Jun 25, 2024 · 51m · bigdeal
Your Under-Performer Friends Cost You $100K a Year | Bill Perkins
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Codie Sanchez and guest Bill Perkins examine the hidden financial and psychological costs of maintaining underperforming relationships, presenting empirical data and strategic frameworks for auditing social circles, setting uncompromising boundaries, and expanding long-term business ambition.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Codie holds 69.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Codie as informed peer 1.4 Guest teaching 1.9 Guest disagreement 0.5 Codie pushing back 0.3
speaking balance: gold is Codie, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 31:16 Perkins rejects host's time allocation
Perkins directly tells Sanchez that she fails to value her own time by handling mundane tasks instead of delegating.
Hardest push from Codie ▶ 15:15 Sanchez rejects soft rejection tacticsSanchez firmly dismisses her father's advice to offer polite hedges, arguing that only an unqualified refusal prevents unwanted follow-ups.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 32:15 Perkins reframes time as a duty to stakeholdersPerkins demonstrates to Sanchez that time allocation is not an ego exercise but a fiduciary obligation to family and charities.
Codie holds their own ▶ 6:35 Sanchez cites empirical contagion metricsSanchez details exact workplace performance percentage swings to quantitatively prove the financial drag of underperformers.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Codie as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Codie pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preview: The True Cost of Underperformer Friends | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Preview teaser, housekeeping, and sponsor ad read for Riverside recorded prior to the main episode. | |
| Contrarian Growth Hack: Being the Dumbest in the Room | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Producer Rachel prompts Codie Sanchez to explain her viral tweet about being the dumbest person in a friend group. | |
| The Quantitative Cost of Underperformers in the Workplace | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo monologue by Codie Sanchez breaking down academic research on workplace underperformers and positive spillover. | |
| Environment, Habit Contagion, and High-IQ Social Dynamics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo monologue by Codie discussing the British Journal of Psychology study linking high IQ with decreased socialization preferences. | |
| The Power of Saying No: Alex Hormozi's Framework | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo monologue where Codie details her personal dynamic with Alex Hormozi on learning to execute unambiguous rejections. | |
| Narrow Aperture and the Danger of Lifestyle Investors | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo monologue recounting a six-figure business loss caused by partnering with a self-described lifestyle investor. | |
| Firing Underperformers and the PPV Relationship Diagnostic | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo monologue introducing the PPV diagnostic tool to identify underperformers who dwell on past, people, and victimhood. | |
| Bill Perkins' Challenge: Escaping Small Business Thinking | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Solo monologue recounting Bill Perkins confronting Codie with the question of whether small business has infected her thinking. | |
| Bill Perkins on Resource Allocation, Delegating, and Time | 4 | 6 | 2 | 1 | Interview begins with Bill Perkins explaining the moral duty to delegate low-value tasks to maximize personal return on invested time. | |
| Bill Perkins on Integrity, Vision, and the Relay Race | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Bill reflects on maintaining delusional ambition, seeking long-term visionary peers like John Arnold, and the relay race metaphor. | |
| Managing Social Contagion, Solitude, and Intellectual Curiosity | 4 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Perkins details how he compartmentalizes diverse social circles and harnesses deep solitude to produce high-leverage work. | |
| Sourcing Autonomous Leaders and Fire-and-Forget Missiles | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Bill describes hiring autonomous 'fire-and-forget missiles' who solve problems without micromanagement. | |
| Radical Wealth Philosophy: Buying Stuff to Give It Away | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Perkins shares his philosophy that asset accumulation exists to create shared experiences and hospitality for peers. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Sanchez: Surrounding yourself with superior peers lets you steal 10,000 hours
“The truth of the matter is, is as often as possible, you can level up where you are the low man on the totem pole to the people around you. The faster you do that, the faster you can steal somebody's 10,000 hours.”
Sanchez: Moving on from friend groups reflects differing speeds, not superiority
“Just because you started out with one group doesn't mean you should finish with them. And it doesn't mean they're less than you. It doesn't mean you're more than them. It simply means that you guys are moving at different speeds on a marathon.”
Sanchez: Dallas country club friends dropped me immediately after my divorce
“One, when I got divorced basically all my friends dropped me. The second I got divorced they all went with my husband who was in Dallas at the time. They were all sort of married couples of the country club. I didn't fit in anymore, and it didn't feel great fo…”
Sanchez: Placing a top performer with average workers boosts performance 15%
“If you are an over performer, and you are placed in a group of normal performers, that over performer will help increase the performance of everybody else by 15%.”
Sanchez: Sitting within 25 feet of an underperformer reduces performance 30%
“If you sit next to an underperformer, if an underperformer is sat within a 25 foot radius of a bunch of normal people like you and me, they take your performance down by 30%.”
Sanchez: Seating high performers near average workers adds $1M in profit
“Dylan Miner, who was a professor at the Kellogg School, basically referred to this as positive spillover, which he says creates about one million in additional annual profits.”
Sanchez: Studies find higher IQ correlates with decreased happiness from socializing
“As someone climbs the intelligence curve, AKA they become more and more intelligent as measured by IQ, it turns out that being around other people, social interaction, friends or otherwise actually decreases your happiness.”
Sanchez: Alex Hormozi and I trade screenshots of saying no
“And basically, We have a little accountability thing that we do. And I told him I had this issue, and so he said, I'm going to send you a screenshot of every time somebody asks something of me, and I say no. And you can just see all the ways that I say no, and…”
Sanchez: Clean 'no thank you' rejections prevent unwanted follow-up negotiations
“That thing where you say, no, that doesn't work for me. No, I'm not that interested in it. Then it opens the door. You're leaving open a little wedge for somebody to come back to you and say, hey Why aren't you interested? Why doesn't that work for you? If I j…”
Sanchez: Top performers achieve outsized success through narrow focus and 80-90-hour weeks
“The best performers have to narrow down their aperture as opposed to widen it to have unfair levels of success. So if you think about it this way, how have the best people in any industry achieved something incredible? Is it by doing what is average, normal, o…”
Sanchez: Passive income does not actually exist
“This elusive term passive income that I'm pretty convinced does not actually exist.”
Sanchez: Lost $100K to $150K partnering with a 'lifestyle investor' friend
“This friendship that became a partnership that became a six figure loss for me. I think, you know, let's call this loss probably something in the realm of a 100,000 to a 150,000, not counting how much time. We spent on this deal and me having to parachute a bu…”
Sanchez: Business hit first $1M sales month right after firing partner
“But what actually happened in the one month following his departure, we did our first million dollars in sales that month, and we grew by like a 175, a 176%.”
Sanchez: Cut ties if conversations are 20% gossip or victimhood
“If those three things take up more than 20% of any conversation, you should move on.”
Sanchez: 80% of social connections do not want you to surpass them
“80% of the people you interact with are not going to want you to be one cent more successful than they are. They want you to be just below where they are.”
Perkins: High Performers Have an Obligation to Stakeholders to Delegate Low-Value Work
“And so I have an obligation to others to effectively allocate my time to my goals, to my ambitions.”
Bill Perkins: Delusional ambition is a requirement to enter the arena
“I generally am the most delusional of my friends. And I think that's a requirement, you know, that, that puts you in the arena. Doesn't mean you're gonna succeed, doesn't mean you're gonna, you know, swim upstream it just means you're in the arena, and you're …”
Perkins: John Arnold is the greatest commodities trader since rice markets
“Actually, my friend John Arnold, he was the most successful commodities trader since the rice trading markets, called in rich and wanted to do philanthropy, and he wanted to have, like, analytical, impactful philanthropy”
Perkins: Solitude Drives Maximum Impact for Knowledge Workers
“As a knowledge worker even though I'm interacting through devices to communicate with people, it's generally me in solitude having the most impact, you know?”
Perkins: Manage autonomous operators like 'fire and forget missiles'
“Like, I'm always trying to find fire and forget missiles. Like, I just want to, that's where I want to go. I want to hit that target. Shoot it up in the air, and they boom, and they hit the target. I don't have to tell them, I tell them what I want, Not how to…”
Perkins: Buy luxury assets to share experiences with friends
“His saying is, is we buy stuff to give it away. And it's true. Like, I didn't buy this boat so I could be on this boat by myself. I bought this boat to share memories with my friends. I didn't buy this property to just sit out here like Little Lord Farm or in …”