Meet YouTube's Next Billionaire (Codie Sanchez Interview)

- Real artists don't starve. - Oh, I have to find the muse and I have to create. And I kind of think that's bullshit. - A lot of people will say you have the number one business channel on YouTube, and you just hired Mr. Beast's former president. - Think we'll get to other dollars? - There's always gonna be people saying podcasts are too crowded, newsletters are too crowded. - What that means is they're too crowded for crap, but come a bit in business. - Business content, it gets a bad rap, especially on YouTube. - The second that you get money in this country, we're like, "Shh." Don't tell them how you got here. We're gonna give me six figures to do a TikTok. - Let's go. - The more money you have, the more you can assert your will on the universe. - Cody, can I see what's on your laptop? - Oh, yeah. - What I would wanna do if I was a creator kind of just starting out, 'cause this is like a little sneaky hack. - What you just showed us, I feel like it's a master class that nobody ever talks about. - I'm a mother of business. - I don't know that I've really ever talked about all this stuff publicly, because I'm excited to give away my free YouTube hack pack, which is all my best templates, tools, and tips to grow on YouTube. Basically, is everything that I've learned after working inside YouTube for five years to now growing this channel all for free. You'll get my 100 viral video ideas playbook with ideas for any niche, my 10 intro templates to improve your hooks with fill in the blank templates, my content on camera master class, and literally the thumbnail templates that I've used to get millions of views. And as a bonus for this video, Cody actually offered to give a bunch of the templates that she uses to grow on YouTube as part of this as well. So just go to this link in the description below, or go to whiteiehackpack.com, or check out the QR code to get it all for free. All right, back to the video. Cody, welcome to the show. - Thanks for having me. - I want to talk about the elephant in the room, because business content is, you know, like gets a bad rap, especially on YouTube, you know? It's a lot of people who say they're influencers, who have absolutely no influence at all, people who claim to have expertise, who don't have expertise. I'm curious, as you started to like navigate that world, how did you think about differentiating, 'cause your content feels different and gets many more views? - Well, you know what, I was like super freaked out to talk on the internet first. Like if you think about it, like if you look at my background, I was in finance and investing for 12 years. I wasn't, I didn't even have an internet presence before we started kind of blowing up three years ago. But then I remember one time that made me chill quite a bit. I remember we were sending videos back and forth, and it was this guy getting shit on. Like just like they were like, who's this finance guru, what an idiot, like no way? And you know, you obviously don't know what you're talking about, like thousands of comments. And if you're in finance, you would know that that guy is Ray Dalio. And you're like, this is one of the best investors of all time. He's a billionaire, multiple times over. He runs something called Bridgewater Capital, and people still think he's a fake. So like if that's gonna happen to him, it's gonna happen to all of us, which I think gave me some chill unlike, all right. Like people just might not like you, and that's okay. You know, if I was to say money is the root of all. - I mean, the saying goes evil, but I think it's root of power is can open things up. I mean, I'm a kind of immigrant, so I think of you a bit differently. - Totally. But like why? If we were to ask a real, might go and do these speaking events, money is the root of all, and everybody goes evil. And you're like, who programmed that? Like who said that it had to be that way? How common scammy if we talk about money? How common scammy if we talk about business? Oh, of course, because if we talk about it, then we're gonna get more of it, and then we can push back on the people who have it. And so I just don't like that. So I'm like, no, I'm gonna talk about it because when I was young and hungry, nobody told me how to make money. It was super confusing, so I never had any, and I didn't have any understanding of financial literacy. And I wish somebody would have talked about it in like simple terms, instead of the second that you get money in this country, we're like, don't tell them how you got here, you know? 'Cause that would be gross, or that would be scammy. Like, no, actually, that's just like putting a hand down. So that's my moral high ground that I get on sometimes about cash. Well, I think, you know what's funny, as I've been doing more interviews with big creators, they've shown me a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I've seen their brainstorming documents, I've seen their notion docs, their processes, and I kid you not when your team showed me your notion page and some of your projects, I felt like a part of my brain that didn't even exist it, like started to blow open, 'cause it's the way you approach it in some of the systems, I wanted to ask you about that. 'Cause I think a lot of folks, myself included just do things and we don't have a system around it, so we end up re-creating the wheel. Yeah. How do you approach your business as a creator to make it so you can scale and grow much more quickly than a lot of the other folks you may see out there? Yeah, well, the first thing overall we do before the tools and tactics is really like a mindset thing. You know, you have any hard-to-tonne creators say like, well, I got burned out, so I didn't want to do it anymore. I think burnout actually happens because we don't have processes. Yeah, well said. So if we had processes and systems and people and ways that we follow it along to things, we wouldn't burn out. It's the fact that because we're creators, sometimes we believe this mindset that like, oh, I can only video myself so much. Oh, this is so hard. And one thing that I had lucky is like investment banking and asset management is miserable, so I worked a lot. And so, you know, our joke at our firm is like, everybody's okay, like we're just making TikTok something out of that, like nobody's gonna die. And so one, you have to like, not take yourself that serious. One of my favorite philosophers, Alan Watts, says that. He says, the universe is very sincere, but it's not so serious. And I think that's true. So one like, don't believe what other creators say because they say that stuff because a lot of times we creators want to mimic artists, I think, and artists have this like, ethereal nature to them, right? They're like, oh, I have to find the muse and I have to create and like, they've got this whole thing. I think you show up and you keep working and then the muse finds you and like, you just, that's how it goes. And so I think it sounds much cooler to like have this ethereal mysterious way that you create. But I think that's the same thing that people do when they make money. They're like, oh, you know, it just, it found me. How big this business got? I just, I could barely. And that's not true. And it's the same with creating. I also really like this role in finance, which is the rule of thirds have you heard of this? - Well, tell me about it. I know the rule of thirds in terms of cameras. - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. - So like the rule of thirds in business is basically like, you get to kind of early that, like one third of your time, you're gonna be, you're gonna be great. It's gonna be awesome to be a creator or whatever job you have. You're gonna really like it. Then more, one third of your time, you're gonna be kind of neutral or it'll be, it'll be slightly stretched but you'll be kind of fine. And then one third of your time, you're gonna be miserable. Like dark, awful, miserable, overwhelmed and indated. But the cool thing is, they cycle. So like when you're in one, just know like, you're not gonna stay there. So just the next one's coming, the next one's coming. And so if I know all of that, then I don't burned out 'cause I have the right mindset. I realize this is just gonna happen for a period and I keep going. And then the way that you keep yourself sort of honest on all this is, I think the only way to build a big business is with people. And I realized that early on, which meant that like, I had to get the things that I saw out of my head and into a process. And otherwise I was gonna go crazy with people asking me again and again what I think. But anytime something that we do has more than three steps and we do it more than three times, we try to write it down and create an SOP. I joke with the team and sometimes I'll be on stage and I'll be like, what's my love language? And they're like SOPs. - And you define SOP for people who don't know what that stands for. - It stands for a system and process, system and processes. - And maybe Cody to put that in context, like you have this great saying of like, you should have more SOPs than a pilot does when they're taking off. Because pilots, like they have to check so many different things and it's a repetitive process. What are some of those SOPs that you have, or like, to talk to me about, 'cause I feel like a lot of creators don't even know what that stands for, let alone how to implement it. - Yeah, it's definitely a business particular thing. But yeah, if you think about a pilot, they have a little checklist they do every time. Even right now for our podcast, I was annoyed because I'm sure people can relate. Like we were making the same mistake again and again. And I was like, why? We have an SOP, which we have a checklist for like, all right, you schedule the guest, what happens? You send out a text to the guest, what text is it? You ask them what their drink order is. You ask them how soon they need to be out. You ask them what is their website, what is their contact information you check in with them the day of the lights go on in the room. The AC goes on like 15 minutes before 'cause sometimes it gets cold in there. Like everything single thing you can and you build it, it's like a living, breathing document. But the problem is your documents are only good as what's called your implementation. So you actually taking the thing and using it. And so for our podcast, for instance, this is like a little sneaky hack. Our generation is so technological that a lot of times our SOPs or our processes go on our phones, right? So you're like, yeah, we'll check it off on there. But what else is on our phones? Like every distraction known demand ever. And so I have the team print out and laminate an SOP. And I'm like, before we do anything, where is it? And so then we have our little lamination and we check it off as we go. Why? 'Cause there's no distractions. It's like, where's the thing? This is it. I get to look at it. The best SOPs ideal you take a screenshot or you take a picture of it. And everybody signs off what they did. And this sounds kind of annoying and over the top, but I learned it from boring businesses because that's what you have to do with technicians in the trades. I'm like listening to this and I'm like, okay, we gotta do this with our process. Laminate, I mean, the team at first was like, why would you do something so weird? And I was like, I promise you, it will change your life because it'll just be there. Like you can't, you can't not do it. It's right in front of your face. And so that's one example. Another one would be probably for creators listening, like you do something and you do it to the level that you want. And then you pass it off to somebody else. And it's not as good. Right, yeah, yeah. How do you get them to have your voice? And that would really annoy me. Like, I would see an email go out for us or something like that. And my friend Aiman and I call it writing love letters to whom it may concern. So, you know, could you imagine? Of course, you wouldn't do that. That would be crazy. Right. But sometimes, yeah, opening the letter with to whom it may concern, which is, yeah. That would not be good. Yeah. No. You know, you would want to say their name. Yeah. Of course. You would want to want to talk to them like they were human. So I was finding some of our emails that they were being written like this. I don't know. Dear reader, thank you so much for being a part of this endeavor that we are doing together. We feel strongly in the future of you as one of our customers. Should you have any inquiry? Please feel free to reach out our team here. No person would ever speak like that. And yet we write that way because we're kind of trained. Yeah. And so I found a few of those from the team lost it and wrote out what I call speaking like a contrarian. And so it's basically a set of ideas and then examples of what good voice looks like and what bad voice looks like. And then a couple of things you could do to get better at it. So it's like checklist again, because I love me a checklist. Like every time you're going to send something to our people, read it out loud. Because if you just read what I said, you would go, oh, I would never talk like right. And so that's one thing that I think is really helpful for us. Yeah. I in fact, your team showed me a lot of these docs. I wanted to pull that one exactly like a contrarian. Maybe point out some of the things that, because I think like scaling your voice is a really hard thing to figure out for creators like maybe point some of the examples. Yeah. Well, you know what would be funny is like, I wonder if you had our first version in here. So sometimes I keep, nah, I think I took it out. Oh, yeah. This is the first version. Okay. So listen to the difference between these two. So in the beginning, somebody else wrote this for me because I was curious. They have my voice. Could you do it? And here's what they wrote contrarian blog principles. In order to achieve those goals, we must ensure we would use this ourselves or with our members. If we would not use the information ourselves, blah, blah, blah, you get it. My version. I'm here to show you how to not bore everyone to death when you write about when you write about a word people can barely spell acquisitions. Oh, and everything else we talk about. Here's the problem with most content these days. It's a bunch of nerd marketers trying to write love letters, but their subject line says to whom it may concern, concern amateurs. You're not going to be them. You're going to serenade our people. The point being, this one is technically right. It's like, we would use this ourselves, except what follows is shit you would never say. And so I think it's really helpful to them comparing contrast because otherwise you'll miss. You'll read this first part and go, oh, this is good. But unless you see bad, you can't tell what good is. That's so because I find I struggle with this because I'm like, I see a lot of bad stuff and I just fix it. And then I'm like, let's continue on. Put our head down and get the thing out there. But then inevitably it happens a lot. So you think like having the contrast of what the earlier draft was, if somebody was doing it for you, 100%. Yeah, I mean, if you'll see in here, we have throughout one of my favorite investing mentors of all time said that he said, nothing is good or bad except by comparison. And so that's largely true until you've seen beauty, like real beauty, you can't really understand if something's ugly. And so we'll use real examples. And so we do that and then we'll have little bullets and it'll be like boring, wordy, obvious. And then a good example might say, this is great, you use the word you a lot. What's everybody's favorite word besides their name? You know, you hit on emotions, you make them feel something. And so I do think that good or bad contrast is really useful. Yeah, that's really helpful to keep the bad example. Otherwise, you won't know what changed. Yeah, I mean, Sam par one of my good friends who sold a business called the hustle. Yeah. He kind of taught me this with copywriting back in the day. And basically said, one, if you want to get really good at copy or writing or video or speaking or anything, what do you do? First, you go watch or read really good copy. Yeah. So if you guys wanted to get good at sales emails, you'd go to contrarianthinking.co, you'd put in your email address and you'd watch all of our emails that come out and you'd be like, oh, I like that. I don't like that. And then you would contrast it. So then you'd go to like the worst newspaper you could think of, you know, or the worst news site. And you'd see what they do. And then then you find your voice in between the two. Yeah. So we kind of came up with a bunch of different ideas about what viral might be. And usually with our content, we place them in buckets. Like we have pillars of content, we create, we have buckets. And so some of them might be, is there an audience specific pain points or desire? Like how do you make a million dollars when you have zero audience? Once it plus it's kind of painful, right? A vogue emotion. You know, I think young people don't work hard enough today. Well, that's going to piss some people off moment. Specificity and numbers. So I found a study where 100,000 people said that if they do this one thing, you will be more successful, right? Study, we found motivate. So is there a line in there where you're like, oh, that line's so good. I almost want to tweet it. Hook. Credibility hack. So this one's kind of interesting if you're a new creator. So if you're a new creator, you probably already noticed this, but maybe you don't have a lot of credibility. Can you steal somebody else's? And that's what a lot of young people do when they're like, here's how Elon Musk made his why. Here's how Jeff Bezos. Here's the secret to Amazon's first million. Whatever. So you don't always have to be the expert. If you can borrow somebody else is 10,000 hours. So we use that as well. And then maybe the only one that I think is really useful is, it's why use five when you can use one, which means if you're going to say something, let's say clearly and concisely and directly. And every time we look at a script or at something we're going to create, I want to value my audience so highly. And they're time even more than them that I'm exiting out anything that isn't absolutely necessary. And so a lot of times our team, especially like, for instance, you know, Christian, he'll get a first draft of a script for something. And the second draft is basically just, can we cut 30% of it? And even with the book, I started with the book. There's probably 390 pages and whittled it down to 270. Because in today's day and age, you don't need more information. You need the exact right information at the exact right time and nothing else. And the graphics, I felt like it was like a very modern read. Like I went through this in one sitting, just like going through and like all the, like, maybe it's because I was also preparing for this, but it was awesome just to see a lot of these visuals that I also want to talk to you about because it was just different than most business books. I don't even want to call it self-help because that's like another term. But yeah, I thought your approach was really different. Thank you. Yeah. We tried to use, I mean, I think the adage of picture is worth a thousand words is true. And I think a picture that shows what you want to demonstrate with out words is extra worth thousand words. Like a lot of what we went for is, you know, I'm a big fan of like somebody I could loosely call a friend Jack Butcher. And he has a site called Visualize Value. Have you seen it? Yeah. Yeah. Super minimalist, like design, like, but conveys a ton of information. Yeah, exactly. And it came back to that idea of like, if you why use five, if you can use one. And so I don't know about you, but it's a lot easier for me to remember how something looked like. Or I can picture in my head when somebody's talking about a then-diagraph with three overlapping circles that show me in the middle the perfect fit business for me. Like I can now picture that. But if I was just to say, well, what you should do is you should use your skills, talents and passions in order to find a perfect fit business out of my head gone. I don't even remember that sense. Yeah. Um, Cody, can I see what's on your laptop? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like can we see like all the more than detailed tabs, Tanner? Oh, okay. So this is called the content control room. Basically, what this is is I'm really big in business and in life. And like, how can I get a message in like 30 seconds? So I don't have to waste a lot of time. Yeah. Because there's something called decision fatigue, which is like the more you have to think about things and make decisions, the more you struggle. And so if every time you're trying to like piece together information, you can't move very fast. And so this is our content control room, which basically hosts all of our platform pages, so social whichever social channel, uh, quick links to things that people might need are resources, which would be like our goals and KPIs, keep performance indicators. Um, as so piece, we got to use less acronyms. So annoying. So finance of me. So all of our systems and processes. And then we try to have a playbook for every platform that gets updated with some frequency. Um, and so you're looking at kind of where I can centrally see all of these things. Yeah. The cool part about notion, I'm not sponsored, but I'm open to it. And notion in particular is really searchable. Yeah. And now it has an AI feature to it. So the incredible part is, um, you can teach your team how to self provision, which is now, I think if you talked to any member of my team, they'd be like, well, Cody didn't make this I did, but, uh, you know, she influenced it, but I don't even know if she'd know how to find it. Like that's where you want to get to. Yes. Yeah. Um, so what you're seeing in the bottom, you're seeing this is our week and content. Probably most creators have this. It's like every single platform. What's going out when, um, so we know what's coming. We're not always perfect again on this, you guys, but, um, we do have that. One of the things that I think is good is for instance, if you went to like, um, let's say our, oh, this is funny. Okay, we have one called, things to know about Cody. So, so one time we had this, uh, tweet go out, it's like our infamous tweet. And I had just tried a Twitter writer, which I had never done before. Like a ghost writer. Yeah, like a ghost writer. And they wrote a Twitter thread that went viral. This is a weird thing to go viral about too. It was about, I think it was about PNL's, like how to read a profit post too. All right, all right. I don't know. So anyway, most boring subject ever goes super viral. Small issue. In the very beginning, like the third line in the tweet was, I worked at Goldman Sachs for seven years. I only worked there for two. I didn't catch it. Usually I review almost every piece of our content. I didn't catch it. At the end of this, you know, millions of people see it, whatever you could only imagine. It's like, you're a liar. You were there for two years. You were probably just a secretary. People go crazy. So I created this things to know about Cody, which is basically, as you scale, people are going to write things about you. They're going to do first drafts across your team. And you have to like, scale your knowledge. And so this is literally just a roll of decks of like, hey, when did I leave this business? What businesses do we own today? In our business because we're in finance, I'm really particular about, we got to make sure we're right on everything that we put out. So if we sold a business last week, and now we only have 26 businesses, but we used to say we had 27, we better update that shit. And so that's helpful to know, like, things to know about Cody. And as you schedule, that might be the same thing. Because the bigger you get, even for you as a podcast host, they're going to write maybe a first draft of a thread for you, maybe a first draft of a blog, and you're probably going to miss a few things. And so it allows you to duplicate yourself that way. Cody, how do you track, like, what does well so that you don't repeat those mistakes? Yeah. So we have a scorecard. I'll actually show it to you. I would love to see that. Yeah. All right. I'll have to see how bad we're doing here. Okay. So because I'm a finance nerd, everything we do is kind of, it's in a spreadsheet. And the idea is we take a goal, like, let's say we want to hit a million subscribers this year. We take that goal. We break it down by year, month, week, day. And we read out each week on our goals to see as a team, how are we doing? Like in your weekly meeting. In our weekly meeting. Yeah, we have two weekly meetings that are relevant for the whole company. And this one's just a content meeting. And in it, we'll go through this, this scorecard. So from here, we'll talk about what is our weekly growth goals? And weekly growth goals are useful because then you don't get overwhelmed at the end of the year. Like, oh, my God, we're so far off. We track net new followers, which you can see. We also track how far are we from goal? So you can see in some of these, like, we haven't filled in the data here. So it looks really off. But in these, it's like, we're a little bit behind, but not a ton. Each platform gets a scorecard. So from our newsletters to YouTube, to Instagram, it's TikTok. And at this stage, we have a big team, which most people do when they get to money. How big is it right now? I mean, we probably have, because it's a little confusing, because we have people who aren't just content. So I don't know. Maybe there's like 12 people in content. And then the business overall is more like 40. And then that doesn't obviously include Main Street Holding Company, which is our main business. And there we have hundreds, but in the underlying company. So it's a big operation. And a lot of that is because my time doesn't scale as well. So like maybe one other interesting thing to see here. Here's our like filming agenda for today. So you can every single day that we're filming, my team sends me this. And basically said, here's everything that we're doing. Here's the locations. Stuff to remember. Each day, like, it's funny. What do we do for a living? They're like, take a selfie with the audience. You're fucking weird. And then stuff to film in between. So we try to have like basically no down time, because I just want to motor with everything else we have going on. But this could be useful for people, because I do think a lot of times there's a there's a principle that I can't remember the name of, but it's basically the tasks take up the amount of time allotted to the task. Parkinson's law. There you go. Yeah. And so we found that again and again with content. Because content is like never really finished. And so you can continue to draw it out. Or you can say, we have this amount of time with a deadline. We hit deadlines at this company. Yeah. There's this great quote. I forgot who said it was like art is never finished. It's just abandoned. That's, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. And you know, and like the beautiful part about the internet today is that it's iterative, right? And so if you don't love the thing that you put out today, then you can remix it. You could do another version of it. You can apply principles to it. Yeah. A lot of times our best ideas, especially for short form, will come up with the idea once it'll do really well. And then we won't edit that video. We'll completely reshoot it. But it's the same idea. Like what's an example? There's one video we have called the bathwater method. Oh yeah. Which is basically it's a business buying method. So how do you buy a business without money when the business is in need of a turnaround that's struggling? And so that did really well. We kind of explained, okay, well, here's what you do. You look for this type of owner. You do it this way. And all of this was written in front of a chalkboard. And we had like, I don't know, a couple million views on the first one. And so I was like, oh, this is interesting. So let's create some more content around bathwater method. People like this method. Which is a term you coined. I coined. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think you're also, that's another thing I want to get into. Like you're very good at these frameworks. And like even boring businesses a term. Yeah. You know, yeah, I do think we, yeah, we came up with, I don't know if we came up with boring businesses, but we might have and we definitely popularized it. You definitely have it. Yeah, yeah. And then bathwater method we certainly did. And the only difference between a video that you might see, it might, there might be one coming out tomorrow. Well, you'll be able to, whenever this goes out. Anyway, the second version, we won't film in front of a chalkboard. Maybe that one will film on a whiteboard. Or maybe that one will have like an image of a bathtub. Or if the team's always trying to get me to get into a bathtub. Because I think you have to stop some rules in this game. Otherwise, you just revert to only fans. You know, I think it's a straight line to porn, actually. So I said no to the bathtub. But yeah. Yeah. 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, this is how I guess how involved are you in the pre-production? Because I find there's another area of struggle for a lot of creators is 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. 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 don't, most of the companies that we own, I don't operate, I 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. Yeah. 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 like voice noting like, hey, this is how we should do it. Or all right, like 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 is why I think our society is falling apart because we don't have ownership. And 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. Because your subject matter expertise, at least when it comes to my stuff, it's hard to replicate. 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 want our community to feel integrated and like, they're part of us. And that's not that normal in finance and business. And so we wanted them to have words that would identify them, right? So just like a sports team. And so we came up with like stuff that we say all the time and then started sort of testing it with the environment. Like, 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 that was useful. And we have like a ton of these. What are some of those cult sayings? Yeah. Well, choose your heart as the first one. Main street over Wall Street. That's a big one. We're going to do a tour on that. Dirty hands, filthy bank accounts. Move 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 throughline we can have through everything that we do. Yeah. You know when you watch like West Anderson, just from the color scheme. You know it's West Anderson, right? And then if you hear a score from like who's the guy that did bad boys? Michael Bay. Wait, this is so easy with you. You know the answer is to all these. What else do you have in there? I watch too many. I actually went on home Michael Bay binge recently. Did you really? 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 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 move. Same thing with Wes Anderson. And I remember like a billion years ago, I got to meet Quentin Tarantino. And the most interesting part 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 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, 'cause 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, cool, but they're like, keep it the same, you know, it's been the same person either way. - Yeah, Cody, 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 them like, I'm already thinking about ways we can implement them. I don't know if you're comfortable, but I've got to be a cool thing. - 100%. - 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, and we'll scrub all of my social security numbers off them. - Yeah, that's good. - 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 also maybe add some of the like main takeaways from this as well, 'cause there's so many things I feel like people could give you a PDF or something like that. - Okay, cool, well, 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. This is my mission control. God, we are, we're kind of nerds. I didn't realize what we named all this stuff, but all that I think about it. - Yeah, it's 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 gonna 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. And I know every single day, like I just go in there, maybe I spend 20 minutes, I'm like, 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 you want to try to keep being a creator, creative for the things that matter. - Yeah. - You know, it doesn't matter how you review your videos every day. 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 a slashed attack, but in a good way? - Are you into processes too? - Well, we're trying to create them. And Amanda, my wife and CEO, she's very good at 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, yeah, 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 too 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? And 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 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. And 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? 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. 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 accidents in success. 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. - Right, 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 get asked, like you're very open about finance, how much money do you make last year? - 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 can 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. And 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 bombs, 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, I'm back to the video. You're gonna try to report it. I mean, a couple of ways we could talk about this. So how I make the most money is through our Main Street Holding Company. That 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 guess KG sometimes is sharing exactly how much we make because what if we sell a company that 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. 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. So that's our media business and how we make money there. So Main Street Holding Company owns like Rezzy 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 a couple of defense companies. 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. That's probably like seven figures a year. Let's see what else do we make money? Add sense, small amount. Like, I don't know how much we make. How much do you think we make an add dollars a year? Yeah, a couple hundred K? Yeah. The 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. That'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 BizCout. 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 just, it costs me money instead. I think BizCout 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. And there are a few billion dollar businesses in both Contrarian Thinking Capital and Main Street Holding Company, but we just don't own a hundred percent of them. So we'll see. But at this stage, 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 wanna see us grow. - Yeah, if I get zoom in onto the income pie chart of like the media company, the sponsorships thing is really interesting. 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? 'Cause it's interesting to talk to you about this 'cause 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 wanna work with folks who could extend your reach work with creators. What tips or what do you remember by your early days of brand deals? And like, how would you recommend creators to go about negotiating them? - I think I actually did a first brand deal when I was first on the internet with kind bars. Is that the name of it? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And it was like, I probably have an NDA, but whatever, fuck it. Like I remember 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 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 with eight sleep. And I'm obsessed with eight sleep. One, the founders are really a cool guy, a couple of them are. But like, if you use their product and you have our in a relationship, like maybe you two, I 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 that I realized it the next day. And so like, that product I just love. So I'll talk about it. 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 partnerships and sponsorships, I think you need somebody in the middle. And so 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 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. Let me tell you why. Because on average, they want like, they want like a five to 10x return 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. The 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. Or 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, 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 I'm like, I'm saying no to every, you know, finance app imaginable. And they'll pay a lot. What's the biggest brand you'll you've said no to? Well, I probably wouldn't say the name because I don't want to be too much of a dick. But 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 of the day, we're going to be six figures to do a TikTok. Let's fucking go. But, um, but now I've realized the truth, which is your 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 Pompeiano, good friend of mine, pop. He got murdered because of some um, crypto companies that he backed, including FTX and pomp is a smart like diligent, very good investor who's made a ton of money. And 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 as 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. Like, how would you try to cut through and grow 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 crowd environment? Well, one, I would ask yourself this, like 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, that's kind of created, uh, 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 like 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. So like, you have to want to write about it. Otherwise, energy transfers and people are going to feel that. And then to a crowd, there's already like a proven area that you're like, oh, people care about this. Millennials are in the 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 determinous 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 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 and 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 the guy who's running my newsletter. 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. But in one particular instance, it was about a landscaping business because we write about more in business. So 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. Yeah. So that 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 started a tree trimming business at 21, right? There's some good aspects to those dollar amount, time frame, specifics. I was like, those are lazy. 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, wrote 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 remember like, what Cody's talking about that? Now I'm not clickbaiting you because it's not saying that I'm going to deliver something else, but it's surprising. It's like slightly off kilter. It's a little funny. It's on brand for us. And so 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, the couple of things that are true always the same with hooks, statistics, studies, emotions, actions, specific stories, all of those do very well. And then I do think humor is important. 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. Although I'm sure there's a lot to learn there, but I'm more like, what does it make me feel? Yeah. 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 into the world. Yeah. We borrowed something from Sean Perry 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. And then every time I welcome to create it, the newsletter that's more vital than like Wi-Fi on a five hour flight or something like that. And like people are like, respond like that, you know, that, you know, puts a little smile on their face. And then obviously the info and the values there, too. But I like that. Yeah. And also it makes it probably makes you guys laugh. Yeah. Yeah. Really important to, you know, like the newsletter that you want to raw dog like the kids are doing these. 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. And that 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 that I won't say who yet that's coming on the pod, who's a 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. The magician. Yeah. So he used to do one trick. And that one trick, like levitating with lasts for like 10 years would be like the levitating guy. Like we go to that. And 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. Like we're viral on YouTube for one day. You're on the homepage for YouTube for one day. What are you doing? Yeah. Celebrating. Yeah. 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 that respect. So like the quantity is so high that if you don't have some fun with it, I think it's probably pretty miserable. And also likes your 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 that 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 say like making money off of content alone is one of the worst ideas in terms of business It's a terrible business model. That's a really bad business model. I mean, why 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 Yeah, so 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 John's all over the place. We're gonna have AI codeies We're gonna have content ripped off, duplicated, and increasingly I think relevancy is gonna be hard So that's what you can look forward to. Yeah, and well, so what are the ways we could combat that or what are the businesses that you feel like? Yeah, creator like they're just getting started maybe less than a hundred thousand subscribers like what should they be looking at in terms of other ways to diversify their income beyond some things we talked about courses newsletter like that I feel like people know about like take me through the business Yeah, 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 Scrapeable so 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 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, 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 so 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 agents 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 But in chapter seven we talk about one company where We get a percentage of the company. It's a video production company because I produce videos and people ask me all the time Who do you use yeah, and so I go okay? Well, I could partner with all these people who are coming to me and they want me to You know take money for me to promote them. I 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 a hundred thousand dollars on video production a month. Okay, cool What if I could double that what if I could take you from 50 to a hundred thousand dollars? Could I take 20% of the additional $50,000 that I bring you? For clients that I bring you it's like you giving me let'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 It 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 I we get approached with a lot of deals Hey, we'll give you this equity and we become wiser to kind of diversify that we believe the company will take equity But we try to get cash flow 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 upfront 50 bucks for a video for y-action you say I want money plus I want a percentage of revenue that I drive So you could say okay, if I 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 in matri 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 a stat three percent of people a year negotiate their salary three percent 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 And this is what I learned on Wall Street that I think so cool So the third way to do it would be okay brand wants you to do why 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. Yeah 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 is 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 So if if the equity I get is 10% when you take a hundred thousand dollars out of the business John because you run the business I get 10k from the business because I have 10% of it. It's called the 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 why outcome and the distributing equity might actually instead be business makes I don't know 10,000 dollars 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 So 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 one million dollars a year in total revenue and I own You know 10% of the business and get paid on the total revenue of the business Then I make 10% of one million, which is what 100k? Yeah, okay So I make a hundred K in this scenario yeah in scenario two the business makes one million dollar in revenues a year but The owner of the business only takes out a hundred K In distributions, which is why it's called distributing equity distributions is a fancy way It's like a tax reason to say that I took money out of the business. Yeah, it's not my salary It's above and beyond salary is the owner of the business Which means if you own 10% of the distributed equity you get 10% of a hundred K. Yeah, which is a lot less Yeah, so you only get 10k there we go That's interesting because that's not now is 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 right versus a revshare is obviously, you know Like you're pulling revenue and you define like the date if it's every six years every year Yeah, and I mean and then a profit share would be like one million dollars 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 10k home. Okay, well, so this is I've never seen a broken down like this. This is um This is amazing for each of these 16 so the why is 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 So why is your deliverables? You're exactly right. Oh my gosh I should have been a doctor with his hand right 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 Output goals are things like 100,000 views Uh 10,000 customers At $10,000 in value, you know a hundred new people customers. Which one do you think brands pay more for the ladder output? Which ones do we usually negotiate for as creators? The first one. So if you're confident in your ability delivered 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 over 10 K because I'm going to kill it. In the beginning, when you don't know what you're doing, you'd 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 deal making comes down to risk transfer. Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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. Like I know you talked about like the Venometh method. Yeah. Where you look at like 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? Yeah. I mean, they're a bigger company. A way to think about that might be you asked me in the beginning about what my pie chart was. Like how do I make money? Yeah. 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 sponsorships 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 is a creator is like largely my companies. Yeah. But 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. Yeah. And there's some split between the two of them. Right. What I would want to do if I was a creator, kind of just starting out is figure like, what's my monthly nut? Like how much money do I have to make every month in order to cover my costs? Yeah. And that I'd probably want covered by adSense and partnerships. Like give me cash. Yeah. Because I got to, I got to protect this thing. Right. But anything above and beyond my monthly nut, I want to take like 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 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. And 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. Can you give me just to make this even more successful? Like what are other examples of like businesses that you feel like creators are 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 and they'll let go of a very profitable business just because they don't have anybody to give it to. Their kids want to dance on TikTok instead of like taking it over. Yeah. Well, give me just more ideas of like 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 dollars in wealth is located. Fascinating part though. And you would probably know this firsthand. Like how much of your net worth is tied up in your businesses? A 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 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 you would it wouldn't really matter if you were relevant forever, which is it's something I think about as a creator. If you started taking a percentage of companies that you interact with. So 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 in 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 month. Okay. Cool. 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 like 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 like 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, a KU, and you just got paid a little $1,000, $2,000 check a month from this studio, plus the studio in New York, plus the studio in Austin, plus the studio somewhere else, you'd probably be pretty happy. And 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? Yeah. Yeah. They've got a lot more. Well, now we get to a point where like we have like the agency does a 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. Did you get anything for that? John. Okay. So there's your opportunity. Yeah. Now we want to be giving. We don't need it. I was trying 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. And 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? And I think a lot more creators could do that than they assume. Well, 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 three K. Then the second year, you made 25 K, then the third year of public speaking, you made 90 K. And in your most recent year, you made over a half a million dollars public speaking. Yeah, that's definitely probably true. Maybe higher. How do you make money public speaking as a creator? When you're, 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. Like what advice would you give to somebody to start getting paid to be on stage? Because events, corporations, like 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. I don't really love transactional businesses as you probably hear from now. So like 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 we they pay us, but we instead invested 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 dollars, I will do things I should for that. And so that's cool. But what I would say is speaking itself because it's really transactional is hard. And 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 a 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 thousand dollars, tens of thousands of dollars a month through doing like one or two deals. I'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's gonna be way down here and Google and Amazon are gonna be up here. They're gonna pay her a hundred thousand dollars to come talk to their employees and get their leadership excited because their ability to ROI on that is Vigilians, technical term. So that's one thing. And then 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 gotta remember how to do deals. And then it's okay. It's very like on 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 there are just people in the world that's how they do it. - Well, I think it's even more true for YouTubers and creators 'cause 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. 'Cause the way you've been able to do it just has blown me away in so many instances. - Well, thanks. I mean, I stole the, I think I added one level, but Naval Ravicon, 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. And 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 are 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 come and do huge labor force. So that would be back in the day, like the Pharaohs, those, that was slave labor. You know, then it would be serfs and then eventually 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. And 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. 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. And I think any creator doing that today, you have way more power than you think. - How do you think about courses and like info products? That's another area where like I think there's a lot of baggage, but you've done a great job of like selling, you know, like I mean, these numbers kind of like stood out to me. You have a $100 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 'cause it's hard to price yourself in many ways. How have you thought about that? - I think there's two reasons people don't do info products. One is 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. So 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 or 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. And so once I started to realize that, my mom's a 30 year special education teacher, I was like, I think we can, 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. Like, wow, you're targeting my ultimate. Is that yours? Yeah, I went to Wharton undergrad, yeah. Well, I use Wharton because I think they are the best finance school out there. Yeah, 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 and finance. And 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 I just tickles my little taint. But this guy came up to me and he was like, what was he, oh no, this was to Chris, my husband. Moral 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. So come on, dude, who is that guy? Get in the bad rap, come on, yeah. So anyway, I'm like, okay, cool, you're going to buy a business that's awesome. He's like, yeah, I've been doing it for 14 months, it's going really well. My gosh, 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' rascal, because I'm not as much. But the point being, like, I think they give people a false sense of the real world. Like, when I left Georgetown and I was, you know, at Goldman and some of these other places, yeah, it helped people maybe take me more seriously. But like, you going to Warren or me going to Georgetown? Does not mean that I know more than a guy who's actually run a real PNL 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 less finance. But yeah, I think you're spot on. Yeah, no, I mean, and I think that's where people go sideways. So anyway, so I feel good about us creating an education business, 1000%. 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 was 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. And my plan is that I want to build that out to be a real institution, but at 100th 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 trying to do the same thing with philosophy and with liberal arts. And so I'm inspired by that. But if you're a young creator, I think one, 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, where you got it, how you could get on a discount, what's really necessary, what 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 a 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 practiqued. They've just been a theorist, are gonna teach you better than somebody who's actually done the damn thing. - Do you have any other advice like for creators who are trying to be more business savvy, like understand the language of deal-making, 'cause I think it's foreign to a lot of us. - Yeah, what other advice do I have? Well, one, like whenever you, I think a lot of people, well, 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. - Yeah. - 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 through it at the stock market, what are you think's gonna happen? You're not gonna know how to invest and make more money. And 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. And 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 vanity fair, I think, cover shot. And it was titled, I'm a mother fucker in business. - Yeah. - 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 partners. castors in the world. Why? 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, you know, 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. Like, no, no, actually the business side of things and remove this idea that like, creators don't understand business or I'm an artist and I don't have to. Like, there's a great book that's, it's like real artists don't starve. Have you ever read that book? Not that one. I read the one. Art of War or War of Art. No, I haven't read that one. I'm not talking about it. Yeah, that's one reference. I didn't get Cody. Yeah, one for five. So I can summarize both books for you in a sense. 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, so I think that's really important. Like, 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. Like, I don't think they make you happy, but they certainly decrease misery. And so if you can decrease misery by not doing the tasks you want to do, then you can become really wealthy. So we come very obsessed with deal making, especially creators, because you have real leverage. 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. A lot of people will say you have the number one business channel on YouTube. Other people may say, you know, you're the most powerful businesswoman on YouTube with like your investments. You're able to bring exposure to them. 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 you're facing a lot of shit that goes on behind the scenes. What'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? Oh, 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, 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 the business of like two million dollars a year in revenue. And we can't get our users back. So 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 and like, let's define little like eight weeks. We're basically in solvent. I was like, that's not, we can't have that. What's going on? 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. Long nights, no sleep, lots of stress, raised voices, people not wanting to do what they had to do, people getting fired. You know, I had another business of mine. Actually, Contrary in thinking at one point, I put somebody in charge of the business. And you know, my fault, I thought they were a 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 for running out of cash. Oh, wow. And so this is the media company. 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. So I don't want to call them out. But 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 employee, any mistake except one that costs us our reputation. And 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, 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 fucking up royally, right? Like they literally, we have the lowest level of trust as a society of media ever. We actually are lower than some third world countries, which is usually the opposite. And so I think about that as a creator is to like, we have a real responsibility to make sure it's a, let's see, what does Jordan Peterson says? He says, tell the truth or maybe at least just don't lie. And so I obsess on that a lot. Like 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 post on access 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. I'm remarried now. And 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 on to me. And sometimes I think we marry people. And in that instance, he thought I was going to be one type of person. And I never was. I never was going to just 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 now I get to work with my husband, which is 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 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. You don't move as easily. And so I had become a person that was like a little bit more serious. So I was here. He's a former Navy SEAL. So he's like very strict. And 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, like it 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 no 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 US and 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. 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 it a little bit before, but man, when you've seen what can happen in a third world's country, you have a lot more respect for what we got here. Like 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, it can new country. And I, you know, when I was younger, I was a journalist on the U.S. Mexico border. I was still in college. It was 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 at the time, they called Juarez Ciudad de Muerto. Ciudad de Muerto. And basically that means the city of death. Right. And they called it that because along the Juarez desert there, they would find basically daily women being that had been brutally murdered, chopped apart, raped. I mean, things you can't imagine. 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 newspaper that was controlled by the cartel. I can never remember if it was the cinema or the snoring cartel and one controlled by the government. And both would report different numbers of women that were missing. And 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 US. Every day, the tune of thousands, and yet it was happening in Mexico, and 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, like, I think in a lot of ways, law is, it follows, it 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, we also had businesses in Latin America where certain politicians came in, and they nationalized all the industry in the countries. And 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. Your 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 are legal. 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, and do you 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. That 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've 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 it all possible. That's beautifully said. I'm so thankful that you're sharing this stuff unapologetically. And I mean, what you just showed us, I feel like is a master class that nobody ever talks about. So 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. I'm 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 out. Thanks for doing my public math, too. Warton is good for something, you know? Oh my god. Thanks for coming out, Cody. - We're so pleasure. - Yeah, amazing.