The Pomp Podcast - #1112 Codie Sanchez On How To Get Rich During A Recession

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Codie Sanchez is an entrepreneur, investor, & founder of "Contrarian Thinking". In this conversation, Codie gives us all of the alternative ways you can earn your way to millions of dollars. Some of these strategies involve buying "boring businesses", which can bring in large amounts of yearly cashflow. We also discuss how young people can win during this recession, various business ideas, how to make money if you have no money, and tips on how to get paid more at your job. ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now, let's kick this thing off. Cody Sanchez is an entrepreneur, investor, and the founder of Contrarian Thinking. In this conversation, we talk about a lot, including how you can make money during a recession, why she is so obsessed with boring businesses, and then we go through tactical advice around specific businesses, evaluating ideas, how to allocate capital, and what you at home can do immediately to get started. I really enjoyed this conversation with Cody and hope you guys enjoy it as well. After listening to the episode, jump on Twitter, let us know what you liked,

what you didn't like, what you agree with, and what you disagree with. I really appreciate the feedback and it helps us create better episodes in the future. All right, let's get in this episode with Cody. Hope you all like this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm here with Cody. The world's going to shit. The entire economy is

collapsing. How do we make money? I like it. I think that is the question everyone's asking themselves as they're watching stock prices fall, real estate's now cooling off, crypto has essentially imploded. Just kidding. And, you know, got to give a shout out to the faithful. People are really worried. And there's a couple different reactions to people say, hey, I don't want to invest at all. I'm just going to save my money and like, just wait till everything recovers. But then there's other people, they see blood in the streets, and they're ready to go. What do you think is kind of the play here? How do people make money during a downturn? Yeah, I think you're crazy to do nothing. So if I'm your audience, I'm freeing up some cash, because I don't think we're

at the blood in the streets level yet, actually at all. I think we're just starting little drips. And so in my opinion, the best way to do it, and people have maybe heard me say this before, is you want cash flowing businesses with relatively low CapEx theoretically, or an ability to get debt or somebody else's capital in order to plow a bunch of money into things that you can raise prices if there's inflation and where people buy them no matter what. For instance, do you know what I was doing yesterday? Actually, this isn't in my notes. We were in Tampa, Florida at a crime scene company, this crime scene cleanup company. Fascinating. Actually, they do $12 million in revenue a year. She's a former cop. Their margins are 60%. And what happens is if you decide

Polina's not going to make it right. And, and there's a crime scene at your house, right? Then sadly you think, oh, well, you know, the cops come in, they take the body and they clean it up. Wrong. There's no such thing as a government crime scene cleanup. In fact, you have to pay a private enterprise to come and clean up whatever mess is there. So imagine there are meth labs, fentanyl labs, hoarders, all of that costs money. And so if there's a meth lab cleanup, it's anywhere from $12,000 to $50,000. This lady comes in, cleans up the meth lab and makes 60% profit margin. Do you have to have special training to clean up the- No. And also not certifications. Isn't that wild? Interesting. So really it's like no different than a moving

company, right? To some degree, but it's specific for, uh, cleaning up crime scenes. Yeah. Like California, you could imagine would probably be stricter than Florida, for instance, where you probably just throw it over your back. Um, but, uh, moral of the story is I think these type of boring businesses, that's recession resistant, right? Like, unfortunately we all still die. We all still have crimes. And so what I would do is I would be looking for, where is there a business where there's something boring, dirty, or sweaty that other people don't want to do theoretically or don't think about doing that have pretty high margins. So you make a pretty good amount of cash on it and you can give them capital in a period where who's going to go out

and fund a crime scene cleanup. Like you put that on Twitter, it's not going to get a bunch of VC capital. That's where I would be putting my money to work. What are some other ideas that you've seen where you're just like, okay, crime scene cleanup is not something most people have ever heard of before. Are there other ones that you're like, this is incredible how these businesses to survive? Oh, 100%. Well, there's so many. I mean, we filmed 30-ish videos thus far on YouTube all about these, what I call boring businesses. We have 130 boring business lists on our website that talks about every type of business that I think would be interesting to own. One of the other ones I really like today that I'm looking at in a big way is ice vending businesses. I've

seen you talk about this. I think we talked about it one time before, like why is ice vending so good? Well, one of the reasons why I think it's interesting that I hadn't thought of before is every time you get into a deal, I think you should always think about how am I going to get out of a deal? Because you might not want to run an ice vending business forever, right? And so with ice vending,

the cool thing about this business, it has my rule of three, which is basically a reoccurring revenue business that you can bundle up consistently that has good margins. And so with ice vending machines, you can have subscriptions for these types of businesses. You have a high repeat customer rates

because they're kind of doing the same activities that they need ice vending for. And then it's also a low-people, high-margin business. And so I like this one because say you want to go save the world. Well, why don't you start in a tough neighborhood located outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the water filtration is actually pretty bad. And so people don't want to use ice out of their refrigerators ever. They want to go to an ice vending machine and use the ice out of the ice vending machine constantly because you have better filtration systems. And so this one I think could solve problems and you could do it in a lot of communities where it's a cheap product relatively, but there's a huge need for it.

And then PE companies like these models because they can bundle them up and sell them off. It feels like PE firms, they used to go do really, really big deals. Then there's kind of the middle market was for independents and they thought there was some arbitrage there. Are the PE firms now getting either desperate or see opportunity and going kind of earlier and earlier as we're seeing venture capital funds and even the crossover hedge funds in the venture world go earlier and earlier? Like, will we see PE funds go and buy a business now with like a million dollars in revenue and try to scale it? I don't think traditional PE firms will do that at a million bucks. But I think there's a bunch of people like you and I that, you know, what's the difference between a private equity firm and Warren Buffett theoretically? Private equity just means you take somebody's money that is private and you use it to buy

businesses, typically outright or a large percentage of them, and then LBOs, leveraged buyouts, you use some debt or something else to apply to the business. So I think private equity has really expanded. It used to just be KKR and Carlisle and these guys. Now it could be you or me, right? So now there are micro PE guys like me that would go in and say, ah, a million dollar revenue business. I think we could do a bolt-on and invest in another company on top of this, and this could be a nice little $5 million business that we eventually sell off to somebody else.

What I do think, though, for these big PE firms is they're realizing increasingly that some of these boring enterprises that they have historically bought at $10 to $20 million in valuations, they want to start tracking earlier because it's so much more competitive to get to the deal when it's at 10 mil. So you could start talking to a PE firm like one of the ones we're talking to for selling our car washes when you only have five or six of them and they're like, hey, the second you have 10 or 12, call me. I want to be your first call. And then they'll buy them for two to three times what I bought them for because they're worth more as a sum that's greater than its parts. And when they buy it, they're buying it to you because they think they can then go bolt on from 10 to 12 to 20, 30, 40, 50, and then they'll turn it on and they'll sell it to kind of the next person in the hierarchy of PE that's looking for 50 or more car washes. And you kind of just continue. And every three to five years, these companies get kind of transitioned between the

owners. Yeah, that's exactly right. Or, you know, a lot of times they'll look at these small businesses and say, oh my gosh, you guys don't have reoccurring subscriptions. You're using all of these people on the back end. We don't need any of them when we add them to our, you know, model. So these guys, this isn't rocket science, but the models are relatively sophisticated where they're like, all right, right now you have 20% costs that we're not going to have. So we can pay you a little bit more for it. And yours are worth only 5X when there's so many of them, because that's a job, not a business. But when you add it to our thing, they're actually worth 6X because now that makes our thing a business and not a job from a revenue standpoint. So yeah, that's

exactly right. And the game isn't always bigger. The game could just be cashflow or the fact that PE funds and you know, all this, but like maybe people listening don't have seven to 10 year investment cycles. So at a certain point, I give you my money as a PE firm, I want that cash back. And so after seven or 10 years, you're like, okay, we've three X'd our money. Now it's time to sell this X for a premium and we close the fund. And so naturally you have velocity of businesses, which is not necessarily a bad thing. So most of the boring businesses that we've talked about in the past are all, I'll call it in the analog world, in the real world, right? Not on the internet with the imaginary kind of audience or activity, but there are companies. We've seen

Constellation Software. We've seen many others, Vista and others that buy internet companies or buy software-based companies. Are there companies that sit at the intersection of boring businesses and software that you find interesting or is it all in the analog world? I love this question. Yeah, we started a fund basically with this entire method. It happened after actually we were talking with some of the bigger partners at Vista who have since left and gone and done other things because the founder of Vista is actually the wealthiest black dude in the country. He's absolutely crushed it. And their model was essentially you just take kind of underperforming SaaS companies, right, and turn them around and sell them or make them

bigger. And I thought, gosh, that's really interesting. I always think of SaaS companies like Slack or YouTube, like they're never going to sell the whole business to you for you to turn around and make better. But there's a bunch of these zombie SaaS companies or these, you know, underperforming tech companies that you could take and turn around. So the two types of companies I think are interesting in the tech world right now are one, that. I actually bought, we bought one tiny little, um, SAS company that essentially does nonstop 24 seven, uh, chat engagement with small business owners, clients. So like, imagine like you want to go get your lock changed. Like you're locked out of your house. You need somebody to respond to you immediately. Most locksmiths do

not have that capacity. Our software allows them to do that. And there's a real human that's connected with sort of the AI and that allows them to outsource to a bunch of locksmiths. And the first one to respond, you know, gets the engagement. Side note real quick. This is a crazy detail about the city of Miami. Uh, anyone who lives in the high rise buildings, uh, in most of the situations, if you get locked out of your apartment, uh, you cannot go to the management office and like get a key. You have to call a locksmith. So there's like multiple buildings. I know this is true. And, uh, it's happened to me one time and, uh, call locksmith. He was there in like 20 minutes. He literally came not with like your normal, like lock picking tools. He literally

came with what looked almost like a, uh, a hanger, like a, like a, uh, um, kind of a men, a malleable hanger. Uh, but it was a, it was specially built. He put it underneath the door. He flipped it up and he yanked on it. And all he did was on the inside, he just grabbed the door handle and he pulled it and the door opened. And then he turned to me, he goes, that'd be 150 bucks. And I was like, ha ha, how much is it? And he was like, no, it's $150. And I was like, what? And he was like, yeah, he's like, normally if we have to pick the lock, it's like 250 or 200 or whatever the number was. Uh, but if we just use this tool, then it's only like 150. And I was like, you spent less than three minutes in front of the door. And it just reminded me, it's like, you don't get paid for

the time he's spending now. You get paid for the fact that he has the knowledge to build the tool to show up, to like do the whole thing. And I was like, man, I bet you locksmiths are amazing business. Oh, amazing. Well, it's like that Paulo Picasso story where like the lady comes up to ask him for a painting. And he takes out a napkin and he draws like a scribble on it and hands it to her and says, that'll be $10,000. And she's like, what are you talking about? Took you 20 seconds. And he's like, no, no, that took me 10 years. But like this last part took me 20 seconds. And so I think you're right. A lot of these service businesses have all this inherent knowledge. And a lot of them actually don't know how to price it that well. Interesting. It's one of my favorite parts

about buying these companies. Think about them. Every single small business is Costco with their hot dogs, right? Like they haven't changed the price in 472 years and they haven't even considered it because they're doing okay. They're like happy. They're mowing along. But for you to get your lock changed in a high rise in Miami, you'd probably pay 300 bucks because are you going to sleep outside? Like, no, you're not. You're going to pay whatever the guy tells you. And it's a last minute need. And so, so my, my point with this conversation is these small businesses, this one that we bought, for instance, I bought it for $60,000. So not a big investment, um, relatively. And this business was doing about 40 K in profit a year, but no marketing atrocious website.

And we basically took this company, put a better, better website on it, gave it a few different lines of revenue. And now the company will do a couple of hundred K in revenue. And that's like that Vista little model, take something sort of zombie, make it slightly better in tech. How did you find this company? I got this from, the best ways I get deals, probably the same for you. Why do I do the internet stuff? Because people send me interesting stuff. So this one, this one guy forever ago reached out to me on Twitter DMs.

I became friends with him. He runs a business. He was like, I found this software that I use for my business. It's amazing. This guy's older. He's ready to retire. I think we could buy it. I'll run it for you.

I'm like, perfect. How much money? Let's draft up the docs. And now we've done two deals with this guy. His name's John. Shout out, John. And when you do that deal, you go in and you look at the business. How do you evaluate whether it's a good business or not?

Like one is like, why do you trust John to run the business? And then two, like, how do you know that? Okay. Paying 60 is a good price, but paying a hundred might not be, but, uh, you know, 75 would be, you know, iffy. Yeah. Well, for that small of a deal. So a couple of different things.

One, your first deal should never bankrupt you, right? So if you're listening to this and 60 K is a lot of money, maybe your first deal is 6K because you're going to make your, some mistakes for the first one. you and I are probably the same in that we've had a lot of reps at this. And so it's like, how do you hit a ball with a bat? You're like, well, you like put it back here and then you kind of turn and then you follow through or whatever. And so it's the same with doing deals. I think my first deal, I did everything wrong. You know, I overpaid for the first deal. You know, I ran it myself. It was a job, not a business. But now I look at basically five key things. One is,

will it bankrupt me? Two is, does it have enough cashflow for me to be meaningful? So I don't want to do a deal. If it's going to make me 2K a year, it's probably not worth it. You figure out your own metric. Three is this business. Am I paying a multiple on profits? And it's anywhere from two to five X. That's just what I pay for small businesses. So that's really easy and means that you don't have to screen out a bunch of extra stuff because I know for a small business, if I can get my money back in two years, it's a pretty low risk. And then the next one is like, is it really simple? Do I understand the business? Are they saying the word proprietary that I'm running. You know, anything, because I don't, I'm not intelligent enough to run a biotech

company with proprietary XYZ that does all of this. I want like, I call it sows, which is simple, old, weak and stale businesses. I want them to be super simple to understand around for a while so that I know they're going to continue to stay around. Weak competition, nobody else is playing and stale in that like this website sucked. There was no marketing. So I don't have to be the best dealmaker because the business has so much upside optimization. So that's how you know. When you look at the businesses, usually you're negotiating a purchase price with someone who has an emotional attachment to the business as well. How do you negotiate in a way that doesn't offend them, doesn't feel like you're calling their child ugly, but at the same time, you can

negotiate well enough to get a price that makes sense for you? Yeah, that's a good point. I usually don't make it about their business. I say something like this. Hey, Pomp, you know, your business is really interesting. I'd love to talk to you about it. I buy businesses at two to five X profits, which is what the industry multiple is for a business like yours. I'm interested in discussing a little bit further. Here's sort of a link explaining what current multiples are. And I send them to a link to this research report from BizBuySell, which is the largest aggregator of small business data. And then I say something like, if it might be interesting to you to talk about selling at the right price and terms, I'd love to have a

discussion. But I've already set the floor and the ceiling, really, like here's kind of where I go. And I've established this isn't me. This is the market. So and I haven't said your business is only worth $200,000, even though you slaved your life for it. I've said, hey, this is what business is, our works. So you remove the emotional attachment with that is the plan, at least. I invested in Microacquire. I think it's similar to BizBuy, what is it called? BizBuySell. BizBuySell. Microacquire, I know.

And I haven't bought a business off of there. When you go on and you look, are there certain things that are red flags to you? Yeah, there's really easy ones. There'll be a ton of them on these sites, not Microacquire. Microacquire does a pretty good job of scrubbing the businesses. And they're all online businesses, not these like brick and mortar ones that I sometimes buy. But you don't want any business that's a franchise or startups. Those websites are littered with people that are like, oh, you can start this. It's not a business. It has to be profitable. It has to be cash flowing. Second, for these businesses, you want to make sure that there's real profits in the business.

And so a lot of times they'll say things like, you know, $10,000 in profits, you know, you can run with this local vending machine route, but then they won't put in the seller's discretionary earnings, aka what you make to run this. So in that instance, you don't want to buy a business where you're getting paid 10K a year to run it, probably. So that's the second thing. And then the third is just lots of people are going to tell you like, by the way, my tax returns don't exactly match my P&Ls, right? And you just have to say, hey, man, I buy on tax returns for my first deal. I can't fuck around on like trying to figure out if your P&Ls are right or not. Once you get a little bit more sophisticated, you could dig in. You could do things like coin counts on laundromats or car washes.

But for your first deal, you're like, I buy based on a profit multiple of the tax returns. So those are the three biggest items. Have you ever seen tax returns that are better than the P&L? No. It's funny how that happens. No, I'm willing to say if you're going to cheat Uncle Sam, like, all right, you got me. But that's probably it. When you think of the types of businesses, many of the businesses that you've mentioned, they don't have a lot of people.

And I think this is really fascinating. We've got a bunch of mutual friends that I think a lot of people are like, hey, technology, the Internet, software, but also traditional businesses. People are figuring out how to do more with less people. what have you seen there that's like super interesting yeah well I love high margin low people businesses I think there's like two caveats man right I mean the first thing you know this too people like I'd like to make 200k in passive income by sitting around and I have no cash like how should we do it and it's like nah dude get a job yeah get a job baby like that's I don't know drive from Walmart you get 100k yeah it's like the second you figure that out call me man

because I'd love to know but uh so like not that that's always by the way that's never somebody with tons of experience says that it's always the 18 to 22 year old kid who watched TikTok. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. So like, so that's not the case, but there are a ton of businesses that I like to call, I think of them like bonds. You know how you buy equity because you think equity is going to go up and it's going to make you a bunch of money. There's a lot of businesses that are bonds. Like a, I don't know, a laundromat's a good example. Like a laundromat is never going to be worth $50 million, right? Like I don't care what to do with it. Paint it, you know, put glow sticks on it, not going to be worth $50 million. And so

that type of business is relatively passive because you don't have to have an operator all the time. You're not going to try to grow the business exponentially. You use the labor of the equipment as opposed to your own labor. And it has a model that's kind of done it continuously. And so there are a bunch of businesses like this, like car washes, laundromats, ice vending machines anything that's machine heavy can often be relatively passive but don't get me wrong like you're gonna at some point have somebody call and say like you know my xyz inappropriate sex object got caught in your laundromat you know and then you're gonna have to fish it out so there's always gonna be these like weird things where you actually have to and the machines break right so

there's always like the the whole uh you have to service the actual things doing the work um but also i do think it's interesting uh that you can meld some of these businesses together or mold them together or whatever um and so uh gas stations are uh very interesting to me is it a gas station or is a convenience store and like it kind of depends sometimes depending on how many pumps do they have how much foot traffic do they get you know are they actually selling more food or gas like all this stuff but then inside of the convenience store uh i've seen some like pretty crazy, innovative things. There's obviously, Hey, we'll rent you, you know, a two by two space on the floor and you can put your ATM or your, uh, crypto machine or whatever. But then you see like,

well, what about the lottery devices that are in there? And that's just renting space, uh, almost kind of like we worked it, but for convenience stores where they take one space, cut it up and rent it out. But then you start to see them doing even more things. So you go into a convenience store and they realize where they are as a really special location. And so, uh, I recently went into a convenience store and they had all kinds of crazy merch. And I was like, what is going on here? And I realized that they were right at the intersection of two state lines or a state line between two states. And there was tons of tourist traffic that went back and forth. And it was like last second before you leave the state, if you happen to stop here and you want to get that

gift, buy it here at the gas station. Oh, I like that. And so I asked the person, I said, Hey, you know, how much of that do you sell? And they were like, that's, we sell more of that than anything in the store. And I was like, wow, that makes so much sense. And it reminded me, what do they do at airports? If you go to Miami airport, all the stores, every single piece of clothing in that store, uh, is Miami something. Why? Because people who are landing or people who are leaving, let me get my Miami, you know, uh, uh, kind of, um, merchandise. And so it does make you think a lot about like, if you ran like a convenience store, like what are all the things you could do within that square footage that could make more money? And then if you ask yourself,

like how many of those people actually are doing that stuff? My guess is probably very few of them. because they're family businesses. They've been around for a while, whatever. And so it begs the question, like if a bunch of young people come in and buy these assets, like are we going to see like a revitalization and kind of all new business models with some of these businesses and these properties?

A hundred percent. I have two thoughts. So first of all, the gas station, yes. The fascinating part about gas stations are they make no money on gas. The margins on gas, I can't remember. It's like three cents a gallon. It's ridiculous how little money they make on gas.

The play is just to get you into their ecosystem. And then they've got the car wash over there and then they've got the air pump over there and they charge a 50 cents for air. Like that's probably a pretty good business. So like all those things with car washes are interesting. I mean, with gas stations are interesting. I don't like owning gas stations because talk about inventory. Like, could you even imagine just going into those things stresses me out with the amount of stuff that they've got in there. Now it could probably all survive a nuclear apocalypse because no fresh food, but for the most part, like that's not a great

business in my mind for a newbie. Um, the interesting part about gas stations in general, though, I think, are that they do what you talked about really well, which is just revenue stream adding for your business. So I'm really big on, okay, when you buy a business, you buy it for the profits. That's it. I don't want to hear your story about you could do X and Y and Z, and I'm going to pay for the X and Y and Z that you haven't done. Nope. I buy the business for what you've done. But then in the back of my head, not talking to the seller, I'm like, ooh, okay, well, what if we added the car wash here? Well, what if we added the air freshener distribution box over here? Well, what if we put ads on top of X, Y, and Z so we get that reoccurring digital revenue?

All of those things, I think, are just like you think about, let me add a little Apple stock, let me add a little Amazon stock, and I want to have a diversified portfolio. You want your business to have that too, especially for these small businesses. So 100%. But to your point on, you know, kids taking over old school businesses, you know, you guys, your audience probably is not going to remember this. Do you remember that movie, You've Got Mail? Yeah.

So when you got mail. You've got mail. Yeah, exactly. You nailed it. So they have this woman who owned a little bookstore. And then like evil tongue of Hanks, Barnes & Noble comes in and like kills her bookstore. And I remember watching that business. And now I think about what I do today.

And I'm like, you know, I love making money. Most of what I do is because I think the game of money is fun. But also, like, fuck Starbucks. Like, wouldn't it be nice if on every street corner there wasn't a Walmart, a Starbucks, a CVS? Like, I go through all these little towns all around the world. Last week, we were in Chickalote, Ohio. I'm like, a lot of them starting to look the same. I'm not into that.

And so wouldn't it be better if that little bookstore, if instead of her trying to like fight the man with like her limited skill set as somebody who had run this business for 10, 20 years, she brought in a young gun. And guess what that young gun would have done probably? Maybe they would have figured out Amazon first. They would have done an actual online bookstore component. Maybe they would have done subscriptions instead. Maybe they would have added a coffee shop or a bar.

And so instead of these businesses having to go under because they can't compete or the owners are tired, they get new revitalized energy. And so that's why I'm a really big component for like young people listening. Okay, fine. Yeah, go work at Slack for a while, get real skills. Go work at a big company for a while, get real skills. But after a minute, as opposed to building somebody else's house or somebody else's castle, why don't you build your own? And hey, by the way, wouldn't it be better if you did it in like a community where you could touch something and you could create something every day? I think that'd be pretty cool.

And we'd probably like our communities and our country a little bit better if we had less Walmarts and more corner stores. I have some ideas of businesses I'd love to run through with you. Let's do it. Coffee shops. I've always thought somebody should create

a membership-based coffee shop that was specifically structured and designed for business meetings. Oh, I like that. Yeah, totally. How many times have you gone to a coffee shop and you're like, I don't want this weirdo listening to my conversation

or I was talking about X and now Sally over here thinks that she has an opinion on whatever. And I had literally had one time a, uh, uh, experience where I was talking about, uh, something, some tech company or whatever. And there was a gentleman, sweetest guy in the world. I frankly think he was lonely. And next thing I know, I'm like, oh, I'm having a meeting with two people, not with one.

Cause he just kept talking and like, and interjecting and all this stuff. And I was like, I would love to just be able to meet someone that isn't in an office or isn't in my home and be able to have coffee, meet quickly and leave and do it with some degree of privacy. It doesn't mean it's got to be some soundproof room or whatever, but like you can imagine you go in and there's like little booths and it's just optimized for people are going to come here, do business meetings and leave. Why would you not pay a couple hundred dollars per month to get coffee unlimited and be able to meet in peace? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, the cool thing

about a business like that is how I like to play this game. My husband and I do it all the time. It's like, all right, let's come up with an idea like that now. And then we do like the Xanax matrix, which I didn't come up with, but like, but basically it's, you know, four boxes and each box, it's like, why should you do it? Why shouldn't you do it? What are the costs? What are the benefits? And I like to take that box and then overlay it with how could we make this work and how could we make this awesome? And so the box for that might be like, all right, we want to have a coffee business meeting place. So like Soho house, but not awful service and totally overpriced and a bunch of hipster douchebags. And also, you know, like coffee

that tastes good and is a little hipster, but the thing's good for recording podcasts. How would we make it work? You got a subscription model. Maybe you also have an e-commerce component. Maybe you get some sponsors because, you know, the sponsors are going to want to be in front of these business owners. So you get like Slack to give you free X, Y, Z. You get like X person to give you X. So then you start to like kind of go down the list. How else could we make this business a huge F yes instead of a maybe? And I don't think enough business owners do that. And so if you're a young gun coming into some of these businesses, you're like, I want to own a car wash. Okay, cool. How could you own a car wash and make it amazing? And not

amazing like, I think this is a cool really car wash to go to, but amazingly profitable. And so in that instance, for me, for a car wash, I'd be like, I want to add a vending machine. I want to add one of those walls like in Austin where it's like, I love tacos so much and everybody lines up and they take pictures at it. And then right by that, I might have a vending machine. And because I know a bunch of young people are going to come around, that vending machine might have stuff that they want to buy immediately. And then maybe I'd have like automated air freshener dispensers. And so you layer on all of this stuff and that's how you turn these boring businesses into something cool. This episode is brought to you by Arculus. Arculus is the next generation

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The other thing that I think it would be an amazing business is to reimagine, uh, remember when you were a kid and your parents would like take you to like a professional photographer on like some like stupid milestone. Yeah. I have four brothers. So you can imagine the five of us and they were like trying to put us like, okay, you sit here, you lay on the ground here, whatever. Where are these?

And we would just beat the shit out of each other. And like, somebody's crying. Somebody's like this. My mom's like, just take the picture. And the photographer's just literally snapping away. Like, I hope I got one. um imagine today with instagram and all this stuff like actually the photographer component of it is not nearly as important as like the sets and like all the stuff and we saw um i think it's

the ice cream museum or whatever like people have tried this at uh they've tried like a really big scale but like how many people between the ages of like i don't know 25 and 40 who have young kids would love to take them somewhere and have like 40 or 50 different backgrounds and kind of set designs that they would love to just take photos on their phone and if they can just take photos on their phone. Now, all of a sudden you don't have to pay the photographer. You don't have to do any of the equipment. You don't have to like do all the things that they used to do after the photo was taken. It's just literally like, Hey, I just hired the people paying me to now be the photographer. And they brought their own kids, thankfully. And so like have at it. And all

you're doing is you're paying rent and then the cost to set it up. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Maybe you had pets too. Cause you know, people are psychopaths with their pets. So I have a little pet component to it. I'm into it actually are, I think, you know, I'm too, but Alex Formosi has a business that they invested in that's like, it's a photography, it's a photography studio. And he said they do millions of dollars a year. It's a franchise photography studio. And I think there is a mixture of in-person and, you know, self-selected, whatever. I mean, even I'm here with my videographer and photographer and like half the time I'm like, yeah, God, I really need to go on and take these headshots and like run in for X, Y, Z. But there's no like, where are you

running in? And so, yeah, I'm on board. I think it's a good idea. The other component of this uh, around pets. Wildest that of 2022, I heard there are 78 million dogs in America and there's like 73 million children under the age of 18. So there are more dogs than there are children under the age of 18 in the United States. Well, you have a kid. Are you really surprised now? I feel like you could have like a few more dogs, but like throw a few kids and that's a commitment, man. It's, but like, think about that. Like the dog market is bigger than the kids market. Yeah, I agree. Well, and I mean, the thing about dogs is, at least as far as I'm aware, you can't like throw your dog or your kid in the trunk and like leave them there for a while and they're still excited to see you. You know, I think there's like some other parameters. But actually, we have this mutual friend, Ramon. We focused on his company, Alpha Pet, in one of our YouTube videos. Amazing. He bought the, I'm going to mess up the numbers, sorry Ramon, but let's say he bought the business for like 10 or 50k or he bought another business and then added this one. went on to it, but he bought the business for nothing. And now they're doing tens of millions

of dollars in revenue. And his little hack that I loved was don't market to dogs, make specific Facebook groups for like wiener dogs. And then for, I don't know, kava poos and whatever, and make branded food and branded treats and branded toys and whatever that are probably a lot of the same thing, but for each type of dog, because people are so crazy about breeds of dogs that That's like one of the biggest revenue drivers for his business. Jumpstart third grade. The old CD-ROMs that you could go buy at like the learning center or whatever. Remember they used to, for all you young kids, they literally used to sell CD-ROMs with software

on them that you would use. And so there was Jumpstart software. And if I remember the details correctly, they had like elementary school software and it was going okay. But the big breakthrough was they made it for third grade and all the parents in second grade bought it because they're like, my kid's not going to pass third grade unless they have the third grade software. And so then they went to second grade and first grade and kindergarten and then fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade. And what they actually did was they drastically

increased the number of SKUs that they were able to sell and they increased the throughput of each one of those individual SKUs and the business exploded. And so it's the specialization and the specific targeting ended up actually making the whole business. There's so many riches and niches. I know people all the time I like to think like, don't tell me what to do. I don't like to get told what to do. I want to be free. I want to do whatever I want. And then the second in a business, I'm like, no, no, no. Actually, these are your bumper lanes and stay in it. You actually make so much more money and are so much happier. I mean, we have an education business that talks about buying businesses now. And what

we found is we have a buying business course and that does well, but we also have a course on laundromats specifically, and we have one on online businesses and we have one on car washes. And the difference is problem aware versus solution aware. And so for problem aware people, like, hey, I want to make more money because I don't want to work at this job forever, but I don't have an idea and I don't want to do a startup. I'd like to buy a business because, you know, I'm interested in that. Maybe that person is just problem aware. They don't really want to buy a car wash. They don't want to buy a laundromat. So their intention to buy is so much lower than somebody who's like, I want to buy a car wash. So this niche, which is so much

smaller, sell so much more because they're problem aware. These guys in solution aware state, basically, we just have to give them more ways to figure out what they want to do. And they won't buy the, you know, generalized courses as much. And we see this, you know, now I have a lot of businesses. And so across businesses, once I realized this, I'm like, oh my gosh, where are we selling to people that are not actually problem aware? They're just a solution aware? Where are we getting a lot of attention, but they don't have the intention to actually execute? And then simultaneously, where do we have businesses where people are thinking about ideas, but not actually moving forward towards execution and we need to move

out of those? You have been creating a ton of content on the internet and it's going very well. I know that you've talked with Knight Media, who manages Mr. Beast, and it sounds like you agree and disagree with some of the decisions that they've made in the past. So I'd love to understand how do you think about the content you're creating? Why are you doing it? And then like why are you independent versus signing with someone and do you consider signing with someone or do you want to stay independent yeah um first of all love the guys at night media so no shame and like they're like giant and all over the internet and have way more they're rich people can critique their strategy yeah plus i've become buds with them one lives down the street for me so

shout out ben i'll give you a hard time um so one of the things i think is really cool that the future is going to we've already seen it is that um everybody's going to be a content business in some way and all my companies that don't get this i'm trying to get them to see it whether a pressure washer company or a roofing company, like make content, even if it's just to get reviews. And Night Media, I think, is seeing this in that they're able to sell something like Mr. Beast's chocolate bar to his audience and make millions and millions of dollars. What I think's interesting, though, is I really am particular about the type of businesses that I want to engage in if I'm going to create something new. Now, they sold Mr. Beast's audience chocolate

bars because who watches Mr. Beast? 10 to 15 year olds. That's his target audience. I had no idea they were that young, but that's why his thumbnails are really bright. That's why it's very like action oriented, not stop. Think about how Mr. Beast dresses, right? It's kind of childlike in a way, even though he's not a child, he's very smart. So they sold them chocolate bars, which is okay. But the problem is you have a business, which one is a business where the product after certain period dies, right? It becomes unable to be eaten anymore. Two, you don't have a reoccurring revenue model in that business whatsoever. Three, it's a highly competitive marketplace for that business. Four, how many kids these days do you see buying chocolate bars and eating them part

of their normal life? Like people don't really buy and eat chocolate bars. You might buy and eat like individual bits of candy. And so in my mind, what's going to happen in the future is if they were smart, they would have said, all right, we're going to buy, we're going to, we're going to buy rights to a video game. And we're going to have a business that is a reoccurring subscription model because there will be new iterations to your point on the third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade CD-ROM. We're going to have a business that has reoccurring purchase points that we build once and get to sell continuously. You don't have to keep building the video game to do it. And simultaneously, where we get to be through somebody's life cycle with them. So you can have

video game one, and then as they get older, they can kind of upgrade to varying things. Plus you can have add-on purchases. So you could have a Mr. Beast video game consult. You could have a Mr. Beast beanbag. And all of these things could be third-party produced, just like a lot of the Kardashians' stuff is. And so it's white-labeled product, but it is for that target audience and allows you to build those additional revenue streams around them. So I think in the future, people are going to get so much smarter about the products that they build, and you will no longer see like a Mr. Beast burger or a Mr. Beast chocolate bar is a really hard business to create.

So I would pick something that you have a lot more opportunity to build once and sell continuously. Do you think right now they're in a startup studio mode? Yeah. Are they going to become a private equity firm? They're going to start buying these businesses? Yeah. I mean, I talked to their head of private equity.

They just launched a hundred million dollar fund with TPG Capital, the woman who's running it. Her name's Alex. She's super smart. And I think that's exactly what they're doing. They're going out and they're buying companies and then going to pair them up with big influencers, which I actually think is really, really smart if you do the right deals. And, you know, and the guys that run it, Ezra and Ben, are super intelligent. Like their backgrounds are impressive.

I think they'll get more into software. Like I've been telling them, listen, you know, and I think they'll get into business influencers too, which is what I'm talking to them about. But you have Mr. Beast, giant audience, you know, Cody, little tiny audience. But my audience, the average viewer or follower of me, you know, 60% of our audience is accredited, right? So they have some cash to throw around. They have super high intention. You know, my audience size spends a lot of money either with me or in investing. And so if I'm looking at creators just like I'm looking at businesses, I'm looking for, okay, who has the highest ROI on each individual purchase in order for me to want to partner with them?

because maybe one, you know, user for me could be worth $100,000 in lifetime value. And so all of this to say, you know, this world that we're living in today, it started with a bunch of influencers, you know, selling gummy bears and like skinny teas, you know, for abs that they got in the gym, right? And where it's going to end up is private equity firms and software companies built on the back of creators. Now, there's going to be a lot of stuff that goes wrong in the middle, but that's my plan. Kim Kardashian, is this real or is this all bullshit?

that's interesting i never thought if it was bullshit i think it's real i mean i do too as well yeah i think it's real and i think they're really smart i mean the part that killed me is like if you guys like look online the screenshot of her instagram the day that it launched it was like american flag ass pic uh pe announcement kim kardashian second one titties kim kardashian right like it was just like right in between the two and you know that is kim kardashian that is why i think she's gonna be present in the united states one day because i was like it's actually perfect it's like who could pull that attention grab this attention grab and i also think it's important that uh she did it in reverse like imagine if somebody had risen to a position of

power influence and high success and then the sex tape came out yeah it doesn't work right it pulls you down so what you actually have to do is sex tape first yeah reality tv star business person criminal justice and then your governor yeah that's our advice for all of you listeners start with the sex tape if you're gonna have a sex tape do it when no one knows who you are yeah like for sure yeah a hundred percent do you see the congressman or maybe not congressman but the person who's running i think it's for congress or senate i think it was in new york he created a sex tape to show that he was uh in support of sex workers no yeah sometimes some days i'm like we live in a video game this is not real there's no chance like i i just i can't even like who

sat down in the campaign room and was like you know what we should do you should create a sex tape and then we'll tell people you support sex workers well we were just talking about i mean that that i don't think is his brightest idea but i'd love to meet him i think that sounds like i could sell him something else um but the other thing we were just talking about before this was like you should tell the elon musk sync story because i didn't does everybody know that have you already talked about that we haven't talked about it but uh it basically elon walks into uh the twitter headquarters uh two days before i think the deal got finalized and uh he's carrying like a big ceramic, uh, sink. And he tweeted it and said, entering Twitter HQ,

let that sink in. And it's like, uh, immediately I just jumped to Bloomberg interviewed him and they asked him, would you rather be a billionaire or a meme Lord? And of course the billionaire says a meme Lord. And so like, it takes a sense of humor, but like, actually what a great way to break the ice with a bunch of people who think that you're literally showing up with like a virtual flamethrower and you're going to fire them all. It's amazing. Well, and the other thing we you're talking about is, you know, at some point you start to make a little bit of money and then you feel pretty comfortable, at least with life. I don't think you ever like lose that. Oh my God, I could lose it all at any moment. They're going to find out. But, but in some ways it's like,

you want to have fun when you run these businesses. You know, we were just out at a car wash in, in Ohio and I was talking to the owner of it. We were running through their business and I'm like, all right, now I'm going to wrap you in this hose and we're going to talk about like what could suck about getting like stuck within your car wash. He was like, okay, you know, I'll do that. I'm like, listen, the reason we have businesses is because it's fun to grow and it's a fun game, but we don't have to take life that seriously. And also, by the way, it's pretty fun running businesses. Like, it's not fun if you have to wear a suit and tie every day like I did when I was doing the Goldman Sachs investment banking thing and you have to pretend to be some suit. But at some point, you know, you get to run your own business and then why not make it entertaining for your customers and the people that work for you?

And that's the goal. I need to, like, bring a sink more places. I have a theory about a lot of the investment banks. It is the most aspirational safe path that you can take. And so the people who go and do that majority, not all, there are outliers, but majority of them end up not going and actually starting businesses because the path and the thought process that it takes to go do that, for the most part, will preclude you from being able to stomach the risk

that it takes to go start. And it also is, Jay-Z's got this line. he says uh we're corner boys with corner offices right and it's like literally the difference between the street and the boardroom strategy yeah uh so you're an outlier in that like you were able to go do that but still we're able to kind of like break out of the matrix you know whatever you want to think about it and be like wait a second like i actually want to practice this myself not just be a point in this big machine that is doing this yeah our firm is doing it but like are you really doing it if you're just the person who's putting together the numbers or the deck oh kind of not

really right now well and it's the golden handcuffs too you know you start making some money you can make some good money in that space and then you're like oh my god I gotta go do a startup and pay for me to maybe one day eventually make money that's crazy town and so I do get that the other thing is I think do you get it though I don't understand it because like I know people who are actively like every day and I'm like you are not happy doing what you are doing right like to some degree like imagine loving money so much that you are willing to do things that you're unhappy doing with on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. I mean, I think it's hard for you and I to stomach it because we've gotten past it. But you know, if you think about most humans in the U S what's the truth,

we're overweight, we're unhappy, we're on prescription pills, we don't have wealth and we're divorced increasingly and not having sex as a society. So like human nature today, at least is like massively path of least resistance and largely unhappy. And so while you and I, I think probably don't, we don't contemplate life that way. And it gives us existential angst to ponder the idea of living inside of a cubicle with somebody else's rules over us constantly. Other people somehow have been wrapped up by society to think that that is okay to live that way. And I want to make a clear distinction between like, there's some people who they have no other choice, right? Like, like if you're in a situation where you're like,

i got student debt i have a family i have like all these things and like literally we need to make money in order to eat yeah that's a completely different story than the people who like if you're making 250 000 and you're working at an investment bank and you're unhappy like you have and you've been there for five years like you're a fucking idiot if you do not have money in the bank to be able to quit your job for six months ago try something else yeah right like you you have either uh partied too much you have made some really bad financial decisions done too many drugs like there's something that happened in your life that got you in a position where you've made 1.25 million dollars over the last five years and you've got nothing left to be able to quit

your job for six months oh my god i mean well i trigger these guys all the time on on twitter because you know it's like crabs in a bucket so you know you start to make the cash and then you see somebody that like starts explaining like yeah we're not doing rocket science it's two and twenty we put together some models we get some bank debt we think that this business looks profitable we buy it we sell it like it's not actually that intelligent and when you start saying that people start losing their minds because they have their identity wrapped up and being a banker bro. Right. And so, um, I think this happens all the time. I try to shake it up a little bit. Everybody gets pissed at me on the internet, but I think at the end of the day,

there's like a little boy inside a bunch of these dudes that is like scared. They're like, oh my God, people are going to find out. I don't know how to run a business. People are going to find out all I do investment banking is make debt, uh, decks. People are going to find out that like, yeah, I'm like, I don't work out cause I don't have time. I haven't seen the sun in 72 years. You know, like I'm at Tao every night with my sparklers, but like, I'm pretty much dying on the inside and i think that's what a lot of them are um and so i mean tau what a shout out you don't know all about that in crypto that was your guys moment for a while but yeah i think those guys increasingly like i almost feel bad for them because i think even making 250k there's

nothing more miserable than a please fix this powerpoint i i have a framework uh there's actually you know, a lot of these folks who are in their mid twenties who, uh, I'm not like a mentor to them, but like we, we talk and they'll ask me my opinions about certain career decisions or whatever. And I always tell them, uh, it's the 10 year sign on the dotted line framework. And all it means is if you do the same thing for 10 years and you're never responsible for signing on the line for the deal, then like you're not doing deals. So if you're 22, I don't care who you are, unless you're a huge outlier, you're not going to be signing for the deal, right? Uh, if you're 25, still unlikely if you're 28 still okay maybe you're starting to get you know high enough

in the organization if you're 32 years old you've been somewhere for 10 years in an industry and you're still not the decision maker on i don't care if it's the smallest deal that the firm does all year long but like something is putting you on a trajectory where like if you haven't done it in 10 years what makes you think you're gonna do it in 12 or 14 or 16 or 20 and so in 10 years you got to have the ability to sign on the dotted line somewhere. Cause if you don't, you never will. Yeah. A hundred percent. And that's why I'd like for people like this, it's like, man, go to something that matters, you know, get, get out of, uh, you know, New York every seven seconds, traveling to the Hamptons, like leave the deal sleds behind. And instead, you know, in my opinion,

like go, go take that brain you have, which is probably pretty intelligent if you're able to analyze all of these numbers. And if you're doing anything in finance and like buy a small business, you know, or go start something on the side and do it for the love of it, not just for the cash. And I, you know, I think what will end up happening is they'll realize, man, I thought it was a deal junkie in investment banking, but it turns out I'm just a deal junkie in general. And I actually might like to build something. And so rehab, right? The other piece that I always say to them is, uh, how much does your boss's boss make? And what, what ends up happening is like these people, like some of them are making, you know, 150 to $300,000. Then they'll kind of jump

up to 500, 700,000. Then you'll get kind of like VP MD levels that now, so you're making a million dollars million and a half dollars right i'm like okay all that's cool like how much does your boss's boss make and uh usually there's like a million dollar milestone there's like a five million and then the leap from five is to like 50 right like there's no like difference between five and seven no right it is literally inside these organizations like you make a million you make five and then it's like unlimited and what i always explain to them is like if you stay there for too long you're capped at five because you the person who makes five at that same organization never makes unlimited right because they are in a different seat and so uh you have to put yourself

in a position if you you desire again some people just don't want to do it right but if you desire to be in an unlimited earning seat then you have to get out of the like track that you're in and to your point like it is scary right like actually in some way the earlier that you rip the band-aid off the better off you are because you're too stupid yeah exactly like you're literally too dumb to realize this is a bad decision yeah and so you just do it and then you realize oh i'll just like figure it out oh 100 well and i think you know the other thing is like we're not talking about dying here nobody's dying nobody's dying and like if you're in these positions you're probably never going homeless like we're actually in this amazingly lucky situation and so how can

we do something really cool with what we got i always loved that was it hemingway i think his quote was like i want to uh you know end up at the end of my day that's in front of the pearly gates like battered beaten and um you know and totally used up i don't want to be like clean and ready to go and i think that's sort of the point of life uh and why i like doing some hard things also like more people need to get in the gym man just like lift some heavy stuff do a few hard physical things and then you'll be like oh i yeah i quit my job today to start something else it's fine everybody's gonna be fine the uh other piece of this is the internet actually makes it so much easier right like when you think of all the asset heavy businesses yeah you need lots of capital you

know stuff but like today i mean i i know two different people who have recently quit their jobs and they quit it because they have a sub stack yeah like that sounds insane yeah right but you're like wait how much money are you making and they're like making like 100k and one of them actually took a little bit of a pay cut quit his job uh he was probably i don't know he worked at tech i'd probably make like 140 150 and so he took a pay cut to go do it but he's like but if i can do 100 in my free time i can do 300 if i focus on it right so there's like the willingness to take a step back to go forward yeah uh and then the other person like they definitely weren't making i think they make 125 or something now on the sub stack like they weren't

doing that in their regular job. So they basically in their free time gave themselves a promotion. I love that. Well, and even, you know, even if you don't want to go start the thing, I mean, there's a lot of founder porn out there, right? But I think get on board with some way to have some ownership to your point, somewhere where you got skin in the game, right? And so maybe that is going and joining a cool startup. Maybe that is joining your team here. Maybe that is getting on, you know, some new, uh, you know, business that somebody else is buying, but you're helping to fund the deals and you're helping to find them and you ask and you put some cash into the deals yourself, you're signing docs. And so I think that's the goal. Just get ownership in some way,

shape or form, or get some aligned pay where like, hey, if I do X, Y, and Z, and this happens, you know, can I get compensated for that? And that I think, then at the end of your day, at least you don't have on your account on your, you know, tombstone that you were just somebody else's accountant. So two things come to mind. One, I don't think I've ever said this. before. But what we do is we take a portion of revenue and we put it into a pot and everyone who helps create that revenue gets a piece of it. That's cool. Right. Now, why? Because most of the media businesses that are like these individuals, Joe Rogan can never sell the Joe Rogan podcast. He can license it, which he did. He cannot sell it because Joe Rogan can't stop recording the

Joe Rogan podcast. So what you get is the incentives are weird in a lot of the individual based media companies where there is no equity. There's no ability to sell it. That's bad for the person doing it and it's also bad for the team uh because like the the shitty thing to do would be like oh give all these people like basically phantom equity instead if you do it more on like a revenue or a profit share standpoint now all of a sudden it's a feedback loop right everyone on the team knows hey we're making more or less money and like when people are making more money they're excited they're enthusiastic they want to work hard if you're making less money people like shit this sucks i've got the right team like let's get back to making more money whatever

So I think that's always like people think like get ownership has to be equity, but like you have to be honest about like, is the equity ever going to be worth something? Because I look at, and we get approached all the time by people who are like, Hey, we should like do a deal. Like you help me grow all my channels and stuff. I'm like, I'll give you equity. And I'm like, I don't want your equity is worthless. Like you couldn't pay me to take the equity. Right. Uh, but like a revenue share I'd be interested in. And so understanding where value accrues is really important. the second thing is uh i have tons of young people who always come to me and they're like hey i'd like a job and i'm like cool what can you do and some of them are like very sophisticated like i can do abcd here's how i've done it before and you're like got it like you're sophisticated other people are like what do you need done oh it's the worst what do you need done people i'm like uh i need you to stop emailing me love you like you know email me later when you've got like a plan right uh but the other folks when it comes to compensation i always say the same thing i say look, there's two compensation paths here. Uh, I can give you a bigger guaranteed, like monthly

salary and very, very little upside, or I can give you a small monthly salary and immense upside. And immediately here's some alpha for all of you. If you pick the big monthly salary, you're the wrong person. Right. And, and I get it. I'll always talk to him about like, you know, what are your monthly expenses, your family situation? Like, like there there's other things that go into it. But the most part, like the people who are hiring, they want the person who will bet on themselves and take the upside and all this stuff. Because if it works, the people that I know that are really, really good at running organizations, they want their people to get paid a lot. When I got into the asset management game, I met somebody who was incredibly successful at

raising assets and building asset management where they managed like $30 billion, like the top of the top of the top. And I said to him, I said, what's the secret? He said, all the salespeople drive Ferraris. And I was like, what? And he was like, yes. He goes, I, that's how I flex is that like all of the salespeople drive Ferraris. And I've been like, what are you talking about? And he was like, we pay them incredibly well. So the best salespeople come and work here. They then go and they're the best. So they raise all the assets, which we get management fees on. And then we share an outsized percentage of that with them compared to other organizations. And so when I show up to somebody else's firm and all of their salespeople have Toyotas in the parking lot, I'm like,

you suck and your people will never be able to work for my, uh, for my organization because they're not good enough to go drive a Ferrari. And I remember just being like, that is so fucked up, but also like so genius. Oh yeah. I feel like I know this guy. Yeah. I think we might feel the same person, but yeah, he, he, I always called him the cult leader. Um, this particular guy I, um, did some stuff with and, uh, he does the same thing. He used to come to an, the annual meeting and he would be like, I have one goal this year. And he had like this big personalities who come on stage have one goal this year and i was like for every motherfucker in this room to be a millionaire and everybody would be like and uh and to his credit uh a bunch

of them were and like millionaires multi multi times over and he had really clear aligned pay i think to your point if if you know if you're a newbie there's one thing you should do like only one thing and it should be, you need to understand where profit and revenue come from in the business that you want to work in and how you can insert yourself into that as a leverage point. And so if you come to me and like, this actually happened, like one of our video editors came to me, he lives in India, he's good. And, uh, and he was like, I want to come work full time. And I was like, okay, what would that look like? And he's like, well, I want $272,000. And I was like, come again i'm like is this are we this currency differential what are we talking about here it's

like no no us dollars 272 000 i'm like bud first of all why and of course couldn't back it up second like where'd you come up with this number what do you think we make on youtube 272 000 is a very specific number it varied too right that goes into that yeah i don't know what was he didn't have a good answer but my whole point is if he came and said hey i want x amount of i don't know 70 000 a year and i want it because i'm going to do this for our channel and I'm going to get our channel to hit these goals, then I would listen. And I might not agree to everything that he says, but there's real like backing behind it. And so for anybody that's working for somebody else, that's what you do. You come in, you understand where the revenue is,

you understand where the profit is, and you figure out how can I make this person more money? And like that, I always did that with that CEO, actually, that I was talking about when I went and started working with him for the first time. I was like, I'm working at a really big firm. I'm going to come to a smaller firm. The only reason I'm going to do that is because I think we're going to have this huge outcome. And I slid a napkin across the table to him. And I was like, if I get us to this number, then we make this number and I want this number. And he was like, yeah, of course, because I understood the economics of the business. This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining, the world's largest marketplace for mining

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Asking for raises inside of a company is probably one of the most popular questions that I get from people who are like, hey, I think that I should go get a raise at my company. How should I do it? And my thing is always like, whatever you ask for, you have to deliver four to 10X, depending on the business,

in revenue or profit, depending on the specifics. Uh, or it doesn't make sense for the business. So if you're getting paid, you know, just use the numbers, a hundred K and you want 150, that's a 50% increase. You can't just increase the revenue by 50 K because the business actually will lose money. You need, may need to be able to show a path to, can you increase the revenue of the business by 250 or $300,000? And then it makes a ton of sense. And what I've always found sad is that like most people don't have the ability to have a kind of those nuanced conversations because they don't even understand the business they're Exactly.

Right? If you don't understand how the business works, then all the conversations you're going to have with a boss, executives, whatever, doesn't really make a lot of sense because they're like, you don't get it. And if you don't get it, then why would I pay you more money? Why would I put you in a position of more responsibility? Because you're not thinking the way that we think. And therefore, we got to go find people who do.

Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of people come to me often because I talk about deal structuring and deal terms a lot. And they'll come to me like one guy is pretty high up at a large production company. company, name you would know, he makes a lot of money. And he was like, God, I'm kind of trapped in this. I do this really cool job. I make a ton of money. But one, I don't know how to negotiate something different. And two, like I wouldn't know how to go buy a business in this space. And, you know, and all I said to him was like, well, do those first things that go learn how

to buy businesses because you're going to understand deal structuring. You're going to understand terms. You're going to understand how a business works from a P&L and cash flow perspective. And it's actually kind of rare that people fully understand that. And people tell me all the time, like, I'm in business. I know how to do all this. I'm like, have you ever run a 13 week rolling cash flow in order to make sure you understand where every dime in a business is? Do you understand zero based expenses where like every single dime that you have, you need to rationalize why we spend one way or the other. And what's interesting is if you can play the game of like, let me just get really curious about business, you'll make a ton of money. And then

you can apply that to negotiation really easy because what's negotiation about when you negotiate with your little daughter, she's not old enough for it yet, but when she's old enough, she's negotiating, she don't talk, but she's negotiating bedtime, right? You know, she wants to stay up, right? Kids always do. So what do you do? You work from their leverage point. And so most people don't know how to do that with business owners, but even like, I don't know if you've ever had this. I've had like the funniest interactions lately and like DMS and like Instagram or whatever as you get gotten bigger and you start interacting with other people that are bigger i find even really big names on the internet are so dense when it comes to negotiations

like one one person the other day hope he's not listening name yeah no yeah literally like we're going back and forth in the dms samuel's gonna laugh at this story and uh and he's like uh you know i'm like yeah cool podcast like that whatever most recent one you did we got some mutual friends blah, blah, blah. And then he comes at me with, I think he's like trying to impress me a little bit, but he's like, yeah, well, if you like the podcast, have you taken my networking course? You know, here it is. Here's a discount if you want it. And I was like, I think I'm doing okay. I got a few people I know. I think I'm all right right now, but like, thanks. Hey, I appreciate that. And then writes back, not really though. And I'm like, huh, what do you mean? He's like,

I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn. He's a billionaire, by the way. And then he proceeds to tell me about how networking works. And I was just sitting there thinking, this is fascinating. What do you think he thinks my end goal is? And what is his with this conversation? And this is a very successful human. If I said his name, you probably know the guy. And I've had so many interactions like this that it's made me realize that even really successful people have no idea how to get what they want in negotiation. So I'll create a negotiation course i'll send it back to him i'll give him a hot discount we could take it from there but it's super rare there's two things that uh my wife and i have decided are important to

teach our child not for every child but our child we think is important one is good decision making and the other is the ability to negotiate uh but not like sit down and negotiate a contract right but just every single thing in your life comes down to uh you're faced with the decision can you make good decisions do you have a good framework to understand pros and cons risk reward uh options like all these things that go into it like if you're a good decision maker you're have a higher probability of like being okay in life yeah and then negotiation is many times implementing the decision that you're making and getting what you want and a lot of people i think look at negotiating as the zero-sum game i win you lose instead the best negotiators actually

i win you win and that's how deals get done and i think that that gets lost and until people start or like really, really get into doing a lot of negotiating, you can almost tell immediately. If a negotiation starts off with demands and not questions, almost categorically, they don't know what they're doing. That is so true every single time. Demands and not questions, if it starts out with prices instead of questions,

I totally agree. Oh, wait, I want to talk about one other thing. We need to make sure we tell people how to make money in a recession fully. So there's actually, we came out with a blog post today. It's on country and thinking you can see it, but it's like seven ways to buy a business with $0. I think we should riff on some ways to make money

if you have no money. Don't be lazy, caveat. But there's a couple of different ways. One, during the pandemic, 60% of all businesses shut down that temporarily shut down. Huge, huge problem. Now during the next recession,

probably not the same level, but there'll be some of those. Every time a business shuts down, I'm sure you agree, there's always value somewhere in the business. And so there's like three types of ways I like to do deals when a business is closing, which is happening now. You're starting to see some of it. One is acqui-hire, right? If you have your competitors shutting down and you run a

business and you're not going out there and trying to poach their top talent, you're crazy. You should be doing that in restaurants. You should be doing that in gyms. You should be doing that in tech companies. It only happens in VC backed tech companies. Two, client acquisition. You run a local gym, let's say. The Pilates studio down the way shuts down. Usually nothing happens with that business? Why wouldn't you go to the owner and say instead, hey, I want you to have an annuity in your business where you continue to earn even though the business is shut down? And what if you're all of your clients that you've spent all this time cultivating now have a new place to go to? Why don't you let me send an email or you send an email to your list with a couple affiliate

links? Anybody that transitions over to my business will give a discount. You'll own part of them for the next two years, right? So that's client list acquisition. Three is also obviously asset acquisition. So lots of people do this in our world, but not very many people think that crime scene cleanup company I went to yesterday, when they go to a hoarding site, they take a bunch of the stuff out of there that people want to get rid of it. And they turn around and they sell it. They also clean up those houses sometimes and say, the people who are hoarding are like, I need to clean it up because I'm going to sell. And they're like, why don't we just buy it as is massive discount. So asset acquisition, you can do that. She bought a house not too many months

ago. I can't remember the exact number, uh, for a dollar in Tampa, Florida. And so that is totally applicable. And those are three ways. Was it worth more than a dollar? Yeah, I think so. Slightly. Wasn't a Barbie house. So yeah. And when you think of things like client list acquisition, how much of it is, uh, you acquire the list and then you tell them, Hey, by the way, like I'm so and so, you know, uh, this is what we do. It's similar to this other thing. It's shutting down, whatever. Versus like you just add them to your email list and like yours off to the races and and just see if they click? I actually wouldn't do either. I would do it based on a success fee. So if I was going to buy somebody else's client list, because they don't think that that has a

value, they're about to just let it go away. So don't put a dollar value on it. Instead say, why don't I pay you for every person that transfers over? And so you can let them control it for a period. Then also you can get away from like some GDPR, like some issues if you just buy an email list and then add them immediately to your other list. So that's how I would do it. And you don't even have to own a business to do this. You could just be a broker, right? You could be like, I'm Cody. I own no businesses.

But this restaurant shut down. I bet they have an email list. I bet they have reviews. I bet they have all this stuff. Why don't I go to a bunch of restaurants in the area and see if anybody wants to give me a percentage if I bring this to that restaurant or whatever type of business? So three ideas for you guys if you want to figure out no cash but a way to buy a business. I think that email is still highly underrated. Yeah.

Right. I mean, so many people are, uh, focused on all these like super sexy, interesting, shiny things. And it's like, I spend most of my time on email. Yeah. How big is your email now? It's big. It's big.

I know. I remember like you told me some time ago what it was and I was amazed. Uh, it's big, I think for what people would think, but it's small, uh, in the grand scheme of things. Yeah. Right. Like we talked, we were talking earlier about Agora. Like, I don't know how many email subscribers they have across all the emails.

Must have millions. Yeah. Maybe even a hundred million. right like if you're doing that was it a billion dollars in revenue yeah we're down the street is yeah so they're doing a billion dollars in revenue a year and you just start backing into cpms like yes they get higher cpms it's a specific targeted audience whatever but like i don't know could you have a hundred million probably yeah right like that's like a pretty big number uh to do a billion dollars in revenue and so it's like okay that's an email company right and it'd be interesting i

don't know how much like a MailChimp makes, uh, in revenue, but like, does Agora or MailChimp make more money? Yeah. I don't know. A billion dollars in revenue is a big number. And so like, that's one of those situations where like maybe actually being the, uh, the service is a better business than being the like platform. Yeah. Well, I think, I think work week, they put out a good article, um, basically talking about why so many creator companies were failing. I mean, not to, not to, you know, blast Substack, but 9 million in revenue, like probably our businesses do more than Substack does in total revenue, which is wild. Then you apply their valuation versus like what the valuation would be on our businesses. And so I

think a lot of these creator businesses, they played a game of like, I'm going to go out to fish and I'm just going to bring a big net and I'm going to throw it out there and I'm going to hope that I catch a bunch of stuff. And I think what they realized is the best creators, like it's always the 80-20 rule, man. And so the best creators are always going to drive the most revenue. And what you actually want to do is optimize for those as opposed to just have the super wide net. And a lot of these companies I think are having that same way. So I agree in general, Substack, this may be a hot take, I think is going to be one of the most important companies. Contexts is, I was very, very honest with one of the first 20 or 50 writers or whatever on there.

And I spent a lot of time working with them. I've even invested in business whole thing. But one of the things they understand that all the other creator companies don't is like the initial thing is exactly correct. The network is really important there. And so, uh, one of the features they recently launched is, uh, when you sign up for one person's email list, they can recommend other people's emails. And so now some of these people, 50 to 70% of all of their growth is coming from this like recommendation network that they've created. So like I, one of the things that people always forget is like creating content on the internet. There are people who like the content. That does not mean you will be successful in building a business. You still have to be an

entrepreneur. You still have to market. You still have to understand how to negotiate deals. So you still have to do all these things that just creating content doesn't cover. So if they can help you get more subscribers, like that's pretty valuable. But then what they've started to do is then they've started to add other features. Some of them are public, some of them are that they're testing. And what you start to realize is like, oh, like they're just going to build like the Salesforce equivalent for these creators in a way where they just say, look, if you want ad revenue like there's all these other platforms but we're going to be the dominant player for subscription revenue yeah and you look at it and you're like okay that's like a very clear thesis

will it work still questionable yeah um but my thought process is that the consumer behavior has now officially changed i don't do we want to guess how many subscriptions you and i both have like a lot it'd be embarrassing don't do it my mom's gonna panic i don't know yeah uh and i have a friend um her husband always jokes with me uh and her that uh he just like shows up at uh their house and like shit just shows up and and he's like what is this and she's like oh it's a subscription like whatever he's like you didn't even know this was coming like you literally have so many subscriptions like you don't know it's coming i'm not that bad but like i've got enough and when you look at them it's like oh my consumer behavior changed i now do not think twice whether

it is a one-time purchase or a subscription purchase because i almost expect these businesses all to move to subscription and so if consumer behavior changes then guess what's going to happen is like it's going to change in these other markets as well and so like people subscribing to a sub stack doesn't feel any different than subscribing to all the other subscription services yeah yeah i think it'll be interesting i mean i believe in the infrastructure of the creator economy to a certain extent because i invested in we're competitors actually it turns out are we uh-huh i invested in beehive oh yeah yeah um so they were the guys that were behind the morning brews infrastructure and you know i think there's room in this space for lots of

different models just like everywhere else and in fact i think there's not enough tools for this new economy yet so i think it's awesome but it's all just small businesses like that that's the other thing is all the creators are just the equivalent of the small medium-sized businesses yeah 50 of jobs in america come from smbs and now we are just watching all those young people who would have taken over the main street store right or created a business in their local town they're not doing it on the internet, which is better for them. And it probably ends up actually contributing more to society. Yeah. I mean, you said something earlier, which I totally agree with it. I think it's really important at some point, maybe soon, nobody's going to care about

you or me, right? Like intention and attention on the internet do not stay forever. Nobody stays relevant forever. It's just not reasonable to think that I'm going to get a few more wrinkles, totally irrelevant, right? Um, I already have them. So it's like, fine, you can have like a hole in your face it'd be fine um but anyway so um the the interesting part i think is that for anybody who's a creator on the internet to your point you better have something else that isn't just your face and your time tied to it because imagine you get sick and you can't write that sub stack for six months what happens do you have a business or do you have a job you know let's imagine that nobody cares about the topic you're talking about i mean we saw this in crypto how

many people had low value crypto content that was largely resharing and hype men and have gone away. They're irrelevant now. Now, if during that period, they had also invested in a bunch of businesses, they had made really smart connections, maybe they had built a business that was infrastructure and not hyper speculation. Cool. Then that attention was well deserved and will continue on. But that's one thing I think a lot of people are not preparing for. It's also why I will never be on one platform. Like you can have a newsletter. That's awesome. But I think you better also have some social channels behind you. And, you know, contrarian thinking our business doesn't have my name on it. Now my face is all over everything, but there's a reason it's called

contrarian thinking because I'm going to have varying businesses that are around it. We already do. And then my employees will be able to have equity in multiple lines that could actually sell as opposed to, you know, the one overarching Cody Sanchez, which I'm never going to sell my name or likeness unless, you know, it's, it's got a billion trillionaire. The, uh, the one other thing, uh, I keep coming back to is this idea of a burnout. I think a lot of, especially young people, um, they're not ready. Like there's going to be a tsunami of burnout. So all these people like, ah, I'm like in the creator economy, I'm a creator. I'm like, you are literally two years away from just being like, Holy shit, this sucks. And so my warning to all of them is like build the

infrastructure. Yeah. Right. Like I can't tell you how many people I know who, uh, they're like, I record my podcast. I edit my podcast. I write my newsletter. I do all my tweets. I do like all this stuff. And I'm like, that sounds awesome. But like, guess what? I don't edit the podcast. I don't edit the video. Right. And like what you, what, what is this saying? Like, um, uh, to go fast, go alone, to go further, go together. Right. And so what you do is like, I get it in the beginning. Like, yes, you do have to do some of that stuff, but, uh, you have to think about it like a business and building infrastructure and systems and processes and all this, or you and your team will just one day be like, fuck it. Like we're out. I actually have two consultants

right now that had really one had a huge YouTube channel, 900,000 subscribers. He now works for me because he was tired. He didn't want to build any more videos. It wasn't interesting to him. He just lost all of his creative juices on it. He did pretty good, had a couple of good months and was like, I'm, I'm out. And now he really likes what he's doing because he consults, he does it when he wants. He lives in Mexico city. He's got a good, good thing going. Um, and I have another one that does that for me on the content side. And so I think you're exactly right. People too often listen to these woo woo, you know, feather wearing gurus talk about passion and profits and bringing both together and then you'll be happy. It's a business, man. Some days you're going to

have to do an Excel spreadsheet as a creator and like you're not going to like it. Another day you're going to get a lawsuit. It's going to suck. And so, you know, this idea of like I have to follow my passion. Like, yes, you want to love what you do, but like find the passion in the things that you do. I don't think every day anybody on this existence of a planet loves what they do every single second. Do you want to know, uh, something sad that we can end on? Yeah. It's sad. It's sad. Cause it's, it's great for you and I, but, uh, uh, I gotta admit that I do this sometimes, especially younger people, like mid twenties that want to do this. I'm like, you know, you should do, you should hang out with me for a day. And about halfway through the day, I'm like,

how's it going like what do you think so far and like they're like it's cool like whatever and at the end of the day i say by the way you'll never fucking catch me right like you never will okay because you're not willing to do this like i'm on year like six or seven you haven't even started yet and like i just did more work this week than you're gonna do all uh or i did more work today than you did all week and part of it is like there's only a few people who have like gone through that and seen it and then they still want to do it so it's like if you're gonna quit like don't start oh yeah but the people who get through the filter then i'm like oh you're gonna do this forever yeah like or you're gonna do it for a very very long time because like you actually

understand what it's gonna take to be able to build this and if you're still willing to like you know run gung-ho up the mountain like all right you got a shot like good luck yeah i was editing the newsletter at 12 a.m last night like still you know and you know it was just i didn't like editing who has time for editing just write it and send it yeah that's how we do well you know actually it's interesting because i remember like back in the day when you were first like really rolling i was like this motherfucker he does a daily show and all the content he does and twitter like i thought you were just licking the walls that were filled with cocaine like how did you how did you do that and like what's your seat because your stamina level's wild yeah i enjoy it

yeah like i i enjoy less some of the like i call it intellectual combat on twitter like oh yeah I used to go to fuck. I used to go to war. I used to love it. I'd be like, listen, you want to go like, I'll go with the best of them. And like, it only takes two or three back and forth before like, here comes the kill shot. Right. Uh, but I think now like that stuff's less interesting to me. Um, I have a daughter, right? Like sometimes I'm like, ah, I'm not going to say that one day she's going to read that on the internet and be like, dad, you're an asshole. Um, so like, I think I've like become less interested in that part. But the part that I do enjoy is like, if you said to me, like, what would I do all day? Right. Like it, it is, I would talk to interesting people.

Yeah. I would like think, which really writing is just thinking it and you have to just kind of clarify it. Uh, I would read and then, uh, I would like think about or work on business stuff. Like that's what I do every day. Right. And the other thing, um, I think people are surprised by, like, I pretty much read like a book a week now and they're like, well, how do you do that? I'm like well it's not a chore right it was a chore i wouldn't read at all but i find things that i think are interesting or that i think i'm learning from and then like it's not that hard if a book is 300 350 pages like read 50 pages a day yeah whatever i mean sometimes i do i like think to myself i'm like can you believe we get paid for this you know like when i when i was doing you

know the investment banking and and wall street stuff and doing 12-hour days and miserable and now people are like man we gotta i gotta film you know like seven or eight tiktoks today i'm like i think we're gonna make it we're gonna make it like this is the worst that you're gonna throw at me you know no problem but it also uh it drastically reduced the barrier to entry on content in a way that like if anyone was interested in doing this you used to have to want to be a movie star or have to want to go be like a tv anchor that was basically the path right um and now what we did is we basically compressed an entire tv studio into a phone and somebody can use this and you know newsflash they are way more popular than uh most of the movie stars and they're way more

popular than most of the tv anchors and they do it with a phone and it's because the quality of the information is better yeah and like i think that goes back to this idea of everyone's like oh i don't know how to do uh what they're doing i'm like no just do the thing that nobody else can do like do the thing you can do and that's where the audience is oh yeah 100 and also you know we're not like spring chickens anymore exactly so you know if you want to crush it on the internet and you're, you know, 12, 15, 17, 20, you're just going to get it faster than us. You know, Pop and I are going to be over here like trying to fix the lighting. He's going to have his glasses on, you know, and like you guys are just going to move faster. And so if we can

help you by saying, all right, we learned a few things. The couple of things we learned are like understand the language of money, which is dealmaking and finance, because no matter what business you do, whether the business is TikToking or makeuping or whatever it is, you got to understand this language. If you don't speak the language, it doesn't matter. And then you got to understand how do you negotiate. And then you've got to understand a couple of things like yourself, like that stuff inside of you. What do I really like doing? What makes me happy? Paired with what am I good at? You know, five, two, probably not gonna be a basketball player. Let's be a little honest. And then you pair that with the fact that you guys have tech at your fingertips in a way

that we never did. It's amazing. No better time to be alive. Don't believe anybody that says otherwise. And even if we come into a really awful recession, which I think is a travesty, how this all has been dealt with and where we've come, I think we have a lot of similar views on that. But, you know, the world that you're coming into right now, for people that don't have debt hangovers and investment hangovers, which if you're young, you probably don't, you are coming in really fresh. And in this world, that means even if you don't have a ton of cash, you aren't negative cash. And so you should be looking at this environment like, man, now is the time to lean in. It's the time to build. It's the time to buy something. It's the time to partner with

somebody to buy something. And no better time right now than to do it. And then pair it with content. Get the cash, figure out the business model, pair it with some sort of content. And I think, you know, next step, you got your ass, your P.E., your titties, just like Kim Kardashian up there. That's a great place to end. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Contrarianthinking.co, probably the best newsletter. And then I'm Cody Sanchez on all the socials. Awesome. Thank you.

We will definitely do this again. That was awesome, man. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry,

we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies.

Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.