I'm a good guy to sit around a campfire with drinking because I got a lot of stories.
This is Mike Novogratz.
Mike grew up as a poor kid on Long Island, made his first million working as a trader at Goldman Sachs at the age of 32, and made his first billion at the age of 40.
Is that life -changing?
Yeah. We were the only company ever where five guys became billionaires in a day.
That's wild. Mike is a cowboy in his personal life and his professional life.
This guy likes to push it, and he's max risk all the time.
yeah that's crazy man mike's made and lost a fortune about two different times we made a bunch of mistakes and next thing you know not only aren't you worth two billion dollars but you're going under the billion pretty quick and you're like oh that sucks and what are you doing like what's the lesson to be learned here the gap between the really greats and the next level and i put myself in that next level is i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i I want to.
I put my all in it like no day is off.
On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
I value people who are good operators at life and who live a certain way that I like.
I'm dressed like a cowboy today because I'm like, you're kind of like a cowboy a little bit, like the energy that you have. And that's something that I really respect.
But I thought one of the coolest things was how you've made and lost a fortune, I think two or three times.
You know, I certainly have lost lots of money.
That narrative exists.
exists. And one of my kids and a few of my friends are like, dude, that's a little unfair because even at your lows, you still had a lot of fricking money.
So your first, your first hit was in your mid thirties.
You're at Goldman, right?
Yeah. I was, I was a partner at Goldman Sachs.
Goldman is an amazing firm.
It's, it's, it, it might be one of the firms that everyone should study because they create a culture there where maybe not good for your mental health, but good for the firm.
people define themselves by what their boss thinks about them.
Lloyd Blankfein was like the big guy at Goldman in the later part of my career.
In every single person, what does Lloyd think about me?
You know, you gave your heart and soul to this culture of Goldman.
And it's a culture of excellence.
It's a culture of world -class people.
You're competing and working alongside the best and the brightest. And so you feel like you're on the New York Yankees when the Yankees are winning.
And one of the big advantages of that is they paid you wildly less than market as you're working your way up because you had the privilege of being at Goldman Sachs, and one day you might become a partner.
And so I started at 24 because I had done the Army and flew helicopters for a while.
And April 1st, 1989, I got my job.
And, you know, I moved out to Asia, which was a great move.
the asian financial crises happened uh and what you'll learn in a financial crises is you're either on the right side of it or the wrong side of it and if you're on the right side of it i .e if you're bearish when the world blows up you make far more money than you thought you would for the firm and so goldman and me and the team i was with was very lucky that you know we got ourselves on the right side of Asian Blunt and we killed it.
And so I became a managing director first and then a partner.
What age were you when you left?
I think 33 when I became a partner, 34 when I left. And what was your big year?
97, 98, I made a ton of money for the firm.
Now in 97, I got paid $2 million, which was by far the most I'd ever been paid, which was a ton of money no matter what you look at.
I was a millionaire at 31.
I wanted to be a millionaire of the time I was 30.
But I didn't have a net worth of $1 million until I was 31.
But the first year I really felt like I got paid.
I got $2 million, you know, in 1997.
Now, me and my team had made the firm like $200 million.
And so, that was a 1 % payout, right?
If you work at Citadel or any big hedge fund today, you're broadly getting paid 15 % to 20 % of what you make.
Goldman paid us 1%, but you're going to be a partner one day and as part of the – and you – listen, you didn't Make it all on your own.
There was a huge infrastructure.
Goldman, you know, deserved more than, like I say, Citadel might.
But they had this mythology at the place that allowed you to stay there.
And I almost quit in that the bosses would take you out and say, oh, no, you're going to be a partner one day.
And listen, I made partner in 1998, and in 1999, the company went public.
And listen, anyone who was a partner at Goldman Sachs when they went public in 1999 was just lucky because the company had been built over 100 and plus years.
So all those people who had built that enterprise value that weren't partners that day, you know, we got all their hard -earned effort.
We sold this enterprise that was built over 100 plus years to the public, was one of the coolest IPOs of all time.
And the junior partners, we all had 420 ,000 shares.
And the stock was a $55 IPO, which traded to $75.
And you can do the 400 ,000 times 75.
And we all were roughly worth $30 million overnight.
$30 million is still a huge amount of money.
In 1999, it felt a lot bigger.
Did you have to vest?
Did that need to vest for the next four years?
If you were a partner, it was automatically vested.
But you weren't able to sell it for three, four, and five years.
year i think four or five and six years or three four or five years so when you left you had to keep it yes okay good um and listen i i left goldman in not the the nicest of ways i had a personal i kind of blew up personally um i've been there man that was horrible it was embarrassing it was humiliating it was you know you're letting people down guys had made big bets on you Yeah, you're like, oops.
One of the great conversations that I will ever remember, at that point, I was working for a guy named John Thornton, who was one of the two co -presidents of Goldman, and he had taken a big risk on me.
And I was like, John, I just feel so bad for you.
He said, you don't feel bad for me?
He's like, I'm the president of Goldman Sachs.
I'm worth a zillion dollars.
I've got a house here and here.
I got a nice wife and kid.
Like, you don't need to feel bad for me.
You need to worry about yourself.
and I was like it was such a nice thing for him to say and it was so true I was so I was so worried about what those other guys were thinking about me and having to letting him down and and instead of saying oh my god like let your family down you let yourself down like go go fix your own shit I left their tail between my legs and spent a year just running myself out I had a shrink for the first time in my life.
I heard you told a story that like you said it one time and it kind of got glossed over, but it's kind of brilliant.
I think you said your brother was near World Trade on 2001 and he calls you and he's like, I think there's a terrorist attack.
I think I'm in this.
Was he in the World Trade Center?
He was in the building right next to me.
He's like, what do I do?
And what did you say your reply was?
I was like, you should buy euro dollars or two year notes.
And I was like, maybe get out of the building.
and then I was like maybe I should go back to Wall Street I literally thought that I was like well partly I then decided to run down I'd been in the army I want to run down to help and I picked my kid up and I'm running down the block we lived in Chelsea at the time so I'm running to the west side highway so I could actually see the World Trade Center because you couldn't see it from my roof and my kids started crying and I was like oh that's not a good idea to run down there with the kids so I ran back in and watched on TV but they wouldn't really take volunteers Right, the police blocked it
off, and I was like, I felt a little impotent, like no way to participate.
I couldn't participate financially, I couldn't participate in safety or physical.
Yeah, it's like when you spent all your life trying to make money, trying to be charismatic, trying to be powerful, and you're like, fuck it, none of this matters right now.
Yeah, and so, I literally remember saying, I want to go back to work on Wall Street, and there's another chapter left in me.
Because in between I was looking at things like Outward Bound or just a whole different career path.
I was like - You were going to be like a camp instructor?
I was going to try to run outward bound.
You know, there was, you know, you're looking at, you got headhunters, you know, what are jobs that you could qualify for?
I remember I was the president of Goldman Sachs Latin America.
I was a young partner from Goldman.
And so. That's wild.
Camp instructor was below my pay grade at that point.
But I was trying to think of other ways to contribute to my life and to society than Wall Street.
And that 9 -11 thing was like, you know, go back to Wall Street.
you had another chapter that's research fortress i i actually before i didn't start fortress uh my partner pete brigger who was a partner of mine and a good friend both from princeton goldman sachs and in hong kong he had called me up and said hey why don't we partner up and uh pete's an amazing guy he he said how about this you're pretty you have a a fun life and I'm a pretty good investor.
And you're a decent investor.
Decent. Thanks, Pete.
And he said, we'll go together.
We'll split it 50 -50.
Half of what I make, half of what you make.
And at that point, his stock was trading at a premium to fair value.
And my stock was trading at a huge discount to fair value.
And that he would make that call meant the world to me.
And so I say, I'll do it.
And so the two of us, we're going to partner up in something.
And Pete had known owned Wes Edens, who had started Fortress a few years earlier.
And at that point, Fortress was probably 80 people and about a billion dollars' asset.
And it was a PE firm or a hedge fund?
It had been a PE firm.
And you were buying any type of businesses?
Well, it was a PE firm that Wes ran with a guy named Randy Nardone and Rob Kaufman, who are still friends of mine and partners in some other things.
And they were doing mostly structured credit type PE buying.
But they, So, you know, Wes was a genius.
He like came up with the idea of let's buy all the cell towers and then think of cell towers as a REIT.
And so he would look at business opportunities and literally craft companies that would then become billion -dollar companies.
And so we thought Pete has a real expertise in building a credit hedge fund.
I was going to build a macro hedge fund.
And the three of us sat there and said 1 plus 1 plus 1 will equal 10.
ahead. No one had ever taken a hedge fund or private equity company public.
And we said, let's build a company where we all build our own businesses.
And to be fair, 90%, 95 % of the time we spent alone.
We didn't like each day, what are we doing today?
I built a company, Pete built a company, and Wes built a company that we all put in the same box.
All right. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot.
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25 again september 3rd through 5th in san francisco hope to see you there did you have to come up with any of your own capital to join i did i did and uh i actually didn't have that much capital you know you you when i said goldman had you know we got 30 million dollars after goldman well that's pre -tax and the stock goes down and i think pete and i put in roughly 10 or 15 million dollars is all i had so you you were worth 15 or 10 and you put all of it into fortress all of it into fortune actually borrowed some i think and you're what 37 yeah 37 and you know started a hedge fund and i started
a macro fund peace started a big distress fund and wes continued to build his private equity business and part of our ethos was if we do what we say we're going to do people will trust us i learned that at goldman sachs as well goldman sachs asset management business didn't have the greatest returns but they had lots of money because people trusted him.
And so how do you build a sense of trust in investors?
It's doing what you say you're going to do.
No one expects you to win all the time.
What was wonderful about Fortress is very cool is that over the first five years, really 2002 to 2007, Pete's business, I don't think, lost money in a month.
He'd buy broken debt.
He'd give loans to people.
I called him a loan shark.
Like if you couldn't get a loan from Deutsche Bank, he came to Pete, like private credit.
Now private credit's a huge business, but he was early in private credit.
And so he built this very diversified portfolio of loans.
Wes continued to do his stuff and literally his track record just kept going up and up.
And I had a very good run as a macro trader.
And so by the time we went public, public, my macro fund in those five years was a top performing macro fund.
You know, it was in the top 5 % of macro funds.
Pete had never lost money in a month and Wes's track record looked like Warren Buffett's.
And that 15 million that you invested or 10 at its peak, what do you think it was worth?
Well, when we went public, we were the only company ever.
And I think to this day, this holds where five guys became became billionaires in a day.
So in roughly 10 years, you turned one million into a billion.
2 .7, 2 .3 billion. That's what the, we're sitting around our office after we rang the bell at the stock exchange and I got my two young daughters and all of a sudden, Bloomberg puts a picture of Wes Eden's.
I was like, oh shit, Wes Eden's 2 .3 billion.
And then a picture of Pete Brigger.
Pete Brigger, 2 .3 billion.
Picture of Mike Norris.
I think Wes owned a tiny bit more.
So Wes would have been 2 .4 billion.
And then Pete and I own the same, 2 .3, 2 .3 billion.
And my two like 9 - and 10 -year -old daughters looked at each other and high -fived.
Because we had never talked about money, right?
You know, like 9 - and 10 -year -olds.
Was there any difference?
Is there any difference between making, let's say, $30 million than from 2 point whatever?
I think that fortress frenzy of us becoming rock stars almost because we were the first company to take a hedge.
We were the first guys to take a hedge fund, private equity company, public.
and that we were all on such a high, it didn't last long because the oil and financial crises happened.
You get treated a little differently.
Also, you're getting calls from the president of your university who wants to sit down and talk with you.
You're getting invited to cool dinners.
And so it goes to your head a little bit and you're not ready, ready for the rush of excitement around it.
You don't feel that different.
I see the same friends and, you know, but you've, there's a little bit of, everyone gets a little bit full of themselves.
Did your life stay the same, but the people who wanted to talk to you change?
Yeah, you're getting e -mails and calls from people you haven't seen in years and people you don't even know that say they know you.
Yeah, you get this.
Especially because it was public, right?
If it had been done quietly, no one would have known.
But we were, like, on newspapers and magazine articles.
And it goes to your head a little bit.
And then, you know, the wonderful thing about having six brothers and sisters is they don't treat you much differently.
They're, like, excited for you, but they...
Well, and you have six or seven, you have a bunch of siblings who are also ballers, too.
And friends. And so, you know, and then the markets always take their pound of flesh.
You know, we made a bunch of mistakes, 08 happened.
And next thing you know, not only aren't you worth $2 billion, but you're going under the billion pretty quick.
And you're like, oh, shh.
You're losing a comma.
Oh, shit, that sucks.
Some of this goes back to, and this is going to sound crass as heck, but if you were a kid in high school that played sports, and the girls liked, or the guys liked if you were a girl, and had a decent social life, and didn't have a chip on your shoulder, it doesn't seem, like, success is a little easier to handle because you were used to it.
And it's not the same magnitude of success, but like if you got lucky with the girls in high school, you usually turn out to be okay.
Like it's often you see the problems of people that really have a hard time adjusting was when they were misfits or social and that chip on their shoulder drove them to this crazed success.
And the reason I'm interested in you is because you've won in a bunch of different parts of life, So you were a great wrestler.
You went to Princeton, like, you did a lot of amazing things.
But then you, you, what's funny is because your personality is so loud and because you're so, like, funny and tell these crazy stories, like, you talk about trading and you're like, Oh, yeah, I forgot, you actually had to be skilled at something.
What, the people who are around you, what do you think they would say you're good at?
I have a weird insight into looking at what the future is going to be, you know, it's called pattern recognition.
I can look at the charts and say, this is gonna happen, or I can synthesize information well.
And so I'm a good speculator because I see the future pretty well." You read a lot?
I used to. I watch a ton of TV now.
But I read a lot of like, nonfiction stuff that's coming through my desk all the time, right?
So I keep up on news and the world and talk to people.
Most of the great CEOs read a lot.
They're curious. I'm curious as heck.
I get a lot of my curiosity curiosity and learning from conversation from either this amazing network of people that i've met in the world and i'm learning all the time i literally had lunch with goldman's chief intel chief uh information officer so he's got 19 ,000 of goldman's 45 ,000 people that work for him and you know that was a master class in ai and so then i'm like meeting some other guy in ai and so So I'm learning AI from reading articles, playing with it, but mostly finding out the world experts and learning from them.
And that's the way I've been learning as I've gotten older.
So you think that people would say that you're good at seeing patterns.
What else would they say you think they think you're good at?
And I'm a good storyteller.
And so why that's been important is crypto in the last 10 years has been about narrative, right?
it has been about the story of understanding the world and then telling that story and I think I've been unbelievably well suited for this moment of time to be a crypto CEO because I'm a good storyteller right how do you convince someone to buy Bitcoin right you've got to tell them a story what about being a good trader because you were actually a trader for a long time I still am a trader that's a hard job because you have to first of all develop a process an internal algorithm that wins more than it loses you got to be really honest with yourself am I good at this right it's not am I intelligent
am I smart but am I good at this am I good at taking this information and making bets on it and even if you are then you need to develop a discipline discipline that allows you to make sure that your guesses are in your portfolio.
There are so many people that say, oh my God, you got to be short the dollar right now.
The U .S. is on a downtrend, right?
Trump is pissing everybody off.
The short dollar is the biggest, easiest trade to see.
Every single macro investor, almost every single investor right now believes that you should be short the dollar.
And it's a maximum conviction belief.
I would bet if you took all their portfolios, only 40 % of them have a really big position.
It should be tautological that if you're bearish, you're short, and if you're bullish, that you're long.
But it's not because of fear.
What if I'm wrong? And so, so much of trading is anxiety management.
So much is how do I overcome my fear?
I heard a guy the other day say, anxiety is just when your brain is a lot bigger than your balls.
And so we, listen, anxiety is real, right?
Like there is this, the lion that shows up and you go with the fight or flight.
In trading, you see the lion all the time and you get nervous when the market's going higher and you're long, well, what if it goes back down?
I'll give back my money.
And so there are all these different reasons you get scared.
How do you learn to trust yourself?
That's a really hard process.
What I've learned from the best, and I'm really good at this, but there's a group that's better than me, and I think about this all the time.
Let me say this. You're good at what?
At being a macro trader.
But does that mean you're good at managing anxiety?
The whole process of seeing the world and then betting on it and making money from it.
And so there are 25 macro traders that people have probably heard of, Stan Druckenmiller, David Tepper, Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon, you know, Alan Howard, Chris Rokos.
There's a bunch of people that are great at this.
The gap between the really greats and the next level, and I put myself in that next level, is discipline.
And so you have to have a set of rules that you follow.
Do you consider yourself a highly disciplined person?
I think I'm a really hardworking person who has, and I was really disciplined at parts of my life.
And I think I have sporadic lapses of discipline, partly because I have this really diverse group of interests and I get excited.
I'm a people pleaser, so I'm trying to help things out, people all the time.
And it's a prioritization.
Like Stan Drecklemuller, for instance, who I think is the best or, you know, David Tepper's pushing on him, but the best trader, certainly of his generation.
Tepper's a little bit younger.
32 years, never lost money, compounded over 30%.
Everyone in our seats look at him as like...
The guy. ...the guy.
A ton of integrity on how he lives his life and how he lives his portfolio.
When he was managing other people's money, he never golfed during a work day.
And he loves golf. But what you said, you said you had this great quote.
You go, you were quoting Napoleon or someone, but you said, I hire lucky generals, not skilled ones.
So this was, how did I learn that I had the right to be good at this, right?
I was making money lots, and I was like, yeah, everyone has a bit of imposter syndrome.
And Ahud Barak, who had been the prime minister of Israel, I'd hired as a consultant.
How do you hire the prime minister of Israel as a consultant?
One of my investors said, you need to meet Ahud Barak.
And Ahud Barak was looking for ways to make money, and he had just started this business.
And he had two clients, Louis Bacon, who was a multi -billionaire, you know, one of the pantheon of the greats.
And Bruce Kovner, multibillionaire, one of the pantheon of the greats.
And Mike Novogratz, who was a little peanut at that point.
What was his rate? Maybe it was $200 ,000 a year or something.
So you got the former prime minister for $200 ,000 a year to give you feedback and advice.
That's a pretty good deal.
I just remember thinking, I've got the same consultant.
He only had, like, three clients.
As two of the world, like, literally the great traders of all time.
Bruce Kovner, who built Caxton, and Lewis Bacon, who built Moore Capital.
and I'm sitting with a hoot for lunch. And he said, you don't know if I figured you out.
He said, you know, you're not so smart, but you're lucky.
And I was like, that's the compliment?
He said, don't worry about it, because, you know, I was just with Louis Bacon, and I spent time with Bruce Kovner.
He said, Kovner might be smarter than you, but, you know, all of you guys have an intuition.
And he gave me this quote from Napoleon.
He said, of course, I didn't know French. He said, I forgot you're not so smart, you don't know French. Son of a bitch. And Barak, at least allegedly, had the highest IQ of anyone in the Israeli military.
And he was the most decorated soldier in the Israeli military.
He was a wonderful guy, charming.
And he said, you guys have an intuition, a pattern recognition, an ability to sense where things are, like a general did.
And that's your intelligence.
Instantly, I was like, that's why I'm right more than I'm wrong.
I never knew why I was right more than I was wrong.
It's easy to know you're being commercial, right?
Right. You and I can be commercial if we can.
If we can make these, you know, cups of broth for 50 cents and sell them for two dollars, we're both going to say, how many can we sell?
Right. That's not hard. But why should I be able to predict where dollar yen is going to go in a year better than you?
Are you able to do this in other facets of your life where like, man, I met this person.
I predict that they're going to face these problems or whatever.
But what's interesting is, without being conscious of it, like, I've invested in a few independent movies.
Nobody makes money in independent movies.
Like, almost nobody.
And I've invested in two of the top three selling independent films of all time.
Independent films that sold for the top prices, right?
Birth of a Nation still, I think, is the highest. Yeah, 19 or what?
19 million it sold for, I think.
19 million, and then there's a movie called Assassination Nation, which didn't do well in the box office but sold for like $13 million.
Like those are two of the top, you know, five prices for independent movies.
At least they were.
And was that just luck or was it intuition?
It's not luck if it happens twice.
Right. And so for me, that conversation with Barack was giving me confidence that my decision process wasn't random, that there was something in it.
So I went back and I thought about like, Like, how do I make decisions?
And it is at the intersection of lots of data and a gut feeling.
And there's that I think moment.
And so once I understood that, I was much more confident in telling investors how I made decisions.
My hedge fund went from $300 million under management to $2 billion, and my performance went straight up over like the next six months, but mostly because investors could feel my confidence.
And so, the lesson for you or for listeners is spend time figuring out what you're good at and where that comes from.
And not everyone has the same skills.
Where does it come from for you though?
I mean, because like I remember reading about, I'm not in the finance world at all, but I read Black Fish, which was about Steve Cohen.
And they told stories about how in the 80s there was a physical ticker and he would like, Like, he could just hear the rhythm of the ticker.
And I'm like, that is just so vague.
And it's a pain in the ass because I'm like, you're explaining it like an art, but I want it to be more of a science because I want to learn.
But that's how you're describing it.
It's very artistic.
For me, the type trading I do, it's very intuitive and it's very pattern recognition.
If I went blind, I couldn't trade.
I need to see the ballet of the charts.
There are other people that do things very differently.
Like, the interesting thing about trading is there are a thousand different ways to approach it.
What does Steve do?
You were saying. I know Stevie pretty well, but I don't know his exact process.
But I would tell you he's one of the most competitive guys out there.
He used to go on vacation and have all his screens set up.
And if he didn't, if he wasn't in feeling things right, he'd fly right back to get it to his desks.
Like, he was obsessed with beating the markets.
Do you think you're competitive?
I'm not as competitive, which is interesting.
when I think about like with Stan Druckenmiller and Louis Bacon and like why those guys have have been in that and maybe one day I'll catch them but they're but I'm not in their category at this point they're more competitive than me they just I mean you Louis Bacon I remember playing croquet against him and I'm like how's this guy killing me in croquet well he had hired the world's best croquet guy to teach him he he doesn't like to lose there's partly like these These guys are ultra -competitive, but they also are ultra -disciplined.
And those two cross -factors— Creates a maniac.
Well, creates an amazing performer.
Yeah. Maybe not the easiest person to go to cocktails with.
Sometimes they are, you know, but like an amazing performer.
And I don't want to discount I've had an amazing run of success at trading.
reading, I just know myself, as I compare myself to the other guys, a little more disciplined.
Now, I would probably argue I've had more fun.
I've done more different things than most people.
But again, each person makes their own decision on what path they want to take.
And I'm not making a value judgment on how people live their lives.
The key is to figure out how you want to live your own life, but figure out what you're good at.
And again, that comes from mentors.
It comes from sometimes chance.
Without that conversation with Hubrock, I was miserable because I was feeling so much pressure.
And I remember telling my wife, I said, I might even just shut this hedge fund down if I can't have more fun.
And I was winning, but I was feeling so much pressure.
And I think I was feeling pressure because I didn't know why it was good.
And that literal conversation over lunch unlocked this story in me that said, hey, this is why I should, this is why I win.
And that was intuition.
intuition, you're just good at, you feel certain things, and you should trust it.
yes, and it doesn't come just, you don't get it from sitting in a box, there's a tremendous amount of information I'm shoving in my brain, right?
Looking at charts, talking to people, understanding psychology, looking at you know who's long and who's short, there's tons of stuff that goes into the algorithm, but it was at that intersection of the intuition, it's all in the part of your brain that you're not tapping normally.
A lot of it's historical, too, like you see things, they repeat themselves.
Yeah, I heard one of my heroes is John Rockefeller.
And I was listening to Business Untitled and you're like, when I was in fifth grade or eighth grade or something, I wrote a paper on Jadon D.
Yeah. And I thought that was cool because he's a fun ass dude to learn about.
And you also, you and your partner Wes did the train thing.
Wes did the train thing.
I was a cheerleader and an investor.
But, yeah, that was fascinating.
When I went down there and I was reading about Flagler.
Yeah, he's the man.
These guys are hardcore.
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I went and talked to a bunch of friends of ours.
You and I have some mutual friends.
And I want to tell you what they said.
They go, he's max risk all the time, his entire life.
He takes tons of risk and he lives life on the edge.
And another person said, he's blown up a couple of times and he's won a lot more.
I'm amazed at how how good he is at managing risk.
And I actually talked to some of the guys who work with and they also use the word risk constantly.
It's hard to be in the crypto business and not to be comfortable with risk.
Like it's an asset that, you know, Bitcoin went up and crashed down.
Yeah, I think it's bigger than Bitcoin.
I think that you got lucky that Bitcoin exists when it does.
I think that you're a guy who you enjoy risk.
You enjoy – I think you were telling – I heard a story about how you said like you are a 37 out of 40 in terms of like some type of personality test of freaking rules.
And you're like it's funny.
My kid like is the exact opposite.
And then you hear – I read the New Yorker or some article where they're like he flew a helicopter down the street like during the Princeton graduation.
Like there's clearly like this thing of like this guy likes to push it and he's pretty comfortable teetering on like big ruins.
And so are you, for your personal finances, are you at risk often?
So part of it is there's this balance between like, yeah, there's an adrenaline need.
Like I like adrenaline, like in sports and in trading.
and it's a dopamine addiction if you wanna think about it.
But part of it is I like my life and I was a helicopter pilot at Fort Rucker, Alabama and I made 18 ,000 a year after tax.
I remember because I had $1 ,500 per month paycheck.
Pat Tierney, who's a buddy of mine still, was one of my buddies down there and we had the time of our lives.
When I look at how much fun and how much I enjoyed that at in the middle of fricking lower, ugly, the ugly corner of lower Alabama, right?
The wiregrass, it was called, by Dothan with 700 other guys and almost no women around because all the women have gone off to college and there's 700 guys and a few women at flight school.
We still had one of the time in our lives.
So when I think, was that year better or worse than the year I made lots of money?
I can't tell, like that was a great year.
And so I think if you enjoy your life, it's easier to take risk if i lost my money it would hurt my ego for a while i would be embarrassed uh i'd be frustrated because all the money really does at one point is allow you to help other people right and that's both a blessing it's a huge blessing but it's also a lot of responsibility and sometimes it's a pain in the ass and so i actually don't think i've tied how I live my life on a year -to -year basis to money.
Now, some of my friends say, oh, that's bullshit.
Look at the parties you throw, you spend lots of money.
I do spend lots of money, but I threw tons of parties when I didn't have a lot of money either.
I just threw cheaper parties.
And so I think so much of being able to take risk is being okay with your life and not being defined by just your money.
Have you met a guy named Brad Jacobs?
No, I wish I have. He has a book.
I've never met him.
I've read his book, it's called How to Make a Billion Dollars.
He's created, I think $6 billion companies like XO Logistics is one of them.
If you ever heard of that, like these like huge, like $10 billion logistic companies.
And his whole schtick was he fragmented industries, bought all of them, operated them, well, took a public whatever.
And he talks in his book about how he was like, I researched like crazy.
Like anytime I get into a business, I researched like crazy.
So I read all the books.
I use Tejas or whatever else, like the services and our alpha sites or whatever they are and like i hire experts but then i go and talk to the employees and i just research so it's like i'm really confident that this is going to work because i've talked to literally 500 people and i have all these notes what i've noticed a pattern with you is that you don't i don't know if you call it research but you talk to a lot of people and so like i just on the way here i was hearing a story about how like your roommate was gloria vanderbilt's son or something like that he was like so that's like pretty
magical like to be around and hear stories of that family and then like your other roommate helped create ethereum uh and then there was like this other story this other story there was like 20 stories where i'm like what the hell like it's like it's like you i'm a good guy to sit around a campfire with drinking because i got a lot of stories but there's just so many times where it's like oh i just it's like normal people would be like i know a guy you know i sat at a bar next to a guy and he did this you just have all these stories except they just happen to be like these like wild crazy people
who what was the story about how you first heard about bitcoin so pete brigger uh who had had been my, he lived above me my freshman year at Princeton.
He lived in the room above me.
This dorm was amazing.
We had a pretty cool little group of people.
Right? Is this wild?
It's like the greatest dorm on earth.
He lived above me. How many billionaires are from that dorm, do you think?
No, seriously. At least three.
For real, in that dorm?
But he's the reason I got my job at Goldman Sachs.
I was literally wandering around Bleeker Street, a little drunk, and I ran into him, and I was interviewing for jobs.
He's like, bullshit, you got to work at Goldman Sachs.
And, you know, I was from the army.
And so he got me an interview at Goldman Sachs.
And 41 interviews later, they gave me a job.
And then we lived in Hong Kong together and we slowly became very good friends.
I'm the godfather of his youngest son.
Then we did Fortress.
And he was the guy I said was the distressed debt investor.
Well, because he made a promise to his wife that at one point they'd move back to California.
He moved his entire business or the bulk of it to Stanford area, Palo Alto.
And what year was that?
This probably would have been – he probably moved his business out there 2010 or something.
All right. Good timing.
And – but he's not a tech guy.
But his brother -in -law was a tech guy and the group of friends he had were tech guys.
And they all started talking about Bitcoin.
And Pete wanted to be part of the clan.
And so he called me up.
He said, I'm hearing about this thing, Bitcoin.
All my smart friends are doing it.
What do you think? And I never heard of it.
And I quickly did a Google search and asked around.
And this was in 10?
This was in 2012, 2013, maybe.
Bitcoin was like $96.
So it was nothing, really.
I mean, there's not, there would have been like bitcoin .org or like some forums. There wasn't a lot, but it was online.
The Chinese had just started buying it.
And I made a thesis.
I said, oh, we got to buy it.
And we started buying some of it.
My friend Jeff Lowe, who's become a great investor, was working in my family office.
He bought my first Bitcoin for me, and then Pete and I kept talking about it, and we were like, maybe this should be bigger than just us buying a little bit of it.
So we called a third friend, Dan Moore, another Princeton guy, who I had – who had, you know, had a similar – went to Princeton.
He had worked on Wall Street.
He worked at Goldman.
He worked at Tiger.
I had invested in his first hedge fund, and he was on the sidelines in between.
You know, after 08, his hedge fund didn't do well.
He was trying to figure out what to do.
He had done some cool stuff in Argentina.
Tina, he researched this for a while and came back and was like, guys, this is going to change the whole world.
And Dan was really confident and was willing to put a whole bunch of his net worth into this thing.
Pete and I were wealthier because fortunes had gone public than Dan at the time.
And we're like, if he's putting that much in, we need to put at least that much in, you know, just the way guys think.
And so we all roughly put similar amounts in.
Was it like Like eight figures?
Or can you even say that?
It was seven figures.
Seven figures. But it was a significant amount in dollar terms at 100, but not in our net worth terms, right?
We were very wealthy guys at the time.
And it's one of the reasons we were able to hold it so long.
Because even it went up, if you're a young guy and you put $10 ,000 into something and all of a sudden it's worth 100 ,000, your friend's like, dude, you got to take some, Like, yeah, you can buy a house.
You can, your girlfriend wants you to buy, you know, like there's so many reasons you're going to sell that thing and almost nobody can hold.
But if you're already having a lot of money, it's just another investment.
And so we get a lot of credit for having made lots of money in crypto.
It was easier having started rich. And it's got me thinking why this world is so off sides.
When you're wealthy, you have assets.
Assets are basically chips on a table.
you know i bought spacex when it was 120th was today because everyone's like oh you gotta buy some spacex and you look you're like elon musk is killing he's brilliant let me get some private spacex and so all of a sudden you make you know 100 million plus in space actually didn't do anything other than make put a bet down and so getting money and getting network work makes making money so much easier.
It's almost unfair.
It's why Piketty wrote that book.
He said that there's no way the rich poor gap ever comes back into balance because once you're wealthy, you have such an advantage.
And the advantage isn't just capital, it's capital and network.
And one of my strengths is I like people, I like cheering people on, I like talking about about people and it makes it easy to make friends and network.
And through that network, you learn stuff.
So my, I'm, um, for our podcast, my listeners will make fun of me.
I, I own a company now that's does well.
And I, hopefully that's going to be a huge home run, but my liquid net worth, I just do, um, basically the S and P 500 and bonds.
You invest like you're like, I got a white guy from Missouri.
Oh yeah. Look, it's worked out boring, which means I've, I've offered for about 90 % of hedge funds, so it's worked out.
Listen, it's been a great— Yeah, I started making money in the Grays Bowl market of all time.
And do you, for your personal finances, do you have any boring stuff?
Or are you active for the whole thing?
No. Listen, I have a chunk of money in, you know, these credit funds, like the one Pete ran, which are private credit funds, which, you know, roughly have done 10 % plus a year compounded.
And you can compound a piece of money at 10 % a year for a long period of time, you get rich real quick.
And so I have some on private credit, I have a lot in my own company, then I trade currencies and stuff on my own, and then I have a bunch of private equity investments and venture investments.
I own a chunk of Bojangles, the chicken company that got announced yesterday that the group that owns it is putting it up for sale.
and so hoping that sells for a high price.
But I haven't really ever done bond stocks partly because that's what I do.
Yeah. And my money has often been tied up in the enterprise that I'm engaged in at Fortress.
I own a lot of Fortress stock.
I guess you've been illiquid like for a large portion of this.
I probably have run the lowest liquidity to net worth ratio of anyone who's been on your podcast. Can you tell me more about that?
You know, it's not necessarily what I wanted always.
I've always had a lot of faith that I'd make money.
And so I've always either wanted to live a big life and also make a lot of investments.
And so - So you just spend a lot?
Spend a lot, live large, I invest large.
And I always think I'm gonna win.
And so in 2021, we thought we were gonna be able to take Galaxy public and I was gonna get a lot of liquidity.
And it turned out we took a little too long to get into the SEC queue.
The administration changed, Gary Gensler shut the door.
And so for four years, There's no liquidity at a Galaxy.
You know, my other stuff, I made some good investments, some bad investments and didn't really change lifestyle.
And you slowly start burning the furniture of liquidity.
Right. And so we just did a deal.
We took some chips off the table in terms of liquidity.
Did you live life on the edge?
I mean, I think I admire like your ability.
Like I'm adrenaline seeking, too.
But I'm also way more risk adverse than you, I think.
and I but I admire people who are into risk because I think it's held me back I think one of the things that people say you blew up twice I listen I I had a personal shit to deal with and I lost my job at Goldman Sachs actually to be fair I resigned but that was embarrassing because I was on a high flyer track there and I loved Goldman Sachs and so that that was painful coming back from that gives you a lot of confidence that yeah you can fall down and like you can lose money it's not the end of the world you're gonna you got to learn how to get back up and being a wrestler teaches you that like
no wrestler wins every match kale sanderson did in college but then he lost in international like you know no one wins every match and learning how to come and i lost a lot learning how to come back from losing is one of the most important things because because losing doesn't mean you're a bad guy it doesn't mean you're a shithead doesn't mean you're not competent it just means you lost that game and I think Nadal when he left tennis gave the best he was like you know I think he lost 48 percent of the points he played you know he was the greatest tennis player of all time or one of the top three
that process of stumbling and coming And I think a lot about how I have managed to do that myself because I often ask to help people to think through it.
What, like a downfall and like a rebirth?
Part of it is take some time off and do some work and understand like what the hell happened.
Most people don't spend enough time figuring out who they are, like literally trying to understand who they are and why they're who they are.
It's always your parents.
you've got a relationship with your mom and your dad, whatever the story was, dad disappeared, processing that, right?
That's the human condition, right?
And trying to understand what moves you.
Some people get there and they're like, oh, the whole world...
Other people just make progress getting there, right?
I think I've made progress.
I'm not sure I've ever gotten to enlightenment by anything...
Not even close. But I keep making progress and going on that journey.
And there's lots of ways to go on that journey right it's through getting a shrink through meditating through prayer through ayahuasca or psilocybin journeys like there's there's radical ways there's subtle ways there's taking time by yourself but it's investing in yourself most people don't invest in themselves that's right i was asked a room full of 800 wrestling coaches how many in the last five years it's been one week with just themselves and not one hand went up not one you do do that now?
I try once a year to spend a week by myself.
My friend, Chris, who has a public drink company, he's like, I mean, I screw up all the time.
And I always try to journal what's the lesson to be learned here.
And I thought that was like a really good way of asking himself that question.
What questions are you asking yourself during that seven day solitude?
Well, I did the the silent meditation in Cardiff, England.
You sit there for freaking 11 days meditating.
You can't read. You can't do music.
You can't exercise.
You can't even masturbate.
I mean, it literally is.
For 11 days. Your back hurts.
You starve. So you guys know this, but I have a company called Hampton.
Joinhampton .com. It's a vetted community for founders and CEOs.
Well, we have this member named LaVon, And Levon saw a bunch of members talking about the same problem within Hampton, which is that they spent hours manually moving data into a PDF.
It's tedious, it's annoying, and it's a waste of time.
And so Levon, like any great entrepreneur, he built a solution.
And that solution is called MOLCU.
MOLCU uses AI to automatically transfer data from any document into a PDF.
And so if you need to turn a supplier invoice into a customer quote or move info from an application into a contract, you just put a file into Moku and it auto fills the output PDF in seconds.
And a little backstory for all the tech nerds out there.
Slavon built the entire web app without using a line of code.
He used something called Bubble .io.
They've added AI tools that can generate an entire app from one prompt.
It's pretty amazing.
And it means you can build tools like Moku very fast without knowing how to code.
And so if you're tired of copying and pasting between documents or paying people to do that for you, you check out moku .ai m -o -l -k -u .ai all right back to the pod do you set goals like this like like to have such a full life where you're running a i don't know how many people work here 200 people a lot of people 600 600 oh my god i didn't even realize it and you have all the you have a lot going on but then you're like i do this week meditation and then this party here are you setting like at the end of the year, this is what a win would look like?
We do, we do set goals.
We've got a management team that's got agenda of things that we wanted to happen.
And I think the crypto business is in such an interesting, both crypto and the data center business.
We have two businesses.
Both are at the forefront right now of explosive change and there's a ton to do in both of them.
And so, when I think about my time, for the next six months, Galaxy is going to get a ton of my time.
There's been times when we first started, it was a smaller business.
My philanthropy got a ton of my time when I started doing criminal justice.
So, I've dialed back my participation in philanthropy solely because this 600 -person baby needs a lot of energy.
And so, I do think of it that way.
But my brain, you know, like, how do I have fun?
And I think if I make this much money, what are we gonna do with it?
So my son and I are brainstorming on like a cool project, fantasy project that you would do if you actually had X hundred million dollars to give away to one thing, you know, what could you do to make New York City better?
And so like, and I'm on perplexity, I'm trying to figure out, I'm working with people.
And so I multitask in that respect, respect, but I got goals.
There was that do what I say, don't want to do.
I'm much better talking about, like, the meditating and the exercise, and this is where the discipline.
My wife wakes up every day, 6 .30, and meditates an hour, and meditates an hour at night and doesn't miss.
I'm just like, she's like a metronome.
And I'm like, I know that would be good for me, and I do meditate once in a while when I'm stressed, I can meditate.
But it doesn't seem broken.
broken yeah when I break I figure out how to fix myself but no I don't feel broken yeah but on this other podcast you did you were like oh I went to a therapist the first time ever and and the thing was like I gotta love myself and forgive myself and and you're like that was like a huge breakthrough and I'm like in my head I'm like playing armchair expert here but I'm like you're doing it again you know what I mean like people have a hard time changing patterns you know one of the things you'll learn as you get older is that you see very few people that actually do enough of the hard work that they do
change. And most of the time you see those people is when they literally hit some horrific rock bottom that the only way to live is to change, right?
That's the whole AA cycle where they just give up and say, OK, I'll do what you tell me to do because I got to change.
Maybe we can change.
Change is hard. Even subtle change is hard. And again, if someone's living their fullest life, maybe they don't wanna change, right?
Yeah, I mean, I love hearing about this shit because I think that, you know, this is gonna sound pompous of me, but in my head, I'm like, I can be like, you know, he's, you know, I'm 35, so I'm like, he's 25 years ahead of me and like - And we both can't hear.
Yeah, we're both a little bit deaf and I came from a blue -collar, like, family.
And I think you talked about Princeton, about, like, you're like, oh, my God, I thought I was the shit.
And then I got around people that, like, kind of were the shit.
And I'm like, oh, fuck.
And so, like, I've, like, felt that, like, I hadn't been in New York City until I was, like, 26 years old.
Hadn't been on an airplane until I was 21.
And so, like, I always felt like these, um...
That line in New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
There's nothing like New York City because you're never going to be the guy.
Like, I go home and I'm like, I'm the man.
And then I go to New York, I'm like, And I'm, like, looking at apartments, and I'm like, I'm nothing.
But it's both so liberating and so awesome because, I mean, go to a Knicks game.
Oh, dude, we were supposed to do a podcast, and you canceled, and that night I turn on the TV, I see Timothee Chalamet, I see the Jenner girl, and then I see Mike.
And I was like, oh, motherfucker, we were supposed to do a thing.
And then I was like, my wife was like, can you blame him?
I'm like, no, I can't.
Knicks in the playoffs is as much. This site, city erupts.
Dude, you had, like, there was Timothy and then you.
We got good seats. You were like the man.
How much does a playoff seat cost?
So those seats are free.
And if you want to buy front row in the playoffs, you know, they can cost as much as $50 ,000, $80 ,000.
That's what I thought.
The second row, the guy who sat next to me, I think, paid $15 ,000.
Wait, yours were free?
Well, no, ours, we have season tickets.
Okay, got it. and so you just pay the normal whatever nicks charge you for playoff tickets that's crazy man and so do you see right you know ryan cohen is yeah billionaire ryan cohen i don't i mean i don't know him but i know who he is and i saw him sitting right in front of you during a game and like jalen brunson like fell in his lap and he didn't break eye contact from the beautiful woman he was with he just like he had the conversation the whole time those seats are fun because you always have the celebrity sitting in front of you i uh went to one game just a a regular season game and DeVito,
the Nigerian superstar, you know, there's two guys in Afrobeats, right?
DeVito's one of them.
The other guy's Burnaboy.
Was there, and I didn't know who he was, but he had a great chain.
I like chains and I'm like, dude, where'd you get that chain?
And I went to get a beer, and I was like, you want a beer, a Coke or something?
And he did it one when he came back, he turned around and he's like, you know, no one's offered to get me a beer in a long time.
I really appreciate that.
We started talking.
I had no idea idea.
He was this megastar and he posted a picture and then his uncle texted me and was like, dude, that guy knows more about crypto.
Get to know him. And so he came on, he was on our podcast, became friends with him.
That's the power of the gift of gab, I think, is what my father calls it.
He did the same thing, but it's sort of like, it's like this weird blue collar grit or like hospitality, but with like big number swag.
People are scared to be nice to people.
I don't want her the guy's sitting in front of you you know ask him where he is Jane like most people like to be at and you end up doing some type of business with him no no he came and got our podcast he invited me to Nigeria I made a huge mistake he invited me to his wedding in Nigeria which turned out to be like the coolest looking thing of all times but it was like a week before my daughter's wedding and I didn't think I could go but haven't you noticed the pattern of like all these silly small interactions have been like I think you said with the Ethereum purchase you bought a golf stream
or something crazy and like it like it's just funny that serendipity, I guess serendipity might happen to everyone, but not everyone capitalizes off of it.
And I've noticed a pattern where like there's so many, like, you're like, oh, I just happened to do this.
And like, I've heard that like 12 times.
You know what? I love other people's stories that you must as well, otherwise you wouldn't do the podcast. And so I get excited for other people, like you meet Davido, you're like, that's freaking so cool.
And I wanted to know his story.
And, you know, I didn't realize he grew up a rich kid and even the relationship with the dad.
It all fascinates me.
And I think if you show interest in people and you're open with yourself, it opens up a lot of, you know, opportunity.
And it's not a strategy.
It's not like I think about doing this.
It comes from partly being raised with seven kids.
It partly comes from, you know, feeling loved your whole life.
Mom and dad love you.
Your friends love you, you know, and so you feel comfortable in your own skin.
The gift you can give your kids, the gifting of your employees is for people to feel comfortable on their own skin.
When I went to Princeton, my great insight, you know, I had this roommate who was Gloria Vanderbilt's son.
Unfortunately, he ended up committing suicide later on in life.
And it was so painful.
He was such a nice kid.
Would that have been Anderson Cooper's brother?
And Anderson's written about it.
Yeah. Well, I read Anderson's book on his mother.
It's amazing. Yes. And, you know, I'm a young guy.
See, I'm meeting Gloria Vanderbilt.
Oh my God, I'm, I'm you know, I was royalty and I'm the middle class guy and my mom had grown up in Queens.
And so probably wore Gloria jeans.
But she knew the whole story.
And after about six months at Princeton, you know, Princeton's a unique place in that everyone lives in the same dorms and they're kind of crappy dorms. There's not like a hierarchy of rich and non -rich and in terms of living space and even quite frankly, social life.
And you're like, they'll shit on the same toilet as we do.
You know, they're, he's got his insecurities, he's got his strengths, just like, and the moment you realize everyone's kinda the same, everyone's a little bit insecure, everyone's got an imposter syndrome, everyone's trying to figure out who they are.
You had that realization in college?
I had that realization in college, freshman year.
Man, so when I used to host these conferences called, my old company was, it was a newsletter company, whatever is like this media company we own trade shows and or conferences like a ted talk and i would uh i was 24 when i started doing it and we would get like the founder of like wework or like casper or bonobos like brands that uh or uh zapier which is now like a 10 billion company these companies that were like at the time obviously before we knew we work was we were uh we're like these like 10 billion dollar whatever companies and i would play a little trick on them where i was like all right
your talk is at noon but you got to be here for mic check at like 10.
and like there's no mic check for conferences right like it like it works the mic works but i just wanted to be around them in the green room and i would hear these billionaires complain it would be i would just be sitting listening with about four or five of them and i knew like how big their companies were and i would hear them complain about stuff about like i've had this cfo who i need to fire but frankly like I just hate the confrontation or like you know this one company had just raised 400 million dollars and they were like things are going horrible I'm like dude I just read about you in the New
York Times I thought you guys were the shit and I remember thinking that that was like the most like enlightening lesson I'd had probably in terms of business and how to live life probably ever and I was like these people they're they have the same downside they have the same issues I have have, yet they're still like just moving forward and doing it.
And I found it very freeing to know that the people I admire were broken.
Listen, every everybody is is going through a similar journey.
Like, there's very few people that are enlightened.
I've met a couple. I've met one or two.
We're all on this path.
And so I think the lesson I learned at Princeton wasn't that I was the same as everybody or is that I was no better or no worse than anybody.
Sure. I did some things better than people and I did some things worse than people.
Right. Wrestling is a pretty objective.
This guy beat your ass.
He's a better wrestler.
And I've tried to keep that ethos my whole life.
It's why at my parties, I got my friend, I got, I got a real weird collection of people because I just like them as opposed to a hierarchy of people.
And I think that is what's brought me lots of joy.
But it's also giving me, when I got to Goldman Sachs, I would walk into the boss's office It'd be like, dude, I got this great idea.
I thought I deserved to be there.
Now, often he'd say, that's a stupid idea.
Oh, okay. And I'd go back to my seat.
But the guys around me were like, dude, how'd you have the courage to walk into the office?
I was like, he shits on that same toilet as you do.
Like, you know. And so part of that sense.
Were your parents confident?
My dad was an All -American football player from West Point, but very quiet and stoic is the right word for him nice he's become the kindest man in the world as he's gotten older but he was tough but kind but my mother was very aspirational the greatest storyteller and she pushed us not in a direct way but like in an indirect way like you know we'd complain about some kid being able to do something and well she jumped off a cliff would but you do it, right?
And there was almost this, like, we could be the Kennedys.
I tease my mom all the time.
She looked like Jackie O.
She named my first daughter, my oldest sister, Jacqueline, her first daughter.
So we had Jackie, Robert, Jon Jon.
Do you really have a Jon Jon?
Jon, yeah, Jon. Oh, Michael.
I was like, Mom, you named us after the Kennedys.
I did not. My mom and dad got married right when Kennedy became elected.
You know, I mean, it's...
Kennedy is one of my...
I'm a huge history buff in the Kennedy family.
I've probably read 12 books about him.
Thank God you aren't the Kennedys, right?
But it was very – my mother was very aspirational.
She wanted the best for us, and she was a big cheerleader.
She wasn't what you'd call, like, you know, the Jewish mom or the Korean mom, that pressured, pressured, pressured.
But, like, there was an internal sense of, of course you could do this.
And I think all of my brothers and sisters picked up on that.
Are you nervous about raising rich kids?
I think about that all the time.
I thought about this when I became wealthy.
I was like, there's nothing I can do about it.
And so I had one rule to my children, be kind.
And the only time I lost my temper, I had one son who was a whippersnapper a few times and was, like, tough on his brother.
Then I said, wow, where does that come from?
Like, I would really, only a few times in my whole life with my kids, I lost my temper.
And it was always when I thought they weren't being kind.
But I didn't think you could fake, like, not being rich. Like I worked a ton for my — when I was a young kid because I was kind of part of the labor force.
And if I wasn't more in the grass, my mom or dad had to.
If I wasn't doing the dishes, my mom or dad had to.
Like we had a labor force besides my kids.
And so you couldn't like fake.
You've got to do — this doesn't make any sense.
And so I thought — and my wife, I did a better job than me.
All you can do is model good behavior.
If you want your kids to work hard, work hard. If you want your kids to be kind to the people that are in your house and the cab driver, be kind to them.
If all you do is talk about money, your kids are only going to talk about money.
If you talk about interesting things around the dinner table, your kids are going to talk about interesting things.
So parenting really is modeling.
And, you know, by no means have I been a perfect model, and my kids probably could give you 85 stories on how I haven't, But that was my philosophy.
And they're going to be rich kids.
And so, so far, they've turned out lovely.
Fingers crossed. You know, they're all finding their own path and doing cool things.
I think it's much harder to be a rich kid than a poor kid.
Like, for us, our success was providing.
It's going from here to there.
We wanted to make money so we can go on a date, so we can get laid, so then we could buy a house so we could send our kids to school.
You want to be better than your parents, and your parents want you to be better than them.
And with my situation, I'm like, man, I got really lucky at a young age, which means compounding is like, it's like, and I feel actually sorry for my children.
I'm like, the natural state is that you need to beat me, but I don't want you to feel the pressure that you need to do that.
But they don't need to beat you.
The book Sapiens was all about humans are people of narrative, right?
I love storytelling.
The narrative in America was the American dream is your kids are gonna have a better life than you yeah so that got built into our system yeah at one point that's you want your kids to have a good life the european ethos says i just want my kids to have a good life and it as you get wealthier better i want my kids to feel self -actualized i want them to have a wonderful life like at one point if you're bill gates's kid and he's worth a hundred billion dollars it's possible like yeah i don't have 500 but like Like, it becomes idiotic.
And then you're like, you're talking about it, dude.
And so, I think the moment you get even half as wealthy as you, that narrative shifts.
And it's like, how do I help my kids?
How do I scaffold them to be self -actualized?
Whatever that means.
I got one son, he's quirky and smart, and we have no idea what he's going to do.
My wife and I gamble on it.
We're like, what do you think?
It can go from here to there.
He's hopefully going to find his niche and be successful, and we will cheer him on. Appreciate you doing this.
You're the man I really admire.
I admire your business stuff.
But I don't think that's what you're great at.
I think you're great at like living a full life.
And I think that there's only a handful of people who I know from the outside or I know personally where I'm like, I enjoy if like, life is like five different facets.
I'm like, I really admire like, up to four or even five of like the way they live life.
Whereas there's a bunch of people who are like amazing at business.
And like, yeah, he's amazing at business, but like, I don't admire anything else about him.
And so that's kind of cool to be able to hang out and meet with someone who I put on that list of people who I really look up to and how they live all different parts of their life.
So thanks for doing this.
And this is awesome.
I appreciate you. Thank you.
you. Alright, so when my employees join Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff.
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Again, copythat .com.
