Scott Galloway: The ONLY Savings Strategy You Need

My new book Own Or Be Owned is out now! I wrote Own or Be Owned to answer one question: How do you make more money, less miserably? I broke it into the 12 Profit Levers… The 12 levers I've seen determine whether you print cash or hate your life. Check it out: → https://contrarianthinking.biz/oobo_bigdeal In this BigDeal rerun, Scott Galloway breaks down how the American Dream's playbook — degree, home, wealth — is broken. Housing costs have tripled relative to income. Two-thirds of young men aren't going to college. One in three men under 30 doesn't have a girlfriend. And the wealthiest generation in history is systematically extracting wealth from the youngest through tax policy, artificial scarcity, and a rigged economic structure most people never see. Scott Galloway has built and lost hundreds of millions. He's an NYU Stern professor, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most honest voices on what's actually happening in the economy and the future of young people. In this conversation, he breaks down the transfer of wealth from young to old, why loneliness and extremism are the biggest threats to society, and the formula for economic security that actually works. You'll learn why Social Security is the largest wealth transfer in history, how the tax code ballooned from 400 to 4,000 pages, why housing went from four years of salary to twelve, how elite institutions use rejection as a business model, why we're producing too few economically viable men, Scott's SCAF framework for fighting depression, and the four-part formula for financial security — plus why low-cost index funds beat 99% of hedge funds. If you're young, ambitious, or trying to win in a system that feels rigged, this episode will change how you see the game. Ready to turn your newsletter into a side hustle? Head to https://beehiiv.link/e2bp10 and use code CODIE30 for 30% off your first three months. ___________ 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:32 The Elegant Transfer of Wealth: Young to Old 00:06:00 The College Admissions Scam: Artificial Scarcity 00:08:39 COVID's Intergenerational Theft: The $6 Trillion Giveaway 00:22:33 Your Economic Survival Guide: Focus, Stoicism, Time, and Diversification 00:47:30 The Rejection Superpower: Why Failure Is Your Edge 00:53:40 The Young Men Crisis: Loneliness, Dating, and Economic Viability 01:08:00 What Young Men Need: Guardrails, Plans, and Demonstration of Excellence 01:17:22 The LBO Boom and Corporate Concentration: Who Really Owns America 01:31:10 Elon Musk and the Tech Bro Problem: Post-America While Leveraging America ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything. You can go deep, keep it on the ground, or draw up something nobody sees coming. And whether you want to run a flea flicker or the tush push, you need a plan to fit your unique situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I think almost everything we do is an elegant transfer of wealth from young to old. Who owns homes, makes money selling stocks, people my age, who rents and makes money with current income, people your age.

• 0:37Codie Sanchez?

  What do you tell a young person today?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I can get you rich. That's the good news. Find something you're good at. People say to follow your passion. I think that's both. You got to develop a savings muscle. And the final thing where I really screwed up was the

• 0:48Codie Sanchez?

  Ooh.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Follow this pattern, you're going to be economically fine.

• 0:52Codie Sanchez?

  Scott is fascinating. Made millions, hundreds of millions even, lost hundreds of millions, and has played this game of wealth incredibly well. He's willing to tell the ridiculously hard truths on both sides of the coin, and then back it up with a massive amount of data. So without further ado, Scott Galloway.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Get used to rejection. Most people aren't willing to endure rejection. I've started nine companies. Four have failed, three are tie, two were hits. All you need is one. We are producing way too few economically and emotionally viable men. They're not going to college, dating. The result is loneliness. I think the biggest threats to our society aren't climate change or even income inequality. I think it's one, extremism, and two, I think it's loneliness.

• 1:33Codie Sanchez?

  Let's talk about another boom, because I don't think the average person realizes what's happened right underneath our nose.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  We have allowed so much concentration of power that the rents they can charge on consumers go up every year. I think there's a lot that can be done to make small business and bring down the costs for regular consumers.

• 1:53Codie Sanchez?

  I think one of the best TED Talks I've ever seen from you recently about stealing from the youth to give to the old in this country. What do you think's happening and how did we get where we are today?

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Well, the D in democracy is working a little bit too well in that as old people have figured out they can vote themselves more money. And people your age don't vote in the same, kind of, I don't know, in the same volume. So the incumbents will blame it on things like network effects or globalization, but there has been a purposeful transfer of wealth from young to old over the last 40 years. The tax code's gone from 400 pages to 4,000, and those 3,600 pages aren't there to help the young and the middle class. They're to transfer money from people your age to my age. So some specific examples, the largest capital transfer in history happens every year. It's called social security.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  People your age, there used to be 12 of you for every one retired person, now there's three. And the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet gets $1.3 trillion a year in the form of social security. And I'm not saying we should do away with social security, but I don't think, you know, I shouldn't get it. There's just, it should absolutely, it should be moved back. People are living much longer, it should be means tested. Look at the two biggest tax deductions are mortgage interest rate and capital gains. Who owns homes and makes money selling stocks? People my age. Who rents and makes money with current income? People your age. And then the two things you really need to get ahead are a college education and to build kind of a future and start thinking about a family, housing.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  And if you look at the price of housing, $2.90 average house before COVID, $4.10 now, interest rates. So I think one of the reasons that Taylor Swift is so huge is I think people have given up on saving for a house. I think the reason Airbnb and so many people are traveling is like, we can't afford a house. I see, it all culminates in a couple of very scary stats. The average 70 year old is 72% wealthier than they were 40 years ago. The average 40 year old is 24, a person under the age of 40 is 24% less wealthy. And for the first time in our nation's history, a 30 year old man or woman isn't as wealthy as his or her parents were at 30, which in my opinion is fundamental breakdown in the compact we have between us and America.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And when that happens, it creates so much shame and rage that every opportunity to confection turns into full blown pneumonia. So whether it's Me Too, or the Black Lives Matter, or some of the anti-Israel protests on campus, I'm not saying those aren't righteous movements with their own, their own momentum, but there's fuel poured on everything because I think young people are just pissed off.

• 4:34Codie Sanchez?

  I've never thought about that being sort of a powder keg that ignites these one-off instances, that it's, it's like anytime you have hyper concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, then the many are kind of constantly on edge. That's, that's really interesting. So is that what you also mean when you say that it's never been easier to be a billionaire, but harder to become a millionaire in this country?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I'll have 300 kids in my class at NYU Stern. In each of those classes is a billionaire, either through all.

• 5:00Codie Sanchez?

  Wow, really?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Not yet, but someone will be a billionaire.

• 5:03Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, I thought, I thought you meant actually, I'm like, they're getting younger.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  And I just call them big B's. No, but there'll be someone will be a billionaire either through alternative investments, probably a hedge fund, but a small chance one of them will join or start a tech company. I also think probably about 10% of them will end up being supported by their parents. Whereas when I got out of school, it was pretty much everyone made a very good living. Some people did really well, but everyone did fairly well. So our economy's definitely become more of a Hunger Games. The genie fish coefficient's gone up. And some people would argue that's a good thing. We believe in winners and losers. But I would argue, and I kind of go to higher ed on this. That when I applied to UCLA, the admissions rate was 76%. I barely, and I didn't get in. I was one of the 24% that got rejected. And I applied a second time and I got in.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  This year's going to be 9%. And they artificially constrain supply among the elite institutions. And the kind of gestalt in America is that we want to identify a super class of freakishly remarkable kids and then turn them into billionaires. As opposed to trying to let in as many kids as possible and give them a shot at being millionaires. So I think the gestalt has changed a little bit in the US. Where we're trying, we romanticize these stories of people dropping out of school and becoming billionaires. But I can, I can guarantee every parent that 99% of your kids are not in the top 1%. And it feels like we've sort of fallen out of love with the unremarkable kids.

• 6:27Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I agree. I also find it shocking how big the endowments of the universities are. At the same time that we have education costs for universities going up so high and sort of like a declining ROI that kids are getting from universities. What do you think about it? Because you're, you're not quiet about the things that you don't like about universities while also working in one.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Well, my industry is arguably the most, one of the most corrupt, maybe with the exception of social media. Or I, I work in a corrupt industry. People are under the impression that we're nice people with our Labradors, watching PBS every night. And then we're noble people. We're like everybody else. We, academics and administrators wake up every morning, look in the mirror and ask themselves the same question. And that is, how do I increase my compensation while reducing my accountability? And we found the ultimate business strategy. And that's to sequester the majority of public from the freshman class and artificially constrain the freshman seat. So Harvard, $54 billion in endowment. It's grown its endowment 4,000% in the last 30 or 40 years, up 40 fold.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  It's grown its freshman class size 4%. So it admits 1,500 kids on 55,000 applicants. It has the resources, it could let in 15,000 and not sacrifice any quality. But they decide to artificially constrain it because. There, if, to a certain extent, homeowners and people who already have college degrees have figured out that this LVMH rejectionist exclusionary strategy is the best way to entrench the incumbents. So if I already have a college degree and I already have a house, I love it when UCLA is impossible to get into. How many people do you say kind of proudly or jokingly say, "I would never get into my college if I applied now"? A lot. Well, that means your daughter's not getting in. And it's not something to be

• 8:14Speaker 01

  proud of. In addition, once you own a home, you become very concerned with traffic and you start showing up to the local review board and you try and kill every new housing permit. I bought some land to try and develop in Florida and a woman showed up at the local review board and said, "I don't want them to build there because that's where I walk my dog." I call that trespassing. They decided to do a study and delay their approval another three months. So putting housing permits or taking them out of the hands of officials and putting them in the hands of homeowners, you have absolutely no incentive to ever approve housing if you're a homeowner because an absence of new housing makes your house

• 8:54Speaker 01

  go up in value. An absence of elite education certification, if you already have it, skyrockets the value of your certification. So all the incentives are to make it more difficult for new entrants versus incumbents. And the ultimate example of this, intergenerational theft, if you will, was COVID. And that is, a million people dying from a virus would be bad, but what would be tragic is if we missed an opportunity to make my generation much wealthier. So we flushed six to seven trillion dollars into the economy and are the auspices that this is a national emergency and people that need it. Eighty-five percent of it wasn't spent. So eighty-five percent was saved, meaning five to six trillion was just kind of like, let's flush money into the market. So where did it end up? It went

• 9:38Speaker 01

  into housing and it went into the stock market. Stock market touches new highs, housing touches new highs. Great if you're me and you already own Netflix and you already own a home. Terrible if you're coming into your prime income earning years and want to buy stocks or buy home. The reason I'm economically secure is that in 2008, we bailed out the banks. We didn't bail out the economy. And Apple, Netflix and Amazon, just as I was coming into my prime income earning years as you are now, I was able to buy Amazon, Apple and Netflix at eight, 10 and 12 bucks a share. Those companies are trading at 180, 240 and 750 dollars a share now. But now, we don't ever want disruption or churn. When you bail out the baby boomer owner of a restaurant,

• 10:22Speaker 01

  all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26 year old graduate of a culinary academy that wants her shot. So what you get is the credit card bill. The closest you get to the club, I'm in the, I'm in the club doing champagne and cocaine. You get to throw your credit card in. I run it up. The deficit is out of control and it'll be fine while I'm alive. We still have incredible creditworthiness, but by the time you're older, I mean, deficit is nothing but a tax on young people. It's a delayed tax, but it just means your interest costs are going to be much higher when you're, when you're my age. So I think almost everything we do is an elegant transfer of wealth from young to old.

• 10:59Codie Sanchez?

  What do you say to young people listening to this that go, wow, those problems are so big. You know, I'm like, like you said, barely trying to make rent, doing what I can over here. How do I not become a nihilist and only want to destroy things?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Sure. So, well, the first thing that sounds stupid, but it's a vote. I mean, seniors figured it out. They figured out if they vote, they get money.

• 11:18Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  So if young people want to figure out more child tax credits, you know, loan interest loans for business, whatever it might be, more opportunities to engage in this economy, they need, the first, foremost, they need to vote. Young people do have a lot of agency. There is huge opportunity. I know that you're making money in the mainstream economy. If you're willing to work hard, I mean, things are, things are worse for young people than they are for old people now. But the reality is things are less bad here than almost anywhere in the world. Every problem I'm talking about, it's, it's prevalent elsewhere and even worse. So for example, If you take the poor state Mississippi, the average household income there is still

• 12:04Speaker 01

  the same or higher than it is in the UK, Germany, South Korea, Japan. So, a lot of, a lot of the anger and anxiety among young people is justified, but some of it is your phone reminding you that if you don't have a hot boyfriend and you're not vacationing at the Hotel de Cap, like all your friends seem to be doing on a Gulf Stream, that somehow you're failing. So, there's all this wealth porn, trying to make you feel bad about your state in life. I do think there's, if you're hardworking, understand technology, there's still a lot of opportunity, but there's just no getting around it. We're gonna need new policies. I'm, like, I've been pretty open about my politics. I've endorsed publicly Harris for president.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Her economic plan would be, would increase the deficit by a third. Trump's economic plan would blow the deficit or increase, be triple the deficit addition. That's just, that is essentially a tax on young people. So, I'm kind of a one-policy voter at this point. I think young people need more money. And this notion that, well, it's just a giveaway. Well, we give away money all the goddamn time. Corporations are paying the lowest tax rate since 1938. The super-rich, not the near-rich, but the super-rich, the wealthiest 25 Americans pay an average tax rate of 68%. So, I think we need an alternative minimum tax. I think we need higher corporate taxes. And I like what Portugal proposed.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  You know, Maguiguan ran for president. Portugal just gave, just passed a tax holiday. Everyone between the ages of 20 and 30 pays no taxes. Cause they found that their younger generation was anxious, depressed, and also, quite frankly, leaving. I think we need something like that. I think we need sort of a Marshall Plan to level up young people because what we're seeing, what we're seeing is that 40 years ago, 60% of people aged 30 to 34 had at least one child. Now, it's 27%. People are literally kind of opting out. And opting out is, I don't want to bring kids into this world. And I don't think it's because they don't want kids. I think it's because they can't afford them. So, you know, what's the point of all of this? If people, if your kids are anxious, depressed, obese, and don't want to have children, what

• 14:18Speaker 01

  is the point of all this? And is it to create a class of... You know, it's this lottery economy where let's just try and create as many billionaires as possible, even if it comes at the expense of young people or people who are just trying to be millionaires. So I think, quite frankly, I just think we're all fucked up. I don't think we've got our priorities straight. Once you're above $2 or $3 million a year in income, you're not going to get any happier. So why, I'm turning into, you know, this sounds very populist, but why wouldn't we have a very progressive tax structure at the highest levels instead of a tax code that massively declines once you get really wealthy? And the myth in our tax code is that the rich don't pay taxes. Actually,

• 15:00Speaker 01

  the workhorses pay a disproportionate share. The bottom 50% pay almost no federal income tax, and the top 2% pay about 90% of the taxes. But there's some nuance there, and that is, I call them the workhorses. Mom's a baller. She's a partner at Skadden Arbs, M&A transactions, makes $2 million a year. Dad is a chiropractor, and he has two clinics. He clears $600,000, 2.6 million a year, right? That is a crazy amount of money. They probably need to live in a city in a blue state to have those types of jobs, which means at that income level, they're making, they're probably paying 48% to 52% in taxes. So when you say the rich need to pay more taxes, and they think, well, I'm the rich,

• 15:45Speaker 01

  they're like, well, boss, I'm kind of working for the government at this point. I don't need to pay any more taxes. Once you make the jump to light speed, and you can have the privilege I have, where I basically buy and sell assets to make a living, I start companies, I sell them, I piece out to Florida because I have that kind of mobility. My average tax rate the last 10 years has been 17%. So when I was your age, making a lot of money, but it was all current income, I was paying 40% to 50%, once I started making a shit ton of money, my tax rate plummeted. So it's the plummet part I don't understand, and I don't see any reason why. You're not going to lose any happiness. If you took,

• 16:24Speaker 01

  if you took taxes, say, alternative minimum taxes to 50% from 17% for someone like me, I'm not going to lose any happiness. Whereas if you can give someone a child tax credit, take them from $45,000 to $55,000, that changes everything in that household. So I think our tax policy... My fiscal policy, I think it's all designed to shove wealth from young to old.

• 16:51Codie Sanchez?

  Scott talks a lot about how the game is rigged against young people, and I think he's right. But there's an angle most people miss. The average young American spends two and a half hours a day on social media. 900 hours a year, creating content, building audiences, going viral for platforms owned by billionaires, who are getting rich off of their labor, while the creators see almost none of that upside. We've handed an entire generation a sharecropper's deal and told them it's an influencer career. So if you're a young person creating content, breaking down politics, economics, culture, like whatever you actually care about, and your audience lives on Instagram or TikTok, you don't have an audience. You have a following on somebody else's property. One algorithm change, and it's gone. That's where Beehive comes in. Beehive is the all-in-one platform to publish, grow, and monetize your newsletter.

• 17:37Codie Sanchez?

  And I'm obsessed with it because the founder, Tyler, and I believe deeply in this same thing, that you need built-in referral programs, intense analytics, and an ad network that actually brings sponsors directly to you, that you can get paid subscriptions from day one. I don't think young people are lazy. They're not broke because they bought avocado toast, for fuck's sake. They're broke because every system they've been handed, housing, education, social media, extracts value from them instead of building it for them. A newsletter on Beehive is one of the few plays where you actually own what you built. Your list, your revenue, your asset. The system won't fix itself, so I think you gotta go own something. Go to Beehive.com, which is spelled B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com,

• 18:20Codie Sanchez?

  and use code CODI30 for 30% off your first three months. Stop building on borrowed land. It's interesting, you know, I think the other part that I find fascinating is the institutional incentives that say big finance companies have. So, you know, for instance, today, if you have BlackRock, Blackstone, some of the really large companies out there buying a bunch of single-family homes, well, they have so much of, they have so much money, so much of our money, really, from us investing in funds and ETFs, et cetera, that not only can they pay more, but they also have the institutional benefit of having great credit with all the money we have on hand, and thus, like, a half to one-third of the interest rate. So I think some of the reason why things have become so expensive are not just...

• 19:05Codie Sanchez?

  They're actually, you know, I don't agree with you on all the tax policies perfectly, but I do think it seems wrong that somebody could use my dollars to have a lower interest rate to pay more for our houses and then bundle them again. We also saw during 2008 that mass bundling of the American dream of homeownership can be problematic as well. So that is another one that I worry about. What do you think, though, about the people who might say, hey, I actually want to pay my fair share in taxes because, like you said, where else is there better to pay taxes in America? But they're concerned about things like trains that go to nowhere in California and government that can't do much with our tax dollars.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I don't think, look, do we need to cut, do we need to increase tax rates or cut spending? The answer is yes. If America was a household, America's making 50,000, that household's making 50,000 and it's spending 70 and has 330,000 in debt. That's just not sustainable. And every day, we get new credit card offers to keep rolling and paying, continuing to spend 70,000 on 50,000 debt. We get 7 trillion, 7 trillion in spending, 5 trillion in tax receipts. You just can't manage a household responsibly. At some point, the Chinese or whoever aren't going to show up for one of our treasury auctions and interest rates are going to skyrocket and you're going to have, you know, shit's going to get real pretty fast. So I, I just don't think there's any getting around it. I like states like

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Florida and Texas that have, you know, states, I like when states compete. And I think ultimately competition is probably going to bring down sort of this out of control spending in some of the blue states because they're just, people are leaving. I think it's good to have interstate competition. Government, when an economy goes above sort of 30, 32% of spending is the government, it just becomes very inefficient. Two thirds of employment in Argentina is civic, is, is, is government employees. It's just not, there's no productivity, there's no incentive there. So I would love it if there, someone had an adult conversation and came in and said, we've got to cut social security spending by 10 or 20%. We're going to have to cut, you know, Forty percent of all spending right now, government spending, goes to seniors.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  It's about to be 50%, which lowers the amount of money we can invest in technology, R and D, and education, which have a much bigger payoff. I think we're going to have to massively cut social services, entitlements, it all leads to entitlements. You know, we're going to have to look at everything, and we're going to have to raise taxes because the far left and the far right, as far as I can tell, come together and agree on two topics. They agree on reckless spending, right? I want more services, more social spending. You want more military and lower taxes. I know, let's do it all, and we'll just keep racking up the deficit because young people haven't done the math, and we still can continue to borrow. Our credit card hasn't been shut off. It's irresponsible, it's mortgaging our future.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  So, I'm with you. No one wants to have that conversation. The third biggest issue among people your age in the election is the deficit, and it never gets mentioned among our politicians. It's just, I mean, the right, there's a myth that Republicans are more fiscally responsible. They love deficits as much as we do, as much as Democrats do. So, I'm with you. I would love to see, all right, we have $2 trillion in deficit. You can have a small deficit, $2,400 billion, as long as you're going the economy. So, that's 1.6 trillion. All right, come up with $800 billion in tax cuts and, or in spending cuts, and the other side will agree to $800 billion in increased taxes. But-

• 22:36Codie Sanchez?

  That sounds way too reasonable.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  There needs to be a grown-up in the room at some point here. It's gone, it's gone on way too long, and because, because the deficit really hasn't popped up, I mean, we're now, this year, going to spend more money on interest on the debt than we spend on our military.

• 22:50Codie Sanchez?

  I saw that.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  That's, at some point, it's going to become, begin crowding out almost everything. So, yeah, I'd like to think we're ready for an adult conversation. It hasn't happened yet.

• 23:00Codie Sanchez?

  Fingers crossed. So, if- You know, if we're sitting out there right now and you're talking to a young person and they're about to slit their wrists as they see no light at the end of the tunnel, what do you tell a young person today? Like, what is the actionable thing that you can go do now, Scott, having seen so many different moves and markets? What are some words of wisdom you'd have if they want to make money?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Okay, I just, well, I just start, I just wrote a book on creating economic security, and I do think there's a formula. The first is focus, and that is find something, find something you're good at. People say to follow your passion, I think that's bullshit. Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich. And the guy telling you to follow your passion made his billions in iron ore smelting, right? Be a DJ on weekends, play in a soccer league, you know, design jewelry with your friends, open a restaurant when you're already rich. The vanity industries are really difficult because there's 180,000 people in Sag Afta. These are incredibly, it's not easy to get a union card. That's the union representing actors and stage workers or producers. Eighty-three percent

• 24:06Speaker 01

  of them last year didn't qualify for health insurance because they didn't make $23,000. So acting might be your passion, but unless you're in the top 1% and you're getting bright, blinking green signals that you're in the top 4%, go find something else. And I don't want to crush your dreams, just have a sober conversation around what's required to make a living in that industry. So find something you're good at. And the key part of that is find something you're good at in a non-romantic industry. The guy who has this studio, I've been here twice this week, this isn't that romantic. He found some shitty loft space on Avenue B and rents it out to podcasters and is probably making really good money. That is not, he didn't dream of that when he was nine. I know, I'm going to install

• 24:47Speaker 01

  sound insulation on a loft in a mediocre area of Manhattan and rent it out to podcasters. I don't think he was dreaming that when he was nine. But this is a good business.

• 24:57Codie Sanchez?

  Now I just opened two more.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  There you go. This is a, find something you're good at and think I could become great. And by the way, if you don't know a 20- When I was seventeen, I thought I was gonna be a quarterback. When I was nineteen, I thought I was gonna be a pediatrician. When I was twenty-two, I thought I was gonna be an investment banker. I got a job in the investment bank. I ended up in business intelligence and analytics. I didn't even know what that meant until I was twenty-five or twenty-six. So try and find some. Your job in your twenties is to workshop and find something you're good at. And maybe it could be in the top ten or the top one percent. And forgive yourself if it doesn't involve college. Because two-thirds of kids don't end up in college. And there's this industrial shaming complex. I've been at these parties. Did you hear, you know, Max dropped out of Rutgers?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  And it's like, oh, shame, shame. You know, the parents have fucked up. The kid is a failure. Two-thirds of our kids do not end up with a college degree. Workshop stuff. Find something you could be good at, maybe great. It might be being a tax accountant. Okay. Do you understand? Are you willing to go to college? Are you willing to get a CPA? Do you understand numbers? Do you understand the tax code? Are you good with clients? Because if you can become in the top ten percent or the top one percent of tax lawyers, those people get to fly private and have a broader selection set of mates than they deserve, which makes them really passionate about the tax law. I am so passionate about analytics because it gave me the ability to take care of my kids,

• 26:24Speaker 01

  take care of my dad, have crazy outrageous vacations and remove stress from my key relationships. Passion comes from artistry, mastery and economic security. So whatever that thing is that gives you the ability to make some good money that you're good at, maybe even great at, in an industry that's not sexy, you're gonna be compassionate about it. I'm building a home right now in London. And there's the soapstone guy or the marble guy. And he's this Iraqi immigrant and everybody knows him. He can tell you everything about the veining and the marble. And I was very open with him and he's been open with me. He makes 2.1 million pounds top line. He has a marble company. He clears about 800,000.

• 27:04Codie Sanchez?

  That's pretty good margins.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a guy in his forties. He's been in, he's been in, he's been in marble since he was twenty-eight. And he's passionate about marble and soapstone because it affords him a really nice life. And he's great at it. And he gets a lot of camaraderie. He gets a lot of prestige, relevance, you know, pride, ability to take care, you know, to be economically secure. So the first thing is focus. Second thing is, I call it Stoicism, but the one thing that's in your control is spending. You gotta develop a savings muscle when you're young and see if you can get alignment with your roommates or your romantic partner and gamify saving money. You gotta figure out, you gotta have a savings muscle that you can flex.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  When I was a junior in UCLA, I wasn't going back for my senior year unless I saved $3,000 through the summer. I had 11 weeks to save $3,000, earn and save. So everyone in the fraternity knew who the four kids were who didn't have money. I went to UCLA, I was in a fraternity with mostly Jewish kids in the valley. They all had money. There were four of us that everybody knew were broke, like our parents weren't helping us. We moved in together in a room in the house and we had a whiteboard and we gamified spending. I spent $78 a week, including rent and food, for 12 weeks. I ate top ramen, bananas and milk. My big treat is every Sunday night I'd go to Sizzler, you ask your parents. And for $4.99, I was on the crew team, the entire crew team would go and we would go

• 28:33Speaker 01

  there at 3:00 PM when it opened and we'd stay till 8:00 PM and we would just eat several million calories. And it was fun. I mean, would I have rather had more money? Yeah. But the ability to gamify and especially with a partner, save money and start investing, if you're young, you gotta figure out that savings muscle. And it's getting reward from other things, getting reward from fitness, from friends. The nice thing about being young is you don't need as much money to have fun. There's this Instagram generation that thinks you gotta have a Birkin bag or go to Coachella fun. When you're in your twenties, pretty much like beer and making out is a pretty good brat. There's a lot of cheap shit out there available for 20-somethings.

• 29:14Codie Sanchez?

  Plus, you can't really do it after you're married.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, then it gets much harder. Or actually, it doesn't get harder.

• 29:19Codie Sanchez?

  It stays in Austin, Pauly, though, pretty big.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  It doesn't get harder, it gets much more expensive.

• 29:22Codie Sanchez?

  That's true.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Anyways, I call it stoicism, but getting a savings muscle. The third is time. For the majority of our time on this planet, we haven't lived past thirty-five. So, young people just cannot imagine they're going to live to be a hundred. And most of them are. And they also can't calibrate how fast time is going to go. Wow, my life has gone really slowly, said no one ever. If you, from the age of twenty-two, just figure out a way to get two, three, five percent of your income out of your hands, don't even, ninety-nine percent of us will spend everything that comes into our hands. You have the brightest people in the world with a godlike technology hitting you at the exact right moment, a chance to upgrade from economy to economy comfort, to add flourless chocolate cake with your panini, whatever it is, right?

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Telling you, you deserve this, it's worth it. Oh, there's two people looking at this hotel room, you better, there's only one left, buy now. Find a forced savings mechanism, two to five percent in your twenties, when you're my age, you're going to be fine. You don't start until your thirties, that's fine, but it's going to need to be five to ten percent. It's going to be closer to fifteen to twenty when you're in your forties. But you're going to live longer than you think, time is going to go fast. Well, I'm only going to get, you know, nine percent in the markets. Well, okay, that means in twenty-four years, it's going to be up eightfold. So, the power of compound interest and time. And then the final thing where I really screwed up was the power of diversification. And that is, I made a, I've always made a lot of money, right? I came out of the gates hot, started new commerce companies.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  And I was raised in the, or came of professional age where you were told, be in it to win it, go deeper, go deeper. And my company was about to go public, and I was that guy that borrowed money against his stocks to buy more stock. So, when two thousand and hit, I went from being, from looking at jets, no joke, to broke. Clawed my way back, two thousand and eight, all my money was in tech again, boom, broke again. And that was about the time my first son came along, which was really upsetting. But diversification is your kevlar, and that is, two weeks ago, I found out, I made a, one of my biggest, I invested five million dollars in a tech-based healthcare company, tier-one VCs, baller CEO, best investors, had to elbow my way to get in. That's a big investment for me. It went out of business last week, that's a zero for me. But...

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I don't invest more than three or 4% of my net worth in any one thing. So it ruined my hour, but it didn't even ruin my day and it certainly didn't ruin my week. Diversification is your kevlar. The moment you have anything resembling an asset base, you want to try and take pieces of it and put it in stuff that is uncorrelated as possible. I'm about to invest in a aircraft maintenance company in El Salvador. I just want anything that's away from my tech world. I love, I now appreciate diversification because once you have an asset base, the way you get rich is probably through a little bit of concentration, your own business, you double down on a house, you fix it up, you flip it, whatever it might be. But the way you stay somewhat rich is through diversification.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  And I didn't realize that. I was always reading these stories about Steve Ballmer borrowing, borrowing stock, you know, Fred Smith doubling down on FedEx, Mark Zuckerberg never selling a share. No, diversify. Cause here's the thing, the market is, the market will always trump individual performance. And no matter how good you are, if you're in tech in 2000, you're going to get hurt. Amazon lost 90% of its value from 99 to 2001. And then also a little bit of forgiveness. Recognize that when your stocks go down, recognize when you have a business fail, that most of it is not your fault. And at the same time, when you kill it and you buy a stock and it doubles and you were smart enough or lucky,

• 33:10Speaker 01

  you weren't smart enough to buy Nvidia three years ago, you were lucky enough. You are never more prone to a big mistake than after a big win. Bring in your horns. So I wish I'd learned diversification. I didn't save money in my twenties and thirties. My first feeling when my son came marching out of my girlfriend, it was supposed to be bright lights and angels singing. I felt so nauseous and I thought, well, okay. In addition to childbirth being gross, which I think it is. I felt incredible shame because I was sitting there at 40 years old. I'd made so much fucking money and I was broke because I wasn't smart enough to diversify. Because I thought, I'm such a baller that my company is going to be worth a billion dollars. So I'm going to keep doubling down.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So my first sentiment when I saw my son was I failed this kid. And I want to help young people realize, I don't want anyone to ever feel that way. And you don't need to be a billionaire. Just start saving some money. Real estate is a great force savings. Figure out a way to get it out of your hands. Keep saving. And just in case you don't go double platinum or have a podcast that's number one or have a movie or buy Nvidia, you don't need it. I can get you rich. That's the good news. The bad news is the answer is slowly. So what I would tell young people is even if you don't end up in an amazing job, if you start early and you follow this pattern, you're going to be economically fine.

• 34:29Codie Sanchez?

  That's such a good point. You know, I think there's a lot of porn these days about, you know, sleeping on floors, sleeping on couches, and that that's the only way to make it too. And that if you want to be successful, you have to go all in on your business. And I don't know about you, but I never wanted to do that. I never wanted to sleep on the floor if I didn't have to. Yeah, I didn't want to have to sacrifice everything early on. I wanted to work really, really, really hard. But I think in finance, we get lucky because we learn that, you know, from an early age. And for most young people today, if they watch anybody who's had success, they go, well, they went all in. And it goes back to your point. I don't think I'm a top one percenter. Like, I think we should all have a little bit more humility, assuming you're going to fail more than you won't. And then I always giggle, like, when people say they want to be a DJ. You go, you know how to become a DJ?

• 35:15Codie Sanchez?

  Become the CEO of Goldman Sachs. It's more likely.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  DJ Soul.

• 35:18Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, and you buy your way onto the stage. You know, who else buys their way onto the stage? Paris Hilton, Shaq. How does Shaq make his money? Fucking chicken stores now and car washes, which I love as well. So I think you're right.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Well, I went to the US Open and... And I thought, okay, I'd rather be Nadal or Federer. The number three or number four ranked tennis player, I'd rather be. Cause I get to go to the US Open and sit in great seats and I'm not stressed and throwing up in the. You know, I'd rather be the number one or number two player in the world. I just was, I coached a lot of young men and I had this kid, he got into MIT and he got, but he had a chance to play basketball. He's played basketball his whole life at what I call a pretty mediocre school. Like boss, go to MIT and buy a fucking basketball team in 20 years. Like, what are you thinking? The sports is a terrible business.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  It's, you know, if you do the math on what's required to become a basketball player, it's, it is much easier to win the lottery. It's just crazy. So you need to have, what I tell young people is you can have it all, you just can't have it all at once. And you need to have a sober conversation around the trade offs. And a lot of times what people don't take into account is, you know, you can control your spending. And there's nothing wrong with cutting your spending and saying, I'm not gonna live to work. I'm gonna work to live. Well, fine, but you're gonna need to lower your cost of living. And there's nothing wrong with moving to St. Louis and dual incomes, make 80 or a hundred grand. You can get a home for that, have a really nice life.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  But be clear, if you expect to live in New York and you expect to have, I survey my kids, when I say my kids, I mean, my students. 70 to 80% of them expect to be in the top 1% of incomers by the time they're 35. Do they realize it's the top 1%? Well, no, because I think the top 1% income now is like 700 grand. Yeah. They don't think of that as that much money. I mean, the average compensation at NYU Stern is 212,000 first years. They think, okay, within seven, eight years, I should be making six or $700,000 and a lot of them will. But if you expect to be in the top 1% and maintain a lifestyle in New York or LA or one of the super cities. You're gonna have to work pretty hard.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to, you know, I had some fun growing up, but I don't. I always say that from the age of kind of 25 to 45, it didn't really do anything but work. Yeah. And it comes at a real price. I lost, I always say I lost my hair, I lost my marriage and it was worth it.

• 37:51Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I do think you either get to choose short term or long term pain.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 37:55Codie Sanchez?

  And I wish somebody had told me that earlier.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Which is it?

• 37:58Codie Sanchez?

  I never like to, you know, when they play those videos, like the reaction videos of the girl crying because life's hard and they make fun of her. And that never really sits that well with me because I think it's because we kind of failed them. We didn't tell them it's going to be fucking awful. Your first job is not supposed to kill you from how hard it is. It's supposed to kill you from the pure monotony of like

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Awful. What was your first job?

• 38:19Codie Sanchez?

  Finance.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, mine too.

• 38:20Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, and so, yeah, 80 hour weeks, taking all the, you know, series seven, 24, 63, all that jazz. And I was the dumbest and the, you know, the least qualified and didn't have any fancy, you know, friends or family. And so, but it was also awesome because I learned massive pain tolerance really young.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It's a great training.

• 38:40Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. And I think that's probably what we should tell them instead, that your first job's going to suck, but eventually it'll be worth it.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, what I would say is that, you know, it's like rearing children, it gets better. We were told a lie that it's going to be great, at least for me. I think babies are awful. I couldn't stand the first two years. I thought it was just torture. I thought my job was just to make sure this thing didn't get near a body of water and keep it alive. And I didn't find that that rewarding.

• 39:05Codie Sanchez?

  Do things make you happy, though? You seem to have like a steady state of not massive happiness.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Here's the good news. I hate my life less and less every day. But what I say about kids is two to five, it gets kind of fun. And then five to 15 is amazing. And then you kind of lose them again. I'm going through that right now, but

• 39:22Codie Sanchez?

  What's your oldest?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Seventeen.

• 39:24Codie Sanchez?

  Okay, so you haven't seen the other side yet.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I

• 39:26Codie Sanchez?

  Maybe that's good?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  I'm waiting for that. We'll see.

• 39:28Codie Sanchez?

  Okay.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  We'll see. It's hard to believe it when they like don't, you know, they don't call them and they don't. It's like, it's like that Tina Fey thing where you have a crush on somebody. My son was in town doing his college tour and I'm like, would you like to grab coffee? I mean, you're probably busy, but, and I'm busy, but if you're free, I could find time, but you probably don't want to. I mean, it's just, it's just my, you'll never find people less impressed with you than your teenage teenagers. But anyways, look, everything's a trade off. You just have to decide what you want to trade off and when and how much. And I get it. I'm not going to tell kids to give up their twenties. Have some fun, spend some money, try and find a little bit of money to put away and also just recognize Your first job, even if you don't like it,

• 40:13Speaker 01

  you know, give it a couple of years, give it two or three years to see if it gets better. But also recognize you may not end up in your dream job right out of college. Few of us do, but that's a learning. I went into investment banking, I worked at Morgan Stanley. I hated it, they hated me, I was terrible at it. Totally. And that was a learning. And but it was really good training because it gave me attention to detail. It gave me kind of the ability to suffer a little bit. It taught me a little bit about working in a large organization. It also told me I don't have the skills to be in a big company. I'm too insecure. Anytime people went into a conference room, I would think they were talking about me. I didn't have patience or maturity. If I met someone senior to me that I think was as smarter than me, as smart as me, I'd get angry that they were making more.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  I mean, I just was too immature to handle a big company. And people romanticize entrepreneurship. I went into entrepreneurship out of defense mechanism. I'm like, I'm just not going to be successful. I met my stallmate from Morgan Stanley, who's been in investment banking for 30 years now. We were both very transparent about our wealth. We ended up in almost the same spot economically. He's endured much less stress than me. Right. If you have access to corporate America, the US corporation is the greatest wealth creator in history. The reality is, most of us don't have the skills. We don't have the patience. It's not easy to get up and put on a tie. It's not easy to go to corporate events and pretend to like the boss's husband. This shit is not easy. It's awful.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  And be thoughtful and be patient. And occasionally, you're going to suffer injustice. People less, less intelligent and less hardworking are going to get promoted. There's injustice everywhere. But if you can endure those injustices typically over time, the American corporation is a great way to get wealthy slowly. And the majority of entrepreneurs, I think, do it out of, I mean, the majority of entrepreneurs are immigrants. They can't go to work for Google. They didn't get to go to work for Dartmouth. So when kids come to my office hours, they think, they say, oh, I have an offer from JP Morgan, but I think of starting my own business. They think I'm going to break into song and say, go for the small business. I'm like, fuck that. JP Morgan, here you come.

• 42:22Speaker 00

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• 43:19Codie Sanchez?

  Well, it's true. I mean, I wasn't Goldman, like I was a shitty little P on analyst back in the day for two years. And I hated my life for all two years of it. And to this day, you know, whatever, 12, 13 years later, it's still like Cody Sanchez, yeah, she's on these businesses. She's got this online thing. She also worked at Goldman Sachs. I'm like that.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Huge credibility.

• 43:37Codie Sanchez?

  Huge credibility. And I hear they spend like about $100,000 a year training new, new members. So that's probably the cheapest university you can get is a

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Great training.

• 43:46Codie Sanchez?

  Is a corporate MBA, basically.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Great, incredibly smart peers. It's the way I describe it is like, it's like having served in the Marines. You're really glad you did it past tense.

• 43:57Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  But I'm, see, I've started a bunch of business, but what did I roll out first? So I was at Morgan Stanley.

• 44:02Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Because we, we all are proud of our brands and the institutions. But anyone who right out of college can go get a graduate degree called a US corporation, I would say do it. It, you might be good at it. And if not, it's going to help you zero in on what you're good at. And they do these crazy things called health insurance and retirement plans and training. First thing they did was they sent me to Columbia for this mini MBA.

• 44:26Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I got my MBA Georgetown through State Street.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 44:30Codie Sanchez?

  Same thing. I mean, it would have cost me $160,000 is what the executive program at Georgetown cost.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 44:36Codie Sanchez?

  It's crazy. And I mean, I had a hell of a time, but I think the most valuable thing I've ever done was work in corporations and start a business, not, not my MBA.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  I think that's, yeah, like, everyone has a, has a path. I describe business school for the elite and the aimless.

• 44:54Codie Sanchez?

  Oh.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  You're good at what you do, you're smart, you want to make money, you're disciplined, but you have no idea what you want to do. We all try to sound very focused in our business school applications, but if you were really good and knew what you wanted to do, you don't need a graduate degree, you just go do it, unless it's, you want to be a lawyer or a doctor.

• 45:08Codie Sanchez?

  That's a great point.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Business schools for those of us who were trying to figure it out, career switches, like, all the investment bankers wanted to be consultants because we didn't want to give up the money, we just knew we hated investment banking. All the consultants wanted to be investment bankers, we would think we'd get together and be like, hey, it sucks over here. But it is a great way to figure out sort of what you'll like more and also get, get a great credential. For, for the first time, business school is not a no-brainer. When I applied, it was a no-brainer. Tuition was $2,000 a year.

• 45:38Codie Sanchez?

  Wow.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. My total tuition, UCLA and Berkeley, as an in-state student, was $7,000 for seven years, total tuition. And 76% admissions rate at UCLA, I graduated with a 2.27 GPA, true story, and Berkeley let me into graduate school. Things have changed dramatically, and I'm now a good citizen. I pay a lot of taxes, I give a lot of money back to those alma mater, so I would argue their really slack admission standards was the right way to go.

• 46:06Codie Sanchez?

  Fascinating. What do you think about, you know, one of the other things that seems to me leads to success long-term, if people actually want to quote-unquote "win monetarily", is like, a massive ability to handle failure. You, you, I think, are really interesting because you're very, you know, you're not quiet about your opinions.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:25Codie Sanchez?

  If they don't turn out to be right, you go, well, here's my thought process, that seemed reasonable, it worked or it didn't, but I'm going to at least say the quiet part out loud, and we can see how I tracked one way or the other. How did you get comfortable? Being wrong publicly and getting over it.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Being wrong a lot?

• 46:41Codie Sanchez?

  I don't think you're wrong a lot, by the way.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  I'm wrong often. I get a lot of strength from my atheism.

• 46:49Codie Sanchez?

  That's fascinating. Why? You just don't think anything matters?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  To a certain extent, and that is, I'm convinced that at some point, I'm going to look into my kid's eyes and know our relationship is coming to an end. And it's going so fast, and everyone who I'm worried about their opinion or being shamed by, they're going to be dead really soon, and so am I. So I think a recognition of the finite nature of life and your insignificance gives you a little bit more courage to try and squeeze as much juice out of this lemon as physically possible. And I do try to live out loud, and when I screw up, I try to forgive myself because when someone else publicly fails, when they say something stupid, or they have a business fail, most people will never be entrepreneurs because they don't want to risk public failure. It's humiliating.

• 47:35Codie Sanchez?

  It's my biggest fear.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Most guys, especially nowadays, don't approach a woman they're attracted to because they're worried about rejection. And what you realize, or what I realize, and it's been my superpower, is my ability to move through fail. My superpower is rejection. I ran for sophomore, junior, and senior class president in high school. I lost all three elections. And based on my track record, I decided to run for student body president, where I went on to, wait for it, lose. I've started nine companies. Four have failed, three are kind of a, three are kind of a tie, got the money back, and two, two were hits. All you need is one.

• 48:12Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  One out of seven businesses succeeds, so I started nine. And my, my superpower was when I had a business fail, or when I was divorced, or when I lost my mom, I knew how to mourn, and I knew how to move on. And the only thing I can guarantee anyone is you're going to have a certain amount of tragedy and a certain amount of joy in your life. The ratio of those things, some of it's out of your control, where and when you're born, a lot of luck, health of your loved ones. But the thing that's in your control is your ability to move through that failure. And I've been beaned, I've been shot in the face professionally and personally. And I was always able to say, okay, my business failed, learned a lot, I'm gonna go raise more money and start a new business.

• 48:55Codie Sanchez?

  What does that look like, like right after you lose an election or you fail in a business? What do you do? Do you sit with like a whiskey?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  No, you know, it's, I think it's different for everybody. What I would suggest is everyone needs to find things that make them feel good about themselves, friends.

• 49:12Codie Sanchez?

  What do you do?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Well, I have, so this isn't gonna come as a surprise to you. I struggle with anger and depression. I'm very cognizant of it and I have a series of kind of activities to try and, when I feel like I'm going dark. What's weird is failure or adversity doesn't send me into a depression, other things do. So I think it's probably more chemical with me. But everyone needs to figure out, how do I maintain a sense of enthusiasm? I have so many really successful friends. Came out of Ivy League school, started hedge funds, got to a billion under management. We're making two, three, 10 million bucks a year. And then the market goes south on them, there's a bunch of redemptions, their fund closes down. And for the next five to 10 years, they're like stuck. They can't get past the failure.

• 49:58Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And it's not, it's not hitting a home run. It's your ability to just get to the plate as many times, because at some point, you're gonna connect. So my, my cognitive behavior or tricks for trying to bust out of a depression, when I feel myself going dark, I have an acronym, SCAFA. The first thing I do is I sweat. Exercising resets everything for me, it's like pressing the reset buttons.

• 50:22Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you're fit.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Well, I'm trying, I'm holding on to every last vestige of my youth. See, clean, I try and eat at home, not a lot of butter or salt. Um, which I find is really helpful. Abstinence, in the sense that I love alcohol and I love THC. I'm a better version of me, a little bit fucked up. I love being high. I love marijuana. I love alcohol. I'm really good at both of those things. And I think like, I'm like most people, they're an enhancement to my life. And I know how to control them mostly, but when I'm feeling depressed, I just take them out of my life. Whatever's happening to those sensors in my brain, I just don't want to fuck with them. Uh, F is for family. My kids are so awful that they force me to take myself out of my own head and stop focusing on my own shit.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  They're, they're just, if I can be around my boys, I know that they will come up with reasons why I need to focus on them. That's actually quite healthy. And the A is affection. I, I will tell my kids jokingly, I'm not feeling good. And they know that means we watch TV, they'll throw their legs on mine. I let my dogs on the couch. Physical mammal touch, I think it's very restorative to me. So whenever I feel myself going dark, and the way I feel myself going dark is I start just getting pissed off at everyone and everything. And I start feeling really down on myself. I get quiet, I get withdrawn and have trouble sleeping. And I'm like, but I've gotten to a point where I recognize it.

• 51:46Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  And I can snap out of it. Uh, but your ability to move through failure, your ability to endure it. You want to punch above your weight class professionally or romantically? Get used to rejection. Most people aren't willing to endure rejection.

• 52:03Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, well, you stop caring about it after a while, I think. You kind of like inculcate yourself against it.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I've had disasters professionally. I've had a company go chapter 11. I've had stocks 18 months after I invested go to zero. And I can get through it. I don't mind it. I've been single. I've, I can't tell you the amount of rejection I've endured from women. And that's the reason I'm with somebody who's much higher character and much hotter than me. Is all the women who reject, I was fine. I could get past it. I could get past it. I wasn't scared of approaching people to ask for money, to ask them to come to work for me, to ask them to be my clients, to ask them to go on a date with me. That is the key to my success is an abundance of rejection.

• 52:48Codie Sanchez?

  This is slightly inappropriate question, but have you ever tried psychedelics? And that doesn't make you.

• 52:57Codie Sanchez?

  Less of an atheist ever? Like have you done like where you do the whole thing and you put on the eye mask and you lay down and you see the spirit world?

• 53:05Speaker 01

  I did it in Austin, actually.

• 53:05Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. The tracks.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did, I just did a massive hit of ketamine.

• 53:11Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  That's the only time I've ever really done psychedelics other than mushroom chocolate. I loved it. It was a ton of fun. I learned a lot.

• 53:17Codie Sanchez?

  About yourself?

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Just intentional about, I went in very intentional. What is my purpose? What is my purpose?

• 53:21Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  But no, I'm, I'm pretty convinced that that, that whole death thing is going to be just a wonderful, long sleep. I don't, and by the way, I want to acknowledge that as an atheist,

• 53:33Speaker 01

  our belief that kind of the world was nothing and then it exploded, that's pretty ridiculous too. I don't want to in any way try and foo foo religion or faith. I think it's a tremendous source of comfort for people. I've always enjoyed going to church and temple. I like the community. But no, I don't have an invisible friend and I think at some point this is, I don't think this is a dress rehearsal. I think this is my first and last act.

• 53:55Codie Sanchez?

  There's something beautiful about that though. I always loved that Emma Baumbach quote where she says, "When I stand before God at the end of my days, I hope I can say to him that I have not one drop left. I use everything he gave me."

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:06Codie Sanchez?

  And I think she was an atheist, so it's funny that she used God in the quote, but I think that's kind of what she meant. She's like, just leaving it on the line, like whatever's left.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, leave it on the field. What was the great, was it a Mexican artist, Frida Marina, the one with the unibrow?

• 54:19Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, Frida Kahlo.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Frida Kahlo. She had this great quote. She said, "I want my exit to be glorious and I don't want to come back."

• 54:25Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, that's on brand for you.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 54:27Codie Sanchez?

  I like that one.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Me and Frida.

• 54:30Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, okay. I could see that in one of your next thumbnails for one of your podcasts. Okay, I want to talk a little bit about,

• 54:39Codie Sanchez?

  I want to talk slightly about young men today. Cause I think increasingly you're talking to them in particular in a way that's not so hard, bro. You gotta do X, Y, and Z. It's like sophisticated, which I think speaks to a lot of this generation. Yeah. What's the deal with young men doing more video games and opting out and not asking women, you know, to go out on dates? What are we doing and how do you get around that as a young man?

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Well, first, let's look at the numbers. There's no group globally that's ascended faster than women. There are more women globally seeking tertiary education than men. And when you look at, there's probably 40 or 50 nations that don't allow women to seek tertiary education. Actually, I don't know if that's true.

• 55:20Codie Sanchez?

  Does tertiary mean university?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, higher education, college and graduate education. More women are in graduate school now, higher education globally than men.

• 55:28Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  That's a wonderful thing. In the last 30 years, the number of women elected to some form of parliament or electoral body has doubled. Women are killing it. And by the way, I don't think there's anything we should do to get in the way of that. Single women own more homes than single men. Women under the age of 30 in urban centers are making more money than men. In the next five years, there's going to be three female college grads for every two male college grads. Two out of three women under the age of 30 has a boyfriend. One out of three men under the age of 30 has a girlfriend. Why? Because women are dating older. Why are they dating older?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  We are producing way too few economically and emotionally viable men. And there's a variety of reasons. There's straight biology. Men's prefrontal cortex is about 18 months behind. When you applied to college, when there was another senior from your high school was a male, you were basically applying, you were competing against a junior. They're, we're less mature. Boys mature later. They catch up at about 25, but at 18, they're basically a 16 and a half year old girl.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  School, education is highly biased against boys. If you think about the behavior we want in school, it's sit still, be organized, be a pleaser, raise your hand. You're describing a girl. Schools that are just boys only end up with twice the amount of recess time because boys are like, boys are like dogs. They need to be tired. They need to be kind of worn out. In addition, there's some societal factors that have been especially rough on boys. We have the second most single parent homes in the world. And if you reverse engineer where a boy comes off the tracks, it's when he loses a male role model. And what's interesting in the studies is that girls in single parent homes have the same outcomes, same college attendance, same rates of depression. All the studies show that while physically stronger,

• 57:15Speaker 01

  boys are emotionally and mentally much weaker. So they're not going to college. They're not mating, they're not dating. Half of millennial men say they are no longer dating. They're no longer even trying.

• 57:28Codie Sanchez?

  This is like the incel movement.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  They're much more prone. Online dating, it used to be family, friends and school. How you met people, now it's 70% online. And we don't like to talk about this because we like to sort of assume that every problem men facing is kind of their own fault and that any problem facing women, it's because they're victimized. And if you look at online dating, basically, most women want the same guy. And that is if you have 50 men on Tinder, 50 women, 46 of the women will show all of their attention to just four men. They all want the same dude. And so that leaves, that leaves 46 men vying for the attention of four women. So a man of average attractiveness on Tinder has to swipe right 200 times to get one match. So that's one coffee.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  And then four of the five coffees will ghost him because their filter kicks in again. So a man of average attractiveness has to swipe right 1,000 times to get one coffee. So he gets what he feels is validation of his lack of worth in the mating market. They're much more prone to addiction. They're much more prone to conspiracy theory. They're much less likely to leave home. So what you have is an entire generation of men without male role models who are more prone to addiction and who start engaging. They become much more prone to misogynistic content. They start blaming women. They become more nationalistic. They start blaming immigrants. They stop believing in climate change. In some, they become really shitty citizens. And the ripple effect it's having is the mating market.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  And that is three quarters of women say economic viability is key in a mate. It's only one in four men. We don't care. Men are disproportionately evaluated on their economic well-being. Women disproportionately evaluated on their aesthetics.

• 59:09Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  But when the pool, men mate horizontally and down, socio-economically, women horizontally and up. But when the pool of horizontal and up of men is shrinking every year, there's just less household formation and there's more loneliness. And if you talk to If you talk to couples that have been married longer than 30 years, three quarters will say one was much more interested in the other in the beginning. And it was always the man was much more interested. Because the downside of sex is so much greater for women than men, men are much less choosy. Men feel like their obligation is to spread their seed to the four corners of the earth. Women's obligation is to be as filtered as possible, as selective as possible about inbound opportunities and pick the strongest, smartest, and fastest seed.

• 59:52Codie Sanchez?

  Of course.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  So what you have is men, essentially women are much choosier than men. And when they're not going to church, not going to softball league, not going into work, men have very few venues to demonstrate excellence. What you find with these couples is the woman says, "I wasn't interested in him, but then I found out he's really kind."

• 1:00:13Codie Sanchez?

  Totally.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  "I liked his hands. I liked the way he smelled. I saw him present to a client. I started getting attracted to him. He made me laugh." How do you demonstrate excellence as a man when there's no venues where you're around other people for extended period of time doing something different? You know, I was just in Israel at the Nova Music Festival Memorial, and I met this battalion of IDF soldiers, 90 men, 90 women, all outside, all fit, all meeting each other. They're finding mentors, they're finding business partners, co-founders, they're finding mates. Where does a young man demonstrate excellence? If everyone's meeting online and everyone wants the same dude, it creates a few things.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  It creates a cadre of men who feel like they've been rejected by women. And it creates this environment. If you're in the top 10% of men, it's never been better. But it creates this Porsche polygamy environment where the guys who are the most attractive males, quite frankly, they have so much opportunity, it doesn't encourage long-term good behavior. So you end up with a cohort of men who feel totally rejected, and you have women who have found dating just across the spectrum is just a little shittier, that the guy they want is not interested in a long-term relationship. And everyone else, really, they don't have venues to kind of, if you will, fall in love. And the result is loneliness. And so I worry about young men not engaging with work, not engaging...

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  One of three jobs used to require a college degree. Now it's two in three. And in some universities in the Northeast, it's two to one, women to men. So they don't, they aren't getting the qualifications. They're much more prone to addiction. And the deepest resource companies in the world are all trying to convince young men that they can have a reasonable facsimile of life online. You don't need friends. You can go to Reddit and Discord. You don't need to work, just trade crypto or stocks on Coinbase or Robinhood. You don't need to shower, get in shape, have a plan, endure rejection, get out of the house, make, figure out how to make a woman laugh, be, you know, be persistent, endure rejection. You got you porn. So you have, and I feel as if almost we're developing a subspecies of mostly males that

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  are totally asocial, asexual. And once they get kind of into their mid, late twenties, they're still living at home and they haven't developed those skills around socialization. I don't want to say they don't become savable, but they become very hard to pull out again. Yeah. And the people I hear from most on this, when I started talking about this three years ago, I was accused of being misogynist because there's a gag reflex from a lot of feminists who are like, oh shit, it's Andrew Tate again. Not recognizing that having empathy for men doesn't mean you're anti-women. There needs to be a more productive conversation. Absolutely. Civil rights didn't hurt white people, heteronormative marriage, or gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage, nor acknowledging the issues facing men doesn't hurt women. Young men are four times as likely to kill themselves.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  They're three times as likely to be addicted. They're three times as likely to be homeless. They're 12 times as likely to be incarcerated. If there was any special interest group that was killing themselves at four times the rate of the control group, we'd move in with programs. Going to NYU down the block, you're going to see, you know, Black Women's Support Group, Women in Consulting, Golden Seeds, Venture Capital for Women. They're really on a lot of support groups for young men because of the privilege I recognized, because of the fact that men have had a 2,000 year head start, we're kind of holding 19 year olds accountable, 19 year old males. And what we're finding is there's real knock on effects in our society. And generally speaking, when I hear from these mothers, they say the following, I got three kids, two daughters, one son.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  One daughter's in Chicago in PR, one daughter's at Penn, and my son is in the basement playing video games and vaping. So less mature brains, less opportunity educationally, a lot of the jobs that were on ramps into a good middle-class life have been outsourced or offshored, mating market that is crowding into the most attractive males and leaving everyone else out, fewer third spaces for people to meet and fall in love and mate and have children, and it's leading and a technology sector that is trying to convince men you don't need to get out of the house, you can stay at home. And I relate to these men, I was one of them. I didn't have a lot of prospects when I was younger, living with my mother, and I could

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  have easily just gone down a very bad path. So I think this is something that is a real societal issue. I think the biggest threats to our society aren't climate change or even income inequality. I think it's, one, extremism from the far left and the far right, and two, I think it's loneliness.

• 1:04:56Codie Sanchez?

  I think you're right. Well, I mean, you see when you go to war-torn countries, and I spent a lot of time building businesses in Latin America, you know what civil unrest looks like? It looks like a lot of fighting-age men on the side of the streets without anything else to do. And if you've been through, I mean, Kareem's sitting over here, and he's from Egypt and has seen all around the Middle East, and I've traveled the Middle East and Latin America, and you can feel what it feels like to be in an area where there is a different kind of powder keg, which is young men that, understandably so, have more aggression, more testosterone, and feel like there's no outlet.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Nothing to lose.

• 1:05:32Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, 100%. You know what's interesting, though, is a small, little spark of light, I think. You know, we're in Austin, like I was telling you, and we've been trying to find a church. And so I'm Christian and grew up Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I'm going to have kids. I think it makes sense, it's a good way to install ethics and morals, in my opinion. And so it's like, where else do you go where you can sort of teach these?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Got a code.

• 1:05:57Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, exactly. And so whether that's Stoicism or Catholicism, whatever it is. And the damnedest thing happened. We did a little tour, a group of churches, to kind of see one we We would like, because I think I would have PTSD from the Catholic Church again. I just, like, too many wooden pews. But we went to this church called Red Rocks, like a new age Christian church, which I kind of thought would freak me out. You know, like, text to donate, like, I don't know, it just kind of scared me. And yet, when I walked in, I was shocked. All around were these really attractive young men and women. And they were, like, happy. And they were meeting one another. And I went from church to church to church to church, all around Austin, which is a pretty liberal place.

• 1:06:42Codie Sanchez?

  And in each of these areas, I mean, we're talking 18-year-old kids to maybe 35-year-olds. They're meeting one another.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:50Codie Sanchez?

  And I thought, man, if you are sort of a lost young man or woman, and you are white, and maybe you come from a decent background, there's probably one place where you have your own little version of a safe space. And that might actually be a church.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  I think, look, when I coach young men, the first thing or exercise I do is I say, "Give me your phone, unlock it, I won't judge you." And we try and find eight to 12 hours on their phone, which is ridiculously easy, between Twitter, TikTok, Coinbase. And then, what do you have? You want to lean in your strengths. You have a lot of capital when you're young. It's human capital, you have a lot of time. So we're going to reallocate that capital to a higher ROI.

• 1:07:26Codie Sanchez?

  Smart.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  First thing we're going to do is we're going to get fit. Right? We're going to, we're going to sign up for classes. I don't care if it's Barry's or an app, or the, you know, there's a great fitness, you know, the ALO app has fitness classes. You go to whatever it is, F45, we're going to start getting fit. We're going to feel better about ourselves, we're going to feel more confident. Two, we're going to start making some money. If you have a phone, you can make money in this economy. I don't care if you're a Lyft driver, Tasker, TaskRabbit, or whatever they call it, you're going to start figuring. If you go to a construction site and you have any skills at all, you can start at about 20 bucks an hour. I don't care if it's four hours a day, you need, the way you make a lot of money is by starting to make some money, because you get a taste for flesh and you start thinking, wow, this money thing is awesome. And then the third thing we're going to do is at least three or four times a week, we're

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  going to put ourselves in an environment with strangers in the agency of something bigger than us. It might be church, it might be a nonprofit, it might be a sports league, it might be a writing class. You have to be around strangers. And we write down, every time you're there, you got to meet somebody, a potential friend, a potential romantic partner, and you got to go up and introduce yourself. But being in that company of other people in the agency of something else like church, it's just incredibly important. And young men need those guardrails. Young men, one of the things I got at Morgan Stanley, excuse me, was how to read a room. You know, also, there's, it's just so important. I think, we talk about a code, I'm writing a book

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  on masculinity. I think masculinity can be a decent code for a young man. And I think of a man is supposed to be kind of three things, a provider, a protector, and a procreator. And I think all three of those things are wonderful, and men should aspire to all three of those things and break down what it means to be each of them. But the only way you're going to get there is in the agency of others and being in communities. Men are dangerous when they sequester. When a woman doesn't have a romantic relationship, a lot of times she will pour that energy into her work, into her friends. She finds other places to give and receive love. They're much better at maintaining a social network. When a guy

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  doesn't have a prospect of a romantic relationship, he stops showering. He stops looking for a job, right? And I remember this, when I was 23, my first girlfriend told me if I didn't stop smoking so much pot, she was going to stop having sex with me. And I was really enjoying that part of my life. So I got my shit together and I stopped smoking so much pot. Guys need guardrails. Young men need guardrails. It might be church, it might be the Marines, it might be a girlfriend, it might be Morgan Stanley that told me I couldn't party every night because it was really hard to get up at 6:30 and put on a tie and haul my ass downtown. But without guardrails, men don't demonstrate the same discipline as women in their early years or early adult years. It takes them a while to catch up.

• 1:10:20Codie Sanchez?

  Such a good point. Yeah, and I think also, women out there too, like, what a dumb thing. The whole, I always sort of giggle about the 6'5" Trus Van Blue Eyes song. Because I'm like, I can't think of anything that would make me more miserable. Like, who cares? Height has no bearing on happiness. Neither does eye color. Sure, money actually decreases misery largely, but I don't think it increases happiness to a huge degree in a relationship. And so I hope at some point, women also start pushing back against some of these ideas. And I also-

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  I wouldn't hold your breath.

• 1:10:48Codie Sanchez?

  You know, I think, yeah, you're probably right. But, you know, I have a lot of friends who are my age, I'm a little older, and-

• 1:10:58Codie Sanchez?

  They make money.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Codie Sanchez?

  And, and, and at a certain point, they start to realize that, you know, maybe men don't want to date them as much because they're really narrowing their field of who they will date. And so, and, and a lot of the women, you know, women these days increasingly seem like, the, the studies show that they don't want to date men theoretically who have different political views. So I always, I always joke with my cousin because she's super liberal.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Codie Sanchez?

  And she can't find a dude. And she's super cute and, and she works hard. And, and I jokingly send her the studies that say, maybe you should date a conservative because young men her age are increasingly conservative. So it's just math. And, and also, by the way, polarity seems to work out pretty well for most of us. Maybe we should, my mom and dad had two different political perspectives.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Codie Sanchez?

  For like our entire, you know, lifetime going up. And now they're married for like forty some odd years.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like, there's something to the yin and the yang. I like that saying that the best marriages are one person loads a dishwasher like a Swiss architect, the other like a raccoon on meth.

• 1:11:58Codie Sanchez?

  I'm the raccoon.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm the same way. My, my partner will make me load the dishwasher because she gets angry that I add no value. And I'm like, I've always, I've never added any value. Nothing's changed here. But then I load the dishwasher and she'll unload it and reload it.

• 1:12:12Codie Sanchez?

  That's Chris, my, my husband, ex-military.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  You're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. But there's, I mean, there's so many reasons. The thing I hate about men getting more conservative and women more progressive, it's yet another reason for people not to hook up. When I was dating, if I looked at all of my dates, all of my relationships, for the life of me, I would not be able to tell you what political affiliation they are.

• 1:12:36Codie Sanchez?

  I know, right?

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  It's like, we've invented another reason for people to decide not to hook up. And what I tell men, the general advice, a lot of young people, how many times have you heard, I have all these great female friends, attractive? Nice, high character professionally, they have their act together and they can't find a man. That's not true. They can't find a man they want to date.

• 1:12:55Codie Sanchez?

  That's true.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  And my general advice to men is you need to get your act together. You gotta have a plan. What's your plan? Right? Every woman is objectively or implicitly or explicitly is gonna try and figure out, does this dude have a plan? You don't need to be a baller. You don't need to have a fast car and a beautiful condo, but you need to have a plan. Like, I am thinking about this shit. You need to demonstrate discipline. One way you demonstrate discipline is you're in really good shape. It says, I have my act together. I know how to commit to something. I have, you know, I'm, I take pride in achievement. You gotta have a plan, right? You gotta be kind. You gotta be, you gotta demonstrate a certain level of, I wanna call it aggression,

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  but you make the plans. This is where we're going to dinner. You have manners. You pay, right? None of this.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  I was talking to this guy the other day, like, I asked him about his date and he's like, it's great. And we split the check and I'm like, let me guess, you didn't have sex? I'm like, you're just, no one is ever gonna kiss you. They'll all pretend that it's fine, you paying, and then she's not going to have sex with you.

• 1:14:04Codie Sanchez?

  I do remember the one date where they did that. Like, to this day, I remember the guy that did that. I was like, you want me to pay? And he was like, sure, you want to? And I was like, I'm gonna fucking pay.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  That's the most hollow offer ever. And I know that's sexist, but there's evidence to back that up.

• 1:14:18Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  I tell my son, if they're in the company of women and they can't pay, they shouldn't go.

• 1:14:22Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, or go somewhere for free.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Codie Sanchez?

  Go for a walk. That's totally fair. Go do a workout.

• 1:14:26Speaker 01

  Take a dog for a walk, whatever.

• 1:14:26Codie Sanchez?

  I get it, yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Whatever it is. But women are generally attracted to men for three reasons. The third is kindness. They want someone who's gonna be a long-term partner. The second is intellect. If you're funny, really lean into it, because the fastest way to communicate intellect, and men who make good decisions, women are attracted to them because... They, if you make good decisions, your kids are more likely to survive. But the number one is your ability to signal resources. Now, the easiest way to signal resources is to show up with a Rolex and a BMW. But also, having a plan is signaling future resources, right? So you just have to be thoughtful about those. And what I tell men is, you gotta have your act together. You gotta say, would you wanna mate with you? Start, start figuring out, start looking in the mirror, start looking the way you dress.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Start, I mean, Christ, you have bad breath? I mean, what is it, man? Get your act together, start becoming more attractive to you and to women. What I coach women around is what I call the second coffee. You can't tell women to lower their standards, that's just not. But what I say is, if you go on a date and it's not sparks, but maybe it was nice, but you think, oh, there was no chemistry there? Give it a second date, because a lot of couples that have been married, found that the woman who's much finer filter, she started to find, he was able to demonstrate excellence over, over the medium term, and she fell for him. Second coffee. Like if, unless it's just awful, or it does not, you know, I mean, I'm not gonna tell anyone.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  I can't tell anyone to lower the standards, but give it a second coffee, you just don't know. And then the other thing I tell all young people, your default setting is yes. I have some friends going out, yes, I'll come. Oh, there's a dinner, oh, there's a lame corporate event, yes, yes, yes. Return eye contact. And what I tell men is, approach strangers. And if you express romantic interest, or you go up to someone and they're not interested, you're both gonna be fine. You're both gonna be fine. And men get a lot of mixed signals in the professional world around the difference around where contact could be harassment. And I'm like, if you don't know the difference between expressing interest and harassing somebody, you have bigger problems.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  But something we don't like to talk about, one in three relationships begin at work. Yeah. And 99% of them are consensual. That's what I mean, that's my first husband. There's some horrific abuses of power in the workplace. Those people should be fired, or worse. But it's okay to meet people at work. There's been 12 marriages at the companies I've started. I see that as a mitzvah. I think it's a wonderful thing.

• 1:17:00Codie Sanchez?

  I love that.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  So anyways, I'm worried the young people, we aren't creating the economic stability, the economic prosperity, or even inventing the third spaces, whether it's church, national service, parks, leagues, nonprofits, a chance for them to meet, a chance for them to get together and quote unquote, fall in love. And we're regressing to a more primal vision of mating where a small number of men get to procreate. Eighty percent of women have procreated. It's only 40% of men throughout history. And we're moving back.

• 1:17:33Codie Sanchez?

  Eighty percent of, say that again?

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Eighty percent of women have procreated, have had a child.

• 1:17:38Codie Sanchez?

  And men.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Forty percent of men, only 40% of men have. Because generally speaking, the middle class is an accident. A group of men in the middle who are attracted to women is an accident. It happened in World War II. Seven men came home from war. They demonstrated excellence. They were in uniform. They were in good shape. And the government flushed a bunch of money into their pockets with the GI Bill, the National Highway Act. So there were a lot of very attractive men coming home. And it started the baby boom. And these loving, supportive, confident households created this prosperity and this progressive outlook with like, let's give women a shot. Let's give non-whites a shot. Everybody, this prosperity and rights shoved into the middle class is such a wonderful thing. We should shove it into as many corners as possible. That's the greatest innovation in history.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  But it started with young people having more economic opportunity and quite frankly, a group of men that were more attractive to potential mates. And what we have in our society right now, unfortunately, is too many men who are just not economically or emotionally viable.

• 1:18:36Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. What a beautiful disaster. I think where I kind of want to end is maybe not the most of high notes, but I think important to note, and I love some of your writing on this, a little wrap up here. Let's talk about another boom. Not the baby boom, but the LBO boom and what happened with leveraged buyouts in this country and what happened with sort of the few owning much. Because I don't think the average person quite realizes what's happened right underneath our nose.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Sure. I look at it mostly through the lens of So I don't think, I'm not one of these people that thinks all private equity and bio firms has been bad because I know a lot of dentists and people who own lawn care and people who own chiropractic clinics who have found liquidity by a private equity firm coming in and trying to consolidate it, consolidate the backend. So I, I think capital coming into the market is actually a good thing for people. Where I see a concentration of power is across industry. One firm controls two thirds of all social media. One firm controls 93% of the $300 billion search market. There's three chicken companies that control like 80% of chicken. We have allowed so much concentration of power that the rents they can charge on consumers,

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  on marketers go up every year. So Amazon 20 years ago, if you were a third party marketer or third party reseller selling your products on Amazon, they took about 20% of your gross dollar volume. Now they take 45 because they kind of own the market. If you don't sell on Amazon, you're kind of not selling online. So this concentration of power that has raised rents across corporate America and quite frankly, raised rents across parents. I know TikTok's bad. I know Snap's bad. Like, how do, what do I, how do I tell my kid to communicate with his friends back home if I get them off Snap? That's it. You know what? These, these companies have so much power. I'm going to tell my kid not to have an iPhone? So there's so much concentration of power that the rents have gotten greater and greater

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  and greater. So I go more towards antitrust. I think there needs to be a lot of breakups. It's good for shareholders. When AT&T was broken up into the seven baby bells, all seven of those companies were worth more than the original AT&T within 10 years. And Google hasn't really innovated. Search isn't much different than it was 10 years ago because they haven't needed to. They have 93% share. They buy any company that threatens them.

• 1:20:57Codie Sanchez?

  Microsoft too, with the suite of products. I mean, they just basically recreate any product that comes out there in the marketplace that they can put inside of a. Microsoft suite.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  That's right, and they're a perfect example of the power of antitrust because in 99, they were found guilty of monopoly abuse and they were ordered to break up. And even though they overturned the ruling, they stopped bundling and putting companies out of business. So if there hadn't been a DOJ ruling against Microsoft in 1999, we'd all be saying, I don't know, bang it. Google is a function of antitrust. So the ability, once companies get too big, breaking them up and oxygenating the environment, there's more people, the rents for labor go up. Employees do better because there's more people bidding on their time. There's more tax revenue. Shareholders traditionally do well. PayPal used to be owned by eBay and they spun it. It's now worth, I think, 15 times what eBay is worth.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  So taxes, more taxes, more entrepreneurship, higher salaries, more shareholder value. The only person that loses is the CEO who generally wants to sit on the iron throne of all seven realms, not just Westeros. So I would argue the way to oxygenate the market would be to go through industry by industry and break up. You know, launching a tech company is really difficult right now. There's a lot of bigger players and there's just a concentration of power across industry that is very hard to break into. And they donate a lot of money to Washington, there's regulatory capture. Why do I have to buy insurance to get a mortgage? Because they're in bed with each other, right?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  So I think there's a lot that can be done to make small business and bring down the costs for regular consumers through antitrust. The private equity market, I'm of two minds. Is there abuses when big players come in? Yes, but at the same time, I like a lot of capital in the market bidding on entrepreneurs' businesses. You know, there's a You know, there's a, there's a person on the other end of that, that pool maintenance company that just got bought. That guy, his son doesn't want to go into it, right? And he's got a nice little business and a private equity shop comes in and says, okay, I'll pay a million bucks for your business. You work here for four years and you have

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  a way out. So I'm of two minds and I work with a lot of private equity firms and I've generally found, generally found that they're good people trying to, you know, who pay well. So I can understand that there's some situations where they come into a company, lever it up in debt, let it go out of business, raid the employee pension fund. I find a lot of that is a bit made for, for, for news, for the, you know, business section of the New York Times. I don't, I think it's, I don't think they're as mendacious as people think. Now venture capitalists, I think that's another story. So I, you know, I think there's some nuance there, but generally speaking, I'm a fan of capital coming into the small business market.

• 1:23:56Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I also think like to your point in the very beginning, everybody's looking for a way to make more with less risk. And so I think the concern is always not that private equity is evil, or even that Google and all them are evil. It's just how do we make sure that our perverse incentives of always wanting to win individually do not overcome everything else. And so I get concerned when I see private equity go from owning 4% of the, you know, private businesses to 20% over a, you know, depending on how you measure it, somewhere between a 10 and 12 year period. But man, you could say the big four are much more of an instigator on the public market than the private equity companies are on the private market.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Seven companies are responsible for a third of the returns. One company, Apple, is worth more than the entire UK stock market. I mean, there is, we have this illusion that the stock market is really robust.

• 1:24:45Codie Sanchez?

  I know.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  There's seven companies that are driving the majority of the return. If you tell me what stocks you have, I mean, if, if you, if Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, and I don't know if the other one's Microsoft. If you don't own one of those seven stocks, you've underperformed the market and your returns are probably flat.

• 1:25:07Codie Sanchez?

  What do you think about people who say, like, the argument today is like, you know, Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock own, you know, let's call it 80% of the S and P and 40% of the broad market. But then people will say, but they're passive. They're passive investors. What do you think about that? Do you think they actually change governance on most of our companies in the, in the US because they own them? Or are they truly passive?

• 1:25:32Speaker 01

  It's a really interesting question. So concentration of ownership is just a bad, is just bad to begin with. Although I would argue that those industries, I mean, it's an interesting question. So there's two sides to it. I love low-cost index funds. I, you want to have some fun. Everybody believes they're smarter than your average bear. I'm not immune. I stock pick. But what I would tell young people is 70% of any of your savings, well, 99% of your savings is going to come from money you can't touch, whether it's equity or things that automatically go into a savings account. Low-cost index funds, the, I work with the brightest people in finance. I've advised the most prestigious VCs, private equity funds. And my sum net conclusion is no one has any idea.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  And the VCs that outperform are the ones that get better deal flow. But if you took the entire, the entire alternative investments industry, any logo on CNBC, anyone that advertises, any hedge fund, it's essentially a grift. And what they, if you look at their performance, they've exactly underperformed the S and P by the amount of their fees.

• 1:26:33Codie Sanchez?

  Exactly.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  So Vanguard, low-cost SPY index funds, I absolutely think that's the way to go. Now, whether those funds have become so big that they dictate corporate governance and they're passive so they don't create enough churn with management, I don't know. I mean, that's, it's an interesting theory how they've, maybe they've created a stasis in the market. It's an interesting question. I don't have a viewpoint. My, where I take from these is I tell people, they're like, oh, is it too late to buy Nvidia? I'm like, I don't know, but it's not too late to buy an index fund. And your 27 cents on the dollar are going to go into the magnitudes in seven. So if they double, you're fine. But if the other 493 companies have their day in the sun, you're going to get to participate.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  And the market, especially in America, I wonder if emerging markets are about to finally have their day in the sun because the US market is actually pretty expensive. But along the lines of index or diversification, I would even suggest like index funds that have some exposure to foreign markets now. Because the US market looks historically expensive. But you don't need to be a hero. It's like what John Bogle from Vanguard said, you don't need to find the needle in the haystack, buy the whole goddamn haystack. And the amazing thing about humanity is that with population growth and innovation in technology, generally speaking, over the medium and long term, we become more productive and the market goes up and to the right. So yeah, pretend you know more than everyone else.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Have an expensive lesson figuring out you don't. Take a third, buy Doja Coin or buy whatever it is, you know, buy the new AI company. Put 70% into, and this is the key, low cost index funds. People, you're in this business. People don't realize how much of their returns are eaten up by fees.

• 1:28:14Codie Sanchez?

  No, because they hide them and they think it's just the expense ratio.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  Well, 2%, that doesn't sound bad. That's a 30% return.

• 1:28:21Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, 100%. And then you don't add the fund admin fees and anything you have inside of it. Yeah, I totally agree. I think Vanguard's a great place to invest, an awful place to work, unless you don't really like working that hard.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  Did you work there?

• 1:28:31Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. It's my first, it's socialism in a company. You know, there's no meritocracy. It's kind of like if you want to progress in the military, they go, cool, three years. Like you're at this level and then at three years you can go somewhere else. That was my experience. It was a long time ago. That was right out of college. And, you know, when you're young and dumb, you're young and dumb. So I don't know how much of that was just like, I'm really good. And really I was an idiot who knew nothing. But I much preferred Goldman, even though it was hard. And I was scared I was going to get fired all the time. But Vanguard's great because you can't get fired unless you like cuss in an email. Or maybe have like some version of harassment. You get a company match in your 401k that's really aggressive.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:11Codie Sanchez?

  They never fire anybody and you can climb the ladder as long as you stay there forever, but you can't go fast and that never worked that well for me.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  But that, those are different cultures and there's people for each of those cultures.

• 1:29:22Codie Sanchez?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Right, and I generally find the companies, it's proximity bias because I'm around very ambitious young people being at a business school.

• 1:29:30Codie Sanchez?

  And you're in New York versus Malvern, Pennsylvania.

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and what I found is that the best companies that really outperform the market have the culture of the following, we own your ass. You're gonna have no life, but this is what we're gonna do. If you wanna go flat out, we're gonna let you run as fast as you can. And we have 30 year olds here making a million bucks. And we don't look at them and go, your time will come. You'll be VP at 45, don't worry. Roger's above you and he's been here 20, like, you wanna go flat out? We'll go as fast as you can run. And, but it's not balance. It's not paternity leave, it's not pet bereavement leave, it's not, it's, the implicit agreement

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  is if you go flat out here and you're good and you're talented and you devote your life to work, which is not for everybody, I'm gonna put you where your parents were at 50 at 30.

• 1:30:29Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of people who want that culture. They're like, I wanna, I wanna go flat out. I want economic security. I'll have more balance when I'm older. There's also a lot of other people are like, no, I wanna work to live. I wanna have kids. I wanna have healthy relationships. I wanna spend time with my parents. I wanna be fit. I wanna have weekends and maybe in the summer take the, you know, Friday off and go to the lake.

• 1:30:55Codie Sanchez?

  They're probably happier.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Good, yeah, they are probably happier. There's nothing wrong with that. And then like, I worked, one of my first consulting clients was Levi Strauss and Company. They were very. Maternal with summer Fridays, mental health counseling. I mean, really like cared about their employees. And Morgan Stanley was like, shut the fuck up. We'll give you feedback once a year and it's called a check and you'll, you'll find out what your bonus was when it hits your bank account. And we didn't even give her, we didn't get reviews.

• 1:31:24Codie Sanchez?

  I remember that. Yeah. Don't you remember when they were like, you get a bonus, like, how do you calculate it? Excuse me? Don't, don't ask how you calculated this. Now my employees are like, can you please tell me how much you make and when? I'm like, what? Also, good for you guys that you have the balls to ask this stuff.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  Quarterly reviews and.

• 1:31:39Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the world's changed probably for the better, but the majority of the people I'm around, young people, want to go flat out. And the companies that usually outperform the market are the ones that create that culture around going kind of, the ultimate arbitrage in our economy is fossil fuels, but the second of that is finding young, super hardworking, super talented people who are better with technology and paying them 30% of what you're paying Bob, who's a 40 year old, and they do 90, they add 90% of the value. They're less mature, they're not very good managers, they're super smart, they don't have dogs or kids, so they're willing to kind of work all the time. That's the ultimate economic arbitrage in corporate America. And the companies that attract that secret sauce, that is very talented young people, outperform everyone else.

• 1:32:23Codie Sanchez?

  That's such a good point. Yeah, today Tanner was like, oh yeah, we've got some free time. We have 23 minutes in between meetings. We were giggling. I'm like, yeah, that's exactly what we want. Okay, last question. Elon Musk, do you not like the guy? You guys get at it at Twitter. Did he, did he really call you insufferable? Did you just put that on a drift? What, what do we think about Elon Musk?

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  No, he called me an insufferable numbskull.

• 1:32:45Codie Sanchez?

  On Twitter?

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:32:48Codie Sanchez?

  Did you talk back to him?

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  I don't even remember. I, I don't remember what I was saying. Yeah, I'm, it's not a big deal. And he's actually reached out to me through a friend saying we should get together.

• 1:32:58Codie Sanchez?

  I like that. I like a little bit of, I think you gotta push back even on the biggest billionaires and they can handle it and they'll probably push back too.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, um, the problem is we're in a culture where we've decided if someone or a company is a net positive, if I had a button that Elon Musk would have to go back to South Africa, I wouldn't push that button. I think he's been a net good for the world. Inspired the EV race, the space, I mean, seeing that rocket, that booster rocket captured on it as it's falling, that shit's just inspiring. But at the same time, the word, the, the problem with the word a net good for so- society is the word net. I also think he should be held accountable for his coarseness and his cruelty. I don't think you attain that level of power such that you cannot pay people their legally obligated severance. I don't think you accuse an employee of being a sex criminal

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  such that that employee has to move their house. I think he's not a very good role model for men. I don't think living alone with none of your 12 children by three women with a loaded gun next to your bed is what men should aspire to. So, you know, I think it's just sort of a Greek tragedy. I, I think he's going to move the world forward. But I think, quite frankly, being coarse and cruel and super into ketamine, I don't think that's something young men should aspire to. So should he be recognized for his achievements? Yes. Should he also be held accountable? And should we be critical of him on the things that where I don't think he's living up to his blessings? Yeah. And so, but look, I don't think he thinks a lot about me, nor should he.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  But I don't, you know, I, I, like, more generally, the people who are most patriotic are the ones who've invested most in our nation, and that's veterans. They're the most patriotic. The thing I find so distressed, distressing about guys like Elon Musk and generally what I'll call this tech bro community is I think they're the most blessed Americans. There's, we're the most blessed people on the planet. Because if you look at a map, if you go up the western coast, you start at San Diego, Qualcomm, and you go up to LA, you get SpaceX and Snap, and you keep going north, you get Salesforce and Meta and Alphabet. You keep going north, you get

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Amazon and OpenAI and Microsoft, and then it stops when you hit the Canadian border. Lululemon, maybe, in Vancouver? And then you go down to San Diego and it stops and you gotta go another 5,000 kilometers until you get to Mercado Libre. Maybe there's something about being in America that has really helped you. And I find these are the first people to shitpost America. So it's like, boss, you don't realize a lot of your success is not your fault. It's the success of other Americans. Every one of these companies is built on a technology that was funded by American middle class taxpayers, whether it was DARPA, whether Elon Musk got $350 million tax free loan. He hates subsidies, but he was there for it when we gave him a low interest $350 million.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Their charging stations are being built out by taxpayers. DARPA, the internet, Netflix was built on net neutrality funded by California and the other 49 states taxpayers. And yet they seem to just dislike America once they have leveraged the shit out of it. And I just find it obnoxious.

• 1:36:20Codie Sanchez?

  I think that's a good pushback. My husband is a contractor still for the Defense Innovation Unit at the Department of Defense and their AI portfolio and runs the the commercial portion. And, you know, a lot of what you talk about of us versus China, and which is real, not like us versus the Chinese, but the actual Chinese government only happens because, you know, the government is willing to fund a bunch of initiatives in Silicon Valley and in venture capital that venture capitalists would not.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  No way, they wouldn't get near it.

• 1:36:48Codie Sanchez?

  They wouldn't get near it. And, you know, and, you know, you and I both know a lot of people who are full time venture capitalists. I want to come back in my next life as one because I don't think the hard, the real hard work is being the founders, doing the ridiculously hard, masochistic thing that is building a business out of nothing. And I also think, you know, being a government worker, when, when you have to go to war to foreign land, which is our soldiers.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:37:14Codie Sanchez?

  So I agree with you. All right. This is incredible. Thank you for being here today. This was so interesting. I learned a ton and, and I know that everybody probably knows where to find you, but if I haven't said it before, No Mercy, No Malice, probably my favorite newsletter.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:37:27Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. Incredible newsletter overall. And I listened to Adrift in probably like three days on audiobook and then I bought actually the real book too, because the graphics are so incredible. And I think it's a, even if people don't read books today, which is more normal, like being able to understand the world through those graphs is very easy and digestible. So if you haven't read Scott's new book, Adrift, it's really good, as are all the rest. Thank you so much for being on this podcast.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Thank you. Congrats on your success.

• 1:37:53Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, well, you know, we'll see how long it lasts. All right, guys, I think that's a wrap.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  Good. Thanks, everybody.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

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