The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 439: Codie Sanchez Wants to Make You Financially Free

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

New York Times bestselling author Codie Sanchez has a background working in finance but gave up Wall Street for Main Street. She is a blue-collar entrepreneur and investor known for buying and growing "boring" cash-flow businesses like laundromats and car washes. She founded Contrarian Thinking to help others achieve financial freedom through unconventional investing.  

Hey, it's the way I heard it. And you know me. I mean, if you don't, I'm Mike Roe. And if this is the first episode you've listened to, boy, what a treat you're in for, Chuck. I don't want to overstate it. But people have, can you imagine? Do you actually think there's somebody in the audience right now who is discovering this podcast right now for the first time? 100%. You know how I know that? How? Because people write in and say, wow, I just heard about your podcast. I love Mike Roe. I didn't realize he had a podcast. What the heck are we doing wrong, man? I mean, how is this possible? This thing's been on the air. for nine years. Eight nine years. We've been doing it. Yeah. Well, like you often say, you know, no such thing is an old joke if you're hearing it for the first time. That's right. And there are a few laughs in this podcast. My guest is Cody Sanchez. Did you know who she was before I brought her up? No, I did not. So what happened was I appeared on a podcast not long ago called Young and Profiting. Right. With a woman called Hala, halla, ta-ta. Yep. Tata.

And she was great. Yeah. And in fact, that's out there right now. She just collaborated with me on Instagram, Chuck. I accept her collaboration, and we chatted, and she told me about her friend Cody Sanchez, who I simply must know. Yep. Cody is a 38-year-old woman who made a bunch of money on Wall Street and then decided that

she kind of had made enough money and she wanted to own businesses. But the reason I love this girl is that all the businesses she was attracted to were like, I call them dirty jobs businesses. Yep, yep. Laundromats. Car washes. Yep, yep. You know, unglamorous businesses.

And she built this portfolio. And there are so many parallels between this woman and me and her organization and microworks and her larger goals and mine. I'm on her website right now. And you can go there. It's codysaneches.com. And it says, clear as mud. My, well, no, clear as day. mud is not clear.

Yeah, mud is not clear. My mission is to create one million financially free humans through business ownership. And, you know, a lot of people are out there talking about how to get rich and so forth. And very, very, very few talk about it through the lens of these dirty jobs opportunities and a true entrepreneurial spirit. I think she's on to something. She totally is. You know, I refer to her as the queen of the unglamorous businesses. and she knows how to make money.

She figured that out on Wall Street. She likes this common sense approach in buying businesses. She started with, I think the first one was a laundromat, right? And then she added more and more and then all sorts of other things. It's not just a common sense approach. It's a contrarian approach as well. This too is something that I completely understand. And we find ourselves in violent agreement early on triangulating the various adventures

and misadventures and our own. careers. And I just think it's going to be a really useful conversation. To anyone who has ever thought about hanging out their own shingle, I don't really care what the industry is, but this has just been on my mind a lot because we're giving away a bunch of money this month in work ethics scholarships. And I often say to the applicants who enter this world of home services, don't simply look at your skill as a thing that's going to keep you employed for the rest of your life. Look at it as a gateway into a world where you might wind up employing people and you might wind up hanging out your own shingle. It happens all the time. And she brought it up in this

conversation, that exact thing for people who are in the trades. Yeah. Yeah. Cody Sanchez is great. She's got an amazing story. She's, I mean, her successes. It's, I don't even know if I should point out out. It's just kind of embarrassing to talk about money and all these things. You go to her website and read all about it, but she's doing some great work. And I just think she's coming at this from a very real, super honest place. I like her a lot. I bet you will too. What are we calling this thing again?

This is called Cody Sanchez wants to make you financially free. That's it. Yeah. She's not the only one in the world who wants to do this, but I don't know anybody else who's coming at it the way she is. I think you're going to like her and you'll meet her right after this. Do do do do do do do do. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company. But he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair.

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and $40 off your first order. Just use code mic at good ranchers.com. Free meat for life, $40 off your first order. Good Ranchers.com. American Meat Delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. I'm not going to officially introduce you because I'll do that in the preamble. Love it. But your commitment or your predilection maybe to the contrarian life

rhymed so much with me when I think about, I used to call it the reverse commute. My career started to make sense to me when the primary metric was look around and see where everybody's going. It doesn't matter where they're going. Just don't go there. Just go someplace else. You made a bunch of money as an investor.

I think it actually says on your website you're a mogul. Is that possible? Oh, God. Isn't that gross? I hope not. I saw the M word there. It's like when they have on LinkedIn the words self-proclaimed visionary. I die.

I really hope that we don't. Somebody's fired, probably me. Well, look, man, the language matters and the way we see ourselves matters and the way we define ourselves matters and all of that stuff. But I guess maybe we should just start with this notion that is the reverse commute in the investing world for the entrepreneur? Is it still for sale? Is it still attractive?

I think there's some good news today, actually. And that is that most of us, I think, were sold a bag of goods. You're located in San Francisco. So I think you know this more than anybody. Adjacent now. Okay, smart. I actually got out of Sodom, and now I'm Sodom adjacent. Well, you know, there's a beautiful part about San Francisco, which I love,

which is one of the only places in the world where a 17-year-old can sit down with an actual mogul, not me, and be taken really serious. They can listen to their ideas and go, whoa, you see the world totally differently. Let me give you money to build that world. That's cool. But on the negative side, I actually don't think we're that happy behind screens, and the data seems to prove that. behind screens, making either investments or investments in our career of creating dating apps.

Like, I don't think that's a world that makes us happy. And so we were sold this bag of goods that we had to create these Fortune 100 companies. We got to get them backed by Silicon Valley. If we are blue collar, if we have dirty hands and calluses, we actually are lower valued, both in net worth and pay and maybe even in sophistication and, you know, human value. And I think that's actually proven to be pretty untrue lately. And so the good part, I think, about going left when everybody's going right, is the left they were telling us to do is real hard, which is competing with the smartest minds in the world with tech. I don't think you need to do that.

In fact, if you look at who the richest people are in the world, they're private equity guys. And those private equity guys, they don't build apps. They buy plumbing companies and they buy roofing companies that are run by blue-collar dudes. This is very much a gold rush kind of analogy, right? I mean, the whole world is running to the gold fields because there's gold and then there are hills. But it was Levi Strauss and it was the, you know, it was the shovel makers who crushed. And for a long time, too. You know, what's interesting is we did a bunch of research.

And I got curious about this idea of what does ownership mean in this country and does it matter? Does it matter to be an owner of anything? And if you go back to the 1800s, when we started this country, 88% of us owned a business, owned something. And then you go to the Industrial Revolution, at which point ownership drops from high 80s to 40% ownership, because we've had machines take over a lot of what human hands did. And then you go to today, and we're at about somewhere between 6 to 10% of Americans own a business. So we have like slowly become a nation of renters, not in the home sense, but in the business sense. And you know we're actually doing poorly because even Canada's beaten us. We got higher entrepreneurship in Canada. than we do in the US, about 7.8%. And so you might go like, well, who cares? I've been an owner before, it's awful, you know, employees and payroll and whatever, which is all true.

Except if you look at, I think money really is just a mechanism for freedom. It's kind of a way to tell somebody like, I'm not gonna do that because I don't have to and I don't want to and I wanna go do this other thing. And so the problem with not having ownership is 60% of all millionaires have it. And if you wanna have a lot of,

of money, meaning more than 10 million, 80% of people have ownership. When did a lot of money become more than 10 million? When did that happen? Well, probably when Twitter and Instagram started showing you Lamborghinis and everything all day. But is that a Northern California phenomenon? I mean, is there a kind of relativism, your example in San Francisco, when you're, you know, you surround yourself with that cohort. It's virtually impossible not to measure yourself against the Joneses, whoever they may be.

Yeah. It's a different class of Jones up in the zip codes you're talking about. I don't think before we could really see it. I mean, you think about it before. You used to compare yourself to people who were in your circle. Now your circle of comparison is quite large. It's global. Yeah, exactly.

And so all of a sudden, our memetic desire kicks in as humans because we're just a little self-replicating apes on so many levels. And we see, man, Mike's got a new car and Mike's got this. And I fall prey to it all the time. I'm like, oh, man, they did this with the podcast? I should have. You know? Ego kicks in.

And so I think that's when this started to go a little sideways. But, you know, for most people today, I think the good news is we should stress test this. I feel both incredibly scared about what's happening in the future with tech and excited on some aspects. The interesting part, I think, is that it's scary to think how fast tech might move for us. But we're starting to see that, you know, you go to a coffee shop, you go to Starbucks. Have you been to one lately? Um, full disclosure, I've been to three in the last week, but only to use the restroom in each occasion. I like this.

Okay. So if you go to a Starbucks lately, you've probably seen them. Unless you're in like an epicenter for a period, they got rid of chairs, right? Like they were supposed to be the third home and then all of a sudden the chairs are gone. They spell your name wrong. It's dirty. They're kind of mad you're in there. You know, the bartender really doesn't want to talk to you or barrester, whatever you call them.

And so these big conglomerates got so big to your point in the very beginning. that all of a sudden... You mean the part where Chuck wasn't rolling? Oh, right. That was the part where Chuck wasn't rolling. Right, where we made the big salient points that we could circle back to and land the plane in a way that makes people go,

wow, these guys are really listening to each other. You can do better. You got it. That is probably true. We can't do better. But the point being that these companies got so big that they become easier to compete with in a way. When you go to a local coffee shop,

you get to know the owner, it's pretty clean. They got chairs, high bar. And I think in the future, we're going to be able to compete way more locally because so much of our life is going to be online with tech. And so we'll see if I'm right, but I think if you're young and hungry,

and if you're old and hungry, it's actually not going to matter. Okay. Well, let's riff on that then. From this standpoint of an entrepreneur, if I think about myself 22 years ago, Dirty Jobs was not my wish fulfillment. I wasn't walking around going,

God, if only I could find a way to pay an honest tribute to the men and women who are doing, civilized jobs that make life possible for the rest of them. But nobody was doing it. That was it for me. It was like, get over there and try this thing. Had versions of, like, had I entered that world 10 years later when like 38 or 39 shows had evolved from dirty jobs and the entire cable landscape looked like a swamp or a junkyard or an ice road or a, right? I'd have been like, no, I think maybe we ought to do something different. So for an entrepreneur, like yourself, who has a soft spot for, I'll just say, dirty jobs. You cut your teeth in the what, the laundromat

business, right? You were focused on the most unglamorous jobs. So when does that focus lose its inherent value based on circumstantial changes? Like if the herd is already going there. it. Where's the herd going? I think the question also is, like, do you think that you created this movement? And so if you hadn't done it, would somebody else have done it? Or did your unique curiosity actually spring this? Well, my unique arrogance would require me to say, oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this. But the real wheel is much larger, and it spends a lot slower. And for me, anyway, one of the big lessons is that there are no new ideas. Very, very, very few, really. But a lot of old ideas feel new when they come back around at just the right time.

You know, when I look at Charles Carault and George Plimpton and Studs Terkel and Paul Harvey, these guys told stories in a way that I admire, but almost nobody's doing it today. And so I got a toehold. But who knows where that toehold would have been or will be 10 years from now? Nobody's got a crystal ball. Yeah, you know, I tend to be an optimist. I think pessimists sound smart and optimists make money. And so, you know, it's very easy to get on the internet and bemoan things and you sound very intelligent while you do it. It's actually sort of hard to get people to believe in themselves.

It's seen as lowbrowbrow, you know, rose-colored glasses, sort of they must be trying to pitch you something. In my opinion, if you're obsessively curious about something, even if the entire world is moving towards it, your obsessive curiosity is going to uncover some weird aspect of that area that no matter what is happening in the world, you can find a unique lens. And I think we can see that right now on the internet because Lord knows, you can go viral and you can find your crew obsessed about anything. You know, there are so many weirdos on this planet that I think the real unlock is your, I saw this tweet the other day and I can't remember who to attribute it to, but it wasn't my words. It was me. It was like, but it was basically, it was like insanity is a moat in a lot of ways.

Yeah, and I think curiosity is a moat, an obsession is a moat. And it's like, you don't have to be the smartest. You just have to go, I didn't say, hey, the whole world's going left, the world, I want to go right. Yeah. I basically said, whole world's going there. I find this kind of uninteresting. This really interests me, and then let's see what shakes out. And I'll probably be able to find something because nobody else will spend more time there.

It's back to the relativism I was talking about before. You know, you're out with your best girlfriends and you're having a nice camping trip, and the bear comes upon you and starts chasing all. all of you. Well, you'll never outrun the bear, but maybe you can outrun your friends, in which case you live. Now, talk about pessimism versus optimism. How do you measure yourself, right? Yeah. Well, my dad was actually a bear hunter, and that was always his line. He's a little, sorry, dad, but he's got a little gut. He's not a fast dude. And so when he would go up bear hunting in Alaska, we'd always give him crap beforehand and say you got to get in shape a little bit.

And his line was always, he was a guide. And his line was always that, He chose his clients very carefully because all he needed to do was out with the client, not the bear. But he has a lot of great lines that I think remind me of this, for instance, you know, this idea of if they're not interesting sober, don't drink until they get interesting. And so I think about that with life too. Like if I'm not just naturally curious about this thing, if you're not just naturally curious about something, don't do it. Because somebody else will be naturally curious. And then they're going to win.

They're going to beat you. Yeah. Because curiosity always wins, actually. Dude, it always wins. It's the secret hat. If I had to choose between high IQ, pedigree, background, Eastern high school, I would actually choose every single day of the week. Somebody who was curious, hungry, and obsessed, and maybe a little weird. Why? Because I think most of work to me, actually, I saw this from Elon Musk the other day. They were like, you know what Elon does? He goes to his company, whatever company it is, every single week with one move, which is, I'm going to come there and I'm going to figure out the hardest problem that exists that week in this business and I'm going to try to solve it. I'm going to do that for every single company, 52 weeks a year continuously. I'm not going to like mess around at the margins. I'm going to go for the hardest problem. And the only way you get to the hardest problem is by asking a ton of questions and by being pretty relentless on the answers to those questions. I don't think you have to have

the answers. You just have to be willing to ask the really hard questions, which is why you were great in dirty jobs and what you do podcasting. You ask weird, interesting, asymmetric questions. It's also the key to investing well. It's like the worst investors I've ever met, are the ones that seem the smartest because they want to tell you all the things that they know and they don't want to find the truth. The best investors are the ones that look kind of dumb. They're like, I don't understand that.

Explain it to me like I'm five. And that question is such an unlock in life because it's like, I don't think I'm dumb by not understanding this. I think you're going to prove how smart to me you are by explaining it really simply. Let me see if I can prove how smart I am to you right now with the question that belies everything you just said.

I probably should have asked it at the very top, But I do appreciate an asymmetrical stream of consciousness, but I also want the viewer to understand how you did this. Or that's a tricky way to frame it, isn't it? Like, isn't the world filled with people right now who are just sitting by waiting to tell you how they did it, as opposed to just explain what happened to them? Oh, that's a good way to think about it, actually.

Somewhere in between, you know, because you're a very intentional person and you've done awfully well, but can you just tell me? me the quick CV. I hate to ask you, but I want people to understand the laundromats and the contrarian way of thinking and how you somehow wound up on Wall Street only to kind of maybe leave it. Yeah, well, I started out in finance because I thought it was the thing that you did. Like if you were smart and you were going to make money and be accomplished, which was important to me. My parents didn't come from a lot of money, blue collar background. My mom was a special education teacher for 30

years. And I thought, you get a good job, you climb up the corporate ladder, you wear a suit, and that's how you show your parents that you appreciate all the shit that they did for you. So anyway, so I did that for a long time, climbed up a bunch of finance companies. But what I realized pretty quickly is like, do you ever like get in a job and look down the hallway at like the end of the boss, you know, the boss has his office at the end of the hall? And you look at their life and you look at their salary and you look at their family and you just think like, you couldn't can pay me enough money to become that guy. Like, I don't care what it is.

I don't care how big the plane. I don't want that life. And so at some point, I kind of woke up a little bit. And I was like, oh, I don't want to become, you know, divorced three times, not like my kids. And feel like I haven't actually touched something that I've built. I just like zeros and ones online buy sell, buy sell. And so at that point, I was too big of a wuss because I was making a lot of money. Who are you working for?

So that would have been when I was working for State Street. Oh, boy. Yeah, big huge asset manager. So there's State Street, there's Vanguard, and there's... BlackRock. Yeah. Yeah, three of them own 80% of the S&P 500. Isn't that wild?

People have sat right where you're sitting, who have written books that really look at that exact statistic and prognosticate something fairly grim. Yeah, I think they're right. And people counter argument to that, right, and say, well, that's just passive investments. And so, hey, they're exchange trade of funds. They're not actively buying these companies. but Bill McNabb let us a little slip go. He was the CEO of State Street when I was there

and said, well, actually, we're very active in our governance, which is a fancy way of saying control. And so they're active in their control of these companies, which they have. And they're holding pensions, which means, and there's ESG, and of course there's DEI, and now all kinds of, yeah, activist agendas are being foisted upon people who really would dissoning. dismiss it out of hand, they just don't understand that so much of their future is invested in the

very funds that McNabb is controlling. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid.

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But, you know, and maybe you've had other people say this too, but I was at a lot of the big bad boys, right? Goldman Sachs State Street. I was also at Vanguard. How am I? I'm sorry, but God, I mean, Jack Bogle's books, did you ever read enough? Oh, yeah, and I met, I met Bogle. Did you really? Yeah, he used to sit at the cafeteria every single day at the same table. He was a hero to me. Yeah. I don't know that Vanguard is, well, yeah, I do. They're not the same company. They can't be. No, they're not. They're not from a couple different ways, too, by the way.

Vanguard is, I mean, sorry, hopefully we never get sponsored by Vanguard. because they're not going to like this. But I think it's a place where meritocracy and dreams go to die. It's like socialism, but in a finance company. You know, I might have a shot, Chuck, on this podcast, but there's no way they're sponsoring hers. No, no chance. What's your current podcast called again?

Yeah, the Big Deal podcast. The Big Deal, sponsored by anyone but Vanguard. Right, exactly. Probably going to get sued. But they, you know, I remember just being there, and it's a great place to go if you just want to coast and not work that hard for a really long time. And that's cool for some people. That just wasn't me. I was kind of a psychopath. And so I went to Goldman and where psychopaths go. To live. Yeah, exactly. But I only lasted, you know, two years there.

That's a whole different story. But, you know, I worked at all those big firms. And I saw firsthand, man, incentives matter a lot. Sure. And the incentives in those companies are just so big and backwards, in my opinion. I actually think Goldman's. I think Goldman's the most honest. Was Lloyd still calling the shots when you were there? Yeah, met Lloyd too. I was a little piano, I was nobody, but yeah, Lloyd actually claimed to fame with Lloyd is that he comes down. We were in something called G-SAM at the time selling these private equity investments, and he comes to our office. I think I only got invited because I was double checkbox. I was like a chick and a Latina. So like, let her in,

you know? So we're around this table. I don't remember what we're talking about. It's in, would have been like 2009, 2010. So they're picketing outside. My grandma's calling wondering how I could work at the, what did they call it, the succubus squid? Yeah. Rolling Stone. Yep.

That was nice. That was a good one. Nice alliteration. Yeah, exactly. And so we're around this table talking about something. And I said, well, you know, what we're doing over here? I start explaining it. And Lloyd goes, what do you do again here?

And he actually didn't even know almost what our entire division did because it was so tiny compared to, yeah, compared to Goldman's main business. So, you know, but I think that they, we don't need to stand up for Goldman, but I think that they got a raw rub. They actually had a really clean balance sheet. I think the government pressured them to take cash and they didn't need it. Yeah. As opposed to Alan Malawi and Ford and said, you know what? You keep your money.

I'm going to keep my salary. Yeah. You guys keep your money. And if this company can't succeed on its own merit, we don't deserve to be in business. I fell in love with that guy a little bit. Yeah. And I was working for him. at the time.

What? Yeah, we hadn't met. Well, I was making commercials for the Ford Motor Company. And it was one of those moments. I'll never forget it. My partner, Mary, and I were watching the news

when he said that, right there. I can still see the three of them there. Like these CEOs being humbled, their legs just took out from under them. You will take a dollar a year in pay and in return, we'll bail your company out. And they come to Allen at the end. He's like, now, I'm going to keep my money.

And you tell the taxpayers to hang on to theirs. I mean, chills. Honestly, I just gave myself goosebumps. Because two years later, some bean counter came in and figured the value of that comment was worth over a billion dollars in earned PR. Over a billion. So I know this point is somewhere lurking under everything. talking about, but in the end, whether it's Goldman State, Vanguard, Black Rock, Ford, Chevy,

somebody at some point is going to grab you by the lapels and shake you until the truth of who you are comes out. It's such a good point. You know, one positive of having these giant institutions today that I never thought I would say about like a Black Rock is the ability for the U.S. to use them internationally. So I'll be curious how that shakes out. I feel like for the most part, people like Black Rock and Blackstone have been used against us in a lot of ways. To me, it's like criminal, that you can have Black Rock go out and we give them all of our money, right? Through ETFs and pensions and all the things that we invest in. So you give them your money.

They take your money. They sit it on their balance sheet. That means that they have, one, a huge pool of your capital to go out and buy your single family homes. So let's buy up neighborhoods all over the place. But it's not just that. Because they have all this capital here, they get decreased interest rates. And so even if they were going to pay the same price for the house as you were, which they're not because they have way more money than you, they get a lower interest rate. So they could actually pay the same price as you or more and make more on the deal.

And then it's worse than that because they have what's called securities lending so they can take all the assets they have and double them. And we can't. So I think there's some real unfairness of what the institutions have done to average Americans that we've got to push back on. We just don't know it. I mean, we can't see it. There's so many layers. I'm going to get back to you in a second with the laundromat stuff because I need to understand how you went from this to that.

But you mentioned private equity. And I saw something the other day. You sent it to me, Chuck. Totally freaked me out. What was that? Private equity has lent, apparently, an awful lot of money to an awful lot of businesses with something that's like a back channel adjustable rate.

Right? It's very similar to what happened in 2008 with the banks, except this is funeral homes and nursing homes and businesses everywhere. I just read Joanne Fabrics. It's basically going out of business. Now, they've only got 100 stores or so, and 97 of them are profitable. How can you go out of business with all that profitability? It must be the rates are going up and those loans are come and due. Yeah, you know, they do something called asset stripping, which is, you know, they did it to Toys R Us famously. Toys R Us was profitable.

Most of its stores were profitable. Toys were us. Exactly. The stores were profitable and what they basically do, and I'm not familiar with Joanne, so I can't talk to that exact one, but in the case of Toys R Us, they buy the company,

then they strip out the assets, aka the real estate, and like a little triangle, basically. The assets sit on the right side, the company sits on the left, but they basically start making the companies pay rent for those assets that they have, and they lever up all of their assets

in order for them to take as much profit out of the business as possible. But then they have what's called a debt to leverage ratio, which basically just means I owe way more money than this company is valued at today. Are these like CLOs? Some of them could be. Like the collateralized loan obligation. So all of these esoteric instruments are being cobbled together into the same unholy bullia base that I remember from 15 years ago. And they're finding their way into pension funds. Yes. The thing that scared me about this is that there's no way the American people are going to stand by and watch another giant bailout of banks. I don't think that can happen. But these aren't banks. These are pension funds.

We're talking about grandma, our parents. Those would be the people to lose everything. I just really wonder if, I don't know. Well, I mean, think about this. So, you know, when we started talking about the fact that we don't own things in America anymore, that we are not business owners by and large, then the next question should really be, where do our businesses go? Like what happened to them? So who owns them now?

And one is public companies, the big three, like we talked about. Some of them are big institutions, strategics like Starbucks that owns all the coffee shops. But the sneaky one is private equity firms. In 2000, they owned about 4% of all U.S. businesses. By 2020, that was 20%. So almost one out of five businesses, in the U.S., depending on how you measure the statistic,

are owned by private equity. So people are owning fewer and fewer and fewer businesses. PE is owning more and more and more businesses. Exactly. That can't be a coincidence. And it's happening at the same time as you see this a lot right now. You're seeing companies go public on the stock market a lot later in their stage.

Well, that means that they need money still to fund these companies. So where's that coming from? It's coming from the private markets, aka these private equity companies. So essentially, there's a couple of reasons that's not great. One is most people can't invest in private equity unless you're rich, a.k. an accredited investor, you know, their government classifications. And then that means that

most of the money that is made by companies historically that used to go public when you and I could invest in it, oh, Google's public now? Okay, now that they're public, I can invest in it. I could have that big rise, right? And I could make money along with everybody else. Well, if now Google goes public 10 years later, then who takes that delta? Who takes the money that would have been made? Well, a lot of that's private equity now. And so, again, I don't think these guys are like, they're not like criminal lizards as far as I'm aware. They're normal humans. Sucububis squids. Yeah, exactly. But there is some incentives that I think we got to get right. And these are the things when you're a small business and you get a chance to sell to private equity

because you've been doing this for 20 years and you're tired. Like, you do it. And so I get it. Well, a lot of people listening do understand this more or less. But I think a lot of people also, their eyes start to glaze over because there is over top of it like a patina of unreality. Yeah. You know, you just hear all these terms and all of these things. And for the average person, you know, it's why back to Dirty Jobs, I loved it when it started because it was kind of a leader in this area called reality TV. back when reality actually met something real. So tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth,

but it feels to some extent like your time at Goldman, your time on Wall Street, you're just surrounded by these intangibles, these esoteric ideas, these instruments of investments and all of these acronyms which make the average person want to just throw themselves off a roof.

How'd you wind up buying a laundromat? Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the things, finance people and finance in general, they want you to be confused. They don't want you to understand basis points and expense ratio and, you know, R.O.I and all of this. Why? Because then you have to pay them a percentage of your money for them to do the investing for you. And so there's a reason that you like, your brain goes, and it shuts off when people start talking about finance and money. There's a real reason. It's a barrier to entry. And so once I got behind the curtain, and again, I'm not that

smart. I used to be a journalist. And so all I was good at was asking a lot of questions. So I asked a lot of questions. And once I figured out, I realized, wait a second, what do these guys do at like a base level? What do fancy Wall Street people do? They take somebody else's idea and entrepreneur's idea and they buy it with other people's money, a k. A.K. yours and mine and pensions are a bank. That's it.

So there's a profitable business that somebody else created. They didn't. They use somebody else's money, not theirs, to buy it. I'm like, wait a second. Why couldn't I do that, but like a lot smaller? You know, that seems like that I could understand that. And then you go to like the easiest, simplest, grandma could understand a business possible, which to me was a laundromat. I'm like, dirty clothes, clean clothes, quarters, not very many employees.

I call them gateway drug businesses because it's your like, it's your little ease in to this game of business. A taste. Exactly. And first taste is free. I am a business drug dealer, yes. Okay. And so I bought my first little laundromat with this idea. I'm like, okay, how can I spend not that much money for me at that time?

it was 100K. And I'm going to buy this business. How old were you? I was probably early 20s. So you know. So you're weird. I mean, you understand. I mean, I'm just thinking of all the women I know in their early 20s

who scraped together 100K to buy a laundromat. Yeah, none. Well, and I was embarrassed about it at the time because that didn't seem cool. It was cool working on Wall Street and it was cool doing these quote-unquote big deals. And then I'm like, oh, I know what a dead rat smells like, you know, now. And I remember very well the first moment walking into that laundromat.

And there is a real, there is a smell to an old moldy laundromat that I will never forget. You could put me there and I blindfold me and I would know. Ironically, there's a similar ode to a car wash. Right? And you would think it'd be like all like detergent and suds and soap. It's not. There's something else in there. Something of the grease, I think.

Yeah. I think so. And, well, we won't digress. you and I could probably compare smells with the things we've done in business. Well, I got time. But so I bought it because I did have that moment where I hated my job and I hated my boss and I hated myself a little bit. And I wanted to get out.

But I had no entrepreneurial chops, like no idea for what to do next. This can't be glazed over. You're still in your early 20s at this point. Yeah. See, this is the thing that people can relate to, that life of quiet desperation moment when you wake up and you're just, you're not pleased with who you are, where you're going, or what you're doing. And those three things combined can get heavy. And, you know, I think it's hard for a lot of people just to shake all that often, right? Yeah, well, and we lie to ourselves. Like, you lie to

yourself that, like, when I achieve this next thing or this next thing or this next thing, then I'll be okay. And I had the kind of beautiful fortune of achieving a few things that I thought were my peak early. Like, I was pretty successful in finance kind of early. And I was like, oh, I'm still miserable and I hate this. And so when that happened is when I was like, what's the exit plan? Like I got to get out of here. And this was, so I would have been mid-20s because then I went through my mid-life crisis. I got divorced.

I was married at the time. I got divorced and I started buying up these little businesses. Kids at this point? No kids. Okay. And, you know, and wish him well. Good guy, just like two different life plans. And so I bought this first business and I thought it was horrifying and I didn't tell

my parents and I didn't tell anybody because I was pretty sure I was going to fail. And then it kind of worked and it started making some money. And then I was like, well, we could just keep doing that. So we bought a few more of them. This is the laundromat? La laundromat. What was it called? Man, that's a good question. I think it was called C's, but not like my C, like S-E-A-S, like that. And I need to, you know, when you go back and you think, too, before there was social, like, I wish I had more pictures of it. and I wish I could show the journey. You probably have them because you're on TV.

What the picture? Oh, I'm the worst at this, but you're right. If I want to be reminded of something I did 20 years ago or even 30, I can find it on YouTube. That's wild. It's beyond wild. Because that wasn't normal for everybody else. Like we didn't, you know, I had an iPhone, but.

No, it's not normal for anybody. There's a very unique feeling. And I only share it because I think other people will experience it as a result of different things, but I can tell you, when you come home late at night and you've had a couple of pops before you go to bed, and for some reason you're on YouTube and you find video of yourself doing something that you have no recollection of doing.

Now, in my case, it was selling stuff in the middle of the night on QVC. Oh, yeah. In like 1990. And when you see the undeniable proof that you have done a... That's you. Those words are coming out of your mouth, but you have no idea. what that guy who is you is about to do next.

It's very unsettling. Oh, it is. Well, and, you know, I kind of hold by this idea that if three years ago you doesn't make you cringe a little, you're probably not doing it, right? Like, you got to keep leveling up the game. Right. So that's how I talk myself to sleep each night. But, you know, I do remember thinking back then, like, I hope nobody finds out that I

own this thing, you know? Sure. And then we bought a few more. And I partnered with a dude who was the, handy person because I was basically a glorified finance here at the time and he had done real estate before so he kind of knew the gist so this is what I talked to people about today it's like you don't always have to know the thing sometimes the answer is a who not a how you know sure sometimes the answer is not a startup it's a business you buy and so if you're not as smart as I am you know

are not smart like me you don't have a brilliant idea you don't have a ton of cash you don't have massive skills like okay then we could borrow somebody else's D-Dood-Dood-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page

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as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just $3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk Did you quit your job

before you bought the laundromat? Absolutely not. So you hedged. Neither did I tell my boss at first. I do remember at one point. You didn't tell anybody. No, no, no. I just kept it super quiet.

But I kept my job, I mean, for like years and years and years and years, even after I had bought a ton. You had to pry my salary out of my cold dead hands at the end because I was so freaked out about could this thing survive. We are so different, but we are the same people. Yeah. I mean, every...

You jumped? Oh, no. I hedged. First of all, I thought about QVC for a long time, like you thought about the laundromat. I didn't tell anybody about it. It was a thing I did early in my career. It was just a rung on the ladder. It wasn't until later that I realized how important a rung it was.

And to the point where I'm happy to talk about it. now. You're doing the same thing with your unglamorous businesses. And for me, I was hosting Evening Magazine when I sold the idea for Dirty Jobs, but I still wasn't convinced it was going to work. I stayed at evening for another year. Yep. So, yeah, I love Risk. And there's so many books out there written by people who assumed a big giant chunk of it. But in the end, man, that's not really me. I actually hate Risk. I don't like it at all, which my parents don't agree with me on this, but deep down, I don't like it. I believe in the monkey bar strategy, which is like, I'm not going to jump to the next one until I got my hand on one.

It's basic. And I think that's okay for humans to do that. I actually think these days, everybody online tells you like, go all in, burn the bridges, sleep in the garage. Burn all the ships. Yeah, I'm like, why? Like, it could take you back if you need it. That seems inefficient. And so I don't think you should feel bad at all for wherever you are using the resources that you have and tiptoeing a little bit. Now, my problem is if you don't tiptoe, you got to make some forward movement. And I do think that at some point,

the universe tries to tell you a thing or two, and then if you don't listen, it kicks you right in the gut. At some point. And that point typically is the middle of the lake. Yeah. You know, I very nearly called my business that, to tell you the truth.

That's a good line. Labrat became the working title. But for a while there, it was middle of the lake, because what do you do if you're not sure you can make it across? Well, if you're going to turn back, don't wait until you get to the middle. Yep. Very true, though.

Because it will paralyze you. Yeah. Right? There's always that point. Yeah. I don't care if it's a bad marriage, a bad job, a bad date. You know, there might be a moment in the middle of the dinner on that date where you're like, you know something? We're this close to getting to the middle.

And I know I don't want to get to the other side. I'm going to go powder my nose and never come back. Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you something embarrassing. But, you know, I really wanted the marriage to work back in the day. I think marriage is so important. I'm married now, and it's like, it's my favorite thing in the world. Like, this is so fun.

That's that Chris guy I met? Yeah, that's it. He seems okay. Yeah, I like him. I mean, you know, for a Navy guy. Yeah. He's amazing. And we have the best time, and I don't think I could do as much as I do without a really

strong foundation, which is what he is. But back in the day, I wanted to work so hard. I worked for so long going through all these therapy and whatever. But eventually, I had to put a deal. date on my calendar. And I was like, if we haven't figured out by this date, then that's my, either, you know, you keep going forever or you get off the bridge. And so I actually, now we have a line of my companies. It's called calendar in, which is like when you have those big, hairy decisions that you don't want to make that you know you need to, put a date on the calendar.

And then you keep your most important promise, the one to yourself. And I try to do that now. Promise made is a debt unpaid. Yeah, that's a good line. Sounds like that's for the Bible. No, it's Robert's Service, the cremation of Sam McGee. Interesting. Yeah. What is going on up there? You got like an encyclopedia up there, don't you? I don't have any original thoughts, sadly.

But I do glom on to a lot of things I heard. Me too. Well, you already had three interesting quotes, all of which you attributed to your dad, which is also to your credit. But there you are, buying laundromats, not losing sight of the shore from which you left. You're not yet to the middle of the lake. When do you let go? Well, I actually had to get push up.

of the boat, so I didn't let go. I got pushed out of the boat two times. I do think if you're an entrepreneur, you're actually just pretty unemployable, which is to the point that I got. Management challenge. Is that what you call it? No, that's what I've been called.

Mike, you're a nice enough guy, but here at our particular system, you've been deemed a management challenge, and we were thinking it would be awesome if you just waited in the car for the rest of your life. Yeah, that's me. I call myself unemployable.

Now we have like a little sticker, basically, that I like it. I wear it with pride. But, you know, back then I was like, you know, when you're young and you just think you know everything. And so I give my bosses some credit because I was really like, you guys are messing this up. I know you have a billion dollar business, but let me tell you what I know. Now, I do think I was right in some of it. My guess was we were going to do better on the internet with investing and getting investors and finding deals than we were, you know, going to steak dinners in mahogany boardroom Eiffel Towers. And they didn't agree with me. And it was okay. The CEO at the time was amazing. But he did the best thing ever for me, which is I often think

when you get fired, my favorite line is I'm sorry and congratulations because it's a great fucking gift, actually, if you take it. And so he didn't fire me, but he basically said, Cody, I'm tired of you pushing me on this. We're going left. If you want to keep rowing right, get your own boat. You can't do it on mine. And I was like, that's fair. And so, So I left the company. But I was such a wuss that I went and got other partners. I didn't think I could do it by myself. And I wish, if you could do one thing differently,

I think it's like almost every time you can bet on yourself more often than you feel comfortable. And so I didn't do it that second time. And so it had to happen again. So I got pushed out like halfway through the lake and then again, you know, like two quarters through the lake. And finally that last one, I said, all right, I get it universe. Like I need to do something by myself and see if I could stand on my own two feet. And that's when I fully took all the money that I had been making,

and I invested in businesses all by myself. I bought them out entirely. And then eventually I started yapping about it on the internet. So wait, you had a nest egg. Yeah. And what percentage of that nest egg did you invest in these unclamorous businesses? Well, I like to call my nest egg your FU Fund. And I think it is just there for that moment where your temperature gauge gets so high

that you're like, I literally cannot tolerate another moment of ridiculousness. And at which that point, you pull the trigger. And so that, I had invested it kind of throughout. So I had some, I might have had five or six businesses on the side at that time. And I had replaced my salary with this business income. But I still was like, you know, when you run a business, you could still have a month where your expenses are so high, you wipe yourself out. And so even though I was making more, I was like, you know, my math isn't always math hang correctly. Are they all laundromats at this point?

No, there's sort of car wash in there. There was a cross-border trade company. It's kind of a weird thing, but I ran a business in Latin America for a while. So there was some diversification, and it wasn't that thoughtful. It was kind of like I collected them, like whatever was around me, and it kind of made sense, and I got a guy here and a guy there. And then I finally started putting it into hypergear. And when I left that last company, I doubled down on laundromats, I doubled down on car washes, and then I started talking about it on the internet.

And was that your own podcast, or were you making the rounds talking about? I mean, it's a great story. You know, it's the, you left a sure thing. Yeah, well, I didn't have a podcast. Our podcast is brand new. It's only like eight months old. And so I didn't have that. It was just a newsletter.

I think there are two types of people, people who think by talking and people who think by writing. And I'm a think by writing. I really like to get my ideas on paper. So I started writing a newsletter in 2020 when everybody was kind of going crazy, I thought. When you had time. Yeah, I did.

Yeah. Before that, I was running around checking on the businesses, buying more of them. And so in 2020, I started my little newsletter called Contrarian Thinking. And the idea was, why can't we question anything anymore? Why is it not okay for us to talk about stuff?

Oh, because you'll be a denier if you do. Yeah, that was big. You know, my husband was still in the military at the time. and so there was a lot of that going on. And I just wholeheartedly disagreed with a lot I saw going on in the world. I mean, before I was investing in these businesses, I ran a business in Latin America. And so I have been, I mean, we had a business in Argentina

that when Christina Fernandez nationalized all the companies there, that was the president, she took my whole business. And what we did overnight became illegal there. What were you doing? We were selling third-party investments in money market funds. So it was basically just she wanted to keep all the money in Argentinian currency, and she didn't want to have offshore funds. So she made offshore funds illegal. See, that doesn't sound like a laundromat to me. No, it was as it was

finance back in day. It might be laundering, but not a laundromat. That's what she tried to make it. If you invested outside of Argentina, you were not a patriot. So anyway, so I had seen governments do overreach before, like live and felt what that looked like and gotten to know my friends who lost everything. And Argentina is a sad country. in many ways or was back then. And so when I saw that in 2020, I was like, let's talk about some stuff online. And that's when we created contrarian thinking as a newsletter.

And at first I started thinking about, how do we just talk to people about asking the right questions? That's what we do in investing. And then I realized everybody thinks that their question asking is good. Nobody thinks they're bad at this. So I said, well, what's the Trojan horse to get people to think differently? And I think the Trojan horse to get people to think differently is to give them something they're really.

want, which is money. So we actually started talking about how do we make money? How is money key to financial freedom? Because I think when you have skin in the game and you have something to lose, then you're a little bit more thoughtful on the actions you take. You don't burn down the house you own, right? Sure. You build it. And so that was my idea on why we started talking publicly because I ideologically think the world's a little bit better if all of us have a little bit more money and a little bit more ownership and that maybe we could talk about that. When did you feel like you did it. I mean, so like you're writing a newsletter, you've got multiple businesses. I don't even know how many. People start paying attention to your newsletter. You start making the rounds.

And now I've seen pictures of you in really large events and lots of very enthusiastic people with that lean and hungry look applauding with gleams in their eyes as they sit there waiting for the knowledge to wash over them so they can have the playbook on how to how to what, become an owner. Is that basically what you're all about? I want them to become an owner. I think what they want is control. They want control over their lives. They feel like other people have made decisions for them.

They feel like they can't figure out how to make money. They feel like housing's more expensive than ever. And my job, I got fired from it, and it's not keeping up with inflation. And I have no control. I am like sort of at everybody else's mercy. And the way I think to push back on that is to become an owner. So we call it owner nation. And the idea is, how do we get people?

to own something. I mean, if you think about it in AI, if AI makes humans less relevant, in a lot of ways, they take our jobs away from us, what is a tangible asset that is hard to take away from you? Well, it starts becoming brick and mortar businesses, it starts becoming real estate. It's like, I think we're in an asset ownership race and we don't even realize it. An asset ownership race. What are the assets in question? We need to own things. We need to own businesses. We need to own real estate. We We need to own infrastructure because in the future, we might not get paid for our labor the same way.

And I think about it like, let's say some of your dirty jobs, the plumber. You have row works, which I love. We need more of that. We need more trade school graduates. What's then the next step? Okay. You can't probably be the guy holding the drill or holding the hammer forever. So what happens as you go through time?

You need to learn leadership and finance in order to become an open. Why can't more plumbers be the ones to buy their businesses instead of private equity guys? I bet the plumber who understands the business and is interested to grow could grow it better than me from Goldman. And so that is where I want to get people. I want to get them, you get them trades and skills that they need and society needs to build. And then I hope they overlay that on, okay, now that I know I can build something with my hands, can I build a business around it too? around it too.

We're in violent agreement. For me, I'm a slave to a kind of chronology. And I talk to Dave Ramsey about this. I've talked to a lot of people about, you know, financial literacy and where that ought to live in the hierarchy of entrepreneurial needs. So with MicroWorks, we do start with, look, if you have a work ethic that we're persuaded is genuine. And if you're willing to learn a skill that's in demand, then I'm,

I believe that's the first collective box you have to check. But it's odd how often the analysis stops right there. Because the next question is now, even before you say, can you think like an entrepreneur? Are you interested in that? I ask, are you willing to travel? Because that is adjacent to entrepreneurship, right? And there is a thing going on now in our country. It's shocking.

People have become so sedentary and so resuscary. And so resistant, you know, this is the country, this is manifest destiny. You know, the whole thing was based on a willingness to go to where the opportunity is or the work. And so if you've got a work ethic and a skill that's in demand and you're willing to go to where the work is, then you're probably real close to being an entrepreneur. You just might not know it yet. That's why I wanted to talk to you, frankly, because what's the, how do you know when you're at that point in the lake crossing? the entrepreneurial lake. When do you know? Because look, end of rant, but a lot of people,

the more things you own, the more things own you. Keep your life simple. Do you really want all the headaches that come from ownership? And oh, by the way, eight to nine out of ten small businesses fail. So all those things, I believe, are still true. So what's the case? Well, I think that I think you're right. The problem is, why take the risk? The very risk that I know you're adverse to. Do do do do do do do. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird.

It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first.

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Odds are you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. A couple things. One, it is miserable.

It'll take longer than you think. It'll be harder than you think you're going to wish that you had never done this game of ownership before until the very end at which point it'll be worth it. And you won't be able to go back and you won't really want to. And the way you know this is look at the people who have taken the risk over time, who have built the business, who have jumped out in the middle of the lake and kept swimming. How many of them go back to a job? That's what I always chuckle about on the Internet. These guys are like, don't tell people that anybody can own a business. It's really hard out here.

I'm like, great, quit. Quit and let me employ you. You won't. Why? Because it sucks, but it's awesome at the same time. It's terrible and it's worth it. You can't jump out of the boat too soon. Otherwise, the minute it gets tough, you'll just swim back because you can.

Jump out in the middle. And what's the point in turning back? You might as well keep going. You have a quote from your dad on your website. And I think it's something like you don't know you're in the game until you come home one evening and sit there with your head in your hands despairing about all you've done. Yeah, isn't that nice? I mean, I don't know if that's reverse psychology or what. I love it and I understand it.

I understand it because it's like back to curiosity. Why is curiosity so important? Because you can't have it without humility. Why is humility so important? Because the minute you lose that, the minute you're going to become complacent, you're going to make a stupid mistake. Whether you're hunting for bear

or trying to buy a laundromat, I think. I mean, I'm in agreement. I remember I called my dad one night when I had a business that I thought was going to go under. And it was one that was a little bit more public. People would have known I was associated with it. I was really embarrassed. I had let some really stupid things happen

and let some people run the business that I shouldn't have. And it was nobody's fault, but mine. And I called him and it was like the middle of the night and I don't even know if I don't think I told anybody else about it. And I told him about this and he kind of chuckled because he's a long time entrepreneur and he said that line to me. He said, you're not really in the game until you've sat head in the hands in the dark on the couch with no idea what to do next. And I remember that line often because that means you're just in the game. And I think expectation is half of happiness.

And if you know that at some point you're going to have that difficulty, you just go, okay, I know when I go to the gym, it's going to hurt. Like, it's going to hurt before I get fit. And I think that's the same thing with entrepreneurship. And if it was easy, for the record, it's not that everybody would do it. If it was easy, it wouldn't be worth it. I don't think you can spell rich without risk. Like, you have to take risk if you want to get financial freedom. I don't know of any other way. Maybe one day you will, but I actually, I don't know of any other way. I'm sorry, just noticed Chuck is producing here. He's put your website up on our monitor. Look at this. Your mission is to create one million financially free humans through business ownership. Yep, that's the plan. We keep a little tracker too.

That's why I like Dave, Framsey. Oh, yeah, he's all about tracking. Yeah, and you know what I love? Man, that man lives his mission. I'm sure he told you, he has a $600 million piece of real estate there for buildings, not a dollar in debt to build it. And then I was like, come on. Show me the credit cards.

Like, you're not running this thing really on debit cards? No, no, he is. You know? And then I talked to his team about, well, you know, what do you guys do if like this business needs some cash? And that one they said, no, no, no, independent. We run the speed of cash that we make. This is so interesting to me. And again, not to get too sidetracked, but it's like debt.

I have this thing called a sweat pledge. Everybody who applies for a work ethic scholarship has to sign one. That's it on the wall right there. It's that blue thing. Yeah, I've seen this. Somewhere on there, it says, you know, I'd rather live in a tent and eat beans than own something I simply can't afford. You know, it's the only four-letter word growing up in my household that was really off limits. Interesting.

Right. But you talk to Robert Kiyosaki, you talk to a Grant Cardone, there's so many different people out there who would be like, well, wait, wait a second. And if you're trying to grow your business and they're very debt friendly. And so I guess my question here is, you know, I don't know how many people are listening. And I don't know what they need to hear. And I wonder if you worry from time to time. And I've asked Dave the same question. Aren't there people who would do very well to assume a certain type of debt under certain circumstances?

And aren't some of those people likely listening right now when you talk about the fact that you would never do? that and do you worry sometimes. The advice business is tricky and consequential. Well, it's a good point which you make, which is I try to tell often what has worked for me. And then I say, you got to do you. The only thing I know for sure is that it worked in my case and some stuff didn't. So I think it is important. This advice business like you talk about is a funny game. On one hand, I think it's kind of criminal. There are all these people that have had massive success and made all this money, they don't share how. I kind of think we should.

I think right about the time when you no longer want to talk about money, when you don't want to tell people how you got there because it feels kind of gross and icky is probably when you should because young Cody would like to know, like, I want to know how to do that. Don't tell me to manifest and, you know, glitter rainbow my way to this. Like I don't, like, tell me for, don't tell me you got lucky and you just worked really hard. Like, give me the path. And so I share a lot because I'm like, man, young Cody would be like,

all right, let me sift through some of this, but trust that I can handle whatever truth you have. And so that's where we default. We default on the side of like, we'll overshare. This is exactly how I did it. It worked back then. I don't know if it'll work today for you, but here you go, if you want to try. It's just so confounding to know that there's so many different roadmaps to get you to the same basic place. I go back to Jack Bogle.

I go back to Burton, who's name, Malkiel? Oh, yeah. A random walk down Wall Street, right? Even Henry Haslett, right? Economics in One Lesson. You know, all like, it's like those are guides. Yeah. Right?

But there are a lot of peas and carrots in these things, right? There's a lot of like be patient. There's a lot of, oh, look, if you want to invest, you know, the intelligent investor, another great book. Benjamin Graham. Ben, I mean, right? So it's, this isn't mysterious. Watch your fees. Yep.

Invest for the long term. When you see the cost of a company get cheap that you've invested in, celebrate the sale and get more. Don't sell for God's sakes. That just makes you a trader. All of these things, I believe to be true. And there you are in this PE adjacent world working for big investment banks. whose entire edifices have been built upon fees and things and so forth. So it's like, it's confusing out there.

Here's my problem. I just, I kind of go back to just, like, explain it to me with napkin math. So I do like what Buffett said. Buffett said, I think it was Bezos that asked him. He's like, hey, why do you tell everybody your strategy and what you're doing? And Buffett said, because nobody wants to get rich slow. And I always love that line. And so we have it in the office, which is like get rich slow, this idea of like, you know,

15 years is okay to play the game. The problem is, I think a lot of people, Buffett hates death. Like Google Warren Buffett debt and see all the quotes he has about him. Here's the problem. Buffett's got a shit ton of debt. Yeah. So sometimes I think we've got to watch what people do, not just what they say, because it sounds good and, you know, is a better thing for a PR cycle. I think there's some really good debt to put on. The problem is, my barometer is, if you can't tell the difference and explain it to somebody smarter and richer than you on why this debt is better than that debt,

you probably shouldn't do it. And so I think the problem lies with people do personal guarantees on things that they don't have to create a life that they don't really need to go back to the quote from Fight Club. And so that's my line. It's like, in most games in life, finance and money isn't that,

It doesn't take you being that smart, really. It does take you doing some independent learning because they don't teach it to us in school properly. And then the best business school is being a business, man. And I think, and this is where I differ from Dave, although I love the man and he's got probably a bigger bank account that I do by far, so maybe you should listen to him instead. He's done okay.

Yeah, I disagree. I don't think you can non-Stabucks your way to enough money to feel secure in the world today. I think buy them coffee, but go earn more. money. And so he is amazing at getting people out of debt, which is super, super important. But these people probably aren't the entrepreneurial types that you're talking to. He's swinging with the fatter part of the bat, I think. He's talking to regular people. You know what I mean? And that's why, again, it's like, to me, the real devil in all of this

is the cookie cutter advice. Yeah, it's a good point. You got to take, I mean, my mom always says we do the best with what we got when we add it. And so I think that's true. You do what you can with what you have. But I push back on this idea that more people can't be entrepreneurial. Like, for instance, let's play a game and earmuffs your crew in case they get crazy ideas here. My crew. Yeah. Somebody wake up the crew. So let's say that they want to work for you forever because they like you and they love their jobs and they want to keep going. And they don't want to run their own business. Okay. Now, what could they do to get some skin in the game? Well, even if they're employees who work for you, they could say, hey, Mike, this month we got two ad slots that

are available on the podcast. They're unfilled. If I go out and I fill those ad slots for us, even though that's not my job, can I take a cut of that and you'd go? Damn Skippy. Of course, but how often do you get asked that? Chuck, you want to go with 0.0.0.000. 0 or 0.1, I think. No, you've actually done that. Okay. You've done, I mean, everybody here knows that we're super lean and super weird.

And that you'll give them upside. Oh, yeah. So I think that's what I want entrepreneurial people to think. I want, we call it owner mindset. You don't have to own the building to get part of it. And I think I learned this because in PE, here's how this works. You want to know how those guys get so rich and they stay together forever.

It's because they don't actually make their money through salary, right? They make their money through distributions to owners and through something called carry. We can leave that alone for now. Carried interest? Yeah. Well, carry is how you get money on a fund, for instance. And so that carry percentage is how most of them get around some of the tax law and make their money. But in this instance, why I say they don't make their money from salary is because it's really important. It means over time, as Chuck costs you way more money.

Let's say Chuck gets more senior. Chuck is more valuable. He requires more money every single year, let's say. Yeah, let's say that. So at some point, you might say, man, I could hire like three Chuck's for this price. Oh, my God, Chuck's going to kill me by the end of this podcast. What would be an interesting way to change that?

Well, it would be to say, well, I'm going to cut him in to every deal he does and execute. for us. That's what private equity does. And so their incentive aligned to stay together forever because there's not this like big chunk of overhead on top of them, aka salary, which is what an owner looks at. The moral of the story is I think in more businesses than you could ever imagine, you have the ability to negotiate upside and to get skin in the game, either equity in the company, part of a deal, a bigger sales cut. So even the people who are following Dave Ramsey and currently massively in debt, I just want them to stop telling themselves why it won't work for them, to make more money, why their boss will say no, why it's not possible, and instead say,

how could it work if I was going to negotiate some upside? And the only formula that you need to know, I think, to negotiate upside is how does the business make money? Can you affect the outcome of the business? Can you help the business make more money? And what is that worth to the business, okay, profit? Can you help the business make more money outside of your job description? Currently. Right. The thing you signed on for. Yeah. That's the style. that I think is that requires a contrarian mindset because we're just so enamored of systems. This is, look, this is what my business card says.

It says right here, this is what I do. I know, I hate that. So why would I do anything other than what it says? I would need a new card. And I don't have any more room in my wallet. Right? It's just like, but I mean, it's not a ding on anybody, but it's the fault in our stars.

It's just how we think. Yeah, it's right. Unless we're taught to think different. Exactly. And as long as you can incentive a line yourself and you can make it so like the business owner wins and you win. So the business owner makes more money and you make more money, you'll get it more often than you won't. And so those are the type. That's like the financial advice I wish we had, which is like there's no downside to you negotiating if you're giving first and only taking after you give.

I get it. I'm not a very good businessman, but I love my business and the business is doing well. And since you've invoked his name, Chuck is uniquely qualified. I've known him 45 years. Sad but true. Yes. I mean, we're our asshole buddies from high school, right?

I mean, Taylor, look behind you. Look at this poster that says work smart and hard. That poster was based on an old opposite poster at the bottom there. It was hanging my guidance counselor's office. Taylor was on a set one day. I think they're doing still what we're actually filming? What were you even doing there?

He's filming like the most important camera in my life is a behind the scenes camera. And we were shooting something for Caterpillar. And he's filming. And part of what I wanted to do that day was recreate this dumb poster that was in my guidance counselor's office. But I needed an aspirational looking model to stand next to me. So I said, hey man, do you want to put your camera down and just pose as this guy next to me? So I'm holding a high school diploma that I can't afford. And even though I'm, you know, certified, I don't have a job.

I got a big pile of debt. And there's Taylor looking aspirational. That's probably 12 years ago. 10, 12 years. That's quite a jawline, too. It is a jawline, yeah. Yeah, and he hasn't changed. Dorian Gray.

I mean, it's annoying. Come on over and stick your head and stick your face at the camera. Yeah, come on over here, let everyone see. Yeah, because that's what happened. I mean, these guys both, I mean, Chuck made his, and I was. want to ask you about freelancing next and I want to be respectful you got another 15 minutes yeah totally so we also we have to show I don't know if you can find it chuck or if this would be annoying otherwise I can find it on my phone but uh we did a version of this that I didn't realize was based

off of you but it was main street over wall street and we had on one side we had this like kind of beat up wall street looking guy a little overweight disheveled yeah and on the right hand side we have this hot plumber like jacked toolbell tan I don't even know how you would find it And the funniest part is when we launched the book, Main Street Millionaire, we put it on billboards all over Wall Street. And then we put it in front on LED trucks in front of Black Rock and Blackstone's headquarters in New York. I love it. It was hysterical. And basically the moral of the story is like, this is what we used to think was cool and smart and led to riches.

And now, I mean, there's this guy online. We should shout him out. His name's Max for Cracks. and he's an Instagram guy and he has this whole series about Is his last name for cracks or is it max for cracks? Yeah, Max and then the number four cracks, I think. And he has this whole series on blue collar cosplay

and how young people are cosplayed blue collar. And I think we have this 180 happening that really wasn't even going on for dirty jobs, I think. Oh, no. I think this is new. You're talking about turning around a tanker, right? You're talking about myths and misperceptions and stigmas and stereotypes that surround certain types of work. And those things take years to shed.

But they do shift and they do change. And it really is exactly what we were talking about before. There was a time when a blue-collar worker with a certain set of skills had the admiration of everybody in the neighborhood and the respect. You're right. How did that change? I've got theories on that. And how do you bring it back? And is the workforce ever really and truly balanced?

Is Wall Street and Main Street? Are they ever perfectly positioned? I would say no way. No way. It's a constant push-me-pullia, to quote Dr. Doolittle. But my point in saying all those things was there is something to say in the Warren Buffett category for delayed gratification. He's my buddy for 45 years.

That counts more than the fact that he wasn't recording on the first two minutes of the best shit we did today. Okay, I'll forgive that because I got the other thing. This guy has been with me on dirty jobs and somebody's got to do it and half a dozen other shows because when I asked him if you would put on some clothes that didn't even quite fit and do something that had nothing to do with his job description or his business card, he said, sure. Yeah. Those people matter. And they went over time. Over time. And actually, I think we just wrote an article at Contrarian thinking about meritocracy being back and it being cool to try again. And I think that's right. I mean, I loved Timothy Shomalay or however you say his last name speech when he said,

and I know it's not cool to say, but I tried really hard on this role. And it was five years of my life and I'm really proud of this thing that I tried for. And that was not that cool to say before, you know, it was like, oh, you know, it was great. And I'm so glad to be here and, you know, Save the Whales or whatever celebrities do when they win an award. And so I think actually for the first time in a while, it's cool to try again, and that meritocracy might be coming back. My guest today, Tom Olbenese, is an American giant, and I'll tell you why.

Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things. American Giant knows this, which is why they committed themselves 16 years ago to make all their excellent clothing right here in this country. It wasn't easy, but they did it. They sourced locally grown cotton,

and they built factories in towns across the nation where they could hire hardworking locals who cared about making a quality product. And then they went about the business of gently reminding people that when you, buy a piece of clothing from American Giant. You're not just buying a high-quality sweatshirt or T-shirt or another pair of jeans. You're investing in a local supply chain.

You're supporting communities from the Carolinas to California. And you're getting a piece of clothing that won't just survive the wash. You're getting a garment that'll get better with age. Check out their high-quality staples, hoodies, teas, denim, built to be worn year after year at American-dash-giant.com slash mic. It's quality you can feel and a true American success story that you can be proud to support. Use code Mike.

Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash mike. American Giant, American Made. American Giant, American Made. Like everything else, it's on the wheel. And virtue becomes vice, and vice becomes virtue. And if you're a contrarian, or if you're looking for the reverse commute, you'll take a position no matter what it is as long as it's not where the herd's going.

And that's what's happened to virtue. That's why that sweat pledge gets me in trouble every year. That's really? Oh, my God. Well, in 2020, when ESG and CRT and all of the acronyms had conspired and big companies like Lockheed Martin and cornfield. had officially stricken words from their employee manual and handbook, words like ambition and drive. And believe it or not, work ethic.

These terms all became, I don't know, dog whistles or some sort of coded language for the white patriarchy or some such nonsense, right? Right? So words started to mean different things. In virtue, everything was stood on its head. But it's just to the point, you know, at some point, entrepreneurship is, by definition, aspirational and great. And then it's not. Somehow it falls out of favor.

And that's a sucker's bet because look at what the big firms are doing. Look at, oh, is this the billboard? Oh, yeah, that was it. Yeah, we put these trucks all over the place. No, that's fantastic. Yeah, he looks great, right? Yeah, man, poor Wall Street guy couldn't even tuck his shirt in. I know.

They thought that was pretty funny. We had all these black rock and black stone dudes taking pictures of it. And, you know, whatever. Again, there's, I don't, I really believe no matter how you make money, as long as it's ethical and moral, there's no bad or good way to do it. If you're out there creating value in the world, because I love Dave's line, Ramsey's line is actually, profit is just a certificate of service. So when you make money, it's just that somebody else feels like you have provided them value. And I like that idea. So no shame on Wall Street.

But I think they've gotten enough credit. And so now it's like, how do we bring this back? And that, I think, is really, really important. And, you know, the other thing that we see for the first time in a while, I think, is this realization sort of across the board that we like to touch things. I mean, you see it everywhere online. You see the Tradwife movement getting big again. You know, you see people want to have their little gentleman's farm or work on the farm and opt out.

There is this move back to, I want to build with my hands. And I think it's good for society and probably a good counterbalance of the fact that we go like this all day long with our phones. Again, you know, the Tradwhite thing is a great example. That's short for traditional wife, right? I mean, like there's a Home Eck connection. Yeah, did you see that they're bringing that back? Well, I mean, our whole, the whole reason for the space we're sitting in right now is to get shop class back in high school. But Homeck is adjacent, right?

Financial literacy. Like those things were primal, fundamental building blocks. And, you know, it's like a big game at Chenga. You start pulling out those lower pieces, which we did. Things start to get a little wobbly up there. Yeah. And there was this great South Park episode. Did you see the one where there's the dad with the stove that's broken?

Do you see this one? No, but my God, tell me more because that's so good. I mean, it's only the greatest satire in the history. That's incredible. Since Jonathan Swift, maybe. Every time that I really want to understand the world, I go to the great philosophers of our age, South Park, as one does. Yeah, Matt Stone, Trey Park.

They're incredible. And so there's this episode where Dad's standing kind of angrily in front of the two kids in the kitchen, and he looks at his stove and the front of the stove is broken. And he's like, you know, kids, you know, this stove is broken. You guys don't know how to fix it because kids don't understand how to fix anything anymore. And the kids are going to say anything.

They're like, okay. And so he's like, let me show you what I do. So he reaches in to pull out his wrench, no, his cell phone, and he calls the handyman. Right. And the handyman comes over to the house, and the handyman looks like a handyman does. And then they're missing apart, so he can't fix the stove. So the dad's about to look real dumb in front of the kids, right? Because the kids, hey, this is his dad moment.

I can fix things. So he kind of starts melvin off to the handyman. And the handyman's like, listen, Brad or whatever his name is, I got so much work. I don't care. I don't need you anymore. And the dad looks foolish. And he opens the door to the house and the handyman leaves. And as he leaves, he shows his gold chain and his escalate out front from all the work that he's

doing a handymaning. And the idea was so funny to me because it is this idea of we used to look at this group of people and think, well, they don't make any money. If I just hand him an extra 50, I can boss him around and fix that stove. Now try calling home services and see if you can get somebody out to fix something. And then secondarily, like there's a deal. deeper visceral philosophical nature to this story, which is we don't know how to fix things anymore. We've given up some personal sovereignty. We don't know how to garden. We don't know how to

fix. We are not handy. And that bothers me. And so I think everything that you're doing is incredible because we've got to get back to being able to do things. Well, you said it earlier. You know, if you reduce work to nothing but a paycheck, if you reduce it purely to its economic transactional component, then there is no argument really for, you know, against UBI. There's no virtue. You just stripped it all out. And then now you're getting closer to the matrix. Now we're batteries. We're just plugged in and we're just waiting and somebody or something else is going to get it all done.

Look, I think it's really important that you're making a persuasive case for these non-glamorous industries. Real quick, what others would you list? If people are listening with an entrepreneurial spirit who are willing to work and want to be around this, what are you partial to now? We have a list of 130 boring businesses I love to invest and build and buy. You can go to contrarian thinking and grab that. Let's talk about some top fives. I love anything home services. We are never going to not need to live somewhere as long as we have these bodies. So home services are great. I really like thinking about the trades overall.

There's a moat around those businesses. So trades businesses to me are interesting. My robots and AI will take over that later. You're talking about HVAC, electric, foundation repair. Anything that requires a certification, like what you do at Mike Row Works, is a great business. has more of a moat that a home services, which is like window cleaning, painting, roofing, et cetera.

I also think there's a real play in professional services, even with where technology is going. So selling things like accounting to small businesses, we're still going to need personalization. I also think there is this independent, individual business on a go-forward basis. You called it freelancing, I think, earlier. I think in the future, you won't be a freelancer.

You can actually use technology around you to create your own one-person. in business. And I think that will be real. I am most interested in that. I really am. I mean, I've freelanced my whole life. And the war here in California

on the gig economy is real. Oh, isn't that bizarre? AB5 is real. The pro act in Congress. Hopefully we'll be walked behind the barn and shot in the head soon, but we'll see. But there is such a visceral suspicion now. I mean, it's there's a cohort in the government that

wants everybody to be an employee. Very much. Well, and why? Because they're at the highest tax rating of any individual. Your income is taxed, right? You are probably, statistically speaking, renting at this point. And you're easier to be controlled because 85% of businesses, small businesses in the U.S., don't have one employee. So if you're a government, what do you want to do? If you want to control the most people, you centralize them in one location, aka 25% of the businesses and then you can mandate whatever you want because it's much easier to control a few executives who have control over tens of thousands of employees and it is to go after 100% of Americans who have independent centers of gravity as a business. So top-down control is not good.

We've seen this story before. Wherever possible, we should try to have some form of decentralization. Not centralized government, right. I think it's worth riffing for a minute on the difference between an entrepreneur slash small business owner and a freelancer. Because as I understand it, or the way I think about it, is freelancers, they don't have a business. They have many, many, many businesses. Their business is going to where the next gig is and doing it. And I was never happier, really.

I'm pretty happy now. But when I was truly freelancing, you know, partly because they didn't have any debt and I didn't own anything. And it was as very much of a sort of a paladin kind of life, back then for me. But I still think that's such a great experience for so many people to have, but they never have it because they just get straight into the employee world. And then it just feels like the longer you're there, the harder it is to split.

Yeah, I think here's what the stats say. The stats on freelancers say they make less money than they have less security freelancing than they do unemployment. So I'm of two minds. One, you get to choose. Why do we tell the government that I have to be an employee or an owner and I can't be a freelancer?

That's ridiculous. That should be up to me. And then second to me is, I think if you're going to freelance, the move there should really be, where can I play long-term games with long-term people? Who cares what my tax structure is?

The long-term game could be, you know, yeah, I come and work for you, but I also do this other thing on the side. And that's where I freelance. Or, hey, I like to work with three people and I have sort of a business that has three clients, but it's really just me freelancing for three people. What I think is wrong is the government mandating it.

I guess I'm biased. Here's my bias, which is that I think short-term games and transactional relationships don't make us as happy as long-term games and non-transactional relationships. And I think a lot of times the reason we like freelancing is because we hate the people who are doing shit with or we don't like them enough to hang out with them for long.

Or it doesn't matter because you touch everything like it's hot and like them or don't like them, you're going to be on to the next thing before too long. That's right. That's how a lot of like production crew works, right? Absolutely. And so they're like, you know, they're the worst, but I'm only here for another three weeks, so we're going to do it.

That's right. And I think instead there probably is a place for you where you could be super highly valued and you could have some ownership even, some equity in the company maybe eventually. And so I guess my pushback to those people is like, man, I think you might be worth more than you're giving yourself credit for and there might be people out there looking just for you and then you can stay with them

forever long you want but don't play short-term games because I think that always ends badly. I just constantly come back to my disclaimer, you know, summer doesn't go straight to winter, right? Yeah. There's there's fall and there's spring and I don't know where you, not you, Cody Sanchez, but who is ever listening, I don't know where you are right now in your evolution of stuff. There are people listening right now who I believe absolutely probably should be employees. There are people who should absolutely get in the middle of the lake and roll the dice because why not?

If you feel called to do it, there are people who should be so many people should be freelancing who aren't. I just can't tell them apart. But I think where we ought to land the plane here, I mean, since your website made it clear, you know, you're really about ownership. Do you know ownership works? Have you heard of this before? KKR of all people. Wow. Yeah, I met a guy over there called Pete Stavros.

And he, like you, believes very strongly in these home services companies. But he's looking at these entrepreneurs who've owned it for, you know, a generation or two. And there's no financial event for them. Yep. They can't get out of it. So they basically encourage. some of the roll-ups that I've heard so many unflattering things about.

But they do this other thing, which is they'll take an ESOP plan. Sure. And they'll run it all the way down to the front line. So this company now I work with Groundworks, who actually sponsors this podcast from time to time. I was at their meeting two years ago in Virginia Beach when they made 5,400 men,

most of whom had high school, some more, but, right? they made them owners of the company. And Cody, you stand backstage and you look out and you see those people with their families weeping and feeling like really having the kind of skin in the game you're talking about for the first time. So I guess I just like your thoughts on, you know, when you look at unions and when you look at these roll-ups and when you look at private equity and you look at ownership in general, it just feels like there might be more than one way to skin the cat.

Oh, yeah. At the end of the day, what I want is, I don't care how you do it, but I want you to have somewhere where you say, I do have skin in the game. Me being here, I'm so valuable to this place in some way, shape, or form that they have decided to give me a part of it, even when I am no longer working there anymore. And I think if more of us have some little aspect of that, because we are so valuable, then we will care more because we are incentive aligned. And I think the world is all about incentives. And so, So to me, I think you should chase your first couple hundred K that you make relentlessly. They say life gets easier up until then. And I think you should chase this idea that everybody who's willing to do hard, sweaty work could eventually be an owner. And if you do that, I think that life might be a little bit easier. You're a complicated cat, man. I mean, really, you're...

My husband's here. You can tell him that, too. You're a capitalist with some very, very populist ideas. You've obviously assumed a great deal of risk, but you're risk adverse by definition. You've made an awful lot of money, and now you've got this site and this mission, and you're going to make a million people owners of something or another. How far along are you? Do we know you? Yeah, well, we've had people buy about $350 million worth of businesses.

Those are about 270 people who have done that over the past two years since we started tracking. we've had about 2,000 people that have gone through our course and said that they have increased their earnings by more than 10%. Now, that's self-reported, so I don't know, could be good, bad, or otherwise. But we're further along than I thought. You know, every single one of those people that buys a business, those businesses, on average, have five to seven employees in them. And so how we end every one of our meetings is don't be the boss that you hated. Because I think that's where most entrepreneurs start is with the boss you didn't like. And so I think our mission is moving, but we got a long way to go. So one day, I hope I saw Dave the other day, had a cruise with like 3,000 people who he helped get debt free with. And he has this wall, and we're building a wall right now too, with the face of every single person that we've helped buy a business. And then every single person who says they are their version of financially free. And so I don't think that's $10 million.

I think it's whatever that is for you. And so I hope we're able to do it. And one day you can come down to Austin and you can see the big headquarters and there'll be a bunch of people who changed their lives. And that's cool to me. Well, let's make it a date.

I will absolutely do that. I want to hit Rogan again sometime this year. I'm working on some things in Texas with microworks that God help me, I think, could actually work. Texas in so many ways can lead the charge on all this, all this stuff we're talking about. Yeah, come down. Can we get you to transplant from California?

A better tax code? I mean, look, honestly, can you do anything about the weather? No, also no ocean in the places we live. Like, I'll figure it out. But I love what you're doing, and I really appreciate you coming out here and making the time for this. Tell me, where should people go to just get an absolute dose of Cody Sanchez right in the pick line? Cody Sanchez on all socials. We're really big into Instagram and YouTube right now, so I would go to those two.

And then our newsletter, contrarianthinking.com, tons of free newsletters to every week for you to figure out how to buy a business or just make more money. You get your choice. I love it. All right, I owe you one. If you still got the podcast cranking when I'm in there and you're hard up for guests, just say so. I'd love to have you on. I would love to drag your listeners through the sewer.

Oh, God. It would be fun. I do know the smell. I've been down there now. You know, you said that's where we were going to land a plane with smells. Do you know all smells are particulate? I know, which means that, yes. That's the worst.

That's not okay. I don't know. You think it through. It's like, oh, like I'm smelling something unpleasant. No, not really. What's happening is that particle is getting in your blood and now it's in your brain. It's not okay. Chuck farts two minutes later.

I beg your pardon. He's in your brain. I mean, you've been a way worse places than I have, but man, I don't know if there's a worse place than one of the businesses that we did a video on than a highly used port-a-potty on a hot construction site. Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh, that's like easy for you?

No, it's not easy. Oof. It's a little more nuanced. I thought sewers, septic tanks, port-a-potties. I mean, how could it get worse? A grease trap. That is actually true. A deep grease trap has components of all the cholesterol, all the, and there's just something

that's, you can, you still know you're sitting in food or something food-like. And it just makes the, again, it's the particulate, gets on your teeth. But you know what? I mean, Dirty Jobs was built around going to places like that, not just with people who did the work, but who laughed while they were doing it, who were in on the joke. They're only the best people on the planet.

Yeah, Shep Boys is the porta-potty company, and he's the man, former NFL player, badass. And when we went to his company, his line is, I would be like, oh, my God, because you break the seal to, like, get the hose down there to shop it out. And so when I first did that, and he's like, don't vomit in this. there because then we have to clean it. So that was a reasonable response. And it hit. I smelled it

and he just leaned in real close. And he goes, smells like gold, don't it, baby? Oh, final thought. If you're not convinced that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the great satirists of our age, there's footage out there you can find of of Trey being interviewed on a pig farm. And as he's answering questions, he's feeding the swine bacon. Oh, fine. It's like, visually, it's really all you need to know. You know who's not sponsoring your podcast? Pita. Yeah, but I think I got a shot with South Park.

Yeah, I think you do too. Trey. You're awesome. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. This is amazing. When you leave a review, only five stars will do, not just one or just two or just three. We were hoping Four and the full Just a quick review

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