Meet YouTube's Next Billionaire (Codie Sanchez Interview)

26:25Um, but yeah. Yeah. Um, anything else like, like processes, like templates and, and I'm curious, it seems like you're like, this is running without you. Oh yeah. Well, I guess how involved are you in the pre-production? Cause I find that's another area of struggle for a lot of creators. It's like, okay we could get everything ready for the shoot day but if the script isn't ready if we're not shooting at the right location the hook isn't like how involved are you before you get to the shoot day yeah well let's see at this point i would say almost no pieces of content go out at this company without me reviewing it um we're still at that stage yeah it's also because i like it yeah so you know i'm not at that stage with our investments for instance i i don't most of the companies that we own, I don't operate.

27:10I get weekly and quarterly reviews. But those have great CEOs. I've been in finance for a long time, so I know how to do that. I've only been doing content for like three years, so I find it fun. So I review every single piece of content. I still write a decent amount of it, I would say, but much less over the last year. And instead, I do a lot of voice noting, like, hey, this is how we should do it. Or I'll write a marquee piece of content, and then they'll sort of tear it up. Or even in preparation for this and some interviews we have tomorrow, I'll think really hard on a piece. Like here's why I think our society is falling apart because we don't have ownership.

27:44And then I'll go and look up all the stats I think confirm that. And I'll check my biases and I'll do a really in-depth piece. And then I'll push it to the team and say, like repurpose this across multiple angles. Um, because your subject matter expertise, at least when it comes to my stuff, it's, it's hard to replicate. Um, this one's kind of fun. so one thing we want to get better at this is called cody brand plus cult sayings so we we want our community to feel integrated and like they're part of us and that's not that normal in finance and business um and so we wanted them to have words that would identify them right so just like a sports team yeah and so we came up with like stuff that we say all the time and then started sort of testing it with the environment.

28:31Like what, what do people like, where are they reposting us? And then we found a few that they really seem to resonate with. And so we went hard on those. And so now like if you go on Instagram every single day, I'm getting tagged in, you know, a business where they're doing something intense or a workout that's intense and it's choose your heart. And so, um, that was useful. And we have like a ton of these. What are some of those cult sayings? Well, choose your heart is the first one. Um, Main Street over Wall Street. That's a big one. We're going to do a tour on that. Dirty Hands, Filthy Bank Accounts.

29:04Move Fast Break Things. We didn't popularize that one. Blue Collar Nation. Unemployable. We focus a lot on that one. And Investing is Math Not Feelings. So a lot of these became things that people would repeat back to us. And then we would try to keep. Yeah. and i imagine this makes it easier to like bring new people on the team because they get a download of everything in your world yeah exactly and then it also is like a through line we can have through everything that we do yeah you know when you watch like wes anderson just from the color scheme you know it's wes anderson right and then if you hear a score from like who's the guy that did uh bad boys um michael bay wait this is so easy with you you know the answers to all these what else do you have in there i watched too many i actually went on a whole michael bay binge recently but i mean he has a whole cinematic style right and you have to assume i mean i've never met michael bay but i'd like to maybe we should put him on the podcast list but i love that you just by listening to him not his songs he's not the singer he's not the artist but just by listening to a score of his movie you can tell it's a michael bay movie same thing with wes anderson and i remember like a billion years ago i got to meet quentin tarantino and um the most interesting part uh to me about Quentin Tarantino is he is like exactly who he is in his videos like in his movies I met him in real life I was like you're just as creepy like you're just as you you know and I also want to have that for us like I want our content to feel so real to me so that like when you're watching me on YouTube and we're hanging out on YouTube together but then you meet me in the street you're like same person because that's like you know how people say don't meet your heroes I hate that yeah I want if somebody meets me, maybe they hate me online and they hate me in person.

30:50Cool. But like, let's keep it the same. You know, let's be the same person either way. Yeah. Yeah. Cody, can I can we give some of these notion templates that you've built away to the audience? Do you think they think they're useful? I think I mean, I was going through like I'm already thinking about ways we can implement them on our team. Only if you're comfortable. But let's do it. Cool thing. A hundred percent. Maybe like how do we want to do this? Maybe like people give their email or. Yes. Why don't you go? I'll give you a link. Yeah. And we'll scrub all of my social security numbers off them.

31:16Yeah, that's a good idea. And then if you input in your email, you can go ahead and get it just linked down below in this video. Perfect. Let's put it down there. And then we'll also maybe add some of the main takeaways from this as well, because there's so many things I feel like people could grasp onto and maybe a PDF or something like that. Okay, cool. And let us know, too, if you think this is useful or not. Yeah. And we can dig in deeper. This one's kind of cool, too. Maybe the last one. Yeah, yeah. This is my mission control. Oh. God, we're kind of nerds. I didn't realize what we named all this stuff now that I think about it.

31:44Yeah, is this like a NASA control center? Yeah, I don't know. what's happening here? I do like space and rockets. Okay. So the mission control is cool because this is the only thing I look at when it comes to content to review. And because I don't have a lot of time, it's very particular. It's like stack ranked for when we're going to post, what is the name of it? And then status. And you can see like, there's a lot of statuses in here. So it's like idea dump on hold. Cody approves the idea. Cody needs some input, final version, ready to film, ready to schedule. I mean, there's a lot. And what's nice about this is like, I don't see anything I don't have to.

32:22And I know every single day, like I just go in there and maybe I spend 20 minutes. I'm like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And the team has a process to work through every aspect of it. And again, this is how you don't burn out because, um, you know, you want to try to keep being a creator creative for the things that matter. You know, it doesn't matter how you review your videos every day. No, no benefit to you making that up every single time. But keep your creative juices for the things that matter and then go on autopilot for the things that don't. I feel so seen right now. Do you see slash attack, but in a good way?

32:55Are you into processes too? Well, we're trying to create them. And, uh, you know, Amanda, like my wife and COO, she's very good at like trying to put those in, but yeah, it's like kind of a push and pull of like trying to put out the best stuff, put it out fast enough, but trying to make it so other people can take it as far as possible before I come in. Yeah. I mean, the other thing I think is important to is like, we want to build, I mean, I'm trying to build something kind of giant here. I want to build like the 21st century media company. And I don't know that I've really ever talked about all this stuff publicly because we're very focused on like what serves job working John, right?

33:30And that's who we're trying to serve. But when I think about it, I'm like, I think my generation, the finance company of me was like Bloomberg. They were where you went to for news. You also logged in and financed your Bloomberg terminal, like that's where you went. And these days it's like, where do you go? Like most of the finance news is kind of trash or it's about the stock market. I'm like, nobody should be day training. That's a terrible idea. So, um, so we're trying to build that. And if I want to build like a lasting company that can exist beyond my time, I have to build it out in a way where I am not the single point of failure.

34:04And I think the moment that you do that too is the moment you unlock all this creative ability too because then i mean we're talking about hannah and i are like okay what documentary are we going to do next like do we want to do some full feature films yeah who's the next talent we want to bring in but it all started with like hey i just don't want to edit this video yeah and so can i make a process where somebody else could follow that and that's a beautiful thing if that's where you are today i mean so many people say that to see you do it is really interesting and the behind the scenes Yeah, there's no there's no accidents in success.

34:35Yeah, like and I think you probably see it even more in creators They're like the thing is i'm authentic. You're like yes, but like yeah, no, let's go a little bit deeper Like let's get all those humble answers out of the way. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Cody, can you Break down your income pie chart? Like what are all the different ways you make money? And if I could ask you're very open about finance How much money do you make last year? Oh a lot. Are you the irs? Real quick? we'll get right back to the video but one of my favorite parts of the interview is coming up and that's where cody breaks down her different businesses and how you can make money as a creator and one of the biggest ways you could do that is by selling online courses which is why i'm so excited to tell you about thinkific the sponsor of this video thinkific is an amazing platform for launching your course and turning your expertise into a thriving business but i love thinkific because their tools are easy to use they look professional and you could tailor fit them to your brand and it's not just courses with thinkific you can sell digital downloads workshops webinars community spaces for members, and even one-on-one private coaching sessions.

35:31And there's so much more that Thinkific has to offer, from custom-built landing pages to marketing emails, easy integrations with other creator tools like Salesforce and MailChimp. But my favorite feature, Thinkific doesn't just help you build, it helps you sell. With order bumps, product bundles, and even financing options, they make it easier for your audience to say yes. So if you're ready to turn your expertise into income, then get started with Thinkific by using my link below. All right, now back to the video. Do I have to report it? I mean, a couple ways we could talk about this. So how I make the most money is through our Main Street Holding Company.

36:06That company does nine figures a year. And more than that, it varies. It can go up and down. It's going up quite a bit right now. But sometimes we sell a company. So I get cagey sometimes with sharing exactly how much we make. Because what if we sell a company and then it's not nine figures? So sometimes I think about that. But that's Main Street Holding Company. That's where we make most of our money. You know, it's safe to say we're making eight figures a year pretty healthy every year. And contrarian thinking, our media company is the same. That business definitely makes good eight figures a year in revenue.

36:41So that's our media business and how we make money there. So Main Street Holding Company owns like Resi Brands, which is a trade services franchise. So that's like a company called Pink's and that one Painter. And there's Garage Up in there. There's, you know, a couple defense companies. There's, so that thing is probably where we make most of our cash. The second is contrarian thinking. So contrarian thinking is a media company that owns our education business, which is where we teach people how to buy businesses, build businesses, and eventually sell businesses. We have some sponsorships and partnerships in there.

37:15That's probably like seven figures a year.

37:21Let's see, what else do we make money? AdSense, small amount. Like, I don't know how much we make. How much do you think we make in ad dollars a year? Yeah, a couple hundred K? Yeah, a couple hundred K. Yeah. And what else do we do? Oh, and then we're working on more affiliates. So where do we own a portion of a company? Inside of contrarian thinking, not the Main Street Holding Company, that we get paid a percentage in revenue share and distributions, and we own part of that company. And then we have contrarian thinking capital, which is our venture capital company. And there, we mostly don't make any money.

37:56That's a cost center, not a profit center. And that business maybe will become a profit center as we continue to grow. And then we have one independent company that's big called BizScout. But that company just cost me millions of dollars. And that's our small business buying and selling marketplace, sort of like Zillow, but for small businesses. And we hope to make a lot of money on that business one day, but right now it just, it costs me money instead. I think BizScout and Main Street Holding Company are like my multi-billion dollar place. Like Main Street Holding Company, I think we'll get to a billion dollars.

38:32And, you know, there are a few billion dollar businesses in both Contrarian Thinking Capital and Main Street Hold Company, but we just don't own 100 % of them. So we'll see. But at this stage, you know, the idea is for most of the money we make, can we plow as much as humanly possible back into both content to continue to grow? our investments to continue to grow them. And then I'm not like that flashy, probably like, I mean, you don't see me really posting anything flashy on the internet. It's not really my deal. I just want to see us grow. Yeah. If I could zoom in onto the income pie chart of like the media company, the sponsorships thing is really interesting.

39:10Like that doesn't seem to be a big portion of your revenue. Not right now. Do you remember when you started out what your first brand deal was? Because it's interesting to talk to you about this because I think you have experience on both sides of the table as a creator, like maybe being approached with brand deals and then being on the other side with companies that you may want to work with folks who could extend your reach work with creators. Like what tips or what do you remember by your early days of brand deals? And like, how would you recommend creators go about negotiating them? I think I actually did a first brand deal when I was first on the internet with Kind Bar.

39:41Is that the name of it? Oh yeah. Yeah. And it was like, I probably have an NDA, but whatever fuck it like I remember it was the most miserable engagement for me it was like you have to take a picture of this and then you have to send it back and then we need to edit it and here you have to have a 47 page long caption that xyz and doing that first engagement I was just like I hate my life I can't believe I'm doing this am I getting paid a thousand bucks like what is wrong with me but I kind of thought I had to try it and so ever since then a couple things one we only do partnerships and sponsorships with companies that we own outright we own part of where we are massive fans of and we use aggressively so like i just did one we'll give them some free love but uh with eight sleep and um i'm obsessed with eight sleep one the founder's really a cool guy uh a couple of them are but um like if you use their product and you have are in a relationship like maybe you to.

40:37I sleep at 95 degrees on the eight sleep mattress on my side. My husband sleeps at 68 on accident. We flipped ours one night and I've never had a more miserable night of sleep. I was like so upset. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't sleep. I was so cold. And then I realized that the next day. And so like that product I just love. So I'll talk about it. Um, so that's one thing I learned. The second thing I learned is I think as a creator, you've really got to protect, you got to protect your art a little bit. And with, with partnerships and sponsorships, I think you need somebody in the middle.

41:09And so, um, in the beginning, I tried to take some of those sponsorships and partnerships. And if you do that and you engage with them and you don't like the back and forth, what you create will be influenced by it. And so maybe I'm just relatively unemployable and, you know, I don't like people telling me what to do, but that was hard for me in the beginning. And now we have somebody who works with all the brands and we take very few and we only do six figure partnerships. There's no, no small boy stuff. And, um, we got lucky doing that. I think because I saw like brands come to us all the time and they're going to come to all creators.

41:45Let me tell you why. Because on average they want like, they want like a five to 10 X returned on ad spend, which is how they would think about creators for us. And so you guys know this all too well. So if they're making 10 bucks, or I'm sorry, if they're paying you$1, they're making five or 10 on everything that you do. And not only are they making five or 10 right away over the lifetime value, the LTV of the user is maybe double, triple, quadruple that. And so, and they don't even measure the LTV because that's hard to do over time. They're never going to pay you on the LTV, which is why so many creators create their own brands.

42:21The brands either have to realize that they want a significant partnership with you for life or for a very long time, or they're going to pay a premium for it, uh, or, uh, creators create their own things. And so I think that's why so many of our products are things we've created ourselves, or I will like reach out to a brand in particular. Like for instance, I just pinged, um, I just pinged the head of Cameo because I have a cool idea that I use their product for a lot. And I just pinged the head of loom because i want to do something with them yeah but uh i'm like i'm saying no to every you know finance app imaginable and they'll pay a lot what's what's the biggest brand deal you've said no to oh well i probably wouldn't say the name because i don't want to be too much of a dick but um uh there's been a lot i mean there are six figure multi six figure deals we say no to often which is like cool to be able to do i never thought like back in the day you were gonna give be six figures to do a tick tock let's fucking go but um but now i've realized the truth which is you're only as good as your reputation is online and who knows at some point i might get canceled for something but it better be for something i did not something some other fucking company did and i've seen too many of my friends i saw some like anthony pompliano good friend of mine pop he got murdered because of some um crypto companies that he backed including ftx and And Pomp is a smart, like diligent, very good investor who's made a ton of money.

43:49And that reputation was hard to get back. And so I'm thoughtful on making sure that I don't partner with fucking Pfizer or something and then regret it later. Another thing you've done really well is your newsletter. And I feel like the newsletter space is getting super crowded now. And just about every other creator YouTuber is trying to start one. How would you try to cut through and grow a newsletter? Let's say they're already doing all the basics. They're consistent. They found their niche. They found their voice. Like, how would you grow a newsletter in today's crowded environment? Well, one, I would ask yourself this.

44:21Like, sometimes I think reframing helps, right? Because that is a good question. But also, do you think that companies ever get created and then go, should we create an email list or not? Or like, well, it's kind of crowded to have an email list. Of course they don't. Of course they have an email list. Every company you've ever engaged with has an email list. If you're a creator, you're a company of one or a company of a few. So one, just know that there's always going to be people saying podcasts are too crowded, newsletters are too crowded. What that means is they're too crowded for crap. So if your stuff isn't good and you don't really have something to say that has what I call the three Cs, which is something that you are truly curious about.

45:03So you have to want to write about it. Otherwise, energy transfers and people are going to feel that. And then two, a crowd. There's already like a proven area that you're like, oh, people care about this. Millennials are into succulents. I love succulents. I'm going to write about succulents in a unique perspective. And then three, cash. I like to have an audience that is already spending on this. I read a funny article that millennials spend like a monthly amount, like a not de minimis amount of money on plants a month. so okay so maybe there's a newsletter there curious cash crowd and if you have those three things i think you can stand out and then you know the only thing that i think about when i think about newsletters it's maybe a little different is i mean how much do you obsess on a subject line or on a um on a title for a youtube video way too much like a lot right you're like really thinking about it you think about the packaging everything that goes into it well with newsletters treat your subject line the same way this is like og internet marketing but nobody really thinks about it anymore and so the one i i giggle about still is we had a contest back in the day with uh the guy who's running my newsletter and uh and they were doing like kind of boring subject lines i thought like too obvious you know it would be like cody's favorite things round up or something like that and it's like okay that's fine that's like a b minus c plus maybe um but in one particular instance, it was about a landscaping business because we write about boring businesses.

46:29So you have to imagine like, we have to be so much more creative because I am talking about fucking tree trimming. Oh yeah. So like, like, you know, if it's not creative, nobody's going to read it. So the, we were talking about tree trimming. They came up with two titles, which was like, he makes$22 ,000 a month with trimming trees or like she, uh, started a tree trimming business at 21. Right. There's some good aspects to those dollar amount, timeframe, frame, specifics. I was like, those are lazy. And, uh, and I said, I'm going to pay you a thousand bucks. If you beat my subject line, they were like, definitely going to beat it.

47:05Wrote whatever they wrote. I sent mine and I won. Why? Because my subject line was, I love wood dot, dot, dot. You know, it's like, you're going to, you're going to be like, what Cody's talking about that. Now I'm not click baiting you because it's not saying that I'm going to deliver something else, but it's surprising yeah it's like slightly off kilter it's a little funny it's on brand for us and so um if you're going to create a newsletter don't make it suck basically any other subject lines that you've seen work really well i mean a couple of things that are true always the same with hooks um statistics studies emotions actions specific stories all of those do very well um and then I do think humor is important yeah you can get really nitty-gritty into like the if you put an emoji here and caps locks there and an asterisk there I'm like less interested in that yeah although I'm sure there's a lot to learn there but I'm more like what does it make me feel yeah like how do I feel and so we talk about that with short form video too I'm like this video made me feel nothing I feel nothing about this video and so I don't want to put that out to the world yeah yeah we we borrowed something from um sean purry uh and the milk road because they have this opening line that always makes you laugh so now in our newsletter we say like welcome to created the newsletter that's more satisfying than closing 27 tabs on your chrome browser something like that yeah and every time it's like welcome to created the newsletter that's more vital than like uh like wi-fi like on a five-hour flight or something something like that and like people already like respond like that you know that you know puts a little smile on their face and then obviously the info and the value is there too but i like that yeah well and also it makes it probably makes you guys laugh yeah yeah really important too you know like the newsletter that you want a raw dog like the kids are doing these things like it's that's funny you're like that makes me laugh yeah and being a creator is like it's a lot of work oh yeah the level of output you have to have today to be relevant is huge and i think people underestimate that like i mean we were talking to somebody today i won't say who yet that's coming on the pod who's his stud like very excited he's a big comedian and he was sort of laughing about how historically back in the day david blaine is that his name yeah magician the magician yeah so he used to do one trick and that one trick like levitating would last for like 10 years it would be like the levitating guy like we go to that that's incredible and everybody goes and you make however millions of dollars off of it and he goes and now we get excited if we go off on youtube on one day.

49:34Like we're viral on YouTube for one day. You're on the homepage for YouTube for one day. What are you doing? Celebrating. You're losing it. And then when he said that to me, I was giggling because he's like, a day? How do these motherfuckers make money on that? And you're like, you're right. That is weird in retrospect. So like the quantity is so high that if you don't have some fun with it, I think it'd probably be pretty miserable. And also life's too short to work with like miserable, non-fun people. Amen. In your book, you talk a lot about like how to buy a business which is even a concept that like just it didn't really feel accessible and started until I started going through with this and I see a lot of creators trying to start these flashy businesses that you know you get you see the headlines when they launch but then when you check in on them a year later they've gone out of business what are some of the most interesting examples of creators who are starting businesses that you feel like are smart their extensions of what they're doing the content kind of like amplifies it like take me into that world of it Because I know you also said, like, making money off of content alone is one of the worst ideas in terms of business.

50:35It's a terrible business model. It's a really bad business model. I mean, what do I mean by it's a bad business model? Every single media company that has become very large has struggled financially to the point of either going under or having to be bought by a billionaire for the most part. So we know that, in fact, playing the game of attention with purely information is highly problematic. Like a BuzzFeed. A BuzzFeed. A New York Times. Yeah. You know, we see this again and again. And if you think that it's bad now in the age of Google scraping all of our stuff, wait until AI comes for us. You know, we're going to have AI Johns all over the place.

51:12We're going to have AI Cody's. We're going to have content ripped off, duplicated. And increasingly, I think relevancy is going to be hard. So that's what you can look forward to. Yeah. So what are the ways we could combat that? Or what are the businesses that you feel like a creator, like they're just getting started, maybe less than 100 ,000 subscribers. like what should they be looking at in terms of other ways to diversify their income beyond some of the things we've talked about courses newsletter like that i feel like people know about like take me through the business oh yeah i think you're well i think if you're a creator today and you're not thinking about acquiring businesses and how to get equity and what's called distributing equity where they keep paying you over time you're making a huge mistake if you are only living off of ad sense and you are only lifting off even info products or education or anything like that you're in trouble because I think that is very easily scrapable.

51:57So instead I would obsess on becoming a deal maker, which is why I wrote the book. Now I talk a lot about boring businesses because that got everybody's eyeballs. Everybody was kind of like, I understand laundromats. I understand vending machines. Maybe I want one of those. Like you can touch it somehow. But for creators, you guys are in such a unique position because you have attention. And so, you know, an interesting statistic just to show you how valuable you are, is that of all venture capital dollars spent, if there is a dollar spent by venture capital, 40 cents of it goes to Facebook, Amazon, Google.

52:32So what does that tell you? Yeah, it's marketing. So 40 cents of every dollar is basically going to the non-creator version of you. And so creators can become a huge market by becoming marketing for these companies. And so for instance, let me tell you how I did it. We talk about one in the book. This is more in the structuring and selling you section, which is like chapter seven and eight. Um, but in chapter seven, we talk about one company where we get a percentage of the company. It's a video production company because, uh, I produce videos and people ask me all the time, who do you use? And so I go, okay, well, I could partner with all these people who are coming to me and they want me to, um, you know, take money for me to promote them.

53:14I could do that. But I think I should take a cut of the business overall and a monthly fee for doing this. So I shouldn't go to a huge company. I should go to a smaller company and say, right now, do you make, you make, I don't know,$50 ,000,$100 ,000 on video production a month. Okay, cool. What if I could double that? What if I could take you from 50 to$100 ,000? Could I take 20 % of the additional$50 ,000 that I bring you? For clients that I bring you, It's like me giving you money, except it's better because it's recurring over time. And that's what creators should be doing. They should be obsessing on how to get part of a deal in the same way they would do a partnership deal.

53:55It takes slightly more time. So you can take some of the upfront cash too. So let's say you're a small creator right now and you're like, I got to eat, Cody. Like I need the money today too. I can't just wait for an equity deal. You're smart. That's exactly right. Don't take some fly by night. hey, I'll give you equity if I ever exit type business deal. Ask for distributing equity where you get paid on a monthly or quarterly basis while you wait to get an equity from an exit. And then the second part is - Tell me more about that because we get approached with a lot of deals. They're like, hey, we'll give you this equity.

54:25And we've become wiser to kind of diversify that. And we believe in the company, we'll take equity, but we try to get cashflow as well. Yeah. So most deals for creators look like option one, which is brand comes to you and they say, I'm going to pay you X dollar for Y action, right? 50 bucks per video. Let's do it here. The right, well, not the right way to do this. One way that you could do this is brand comes to you, they actually say the same thing, but instead of just taking money up front, 50 bucks for a video for Y action, you say, I want money plus I want a percentage of revenue that I drive.

55:06So you could say, okay, if you pay me 50 bucks and as an affiliate partner, I want a percentage of revenue. That's called an affiliate deal, right? So standard partnership, affiliate deal. Number three might be, and this is why deal making is so cool. You basically get to like, you know how when Neo sees the matrix and he's just like, whoa, look at all this stuff you can manipulate and play with it? Deal making is kind of the same. Everybody else just thinks, I mean, here's the stat. 3 % of people a year negotiate their salary. 3%. We don't even negotiate our salary. Sometimes maybe we negotiate a little bit more in a partnership stake, but it's because we don't know the next levels of the matrix.

55:46And this is what I learned on Wall Street that I think is so cool. So the third way to do it would be, okay, brand wants you to do Y again. You're going to ask for money from them. Plus you're going to ask for equity. This would be like a stock, right? So give me some money now and then give me some equity later. Another way you do it might be brand gives you money, they give you equity, but you also ask for distributing equity. For why? What does distributing equity mean? That means, could mean a few different ways, just like it. Could mean when you, the owner of the business, take out money from the business, I get a percentage of it.

56:27So if the equity I get is 10%, when you take$100 ,000 out of the business, John, because you run the business, I get 10K from the business because I have 10 % of what's called a pro rata distribution, but that's a little nerdy. The other way that you could do it is, let's call that option five. You could go business, dollar, equity, distributing equity for Y outcome. And the distributing equity might actually instead be business makes, I don't know,$10 ,000 a year. I get a either a profit a percentage of the profit the net money they make or a percentage of the revenue of the business of the entire business so it's not just if you take money out of the business John it's if you make money overall and so there's basically six ways from sideways to layer this on you could also say if you were not cash strapped you might just say hey I actually don't want any money keep your money but I want a bigger percentage of the equity and I want a bigger percentage of the distribution for why.

57:33So this is likely what Logan Paul did with Prime, right? And just so it's super clear, can you explain distributed equity one more time versus like a rev share? Yeah. Well, so rev share means if my business makes$1 million a year in total revenue and I own, uh, you know, 10 % of the business and get paid on the total revenue of the business, then I make 10 % of 1 million, which is what? 100K. Okay. So I make 100K in this scenario. In scenario two, the business makes$1 million in revenues a year, but... The owner of the business only takes out 100k in distributions, which is why it's called distributing equity.

58:19Distributions is a fancy way. It's like a tax reason to say that I took money out of the business. It's not my salary. It's above and beyond salary as the owner of the business, which means if you own 10 % of the distributing equity, you get 10 % of$100K, which is a lot less. Yeah, so you only get$10K. There we go. Thank you. That's interesting because now as a business owner, I'm like, I'm not taking money out of the business. So that may happen less if that's the type of deal versus a rev share is obviously, you know, like you're pulling revenue and you define like the date if it's every six months every year.

58:50Yeah. And I mean, and then a profit share would be like$1 million in revenue a year the business makes, but the business only makes a hundred K in profit that year, which means again, if you have 10 % of the profit share, you're taking 10 K home. Okay. Well, so this is, I've never seen it broken down like this. This is, this is amazing for each of these six things. So the why is like an output, like you have to post this many times about it, or you have to bring in this many referrals or like, you kind of have to, define what those deliverables are with the brand. Yeah. And there's two ways to do that with the brand.

59:25So why is your deliverables? You're exactly right. Oh my gosh. I should have been a doctor with his handwriting, but how you can also mess with deal making a different way is you can have either input related deliverables or output related deliverables. So an input related deliverable might be something like two IG posts, three lives. These are things that you can, are activity-based, input-based. Got it. Output goals are things like 100 ,000 views, $10 ,000 in value, 100 new customers. Yeah. Which one do you think brands pay more for? The latter. Output. Yeah. Which ones do we usually negotiate for as creators?

1:00:08Inputs. The first one. So if you're confident in your ability to deliver results, you'd probably want to do output goals. and you'd want to say, I think I'm going to crush this. I want to get a percentage of every customer I bring in over 10K because I'm going to kill it. In the beginning, when you don't know what you're doing, you probably say, I don't know. I probably want to have input related because I don't know how this is going to land with my audience. And so basically everything in dealmaking comes down to risk transfer. It's like who holds the risk and who has more of it. And the person that has less risk typically gets less reward and the person with more risk gets more reward.

1:00:47Yeah. And I guess the big caveat with this is because I think a lot of creators see big brands that sponsor a ton of creators. But I guess the nuance here is like maybe there's that local studio near you that you could partner with or maybe there's a business that like is around you or that you're using a lot. I know you talked about the Venmo method where you look at where a lot of the people or the vendors you're transacting with. And can you do a partnership with them? Because people may be asking, what studio do you use? What editor do you use? And try to partner up with them if they're a bigger company.

1:01:18A way to think about that might be, you asked me in the beginning about what my pie chart was. How do I make money? And I said, well, I think I make, I don't really know the exact answer to this. but let's say most of my money from my companies companies that i own a large percentage of and then i might make i don't know something smaller from partnerships and sponsor shows would be traditional ads and then i might make i don't know another amount from our education business overall and then i might make the rest from like speaking and book etc right so my pie chart as a creator is like largely my companies.

1:01:56But if I was brand new and I wasn't from a private equity background, your pie chart is probably like in the beginning, like the whole thing might be, well, in the beginning, it's probably what AdSense. So you probably have like two things. You have like AdSense and then you have partnerships. And there's some split between the two of them. What I would want to do if I was a creator kind of just starting out is figure like, what's my monthly nut? How much money do I have to make every month in order to cover my costs? And that I'd probably want covered by AdSense and partnerships. Give me cash because I got to protect this thing.

1:02:31But anything above and beyond my monthly nut, I want to take a little bit of risk. And risk looks like affiliates, equity, distributing equity, revenue share, profit share. And so I think what you should take away from all this, if this feels like, fuck me, we're looking at so many numbers and we got pie charts and I thought I left finance. What you might want to take away is just if you can learn the language of money, which is really deal-making, you'll never be poor. I truly believe that because you will understand how wealthy people think and you will understand how companies make money and you make more money when you understand how people who make money make money.

1:03:08And so what I would do is obsess on deal-making, which is why I wrote the book and why I won't shut up about it on the internet. I love it. could you give me just to make this even more accessible like what are other examples of like businesses that you feel like creators or like people who are making content are uniquely like positioned to help out or partner with because there's a lot i mean another stat that you had in the book that blew my mind was that there's so many boomers who have businesses who are about to retire um and they'll let go of a very profitable business just because they they they don't have anybody to give it to their kids want to dance on tiktok instead of like taking it over.

1:03:43Give me just more ideas of businesses that a creator may be uniquely positioned to take on to help diversify the pie chart. Yeah. Well, first of all, you got to realize that there's something happening all around us right now, which is we have what's called the silver tsunami or the great wealth transfer. So 75 million businesses up for sale in the next 10 years, let's call it. Most of these businesses, 60 % are owned by baby boomers. Their kids don't want to take over their businesses, yet that is where somewhere around $68 trillion in wealth is located. The fascinating part though, and you would probably know this firsthand, like how much of your net worth is tied up in your businesses?

1:04:19A lot. 90 % on average. So most small business owners, if they're 65 plus, they have no transition plan. They have to exit. They need to figure out a way to sell some portion of this business. And so we've created a group where we focus on a community of people teaching other people how to do seller financing. So how do you get an aging baby boomer business owner to trust you to take over their business and you pay them through a percentage of future profits? So for creators, what would that look like? Well, you'd be really different and it wouldn't really matter if you were relevant forever, which is something I think about as a creator, if you started taking a percentage of companies that you interact with.

1:04:59So how would I think about this? Right now we're sitting in a studio, it's not yours, right? Then you pay a dollar amount to come and work here. Right. So what could you do? Well, you could talk to this studio that's probably owned by an independent person and say, Hey, I got this big thing where I talk about creators all the time. My entire audience is literally creators. How much revenue do you guys do at this business? Like how big is this business? Oh, you make about$20 ,000 a month. You own this place, but you have it set up as a business. Is it profitable? Oh, it's profitable a month. Okay, cool.

1:05:30Well, what if I could like, how much capacity do you have? Are you like overwhelmed with capacity? Do you have more? Oh, wow. You're only operating at 30 % capacity. What if I could fill this for you? Do you think I could own? If I filled it for you or damn near close, could I own half of the business that I drive to you in distributing equity or in equity or in revenue share of this property plus the business that sits on it? And you might have to negotiate the terms a little bit, but let me tell you what, I bet most studios today are struggling. And if they had a built-in marketing mechanism, aka you, and you just got paid a little thousand dollar, two thousand dollar check a month from this studio, plus a studio in New York, plus a studio in Austin, plus a studio somewhere else, you'd probably be pretty happy.

1:06:16And so would they. So like, that's one way to do it. Right. You could also do it with like, you talked about how some of your podcasts editing, you outsource to this agency. What happens when you talk about that agency online? Like, do they get a lot of users? Oh yeah. They've gotten a lot more. Well, now we get to a point where like we have like the agency does the graphics and we try to bring all the editing in-house but that graphics agency has got a lot more work because we've talked about them online yeah did you get anything for that john okay so there's your opportunity yeah now we want to be giving we don't need to try to be generous with it always yeah well here's how i think about it be generous and what is the most generous thing you can do have a partnership that is mutually beneficial that continues to allow both parties to have a symbiotic relationship where they make more money.

1:07:01And so that's what you would do. You're being nice by mentioning them sometimes, but would it be nicer if they had a consistent marketing partner that was always talking about them? Maybe. And so because of that, you could go to the owner of that business and say, hey, you know, you kill it for us. I'd love to give you more credit. Can we walk through how much money your business makes, sort of what your returns are, what your margin is, which is how much you make between what it costs you to run the business and how much profit you keep in your pocket. And if you like those numbers and you like the guy or gal that runs the business, then you'd say, well, why don't we figure something out between the two of us?

1:07:38And I think a lot more creators could do that than they assume. Wow. You got to tell me if you close these deals. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah. Another thing I feel like a lot of creators don't do is taking their content, taking on the road and making money public speaking. I pulled up these stats about you that I thought was fascinating. In your first year getting paid to speak on stages, you made 3K. Then the second year you made 25K. Then the third year of public speaking, you made 90K. And in your most recent year, you made over a half a million dollars public speaking. Yeah, that's definitely probably true, maybe higher.

1:08:14How do you make money public speaking as a creator? I feel like we're in a unique position that we think about the content on camera. We take it on the road. We built an audience. We're building a brand. Yet so few creators make money speaking on stages. What advice would you give to somebody to start getting paid to be on stage? Because events, corporations, there's no shortage of it post-lockdown. No, that's true. Well, two things. One, I also think speaking is a terrible way to make money. So the reason I don't do a lot of speaking typically is because, think about it, it's a transactional business.

1:08:51I don't really love transactional businesses, as you probably hear from now. So the reason we've done a lot of speaking this year, which is probably north of seven figures, is the book. It's like we go, we talk about the book, we hope they buy a bunch of copies, or they pay us, but we instead invest in more copies of the book that we send out to people. Now, in the beginning, who cares if it's a good business model or not? When you're young, you're like,$500 ,000, I will do things I shouldn't for that. And so that's cool. But what I would say is speaking itself, because it's really transactional, is hard.

1:09:22And so it's a volatile thing that you can't really track. Now, if you don't care about any of that and you just want to do it anyway, I would say your most important thing is the same thing that you do on YouTube or anywhere else, which is who's your avatar? Who are you serving? Why do they find value from you? And can you over serve them? Yeah. So for me, I'm a little lucky and that my niche is finance and like, it's kind of a perfect example. If I can truly, if I really am an expert in buying and selling businesses and I can teach a group of creators from coming and speaking to them, how to immediately make tens of thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars a month through doing like one or two deals.

1:10:01I'm very valuable to the sponsor of that event. And so I think you have to ask yourself, how do you become really valuable? Now, the trick is like my friend Vanessa Van Edwards, who's a big YouTuber too, she's actually more valuable as a speaker and gets paid more than I do because she helps big corporations get more out of their employees. So how much will Google or Amazon pay as opposed to like VidCon? VidCon is going to be way down here and Google and Amazon are going to be up here. They're going to pay her$100 ,000 to come talk to their employees and get their leadership excited because their ability to ROI on that is bajillions, technical term.

1:10:36So that's one thing. And then, you know, what I would say is even if you go speak, what do you have to do? You have to negotiate your contract with them. You have to figure out, are there other things I can put on the table besides you just paying me a flat fee? And so it all kind of comes back to this idea of, like, we've got to remember how to do deals. and that it's okay. It's very like un-American to think about how do we structure a deal on stuff? How do we ask for equity? It probably makes people feel uncomfortable even thinking about it. And yet the richest people in the world, that's how they do it.

1:11:08Well, I think it's even more true for YouTubers and creators because we're programmed to chase views, you know? And it's like, I think that there's so many things that you could share that show, okay, now here's how you could turn a hobby or a side hustle or something that's getting a lot of views into an actual business. Because the way you've been able to do it just has blown me away in so many instances. Well, thanks. I mean, I still the, I think I added one level, but Naval Ravikant, who found an angelist amongst other things, talked about the three levels of leverage and how the first, and leverage basically meaning the way that you get more for every action you take.

1:11:41And really the key to money often and wealth and success is leverage. If you were to go to the richest people in the world, all of them are levered with debt. All of them levered with these things that Naval talks about. And the first one is labor, right? So you think about the first titans of the world, they were people who could command a huge labor force. So that would be back in the day, like the pharaohs, that was slave labor. Then it would be serfs, then eventually it became employees, right? And then after labor, you had capital, like the big Rockefellers and the titans of industry were created after the Banking Act was created in the US.

1:12:16And so capital created like titans of industry. And then finally, you had code, right? Which is how Bill Gates, how Elon Musk, a lot of them have like an army of robots at their fingertips. Once I thought about the world that way, I realized if I want more money, I can use more employees or I could use more money to get more money or I could use code. Well, that's kind of confusing. I don't know how to do that, but I could definitely use audience or attention. And that's basically what we have today, audience. And it's the most permissionless form of leverage out there. And so once I realized that I could use attention and audience in the same way as I could capital, I just sort of restructured our business like I would a finance business.

1:12:57And I think any creator doing that today, you have way more power than you think. How do you think about courses and info products? That's another area where I feel like there's a lot of baggage, but you've done a great job of like selling, you know, like, like, I mean, these numbers kind of like stood out to me. You have a hundred dollar course, a$2 ,000 accelerator, and you have a$10 ,000 course in community. Like, how did you think about the price points? Like how well are those doing? Like, I feel like a lot of creators can also package up what they say into these courses, but maybe not a lot of them do because it's hard to price yourself in many ways.

1:13:33How have you thought about that? I think there's because people on the internet tell you that it is better to go invest somebody else's money than teach them how to do the investing. There's a lot of people that look down on education products. And I can see why. Because one, universities are a huge institution that has sort of monopolized the idea of teaching another person. I think it's criminal and they're totally overrated. And if you look at the actual numbers for educational institutions today, We have had a three to four X incline in the cost of universities, and we have had a flat line of return, meaning our salary increases after university.

1:14:11So for me, I got like on my, again, on my moral high ground here, it was like, why did I go to an MBA at Georgetown? I mean, if I want to climb a corporate ladder, it's very useful. Having that on there is much better than Arizona State, Harvard of the West, where I went to undergrad, right? Like way better. But if I don't want to climb the corporate ladder, that$160 ,000 degree or whatever it was that really didn't teach me much of anything. And then they say, well, it's for the network. I don't know. Better network by meeting people like you guys at conferences than that. I think that's a scam.

1:14:45And so once I started to realize that, my mom's a 30-year special education teacher. I was like, I think we can go to war with those guys. I think we can be a better financial education company and we can teach people more about getting financial freedom than a Wharton degree. Wow, you're targeting my alma mater. Is that yours? Yeah, I went to Wharton undergrad. Well, I use Wharton because I think they are the best finance school out there. Yeah. I think NYU Stern is like second, but it's not Harvard. And MIT and Stanford are actually incredible for entrepreneurship and engineering degrees. But Wharton's like the cream of the crop in finance.

1:15:23And I can't tell you, sorry, Wharton grads, I can't tell you how many of them I meet who come up to me. One came up the other day and it just tickles my little taint. But this guy came up to me and he's like, what was he? Oh, no, this was to Chris, my husband. Moral of the story, dude comes up. We're like, hey, how's it going? Who are you? He's like, oh, you know, I'm so and so. What are you up to? and he says, I am a independent sponsor, which is a fancy Wharton-esque way of saying I'm buying a business. That's literally fake vernacular about I'm buying a business. Come on, dude. Who is that guy?

1:16:00It's a bad rap. Come on. Yeah. So anyway, I'm like, oh, okay, cool. You're going to buy a business. That's awesome. He's like, yeah, you know, I've been doing it for 14 months. You know, it's going really well. I'm like, oh, all right, cool. I'm like, well, we do a little bit of that if I can help at all, like here for you. He's like, no, I don't need any help. I'm nailing it. And of course, my husband's kind of a smart ass. So he goes, 14 months search. Awesome. You're nailing it. And thank God Chris is a rascal because I'm not as much. But the point being, I think they give people a false sense of the real world.

1:16:28like when I left Georgetown and I was you know at Goldman and some of these other places yeah it helps people maybe take me more seriously but like you going to Wharton or me going to Georgetown does not mean that I know more than a guy who's actually run a real P &L business oh yeah and I feel like I've learned more like afterwards like running this business with Amanda then like I don't know there's so many things and I never fully felt like I was studying marketing entrepreneurship and less finance. But yeah, I think you're spot on. Yeah. No, I mean, and I think that's where people go sideways.

1:17:00So anyway, so I feel good about us creating that education business. A thousand percent, even though there are people that don't like that online. And I think a lot of people don't like it online. I don't really understand why, except that there are people who are scammy. But I think the ultimate scam is six figures in debt that you can never shake off because the government doesn't allow you to, which is what happens with student loans. And so that's a hill I'll die on. So I feel really good about what we do there. It's a big business. That's an eight-figure business a year. And we're working on accreditation with some local universities.

1:17:34And my plan is that I want to build that out to be a real institution, but at one hundredth of the cost, which I think is actually doable and feasible. And I talk a lot with like Michaela Peterson and Jordan Peterson, who are liberal arts. And so, um, so I'm inspired by that. But if you're a young creator, I think one, um, if you have something that other people ask you about consistently and they're like, John, I don't know how to run a podcast. I wish somebody could show me how to set this all up, what all the equipment is, um, where you got it, how you could get on a discount, what's really necessary.

1:18:14What are the stages to it? I don't think there's anything wrong with you saying, Oh yeah, I put that together. Here's a one pager on it. It's all affiliate links. let me send it out. Like let's normalize learning from each other like we used to, apprenticeship, instead of going to a big institution and feeling like academics who have never actually done the thing that they're teaching you, they've never actually practiced, they've just been a theorist, are going to teach you better than somebody who's actually done the damn thing. Do you have any other advice for creators who are trying to be more business savvy, understand the language of deal-making?

1:18:46Because I think it's foreign to a lot of us. Yeah. What other advice do I have? Well, one, I think a lot of people will, for instance, we have a community where we teach people to buy and sell businesses. And sometimes people will say, well,$10 ,000 seems like a lot of money. for that. And then they'll say, well, why don't I just take the$10 ,000 and I go invest in a business? And I say, you should do whatever you want. But if you didn't know how to invest in the stock market and you had$10 ,000 and you just went and threw it at the stock market, what do you think is going to happen? You're not going to know how to invest and make more money.

1:19:21And so it's the same with like buying a business. You have to invest in the education before you can actually make money on the investment. So I think the biggest thing for creators today is like lean into even just like 10 % of your time figuring out the business behind creators. Because where did I see this the other day? Oh, Alex Cooper. She had a, she had a vanity fair, I think cover shot and it was titled I'm a motherfucker in business. And I loved that because she is, she's an incredible podcaster, but that bitch knows business. And because of that, she's one of the biggest podcasters in the world.

1:20:01Why? Because it costs money to get attention. I don't care what you say. I mean, Mr. Beast is a perfect example of it. He just spends and spends and spends in order to get eyeballs. And if you think that the best people who make attention don't do the same thing, you're crazy. And so I would say, become a bitch in business. Know actually the business side of things and remove this idea that creators don't understand business or I'm an artist and I don't have to like, uh, there's a great book. Um, that's, um, uh, it's like real artists don't starve. Have you ever read that book? Um, not that one.

1:20:37I read, uh, the one, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. That's one reference. I didn't get Cody. Yeah. Okay. One for five. So I can summarize both books for you in a sentence. One is real artists don't starve. What does that mean? That they know how to make money and they obsess on it. You can skip the book now. And so I think that's really important. How do you become a really good business person? Because that will allow you to do more art. It's just resources. The other thing that resources and money do is they decrease stress. I don't think they make you happy, but they certainly decrease misery.

1:21:12And so if you can decrease misery by not doing the tasks you want to do, then you can become really wealthy. So become very obsessed with deal-making, especially creators. Yeah. Because you have real leverage. Yeah. It's actually sometimes harder for people who are listening who are like, I'm a nine-to-five employee, and I have no attention online, and I have no capital, and I have no skill set. Then I would say, you have to work a really long time, really hard, increase your skill stack, take risk, and increase your connections, and then you could play this game. Yeah. um a lot of people will say you have the number one business channel on youtube um other people may say um you know you're the most powerful businesswoman on youtube with like your investments you'll be able to bring exposure to them um but there's a quote in your book from your dad that really stuck with me in that like you're not in the game until you're in the dark of the night your hand is your head is in your hands and uh you're facing a lot of shit that goes on behind the scenes.

1:22:14What's a moment where, you know, your head has been in your hands and kind of, we've talked about a lot of your success, a lot of the money you made. What's been some of those hard moments? You know, business is so hard. I think it might be one of the hardest games out there to play. Just this week, for instance, I was just writing a little video about this week, one of my companies, a payment processor, shut them down and they took$200 ,000 in recurring monthly income from them and won't give them back their users. So that just killed a business of like$2 million a year in revenue. We can't get our users back.

1:22:52So I'm having a fun Twitter battle with that right now. And so that was awful. Another business was about eight weeks out from running out of cash. They like called me flippantly about it. We're like, the thing is, we're a little cash strapped. I'm like, let's define little. Like eight weeks, we're basically insolvent. I was like, that's not, we can't have that. What's going on? And we had to spend, you know, kind of our vacation over the summer, really diving into this business, turning the entire business around and making sure that it didn't die. Um, long nights, no sleep, lots of stress, raised voices, people not wanting to do what they had to do, people getting fired.

1:23:26Um, you know, I had another business of mine actually contrarian thinking at one point I put somebody in charge of the business and you know my fault i thought they were really good operator i was actually running the holding company and talent which felt like a lot at the time and my fault i didn't catch it but they were running the finances wrong and we were almost out of cash that was four weeks from running out of cash oh wow and so um this is the media company yeah oh wow you put somebody else in charge of it at one point yeah well yeah it was like somebody else who was running a portion of it i won't be too specific because I don't want to call them out.

1:23:59But if I hadn't literally been, like, if you want to go and get loans for companies, they require an analysis of all your debt and your cash situations. And so if I hadn't been looking at our debt profile and thought, like, that number seems off from this, I wouldn't have caught it. And like, do we have plenty of cash and we could have pumped it in? Yeah, thankfully. But what if, like, our payroll had all just died one Friday And I didn't tell anybody like, would my employees have trusted me again with that? And so there are so many moments. But I think, you know, I do go back to the Warren Buffett adage, which is like, I'll forgive any an employee, any mistake, except one that costs us our reputation.

1:24:40and so the thing that keeps me up the most at night is like do i always feel like we're doing the right thing you know uh do i feel like we have enough checks and balances in place to make sure that we're compliant and we're being truthful and honest because i think we have a huge responsibility as creators i mean we saw the media fuck it up royally right like they literally we have the lowest level of trust as a society of media ever um we actually uh are lower than some third world countries, which is usually the opposite. And so I think about that as creators too. We have a real responsibility to make sure it's a, let's see, what does Jordan Peterson says?

1:25:17He says, tell the truth or maybe at least just don't lie. And so I obsess on that a lot. If people are listening to how to grow wealth and how to grow businesses and how to buy them, am I making sure that they have what they need in order to do so? That's what keeps me up at night. you also had a really honest uh post on x that's like your biggest regret is not prioritizing marriage sooner can you tell me about that i was stunned to read that from you given all the business success you've had yeah i mean i was married before uh i'm remarried now and i was real young when i got married the first time and i kind of let other people's opinions of who I should be and how I should be reflect onto me.

1:26:04And, you know, sometimes I think we marry people. And in that instance, like he thought I was going to be one type of person and I never was like, I never was going to just like be the type of person that he wanted. I was always going to be kind of a psychopath in business and I really like it. And I love, now I get to work with my husband, which is like the best thing ever. And back then, you know I wasn't honest with myself and you know and he probably wasn't honest with himself and so the second time around I was really serious like if I'm going to do this again I'm going to do everything in my power to do it one more time and that's it and I think you know in the early days of marriage it took a long time to I was older by that point and you become kind of this collection of things as a human as you get older you get more you're like more brittle.

1:26:54They don't move as easily. And so I had become a person that was like a little bit more serious. And so it was here, he's a former Navy SEAL. So he's like very strict. And, um, it took us the first year of like really battling one another until we finally got to a place where I realized like, this is the most important thing we'll ever do. If we fuck everything else up. Oh, well, as long as we do well by this. And I wish I would have realized that earlier because it's my greatest gift. Like all these businesses and all that is super cool. But when I wake up in the morning. He's my favorite part.

1:27:25Like sounds whatever, but like reaching over, having a snuggle with your human and knowing that like they got your back, even when you want to murder them, like the night before, you know, is, is really special. And so I think we were told a lie on that too. It's like marriage is hard. It has to be hard. Marriage is work, but it is so worth it when you obsess on finding the right person, I think, and becoming the right person. I should probably say even more than that. Well said. Yeah. And to bring things full circle, I know you started your career as a journalist, you went to the border of U.S.

1:27:56and Mexico. Can you just talk about some of the things you learned there and maybe some of the perspective that that set forth for everything that you're doing today? Because as a first generation immigrant, I think that really stuck with me. I just wanted to hear from you. Where are you from again, your family? I'm from Chicago. My parents escaped from Iran during the revolution of 79. Yeah. I think you and I probably have a similar view we talked about a little bit before. But But, man, when you've seen what can happen in a third world country, you have a lot more respect for what we got here.

1:28:25Like, we're a messed up family, but we're still a family, you know? And I think, you know, I was thinking today, like we did a post that said, like, you know, no president can save you. Like, it's up to you. And, like, no matter who becomes president, they're not going to save you. But what they can do is they can really hurt you. And so nobody else can make you rich. That's only you. but a bad political regime can really um it can nuke a country and i you know when i was uh younger i was a journalist on the u.s mexico border i was still in college it's my senior year and i graduated a year early to take this like basically year going back and forth between juarez and el paso and um and at the time they called juarez um uh ciudad de muerto and basically that means the city of death right and they called it that because along the the war is desert there they would find basically daily um women being that had been brutally murdered chopped apart raped i mean things you can't imagine and um and i remember at the time i was writing stories about it and i would go to the morgue like every couple days because there were two newspapers there was a there was a newspaper that was controlled by the cartel i can never remember if it was the sinoloan or the sonoran cartel and one controlled by the government and both would report different numbers of women that were missing.

1:29:42And a lot of times that was an indicator of like, who killed them? Like what happened here and whether they wanted that to come out or not. And so every single day I got to look in the face to see young women who had long brown hair, brown eyes, last names like Sanchez, right in my age range. And I would look at these women that not only were they brutally killed, but nobody cared. I mean, could you imagine if every day in your city. They found women's body parts daily, different ones. Like we would never let that happen in the U.S. Every day. The tune of thousands. And yet it was happening in Mexico.

1:30:16And it really, it fucked me up. I couldn't, it was like, what's the difference? Because it wasn't actually that they were Mexican. It was that they were poor and they had no money and no resources. And so nobody cared. And so they had little paper signs all over the city of these women's faces who all looked the same. It was wild. And so I think from that moment, I realized, man, power is money. And if we can get more of it, then we can push back on bad things happening in the world. And that's what made me go into finance. I was going to go into law. And then I realized, I think in a lot of ways, law, it follows.

1:30:56It doesn't lead. and money can lead. And so for that reason, I changed. And I think that's probably why I still care a lot about politics too, because I got to see so many politicians who didn't care in Mexico and would say one thing. And then, you know, we also had businesses in Latin America where certain politicians came in and they nationalized all the industry in the countries. And, you know, one of the countries I had to fly in an airplane, get the last plane out of there, because what we were doing had become illegal, which was just changing investments from that country's local currency to USD, which is like, think about that for a minute.

1:31:34Your president makes it so that if you take your money out and you put it in US dollar somewhere not located in that country, you're illegal. And so I've seen the effects of it. And I think it's so important that we get as much money as we can so we can have freedom and push back on rules we don't like. And also, So I do think it's important that we kind of skin in the game as creators. And maybe this is my little call to action for you guys, like what I'd ask for you. Like I'll teach you everything you need to know about deal making. I can make you a millionaire. If you read the book, if you learn the lessons in there and you get equity and you do good deals, you can become a millionaire.

1:32:12That is actually totally possible. But what maybe I'd ask for in return is what are you doing with that power? And it doesn't mean you got to become like virtue signaling or anything like that. but like realize that you have a real platform and ability to make change. And I think it is your moral responsibility to do as much as you humanly can with that and to try to help your fellow man, if at all possible. That's beautifully said. And I'm so thankful that you're sharing this stuff unapologetically. And I mean, what you just showed us, I feel like is a masterclass that nobody ever talks about.

1:32:48So thanks for putting in the YouTube videos, the book, which I can't wait for people to pick up. We'll put a link down below and just everything you talked about, Cody. I'm just cheering you on and excited to see what else you'll do next. Well, same. And I want to hear from you guys. If you buy a business, tell us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And tell us the feedback you think about the frameworks we shared, too. I really hope it does make you guys money. Yeah, yeah. I can't wait. This was fun. Thank you, Cody. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for doing my public math, too. Wharton is good for something, you know?

1:33:17Oh, my God. Thanks for coming on, Cody. Of course. My pleasure. Amazing.