I Turned $1M into $2.3B (Then Blew It Up and Rebuilt)

i'm a good guy i sit around a campfire with drinking because i go watch benefit this is mike nova mike grew up as a four on long island made its first million working as a trader at goldman sachs at the age of thirty two and made its first billion at the to forty is that life changing yeah we were the only company ever where five guys became millionaires in a day that's wild mike is a cowboy and his personal life and his professional life this guy likes to push it and these max wrist all the time yeah that's crazy man mike's made and lost the 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 like oh shit that sucks and what are you doing like what's the lesson to be learned here the gap really great and the next level and i put myself in that next level is hey i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never look i value people who are good operators at life and who live a certain way that i like that i'm dressing a cowboy today because i'm like you're kind of like a cowboy a little bit like in the 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 loss of fortune i think two or three times you know i certainly have lost lots of money that that narrative exists and one of my kids and a few of my friends like dude it's a little unfair because even at your lows you still had a lot of freaking money so your first your first hit was in your mid thirties at goldman right yeah listen i was i was a partner at goldman sachs goldman 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 to find themselves by what their boss thinks about them lloyd blind was like the big guy goldman and a later part of my career in every single person what is life think about me you know you gave your heart and soul to this culture of goldman and it's a 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 new york yankee when the yankee are winning and one of the big advantages that is they paid you wildly less than market as you're on your working your way up because you had the right the privilege of being a goldman sachs and one day you might become a partner and so i started at twenty four because i had done the army in blue helicopters for a while and april first nineteen eighty nine i got my job and you know i moved out to asia which was a great move the asian financial crises happened 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 made far more money than you thought you would for the firm and so goldman and me in the team i was with was very lucky that you know we got themselves on the right side of killed the asian blown 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 thirty three when i became a partner thirty four when i left and what was your big year ninety seven ninety eight i made a ton of money for the firm now ninety seven i got paid two million dollars which was by far the most i'd ever been paid which was a it's a ton of money no matter what you look at i was a millionaire at thirty one i wanted to be a million a time i thirty but i didn't have a net worth of million dollars until i thirty one but the first job i really felt like i got pay i got a two dollars you know nineteen ninety seven now me and my team had made the firm like two hundred million dollars and so that was a one percent payout right if you work at citadel or any big hedge fund today broadly getting paid fifteen percent to twenty percent of what you make goldman paid us one percent but you're gonna be a partner one day and it's part of end and listen you did make it all on your own there was a huge infrastructure and goldman you know does deserve more than then i say said it all might but they had this mythology at the place that allowed you to stay there and i i one time my most quit and that the bosses would take you out and say oh you're gonna be a park one day and listen i made partner in nineteen ninety eight and in nineteen ninety nine the company went public and and listen anyone who was a partner at goldman sachs when they went public in ninety nine was just lucky because the company had been built over a hundred 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 harder earned and effort we sold this enterprise that was built over a hundred plus years to the public was one of the coolest ipo of all time and the junior partners we all had four hundred and twenty thousand shares and the stock was a fifty five dollar ipo which traded to seventy five dollars and you can do the four hundred thousand times seventy five but we all were roughly worth thirty million dollars overnight thirty million dollars is still a huge amount of money in nineteen ninety nine it's felt a lot bigger did you have to vest the did that need to vest for the next four years if you were a partner it was automatically vested but you weren't able allowed to sell it for three four and five years i think four or five and six years or three four and five years so when you left you had to keep it yes okay good listen i i left goldman and not the the nicest of ways i had a personal i kinda of blew up personally i've been there man that was horrible that was embarrassing you know it was humiliating it was you know you're letting people down and guys had made a big bets on you it like oops one of the great conversations that will ever remember at that point i was working regarding john thornton who was the one of the two c presidents of goldman and he had taken a big risk on me and i like jive and i just feel so bad for you he took bad for me he's like i'm the president of goldman sachs i'm worth the zillion dollars i've got a house here in a year i got a nice wife of 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 let him down and and instead of saying oh my god like let your family down you let yourself down like go go fix picture own shit i left there tail between my legs and spent a year you sorting myself out i had a shrink for the first time in my life i heard you tell the story that like you said it one time and it kinda got gloss over but it's kind of brilliant i think you said your brother was near world trade on two thousand one and he calls you he's like i think there's a terrorist attack i i think i'm i'm in this was was the in the world trade center he was in the building right next she's like what what what do i do and what did you say your your reply was i was like you should buy euro dollars or two year notes and he's what fuck and i was like get maybe to get out of the building and i was like maybe i should go back to wall street i literally thought that i was like well party i then decided to run that i'd i've been the army i wanna run down to help and i picked my kid up and i'm just running down the block we lived in chelsea at the time so i'm running to the west side highway so can actually see the world trade center because you couldn't see it from my roof and my kids started crying and i was about not a i didn't 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 ugh i felt a little like no way to no way to participate i couldn't participate financially i couldn't participate like in insane your physical you you it's like when you you spend all your life like trying to make money trying to be charismatic as mad trying to be powerful and you're like the fuck it none of this matters right now yeah and so i literally remember saying i wanna go back to work in 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 i was like you were gonna be like a camp instructor i was gonna try to run outward bound you know they were there was a you know you're looking at you head hunters like you know what are jobs that you could qualify 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 was below my pay rate at that point but i was trying to think of other ways to contribute to to my life into society of that then wall street and that that nine eleven thing was like can i go back to wall street you got another chap and that's where my search fortress i i i actually sure didn't start fortress my partner pete rigor who was a partner mine 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 pete's an amazing guy he he said how about this you're pretty you have a fun life and i'm a pretty good investor and you're a decent investor decent thanks pete we'll go together we'll split at fifty fifty half of what i make of what you make and at that point his stock was trading at a premium to fair value and my stock was trading a huge discount of fair value of like 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 were gonna partner up in something and pete had known west eden who had started fortress a few years earlier and at that point fortress was probably eighty people in about a billion dollars asset and it was a pe firm or hedge it been a pe firm and you were buying any type of businesses what what well it was a pe firm that west ran with a guy named randy our own and rob kaufman course still friends of mine and and and partners and some other things and they were doing mostly structured credit type pe by but they 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 sell towers as a reit and so he would look at business opportunities and literally craft companies that then then become billion dollar companies and so we thought pete has a real expertise in building your credit hedge fund i was gonna build a macro hedge fund and the three of us sat there and said one plus one plus one will equal ten 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 ninety percent ninety five percent of the time we spent alone we didn't like each day what are we doing today i built a company people built the company west built a company that we all put in the same box you have to come up with any of your own capital to join i did i did and i actually it didn't have that much capital you know you you you when i said goldman had you know we got thirty million dollars after goldman well that's pre tax and the stock goes down and i think pete and i put in roughly ten or fifteen million dollars is all i had so you who you are worth fifteen or ten can you put all of it into fortress all of it into fortune and actually borrowed some i think and you're what thirty seven yeah thirty cent and you know started a hedge fund and i started a macro fund he started a big distressed fund and west continued to build his private equity business and part of our ethos was if we do what we say we're gonna do people will trust us well i learned that at goldman sachs as well goldman sachs assets management business didn't have the greatest returns but they had lots of money because people trusted them and so how do you build a sense of trust in investors it's doing what you say you're gonna do no one expects you to win all the time what was wonderful about fortresses is very cool is that over the first five years really two thousand two to two thousand seven pete's business i don't think lost money in a month he'd buy broken comp broken debt he'd give loans to people and you know i 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 credits 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 in 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 my macro fund in those five years was a top performing macro fund you know is it was in the top five percent of macro funds pete had never lost money in a month in wes track record looked like warren buffett in that fifteen million that you invested at ten 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 billionaires in a day so in in in roughly ten years you turned one million into a a billion two point seven two point three 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 a sudden bloomberg puts a picture west eat and i was like oh shit west eden two point three billion and then a picture of pete pete b two point three billion picture of might know hey wes owned a tiny of bit more way best would have been two point four billion and then pete and i own the same two point three and two point three billion and my two like nine and ten year old daughters looked at each other and high find because we had never talk about monty right you know like you know nine ten there any difference is there any difference between making let's say thirty million dollars than from two point whatever i think that fortress frenzy of us becoming rockstar stars almost because we were the first company to take a hedge we're the first guys to take a hedge fund private equity company public and that we were all on such a high i didn't last long because the oil financial crises happened you get treated a little differently all you're getting calls from the president university who wants to sit down and talk with you you're getting invited to cool dinners and and so it goes to your head a little bit and and you're not ready ready for the rush of excitement around it you don't feel that different i think 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 did your life stay the same but the the people who wanted to talk to you change or you're getting emails and and calls from people haven't seen in years and people don't even know that say they know you yeah you get this there's a especially because it was public but if it doesn't quietly don't with done but we were like on newspapers and magazine articles and so and it goes to your head a little bit and then you know the wonderful thing about being having six brothers and sisters is they don't treatment differently they're like excited for you but they well and you have six six or seven you have a bunch of siblings who are also baller too and friends and so you know and then the markets always take their pound of flesh you know we we made a bunch of mistakes o eight happened and next thing you know not only aren't you worth two billion dollars but you're going under the billion pretty quick and like oh it lives a comma oh shit that sucks sometimes goes back to and this is gonna sound cra heck but if you were a kid in high school that played sports and the girls like 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 it 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 it's off of you see the problems of people that really have a hard time adjusting was when they were mis or social and and that ship on their shoulder right drove them to this cray success and you the reason i'm interested in in you is because you've won in a bunch of different parts of life so you're 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 tall these crazy stories like you talk about trading 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 gonna be you know it's called pattern recognition i can look at the charts and say this is gonna happen or i can s synthesized information well and so i'm a good spec 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 non fiction stuff that's coming through my desk all the time right so i keep up on news in the world and talk to people most of the great ceos re lot they're curious i'm curious as heck i get a lot of my 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 chief intel her chief information officer so like he's got nineteen thousand of goldman forty five thousand people that work for him and you know it was a master class in ai and so and i'm like me some other guy in ai and so i'm learning ai from reading articles playing with it but mostly finding out the the world experts and and and learning from them that's 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 a good storyteller and so why that's been important is crypto in the last ten 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 gotta tell him a story what about being a good trader because you were actually a trader for life still 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 gotta be really honest with yourself am i good at this right it's not am i intelligent and am i smart but if i good at this i good at taking this information and making bets on it and even if you are then you need to develop a discipline that allows you to make sure that you're your guesses are in your portfolio there's so many people that say oh my god you gotta be short to dollar right now the us is on a downtrend trend 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 forty percent of them have a really big position it should be pathological that if you're bearish you're short and if you're bullish at 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 guide the other i 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 to fight or flight in training you you see the lion all the time and you get nervous when the markets going higher and your long well earth goes back down i'll get my 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 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 to say this you're good good good being a macro trader but does that mean you're 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 i know there are twenty five macro traders that people probably heard of stan drunken miller david t paul tudor jones lewis bacon you know alan howard chris ro there's a bunch of people that are great at this the gap between the really great 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 do you consider yourself a highly disciplined person i think i'm a really hardworking working person who has and i was really disciplined 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 please so i'm trying to help things out people all of the time and it's a prioritization like stan for instance who i think is the best or you know david t pushing on it but the best trader sort of his generation temper a little bit younger thirty two years never lost money compounded over thirty percent 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 golf during a workday and he loves golf what you said you said you had this great quote you go you were quoting a napoleon or someone but you you said i hire lucky generals not skilled ones so this was how did i learned that i was had the right to be good at this right you're i was making money lots and i was like wow yeah everyone has a bit of impostor syndrome and a hoo barrack who had been the prime minister of israel light i hired as a consultant how do you hire the prime minister one of my investors so you need to meet to hoo moroccan and a hoo barrack was ways to make money and he had just started this business and he had two clients lewis bacon who was a multi billionaire you know one of the pant of the greats and bruce c multi billionaire one of the pant of the greats and and mike know who was a little at that point well what was his rate maybe it was two hundred thousand a year or something you got the a former prime minister for two credit year to to give you a feedback yeah advice that's pretty good deal just remember thinking i've brought the same consultant only i like the three clients as two of the world the like literally the great trade traders of all time bruce company who build ka and and lewis bacon who got more capital and i'm sitting with the food for lunch and he said you don't know if i figured you out he said you don't 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 know i was just with lewis bacon and i spent time with bruce coverings come might be smarter than you knew but but you know all of you guys have an intuition you know and he gave me this quote from napoleon he said and of course i didn't know french he said i forgot you're not so smart you don't know french just sort of a bitch and and bar barack at least allegedly had the highest iq of anyone in the israeli and he was the most decorated soldier in this 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 you and i could be commercial if we can if we can make these you know cups of broth for fifty cents and sell them for two dollars we're both gonna say how how many can we sell right that's not hard but why should i be able to predict where dollar yen is gonna go in a year better than you are you able to do this in other fast of your life where like man my i met this person i predict that they're gonna face these problems or whatever 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 i i independent films that sold for the top prices right birth of a nation still i think it's those the highest yeah nineteen or what nineteen million that's sold for nineteen million and then there's a movie called assassination assassination which didn't do well in the box office been sold for like thirteen 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 i i i it's not luck lucky if it happens twice right and so for me that conversation with brock was giving me confidence that my decision process wasn't random that there was something in it so i i went back and i thought about like how do i make decisions and it is at the intersection of lots of and lots of data and a gut feeling and there there's that i think moment and so once i understood that i was much more confident in telling investors high made decisions my hedge one from three hundred million dollars under management to two billion in a and and my performance went straight up over like the next six months but mostly because investors could feel my confidence and so the 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 for you though of i mean because like i remember reading about i'm not in the finance world at all but i read a black fish which is about a steve cohen and they told stories about how in the eighties with that there was a physical ticker and he was like he could just hear the rhythm of the ticker and make and i'm like that is just so vague and it's it's and that's and it's a pain in the ass because i'm you're explaining it like an art but i want it to be more of a science because i wanna learn but that's what you're that's how you're describing like it's more of it's it's very it's very artistic for me the type trading i do it's very intuitive and 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 training is there a thousand different ways it's to approach it what is steve do you're saying look at i know stevie pretty well but i don't know exact the exact process but i would tell you he's one of the most competitive guys out there he's going on vacation and and have all his screens set up and if he didn't didn't he wasn't in in feeling things right he fly right back to get it to his desks like he was obsessed with beating the markets oh you you think you're competitive i'm not as competitive which is interesting when i think about like with stan jo mueller and lewis bacon and like why those guys have have been in that and maybe when one day all catch them but they're i'm but i'm not in their category at this point they more competitive than me they just i mean you lewis bacon i remember we're playing cro k against them and i'm like how's this guy killing cro k well he had hired the world's best cro k gotta teach him he he doesn't like to lose there's partly like these guys are ultra competitive but they also are ultra discipline and those two cross factors creates the man y well creates an amazing performer yeah maybe not the easiest person to go to cocktails sure sometimes they are you know but like like an amazing performer and i i'm i don't wanna a discount i've had an amazing run of success at trading 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 i we haven't again each person makes their own decision on what path they wanna take and i'm not i'm not making a value judgment on how people live their lives the key is to figure out how you wanna live your own life but figure out what you're good at and again that that comes from mentors as it comes from sometimes chance without that conversation with who brought i was miserable because i was feeling so much pressure and i remember telling my wife i said i even just shut this hedge fund down i can't have more fun 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 in 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 you're just good at you you you feel certain things that you should trust it and i and i and it doesn't come just like you you don't get it from sitting in a box there's a tremendous amount of information i'm shoving 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 like you see things they repeat themselves yeah i heard one of my heroes is john rockefeller and i was listening to business on title and you're like when was in fifth grade or eighth grader or something i wrote a paper on john d yeah and i thought that was cool because he's a fun to learn about and you also you and your partner west did the train thing oh did the train thing i was a cheerleader at an investor but but yeah that was fascinating when i went down there and i was reading about flag yeah he's a man these guys are hardcore yeah i went and talked to a bunch of friends of ours who we have mutual we you and i have some mutual friends and i wanted to tell you what they said they go up 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 times and he's one a lot more i'm amazed at how how good he is at managing risk and then 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 crash down yeah i think it's bigger at the 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 you were telling heard a story about how you said like you are a thirty seven out of forty in terms of like some type of personality test of freaking rules you're like it's funny in my kid like it's the exact opposite and then you hear i read the new york or some article where they're like tea flu a helicopter down the street like during the prince graduate like there's clearly like this thing of like this guy likes to push it and and he's pretty comfortable catering 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 i there's a there's an adrenaline need like i i like adrenaline like in sports and in trading and and you know 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 runner alabama and i made eighteen thousand a year after tax i remember because i fifteen hundred dollars per month paycheck pat who's a buddy mine still was one of my buddies down there and we at the time of our lives i when i look at how much fun and how much i enjoyed that in the middle of freaking lower ugly the ugly corner of lower alabama right the wire grass it was called by dot with seven hundred other guys and almost no women around because all the women have gone off the college and there seven hundred guys and a few women at late school we still had one of the time our lives and so when i think was that year better or worse than the year i made lots of money i 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 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 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 it's bullshit look at the parties you thought you spend lots of money i do spend lots of money but i threw tons of apart i didn't have a lot of money either i just few 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 that's i have never i've read his book it's called how to make a billion dollars he's created i think six billion dollar companies like ex xo logistics is one of them if you heard of that like these like huge like ten billion dollar logistic companies and his whole stick was he fragmented industries bought all of them operated 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 crazy so i read all the books i use t or or whatever else like the services and or alpha sites whatever they are like a higher 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 gonna work because i've talked to literally five hundred people in i've 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 just out on the way here i was hearing a story about how like your roommate was glory of van annabel son or something like that it 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 and then there was like this other story this other story there was like twenty stories where i'm like what the hell like it's like it's like you a good guy to sit around a campfire with drinking because they got lot stories but there's just so many times like oh i just it's like normal people would be like i know a guy you know i sat a bar next to a guy and he did this you just have all these stories except they just happened to be like these like wild crazy people who what was the story about how you first heard about bitcoin so pete b who had been my he lived above me my freshman year at princeton he lived in the room above me this storm was amazing we had a pretty cool little group of people right is a smile this like the greatest arm on earth he lived above many billionaires are from that door you think no seriously at least three for really in that door yeah but he's of the reason i got my job at goldman sachs i was literally wandering around bleak street a little drunk and i ran into him and i was interviewing for jobs he was like bullshit you got work at goldman sachs and you know i was from the army and so he got me an interview of goldman sachs and forty one interviews later they gave me a job and then we lived in hong kong together and we slowly became very good friends the godfather his his youngest son then we did fortress and he was the guy that was the distressed debt investor well because he made promise to his wife that at one point they'd moved back to california he moved his entire business or the bulk of it to stanford area around and what year was that this probably would have been he probably moved his business out their two thousand and ten or something alright good day and but in a tech guy but his brother i was a tech guy and the the group of friends had were tech guys and they all started talking about bitcoin and pete wanted to be part of the part part of the you know the clan and so he called me up and he's said i'm here 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 ten this was until would been in two thousand and twelve two thousand thirteen maybe bitcoin was like ninety six dollars so it was nothing really i mean there's not there would have been like bitcoin dot 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 we gotta buy it and we started buying some of it i'm my my friend jeff lo who's become a great investor was working my family office and he bought my first bitcoin for me and and then pete and i kept talking about it and we like maybe this should be bigger than just us buying a little bit of it so he had called the third friend did more another princeton lie who i had invested who had you know had a similar went to princeton he'd had worked on wall street it worked in goldman he worked at tiger i had invested in his first hedge fund and he was on the sidelines in between you know after o eight his hedge fund didn't do well he was trying to figure out what to doing and he done some cool stuff in argentina he researched this for a while and came back and i was like guys this gonna 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 fortress have gone public the day at the time we're like if he's putting that much in we need to put at least that much in and you know the way guys think and so we all roughly put similar amounts in was it like eight figures or you can even say that it was it was seven figures seven but it was a significant in dollar terms at a hundred 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 ten thousand dollars into something and all of a since worth the hundred thousand your friends like dude you you gotta take yeah you're in my house you can your girlfriend wants in buy you know like there's so many reasons you're gonna 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 one twentieth was today because everyone's like you gotta buy some spacex and you look through like elon musk is killing he's brilliant let me get some private spacex and so all of a sudden you make you know hundred million plus in spacex she didn't do anything other than make put a bet down and so getting money and and getting network makes making money so much easier it's almost unfair it's why pike he wrote that book he said that there's no way the risk poor gap ever comes back in 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 sharing people on i like talking about people and it makes it easy to make friends and network and through that network you learn stuff so my i'm for our podcast my listeners will be front of me i i own a company now that's does well and hopefully that's gonna be a huge home run but my liquid net worth i just do basically the s and p five hundred and bonds you you invest like you're like like kind of a white guy from missouri oh yeah look it's working boring what which means i've i've outperformed about yeah the ninety percent of hedge headphones so it's worked out but like listen it's been a great yeah i've like i started making money in the greatest bull market of all time and do you for your personal finances or do you have any boring stuff or are you all we are you active for the whole thing no i listen i have a chunk of money in you know these credit funds like the one pete rand which are private credit funds which you know roughly have have done ten percent plus a year compounded and he can compound a piece of money at ten percent a year for a long period of time you get rich real quick and so i have someone private credit i have a allotted of my own company that 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 angles the chicken company that got announced yesterday that that they're the group that owns it is putting it up for sale so hoping hoping that sales for a high price but i i haven't really ever done bond stocks party because that's what i do yeah and my money has often been tied up in the enterprise that i'm engaged in and at fortress i owned a lot of fortress stock i guess you've been ill liquid like for a large portion of i i probably have run the the 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 would wanted always i i've always had a lot of faith that i'd make money and so i've always he's one a live a big life and also make a lot of investments and so so you spent you you just spend a lot spent a lot it live large i invest large and i always think of on a win and so in twenty twenty one we thought we were gonna be able to take galaxy public and i was gonna get lot of liquidity and it turned out we took a little too long to get into the sec queue spent administration change gary gains are shut the door and so for four years no liquidity out of galaxy you know my other looks 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 we just did a deal we took some ships off the table in terms of liquidity did you you leave have wife on the edge i mean i think i admire like your ability like i'm a adrenaline seeking to but i'm also way more risk adverse than you i think and i had 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 i asked 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 gotta learn how to get back up and dean a wrestler teaches you that like no wrestler wins every match kale sanders did in college but then he lost in international like you know no one wins every match and learning how to come and and i lost a lot learning how to come back from losing is one of the most important things because losing doesn't mean you're a bad guy it doesn't mean your shit that doesn't mean you're not confident when lost that gate and i thought i think the doll when he left left tennis gave the best he was like you know i think he lost forty eight percent of the points he played who do you with the greatest tennis player of all time or one of the top three that process of stumbling and coming back and i think a lot about how i have managed to do that myself because i often asked to help people to think through it what like a downfall and like yeah how do you rebirth come back part of it is take some time off and do some work and understand like what hell happen like how do most people just spend enough time to figure out who they are like like literally trying to understand like who they are and why they're that who there 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 like the whole world other people just make progress getting there right i think i have made progress i'm not sure i've be ever gotten to enlightenment by i not even close but i keep making progress going on that journey and there 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 i right i would ask a room full of eight hundred wrestling coaches how many in the last five years it's been one week with just themselves and not one hand run up not one you do that now i try once a year to spend a week by myself my friend chris who who has a public trade company he he's like mean i'm screw all the time in i always at 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 done that seven day well solid well i did the saw that meditation in cardi thing you sit there for fucking eleven days meditating you can't read you can't do music you can't exercise you can't even mas i mean it literally is for eleven days your back hurts you starve do you set goals like this like like to have such a full life where you're running i don't know how many people work here two hundred people a lot of people six hundred six hundred oh my god i didn't even it and you have all the you have a lot of shit 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 want 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 like 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 galaxies gonna get a ton of my time there's been times when we first started it was a smaller business my phil philanthropist got a ton of my time when i started doing criminal justice so i've dialed back my participation and phil solely because this six hundred 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 so think of 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 hundred million dollars to give away to one thing that you know what could you do with to be new york city better and so like and i'm on per complexity i'm trying to figure out i'm working with people and so i'm multitasking in that respect but i got goals there there was that do what i say the one i had 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 six thirty and meditate an hour and meditate an hour at night and doesn't miss i'm just like she's like a and i'm like i know that would be good for me and i do fucking i take once in a while but i'm stressed like in meditate it doesn't seem broken yeah it when i break i figured 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 huge breakthrough and i'm like in my head i'm like about playing arm share expert here but i'm like you're doing it again you know what i mean i'm like dude people have a hard time changing pattern say 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 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 cal i'll do what you tell me to do because i gotta change change hard even subtle changes hard and again if someone's living their fullest life and didn't wanna change right yeah i mean i love hearing about the shit because i think that i think that you know this is gonna sound pom of me but in my head i'm like i can be like you know he's you know thirty five so i'm like okay he's twenty five years ahead of me and like i had and we both can't hear yeah we're both a little bit deaf and i came from a blue collar like a family and i i think you'd talk about princeton about like like oh my god thought i was shit and then i got around people that like kinda wear the shit and i'm like fuck so like i've like thought that like like i hadn't been in new york city until i was like twenty six years old hadn't been on my airplane until i was twenty one so like i always felt like these 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 gonna 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 an apartments and i'm like i'm nothing but but it it's it's both so liberating and so awesome because i mean go to a knicks game oh dude we're supposed to do a podcast and you canceled and that night i turned in the tv i see timothy charlemagne i see the jenner girl and then i see mike and i was like i mother motherfucker i were supposed to do a thing and then i was like my my wife was like can you blame them i'm like no i can't knicks in the playoffs is as mud site city erupt when you had like there was timothy of you we got good seats you were like the demands how much is the playoff seat costs to that we're where where he i i imagine free and if you wanna buy front row in the playoffs you know they can cost as much as fifty eighty thousand dollars i the second row the guy who sat next to me i think paid fifteen thousand four years were free well no ours we have seasoned tickets okay got and so you just pay the normal whatever knicks charge you for playoff tickets that's crazy man and so do you see right you know ryan cohen is yeah billionaire know 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 the game and like ja b 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 are fun because he always have the celebrity sitting in front of you i went to one game just a regular season game in da the nigerian superstar you know there's they're two guys in in a beats right da is one of them the other guy's burn a boy was there and i didn't know he was but had a great shane i like chains and was like dude where'd did you get that changed scott and i went to get a beer and i was like he you want a beer or coke or something and he did one he came back he turned around he's was like know no one's offered to get me a beer in a long time i really appreciate that and we started talking i had no idea he was this mega star and he posted a picture and then his uncle texted was like dude dude that that guy knows more about crypto he get to know home him so he came on he was on our podcast no shit became friends with him that's like that's the power of gift to like the gift of ga i think it's what my father calls it he that 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 people are scared to be nice to people i don't wanna i don't wanna i think the guy sit in front of him you know asking where you out his jane like most people like to be and you end up doing some type of business with them no just he came dead our podcast inviting nigeria i i i made a huge mistake he invited me to it 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 can go and haven't you noticed the pattern of like this all these silly small interactions have been like i think you said with the ethereum purchase you like bought a golf stream or something crazy and like it like it just funny that serendipity i guess serendipity might happen to everyone but not everyone capitalize 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 it like i've heard that like twelve times you know what i love i love other people's stories that you must as well if i you wanna do the podcast and so i get excited for other people like you need you're like that's freaking so cool and i wanted to know a story and you know i didn't realize if you could up a rich kid and and even the relationship with the dad and all fa 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 it's not a strategy it's not like i think about doing this it 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 feel comfortable in their own skin what i went to princeton in my great insight you know i had this roommate was gloria interval son unfortunately ended up committing suicide later on life and it was so painful because he was such a nice kid but that had been anderson cooper's his brother and anderson anderson's written about it yeah well i read anderson anderson's book on his mother is amazing yes and you know i'm a young guy i see i'm mean gloria van building he's so my god on you know like with royalty i'm royalty i'm you know middle class guy and my mother gonna have in queens and so probably wore gloria jeans yeah but she knew the whole story and after about six months at princeton you know princeton in unique place and that everyone lives in the same dorms and they're kinda 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 damn y'all shed on the same toilet as way to you know they're he's just he's got his insecurities he's got his strengths just like and the moment you realize everyone's kinda of the same everyone's a little bit insecure everyone's got an impostor syndrome everyone's trying to figure out who that you had that realization in college i had that realization in college freshman year man so what i used to host these conferences called old company was it it was a newsletter a company whatever is like this media company we own trade shows and or conferences like a ted talk and i would i was twenty four when i started doing it and we would get like the founder of like we work or like cast spur or bon no like brands that or zapier which is now like a ten billion dollar company these companies that were like at the time obviously before we knew we work which we were work we're like these like ten billion dollar whatever companies and i would play a little trick on them where i was like alright your talk is at noon but you gotta be here for mic check at like ten 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 and listening with about four or five of them and i knew like how big their companies were and i would hear him i'm complain about stuff about like i've had the cfo who i need a fire but frankly like i just hate the confrontation or like you know this one company had just raised four hundred million dollars and they were like things are going horrible like gosh read about you in the new york time i thought you guys were the shit and i remember thinking that that was like the most like enlighten less i've 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 down they had the same issues i have yet they're still like just moving forward and doing it and i found it very freeing to know that the people at admire were broken i every every everybody is is going to a similar journey like there are very few people that are aligned i've met a couple i've met it 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 betty 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 yeah as opposed to a hierarchy of people and i think that is what's brought me lots of joy but it's also give when i got the goldman sachs i would walk into the boss's office it like dude i this great idea i thought i deserve to be there now often he'd say that's a stupid idea like oh okay good and i go back to my seat but the guys are ram me right dude how'd do you have the to walk in the office i was like he shit's on that same toilet like and so part of that said where your parents captain my dad was a all american football player from west point but very quiet and stoic is the right word for nice he's become the kind man in the world he's gotten older but he was tough but kind 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've complain about some kid be able to do something and well she jumped off a cliff what you do it right and there was almost this like we could be the kennedy i tease my mom all the time she looked like jackie she named by first daughter my first my oldest sister jacqueline and her first daughter so we had jackie robert john john you like with john john john yeah john michael like i was like mom you named us after the kennedy i did not my mom and dad got married right when kennedy became elected you know i mean it's kennedy kennedy is one of my i'm huge history about kennedy the family i probably read twelve books about them thank god you are the kennedy right like but it was very asked my mother was very aspirational she wanted the best for us and she was a big cheerleader leader she wasn't what you'd call like you know the jewish mom or the korean mom that pressured pressured pressure but like there was an internal sense of of course you could do this and i think all of our 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 once one son who was a whip snap a few times it was like up on his brother died like i well 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 part of the labor force and if i wasn't more than cra my mom or dad had to if i wasn't doing the dishes my mom or dad like we had a labor force besides my kids and so you couldn't like thank you've got do this doesn't make any sense and so i thought in my wife if 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 you want your kids to be kind to people out in your in your house and the cab driver be kind of them if all you do is talk about money your kids only talk about money if you talk about interesting things around the dinner table your kids are kindergarten aren't been interesting and so parenting really is modeling and you know by no means if i've been perfect model and my kids probably can give you e five stories and i know how i haven't but that was my philosophy and they're gonna be rich kids and so so far they've turned out lovely fingers crossed you know they've all finding their own path and doing cool things and 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 it's you we wanted to make money so we can go on a date so we can get laid so then we can buy a house so we can send our kids to school you wanna be better than your parents and your parents want you to be better than them yeah and with my situation i'm like man i got really lucky at it one young age which means compounding if 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 be the the book sapiens was all about humans are people of narrative right i'd love story the narrative of in america was the american dreams your kids are gonna have a better life than you yeah so that got built into our system yeah at one point that's we want your kids to have good life the european ethos i just want my kids have good life and it as you get wealthy earth better better i want my kids to feel self actual i them have a wonderful life like at one point if you're bill gates is kid and he he's worth a hundred billion dollars impossible like what i don't have five hundred but like it it becomes idiotic and then you're like you're talking about a dude and so i think the moment you get even half as wealthy as issue that narrative shifts and it's like how do i help my kids how do i scaffold them to piece self actual whatever that means i got one son he's quirky and smart and we have no idea what he's gonna do yeah my wife and i get gamble on it but like god what do you think it can go from here to there he's hopefully gonna 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 i 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 a business and like yeah he's amazing a business but like i don't admire anything else about them and so that's kind of cool to blake build hang out and meet with someone who i i put on that list of people who i really look up to you and how they live all different parts of their life so thanks for doing this and this is awesome appreciate thank you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back