards and debit cards that people can solve right now.

Is there a special credit card they should be getting?

Is there one that's better?

What should they be looking out for?

What does APR mean?

You know, walk me through the hidden things behind credit cards that we all feel stupid about when you see an ad and you're like, I have no idea what that means.

Yeah, it's so true.

You know, I had an employee, actually, Christian, who's in from the UK too.

And we were ridiculing him mercally, actually, because he only had a debit card to pay for things.

And I didn't even know that the UK was completely different.

No, there are credit cards, but it's not.

Because he said it's not normal.

I was like, you're a 28-year-old man and you don't have a credit card.

And he was like, you need to travel more, Cody.

And I was like, sorry.

But then we got him a credit card so he could start establishing credit here.

But moral of the story is, here's, I think, the couple first steps to to financial freedom you know if you want to set up your kid for success you actually want them to get a credit card really early doesn't so much matter what type of credit card i'm not like the points guy where i like to operationalize and optimize every aspect of a credit card i think that is almost more work than trying to make more money But I think if you go from any of the major banks, there are a lot of rules around credit cards.

So they're really not allowed to mess with you so much on interest rates.

There's a lot of protections for consumers.

So don't stress too much about which one.

Which one seems like it has some nice perks for you?

And you you can get the most amount of money that you need.

Cool.

So that's step one.

And if you can do that for your kids when they're in high school, they will actually have more access to the first pillar, I think, of wealth, which is resources.

We all know what's the saying, takes money to make money, right?

And so if you come from nothing, well, you can start actually building up your resource pile just from your credit, which you can start at a young age.

You don't need to be rich to do that.

And then after resources, you pile on knowledge, right?

The rich pass on how to invest.

We need to start doing that to our next generation.

Then you pass on wealth accumulation.

That's where you start to pile on your own money.

And then finally, you pass on, you know, the ability to invest to continue to move cyclically your money around and make it work for you.

But that's where I would start.

It's like you start with a credit card.

You have a debit card, really, just because you want to get cash out sometimes if you're going to the club and buying drinks or whatever people do these days that are cooler than me.

And that's where I would start.

And then I would move to this next level of, okay, if I have some credit,

now we need to focus on earning.

So how do I make more money?

And but I think most people skip that first step because credit is scary.

And like, listen, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner, obviously very famous dude, but he has a line I love, which is, men only go broke by three things.

And it's whiskey, women, and leverage.

And leverage means debt, right?

Warren Buffett gave him a little adage to it at the end.

And he goes, I think actually what my friend meant to say was it's really just the last one.

It's really just leverage.

And Warren Buffett, one of the richest guys in the world, said he doesn't like debt.

But here's the problem, Jay.

He's highly levered.

He has a massive amount of debt.

Why?

Because he has debt on assets and other people's things as opposed to personal guarantees on his own.

He's not mortgaging his house to buy these companies.

He is raising debt.

on a company in order for it to make more money.

And so if you don't understand all that right now, that's where I want you to dive in a little bit more.

Maybe you can start with a debit and credit card.

Yeah, no, I think it's so important to understand debt.

And you see that when you see a celebrity buy a new home and you realize they borrowed to buy that home, they didn't buy it in cash, even though they have the cash and it's available to them.

And I think that idea is so foreign.

So if someone's thinking about starting a business right now or wants to grow a business and the number one thing you hear is, well, I don't have any money.

I don't know how to fund it.

How much do you actually need to start a business?

I think you never suffer from a lack of money.

You suffer from a lack of knowledge knowledge on how to get money.

The richest people in the world, they never use their own money entirely to buy things.

And if you can like sit on that for a second and let that sit in, then I think you can really open up your eyes to the fact that all around you, there are deals right now and there is money that is waiting for the actually rarest of things, which is a human who wants to work really hard and has a good idea where to put the money.

And so you actually don't need money to start a business.

I don't think you need it at all.

What you need is some access to it.

And so, you know, next week I'm going to the SBA, the Small Business Administration, and they just ran out all of these new programs for new business owners where they will, one, do grants where they give you money.

A grant means you take this money, you don't have to give it back.

The government is going to give it to you, maybe because you're a minority or a woman or have a core needs business.

They also do a ton of loans.

You know, they'll loan you 90% of the purchase price of a business if you need one.

And all around us are also people who want to invest.

And so like, there's a website called percent.

And on percent, if you have a small business and you need some debt for a small business, you can actually get debt from your small business through a website.

But I think the most important part is not just tactically.

It's like, can I change my belief to believe that money is all around me?

And I do not need to have only my own money in order to get rich.

And I want more people to think that way.

It's hard.

I get it.

Do you think everyone needs a side hustle right now?

I have two thoughts.

One, I do not believe that you have to go all in on the thing that you want to do in life.

I think that is told to you by people who had survivorship bias, like it worked for me, so it's going to work for you.

And what do we know to be true?

90% of startups fail over any five-year period.

And so I actually think that the way to never have risk in building a business, if you want to do a startup and have no risk, I think you keep your job.

You do really well at that job while you're doing it.

You use your salary to fund your side hustle or your next venture.

You keep moving forward on it until your side hustle matches the cost of living that you have, your cash flow.

And then you leave your business or your job to go start your business once you have enough money from inflow of the business.

And I think we've told too many people and idealized this idea of entrepreneurship when in fact, you know, I had three or four businesses fail.

If I had just left my job that paid me good money, I would have been sleeping on somebody's couch.

And so you can have a side hustle, but please keep it on the side for a minute until you make sure it's not just a passion project it is a profit project yes yeah and and i think that's the smartest wisest advice i'm in the same boat when i started doing what i do today i had a full-time job it didn't pay great but it paid enough to get by it paid my bills it means it means i wasn't creating from a place of stress and when you're creating something new from just stress

it can be quite dehydrating.

Now, sometimes stress can be the greatest motivator.

It can propel you.

It can be your launch pad, but you've got to kind of get it right.

Too much stress and you fall apart.

Too little stress and you stay in the golden handcuffs.

That's right.

And I think that's where I see a lot of people stuck today is I meet a lot of people who I feel have tied on the golden handcuffs, but not using that as the investment.

So it's like, I want to have a lifestyle with the money I make.

I don't want to use it to build a new life.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

Well, I mean, and you know, there's a lot of data out there that actually backs that there was a study that was done on should you leave your job to do a startup or should you stay in your job and do your startup at the side.

And what the data tells us from hundreds of individuals that went through this is you have a 33% higher likelihood of your startup succeeding if you have an income source while you're doing it, because we make better decisions when we're not in flight or fight, when we can actually sort of downregulate.

You know all about this.

Thankfully, there's so many tools like what you do that teach people how to downregulate.

And sometimes you can't control it.

But if you can control that your decision making is better by keeping an income source, oh my gosh, why wouldn't you?

Because being a CEO is really, in my opinion, it's like three things.

If you want to be a great CEO, it is number one, you have to be able to sell a dream so big that other talent wants to come alongside you.

They think that their vision is bigger under yours.

Then number two, you have to make great diagnoses, what's happening in the world around us, just like a doctor would to understand what's good or bad.

And then you have to have great decision making on top of the diagnoses.

And so if you can hire great talent, diagnose well, but you make bad decisions because you're scared, that's not going to lead to a successful startup in my experience.

I love those top three qualities of a CEO.

I wanted to ask you the opposite.

What allows an employee to be great and make more money as an employee?

If you want to make more money as an employee, number one, you have to understand how much money you make the company today.

If you don't understand what your value dollar amount is, you bring into your business, you should probably go talk to your boss and say, hey, I'd like to understand how I make you money.

If you had to quantify how I make you money, could you help me understand that?

One, your boss is going to be like, this is amazing.

Nobody's ever asked me this before.

And then two, once you understand that, you need to figure out how could I make more money for the company.

Once you can understand how you can make more money, you can say, well, what do you think the profits of this business are?

If we bring in a $100 sale, do we keep 20 bucks of it?

And if I figure that out, then I can go, okay, I made you 100 bucks.

We kept 20 of it.

If I do that, could I keep five of that 20 I brought you?

And then you actually know how to negotiate for your salary.

And a lot of times this isn't always possible if you're in a big corporate job, but more often than not, there is money available for those who understand how to ask for it because they've earned it.

I love that.

That step-by-step process is so brilliant because you're so right.

If someone ever came up to me and said, how do I make money?

And how do I I make you more money?

Yeah, oh my gosh, it's like the best thing ever because it's so often not thought about and you don't realize.

And, like you said, there may be certain companies where you can't have that conversation, but today I feel like there's just so many more spaces to actually have that connection that you can.

Yeah.

And, you know, and think about it from your boss's perspective.

Like they hired you for a reason because they thought that you would make their life easier and that you would make the business better.

And I think a lot of times you leave your job before you get all of the money out of your job you could have.

And I did this so often in the beginning.

I think you'd make way more money if you thought that you could have a conversation with your boss and say, man, this isn't exactly working how I thought it would be.

I think I could be of use over here as well.

I'd love some additional responsibility here, maybe less here.

You know, could I make you more money over here?

If I prove myself here, could we do less here?

You leave the devil that you know for the devil that you don't often.

And when that happens, I think you actually lose more money than you anticipated.

It used to be back in the day, you made about 20 to 25% more money every time you job hopped to the next job.

These days, I actually think that there is a real value you can have to increase your salary or overall pay by more like 25 to 50% if you stay and you diagnose, as opposed to you skip and then you guess.

Yes.

And so I would highly recommend that you not do what I did in the beginning of my career, which was skip, skip, skip and never give the place a chance to pay me more.

Yeah.

Because they might want to.

Absolutely.

And what you miss when you skip is you actually miss the skills of negotiating, up managing.

learning new skills and abilities at that place.

You're so right.

And it's so, I mean, you're, you're so vulnerable for even saying that because, you know, you've, you've done so phenomenally well, but, but it's such a good lesson for people to understand because in the carrot of a couple of extra, whatever it may be, you're moving across, but you're actually losing the skills.

One thing I painted up recently, which I haven't fully presented to my team yet, but it's been something I've been putting together for how, and I know you have something on this too, so I want to share mine with you to get your thoughts on it.

I've been building this framework of how to talk to my team about what helps you grow at the company.

And I used a very, very simple analogy and metaphor of beginning at the brick layer.

So the bricklayer is usually at the level with which you come in.

And the bricklayer knows, I have to lay this brick and I've got to lay it next to this one.

And I know the pattern and I can lay a brick.

And maybe I can build a wall.

Maybe.

The next level up is a builder.

You actually know how to build a wall.

You know how to paint the wall.

You know how to put up scaffolding.

You know how to connect walls.

You can do a bit more and you're a builder.

Above from that is something I I call the architect.

Now, the architect is not just good at building a wall.

They could actually go and build me and design me a new part of the business, an extension of something, a new idea.

And that's how I want people to grow.

And then the highest stage that I've come to is the city planner.

This person's not just building me one home.

They're planning the whole city of the ecosystem of how everything falls into place.

And so I'm communicating this to my team now because I'm like, I want all of you to graduate from bricklayers to builders to architects to city planners.

And that is what's attached to more money.

It's not more effort.

It's not more work.

It's not being more busy.

It's not doing more stuff.

These all come with a different type of vision.

They come with a different strategic element.

They come with more care.

They come with a wider scope.

It isn't just about, oh, but I worked more hours this year or I put in more time.

Didn't you see how much effort I put in?

And I think those things don't necessarily result in more success for a company.

What's your thoughts on that?

I think it's perfect.

One, you know, we all want to feel like we can see a future at an organization.

And I think we all want to make money, but we also really want to know that we're getting better.

And we want to know that we're going to get rewarded for all the hard work we're going to put in over the long term.

And so if you can show people a vision for the future, I think that's incredible.

I totally agree.

We also talk about it as,

and this isn't quite the same because a bricklayer is in many ways just as important as the city planner.

And so one of the way we talk about it is called the NPC ladder.

And we sort of talk about, you know, how there are video games, right?

And in the video games, you have the NPCs, which are sort of these people that sort of stay in the same spot and repeat the same things, like, you know, find the dragon, find the dragon.

And

some people choose to kind of stay in the same spot.

and to stay as an NPC for much of their life and not to move to each level of the game where you become not the main character next, you're a supporting cast member, you know, and then you might be one of the main characters and then you might be the protagonist, et cetera.

And so at the very top of my best performers, where I say the people who will be paid the most maybe eventually get equity, well, they're the main characters.

And that means that they actually change the script.

They move forward the company overall.

And so I love that.

And I think, you know, for most of us, There's a saying that you don't leave bad jobs, you leave bad leaders.

And so I like to try to remember that often in my companies, that when somebody leaves, that's a reflection on me and my team, that they didn't see a way for them to become a city planner and that they didn't see a way for them to come to the next level.

I do think about that often.

It's almost like it's an it's a validation of all of these are needed, but there's a ladder.

Yeah.

And the ladder isn't just more time and more work.

No, which often is the mistake.

Well, I think you're, you're really right.

I mean, today, I think there's a culture of, there's a hustle culture that happens about hard work will equal wealth.

And that is actually not true at all.

And we have seen over time, if hard work would equal wealth, then the person who runs my laundromat would make just as much as Jeff Bezos.

And we know, you know, there's an incredible video out there that I, I can't remember who did it, but it basically shows.

for the 60 seconds that Jeff Bezos is in the video, how much money Jeff Bezos is making every single second as he walks around the factory.

And it shows that he makes, let's say, I don't know, X millions of dollars per second.

And so by the time my laundromat owner has picked up his coffee, put it in his mouth, Jeff Bezos has already lapped him multiple times for the year.

Now, why?

Jeff doesn't work as hard as the guy who's laying actual bricks or actually cleaning the roof.

And so I think we have to ask ourselves if this idea of just work harder, what's your work ethic, that's not true anymore, especially in the age of AI.

You know, the more I think about AI as a total normie, I'm not a big tech person.

I'm almost like boomer incapable in many ways with tech.

But the more I think about it, the more I think it will enable all of us to have massive knowledge.

And because we'll all have massive knowledge, we will actually have to perform better because everybody will be able to do a mid-level execution.

Very few people will be able to stand out amongst the noise.

And we're already seeing this 47% increase in creators just this year online.

So why?

Because it's so much easier now to go bang, bam, boom, put it on the internet.

So that's going to be everywhere, which means that going forward just doing a lot more just working a lot harder won't be what changes it what will taking a moment to look at what do i know different than anybody else how do i increase my knowledge stack and how do i get really creative in a world of lack of creativity but mass production and so i loved nandal ravakant's line which was in this world today you don't want to work like a cow You don't want to work continuously sort of grazing nonstop like this.

You want to be the lion.

You want to have periods of sprint and rest, sprint and rest.

And that will be what the top performers do.

Yeah, absolutely.

So well said.

Is passive income a myth?

Well, passive income is a tax statement.

So like the actual words passive income versus active income are real per the government.

But is passive income in the fact that I will make money if I do nothing and I take X amount of risk and X amount of my money in order to do something?

No, that's a total lie.

And I think anybody who tells you that this will be completely passive income, there's a red flag, immediate red flag.

I mean, I own a bunch of vending machines.

Vending machines are often something people call passive income.

Let me tell you what's not passive, a vending machine.

They break all the time.

People break into them.

They don't make that much money per machine.

And also, they make a ton of money on aggregate.

And they're great for many things once you have hundreds of them or thousands.

But there's no such thing as passive income.

And once you know that, I think you also can recognize, like, do you want passive income?

Is that what you really want?

Or do you just want a job that you love, that pays you well, that like lights that fire inside of you?

I think we want passive income because we hate what we do.

Because 87% of Americans don't like what they do for a living, they don't like who they work with, and so why would they want to do more of it?

Please give me passive income.

But I don't think that's actually what we want.

We just want something that really speaks to us.

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And back to our episode.

Do you think people can do what they love and make a lot of money?

Or are those ideas disconnected?

I think that anybody who tells you you should follow your passion in order to make money is probably already rich.

And it sounds really nice, actually.

And so they're like, of course, follow your passion.

Well, even somebody like we both know some of the founders of Airbnb.

You're closer with them than I am.

But like, you know, Joe and Austin, he would say that he was incredibly passionate when he started Airbnb.

But was he like passionate about, I don't know, home design of his like, you know, mattress on the floor?

Like, no, what was he passionate about?

He found some game that he loved to play in the game of business.

And it probably could have been a lighting company that he had or a painting company or Airbnb.

He just learned to love the game.

So where I think people get it wrong is learn to love the game.

Don't try to obsess on your passions.

We try to turn like painting that we do or underwater basket weaving or whatever our weird hobby is into our profits.

And that's where you go really, really wrong.

And in fact, there's a lot of data to support this.

I mean, we have something called the boring sexy matrix that essentially, it kind of looks like, you know, two lines and then a charted graph that shows you the more boring the industry the higher the income and so especially in hollywood in fact there's an incredible study that shows in sagaftra the hollywood union there's 187 i believe 187 000 members of this union and of those more than 80 percent of them do not qualify for health insurance which means that they don't make enough money to even qualify for health insurance the average income is like twenty three thousand

for an actor in LA.

And so what does that tell you?

When you want to try to be a cluny or you want to try to be, you know, a famous Brad Pitt, most people make no money from it.

You'd be way better off going to finance where 99% of the people earn 100% of their income from their job than in acting in which it appears that less than 20% of people make their full income from this job.

And I'm not like trying to dissuade anybody from doing things that you love.

I might just be pushing you to even say, how could I be more creative about this?

If I love to act, where is there money around the world of acting that I could go grab and still integrate the two?

But does it have to be this preordained sexy role?

And I think the answer is no.

You're a perfect example of it.

That's how podcasts were born.

You know, it was like these people who wanted to maybe have talk shows, who wanted to interview people.

And we said, we could do it here instead of a studio.

And you change an entire industry.

I wanted a talk show so bad.

It's such a good example.

And I love that.

Yeah.

Like, who, like, that was, you know, I grew up watching Oprah.

Yeah.

Big fan.

And I was like, how cool would it be to sit down with people and to have a talk show and all the rest of it?

And then you realize no one's giving you a talk show.

And unless your talk show is really, really significant, no one's making any significant money.

And no one's giving you a talk show.

That's the reality of it.

There's only ever like three daytime talk show hosts that are successful and maybe three late night talk show hosts that are successful.

And then everyone else, like you said, same as acting, 97% of people, 99% of people don't have that.

And when you do what you love, like, so do I love interviewing?

Yes, I do.

But I love the distinction you made because I think there's a difference between a hobby and a skill.

So, and you just said it.

You, you literally just said it.

So I love soccer.

Soccer is my first love.

It's one of my favorite hobbies.

I love talking about it.

I like playing it.

I like FIFA, like on the PlayStation, Xbox, whatever.

I'm in.

If I tried to become a soccer player, it would never have happened.

Like I'm not good enough, not even close.

And sure, I could have found a way to maybe get into coaching or maybe whatever.

But to be honest, it's a hobby.

It's something I love talking to my friends about.

That doesn't have to be the thing that I monetize or that I build into my offering to the world.

And I love the difference because I think when we hear the word passion, we confuse hobby for skills.

And then you go, wait a minute, no, my hobby is painting.

I'm not the best painter.

Let me be honest.

And I think I've never heard someone say that before.

I've never heard that clear clarification.

So thank you for making that crystal clear.

Yeah, it's really, you know, I heard Michael Dell, the, the, it was, I think it was in Michael Dell's book.

Yeah.

He said somebody was asking him why he wanted to take his company back because he had kind of had it pulled away from him.

Him and another big investor basically got into the scuffle.

And, and, and somebody was asking him, why do you still care about Dell?

You're a billionaire many times over, you're super successful.

Why don't you just let this go?

And he says, I will care about this company after I am dead.

He loves the game.

He was so obsessed with Dell that you couldn't pry it out of his cold, dead hands.

And I think about that often.

I think, you know, you couldn't make me retire no matter how much money you gave me.

Why?

Are there many days where the game of entrepreneurship is so brutal that I do think, what am I doing?

I don't have to keep doing this.

Why do I do it?

But I love the game.

And I think if we can instill in more young people a love for the game, then they will realize that it is the most fun thing that you can do when you get a chance.

And that's also how you know if the thing you're doing is what you should be doing.

Like famously.

When the two Steves, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were first starting out, they were at, I think it was Atari, the company that they were at.

Anyway, they were at another tech company.

And it was Atari.

Yeah, it was.

And Jobs, do you remember the story where Jobs said, the only way that I'm coming to work here is if I can sleep here too.

And the founder, as a normal founder, probably would do is like, that's weird.

No, you can't do that.

But he realized that they were so good, they were so obsessed that their outperformance meant that he should let them be weird.

And so he let them stay there, which was like a little problematic because I hear Steve was a little smelly.

But like top performers are really just people who are obsessed with the game.

It's not that you have to have crazy IQ.

It's not that you have to have a crazy skill set.

It's really hard to beat the compounding thing that is is obsession.

And I think that should open up for some people a realization that you could win.

You could beat a Jay and a Cody if you're more obsessed with something than we are.

Oh, for sure.

And what I've learned is that in order to love the game, you have to respect the rules.

Oh.

And what I found, it's like playing Monopoly.

Everyone knows Monopoly, so I'll use that as an example.

It's like playing Monopoly.

You know, you have to have a three set

in order to build homes.

Once you build four homes on one street, you can then upgrade it for a hotel.

That is the rule of how monopoly works.

Now, you'll play with some people and they'll say, well, I don't like that.

I just want to be able to build on even if I have one of the sets.

Or why do I have to build four houses to build a hotel?

I should just be able to build a hotel.

And I see this in real life too, where we start saying things like, well, I don't like the social media algorithm because it's not fair.

And it's like, it isn't fair, but it is the rule.

And so if we hate the rules, you can't love the game.

And I see that over and over again, where it's like, well, Jay, but this isn't fair or this isn't right, or it should be like this or new thing.

And I'm like, I get it.

Like I actually empathize with that and I validate you.

I feel the same way.

But in order to love the game, you have to respect the rules.

And so figure out the rules.

Like you've figured out the rules of vending machines.

You figured out the rules of different businesses that you've built.

And once you know the rules, you can play the game just like Monopoly.

And I think that's what it takes.

So what would you say are the rules some interesting businesses or even business in general or money that you think people need to learn to respect?

I think the number one rule, if you want to be successful today, is that there's really, there's two type of people.

One type of person will be really successful and one type of person will never be successful until they change their mentality.

And we call these fixers versus freeloaders.

A fixer is somebody who, if you imagine, there's a leaky boat, right?

And there's all these holes in it.

The fixer will be the one that starts actively thinking, okay, we've got some, you know, putty over here.

We're going to put it on here.

We're actually going to start bailing things out over there.

They realize that there is a problem.

The problem is annoying.

They probably didn't create the problem.

The problem might actually be somebody else's fault entirely.

And yet, what do they do?

They immediately go into fix mode.

And then there is the freeloader.

And we can all have a little component of this, but a freeloader is so common today.

The freeloader is the one that's standing in the boat and they might be saying, well, you know, I don't mind the holes.

or that was somebody else's issue, or I don't have time to fix that, or I don't really know what to do about that.

And if you go through your life with this freeloader mentality, somebody else will fix it all the time, well, then somebody else will profit all the time.

I've really had,

right?

I've had this realization lately that every time I find a problem in my business, that's where the profit is.

Every time I have a problem in my life, that's where the money is.

Oh, that's so good.

And so, if I can just start not having that that sinking feeling in my stomach when I find a big, hairy problem and instead say, ooh, that means there's money there.

That means there's opportunity there.

That means there's growth there.

Then my worldview kind of changes.

And, you know, when we came in here, we were just talking and I was like, oh, God, I'm having a week because I, you know, I got this one business and we're growing really fast.

And that sounds cool, except that when you grow really fast, there's all these issues.

There's people issues and there's business issues.

And so I'm in it right now.

And yet I always try to make myself go back and say, it's my fault that we're here.

And that actually is really liberating.

Because if it's my fault, that means that I also might be able to fix it.

If it's somebody else's fault, then what am I going to do about it?

And so as often as possible, be a fixer, not a freeloader.

It's where the money is.

I really like that.

And that's true, whether you're a team player, whether you're an employee, whether you're the owner, whether you're looking at a new opportunity.

It's true for everyone.

That's why I love it so much, because you could be on a team and going well where is my ceo's greatest pain point where is my manager's greatest pain point and if i can solve that and we're clear on it that could be the greatest opportunity for me to grow my career a hundred percent you know and if if you really want to grow and earn a lot i think one of the greatest things that you can do is go find a leadership team and a leader that you think you want to be like and that you like their trajectory i mean i think you should try to get on as many rocket ships as you can and you should really stay away from like the pta mom bus you know in life i think often we want the smooth ride we want the certain ride we want the sliding doors we want to be on a little nice little minivan and what we realize is that minivans don't go fast and minivans will probably not be the winner of a race but winning comes with all the prizes so i think wherever you can you should try to get on the rocket ships and then when you get on the rocket ship you got to realize rocket ships have turbulence they're bumpy they go fast.

Things break.

You can't be surprised when you want to be an astronaut and there's turbulence on the way up.

And so, you know, I think there's two things that I didn't do early enough on in my career was, gosh, I really should have tried to get on more rocket ships fast.

Bumpy, messy, big problems.

Oh my gosh, but we're going to the moon.

And I should stay away from the normal, you know, mom bus life that's super, super smooth because when I'm young, man, I don't need this.

I need this once I got kids and once I got a bunch of responsibilities, but in the beginning, I should be trying to take all the rides I can.

And so if I was young and hungry, I would be trying to find a J.

I would be trying to find teams where they are moving and I want to learn from them.

Yeah, it's such, it's such great advice.

And I look back and I think as well that I had that same spirit then.

And I probably didn't seek out people like that enough.

I got lucky with a couple of examples.

And I remember it could happen anyway.

I remember being, I used to work at a grocery store and, you know, stacking shelves and whatever, but I was always trying to find that on a weekend, you can make a time and a half.

On a holiday, you could make time and a half.

If I worked a few extra hours, you'd make, you know, you're always trying to figure out what the rules are, as I was saying earlier.

And I think you're spot on that if you can jump on a place where your role is not perfectly defined, you get to do lots of stuff, you get to take more on.

When I was at Accenture, which is a global consulting firm, million employees now globally.

It used to be 500,000 when I was there.

They actually had this really great setup where every year they asked you to learn one professional skill, one personal skill, and then one skill that you were just fascinated by.

And it was really interesting because it was always encouraged that you needed all three.

And I loved that about the workplace because it was almost like, what's your extracurricular?

So you did your day job, but what did you do in the evenings?

So my evening job at my company was teaching meditation.

So I was bringing my passion into work.

What did it do?

It helped me network more, helped me connect with people deeper, helped me learn about different parts of the company that I would never have got to see if I wasn't teaching meditation.

I had a friend who was a photographer outside of work.

We were consultants by day, but he brought photography into work.

He would photograph all the major events.

He'd take headshots of our CEO.

He'd take headshots of our CMO.

All of a sudden, he's networking inside the company in a way that you never would before.

And so it's so interesting when you take on new responsibilities, which are based on your passions, even in the workplace, because you never know where they can go.

Oh, yeah.

And there's something really contagious about somebody who is hyper-passionate with the things that they do for a living.

I mean, there's so many studies that show that humans are contagious.

You know, I was reading something the other day that said, if you want to make more money, The fastest way you can do it is actually just by who you surround yourself with.

And so there is actually a correlation between if you have more friends who make over $100,000, you have a 10 increased likelihood of making more money and somewhere between a 2.9 i believe and a five percent higher likelihood of investing more this is just like jay stays the same cody stays the same but i hang out with a few people who have more cash i start making more money and investing more that's wild but if you think about it makes all the sense in the world imagine you wanted to lose weight and so what did you do you went and hung out with a bunch of people who partied all the time who ate late night food who were drinking constantly who slept in late who are more lethargic because of it Or you went and hung out with CrossFitters that don't drink, that work out every day, that already have six-pack apps.

Jay is the same person, Cody's the same person.

I choose the group that parties, you choose the group that CrossFits.

Who do you think wins?

It's the people that you surround yourself with.

And so, gosh, people are contagious in every sense of the word.

If you hang out with people that are passionate and obsessed and moving forward, it's just going to be easier for you to do the same thing.

Oh, it's so good.

It's so true.

And I just, you know, how simple it is when you start doing it but i feel like we're also scared of like letting our friends down we think we're you know sometimes we also get the backlash like our friends might be like oh yeah you just want to be around that person now you just want to be successful now we're not good enough for you and i think all of these things are what play on people's minds is we don't want to be bad people but this isn't being a bad person but we kind of carry that around it's very true i mean like there's like a micro lesson so let's say right now you're trying to save more money a lot of the ways when when you're young and don't have a lot of money money that you spend it is entertainment, right?

It's going out with your friends.

And a lot of times when you go out with your friends, what do you do?

Like you guys are eating and drinking and who's splitting the check and what's happening here?

And I think that's a really uncomfortable thing for young people to do.

They're like, I don't know how to have a conversation with somebody saying, I'm really limiting my spend.

So I know there's six of us and it would be really awkward, but I'm not drinking tonight and I'm just going to have this little thing.

So do you mind if I pay for my portion of it?

Why do we worry about doing something like that?

Because people are going to think we're cheap.

They might judge us.

They're going to think that, you know, we're not all in it together.

And yet, how are you going to reach your goals if you're not willing to do even that little thing?

And I remember back in the day, you know, when I had no money at all and I couldn't afford anything, that felt super embarrassing to me.

And yet, those micro decisions will help you macro if you do it.

And all it is is expectation setting.

I think a lot of times if you want people to go along with something, you just say, hey, I'm super embarrassed to bring this up.

And it's a little, it feels weird to me, but I'm really trying to save up to invest and to do this other thing.

And I want to hang out with you guys tonight.

Would it make you so uncomfortable if I asked to just pay for my portion?

Because I can't keep going out and doing all this if I have to spend everything.

You know what you're going to do?

You're going to unlock for somebody else there who's too afraid to say it and never will that they feel the exact same way.

They're actually like, oh, God, they got me too because happy hours slowly killing my entire investing budget.

This is coming up more and more in every conversation I have right now.

If you actually said what you were worried about, people would actually get it.

It's when you kind of try and do the awkward thing of not sharing how you feel about it.

Like when you say, hey, I'm embarrassed about this, all of a sudden that person has empathy.

Right.

Your confession of embarrassment creates empathy and compassion in the other person.

And then they receive it with the understanding.

Whereas if you just say, hey, I don't think I'm coming out tonight.

Now it's like, wait, well, what's wrong?

If you now go out and say, oh, yeah, I'm just going to pay for my thing.

Now you could come across as cheap or all the other things you're worried about.

As soon as you're honest about the embarrassment, the vulnerability incite such a beautiful connection with someone.

And by the way, next time, they may not choose that spot.

They might choose somewhere that's easier for you.

If they're a good friend, they'll actually, they'll actually walk in your direction, if that makes sense.

Yeah, you give somebody else a chance to actually be there for you, which I've realized is a real gift.

I'm not so good at that.

But, you know, if you can allow another person sort of in, man, walls break down pretty quick.

And then as you make more money, you can start paying it forward the other way yeah you know and and then when you can that's one of the coolest parts about having money is then you're like i got all this like don't worry about it not one of you and you don't have to do it all the time you don't have to you know big shot people but when you're in your growth phase when you're in your save phase just be there that's okay that's where you are and know that you don't have to stay there you can eventually be in your big boy giveaway buy the bottles do whatever you want phase but you don't have to pretend like you're not there and man that that'll really help too in environments like this where it feels harder to make money and you feel a little heavy.

And, you know, I saw this in business too.

I saw this tweet the other day that I was like, oof.

It was a business owner and the tweet was literally a picture of a really expensive looking dinner.

And it was like, when your company's a couple of weeks out from having no cash, but you know that team morale is really expensive.

So you spend a couple thousand dollars on a dinner for the team.

And I looked at that for a second and I don't believe in like posting any like criticism on the internet.

So I didn't, I would never say anything for that person directly, but I think he's wrong.

I think instead, what you really should do as a leader is say, hey, we're in a period where we need to tighten up a little bit.

And I'd love us to maybe take an afternoon off or maybe do something that doesn't cost the company money.

Or maybe we could, you know, come up with some cool ideas.

We could do a little challenge to see who could come up with the best idea for us to do some like team building.

But I can't actually afford this couple thousand because it's my duty to protect your job and to protect your future in this company.

And so even though it would make me look good to spend a bunch of money, I'm not going to.

And it's, it's scary being in an ownership position when a business isn't working.

It's super, super scary.

And so it's okay to also, you don't have to tell everybody everything all the time.

It's not their job to handle your business stress, but it is okay to tell them some reality.

Cody, there's two big areas I want to.

quiz you on now.

Oh, I like it.

I think there's going to be a lot of great stuff.

I'm going to let you choose which one we start with.

One is money and dating and relationships.

And the other is the basics of investing when someone is starting with little.

Where do you want to go first?

I want to start with something really random, which is, so there was an interesting study I saw the other day that shows how you can predict if a recession is coming through the way that women buy beauty products.

And so it's called the lipstick theory.

And I was playing around with this today because I think all of us are wondering where the economy is going.

And basically what happened is during the, this is when the World Trade Centers came down.

So Estee Lauders, the founder of the company, basically realized that even though the market had a lot of fluctuations in it, it was down hugely from the World Trade Centers crashing, lipstick sales were up 11%.

And actually, a bunch of these like non-necessary cosmetics were up a ton.

And so he started looking at why.

And what they realized is when the market really crashes, you would think people would pull back on things they don't need.

But what they actually do is they pull back on the big luxuries and they spend more on the tiny ones.

So it might not be that they go on vacation that year, but it might be that they look a little prettier in the mirror every single day.

And so I thought that was interesting because as we're thinking about recession, what are some of the indicators that nobody's watching today that could tell us what's happening?

So one of them is actually look at a spike in beauty products.

You can also see that by a spike of the people who are launching them.

Are a lot of people continuing to buy, which I thought was kind of interesting.

Which is happening right now.

Which is happening right now.

Yeah.

and then you know the the place i think that this takes us is maybe a little bit more on the dating side which is here's some like a little tough truth it turns out if you want to make more money one of the best things that you can do is find a partner which is crazy so married couples make on average more than 30 more than non-married couples their net worth is almost 3x

someone who is single over the course of their entire career and so i I bring this up not to shame anybody who hasn't found their partner.

I know what that's like when you feel like there's no options and you want to find love, but it's not around you.

But why I do bring it up is because I think it's something that we should really prioritize.

We should prioritize if we care about making money and we should prioritize if we care about love, certainly.

And I think it's gotten a bad rap.

Marriage has a bad rap.

You do an incredible job of showing the beauty that can be behind it while also being like, sometimes I hate her.

Like I with my husband, sometimes like, oh, you today, really?

They got to love you because I want to murder you.

It's, it's a real boon to your financial health.

And so anybody that is around you that is saying, I don't need no man, I'd be better off without him.

You know, they're all toxic.

Everybody else is a narcissist that I've dated.

I kind of want to push on your frame a little bit and say,

one, do you think you attract things that you hate on?

Probably not.

Two, there's a lot of reasons why you showing the stability for a partnership will lead to a more stable life overall.

And so I thought that was, that was fascinating.

Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from our sponsors.

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Okay, I'm going to assume that everybody messages their friends.

I'm also going to assume you've run into some issues when messaging, especially during group chats.

I know I I have.

One time I sent a message way too fast, full of typos, and everyone had to guess what I was even trying to say.

WhatsApp can help.

First, you can message privately with everyone, even if you're all using totally different phones.

It just works.

Sent a message too fast and instantly regretted it?

No problem, just edit it.

And when the chat gets a little too intense, you can switch to a group video call and actually talk it out.

Photos and videos come through super clear and messages get delivered without weird gaps or delays.

Plus, WhatsApp has so many great features like polls, pinned messages and even event invites with RSVPs so planning stuff doesn't just turn into a mess.

I mean it just makes a lot of sense.

It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

Thanks for taking a moment for that.

Now back to the discussion.

When I look at successful men, going back to your earlier point of mentors,

any of the successful men that I've ever been mentored by talk to me about having a one-woman life change their career trajectory because they found that the less time they wasted on chasing, pursuing, wooing women, the more time they had to focus on their career.

So even from the other side, men who decide to commit to one woman have more energy, more focus, more drive, more power to direct towards making money and building a business than they do when they're trying to impress lots of women or take care of lots of women.

Now, of course, there are exceptions.

There are people who become very successful without having a partner and whatever.

They may have even put their love life on the back burner.

Sure.

But men who were married were just more who had that commitment in their life.

Which is wild.

They say you're happier too and you guys live longer.

Yeah.

Or like slightly less happy.

You guys don't live as long as you don't live as long as you're dealing with a baby.

It was funny.

Yesterday my wife said to me, because I must have said to her, what I want for dinner.

And she goes, well, this is great training to have a kid and I said to her yeah she goes husband's a great training to have a kid and I go yeah wife's great training to have a teenager

and it's just like it was it was just this really funny moment where we were bantering and I was like yeah you're like a teenager like like dealing with emotions and all this stuff and you're dealing with my like baby needs of like hey can you feed me like you know it's very very true yeah I also think man if you're like I talk more from the women perspective just because I'm a I'm a chick.

And so I'll try to talk about all the things things I know about.

But, you know, from a female perspective, there's a lot of things that I think are wrong in the way we date with money.

Yeah, that's what I want to get into.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, for instance, you know, increasingly, they say that 64% of women will not date a man if he doesn't have the same income level or higher.

than her.

For men, that actually, in the studies at least, does not seem to be the case.

They actually don't care about income level.

Well, problem there, that more women are increasing their incomes and increasing their education levels than men are today.

I think there's something darker even than the six, five trust fund blue eyes thing, which is we're prioritizing the thing that seems to not lead to any increase in happiness.

Couples are no happier if they are the same income level or higher or not.

They aren't wealthier if they focus on that than something else.

And so from my perspective, I'm like, man, if you're a woman today, you know, I don't give dating advice, but the money seems to show that that does not matter in a relationship.

You know, my husband is amazing and I was, I already ran a business when I met him.

He was a Navy SEAL.

The government doesn't pay very much for that role.

And so he was just playing a totally different game.

He didn't care about money actually at all.

He cared about service and he cared about respect.

That's what he wanted.

He wanted to do something that served and he wanted to do something that commanded respect.

I, in finance, was not that much serving, you know, but I was a lot money.

And so when the two of us came together, it was really, really powerful.

And so for women today, a lot of times when they ask me, how do you, you know, how do you find a partner?

What do you do if you make a lot of money and he doesn't?

I'm like, find somebody who plays a different game because then you two can complement.

Did you both play the same game?

Were you both trying to grow and make money?

No, no, no.

So, well, Radhi's always been at peace.

She's always been at peace with who she is,

what she has.

And her journey was more kind of, I always talk about the aspect of what you mentioned of being surrounded by more people.

So we grew up in a culture where generally women in our community became housewives and took care of the kids.

That's majority of what you'd see growing up where I grew up.

Now, that's beautiful.

There's nothing wrong with that.

And I'm not judging it.

What was interesting was when we moved to New York and then we moved to LA, Riley was surrounded by a lot of our female friends who are all founders, who built businesses, who've achieved a lot of incredible things.

And they happen to be happy moms and happy wives as well.

Riley being exposed to them almost opened up to this idea of what women could do, what women could achieve, achieve, what was possible.

And she has just come into her own.

Like when she launched her book last year for the first time, when she launched her podcast last year, when she's just been growing and finding herself, and I think she's really loved the journey.

It's never been about growth.

It's never been about conquering.

It's never been about a destination.

She just loves the fact she can fully express herself and use her skills to help people.

I started with the same thing.

I never had financial goals.

I never knew anyone who was that financially successful.

I just wanted to find a way to help people.

And then I realized you couldn't help people full time if you couldn't do this full time.

So you can have all the most noble reasons to do what you do.

If you can't pay yourself and pay people to help you do it, you're not going to do it for that long.

So I had to rewire my relationship with money because I used to believe that if you were doing good in the world, you had to be poor.

Wow.

And I had to completely shift my relationship because I had to understand that actually, if I wanted to do bigger good in the world, I needed money because I needed bigger teams.

I needed bigger opportunities.

I needed bigger relationships.

And the rules of the game are money gives access to that.

I come from a Latino culture.

And so money was never really bad.

It was bad to talk about it.

You couldn't really talk about money.

And it was bad to maybe have too, too much of it.

That was like, oh, they're really rich.

So how'd they get there?

Same.

You know?

Same, very similar.

Yeah.

But my dad, which I'm so grateful.

And if I have kids, I hope I can do the same thing.

You know, if you want to be a good father to a daughter and you want your daughter to be really confident and have a ton of optionality, I'd model after my father.

And what he always said is, well, you could be a princess or you could also be the president.

You know, you choose.

And then

he's very cute.

And he also really taught me that money is amoral.

It doesn't care.

It is a tool.

A hammer is not good or bad, except how you use it.

You could use a hammer for really good to build something.

You could use a hammer for murder.

Same with money.

And so I had to, I came to the terms with money in this way because I think that money is an accelerator to whatever is inside of you.

So if you are not a great person and you want to do bad things in the world, money is really bad to be in your hands.

If you are a good person and you want to do good in the world, money is really good to have in your hands.

And as long as you can stay true to that thing inside of you, then money is actually just an ability for you to build the world that you want as opposed to live in somebody else's.

You know, I watched my brother kind of go through this because he's never cared really about money or success.

I mean, he got married last weekend.

And Attlee, wow, good.

Thanks.

I'm really excited for him.

She's amazing too.

And he said in his speech, he's like, before I met Athena, I used to think that I wanted to just kind of post up on a beach somewhere, drink beers.

Like I didn't really want to build very much out of life.

I wanted to just chill.

And I never heard him say that out loud before.

And he said, but then I met Athena.

And now that's not enough.

Now I want to build something.

I want to build for her.

I want to build for our kids.

And I just watched him like turn into a little man, you know, in front of me, which was incredible.

And then also realize like, you're made for more.

But he is, he sounds to me like what Roddy sounds like to you, which is he has always been very comfortable as him.

He is the most him human I've ever met.

You couldn't really peer pressure him into anything.

And I have a lot of respect for people that have that kind of piece.

Yeah, it's really special.

I want to go back into this.

And I know I'm not asking for dating advice.

I'm asking for money advice.

Which I think they go so closely together now.

And I love where we started off, but there's so many things to kind of unpack with that.

Who should pay on the first date?

Men or women?

In my opinion, I think the person who asks for the date pays.

I agree.

Yep.

Men versus women.

Women, if you're going to ask somebody on a date, I think the expectation is at least offer.

Men, if you're going to ask somebody out on the date, I think the expectation is do it.

I tend to be a traditionalist in some ways.

I think sort of a high-value man wants to support and protect his woman.

Doesn't always have to be financially, but in some way, shape, or form.

And a high-value woman wants to do the same thing for her man, but probably can't protect him as much.

Like that's just, that's just our physiology, right?

And so that would be my gut reaction.

Now, if it's up to me, I remember back in the day, I did get asked on a date once and they didn't pay.

And it was such a huge turnoff for me.

And we stayed friends, but I was like, immediate unsubscribe.

We're never dating.

And so

it's tough to be a man in that case in some way today.

But if you were going to date somebody like me, I would expect you

to at least offer if you ask.

What do you think?

I think, so I agree with you.

The person who asks, the person out on the day should pay.

And this wasn't to get you in trouble.

I think it's a real discussion because I think that's what people do.

How you just said, hey, if he didn't pay, he's out.

By the way, I know I come from, I was raised by my mom.

I have a younger sister.

So I come from a very like, I'll do it.

I'll take care of it kind of background.

And I did when me and Radhi first started dating, I used to actually tutor

students for their college and 11 plus exams to make enough money to take Radi out on a date to make like £20 an hour because I didn't have any money when we met.

And that's how I'd pay for stuff.

I think a lot of men feel, yes, I'll do that once we have some commitment.

Like once we're going somewhere today, like I feel like men are like, well, why would I do that if we're both figuring this out?

Like I would do that once we both say, hey, we're exclusive, we're boyfriend and girlfriend, we're in a committed relationship, like this is going somewhere.

But if it's like our first or second date or third day and we don't really even know each other, then I kind of want you to come and meet me hot middle because that's what we're trying to build.

I mean, I can't imagine I've ever been on a date where I didn't ask to split it, at least.

I think I would feel weird if you asked to, you know, yeah, you pick it up all the way.

I've been like, oh, yeah, that's a signal.

Yeah, that's definitely a signal.

That's a signal.

Let's opt out.

But, you know, men, hey, it's a byproduct of the fact that we have, for the first time in our, let's call it the last 200 years probably of human existence, men and women are competing for the same thing.

This has never really existed before.

I mean, my parents were the first generation where this started.

My grandparents, that was not an option.

So we have to be honest about the fact that today, men and women, they are competing for jobs.

They are competing for education spots.

They are competing for relevancy.

They're competing for being heard places.

I mean, heck, in some ways, they're even competing for like necessity to procreate with all of the modern medicine that's happening.

And so there are going to be rippling side effects from this that I can't even imagine.

And one of them is that when we say we want to be equal as women, well, then we should think about what that means.

And so I think young men today are very right to say, hey, you know, it's, we're equal in every way.

It's a partnership between the two of us.

So I don't believe that we are partners yet.

Ipso facto, let's split.

And I think in life, Chris and I always have a saying, which is, do you want to be right or do you want to win?

And so my thought is, if you're a young man and you are pursuing a woman that you really like or think you might like, do you want to be right or do you want to win?

Do you want to be right in society that, yes, she should have split the bill, but now you have to talk her back into a second date?

Okay, fine, then go that way.

If you're a young woman and you really like the guy and he is more comfortable with this, do you want to be right or do you want to win?

Split the bill.

And then tell him at some point, hey, you know, if we're committed to each other, this is important important to me.

Can we negotiate it between the two of us?

We're so busy these days pointing fingers at what's right as opposed to saying, what do I want?

And then, so what action am I going to take to get there?

In a world in which a lot of guys split bills, if you have a hard time getting chicks, be a pretty big upside if you can pick up the bill.

Right.

And if you're a woman that can't find a man, maybe you show the man that you're a true partner.

And like, even if he offers, you say, I really would like to split it.

Would that make you feel comfortable?

I want you to know that in partnership, I believe in being there for my man.

Neither of those are wrong.

They just might help you win.

Definitely.

I love that.

Right and winning.

There's a, did you watch that movie Fair Play?

No.

Okay.

So there was a movie last year.

I don't think a lot of people saw it.

It was kind of like an, I think, I don't know if it was a true indie, but it wasn't, it was on Netflix, but I don't think it was hugely popular.

Yeah.

But it was a dark take

on a couple who were both vying for the same job in a company.

It's really good.

Like it shows, it's definitely dark and it's definitely extreme,

but it just shows the envy, the competition,

how the gender roles have changed, the expectations, women being more talented and educated.

And, you know, it's such a good social commentary on where we're at.

I wonder, how have you found it?

Because I meet a lot of ambitious young women who want to do really, really well.

And they seem to intimidate men today.

And I look at that from the men's perspective and I understand that it's new for men.

A lot of men feel left behind.

They've inherited the pain of the men who came before them, who've abused power or used it wrongly.

If a woman's ambitious right now, how does she continue to be ambitious and still find a man that gets that and respects that from a financial point of view?

Yeah.

The hard truth that I've found as a woman who you could say is hard charging is that you can't play a man's game and win in this society.

And I'm not sure we should.

And so what do I mean by that?

I mean that men are push, push, push, aggressive, even our physiology, right?

One is receiving and one is certainly giving.

And so today, I think if you are a young woman who's really hard charging, you have to think about, are you being ambitious and intimidating?

Or are you being kind of a bitch?

And I think a lot of times, because we've had, we felt like we have to stand up, we have to push for ourself, we're actually just not being that nice as women.

And it's that, you know, you, you can go get a girl and you don't need a man and he's not listening to you.

And, you know, blah, blah, blah.

That energy is really negative.

Men don't need that.

The two women that I know that are lovely and they're single.

And, you know, everybody I know tells them all the time, can't believe you're single.

You shouldn't be single.

But what do they say often?

One of them who I adore, and I'm kind of have given her my opinion on this, but she says all the time, well, I don't want to like mother anymore men.

I don't want to mother them.

Like, you know what?

All these boys.

I'm like, well, if you keep keep calling them that, then that is what they will be.

And so you've got to be really careful about not demasculating men.

And you've got to be really careful about making sure that they care about the two things they care about more than women do, which is, which is they care about respect.

And, you know, women really, we want to be loved.

You guys want to be respected, right?

Like by and large, gross generalization.

And so in driving businesses, I have to remember that all the time.

I employ men.

I just had a conversation right before this where I steamrolled somebody.

I totally owned the entire meeting.

I just kept talking and I was really aggressive.

And I lectured a little bit in the meeting.

And thankfully, my person in this situation was like, hey, by the way, I felt a little bit like a lecturer.

It felt like they needed to be heard, not pushed so much.

And I was like, God, you're right.

And that's when like the negative feminine shows up in my mind is when we think, let me just keep going.

I'm going to pound on this.

So I would push back on the negative.

Are you really intimidating men or are you being mean?

And I think often we are being a little mean.

And so we need to pull that back.

Not all men want to dominate you.

You know, a lot of men are the best mentors I've ever had.

Yeah.

And it's that it's that hard part for women because men for so long have gotten away with pounding the payment, right?

So like if a man behaved there in a meeting, would he get the same feedback?

Absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

He'd just be told that's normal and he'd get away with it and he'd move on.

And so it's almost what people expect of you.

And it shouldn't be based on gender.

It should be based on your demeanor.

Like, for example, I'm not someone who gets angry or shouts at people or it's just not who I am.

So if I did it, it would be so out of character that I think someone would cry.

You know, it's like, you think the person who shouts you every day makes you cry.

No, no, no.

It's the person who's really silent and calm that if they lost it, you'd be heartbroken because you don't expect it from them.

And I think this all gets difficult when we're talking about money because money creates power dynamics.

it creates especially in couples it creates power dynamics in families i mean the amount of friends i've had recently who've both men and women have had to ask their partner to sign a prenup before they get married and it's been really uncomfortable yeah because you hope that we love each other and that we wouldn't ever have to do that and my friends have talked to me that's really hard what's your take on people having to sign a prenup before they get married I think you should always sign a prenup before you get married.

Wow.

I think you should have every hard conversation that you need to have up front.

And that is just another hard conversation.

You know what a prenup will tell you before you get married is, do you guys have the same vision for life?

Do you guys care about the same things?

How do you handle conflict between the two of you?

Can you guys compromise on the important part?

So even if it's not about the money, like your bank account is a reflection of how willing you are to have difficult conversations.

The more you delay, and the more you don't have, the less money you'll have.

And I think a prenup is a perfect example.

You can take it as a victim and say, if he's asking me for a prenub, that means that he does not want to stay with me or she does not want to stay with me.

Or you could say, this is an opportunity for us to determine what our life will look like together and what is his and what is mine and what is ours together.

And so I am a big proponent of get that prenub on either side, get real clear on your finances and have a crucial conversation up front.

Now, That said, I really try to never give like individualized one-on-one advice.

I'm sure you're kind of the same.

So it's like, here's the big giant you.

But, you know, when my brother and new sister-in-law came to me, they were like, should you, once you get married, should you have a joint bank account or should you have a separate bank account?

I said, you should have a hard talk

first.

And you should ask each other why you want each separate segment.

Because what is the real conversation you're having?

It's, do I trust your spending?

Are we going to communicate well?

Are you going to put me in a weird situation?

Are you going to tell me I can't do something?

I'm an adult.

Don't tell me what I can't do.

And so it's not really about money.

It's about, can you get on the same page?

Oh, yes.

And so forget the bank account, right?

It's really, can you have a hard conversation?

And there's no right or wrong, in my opinion.

Some people say they still Venmo each other, their partners back and forth.

And they're like, that's awful.

How could you do that?

That is up to you.

A lot of my like, you know, big friends in finance would say, if you get married, you have a joint bank account.

That's what you do.

And I would say, even having a joint bank account can be hugely problematic if you're not willing to talk about it.

Absolutely.

No, I love how practical that gets.

And I love how practical you always get because that is what people are dealing with.

And you're right.

It's not about money.

It's about power.

It's about agency.

It's about accountability.

It's about all these other things.

But money becomes the central point of conflict.

And you're right.

Just because you have a joint bank account doesn't mean you have better compatibility.

That means nothing if you haven't had the hard conversation.

And I think having the hard conversation early about money and expectations is so important.

Going back to your earlier point, which I was thinking about, that idea that it's really important how married couples end up making more money.

I found a lot of people recently looking for a business partner, not a partner.

So like when they're looking for someone to be with, they're kind of seeing, will this person help me build my business?

Which is a really interesting

difference to what love is.

What's your take on finding a partner or a business partner?

That's fascinating.

Well, I mean, isn't it funny how everything just comes full full circle?

So if we think about the original contract of marriage, it was business.

It was, can your family further my family?

And we will come into contractual agreement one way or the other.

It was that way in India and the UK.

It was that way here in the U.S.

And so that used marriage was a business contract.

And in some ways, it still really is because it's a government contract.

And so, and then for a long time, well, not that long, really, what?

A generation or two, it became love.

It was about love only.

That's actually a new construct.

And so I think it's interesting.

It's coming back to this idea of partnership.

Now, I have a personal bias.

I think that you should marry somebody if you believe that they will help get you out of a third world prison when you get imprisoned.

You know, is this going to be your person who will save you in your times of difficulty?

That's, to me, what a good partnership is.

It's, I trust this human with my life implicitly and I want to build with them.

Yes, I love them, but it's, it's not this like, oh, this, this victimized, like, I love them even if they beat me.

And if it, if the world, you know, ends and some of the things we see in books today, it's like, no, is this my chosen human who we're going to go through time together?

And I trust their ability and who they are.

So that's for me personally.

The flip side of that is it's really hard working with your spouse.

We both do it in many ways.

My husband runs our investment side of our fund, our holding company and our venture capital fund.

And our first, hardest year together was our first year of marriage.

We got married a little older.

And so I didn't really know how to compromise.

He didn't either.

It was really hard for us our first year.

And I hear that's a common thing.

Our second hardest year was the first year that we got into business together.

And I was like, huge mistake.

You know, where's the like pull the chute?

This is so hard.

Why?

Because anytime you put two things closer together, what do they do?

Friction, baby.

You know, it's just natural.

This is physics.

And so I don't know why I was surprised, but I was surprised.

And then I realized after we got through the first year, I was like, whew, how did I ever do it?

Where I had a human who couldn't understand some of the stuff I was going through at work.

He is such a crutch for me now, and I am for him.

So now I'm kind of a proponent of my personal bias.

There's nothing better than having the ability to truly understand what your spouse does for a living and intertwining it some way.

What do you think?

We were together for a long time before we launched a business together.

There's a couple of things I have that I take.

It's almost like, so I never wanted my wife to support my work when my career was taking off in the beginning.

And my reason for that was very clear.

I knew a lot of men who were extremely successful in their 50s after three decades of success, where their partners had become basically their assistants.

And at the age of 50, their partner had now felt that they didn't achieve their dreams because they felt they didn't achieve their potential.

And the guy had gone off and ticked off every box on his checklist and felt like a champion.

But now at 50, they're having this realization.

And because I saw so much of that and my own work on purpose, I was really clear that everyone has their own purpose.

Like everyone has their own offering that makes them feel significant.

And no matter how much you love someone, no matter what anyone says, you cannot say that your significance is just tied to someone else's significance.

You have to have something that feels like your own thing, that feels meaningful to you.

That could be your child.

It could be your business.

It could be coaching the college basketball team, right?

This isn't about building a business.

And so all I would encourage Raleigh to do was to find her thing.

My favorite thing was setting her up on girl dates.

I'd become friends with women, just introduce them to my wife.

She'd be like, what are you doing, you weirdo?

But they're now her best friend.

So I guess I don't know.

You're welcome.

Yeah, exactly.

But my whole goal was just, I don't want her to fall into the trap.

of Jay's doing really cool stuff.

I'm just going to help him.

And then feel like she didn't find herself.

And you see, women do this more than men doing this.

Men generally are more independent.

They know their thing or they don't want to be involved anyway.

And she was so talented and skilled and amazing from the moment I met her that I was like, I mean, like Raleigh could have a TV show and it would crush.

Like, she's just the most

magnetic electric.

Yeah, she's just so lovable, right?

So I was like, she deserves to have all herself.

And she found it as time went on.

When we found a Juni, we were both at such a strength in our knowledge of each other's strengths and weaknesses but we don't take any meetings together so zero zero so she does all the formulation meetings of the taste the flavor profile the mixtures all of that she does everything to do with the colors and the packaging and everything else and i'll do all the business and marketing calls and so we're never even on the same calls

and that works for us because it actually splits up the work because i'm like oh i trust you you can nail like my palate is basic you know it's like i knew knew nothing about Yuzu pineapple when I met Radi, or you've got the peach one over there.

Like, I had no clue.

She really gets that.

And, and I really get my part.

And, and that works well for us.

But we founded this like 10 years into our relationship.

And so there was such an understanding of each other that it split it up nicely for us.

It's, you know what?

It's a, when you say it out loud like that, I'm like, oh, that's actually similar in a lot of ways.

Cause our reasons for friction in the beginning were because we were two captains.

Yes.

Two captains don't work.

No.

so, you know, I was on there trying to, and he was trying to, and now he runs our investment business entirely.

And like, you know, shout out to him.

He gets so embarrassed because I love bragging on him.

But, you know, he has like one of the top performing funds for his whole 2022 vintage.

And people always say, congratulations.

And I'm always like, honestly, I did so little for that.

You know, I'm, I'm good at like top a funnel, bring people in.

And then he is really good at execution and, and he's a hunter.

He chases things down.

And so you're right.

Now that we, now that I I think about it, I'm on two calls a week with him, but he runs everything else

and does it much better.

And actually, our only annoying spots are when I'm like

weaseling in on something that like he's already, I got it.

I got it.

Like, don't bother me over here.

And so it's, it's, you know, I'm the, I'm the weasel in.

I'm that peasant too.

Are you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Roger will be like, wait a minute, where have you been for the seven months we've been working on this?

And now you want to give your opinions.

Yeah, thank you.

You're making me feel better.

Yeah, I'm that guy too.

yeah gosh where did you turn up from like i've been working so hard on this yeah he says he'll be like here's the summary i sent you four times and now you want to talk about it but you know we are endearing sometimes you know sometimes yeah yeah but that's what's so important right it's trust to me i just don't want my private time with radi to become business time and that's a personal choice i don't look down on someone who does it i don't think it's I don't think that's the best for business or whatever, but it's the best for me.

I married Radi because I like spending time with her.

I didn't marry her so that we could talk about how to make more money together.

Like that just wasn't, that's not why we're together.

And that's not a bad thing or a good thing.

It's just who we are.

It works for us.

It's true.

I actually haven't found a lot of people that are like that.

Usually, and now I have a lot of friends, probably just selection bias, who both work together, but they're very different, you know?

And usually you have one person who I kind of joke is like more of the fun.

They're the one that's like, let's go do activities.

Let's do whatever.

They're still working a lot.

And then you have sort of the fun sponge, which is me, you know, that's always working.

And without, without my fun guy, I would just be working all the time.

And so it is this, this balance.

I mean, I've become friends with Sean Radd, who's the founder of Tinder.

And what's so interesting, every time I talk to him, we're going to see him tomorrow night, is that he has all this data on when relationships are the most successful.

And he's like, the problem with a lot of these algorithms and how they do dating is that actually the things that we choose do not lead to happiness,

such as similarity.

Similarity actually doesn't lead to us happy of relationships, according to Sean and his dad.

And that tracks for me.

Tracks for us too.

Roddy's the playful and the serious.

Yeah.

And I've always said that that playful and that performance mindset work so well together because you're balancing each other out.

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You know, isn't that funny?

And that's most things in life, too.

Like, if you want to make a lot of money in business, you also need somebody who they call them the visionary, right?

The person who has all the ideas, the crazy things.

And then you have your executor, which is often called your implementer.

And so if you only have vision, but you have no execution, you will fail and make no money.

If you only have execution, but you have no vision, you will play small games for life.

And so there's a great book actually called, have you read How to Make a Few few billion dollars?

No.

It's a good book.

It's by this guy, Brad Jacobs.

If you could get him on the podcast, I will listen.

I've been trying to.

I don't know if he's your style, but he's, well, actually, he might be.

He was like, he's a multi-billionaire hedge fund manager and private equity investor.

And he started off as a jazz musician.

And that was going to be his calling.

So he really likes like dissonant noises and like, how do you pull things together and sort of make them play like a jazz musician?

Anyway, he's bought all of these companies.

He's massively successful, but he always talks about what makes a great deal.

If you want to make a lot of money, you've got to pick the right deal.

And there's sort of four types of deals.

You could think about it like a quadrant.

You could have a low risk and you could also have a low reward deal.

That's actually most deals in life, right?

That's like stay in your same job, don't take risks, et cetera.

The problem is you're not going to make much money.

Then you have a high risk.

high reward deal.

Well, that could be like investing in an El Salvadoranian power plant.

Okay.

It's just so likely to fail that even though it's super high profit, we probably want to stay away from those.

And then you have sort of the golden child, which is how can we have high reward, low risk?

Well, not many of those exist, right?

That would be a unicorn.

So what we're really looking for is where is there a big hairy problem that has the right amount of risk?

And if we can find that, then we have profit.

And so now they call it hair on a deal.

That's like, you know, investing terms.

You want to look for those hairy deals where you think, oh, that level of risk is manageable and in our culture for some reason i think we've gone into risk off yeah god we don't even want the risk of asking somebody a question at a bar you know more or less starting a business and that's a problem i mean the sba has fascinating data do you know there are more small businesses that close each year than open in the us

no way more close than open and so we have people taking way less risk than we think and that means you'll never make as much money that crazy Yeah.

Let's talk about that in terms of investing.

If someone's thinking that, because exactly what you're talking about right now, this risk reward profile, if someone has never invested in anything, they're working their job,

they've got a little bit of money, maybe if they've got $1,000 to start thinking about investing, maybe they've got a bit more.

Maybe they've been saving up and they're thinking that home that they want to buy is a long, long, long, long, long way away, but they've got a little bit.

Where should they invest?

If you have only a little bit of cash, the best returning asset class of all time is going to be you.

Put the money into you, learning first before you go to invest.

A lot of days, a lot of people these days will say, hey, it's Airbnb.

Hey, it's buying small businesses.

Hey, it's real estate.

The highest performing asset class that you could ever have is you, because you have unlimited upside and it compounds over time.

And so if you don't have a lot of cash right now, bet on you first before you go bet on somebody in the SP.

Now, after that next amount, I believe, because I'm old school, I started at Vanguard.

I believe, if you're reasonable, you'll probably agree with me.

Like, do we think that we're going to beat the best stock pickers in the world who obsess on this every single day?

Are we going to beat the Titans of industry with their technology?

No.

So, that's why I always go for low cost, low movement, so they don't trade a lot, index funds.

I worked at Vanguard.

They have the best cost structure.

So, I throw things in the SP 500 in a diversified portfolio out of the.

How does someone do that?

Someone who's totally new to this you go to vanguard.com you have no fees on their trading platform in my opinion avoid robin hood avoid anything where you're buying individual stocks when you don't know unless you're doing it purely for learning and you're okay with losing everything and you go to vanguard.com and you select a diversified portfolio.

It's cool too because they'll actually help you do it based on your age and based on how much risk you want to take.

So they'll have a 60-40 portfolio, which is like 60% stocks and 40% bonds.

If you're our age, for instance, if somebody's a little younger, they'll go 80-20 because you should take more risk with stocks when you're young.

So you can literally, in one click, get a diversified portfolio, and then you can add to it.

You could also use like a wealth front for that.

What's a diversified portfolio for someone who doesn't?

That means that you would never want to have all your eggs in one basket in anything in life, but certainly in investing.

And so that means that they're going to give you stocks and bonds.

It means they're going to give you emerging markets versus the US.

So let's say India, China, Russia, Brazil, and the US stock market.

And it means that typically over time, you know, there's these charts you can see in finance where it kind of looks like,

looks like a grid.

And on it are all of these different colors.

And what do all the colors represent that have no pattern to it?

Every single year looks different.

They represent every asset class you could invest in from bonds to stocks to Chilean stocks to short-term money markets.

And what you see over time is in every single market, everything moves.

And so what what you want to have is a portfolio that over time averages somewhere around 10%.

That's the average cost of inflation, how your money really, if you don't invest it every single year that you don't invest, you lose money.

Say you took a $100 bill right here and I had it right in front of me.

And I looked at that bill since the beginning of the Federal Reserve, which is the government institute that mandates or manages all of our currency in the U.S.

So if I go all the way back to the 70s and I look at it today, what do I see?

I see that that $100 bill, if I just held it from then to now, is worth about $25.

It's not worth $100 anymore.

Why?

Because of inflation.

And so if we don't invest our money and we stick it under our mattress, then sadly the government eats away at it every single year.

Both sides, politically agnostic.

And so we got to make sure that we put our money somewhere.

That's why stock market overtime is usually what most people do.

Okay, makes a lot of sense.

And what's the difference between a stock and a bond?

Okay, so stocks and bonds, 101.

I think about stocks like a ability for you to have future upside of a company.

So you are betting in a way on a company.

You're saying today the price of Amazon is $10.

I think in the future, the price of Amazon will be $15.

I want to go for that ride.

It's called upside return.

With a bond, what are you doing instead?

You're saying, I actually want income.

It's like a certificate.

If I give you $100, I promise you.

Over the next five years, I'm going to give you $120 back.

You're not going to make more if the bond that you invest in goes up or down in price.

You're just going to clip coupons is what they're called.

It used to be like that.

So

you're clipping the coupon.

And the reason we want both of those is because, again, you want when the stock market crashes, you want your bond to still be clipping those coupons, baby.

Still coming in.

When the stock market's raging, you want to capture some of that upside.

And that's how we play right there in the middle of investing.

Is there a stage three?

So we did stage one is you.

Stage two is SP.

What's a stage three?

Stage three is private.

So if you're a real pro and you want to go for 303 of investing, that's where we start to do private equity.

That's just investing in those same companies, but instead of them being traded publicly, those companies are now held by private investors.

They'll never trade on a stock exchange.

That also includes things like you can have alternative investments.

That might mean investing in direct in real estate or investing in commodities, which would be like timber, right?

You could bet on timber prices.

That might be like equity and options.

I think this generation got a little crazy because they were the first generation to gamify stock market investing and make it seem fun as opposed to serious.

And they were the first generation that got easy access to things like options and warrants.

And that's really actually only for pros.

So I think anybody who's trying to tell you how to day trade, anybody who's trying to tell you how to do options, that strategy, think about that.

Like somebody trying to tell you, let me teach you over the the course of a couple hours of me speaking to you how to cut open somebody's brain.

We just wouldn't do that.

This is for pros.

And if you really want to make real money, you don't do it by messing around at the margins of financial investing, in my mind.

You do it by becoming the company that they invest in, which is stage four.

So that's when you're like, I buy the business outright.

I raise money for my own business.

And that's the next level of the game.

That's so great.

I love that step-by-step because I feel for so many people, it just feels like this unorganized, messy wild, wild west.

And now it's like, wait a minute, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four.

I love those.

Going back to stage two of the SP,

what percentage of someone's income should they be looking to put into the S ⁇ P?

There's lots of rules around this, but I believe in you pay yourself first.

And by you pay yourself first, what I mean is you think about your investments just like you would a need, not a want.

So every single month, I believe in automatic investing.

I've done it my entire career.

Vanguard taught me that.

You get really lucky in finance.

They teach you how to invest so that it becomes a habit, not a possibility.

You don't wake up unless you're gross and not brush your teeth, right?

You just brush your teeth because you're not gross.

And so for investing, I think about it the same way.

It's like you automatically set up your payments so a little bit goes every time.

I believe you want to have at least 10% of the money that you make go into investing.

There's lots of different rules.

People could play it either way, but I think pay yourself first because otherwise you'll never pay yourself at all.

And give yourself at least 10% because we want to beat inflation every single year.

And if you do those two things, you are better than about 90% of people that don't do that.

10% off to tax.

That's just such a great goal for people.

And you start thinking about it and you go, oh, what am I spending dumb money on?

You know, like, what do you see people wasting money on?

You know what the biggest thing is?

People waste money on looking rich instead of being rich.

And that is a cultural phenomenon that I think is eroding our wealth as society.

I mean, perfect perfect example here, Coachella.

We know, because we're on the inside, that the dirty secret of Coachella and everybody that you see on there is that most influencers are one, paid to go, two, given free tickets, three, flown out for free, four, they actually have warehouses where you can pick out the clothes because that part's expensive and you get the clothes for free.

Or if you're a real pro, they'll pay you to wear the clothes and give you the clothes for free.

And so this entire experience for the few who become because we're all, we just desire what other people have, that's how humans are, they're not paying anything for a thing that costs thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.

Well, the problem is that the average Coachella main ticket holder, about 64% of them couldn't afford their ticket.

So they had to do buy now, pay later options this year.

They offered buy now, pay later.

And that is just for the ticket.

That's not for the clothes and that's not for the food and that's not for the drinks.

And so we are basically having credit card debt, which lasts forever as a trade for Instagram posts, which last for a minute.

And so the number one thing that you can do to change your financial future is to not buy into what you see on the internet, everybody else doing, which is why I really respect what you do.

And I try to do it online too.

Sure, we have nice things now.

Sometimes you'll catch it in places because I won't really tell, but you don't see me flashing nice watches.

You don't see me having nice cars.

You don't see me posting about private planes.

Why?

That's not really necessary.

And all you are signaling is that that is what success is.

That is not what success is.

Those are just accoutrements that could be fun if you're into it once you're rich.

But I promise you, I've met so many unhappy motherfuckers who have private jets.

Yeah.

No, and I really appreciate that you're saying that because I think for me, it was the same thing.

I didn't, I never wanted, I mean, when I started, I didn't have anything to show, but I didn't want someone to follow me for what I had.

I wanted them to follow me for what I was saying and doing and living.

And that to me always felt like that means anyone could do it.

And as soon as it became, and also it was never about getting the thing, even for me.

So if you make it about getting the thing, then the thing you do to get it, you don't love.

Whereas my thing is, I love the game.

I love what I'm doing.

And same as you.

And it goes back to where we started, where it's like, if you love the game, if you respect the rules, if you love what you do, then all of these things are a byproduct.

They're wonderful, but they're never the goal.

They're never the destination.

They're never the thing that you wanted.

That's not what drove you there.

It's so true.

And they'll all be taken from you at various points, you know?

And so I think about it a little bit like beauty.

You know, I'm getting older and I've tried to on the internet never make it about how I look one way or the other, if I'm fit or not, if I'm in sexy outfits or not.

Why?

Because I'm going to get old.

I know what the future looks like.

And it's old and wrinkly and saggy tits and all the things, right?

And that's cool.

It doesn't matter.

And so if I can like prepare now that maybe people listen because I might have something valuable to say, then I'll still have something valuable to say when I'm 80, as long as I'm still with it.

And I think it's the same with stuff.

You You know, somebody could take that from you, but they cannot take ever.

Nobody but God can take all the lessons that you've learned while running this business.

Nobody but God could take the relationships that you've built from this business.

But many things, including the market, could take everything that sits around us.

And so I try to remember that so that I never anchor to it.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not like, I am not an actual monk.

I am very flawed.

Neither am I.

And so, you know, I wish that I was better at some of this, but it is like the habits of millionaires are that they actually, by and large, they don't care about money.

They care about winning and they care about learning.

And real players

find things and money to be uninteresting at some point.

Cody Sanchez.

You're amazing.

This is so great.

I love hanging with you because it's just, it's refreshing.

We talk about everything from dating to investing to making money to being a good employee.

And I love that you're so flexible to go anywhere and everywhere because I feel people are going to get so much out of this episode.

And I'm just so grateful that you're showing up as you are always.

Despite everything else crazy life that you have going on as well, you're able to come here and drop wisdom gems with ease.

Thank you for the priceless advice.

It was so fun.

Amazing value.

Everyone who's listening and watching, make sure you tag me and Cody on Instagram, on TikTok.

Let us know what you're testing.

Let us know what resonated with you.

Let us know what connected with you because there were so many moments that I was sitting there going, this is great this is great i hope someone does this i want to see what stuck with you and of course if you don't already go and grab a copy of main street millionaire subscribe to cody's podcast follow her across social media don't miss out on the amazing wisdom that she has to share and we'll see you again soon thank you so much for listening to this conversation if you enjoyed it you'll love my chat with adam grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential.

If you know you want to be more and achieve more this year, go check it out right now.

You set a goal today, you achieve it in six months, and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief.

There's no sense of meaning and purpose.

You sort of expected it and you would have been disappointed if it didn't happen.

This is Jay Shetty from On Purpose.

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