How to Live Your Life Like a Start-up with Codie Sanchez

Today I'm super excited because I get to talk to my friend and somebody who shares my values of bringing a better life to more people very deeply. This is Cody Sanchez, the founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking. She has a mission of creating 1 million business owners.

How did you wind up doing this thing? I don't know if you've ever had like a moment in your life where you were doing something and then you look down the hallway and you see who the person is that you would be in 10 years and you hate them.

I believe very deeply that ownership is like the key to all freedom. And so like in our belief, it's not that ownership of a business, it's ownership of your life, your decisions, the next moves you make in determining you're not the victim. You know, life doesn't happen to you. It happens in general. And you have the ability to assert your will, too. And so, we believe really deeply that ownership is a key to happiness.

Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm delighted to have you with me. As every week, this is a show about the pursuit of happiness. This is a show about finding more love and happiness in your life and bringing it to the lives of other people. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. Once in a while, I get to meet and talk to some of the people I admire the most who share this vision of what a better life looks like. And that's a perfect example today.

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I'm super excited because I get to talk to my friend and somebody who shares my values of bringing a better life to more people very deeply. This is Cody Sanchez, the founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking. You know Cody Sanchez, she has a huge footprint on the interwebs, all over social media. It's really extraordinary. Contrarian Thinking is one of the fastest-growing financial media businesses in the world. And she has a mission of creating 1 million business owners. That's an extraordinary mission. Why? Because the mission is not to make $1 billion. It's to create 1 million business owners. And we're going to find out where she is in that mission, how it's going, and why. That's the mission, among other things.

She's also the founder of Contrarian Thinking Capital, which is a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in technology for smaller businesses. So this is not trying to create the next huge thing, find the sexiest Google out there. This is really about the businesses that are the backbone of economies all over the world and making sure that the people who want to run those businesses have proper technology behind them. That's what this venture capital business is all about. And the philosophy behind that, of course, is interesting, and I want to talk about that.

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Welcome, Cody.

Thanks for having me.

I'm so happy that you're with me today.

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like I should have mentioned actually in the introduction here that you're also a best-selling author. Congratulations, Main Street Millionaire. Those of you who haven't read Main Street Millionaire, I love it. Everybody who reads it loves it. It's practical. It's interesting. It's philosophical. It's actually very touching, too. And that was your first big book, right?

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it was my first, my only book, although I'm working on my second because, you know, self-flagellation.

You got to do that. And what happens is you think for five or six years about your first book and it hits the list and then of course the first thing that your publisher says is, "What's the next book?" And so you get like six months to think about the second book. And that's what leads. When I was running AEI, I was the president of this think tank, and scholars would have what's called the second book curse because you only get about a tenth as much time to do your second book as your first book. So if your first book is successful, the second book is going to suffer. So make sure they don't force you to turn it in too early.

That's good. What's your next book about?

Well, it's kind of it's a continuation. The good part is we've been studying two things for a long time. 10 years building businesses, I'm sorry, buying businesses, and then we've started studying entrepreneurs who build businesses over the past 5 years and teaching them how to build the business. What happens is, you know, now we've taught 14,000 people how to buy businesses. So, I always say congratulations and I'm sorry because now you have a business, right? And so, I realized, well, we got to help them. So, the second that you buy a business, now you're the owner. Now you're in charge. Now the buck stops with you. What's going to happen next? And our goal wasn't just that they buy any business. It's that they buy enduring, profitable, and consistent businesses. So those are businesses that last through the test of time.

Which is usually businesses that you've often talked about, boring businesses.

That's right.

Which are not boring at all.

Yeah. I don't think so. I don't think so. So, it's sort of tongue-in-cheek, but this next book is really like, I think, and we'll see if I'm right, but what we've been able to test thus far in our little laboratory that is where we consult and advise people on building businesses, we're able to test and see why some businesses fail. And it's really important because 90% of all businesses fail, right? And most businesses, you

90%.

90% within

a 10-year period.

Yeah. And the only businesses that really don't fail at that degree are kind of fascinating, actually. They're franchises. And at first, I thought, huh, why? Because I don't want to like run a McDonald's franchise. But there's really three reasons. One, they have screening mechanisms for who can own them or not, right? So they immediately see upfront, like, how serious are you? Do you actually want to do this? But two is the most important, which is they have operating systems. So like a franchise gives you a non-MVP business, a real business that has the Lindy effect, so historically has worked, has a high likelihood of continuing to work. And then systems that you don't get to just like pick and choose. They say, "No, no, this is like how we make a cheeseburger." And so your guess factor kind of goes away. And then the third component is continual oversight. And so, you know, having somebody to say, we all know you've had an SOP or a training manual or you have a program from your gym trainer on what to do. It doesn't mean you're going to do it unless they're there with you.

Right?

And so, we're trying to figure out, like, can we actually meaningfully do those things without being part of a franchise system?

Bingo.

You're going to basically outsource the franchise part or the oversight, the ownership, the quality control, the all of that, and the screening.

Yeah. Yeah. In most franchises, the average franchise cost is $140,000 to $2.3 million to start. It's a lot of money, and so they better succeed more often because you're paying a lot for that, right? And so my point is, like, what if we just wipe that and there's no cost involved? It's a book. We just tell you how to do it, and then maybe we have training for you to do it on top of it.

So that's what the book is, is actually how to be like a franchisee without being part of a franchise.

Yeah. Without a boss.

Cool.

Yeah, that's the idea. What was the secret to the success, do you think, of, well, first, in a nutshell, describe Main Street Millionaire for the audience and what was it? Why was that so successful, do you think?

Well, the book is simply this: how do ordinary people buy normal businesses and have extraordinary results? And we determine results as you continue to make money over time, which actually is extraordinary. And so it's a manual for how to take Wall Street's private equity program and apply it to Main Street, to all of it. And I think it was successful maybe for three reasons. One is we got really lucky with an uptick of, I think, in this day and age in this country, people are a little bit tired of the system that they were told to follow that didn't actually lead to the things that they wanted, right? They went to school, they spent all this money, they were supposed to get a job, wages have relatively stagnated, and increasingly, I think they wanted something more. And so there was this desire for ownership because ownership's hard, so people have to desire to do a hard thing. And then the second reason I think it succeeded is it's very practical, to your point. I've always been a believer in like, okay, tell me the theory, tell me why so I buy into your idea. Tell me why I should listen to you at all, and then give me what? Okay, fine. What am I going to do about it? Are we just going to sit here saying, you know, be like the French smoking cigarettes on the river and talking about how nothing matters? Like, no, tell me how to fix my life. And so, it was the same thing with this book. Like, tell me how to actually buy a business. Don't just tell me why it's a great opportunity. And so I did, and it's very straightforward. And then the third is it's riddled with frameworks and stories and case studies because I think you learn the best through story, and you learn the best through frameworks. Like, you can call it name it and frame it. So, you know, here's the 10-5-1 method. You have to talk to these 10 business owners to get to one potential prospect. And so you could just kind of remember these things.

Is rules of thumb?

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And they're empirically sound, right? You had the backing behind why this stuff actually works.

So, it's a big bestseller and it really helped a lot of people, and that's great. And this really leads to the next question that I have: How did you wind up doing this thing? I mean, it's it's I mean, you have a very elite background. I mean, you have a very elite not just educational background, but you worked for some of the biggest financial firms. You worked for Goldman Sachs. I mean, you're the pro. This is not what you'd expect somebody in your line of work to do is to be a huge social media influencer to get people to do things that seem incredibly ordinary so they can lead better lives. Walk me through college till now that led you to this apostolic mission.

Yeah. Well, you know, I started as a journalist. So, I actually covered human trafficking and drug smuggling along the US-Mexico border for many years. Uh, and I did it when I was in college and then right at the end of college. And it was fascinating because all of these young women that I was covering, it was in Juarez. So, it was called Las Desaparecidas. This, like, I'm sure you're familiar with it. Like, they disappeared.

Yeah. Have you been to Juarez? It's called Las Muertas. And if you were to cross the Rio Grande, the river there, and go over from El Paso to Juarez, you would see a bunch of wooden crosses, covered in pink ribbons. And every one of those ribbons represents a murdered woman in Juarez. And it's been going on for decades, and they can't really figure out who's murdering women, and they're mutilated. It's pretty egregious. And I was a journalist covering this. And I watched all of this happen and I thought, "My last name's Sanchez. I have long brown hair. I'm a woman of this age group." Like, what's the difference between me and them? Why do these women get murdered, tens of thousands over the course of a few years, and really nothing happens? Nothing changes. You know, we I would go to the morgue and I would be able to see firsthand, we would determine how many women were killed because they were so badly mutilated that they weren't all in one piece. And

It's just a big mystery.

It was, it's a big. And now it's less of a mystery. It's a little bit of like, you know, there's a lot of patriarchal tendencies in that area. There's narco-trafficking. There's a pretty big human trafficking component. And so, it's kind of like probably a borgus of reasons. But what I realized is I was like, the difference between me and them isn't just that I was American and they're Mexican. There's lots of rich Mexicans, and if somebody had killed one of them on the border, they would have been in trouble. But it was really that I had resources and they didn't. I had money and they didn't. And so at that point, I was like, huh, maybe I don't want to be a journalist and just tell the stories about this. Maybe instead, I want to figure out. I think in a lot of ways, money is power. And so if you have money, you can just assert your will on the world more. And if you don't, you can't. And this is less true in, like, America, maybe, where it's more of a first-world country. But if you have no money in Mexico, you don't have a lot of options. And so that's when I got into finance. And I sort of climbed up through the financial ecosystem really to figure out because I knew nothing about money. I like couldn't have explained to you a 401k. I am not great at math. I don't like any of that. But I climbed up with this idea of like, huh, let's understand this currency that we all seem to speak in this day and age. Did that at Vanguard, and then I did that at Goldman, and then I did it at State Street, and then I kind of went back to Latin America and built a big business in Latin America at a company called First Trust. And while I was doing all this, I don't know if you've ever had like a moment in your life where you were doing something and then you look down the hallway, metaphorically speaking, and you see who the person is that you would be in 10 years and you hate them and you don't want anything to do with them? And then you're like, "I see myself divorced multiple times with like an alcohol dependency, worshiping at the altar of money, and I don't want this life." And so I had built my whole life for this one moment and then realized, "Oh Lord, this is not actually what..."

Most people don't have that moment of lucidity because they'll see, they think they know what the rewards of money and power and honor and admiration actually are. And they won't recognize actually the fruit of that in people who are older than they are. So they'll say, they'll see somebody like, "My boss is miserable and he's a workaholic and he drinks too much and he never sees his kids and he hates his wife and his wife hates him," and all that. But if I had his money, it would be completely different.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah. I wonder what... Because Mother Nature says that you'll be happy if you get these worldly rewards. Mother Nature doesn't lead you to think that you're going to pay the price. Again, interesting. What we all, what we know, and you and I have talked about this in the past in other venues, these rewards are not bad, but if these are your ultimate goals, you're in trouble, and you're going to be in trouble, is what it comes down to. So when you see people who say, "I just want to be rich, and being rich is the point," their life is going to be a mess. That's what it comes down to. And you saw it, and most people don't.

No, I saw it firsthand. And, you know, when you first, I think you should chase your first $100K, see what it's like. Like, it's not going to ruin your life to go figure out how to get money first. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. There are things that are true about life that it is a little bit easier if you have money, and like I have a decent amount of it now. So I know that on high, it's very easy for me to say, "Ah, I could give it all up." But, you know, I don't really want to. And so I think it's okay. Like, go chase your money. At least that's what it was for me. Me, I was like, "I'm going to go chase it." But at a certain point, it's like, goes to that moment, you got to keep asking yourself, "Is it enough? And am I going in the right direction?" And when I looked down that hallway and saw those guys in finance, I was like, "This is not it." And so I took a little pause and did my version of your little pilgrimage, which I think was just like six months off, kind of hanging by the beach, unsure of what to do next.

Yeah, and started writing. And that was it. I started writing a Substack and the newsletter. The first one was about how I thought like the world was kind of losing the ability for us to question things. I was like, "Why? Why is it we're not allowed to question things?" This was right during COVID. And so I was like, "We're losing our minds. Like, we should question everything on all sides, always. That's what we do as journalists. Why wouldn't we keep doing that?" And, um, and so anyway, I never was on the internet before. I had no interest in being public. I'm relatively uninterested in fame, although it certainly can tempt me sometimes. And but in that writing, I realized like, "Oh, I this feels good. I can help people and I can talk to them about things and I know some stuff about money." And so, you know, when you find that thing that you kind of, it's your unfair advantage. I'm pretty good at diving into a subject, figuring out some things about it, explaining it to other people. I was like, "Wow, if you can find the thing that you're really uniquely good at and then share it with the world, then that's a fun way to make money." And so that's what I found. And that first little newsletter led to this media company, Contrarian Thinking. That's what I called it back then. But before then, all I did was buy businesses, build asset management companies, and think that one day I wanted to build the next, you know, KKR or Carlyle Group, the next big private equity fund.

Mhm. Mhm. And you actually found your own mission. How do you describe your mission statement today?

Yeah. Well, we have two mission statements today. And the main one is that I want to create 1 million financially free humans. And I think the best way to get financially free is ownership. I also think it's the right way. Like, you don't want to just win a lottery ticket. You want to earn it.

That's the what part. Now we're getting to the why part. And the second part of the mission is that I believe very deeply that ownership is like the key to all freedom. And so like in our belief, it's not that ownership of a business, it's ownership of your life, your decisions, you know, the next moves you make in determining you're not the victim. You know, life doesn't happen to you. It happens in general. And you have the ability to assert your will, too. And so, we believe really deeply that ownership is a key to happiness. And I don't mean ownership by saying control. And anybody who's been an owner knows you are not in control as an owner. You are the janitor and you're the CEO at all times. And it's very perplexing. But if you can own a piece of a house, you don't burn it down, right? You build it. And I think in this country, if you see the statistics, we've gone from 80% ownership of businesses in this country when we started to less than 10 or 6% today, depending on how you track the metrics. And my thesis is that that is a key reason why so many of us also feel disenfranchised. We don't feel like we're really part of anything anymore, and we're not responsible for anything anymore. And there are very few people who own a lot of everything, and the rest of us kind of rent. And I don't mean that you have to own a business entirely, and this is my last little rant. I think you can own part of it because like, you want to plant something and see it grow. And this kind of comes up with your idea of capitalism and progress. I think when you own a little something, you want to see it grow. You don't get mad that somebody else owns it and they don't pay you enough from it. And so that's our thesis.

Yeah. Good. And I'll get back to the thesis here in a second. I want to make one distinction. When you're talking about accumulating some money such that you can have some ownership, such that you can actually live a life that can be happier, there's a bunch of links in that chain, to be sure, and I want to dig into that. But money isn't all. Money, you emphasize earning it a lot. Super important. Super important morally, super important with respect to the behavioral implications. So dig into that a little bit, because a lot of people, they want to go to Vegas, right? They play the lotto. They hope to inherit. All those things have something in common. In my work, it's really clear that if your income is unearned, it will actually be a problem for you. That unearned money creates problems in people's lives.

Oh, I've seen it firsthand.

Yeah. So, so talk about that a little bit more about the importance of earning it and how, in the context of what you're trying to do to set people up in businesses.

What we found. So, there was a young man actually who came to one of our advisory groups and wanted to grow his business. And we turned him down. And the reason why we turned him down is because he did an online stock trading business. And this was like day trading education business. And I just said, "It's not morally aligned with what we do here." And so I wish you well and no judgment, but like, that's not a type of business that I actually think is good for society or works.

Speculation, which has too much to do with gambling, which is too much to do with like Vegas.

Exactly. That's your point, right? That's exactly right. And so, and it was funny, but I've stayed close with the young man. He's actually a man of faith. He's Christian. He's a lovely guy, actually. And very talented. But he had got caught up into what a lot of young people I think hear today, which is, "Give me the Rolls-Royce, the Lambo, the exterior thing. Make people think that I'm somebody special, and then I will feel a certain special." And through his career, I watched him go from this to Airbnb arbitrage, to now selling a sales program,

Crypto mining,

basically. And I watched it. And through each phase, and now he's kind of removed himself slightly from it. But he would continue to say, "Well, I can't figure this out and it's not working." And I would say, "Well, when you don't understand the foundation on which you've laid your house, you're going to be constantly confused when the sand shifts, and you think that it's built on cinder blocks. You cannot. You could build a high-rise on sand, and it will fall eventually. And so until you get right with the why of why you're doing things and with who you're serving, as opposed to how you make money, you probably will continue to have this problem." And maybe not. There are plenty of very, very wealthy people that do things that are speculative and scam-like and whatever. But he was such a perfect instance of I think what happens to the youth, which is like, if you play short-term games, you're going to have short-term pain. And if you play long-term games, you're going to have long-term gain.

Yeah. So that's important because, you know, we can all come up with somebody who had a kind of a scammy business and turn it into a billion dollars. But the truth of the matter is actually quite the contrary. If you look at empirically, people who make good money are people who do good things. People who create serious businesses that create real value in the lives of other people, not like, "I got a new way to do a little arbitrage, you know, one-hundredth of one penny across every trade," or or or mining the crypto in a brand new way. On the contrary, they're doing something that people actually need. They're they're thinking. It's funny, I have this friend for years and years, still a friend, and he did this thing. He leases mainframe computers, and he made huge money leasing mainframe computers. And I thought, "I wouldn't want to do that." "Why do you do that?" And I got to know him a little bit better, and I realized that he would lay awake at night thinking, "What does my client need? What does my client need? What's actually keeping up my client right now about his computing capacity?" And the whole point was he wanted to create value in the life of somebody else as opposed to trying to make money. And that's behind your philosophy, right? That's the reason that you're helping people set up businesses that are just, they're not sexy necessarily, but they do. And this gives people joy to serve other people.

You're exactly right. I mean, there's actually something kind of fascinating. It's called the Songhurst matrix. And basically, there's data to suggest that the sexier a career, for instance, the lower the amount of money that you make. And the unsexier the career, the more money you make on average. And I think it was Scott

Compensating wage differentials by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

Yeah. And so, Scott Galloway had an incredible quote that I'm going to steal, which is he explained it as, "We called it the boring sexy matrix before I knew there was something that actually existed in the world already called this." All ideas are obviously stolen in some way, shape, or form. We had actually tracked it in our businesses. So, if you can imagine, we analyze a couple thousand businesses a year and then determine, "Should we invest in this? Should we not invest in this?" And then we review, "Did we miss anything? How much money would we have made?" etc. And what we found over time is those companies that we passed on were the companies that were really, really sexy on average, they didn't make a lot of money. And the companies that actually paid us consistently over time were the more boring businesses. And so it was literally our internal tool for tracking the data, which now is backed by this thing called the Songhurst matrix, which had already existed previously. And Scott gave this incredible line. And he goes, "When you think about your profession and you think about what you want to do next, and you chase after the shiny object, I want you to think about the fact that most actors and actresses inside of the SAG-AFTRA union in Hollywood, more than 67% of them cannot actually afford to pay even the insurance premiums on the insurance to stay in the union."

Yeah.

So what does that mean? It means that actors and actresses, a few of them make a lot of money. Most of them have to have two or three jobs in order to have the blessing of that potential profession. But how many electricians are doing that as a side hustle because they love it? No, no, that's a full-time job. They make all their money from it. Same thing with people in finance, because those professions, they actually pay quite well because it's not just for prestige.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's interesting. So among musicians, which is a mild career all the way through my 20s, 90% of musicians are either unemployed or underemployed. Professional musicians who call themselves musicians. And you're in Los Angeles, for example, and you have a waiter or a waitress is probably an actor.

Is what it's coming down to. And it's pretty interesting because even the ones who are really successful, and you and I both have friends who are, you know, really famous people in Hollywood, for example, who do you think is happier? That movie star or your electrician? Who do you think has a better family life? Who do you think actually has a better kind of balance between the activities in life? And it's a question that almost answers itself, doesn't it? So the compensation that you're talking about is not just financial. It's not just pecuniary. It's actually financial and lifestyle and happiness and love and relationships and a lot of other stuff. There's a lot to be said for doing a boring thing. And boring in the eyes of the world, by the way, when you talk to an electrician, not boring.

Very. Yeah. No, they think it's fascinating.

Yeah. Because it sort of is when they describe it to you.

Yeah. You know, and I mean, we know many, many, I mean, in the boardroom where we train people how to grow their businesses, you know, most of the businesses that are doing, let's call it $10 million or more in revenue are home services or professional services businesses. They are not recreating a wheel. They are not coming up with the next Snapchat or you know, Palantir or Anduril. These businesses have already existed. There is a ton of competition. Other people want to play the game, and yet they are making tens of millions of dollars a year doing it. And is it easy? No. Like, but the optimizing that you have to do on a plumbing company, I mean, think about it for a second. How many plumbing companies can you name? I mean, I can't name one nationwide plumbing company.

Right? As opposed to if you go to that space and you start creating a real brand and you compete because I don't know, you pick up the phone and you show up on time, and you and your staff look clean and put together, and you price appropriately, and you market, you can compete in this space. And so one of the most incredible parts about entrepreneurship in this country right now, I think, is that the bar is actually so low for you to win. It's so low. There's more people than ever now competing in entrepreneurship. You basically 19x the number of businesses created this year than 2020. And yet most people do not follow through. They do not continue to compete. And the reason that most businesses fail is the founders give up. And so they're right.

Yeah.

That's the number one reason for the failure of small businesses is that people walk away from them.

Technically, the number one reason is they run out of cash.

Uhhuh.

So, number one reason is cash. The number two reason is the founders give up. The number three reason is typically product-market fit.

This is based on SBA data.

So this is really important because this is basically what your business is doing is solving the problem, those problems for them.

Exactly.

Is making sure that there is a market fit, that you're screening them to make sure that they have the requisite skills, etc., etc., right?

Yeah. That they actually, it's similar to your work in some ways. Like, do you actually want to do this thing? Is a really important question to ask the founder. You know, when we analyze all of these companies, the most important thing is really never the idea. The idea is kind of important. The important thing is like, what hard, ridiculous things have you done in the past that lead me to believe you're going to continue doing this thing?

Would you want to do this thing on your worst day? The number one predictor of CEO demise. And CEOs on average in Fortune 500 companies, they have a 25% fire rate within the first 24 months. It's a dangerous job. I mean, this is like, you're cannon fodder if you're a CEO for one of these companies. The number one predictor of getting fired. You know what it is? Not liking their job. That they, everybody wants to be CEO. Nobody wants to do CEO. You know, the being and doing are very different when it comes down to it. But it's exactly the same principle that the number one and two emotions that a brand new CEO actually experiences in the first 24 months of the job: loneliness and anger.

Yeah. I believe that.

For sure. And you're a CEO. Yeah. I mean, it's and I've been a CEO too. I was a CEO for, this is how we met, because you were involved with the American Enterprise Institute where I was president. And the first two years there, it was hell on wheels, man. It was just like, I was lonely because, you know, my friends were the people I used to work with, and now I was signing their checks, and nobody wants to hang out with the boss. And anger because I didn't, you know, it's to your point, you don't have any control. You know, I had 310 bosses. You know, I was at the bottom box on an enormous org chart, all alone in that bottom box. And so, the whole point is, you better love it. You better love it. You better find it intrinsically rewarding. If you're doing it for the money, it will be unto you. Well, you're not going to. And so, the same thing is true for entrepreneurs and business, small business owners, as it is for CEOs of big companies. There's a truism, right?

Very much so. I mean, even Mark, so you met my president here. And I'm still the CEO of the company, but he really runs a lot of the day-to-day ops. And we can tell how bad the day has been by how ruffled Mark's hair gets.

Yeah. Because it really.

Yes. He's got to be like me or your husband. It's like, make sure you can't, there's no hair.

So I don't know how we'd be able to tell with you. His general aura, your vibe.

It's like, yeah. But you know, it is an impossibly difficult job, except that if you do it and you like it, it's so worth it, and then it'll be impossible to go back. And, you know, I think the other thing with entrepreneurship is that everybody should try it once in their lives. I think I think you talk about living life as an adventure. I have, there's this quote by Erma Bombeck that I love, and she said, "When I stand before God at the end of my days, I hope to be able to say, I'm wrung dry. I have not one drop left of what you gave me." And I think about that every day. And when I am at the end of the day, actually feeling wrung dry, like I have nothing left to give, I remember that's the point.

Yeah.

And so what would it be like if I could? And I don't mean just even with work, just with like my capacity. What am I, what am I capable of? What's in here? And having this like curiosity about putting that out into the world, not because it really matters, not because anybody's going to remember me, not because I need to win, but just to like see.

Yeah. Well, I mean, and this actually speaks to, you know, the next big topic I really want to talk about here, which is your philosophy, because you've got a philosophy. This is not just an operational business where you're checking boxes and looking at systems. On the contrary, this is underlying this is a view of life that you have. And it's so interesting to me because, you know, as a guy who studies happiness and teaches happiness classes, you actually have happiness principles now. Now we've sort of established the fact that, you know, what's money all about? Earned money all about, it gives you ownership. What's ownership all about? That's what leads you to be able to have a happier life. That's very philosophical. So, in what you've written and said, happiness requires three things. These aren't necessarily the macronutrients of happiness, but these are requirements, necessary, potentially insufficient, but necessary. Number one is progress, number two is freedom, and number three is ownership. So, I want to talk about these things because these each one of these things has a whole library of neuroscience and behavioral science behind it. And so, we can talk about this, and all of this is super solid and really, really great. So, let's first talk about progress, because this is weird. This is not what a lot of people understand. They think happiness actually comes from arrival. They think it comes from outcomes, not from processes. And what we know, I teach at a business school, one of the things that we teach our business school students is the biggest predictor of your success is not your outcomes, it's your processes. Set your outcomes that you want, and then forget them, and focus on processes. Okay? Now, that suggests nothing about happiness. Your philosophy, however, says that that's not just the secret to success, it's also the secret to happiness. Tell me more about why progress is so important.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, one line that stood out to me, I think it was from a fellow by the name of Brad Jacobs, who wrote a book called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, which I always thought was a funny little word to throw in there. And but he said a line, he said, "One of my favorite mentors told me, every time you find a problem in business, that's where the profit is." And Brad, if you've ever met him, is like a very happy billionaire. Weird, because most billionaires I've met, they're tortured in a lot of ways.

Well, they're chasing, right?

They're chasing because when they get their first billion, the first thing they think is, "I didn't feel the way I thought I was going to feel." So I guess they needed another billion.

Yeah. Exact. Well, and that's how I think you feel with a million or a hundred thousand.

That's how you feel with anything when you have this fallacy of arrival, which speaks to your point.

Yeah. And so I, you know, when I saw him, I thought this is a, he's just, he loves the game. And so this idea of progress probably comes from a mixture of when I find difficulty in anything we do in life, I tend to find that really interesting.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think my husband and I have a shared philosophy on this, too, which is he always says to me when I don't want to do something, "Are you a good white shark or are you a great white shark?" And I find that very annoying. And simultaneously, he's right, because we have this idea of like, who are you going to be in life? Once you declare who you want to be, what would be the actions of the person that you want to be be? And so if I want to be somebody who wins over time, if I want to grow in my business or life, that means that I probably have to keep my word to myself. I'd probably have to treat my body well. I'd probably have to move forward in my life. And all of those things are not about arriving. They're about little decisions you do every day that make you feel better. And so the idea of progress, I think we have found, at least in our lives, that the more you are moving towards a goal that excites you, the happier you are. And he has this line he always tells me, which is, "What do you need in life? Somebody to love, something to do, and something to look forward to." And that's kind of how we live our life. So a lot of times when we're not in flow and we're not progressing, we'll say, "Well, do you have somebody you love?" Like, "Yes, we do." "You know, do you have something to do?" "Yeah, we do." "Do you have something to look forward to?" And in that moment, that's often the one that's missing. It might be like, "Oh no, we feel like we're on an endless grind." You know, there's just hamster wheeling. I'd be like, "Okay, let's break that down. What would you like to look forward to in life?"

And so that idea of progress is interesting and probably a little scary sometimes to think, what would it look like if you didn't progress? And so you have to be careful about that.

Well, and we actually sort of know. So there's a really interesting statistic in the literature on weight loss, right? And it depends on what study you're looking at, somewhere between 80 and 95% of diets are unsuccessful. Now, what they all diets have in common is they all work. Like, you can do almost any diet and you'll lose weight if this is your goal is to lose weight. The problem is that within one year, usually is how it's measured, within one year, you gain all of the weight back and more, between 80 and 95%. And this is just this triumph of hope is that people keep doing this, and it's a $40 billion industry that fails all the time. There's nothing else that exactly that.

works this way. Now, here's the interesting thing about it. Diets are unbelievably rewarding because they're all about progress. And you will absolutely delightedly not eat things that you like when the scale is going down. The reason they fail is because you arrive. And when you arrive, your reward for hitting your goal is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. You've arrived. Now you can not make progress and not eat what you like. Isn't that just wonderful?

This is one of the reasons that 30% of people on serious weight loss programs wind up with an eating disorder. The reason is because they keep going because they want to stay happy. They keep losing weight even though they shouldn't and they get unhealthier because losing weight per se feels like progress. This is an example of the principle that in life, we need to be doing healthy things that bring progress and we need to love playing more than we love winning. That's what great athletes have in common, by the way. They love playing even more than they love winning. And that's what you're talking about in business too, right?

100%. You know, and even I think whenever we like lose the goalpost and can't figure out where to go next, the problem is usually multitasking. And so, like even today, one of the new things I'm doing that probably doesn't sound very clever at all, but has actually been really impactful for me is just like when you eat, do you do other things? Like do you check your phone or do you like read a book or anything? I used to, and it's pretty normal. And you see us in this day and age, you sit at your desk, you have the food, you're looking at your computer, you're scrolling on Instagram, and you're eating. And I never really thought about that very much. Instead of doing that, I just don't do anything. And so I eat and when I say, you know, you're like a young kid in love for the first time. You're like, and the food tastes better and I'm more, you know, and it's more enjoyable. And so I think in business too, you can get caught in all these multitasking when you're eating. You can get caught in this multitasking and either way, you lose the taste. You lose the taste completely for what you're doing because you know, you feel like you have forward momentum only. And so we like to pair that idea of progress with like, can you really be here right now?

Yeah. That's mindfulness. So you're very Buddhist.

That's a very Buddhist idea, of course. And that's hard because, you know, we time travel. Our enormous prefrontal cortex, what it's good at is allowing us to travel between three time zones: the future, the past, and the present. The average person spends 20 to 50% of their cycles in the future, planning out the future. Which is why Homo sapiens rules the world because we practice future scenarios, make mistakes, come back to the present, and not do that. That's what we're really, really good at, as well as going to the past, seeing what went wrong, understanding it, learning from it, and not going back there again and not replicating that. That's why this supercomputer in the front of our heads, 30% of our brain by weight, allows us to do that. And you know, your dog has a wafer-thin prefrontal cortex and can't do that. Your dog is incredibly mindful, which is why your dog is happier than you, right? But your dog is less successful than you. That's okay.

So, here's the interesting part about that, however, and here's the wrinkle in all that. Entrepreneurs tend to spend up to 80% of their time in the future, which is one of the reasons that entrepreneurs tend to be quite successful, but they're often pretty unhappy. How do you square the circle on mindfulness and future-oriented thinking, which is also known as prospection, which you actually need to be a successful entrepreneur? How do you fix that?

Yeah. Well, maybe it is all self-serving in some way. Because if you think about your job as a CEO, I do think your job is to look into the future and make sure that you make decisions in order to allow your company to continue to survive. Survival is really the game as the CEO because most things fail. And if you aren't progressing, you have immediate entropy, right? So, you're either actually growing or you are dying. And yet, I've also found there's a point about being a CEO that not enough CEOs talk about, which I believe there's real energy transference in almost everything we do. And so at the end of your and my interaction, you will either leave depleted and a little tired and kind of wishing I don't see Cody again and like that was not that great, or you'll leave like that was enjoyable and I learned a few things. And even if I'm tired, huh, I'm feeling right. And as a CEO, I think you have to be really careful only thinking that you have to do the tactic and not also thinking about the feeling. So if you sit in our meetings, which I think is one of the most important things you do as a CEO, is your weekly meeting with your team. The reason why is because that is your one chance to sort of rally the troops. And your job is not to just tell them what to do. It is hopefully to inspire them why they should want to do this thing.

It's after all, you are the bottom box.

Exactly. And it is this whole I love that you would know this. If you want to teach your people to build a boat, do not teach them about ropes and hammers, but teach them about yearning for the vast and endless sea.

Oh, nice.

And I think about who that is. I like it a lot.

I'll have to find the attribution. But I think about that a lot as a CEO. I think part of our job is really to inspire others. And how can you inspire others? If you're thinking of the future, stressed out, worried about this, always focused. No, it's because you have to take a pause and go, you guys, like this is what I know you want deeply. This is where we are. this is what we're making jokes, making them feel seen and I'm not touchy-feely or super nice. So I'm not saying like you have to be this cheerleader at all.

Instead, you could just really be in the moment.

That's what Daniel Goldman calls authoritative leadership. Authoritative leadership is that everything gears to the broader mission and everybody has a role to play in it and the CEO's job is to help them understand what that role is in the mission and make them want to run through a wall for that mission.

That's right. And that's not cheerleading. That's a clear author, not authoritarian, authoritative leadership. And those are the most beloved leaders, whether they're pleasant all the time or not, is what it comes down to because it's like, do you see a better future? You see your part in it? Are you ready to go?

That's right. That's the weekly meeting, right? And that's progress. It gets back to the progress principle.

Right. And I, you know, I was talking with a member of our team yesterday and I found that there is a bit of a, I don't know if it's generational. I don't know if this is continuous, but I've seen a change in let's call it the last 10 years and a lot of people want to say, "This is my job. You know, that is their job. I do this, they do that," and they want to sort of stay in their lanes. And maybe because we're overworked and overstimulated and are mentally masturbating about things as opposed to actually doing them, we feel overwhelmed and so we don't want to do more at work. I push back pretty hard on our team and, in my opinion, every time you have the ability to collect a skill, it's a gift. It's a really beautiful gift. And work, if done correctly, shouldn't just be like monotonous continuous work that you do. We should find ways to give that to AI and to other things. Instead, we should be in the skill accumulation game. And every time we give an outsourced party or somebody else the ability to learn a skill and not us and our team, it's actually a tragedy because not that many people get to work at companies where you get to learn incredible things that will progress your career and your humanity forward. You know, if you come to a company like Contrarian Thinking and you learn how to communicate, I don't care if you never work again a day in your life after this, you will use that through your life and you will be better for it. And so, I do think the other thing as a leader, how I think about it is like, you know, we've got to inspire people not just for the vision, but for wanting to do more. And you talk about it as like happiness in some ways is suffering. I think it's the same in business. It's actually like, no, no, take on that extra responsibility. Do a little bit more because if you do, even if you don't get paid for it in this moment, you are actually the one reaping all the rewards.

Right. Right. Right. Um, one last question about progress before we move on to freedom. It's going to get heavier. To make progress, you need to have the right goals. Now, there's a, you and I speak Spanish. Not everybody watching us speaks Spanish, but there's this wonderful word in Spanish that's a navigational term that you use in ordinary life. It's rumbo. Rumbo, which means in English, the word is actually rum line. R-U-M-line. And it's like it's not a word that we ordinarily use, but what it means is the straight line between where you start and where you're going to wind up. And you have to have rumbo. You have to have the goal in mind. That's a very specific thing and the correct thing. Now, not because the navigation is going to be perfect. Not because you're not going to get blown off course. Not because your trip is going to be in a straight line, but you got to have a straight line between where you start and where you're going to go, is what it comes down to. And so to have a rum line in life is really important. And that requires that you put the pin in the other place in an appropriate way. And that means having the right goals. How do you select the right goals to have appropriate progress? How do you know the right goals?

I think the way you get good at anything in life is practice continuously. And I usually learn things like Charlie Munger always talks about, invert, always invert. And so when you're looking for something, instead of looking for what you want, look for what you don't want. And so typically, I'm not actually smart enough to always figure out what I do want in life, but I can usually get to the things I don't want. And so my husband and I have a practice every single year and then a couple times throughout the year. And the practice is writing down our goals. I have like a journal going back 15 years and I write down all the things I want and then that year, at the end of the year, so we'll do it in a couple weeks, all the things that I got that year, those things that I achieved. And it's quite comical to see what those were 15 years ago as opposed to now. And I'm sure in 15 years from now, I'll laugh at myself, but I really like this belief of you practice figuring out what a good goal is and a bad goal. And then you write down, did you get it? Did you not? And how did you feel about that? And so, you know, my goals from back when I was first starting in finance were very embarrassing. You know, I at one point wrote down how many pairs of designer shoes I had. I have it listed. We could go back and see, you know, and I thought that was quite the goal.

That was a proxy goal, by the way. It wasn't about the shoes. It was about what was that's the star of Bethlehem. So, the star that the three kings weren't going for the star. The star was supposed to guide them to the stable, to the manger where the baby Jesus was lying. And they just thought that the star would be above that. The designer shoes for you were going to be in the sky somewhere above what you thought you really wanted, right? I suppose unless you're Imelda Marcos and you really are like super into shoes.

No, no, I definitely am not. I'm really, I like, I wear whatever clothing, but it doesn't really matter to me that much. In fact, if it's

It was what it represented.

Right. It was what it represented.

And so, it's interesting because I read Main Street Millionaire and I would say that there's three kinds of goals in your philosophy. Let me say this right.

Let's see. Number one, they should be intrinsic, not extrinsic. Intrinsic goals means it's about love and relationships and the person you want to be. Make sure that those are the real goals. The second is approach goals, which is to say something good as opposed to avoiding something bad. Don't be fear. And this is I see this a lot in your work. And the last is non-positional, which is why you talk about boring businesses. Positional goals are being sexy in the world's eyes. Non-positional goals are doing what you need to be done, notwithstanding the opinions of others. So those are the three sets of goals in your business life and in your personal life. Is that fair according to your philosophy?

To make progress appropriately, to have the star of David or the star of David, the star in Bethlehem appropriately positioned over what you truly do want. That's a good set of characteristics, right?

Yes. I mean, we say, do the right thing even when it hurts, maybe especially then.

Yeah.

And so that's one of our intrinsic goals.

Right.

Right. And and you know what I love about your work is you have this like mass amount of research and data in your head and this ability to recollect studies and authors and who they are. And I don't have that same brain. My brain works more like if I want this outcome and I can sort of like validate, huh, what Arthur says is true. Look at all of this research and data. Then I go, okay, if I was to explain it to a 10-year-old and then have to take a practice from it to execute on it, how would I do it? And so the way I think about goals is just so stupid simple. And that is, I just only want to know the how-to once I've figured out the why is worth it. And the how-to is as simple as every year, grab a journal, write down all the things that you want. Then at the end of the year, write down all the things you got. Then ask, how did I feel about those things? And what should I change? And then do that every single year. And every single year, look back on previous previous years and make your goals slightly better than the one before. And even better than doing it once a year would be to do it once a month, in the beginning, once a quarter, a little bit longer because you won't have the repetitions to even recognize if something is intrinsic or if somebody is something is approach until you can touch it and feel it. And so that's why I love your work because it's like, tell me the whole corpus of why and convince me that this is right and then we can figure out how to get there.

Yeah. And you know, our viewers can decide which approach is actually better, whether doing it in a very practical way that leads to success is better or starting every sentence with "studies show."

So I take your

You need both. I think you need both and I think you need to question. You know, I read a study which you would be able to tell me if it's true or not, that the simpler you speak, the more people listen to you and the more intelligent they think you are on average above a certain level.

Above a certain level, without grammatical errors, etc., etc. Using, and this is one of the things that I wind up telling, teaching my students when you're in your 20s and you're intelligent, you use way, way too many words. You use. And so one of the things I'll tell my students is when they're writing non-fiction, for example, which is what we do, I mean, they're talking about research, take out literally all the adjectives. Take out all of the adjectives. Okay? So, what I just did was I said, "Take out literally all the adjectives." And then I rephrased it by taking out the word "literally." And it was better the second time. If you take all the adjectives out of your writing, people are going to understand you better and admire the thought more. And you don't learn that, of course, because you want to lard everything up.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think it's harder to take a complex subject and make it simple the first time. And then it's actually one step harder, it seems to me, to take the complex that is simple, but expand upon it in your own vernacular, which you do. And so say, let me sort of name this, let me frame this, let me put together ways that you can actually remember things over time. But you really need both because these days you got to be careful of people who speak so simply and do like rhythmic intonation and have one-liners that sound incredible, except they're not backed up by anything.

Well, you don't want to, you want to avoid that. It would be good if there's an empirical backing to the idea, I think. So, and not lead people in the wrong direction.

No.

Okay. Progress. Got it. Now, I want to get on to the next one because the next one gets philosophically, it's pretty interesting the way that you think. Is freedom. When you say freedom, what do you mean? When you say freedom is one of the ingredients of a happy life, what does that mean?

So, when I think about freedom, the first thing that comes to mind and what we try to optimize for is I want you to actually feel like you're the captain of your ship. Like you are the architect of your life. And you know, in many ways, I don't think you are completely right because you will die and there is a God in my opinion. But we've like relented and given up so much of our freedom to other men and women, to humans. And so, you know, we get taught what to think, not how to think, often in school these days. We decide to go into careers and into marriages not based on the things that we truly want, often, but because of societal norms. We choose jobs sort of flippantly, maybe based on salary, not often because of skill set. You know, back when I was learning what career I should follow, I took a test that told me it should be finance, but I hated math and wasn't sure why it was finance, right? And so, this idea of freedom is really you and your ability to choose. That choice, I think, is so crucial for us to believe that we have autonomy in our lives. And I think people who believe that they have autonomy, they don't turn into victims as often and they actually build things as opposed to burn things down. And so our belief is freedom is not less work. Freedom is not doing nothing. Freedom is the ability for you to choose what to work on. That is it.

And you know, often I think freedom is the ability to choose what you want to work on, with whom you want to work on, where you want to work.

It's a lack of coercion. But

Yeah.

Here's the question. It's funny because, you know, a lot of how people talk about freedom today is a sort of a it's a libertine thing. And it's funny because I feel free precisely because I do not feel like I have the choice to betray the loyalty of my marriage. I feel that I am free because I am loyal to as a Christian man. And it's weird because, you know, G.K. Chesterton has this famous metaphor of boys on the top of a mountain. It's sheer cliffs around. You know, this is a soccer field and just cliffs at the edge of the soccer field and they say, "Play soccer," and they're too afraid because, you know, the ball is going to go over and they're going to fall off. And so they're like lying down. Then they build high fences and they start playing soccer joyfully. And the whole point is that real freedom requires personal circumscription of that liberty.

Yeah.

You know, you need to live according to actual rules in your life, but you have to choose to live according to a bridgement of your own freedom to be truly free.

Well, I think my husband always says freedom needs constraints. And you know, I remember asking him, he was a Navy SEAL, right? And so, what's interesting is I like to break a lot of rules. And I don't mean, like, I will cross the street without a crosswalk almost every time. And Chris actually does not enjoy that. He's like, "There is a crosswalk. We need to go within the crosswalk." And I remember one day, you're right. I remember one day, I just asked him, I'm like, "You have, with much love, ended lives and done these really intense things that seem to be ultimate rule-breaking. And I have done none of those. I have broken spreadsheets." And yet, you know, I'm willing to break these rules. His response back to me was that the reason that we could do the things that we do was because of all the constraints that we had. We couldn't break the rules. We kept the rules very intact. And inside of those rules, we had a lot of freedom. And so I suppose that's how I think about it. Like, you get to choose what your doctrine is. You get to choose what your rules are, but you need to be the one to choose them. And I think that is a joy in life today.

And voluntarily live according to your own values and principles.

Exactly. Without being impeccable, with no contradictions, even in private.

Attemptedly. You know, I certainly attempt to do that.

That means being true to your word. That means not lying to anybody for any reason. Not just your spouse, but also your co-workers.

Or yourself.

Yeah. And yourself.

Yeah. I mean, my father has a great line. He says, "Tell the truth. It's easier to remember." And that is very true for me. You know, I don't have a great memory. And so, wherever I can, I try to just tell the truth. Not to be mean. I don't believe in this like random radical candor thing that was kind of big in Silicon Valley for a while. I actually believe like, you know.

You don't need to say the truth all the time. You don't need to volunteer. You know, if you want to stay married.

Yeah. "The dress looks great, honey" is so useful. Just stick with that.

But it's also, you don't need to volunteer things that people don't want to hear constantly because that's actually usually using information as a weapon, not as a gift.

Yeah. You know, and I also think about bowling. Like in bowling, if I got to choose between bumper lanes or not, and my sole goal was to hit the pins at the end of the lane, I might choose bumper lanes sometimes. And so I think about freedom that way. Like in my husband and my marriage, we're the same. You know, very happily married and I would never break that covenant. You know, we also have a lot of rules between the two of us. He's very big on not lying. To be frank, when I grew up, like there was a lot of white lies. Like it was like, yeah, I got home at 10:00 last night, but it was really 11:00. You know, Chris literally doesn't do that.

That's probably one of the reasons you married him is because he's more impeccable to his word than that which you saw growing up and that's what you wanted in your life. That was a you that's what great marriages have aspiration in them and they look for. You look in your spouse for a characteristic that you want in yourself, a virtue that you want in yourself. That's one of the reasons that my wife grew up in a family in Barcelona and there was a lot of infidelity and there was a lot of dishonesty. And the main thing that she liked about me when we learned to speak each other's language, which was a couple of years in actually, was that I never lied to her. I just wasn't going to lie to her. And that was crazy. She'd never met a man that doesn't lie to her ever. You know, family, friends, none of it. And that in and of itself was what she actually wanted. Had never seen before. And that's kind of what you're saying too, right?

Very much so. And

Marry a Navy SEAL.

I'm not a Navy SEAL. Be careful what you wish for. He would say the same thing. I mean, we're both jokingly say we're hard to love. And so, you know, we come with a lot of things. But I think

You know,

if I don't like to give marriage advice because I haven't done it long enough, but you know what?

How long have you been married?

We've been married for six years, but we've known each other since we were 11. We've been together for 10. And so,

You've known each other since you were 11.

Since we were 11. Yeah.

Growing up together.

We grew up together. We went to prom together. Um, yeah. He's very close with my father.

This was your high school boyfriend.

He was. Yeah.

Huh. It just took a long time to get together formally.

Exactly. Exactly. We took a big hiatus. He was a year younger than I was in college. And so I went.

He still is.

No. No. No. That's not how it works. Exactly. The husband always catches up with. I'm a year younger than my wife when we married, but now I'm like a decade older.

That's exactly how it works. He always jokes because on the internet people are like, "God, her husband's so much older." And he thinks it's very funny because then he tells them that I'm the cougar.

But um, nice.

Women have a lot of makeup. You know, we can face.

And men have a lot of baldness.

You guys wear it well. But, you know, if I was to talk to young Cody, just myself going back to thinking about getting married and what to look for, it would be to look for all the things that nobody tells you to almost completely disregard most advice on marriage, which is like, find a nice guy who cares about you, you know, that wants to have kids, you know, that you guys get along. And I'm not sure it's any of that because Chris and I have a lot of friction, but it's like beautiful friction. And instead, our rules, at least in our marriage, are you find somebody who wants the absolute best for you above almost anything else. You find somebody who's your biggest cheerleader, even when they probably shouldn't be. You find somebody who tells you the truth often, especially when it hurts. And you find somebody who wants the same vision of life, in some way, out of it. And finally, who believes in the same moral and ethical compass. And those five things for us have led to a very happy marriage and an ability to work together and do all these things together that lead to a bigger surface area, which means more friction can happen because we're together at a high degree and yet quite happy. And I also think it's really odd. You and your wife work together in many ways now, too. But people will always say, "Oh, a power couple." And I'm like, "I don't even know what that means, actually." Or they'll say, "You work with your spouse. God, that must be hard." And I think quite the opposite. You know, at the end of the day, we have all of these things to discuss. We have this big friendship, this big continual conversation that we get to stay on between the two of us. And I think it's a beautiful thing to ponder, at least allowing your other spouse into your sphere of genius. It's also very sexy to see them.

And that's, you know, parenting is supposed to be like that, too. Parenting winds up being the family as a firm where you've got, you know, and one of the interesting things about it is when you see as parents, you see yourself as a team and really how it works is it's you against them, you know.

Totally.

It's team parents versus team kids.

And it should be. And what they can't, they're not going to get between the management team. They're not, they're just not getting in there, you know. It's just not. And even if you think that your spouse might not be right, she's right. Yeah, that's what my parents always say.

The kids are always wrong or kids are always wrong. I mean, that's just like that. You have to have a philosophy of things like that.

You know, it's funny. People ask my parents now, my father actually works for us and my mom likes to come to the events, too. So they'll be around a lot of people in our ecosystem. And I'll often ask them like, "How, you know, what did you do with Cody?" or like, "How do I have a daughter who works or is successful or whatever?" And my parents will always say the same thing, which is that they were always on the same team. And so, I'm sure they had their fights. We really didn't see much of them. Now that we're older, we see it. But when we were younger, no. And they always chose each other before they chose us. And that seems like it's really hard and not that normal.

Yeah. No, it isn't. And but the rules turn out to be quite simple. The rule for raising a good son, for a father to raise a good son, this is not entirely sex-specific, but it sort of is, is the number, your number one job if you want to raise a good son is to love his mother. That's it. Why? Because the number one thing that's going to help him grow up to be a successful person and a happy person is to be well married. And the only way that he's going to be well, that his leg up in getting well married is actually seeing you loving his mom because that's what registered everything. That's the model works. You got kind of one job, man, is to love his mom.

That's an I never thought about it that way.

Yeah. Yeah. Super important. It's actually super important.

It makes all the sense in the world. And not to mention, like if you want to play this game of life or business at a very high degree, there is nothing better than having somebody who has your back. And so I don't think people realize, you've said it before, but you know, the best partner that you'll ever, the best partnership or the worst partnership that you'll ever do will be your marriage. And if you, I have been married before, and not a great marriage on both of our parts, and there is no greater misery than to be badly married and there is no greater joy.

Well, that was your hiatus with Chris.

Because you're married to somebody else. That's quite a hiatus.

That was a long time. And I was only married for three years previously. I got married pretty young the first time, but for all other people's reasons and, you know, it not fair to him, not fair to me. And, you know, now that I look back at it, partnership is just so crucial to anything you want to do in life. It's an old African proverb like, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And there's no way we could have built this business without each other.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got one more, which is your last, the last pillar of the Cody Sanchez philosophy of happiness, which is ownership. And we started the conversation with ownership because ownership was about how to, it's not about control, but it's about being in the driver's seat of your relationships and your business and who you are as an adult. You have to have a sense of ownership. Now, it's an interesting, here's a historical artifact. You probably know this, but not everybody does. We all know this language from the Declaration of Independence. Were good old Tom Jefferson. He was almost certainly taking dictation from Benjamin Franklin when he wrote that line that we have this unalienable right endowed by our creator to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? Well, it turns out that that language was cribbed from the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason. And there was one word different. It was the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. And the whole point was that that was the essence of what it meant to be a person who was really in control of his or her life was to actually have property. Property was this tangible thing. Now, what's really interesting about your philosophy is when you talk about ownership, it's like property, happiness, take your pick.

It turns out that George Mason and Thomas Jefferson were kind of saying the same thing according to your philosophy, right?

That's fascinating. I had no idea. Yeah. I mean, I think, listen, I think it's hard to be alive. That's a broad statement.

Just, you know, from the beginning to the end, it's really nothing but trials and tribulations and joy along the way also.

And so I like to think about the things that we can control to try to make our life better in some way. And if I look out at society at large, does it feel better or worse when other people tell you what to do all the time, or when you get to determine a little bit of that? And I think by and large, it feels pretty good when you get to have some ability to say, "I'd rather do this than that." That feels kind of good. And not always. Sometimes it feels nice to say like, "Thou shalt not kill." Okay, fine. And so this idea of ownership is really, yes, I do think happiness stems from the belief that no man should tell another explicitly what to do in higher order than another. And that the ultimate sovereign is God. But I don't think that I should bow to another human. I don't think you should bow to another human. I do not think my life is worth more than somebody else's. I do not think I have better answers writ large than the collective does in many ways. And so this idea of ownership really is deeply a belief in humanity and that you are capable of more than you assume and of being the captain of your life, if you will do the very hard thing, which is take control of it and reap the either benefits or the risks from it. And so that is this idea of ownership. When I explain it normally, I just say literally ownership, owning a house, owning your own.

Own something that drives action.

But what you're really talking about is owning you.

That's right. And but that's much more touchy-feely.

Well, it's hard. It's also, I mean, once again, I mean, I am renting me from God, right? And so owning me. I'm the I'm the steward of me in its way. But at least it's temporal earthly ownership in its way. Do you consider yourself to be a libertarian?

Yeah, I mean, I try to never apply political labels to myself because I've done it before and then I got to that fate where I was like, oh, these guys, they'll always break your heart.

Exactly. Well, you know, I loved, you know what you said, which is, you know, you have that whole book, Love Your Enemies, which was an incredible book about something that seems so obvious, and yet I needed to read 300 pages on it because it was very easy to get on a moral high ground about why these idiots couldn't understand XYZ thing that I thought. But, you know, I do believe that like if I had grown up as this other person did and had their life experiences, I might be exactly who they are. And so,

This is your view of life. You're sort of a Patrick Henry type.

I think so.

In Austin, Texas, in 2025, and female.

Yeah. Exactly. Just small changes, really. But really is this viewpoint of, you think of yourself as the captain of your ship, is what it comes out. You're an Emersonian.

Is that fair?

Takes one to know one. Yeah.

Yeah. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Yeah. Yeah.

Self-reliance. You believe in self-reliance.

Very much so. Yeah. I mean.

The morality of it. You believe in the empowering nature of self-reliance, right?

Well, and I think to your point, the data seems to back that it makes for better lives. The data seems to back that, you know, us believing in our unique ability to strive and build, and thus capitalism leads to less poverty. You know, it seems to lead to the fact that if we make our own decisions and then we own those decisions, we can be happier. And so, like, I think also I'm very willing to always be wrong. And so if somebody proved me otherwise, I would. But yeah, we just hired a young woman the other day and one of the main reasons I knew I was going to hire, now they're going to know my secret. I won't be able to hire this way anymore, but she had, you know, behind her, the poem Invictus. And it's one of my favorites. And so I do believe that like, you know, through the dark night, being the captain of your soul is incredibly important.

Yeah. So, is there a last question on that? Is there danger in desiring to own too much?

Oh, for sure. I think like, you know, I don't believe, but there's.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't believe in competitors. I think you are your biggest competition always. And it's the dark parts of your soul that will usually pull you down one way or the other. And it's, you know, it's fear and it's greed. And so I believe what Warren Buffett says, which we are always either leaning towards being fearful or being greedy. And both can lead us massively astray. And in markets, he would talk about when to buy and when to sell, but I think it's also when to make a decision and when to not. If you operate from too much greed, I see it all the time in the business space. I mean, it's quite rare to be in business and talk not about "I hate them and I like them" morals, which does exist in business, but just why don't we do some things for good and better in business? That's actually not that normal. It's pretty much, especially on the internet these days, let's just go build big things and make a lot of money and my goal is a billion dollars. And I find that relatively uninteresting.

Um, can I sum up?

Yeah.

Because this has been a philosophical conversation more than a strictly practical one, but with big practical overtones. I mean, anybody watching this is going to do a lot better in their economic lives. But I hope that they make them a lot happier because these two things are entirely linked, which is your way of thinking and your way of being. So this first point is, in this philosophy, if I'm right, is that money is great, but it better be earned and you better have it such that you can have ownership over your own life. That's the whole reason for it. It's not for the Bugatti. It's not for the fancy watches. It's because the process of earning it and actually the autonomy it gives you. That's the point of money, right? And now that.

Second, you're going to create value, but not for yourself, but for others. The whole economic process of what you do with your job and your career and your business is to serve others. Success is to transcend yourself and to serve other people, and the benefits that it brings to you personally will take care of themselves.

Yes. The more you give, the more that you will receive, 100%.

Third, when you're pursuing your dreams, you better love the playing more than you love the winning.

Yes. Otherwise, you're going to do a lot of playing.

Yeah. You will quit. It's too hard.

Make sure that whatever you're doing, you love the playing, not just the winning. And even more than the winning, choose your work accordingly. Right?

So, good.

Number four is that freedom actually means choices. Freedom doesn't mean unconstrained behavior. It doesn't mean the 60s, man. No, it means choices, as well as the willingness and ability to choose correctly and to set and live by your own rules. That's freedom, right?

Number five is ownership. And that's really to be the captain of your ship, to be the captain of your soul, and to see yourself as really the proper steward of your own life, such that when you get to the end of it, you can say, "I think I was a good and faithful servant." That's what actual ownership of your life means. Right.

Right.

Good philosophy. I like it. I want to live by it.

Me too.

Yeah.

Depends on the day. You know, we try our best.

I hear you. Thank you for this. Thank you for sharing this with me. Thank you for the work that you're doing. For all the people who follow you, for all the business owners that you're creating, and all the people that you're touching every day, you're making the world a better place. Cody.

Thank you for having me. This was such a blessing.

Thank you. God bless you.