BigDeal - #16 What Self-Made Millionaires Have in Common | Bill Perkins

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

🚀 Main Street Over Wall Street is where the real deals get done. Join top investors, founders, and operators for three days of powerful connection, sharp strategy, and big opportunities — live in Austin, Nov 2–4. https://contrarianthinking.biz/msows-bigdeal Codie Sanchez and guest Bill Perkins discuss how the company you keep can significantly impact your success. They highlight the importance of surrounding yourself with high performers and sharing research and personal stories on boosting productivity and growth. Codie also emphasizes the need to distance yourself from underperformers and explains why being the "dumbest" in your friend group can actually foster personal development. The episode wraps up with tips on protecting your time, choosing the right partners, and leveraging your network for success. Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. Record your first video https://creators.riverside.fm/Codie and use code CODIE for 15% off an individual plan. 01:22 Contrarian Idea: Be the Dumbest in Your Friend Group 03:15 Personal Experiences with Underperformers 05:33 The Power of Saying No 10:00 Research on Social Interactions and Happiness 19:50 Identifying and Removing Underperformers 24:41 Meeting Bill Perkins 26:37 A Humbling Conversation 28:18 The Power of Ambitious Friends 28:44 The 80/20 Rule in Friendships 30:53 Valuing Your Time 33:27 Investing in Yourself 35:13 Choosing the Right People 36:19 The Importance of Integrity 44:37 Finding the Right Talent 48:58 Generosity and Sharing Success MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: 🫂 ⁠Our community⁠ 📰 ⁠Free newsletter⁠ 🏦 ⁠Biz buying course⁠ 🏠 ⁠Resibrands⁠ 💰 ⁠CT Capital⁠ 🏙️ ⁠Main St Hold Co⁠ Relevant Links: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/sitting-near-a-high-performer-can-make-you-better-at-your-job https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26847844/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you surround average performers with one underperformer, it will decrease anybody in their radius of 25 feet by 15%. I mean, you're such an asshole, but you're my best friend. But there's gold in there and there's value as long as they have integrity. His name's Bill Perkins. He's worth hundreds of millions of dollars, best-selling author, and he's just a stud. It turns out that being around other people, social interaction,

friends or otherwise, actually decreases your happiest. And the relay race of life, you never know if you're the starter or the, finisher, you just run. Oh, that's good. And he goes, well, is there any part of you that thinks that because you've been investing in small businesses for this long, small has infected your thinking, how have the best people in any industry achieved something incredible? I want to share a quick business tip that I've been thinking a lot about lately. It's eliminate, automate, delegate. So if you do tasks in that order in your business,

it runs more smoothly. I'm always looking for tools to help eliminate tasks, then automate them, and then finally delegate those that are absolutely necessary. One of those tools is Riverside. Not only can it record 4K video and audio remotely to make sure your podcast quality is top-notch, but it's also drastically improved my team's editing speed with the text-based editor. Transcribes your footage, remove silences, one-click, and creates these short clips just by selecting the text. Even better, if you make a mistake, which we try to do, you can delete the sentence, and the transcript will delete it from your video instantly. So Riverside has an in-platform editor where you can upload your own content to, so it's not just footage,

recorded on Riverside that gets the special treatment. So how do people find new podcasts often from seeing clips, right? You see a bunch of mine. Riverside gets this, and that's why I like their AI magic clips. Analyzes moments in your podcasts that have the most potential to get traction online that saves hours of listening to your podcast for the fifth time to find the perfect clip. Riverside's got you covered. We're always trying to remove, automate, not add, and complicate. But don't waste your time doing what Riverside can do for you. I got you guys a deal. If you want to try it for yourself, get the Riverside link in the description and use the code Cody for an exclusive discount. Just for y'all. Hi, it's Cody Sanchez and this is the Big Deal podcast for those who not only just want to get rich, but free and are actually willing to do the work to do it.

All right. Lucky for you guys today, I got Bill Perkins, one of my favorite humans in the world, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, bestselling author to come and share some of his advice on underperformers and how to make sure you're surrounded by pro performers. This week, I'm going to be on a little bit of a rant. And the rant is about the underperformers in your life that are costing you tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands a year. We're going to ask if this quote is really real. That is, you were the average of the five people you surround yourself with. And it turns out it's worse than that.

But before we get into the nitty-gritty of it all, I think we're going to start with a contrarian idea. Maybe you'll love it. Maybe you'll hate it. Rachel, what's the contrarian idea this week? So the contrarian idea actually comes from a tweet. you wrote and it says personal growth hack be the dumbest one in your friend group then move on when you're not and that that got some people pretty pretty feisty in the comment section so that's what we're

working with today well listen i'm not trying to tell people that not make friends or to cut your friends when you're done but i am here to tell you the things that nobody will because they actually work as opposed to sound pc i have very little interest in being pc on the interwebs because that's one of the beautiful parts about financial freedom. The truth of the matter is, is as often as possible, you can level up where you are the low man on the totem pole to the people around you, the faster you do that, the faster you can steal somebody's 10,000 hours. And then if you want to give back to the other people in your life, which is a beautiful thing to do, you do that. But you do that thoughtfully, as opposed to turn out like entourage. Adrian Greeneer, he was this famous actor

and he brought along a bunch of idiots that essentially were funny for the show, but not not so great for his career. And I feel like that's what happens with a lot of us. Just because you started out with one group doesn't mean you should finish with them. And it doesn't mean they're less than you. It doesn't mean you're more than them. It simply means that you guys are moving at different speeds on a marathon. And so as often as I can remember to tell myself that, that I can still have love and

respect for the people who aren't at my speed because I'm fucking psycho and you guys probably are too, the more I achieve in life and the more you are going to achieve. So that's what I mean. But, you know, Twitter's ticked. So you guys can write your angry comments too, or you can make some money. Up to you. I guess I have another question for you, though, off of that. Have you ever been dropped in that situation where somebody felt like you were holding them back?

And like, how did that conversation go and how did you handle it? Probably. I'm sure. Actually, totally. 100%. I mean, a couple times I can think of. One, when I got divorced, basically all my friends dropped me. The second I got divorced, they all went with my husband, who was in Dallas at the time.

They were all sort of married couples of the country club. I didn't fit in anymore. And it didn't feel great for sure. But we just weren't on the same path. So at the end of the day, I didn't really get upset at them. I don't know if they got upset with me. I wish them nothing but well. But we went our separate ways.

And I don't think it has to be some big dramatic standoff. In fact, I think that's your ego talking. If you think you need to explain this other person why you're superior to them and no longer engaging, you can just stop engaging so much. And I'm sure there have been people in my life where, you know, know, they've moved forward without me. And it's just a natural progression. It doesn't have to have some emotional charge to it. So you had a really good tweet and it was actually about Bill Perkins, but I want to read the second part where you said, I took a deep breath, he's right. You need to

shed the bullshit or you'll never be truly big. And you kind of talked about how that hurt you. And I think that was just a very impactful thing that anybody who's listening can can take a lot out of yeah true friends are the ones that tell you to do more not less this week i'm on a rampage and the rampage is about one thing do you guys remember this quote um you are the average of the five people you spend time with right oldie but a goody it turns out that the truth is even more aggressive than that quote and so we thought we'd break down the numbers through the narrative and see what it actually means because it turns out that if you hang out with underperformers they can cost you a hundred thousand plus a year and ain't nobody at that's

time for that. So let's break this down a little bit. Oh, and if you guys don't know me, I'm Cody. I've been in private equity and investing for 13 plus years, run contrarian thinking media company, and 20 plus what I call boring businesses that do nine figures in revenue. Everything we do here is to create more owners in a world of consumers. All right. Now, contrarian idea is how we start this. I wrote this tweet, which people hated on the internet and said, personal growth hack, be the dumbest one in your friend group and then move on when you're not to which a bunch of people on the internet said cody are you telling us not to make friends do you just ditch people you're terrible this is no way friendship should actually work and i thought let's pause on this as opposed to getting

triggered based on emotions what do the numbers tell us and the numbers are fascinating so there was a research study that was actually conducted at a large tech company where the founders found some interesting to statistics that has led to a lot of the way workplace culture happens today. This is how it went. Imagine this. If you are an over performer and you are placed in a group of normal performers, that overperformer will help increase the performance of everybody else by 15%. So if you're by a badass, you turn into 15% more, 15% more of a badass yourself.

Now, the problem is if you sit next to an underperformer, if an underperformer is sat within a 25-foot radius of a bunch of normal people like you and me, they take your performance down by 30%. So think about that for a second. It's not only that you're the average of the five people who you surround yourself with. It's that being around great people increases you a bit. Being around not so great people decreases you 2x more than that. So it turns out it's not just a mean tweet. There's some reality here. And Dylan Minor, who is a professor at the Kellogg School, basically referred to this as positive spillover, which he says creates about one million in additional annual profits.

You have overperformers sit next to normal performers. And can you imagine then that that means that there's probably double that in annual drag on a company or on you? And that's why I started thinking about it as this $100,000 mark. If we think about our goals and what we want to achieve, let's say that you make $100,000 a year right now and you sit next to a performer every single day. How much do you lose potentially by sitting next to that performer? Well, if it's dollar for taller, that basically means that you're losing $30,000 a year

based on catching that energy from somebody who is not at your level. Now, the question then becomes, what do you do about this, right? And we get that question all the time. Like, so okay, so you're just mean to people, you move away from others. And I don't think that's the answer. I think you get in rooms where other people's realities are your dreams. I think about like this. People know that six packs aren't contagious,

just because Tanner, who's sitting here next to me, might have one of those doesn't mean that I just get it from hanging out with Tanner more, except that maybe it actually does. Because what happens, and the study seemed to back this up, is the more you hang around people who already do the activities that for you are goals, not habits, the more likely you are for those goals to become habits. And so you'll notice quickly, if you're with a group of people who drink a lot, what happens?

You drink a lot. If you're with a group of people that don't drink at all, it'd be kind of weird if you were hammered by yourself. And so that baseline activity just increases the likelihood of you going to succeed. And we've all felt it. You've been around friends who have that positive push on you in your life. The thought that I then went to next was, is more friends better? Right? Is more friends better? And should we then hang out with more people, less people in our pursuit of quote unquote excellence? And so I found this study by the British Journal of Psychology, which is sure to trigger the internet because it's kind of wild. And it basically talks about something called ancestral versus modern tendencies. And ancestral tendencies are basically things like humans are generally happier with lower population density, meaning, you know, not in New York's.

city, they're probably happier in more open rural locations, and that humans tend to be happier when they're around other people, aka their friends, more often. So we're not very happy in huge city centers, but we are a little bit happier when we're around our friends more often. Makes sense, right? There's one issue, though, as someone climbs the intelligence curve, aka they become more and more intelligent, as measured by IQ, it turns out that being around other people, social interaction, friends or otherwise, actually decreases your happiness. And the reason I thought this was interesting is because I don't know if you, like me, have often been told you should hang out with your friends more.

Why are you working so much? You know, you can kind of take it easy. The weekends are for hanging out and not working. And that's never really resonated with me because I'm so much less interested in pickleball and pottery than I am in building something and talking about it. In fact, I can't think of anything more atrocious than having a sense. sit and listen to somebody talk about PTA meetings, the weather, what did you do this weekend? It's probably the reason why I'm unemployable, because if I had to come back into corporate

America on Monday morning and listen to that, like I would end it all. And what's fascinating, I think, is that when you hear these studies, it removes this belief that there's a common narrative, and that common narrative actually doesn't mean that that's the truth. And at contrarian thinking, we're always sort of striving for that. What is the noise and what are the numbers tell us? And so if you guys want to see the study, we'll put it in the show notes, and you can send this to all your friends when they try to get you to go out on Friday night. And you can tell them, no, I'm too smart for this shit.

Okay. The second thing I wanted to talk about is the next question then becomes, okay, so if it's true that you're the average of the five people you surround yourself with. And if it's also true that being around people more often isn't necessarily a contributor. to your happiness or success, then how do you say no? And how do you push people out that shouldn't be in your circle without being a jerk

and doing it in a way that doesn't leave people with a feeling from you that one makes the personal people pleaser inside if you want to die on the inside and also leads to actual performance in your life. And so I have this friend, Alex Formosi, and we talk a lot.

And perhaps you're like me and I'm a people pleaser. So I was, you know, I'm a Latina. I'm a woman. I was in sales. And it seemed like the easiest ways for me to get people to like me were just to say yes to things all the time. And I felt a sense of guilt deep in my gut any time I didn't say yes to people.

I had to come up with a lot of excuses. Sometimes I would lie. And I'd feel like I was letting people down constantly. I don't know if you've ever felt this same way. Turns out it's very common, though, that we are not used to in modern society saying, know, especially with a period at the end of it. And so I thought I'd use some of his advice to help you become your friendly neighborhood no dealer. And basically, we have a little accountability thing that we do. And I told him I had this issue. And so he said, I'm going to send you a screenshot

of every time somebody asks something of me and I say no. And you can just see all the ways that I say no and you can see how the interaction goes. And he's like, and I'd like you to do the same thing. shoot me a screenshot of when you say no. So I always send screenshots now and I'm like, how proud of me are you? And the screenshots then align to a positive feeling, aka we get an endorphin rush, we have adrenaline, we have these natural states which tell our body that the thing I am doing right now is actually a good thing, as opposed to that sinking feeling you get when you usually tell people something no.

And you kind of wait for their response and then you over-explain. And so, you know, the last text and I had it here, I thought was kind of interesting. I basically, from back in the day, I had this woman reach out to me. She used to work in one of my businesses. We didn't have the most positive interaction in that last endeavor. And she pinged me saying, hey, I've been seeing you all over social, and I'd love to do X, Y, Z thing to you, or for you. But, you know, so would you like to use my services, which is funny to me?

One, I think generally, when you want something from somebody, you should leave with a, you should lead with a give, not an ask. So if I was this woman, I would have said, hey, looks like you're doing well in life, haven't talked in a long time. I provide this service. Here's this thing for free. If I can ever do anything to help you let me know, I'd love to talk about it more. Okay, cool.

Maybe I could get on board with that. But like, hey, I've got an idea for you. Do you want to pay me for the idea? I'm not that interested. Now, typically, I would give a lot of excuses as to why. But because Alex and I are working on this, I just said, no, thank you, period. Hope you're well, exclamation point. No explanation.

no excuses. And I tried to explain this to my dad afterwards. So I called him and was like, Dad, I'm really trying to get good at this thing called saying no to people about stuff. And he's like, yeah, that's great. You know, what you should do is just say, no, that doesn't work for me or no, I'm not interested in that moment. And I'm like, absolutely not. That is the wrong way to do it. That thing where you say, no, that doesn't work for me.

No, I'm not that interested in it. Then it opens the door. You're leaving open a little wedge for somebody to come back to you and say, hey, why aren't you interested. Why doesn't that work for you? If I just say no thank you, there's no door. There's no, there's no crack in the door. It's closed. So why is it that more intelligent people don't actually like hanging out with other people all the time and have to learn how to say no continuously? And I think it's a couple different things. As you get to the crazy end of the curve on intelligence, there's also typically some aspect of being on the spectrum, which usually means like singular focus, which I think

makes a lot of sense. I also think it's because the best performers have to narrow down their aperture as opposed to widen it to have unfair levels of success. So if you think about it this way, how have the best people in any industry achieved something incredible? Is it by doing what is average normal or shallow? Absolutely not. They go deep into one segment. They spend 80 hours working, 90 hours working instead of 40 hours working. And typically when you do those things and you narrow your aperture, the whole world doesn't quite understand. So it actually made sense to me.

I have a deal that I did that I invested in a company with a guy that ended up not being a good friend to have in my ecosystem. And it came with a big, huge price tag. I lost a ton of money by not paying attention to the people that you let into your sphere. And instead of the six-pack transferring, basically six figures transferred out. And that is the cost of having people in your sphere that are not on your level. And it's often really expensive. So what happened is I bought a company from a partner.

And he used these two words that I realized were dangerous. And those are lifestyle investor. Basically, I realized too late that this guy was more interested in having a company serve him than serving the company. and was more interested in this elusive term passive income that I'm pretty convinced does not actually exist. And so he basically, about a company with him, I put up most of the capital for the company. He put up the sweat equity, the work, the labor for the company.

And then I started watching it for a few months, and it worked out okay, except as I started seeing the numbers, there seemed to be a few anomalies in there. The numbers weren't exactly matching what I thought the company should be doing. And as I started talking to him, what I realized is he was basically layering all these other costs inside of the business. So instead of him actually operating the company, he had hired a VA first. Okay, fine.

Then he had hired an operator to replace himself. Then he had hired a VA for his operator. And so by this time, about $20,000 worth of monthly costs in this business were being added. And he really wasn't working in the business. But I was funding his lifestyle and this new additional operator. And the teaching moment there, I think, it's that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. And so if you are around friends who already don't drink, work out, work hard, it is likely that they are going to continue that behavior. It is unlikely that that group of people is going to 180 change the behavior that they currently do today and have done in their recent past.

But for some reason, when we meet somebody and we start to do deals with them or we start to work with them, we don't necessarily look at their past behavior. They tell us things like this guy did, which was, yeah, my past partner really didn't work out. You know, it just, he was too involved in everything and he wanted to know what's going on inside of the business all the time. And he wouldn't just let me run with it. What does that actually mean? That red flag actually means that he didn't report out well to his other partner, that he was probably underperforming. And that this other partner just wanted to get more intel, which is exactly what happened to me. So if you want to see somebody's future with you, look at their past with somebody else.

And that's what I realized with this, with this friendship that became a partnership that became a six-figure loss for me. I think, you know, let's call this loss probably something in the realm of 100,000 to 150,000, not counting how much time we spent on this deal and me having to parachute a bunch of people in there to actually fix this company and take it over. Now, the question then becomes, how do you move out a person like this from your life? And we're going to get to that in a little bit. We're going to get to this idea of how do you get somebody out of your life? Let's say that you have a partner, a friend, a colleague like that. Whether it's somebody who think is actually underperforming, here's a number.

They're supposed to hit it. It's not. Or what I think might be more insidious, which is the energy suck. Now, this partner that I had was really underperforming in this business, obviously. I was scared to push him out or get rid of him in the company. And yet, every time I got on a phone call with him or met with him, I left the media depleted and just like frustrated almost every time. And so I worked up the nerve and I finally fired him probably like a year later than I should have.

And it got really ugly. You know, he was mad. He was yelling. He tried to sue me. He threw a fit. He sent angry letters. But what actually happened? In the one month following his departure, we did our first million dollars in sales that month,

and we grew by like 175, 176%. The moral story is when you think somebody is not a fit for you, the truth is they probably haven't been a fit for you for a very long time. And so you should cut the ties early. Now, there's two things I use to tell if I have one of those people in my life right now and that you can use to tell if you have one of those people in your life. How do you tell 15%ers versus 30%ers? There's one thing I use called pay-per-view,

which basically means past people victim. So if you find your friend always talking about people, so, you know, oh, Sally did this. Can you believe Bob did this yesterday? Well, yeah, I found out about such and such. If they're talking about people, giant red flag, they're probably not moving forward because they're more interested in gossiping about those around them.

If they talk about their past a lot, aka nostalgia, well, it used to be like this. And do you remember back in the day we did this? And do you remember this happened there? What that means is they're not looking to build in the future. They're stuck in either their highlight reel or they're stuck in sort of their victim circle, which gets to the next point, which is victim. When it comes to a victim, this one's really easy. It's they start talking about how something bad happened to them.

Every time you get on the phone, you realize you both start bitching about stuff almost immediately. Everybody has that friend where you don't mean to, but you just immediately start talking gossip as well. You start actually talking about negative things in your life going on. And it's just really easy to slip into victimhood and complaint mode. If those three things take up more than 20% of any conversation, you should move on. You can wish them love, you can wish them light, but you don't need to let them control your future, which is what you're doing for every moment of time you spend with humans who are in their pay-per-view mode. Now, I want you to try something for me.

Picture in your head, that friend or colleague that you know you kind of need to move on or you think you should. There's that person that you're like, ah, I am. They're probably not right for me. You have that human in your head right now. All of us do. We typically at some point all have one person in our ecosystem. that if you're a boss, it's your employee, that if you're an employee, it's a colleague, that if you're a friend, it's maybe your boyfriend or husband's friend.

And I want you to picture them. And then I want you to give them a ring this week or go to coffee with them or something this week. And while you're there, sit and do one thing for me. See how you feel. See how you feel engaging with them in that current exact moment? But more importantly, how do you feel when you're done? So typically, by the time I'm done with what I'll call an energy sock or a paper

person, I feel less inspired that I did at the start of the conversation. I feel like I might need to go for a walk or get a coffee. I feel like I have performed in some way, shape, or form. There's no fueled up. There's, I feel a little depleted. And that is going to be your instant signal that this is an underperformer, not an overperformer for you. Now, the important part here is like, you know, you're not a saint and they're not a devil. And nobody's good or bad completely. It's just relative contacts of where you're at and where they're at and where you want to go. And so I sort of think about it like a triangle. If you're trying to get up here on the top of the triangle and your friends focused on being down here,

it's not that they're worse than you or better than you, but at this moment, you're outpacing them. And you don't want to run a marathon at the rate that the lowest performer that you know goes. You want to run it at your rate. And let me just tell you, you know, I have lived this in a lot of real way. But one of the other fast ways to know if you're with underperformers or not is to get around really, really big performers. I thought I'd tell you a story about this guy. His name's Bill Perkins.

I don't know if you've heard of him. He's worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He actually wrote that book, Diah was Zero. Great book. Best-selling author. He's a hedge fund manager and a professional poker player. And he's just a stud. And I met Bill because we both invested in a company called SkyFi as a startup investor.

And we were both on a panel and we just jived. And so we started talking. And now Bill is much more successful than I am monetarily. And so I was pretty deferential. But he texted me one day and was like, I want to talk to you about some of the stuff you're working on. Why don't you come out to my house? I'm like, all right, that's cool.

So me and my husband go out there. And as we're driving, you know, we pull up, it's like gate number one, enter the code. Gate number two, enter the code. Gate number three. And if you have three gates, you have a lot of money. I've determined by now. So anyway, we get over onto this massive compound. It's overlooking this lake.

It's like multiple houses on it. And I'm late. So I'm typically late. It's a terrible trait of mine. I'm stressed. We're rushing to get to him. So we pull up and I'm like, Bill, I'm so sorry. We're late.

You know, we won't take up very much of your time. We'll be in and out. Don't worry about it. And he's like, no, I'm here for you. It's no problem. Like, yes, but we won't take up most of much of your time. And I'm like, he's like, stops me, puts his hand out. And he's like, I'm here.

here for you today for as much time as you'll give me. And I kind of looked at him like, lie. So I'm like, okay, well, let's sit down and talk. And so we start sitting down and talk and he's like, tell me about what you're working on right now. So I start prattling off all the stuff about contrarian thinking and all these businesses we own and how I'm building this portfolio. And I think I'm being pretty impressive, to be honest. I'm like, nine figures, baby. And here's like the 20 plus businesses we own. And we get a hundred million views a month. And I don't think there's anybody growing faster on these varying platforms. And he's like nodding his head.

He's super nice. And then he kind of pauses and looks at me. And he goes, well, is there any part of you that thinks that because you've been investing in small businesses for this long, small has infected your thinking? And I kind of like, I'm not sure what I do, but I've taken it back. And I'm like, well, you know, I don't know what you mean by that. and he's like, I think you could own the entire ecosystem of small business. I think you have a once-in-a-generational opportunity to do this, and you're just not trying. And then we kept conversating, and we had a nice chat at the end of it, but I couldn't get out of my head.

You know, it was like that little splinter lodged into your finger that you can't wiggle out. And so I started talking to my husband about it, and I realized that because Bill has, let's say, billions, and I'm playing with millions, tens of millions, and, you know, getting to nine figures, he just sees the world differently than I am. It's the difference between the person who makes their first $30,000, $50, $100,000, and the one who makes their first million, $10, and $100 million. There's a chasm as big as the Grand Canyon. And that conversation changed a lot for me, because now, every so often, he'll send me a little text like this,

well, he likes WhatsApp, and he'll just say, so, do you want to be? be a billionaire, and then he'll send me some article about somebody that's building something faster than I am. And my point and Bill's point is I think this. You need friends who are so interested in seeing you succeed that they see you as larger than anything you could imagine yourself. If you don't have friends who want you to be bigger than they are and who in fact think that you are playing small when you play to your biggest dreams, you need to get new friends. And it turns out this is actually harder to do than you would think. I have another couple of really successful friends, and they basically said,

it turns out the 80-20 rule, Paredo's principle, is real everywhere, which means 80% of the results are driven by 20% of the things. Or in nature, just about everything has an 80-20 principle. And with friends, it's the same thing. 80% of the people you interact with are not going to want you to be one cent more successful than they are. They want you to be just below where they are. And then you find the 20%.

And the 20% are so inspired by seeing you win because they know that it just means that they can do more, if you can do more, that there's this abundance game as opposed to a scarcity mindset. And so now I've started to look at my group of friends. And once you share a win once with somebody and they come back with, oh, hmm, you know, you must be working a lot because you did that. or wow, that's a big risk, why are you taking that? They're allowed one. But they don't get two. Because the second that you have a friend give you two and say,

huh, maybe you should play smaller instead of why are you thinking so small is when you know the friend hasn't had your best interests. And you need more friends whose response is that you are not doing enough. Think about the last time somebody said that to you. It's probably pretty rare. Bill Perkins and I became friends because he was one of the, the few humans who said you could be doing more, stop settling for less. We don't need more humans in our life telling us why it's okay that we are not performing. We do not need more

humans telling us that we are small, incapable, that it's not impossible, but for you it is. What we do need are more humans that push us to the next level. And that's what I hope my rich friends can teach you because they sure as fuck push me. Bring the band in One, I was just talking about getting an assistant and that's a big thing that you've pushed on me and a lot of people.

Why is that? Well, I value your time and I don't think you value your time. So, you know, you describe some of the activities that you were doing and that you were having to do and I was like, if I were in a business, would I put Cody in charge of filling up the gas tank,

worrying about whether there's skim milk or oat milk or whatever milk you drink, I wouldn't do that. That would be kind of horrible for running my business. And you run many businesses and you're a very busy person. And so I want you to value your time the same way I value your time. So good. So a lot of people, I think, have friends that tell them the opposite of that all the time, right? They say, why would you have somebody else do that?

Aren't you scared? You know, do you think you're better than that? When did your mindset shift to start giving yourself permission for even ideas like that? I guess it was, you know, kind of through osmosis and seeing a lot of books that I read about effective allocation of resources. And so one of the things you have to effectively allocate is your own resource. And I don't think people think of themselves that way as a resource for my family. Does my family think I should be working my hours doing that? Do my future kids think I should be working that way? No, they want to maximize the return. How about the charities that I

donate to? They basically get a percentage of what I earn, right? Like, did I make this much this year? this is my taxes, this is a percent, I ship it out. I can tell you right now. They're all sitting there. I mean, they don't know, but they're thinking if they could have a lens. Like, no, Bill Perkins, don't work on that. Spend your neurons and your time working on this business or this multi-million dollar idea. Don't make the bed. Don't clean the sheets. Don't do whatever. Please pay somebody to do that. And so I have an obligation to others to effectively allocate my time, to my goals, to my ambitions. And so I don't look at it as like I'm better than somebody. I just think that I'm better suited doing certain things and other people are better suited

to doing other things. And plus, you know, they get to save their money, learn, and move up the chain. You know, I want sweat floors and weighted tables and got fired from that job because I was terrible. But yes. You know? It's so true. I mean, you talk about the allocation of resources and the time of bill.

And the way I see your mind to work sort of, I kind of. can see you allocating it actively as we speak. Was that part of you being a trader, part of you being a poker player? Was that really just from reading other people's books? And when was like the first moment that that changed? Do you remember? It changed very early on. How much money do you think you made when it changed? I was broke. And you still thought that way. Yes, because there were a lot of books out that were like invest in yourself, investing yourself, invest in yourself. Yeah. Right. So when I buy somebody else's time to do the other things, I'm making an amazing. investment in myself, right? And so it's kind of the question, it's a little bit of arrogance, too.

Like, if you give me four extra hours a day, I'm going to kill it, right? If you give me an extra hour a day, I'm going to kill it. Like, I'm going to make way more than the prevailing, you know, wage rate over time. And so there's that belief, right? That kind of like optimistic, delusional belief that I can kill it. And I invest it in myself. And you know, there's other books, effective allocation resources, and that's in yourself, thinking grow rich, these type of things have the thought. It's like, okay, there's no way I'm supposed to be doing X, Y, and Z when I have these big dreams, these ideas, this ability to analyze this very fat world with lots of opportunities. This is where I belong in the chain.

It's so good. Yeah, I remember vividly, we were walking here, and I think what happens when you have any sort of success, and I've had some, and you've had a lot, is people stop telling you the things that you should hear. And you did such a cool favor to me, which is you kind of looked at me after we had this in-depth conversation, and you said, huh, do you think that investing in small businesses

for so long has infected your thinking to becoming small? And I think a lot of people, if you heard something like that, they would immediately go defend and attack. And it was such a gift, actually, because I heard that statement, and I was like, oh, my God, he's right.

And what a gift that I could then kind of level up a little bit higher? When you think about the people that you allow in your ecosystem, because you get to gift them things like that, and the things they say to you probably also embed into your psyche, how do you determine who's in Bill's friends group and who does Bill spend time with? Wow. You know, people have different types of friends, right, in your friends groups that I'm able to give value to. One of the things is that I have to be a value to some way. Either the goofy bill, party bill, go banana bill, the analytical. the mediator kind of high integrity bill.

So I have to be able to provide value to you because I don't want to be just sucking from somebody else. Like I got to be a friend in order to have a friend. So I look at that first. And then the second thing is I look kind of fine. Can I trust this person, the integrity? And then whatever wacky stuff is coming out, like, you know, there's going to be gold in there, right? Like, you know, when you're mining for gold or lithium or whatever, it's like 1% or 3%, or

3% or 0.6%, right? Like, I think that's kind of true with like human beings, right? Like, we got all of stuff, right? But there's gold, right? And so you can have friends with that, like, oh, man, you're such an asshole, but you're my best friend. You know what I mean? Or you're such a whatever. But there's gold in there and there's value as long as they have integrity and as long as they have trust.

Is there a way that you test for integrity? Unfortunately or fortunately, you know, I trust first. I'm very generous and trusting first. And then I have a very big filter to like, you know, like, okay. You know, and then depending on the level of breaches of integrity towards me and or others, you know, you kind of move out of those concentric circles. Right.

Yeah. And do you think, is there somebody who for you when you meet with them, they hit you with stuff like that statement you said to me? Like, is there somebody who every time you sit down with them, you're like, Fuck. I should be doing bigger. I should be doing more. Wow. Wow. There aren't the people... I generally am the most delusional of my friends.

And I think that's a requirement. You know, that puts you in the arena. It doesn't mean you're going to succeed. Doesn't mean you're going to, you know, swim upstream. It just means you're in the arena and you're in the stream and you're swimming. And I think I'm pretty delusional. So I have to look towards... other visionaries and you know you can go to a TED conference or you can hang around in

Austin and I sit down with these people and like what am I doing my life I've been slacking you know what I mean like I feel like I'm slacking you know and they're they're out there here in Austin when you meet them and and thank God Austin is one of those places where it's just so dialed back everybody's just so I'm just a human you can meet anybody talk to anybody and then you find out they're working on the most interesting complex visionary things and so I've kind of been looking at like these long-term visionary guys who like, I don't know, slim chance of success, 20-year outcome type goals. And I'm thinking, okay, this is the big type of thinking. I get inspiration for people around me. But I unfortunately, I think I'm the most delusional. Actually,

my friend John Arnold, he was the most successful commodities trader since the rice trading markets, called him rich and wanted to do philanthropy. And he wanted to have like analytical, impactful philanthropy and he is attacking very very big problems which are seemingly intractable like pension reform education reform medical and health care reform prison reform these things that people may find hopeless or or are not able to make any change and he has just a very methodical long-range data-driven vision that he's executing on and so you know even though i might be doing something different, I can look at what John's doing and the type of problems he's tackling and the dedication and the work and the small wins that he can get to hopefully change the world. And so, you know,

that kind of changed my thinking into like, what am I doing in the startups and what am I doing in businesses? And then I went a long time ago when I was divorced on a date and I was going on a lot of dates and I was coaching on dates to discover what I liked. And someone said, to me, I'll never forget. They were working in banking, and they were part of changing banking culture about reporting problems, et cetera. And I was very, very dismissive, like, oh, my gosh, that's never going to change. You're never going to change the culture. And she said to me, in the relay race of life, you never know if you're the starter or the finisher, you just run. And I, that hit me like a ton of bricks. And I stole that. I use it all the time. And so

it's kind of like everybody has a part to play in life. And so I may not cross the finish line, but I can advance the cause. And so I look at people who are like that. Right. Interesting. Yeah, you know, we were talking about this study we found that basically talks about distance between under and over performers and the effect on the average median employee, average or median employee. And so basically if you're around people who are bottom quartile, what effect does it have? If you're around people that are top, quartile, what effect does it have? And for the average person, it actually seems like performance is contagious in some way, shape, or form, which is fascinating from a company culture perspective,

because it tells us the thing we know as leaders, which is if you have a cancer, you've got to let it go. Correct. And quickly. And yet, I hadn't thought about it that much in my personal life or friends. And so that's the whole point of this episode is us obsessing on what do you allow to be contagious. But you have sort of an interesting perspective in that it doesn't seem to me like you let a lot of negative things become contagious to you. You have friends that are crazy, Dan Blesarian, right? You have friends that are brilliant, huge names, and you allow sort of varying parts of them into your life.

Is there a way that you don't allow the contagion to spread negatively? I wouldn't say it's like I have 100% filter, right? But what I say is, what I try and do is that everybody has something to offer. Everybody has, and you have to mine, right? So you go from your first principles and try and state. you, but also mind what's great about them, right? Like, I have brilliant friends with low EQ. I have high EQ friends that are not brilliant. I have crazy friends that are just like, hey, when it's time for you to go crazy, this is the crew. This is the crew, right? Like, not that

crew, this group, right? And so, you know, I try and, you know, everybody's multifaceted, right? Like, I have many, many, many, many facets. You have many, many, many facets. And it's like, each one of those can be improved upon or need to be addressed or let loose at times. And so I try and have that menagerie and get that value out of it. How often do you let people into your sphere and ecosystem? Like, are you around friends and family every single day? Is it a once a week occurrence? Do you prefer to be by yourself?

I'm usually a homebody. I'm around Lara all the time, my wife. She's the boat driver off camera. Yeah. Yeah, the, the, it's tough because, you know, most of, you know, the things where I have an impact are, are my brain, right? It's just kind of like, think of this, email that, whatever. So, you know, as a knowledge worker, even though I'm interacting through devices to communicate with people, it's generally me in solitude having the most impact, you know. but I generally people are easily let in when they have enthusiasm in their field

and I just become fascinated and I want to learn and so I dig in and I want to know and I know what makes them tick and why are they thinking this way and that's crazy I wouldn't do that why are you doing this well you know and then you get this and then you that really draws me into people and I learned like, what is it about their life, their upbringing, their nature and their nurture that made this human, this human, you know, that put them on this quest in life.

And I just find a lot of people fascinating. Yeah. You know? And so it's very easy that if you're a trustworthy human being, you know, I can easily be fascinated by you if you're on some quest. Even the quests that are going to fail. Yeah. Like I think we overrate, um,

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You know? Yeah, well, I mean, we were talking about that because you've helped me, inspired me a lot to think bigger in my acquisition strategy. And so we share back and forth varying businesses. And you'll say, what do you think about this one? I'm like, oh, I hate that model, but I like this one aspect of it. And I don't think I've ever seen a model that I hate every aspect. I'm always like, fuck, that one, thing's really, really smart.

And like, we should steal that component in that component. Right. So I can see the ore in the humans and the ideas. Yeah. And you're sort of like picking petals off the flower as opposed to the whole thing. So that makes a lot of sense. What about maybe sort of my last question on this direction is we, and definitely, I bet, you spend a ton of time working. And you built a ton of companies.

You've put operators into those companies, like a few that we've won that we've invested in together. How do you decide who's going to be a winner in your company and become part of one of your endeavors? Wow. We have a saying it's always an HR problem, right? Because people have brilliant ideas and they're like, yeah, we're going to do this. And then we're going to have this person do this and this. And it's like, okay, now we got to go find out who's going to be the actual person executing. Who am I going to trust? Who's going to be a leader? Who's going to be able to bring in more people, align them on the vision, and execute? And that is like one of the hardest things to do. I've tapped networks. And particularly here in Austin, you know, for the one we had, you know, was the Uber, And these are all ex-Muber people who worked hard at Uber, where, you know, senior have gone on in their own things. But they know all these leaders. I know this guy.

He's a badass. And this person, this person. I had, like, through talking to one person, Nikale, he introduced me to, like, seven to ten people who may get the vision and are qualified to run it. Far more qualified than I am, right? Like, generally, you know, I think it was thinking grow rich. that said you'd rather invest in the efforts of have 1% of the efforts of 100 people than 100% of the efforts of one person even if that person is yourself. Now there's probably an education exception, right? But, you know, I took that to heart.

It's like, oh, I'd rather have brilliant people working for me than me trying to learn everything and be a fact tunnel. Plus, I just can't. Like the odds of me being the best guy for the job are extremely slim, right? or girl. And so going out, tapping your networks, interviewing, finding people of integrity, and then, you know, using your network for the skills test, and then just trust. You know, I don't know. I'm always guessing a little bit, but it's an educated guess, and then we're just going to find out. Yeah. What about when you do it for companies that you, for types of companies you haven't run before? Like, you've put operators in tech companies

that I've seen, SaaS companies obviously inside of your actual commodities funds. Is there a common thread or is there a different type of human you're looking for dependent on industry? Usually it's a self-motivated fire and forget missile. Like I'm always trying to find fire and forget missiles. Like I just want to, that's where I want to go. I want to hit that target. Shoot it up in the air and they boom, and they hit the target. I don't have to tell them, I tell them what I want, not how to do it.

Right. And so having had a hedge fund and having, you know, Eric, my CTO was like, this guy self-taught them machine learning and OCR and built a whole model for tracking LNG ships in this display. We used it. And it was like, okay, this is the type of person I want. And so in your universe of people that you run into, you're going to find them, right? You're going to find them. Right? You're going to see them. And my goal is like to convince them to be on my vision and pay them and just don't go. Right. Like we and you know, so that going back to friends, like when I find a good person, interesting, integrity, fun, open, vulnerable, I don't let go. You have to scrape me off. I'm like, hey, come on, let's hang out. Let's go here. Let's go on a trip. Like, come whatever. Let's talk. Like I try and like, bring them into the. the group, right? And so the same thing when you're running a company, you'll find that star, right? That's like, and you just know. You just know, just know, just like, wait, how'd you do this? Why did that happen? Oh, you learn this and you learn this thing to do. And you're like, this is the person. Do not let them go. Find places for them to be in charge. Yeah. Right. And these people, when you go on externally, their resume kind of tells you that, and you kind of see you that, what type of person they are. So, but you, you bump into them, both as friends and as, as, as, as, as, like,

co-workers or workers. Yeah, my dad had a great saying that I paraphrase kind of the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, kind of the opposite of what we say in finance, right? But it is true for humans. Usually what they've done in the past is some iteration of what they'll do in the future, not always.

And so you look at their past, and then I think you can kind of predict the future in a lot of ways. What about maybe last thing here? You are super-giving. And, like, I think last time I was at your house, You guys weren't even here. Somebody else was throwing a birthday party for like three.

Yeah, it might have been Luke's party. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of a bunch of PayPal guys. But it was, and so I texted you, I'm like, oh, I just realized this party's at your house. Where are you? I want to say hi. You're like, oh, yeah, we're in Aspen. Have a great time.

Yeah. Like, is that something you've always been, just upfront and giving? Yeah, I'm pretty, I mean, we're pretty generous. And I think the best saying I had a friend who, no, I have a friend. His name is Greg. And he crystallized it with this story. He took his brother, he's done very well. He took his brother skiing, a ski trip, and they had a hotel rooms, and he wanted to pay the hotel rooms.

And his brother was like, no, no, no, I can't let you pay. He's like, let me pay. He's like, no, no, no, Greg, I can't let you pay. He goes, if I own this house, if I own this house and I invited you to stay, okay, would you be okay? And he goes, yeah, you wouldn't pay me any money. Yeah, I would be okay. He goes, if you owned it, yes, I would be happy. He says, then save me the $3 million from buying it and let me pay your bill for the hotel.

And it's saying is, we buy stuff to give it away. And it's true. Like, I didn't buy this boat so I could be on this boat by myself. I bought this boat to share memories with my friends. I didn't buy this property to just sit out here like Little Lord Farrell or in the castle. It's a memory maker for me and my friends and people that I meet. And it's an adult playground where people exchange ideas and enjoy their ride here on earth. And so, you know, I try and find those people and invite them.

And then I'm like, if I'm not here and it's not a penny, yes. I'm like, whatever. Have fun, dude. That's why I bought it. You buy stuff to give it away. Great. All right, that's a wrap.