How Scott Galloway Turned $8M into $120M Through Investing

i've invested in every piece of the stack i've done me i've done public company investing growth stocks hands down the best asset class is distressed i feel like got rude work to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a less travel never i heard you say something recently and i think this happens to us and i it happens to you i i would have to imagine you get peg as like just like an influencer or a thought leader in reality you've built a lot of amazing companies and you you talked about something the other day that you are with michael lewis and at the end of the podcast you guys barely mentioned this and it was like pretty astounding you talked about or you told the story about how when f t went bankrupt you made the some like pretty amazing trade can you tell sean and i more about that story and what happened do you know what talking about yeah so i was like to counter it with how many times i fucked up so i i bought netflix at ten bucks a share i'm sorry at twelve and i sold it at ten and now it's at eleven hundred so i get it wrong all the time i i can't stand people who constantly taking pictures of all their wins and post on social so i get it wrong all the time this one i got right and that is i'm that guy who reads bankruptcy filings and i read the f banks bankruptcy filing and essentially they list all their assets when you declare bankruptcy your creditors come in and say we're gonna take all the assets we're gonna sell all the furniture sell all the companies sell all the ip whatever whatever we can sell and then we'll divide it up and give it pro rat to the creditors based on the claims they have and there was approximately eight billion dollars in claims against a bankrupt f t and i went through the list of assets and one of the assets was they had said they'd made a five hundred million dollar investment in ant profit and it thought wow i looked when they made the investment for the life for me i couldn't find the valuation i assumed evaluation was at about five billion so i thought they probably own about ten percent ant philanthropic it was trading i estimated it was worth around forty billion so i thought okay their stake ant philanthropic is worth fifty cents on the dollar in other words creditors claim eight billion of claims against the company and i believe that stake and ant philanthropic was worth probably four billion so i thought okay eventually the creditors are gonna get fifty cents on the dollar just on the ant philanthropic shares at the time i started at that time you could buy claims against some bankruptcy f extra twenty two cents so i bought ten million dollars with of claims for two point two million dollars and it's better to be lucky than good crypto took off everything they'd had invested in went crazy and it looks like we're gonna get a hundred and sixty cents on the dollar so that was kind of a an incredibly lucky it was also a good trade there was a little bit of school there i did my homework but that's worked out that's worked out really that's not luck look look there's a lot of things you can call look that one is dot luck in the sense that like i was reading the bankruptcy claims sorry that's action not luck and then you did the work to try to figure out like okay ballpark what is this worth but you just said it in passing like so i went and bought claims now you know i consider myself you're not a complete novice at the world of business and investing where do you even go to do that i didn't i would i that wasn't even on the table it's more exotic than buying a stock or even buying crypto like going and buying big bankruptcy claims it how does one even do that and then how you have the confidence to say alright ten million because you didn't need to go you didn't need to bet size that large right so to be clear i bought ten million in claims i purchased them for two point two million so it wasn't easy i typed in bankruptcy claims and i found this guy named thomas brazil who's living in italy and he was making a market in them and thomas had assembled a team that went because when you buy a claim you've gotta make sure that the person who who claims they own the claim actually owns it then you've gotta do some diligence then you've actually actually legally transfer the claim you're sending money to a third party i mean there's there is risk here so i contacted this guy who was doing making a market in it and i said i have some capital i wanna put to work here i'll give you ten percent of the upside if you go buy these claims and so he would every forty eight or seventy two hours say i found a basket or found a claim of three hundred and eighty three thousand dollars and they want you know ninety thousand four and that's i'd said great and i'd i'd press you know yes and he'd buy it and then transferred it into an account of mine so yeah it did take some real work the this guy basically made two he he basically at the time got like two hundred thousand dollars worth of claims if you're giving them ten percent and then sounds like it went up about eight x from there so this guy made a million bucks just broker these f t x claims in in a way for you well he he it was a lot of work though so thomas is gonna make i mean these are famous last words because the the the trustee hasn't hasn't distributed the funds yet but it looks like we're gonna get fifteen million off of two or two and half million dollar investment twelve half million dollar he's gonna make a million dollars but what he did was real work because he has a lawyer and people following up doing diligence and if it sounds sketchy like okay this claim doesn't seem real or it feels like maybe this person sold the claim to multiple parties that happened to us there was a kid in italy who had sold the claim to us and sold it to a large hedge fund in the bay area i had to go to the hedge fund and they said oh this is too bad let's just split it it's gone up and sound and i'm like well no who got the claim first who filed it first and got recognized and it was me and i said fuck you i want a hundred times i want all of it i didn't use those words they're not they seem like fairly nice people but he was doing real work but this was i i like this stuff in in the lesson here of all the ass i've invested in every piece of the stack or every every part of the capital structure i've done seed first off i founded companies so that's the ultimate seed i've done seed stage investing venture growth late stage i've done me i've done public company investing growth stocks mature companies and then i've done distressed investing where i've brought companies or partnered with someone smarter than me to go find claims against a bankrupt company or bring a company out of bankruptcy hands down the best asset class is dis distressed and it goes to a very simple notion investing the sex year investment the lower the returns venture sexy everyone wants to hang out with tom brady and ale no one wants to hang out with old people and distressed investing it smells like piss it smells like urine you're it's just like no one wants to hang out with bankrupt companies it's ugly it's complicated it re of death everywhere this thing didn't work out do you remember it looked like it look like if it's trading in twenty two cents on the dollar the market is saying this might all be worth nothing yeah so i have found generally the sex year of the asset class to lower the returns and if i if i was just an economic animal i'd i go back and learn a lot more about distressed credit i've the bet the biggest one i've ever had was bringing a consumer company out of bankruptcy i partnered or i have a friend jason mud who runs a distressed credit shop called mud capital and he thirty x we thirty x on and about granted was six years and a nightmare and we almost went to zero two or three times so we ended up what we that was my best endorsement yeah what what great was that we're would this like the only nerd podcast on earth where we are like oh you've just that's our sweet spot tell us this story okay but i always have to match with a loss i'm i'm in odd which is this amazing ai beauty company i own i don't know a decent amount of shares and i thought i need to generate some income here i was bored so i sold covered calls way out of the money right to try and collect rent so stocks trading at stocks trading at i don't know forty i sell calls at fifty to generate some income meaning that it if long as it doesn't go above fifty in the next month and fine i hadn't sold covered calls in a long time the next day and announced earnings and the stock went to sixty one so i've literally left like two million dollars on the table selling covered calls trying to generate and come off this thing and i should have been smarter i should have done a little bit research on that earnings were coming up and no this is a great company and they're gonna do really well so in the last week i've literally like cute a million dollars to no fucking reason because i didn't do due diligence alright everyone really quick this is the third time scott gallo has been on m and also i read all of his books i listen to all of his podcast podcasts i'm a huge fan of scott's and that's why we've had them on the pod many times and hubspot they did something awesome so they took the twenty three best insights from the first two episodes but also this one the one you're watching or listening to you right now they took the twenty three best insights insights on wealth creation on spotting good deals on building relationships and they put it all together in one really easy to read document and so instead of having to go and listen to all the other podcasts which by the way you i think you still should you could download their document to read all of the best stuff and it's sort of like a cheat sheet or a guide on all the best stuff that scott has said on m mfa all three episodes so it's in the link below or you can scan the qr code but check it out it's in the description enjoy the rest of the episode anyways the company was a company called enjoy and my mother died of a smoking related illness and a couple of my buddies said they were using a vape to get off of nicotine this is like eight ten years ago and that they quit smoking using this thing called joy the company had gone bankrupt it was considered it's called india electronic nicotine delivery system and the equivalent of the fda in britain sends these out for free if you're smoker because let me be clear no one under the age of twenty five or anyone who doesn't smoke should vape nicotine it's not good for you but it's much less bad than smoking combustible with the tobacco nicotine is highly addictive but it's not it doesn't cause cancer it can it's bad for brain development i i don't wanna suggest anyone get addicted to nicotine but i thought this is great at smoking cessation we're getting in we brought it out at a valuation of sixty million out of bankruptcy i my friend jason is just a super smart super aggressive guy like so you you heard about this thing and then you googled it and you saw it was bankrupt and then you're like i'm interested what came first the chicken or the egg it jason was gonna go look or you found the company then you found jason no no i wasn't that smart i had heard about this company because two of my friends had quit using it and then jason called me and said i'm about to bring a company out of bankruptcy have you ever heard of and i'm like i know the company and i like it so i put two and a half million bucks in and he bought brought it out of bankruptcy for sixty million and said this is a regulatory play we're the least bad actor here that was jewel which had gone up to like ten or fifteen billion in market cap but was marketing to kids and selling bubble gum flavor and was just getting hammered correctly and justified we in the us as addict a ton of kids they're at one point about three years into in the investment high schools in the midwest were pulling the doors off of bathrooms because so many kids were vaping and then the low the absolute low point was there was a huge draft of kids going into emergency rooms with what was called popcorn lung yeah and basically kids were getting so addicted to vaping that they were buying the vape liquid in like festivals and out of people's trunks and people who are doing homebrew of this vaping liquid were mixing in we're cutting it with i think vitamin a ace not recognizing that would have a really negative reactions on kids lungs and by the way i'm during during that era i knew people who work there i'm pretty they gave all like one thousand employees from the top to the bottom five hundred thousand or a million dollar bonus to retain them as employees because all the press was horrible and they had to like deal with this conscious of like shit i'm selling this horrible stuff okay but because it's worth it if i get a million dollar bonus so we we really were we weren't cool at all wasn't selling into teen looking to go to rave was selling into a trucker mean the stats around smoking are crazy one out of three people who buy it carton cigarettes promise themselves it's the last time they're ever gonna buy cigarettes it is the such an incredibly malicious man malicious to dick it's the second i think it's a second most addictive substance i grew up in a household just a quick parable about me i remember i never went to the doctor we just weren't the kind of family that went to doctors it was like rob tu was our emergency room you know rob test used everything and i got so really sick with a long infection they took me to the doctor and the doctor said okay i got a serious slug infection here antibiotics and also tom and so and my parents you can't smoke so on the way home we rolled down the window so they could smoke on the ride home and then my dad went in first got a wet towel stuck it under my door jam stuck me in my room so they could continue smoking i mean they were so radically my mother died of a smoking later they were so radically addicted to nicotine so our our tobacco anyways we brought it out for seventy five million popcorn long and i'm like and kids are dying and not because of anything enjoy or even jewel is doing but because vaping had becomes so big that now kids were buying black market liquid that was damaging their health and i'm like great i'm this guy who put who claims to care about young men and i'm putting him in the fucking hospital i that was such an incredibly low moment for me and i remember i resigned from the board because i'm like i just can't stay i was on the board and my i just can't stay on this board my i was on the board of my kids school and the head master was putting out memos warning of vaping and i'm like i am such a fucking hip and i tried to sell my stake and there was no market for it there was no market for it and jason and vas ceo ryan we're real vision and said this is all about an fda play we're the best actor in the space we're selling the people who wanna quit smoking where there's almost no youth complain of underage people buying in third party retailers and they spend about a hundred or hundred and twenty million bucks i think maybe a little less than that trying to get fda approval and they thought if we get if we become one of the three or four companies that has fda approval around smoking cessation this is a regulatory play anyways five seven years later eighty or a hundred million dollars we get the regulatory approval and we sell the company for i think two point two billion to alt so that was a thirty x on my investment does does that mean you turn two million into sixty two and a half and the seventy five that's insane i give twenty five away though because my guilt tax so anyways that hands down nothing was ever like that in total classic ton of hair on it almost went to zero regulatory play really on sexy bankruptcy just all the shit that you wouldn't actually that most people just wouldn't wanna get near it was really really difficult and then just every all the moons lined up and alt came in and said we have to own one of these companies that's hands down in other than the companies i've started and sold which is hard work as you guys know that shit's hard that's really hard that was the best and let me match it again with another one ninety eight point six this amazing health care texting company preventive care by text message costco big company signing up three five bucks a month anyone in the company can text them data i invested five million bucks and went to zero in eighteen months i mean i've never lost that much money that fast did i hear a story about you doing a bankruptcy thing was it with yellow pages or white pages or something like that yeah decks media that's probably not my second best by my third fourth really great ceo i got joe walsh remember my yellow pages the book yellow pages the things the things dropped on your dropped on your you know on your porch amazing business yeah it's like six hundred million in revenue and two hundred and eighty million dollars in eb but it was declining twelve percent of year it's just advertising yeah the local plumber there's still a lot of people that that in rural parts of america they get a phone book it's it's almost gone but the business so it's like aol dial up it's like why would anyone have aol dial up well people still do my mom does there you go it's just twenty dollars a month so again another json magic investment i went on the board i invested i think i missed more there i think i missed about four million bucks and and i really like that board because i add a lot of value i sort understood the business and they were trying to transition and become a crm company because the core asset of the company was relationships with tons of small and medium sized businesses and they started selling them calendar and client telling software and basically we would go and buy the biggest yellow pages company in the south than the biggest yellow pages company in canada than the biggest yellow pages company in australia are they like franchisees or is there one com is there one yellow pages or how does that work big companies like there was like one or two companies in australia that were still in the elevate business and they traded at two to three times eb because everybody knew they were going away but you could basically buy these companies and then you would close the headquarters keep the thirty percent of the best salespeople people and then let go of everyone else and as long as you cut cut costs faster than twelve percent a year through consolidation you cash flow acc and every year the stock price went up and then what the management team did that's just staggering impressive is able to transfer transition from you know a yellow company to a crm software company and they actually did it i think we bought in at like two or three bucks a share in the stocks now i don't know at fifteen or twenty bucks i've already sold my steak i think i four or five x there x there i did ten x but again what is less sexy than yellow pages right and all the shit i invest in that sounds remotely cool and i think this is a lesson for listeners if you have financial capital invest in the un sexy shit and also more importantly you're human capital if you wanna be an athlete a rockstar star a musician an artist a model going to restaurants nightclubs just be clear you're gonna make a lot less money than someone at that same level of talent in a less romantic industry if you're just in the top ninety percent of tax lawyers right you're not in the bottom ten just in the top ninety you can make a good living and tax law if you're in the top ten percent of actors you make forty or fifty thousand dollars a year the majority of actors don't make a very good living the majority eighty three percent actors don't have health insurance because they did make twenty three thousand dollars last year and that's members of the sag after union who were the best in the world if you're in the top ten percent of tax law you fly private and have a much broader selection set of inmates than you deserve so just keep in mind you wanna do something sexy fine you better get a lot of psychic return because the financial returns won't be nearly as great is the person in that shitty boring business who's almost as good as you but it's gonna have a much much bigger return on their human capital so i agree with everything you just said but at the same time i have this like cocky part of me that's like cool yeah but i'll still be at that top top one or two percent i'll still get there and so i'm just curious do are you wired like that you know knowing even knowing that you still play the like right now you're play the internet personality game that's kind of like a hollywood that that's like the hollywood ratio not the tax law ratio you know you're doing these exotic investments when mh you know the math would show us that just being a boring index and a compound that way is gonna work better than being a picker but we do it because we like it it's fun it gives us these other returns plus it feels really good to be smart when you get it right so like even knowing what you know realistically if you're twenty eight whether you know that or heard that would you do it any differently yeah but it just to be blunt and this is a story of privilege i have access to deals and most people don't and this is also gonna sound arrogant again i i i've an undergraduate degree in economics it was a graduate student instructor and macroeconomic micro that i worked in fixed income at morgan stanley i i know more than your average pair about the markets and i get deal flow that people don't get people will call me and say hi i'm the ceo of this company and it's going public i would like you to be in the ipo when but but when did that happen i mean was that happening go the yellow page era like i mean you're you're you're you've been successful for decades but you've only been popular for what eight years ten years it's really just happened the last ten or fifteen years if i had it to do again and what i advise you young people unless they have some extraordinary niche knowledge or access to deal flow that other people don't have which is almost nobody hands down going into months and not only going funds but make sure you're diversified geographically my big theme over the last six months and i've been saying this over and over is it that if you're just an spy or in the nasdaq and you think you're diversified because you're in an index fund you're not because i believe the us is gonna go flat for the next decade and if you look at the p of twenty six versus germany at twenty two japan at eighteen china fourteen and you look at the head up your ras reckless ridiculously fucking stupid decisions of this administration and how it's undermining our brand of rule of law and consistency that is gonna result in massive multiple contraction and it doesn't matter how good the company is if the broader market is engaging is is registering multiple contraction it's you can't out run it so i have been massively transitioning my us holdings into asian european and also the only company i and have at least fifty percent of their business abroad because i think the us has is about to go into a ten or fifteen year down cycle but to your question would i do it again if i did it again what i would do quite frankly is i would probably just buy residential real estate for rental and i i've to me that's the most it's not only a good return but because our society is rejection and and wants to the entrance always wanna come up with a way to make it harder for the entrance there's been such incredible n in america that continues that real estate just gets natural lift and so i think residential real estate over the long term and there's very few investments you can lever a five to one there's very few investments you can depreciate it two or three percent a year regardless of they're going up in value and also just from a mental wellness standpoint i like the idea of being and investments that aren't marked every day i checked my phone way too much i checked my phone five or six times a day and i get all i'll bummed out when my covered calls on odd i would've made a million bucks more it bum me i ruined my day yesterday whereas the apartment rental units i own in del beach i don't know what they're worth today i and maybe they went down ten percent maybe they didn't but i like if i had it to do all over again i probably just would have been taking all my excess cash flow and done massively diversified etfs in all also all over the world and i would have bought more and more rental residential rental real estate you said something great i saw on when i was prepping for this that you you were talking about the short sort of checking your phone every day you're like look if you're mh the stock markets of roller coaster right now and like you know there's like a political sort of like circus going on so you it's easy to feel some type of way and you had a good point of view i don't know if if you said this off the cuff or or if there's something you've sort of really thought about but you you were like you said something along the lines of look if you got your health alright you're you're at you've already got fifty one percent of the game if you have your health let's start with that are you got some friends some family you having dinner with people like you know if you started sort of stacking back up rather than being like mh cool i'm in a mood swing along with the sort of like rolling average of the of the index you know what i mean what's can you could you sort of like give your take on that i para you well i've been reading some buddhism recently and i love this one thing i read really struck me and that is the person with good health has thousands of problems the person with bad health has one problem and you guys are well you guys are younger than me when i went into my fifties something happens in your fifties and it's really awful two or three of your friends die just like weird genetic shit pops up had a friend who is healthy ripped handsome happy this weird nerve disorder bo took him out another friend or in tu bloom fifty one having a great time great life three kids killing it professionally a little bump on a set what is that know i gotta go and check it out it's leukemia but they think they can get rid of it with with with pharmaceutical so i don't need chemo or anything oh it's not going away i need chemo oh it's come back stronger i have to get a stem cell transplant and they basically gave a very intense and then it's like oh it's back i'm done and he's gone like diagnosis to death six months and you realize like okay if you're waiting to have wash board abs if you're waiting to find the perfect spouse if you're waiting to have more money don't wait i mean really try and try and take advantage of the moment tell people you love them be nice to yourself be kind yourself enjoy yourself because it's going i mean you guys are sort of at the age where time starts to fall off a cliff but i think a lot about the notion of freedom i always thought that money would give me the freedom i wanted and it has given me some freedom from the economic anxiety of it was had and it's given me a lot of options but what i have figured out is i've gotten older is that true freedom is releasing yourself in the conventions and expectations of a broader society around what i should write or what i should say or how i should condition something and say you know i constantly when i talk about young men or i talk about what i think is going on the world i feel need to add a sentence and such that it i watered down watered down such that the far right of the far left don't come from me and shame me and i still haven't found the freedom of relief myself from the conventions of expectations now i still wanna be kind because i like that i wanna be a good person but i still fall i still have a lack of freedom around really my goal of my content is to catalyze a productive conversation that shapes better solutions and i might be wrong the conversation i'm cat the way i catalyze it i might get it wrong but that's my goal and yet i'm still too fucking worried about being shamed or getting it wrong or saying something stupid or disappointing people or not being liked by strangers so i still am not free so i think a lot about what does it mean as i barrel towards the end to have real freedom because if you're just focused on getting to a certain point and think that you're gonna find the perfect x y at no you're here to learn you're here to enjoy yourself you're here to be as kind as possible you're here to surround yourself with as many people is possible who love you and unless you love them but i am trying to get off this hamster wheel of constant ambition and and engaging in true freedom and i'm still not there but do things you you know you i guess it's a a weird like i i act like a tough guy this thing doesn't bother me but then like i'll see a comment and i'm like you know i'll think about it late at night i'm like fuck like did do i really look puffy in the face you have this thing called the anti gallo index or is that what it's called where inverse gallo anti gallery something inverse the inverse index does that bother you insult sign of respect how do you take yeah well no at the at the time well first off anyone who takes pictures of a plane doesn't have a plane anytime someone's instagram you pictures of a gulf stream it's not theirs anytime anyone says i i don't care what other people think it means they're obsessed with what other people think it's like when people say i don't think about i hate to vu like i don't think about money but they're fucking obsessed with money they fuck their sister for a nickel i hate it when people say well i don't care about money i just wanted to build great products and everything would work out yeah okay it's like those douche bags that say they went to school in cambridge rather than just saying no i went to harvard well good for you means you have rich parents you shit had am i a little angry today my little angry did today guys a little angry touch angry ish when we hit the forty minute mark you really just like cr send it's like you say both breaking away in the hundred meter dash i think you're you're out of the investment or whatever was just still drop more perhaps yeah like i would say the six or eight times i've had a quote unquote mental health episode where it's something is really bum on his room my weekend and i haven't been able to enjoy my kids or whatever it started online someone calls me professor genocide i go on morning joe and i talk about my support of israel and why i think they have a right to defend you know i'm very pro and thousands of comments that i don't care about children people start referring to me off offhand as professor genocide it if fucking can rattle me there's just no getting away from it and i don't and i think some of that's good i think if if your total i've gotten much better i let i don't engage in comments anymore i read the first ten to get a feel for what they think and i try to learn from them but what i found is most of the really vile content or comments if you click on them it's a bot it's dog face one zero one with three followers so i try not to take it too seriously but yeah it's still it affects me less than it used to but it's still it still does affect me it still has the ability to bum me out but at the same time he can't be soc path it also makes me really happy i get a lot of positive feedback and so i read i try and register that emotion as well i try and appreciate that people are nice enough to take time and say something nice in the comments and also i get a lot of really constructive feedback you know like your work really appreciate the effort you went into this dis i think you got wrong and this is why and i learned from it i don't mind that i'd like that i like pushback it you know if it's long as it's civil and thoughtful but yeah it doesn't the notion that it doesn't get to me oh no it it it absolutely sometimes gets me it just gets to me less now i am a little less focused on on the comments of the sewage system and also i got off of x which helps a lot one of the things i think you're great at and like maybe you know in politics they have john stewart it's like somebody who's both funny and entertaining to listen to and like we'll speak truth to power and if you see something that he thinks is nonsense i'm like there's there's people like that in like let's say the political game i feel you are you you do a little bit of that in the in the business world and you whether it's big tech or it's things like that and you say you said you know i don't feel totally free to kinda like say you know fully what i feel because i'm worried about you know maybe what other people think do you feel like there is anybody who is free like you know who do you look at and say like okay the way they're doing it something i admire right because your role is in some ways like you're a take down artist sometimes you call out bullshit you call out something that's wrong you wanna catalyze that conversation like you said and like push us in a better direction so inherently there's like a a little bit of like finding negative things and calling them out or take taking down something that's powerful but is going in the wrong direction mh what about the other side like is there somebody who you look at where you think like wow the way they're living the life that's that's kick ass or this the way this this industry is going i think that's really great like what's the positive spin of that yeah there's a lot i i i'd say if there's one person who i really just admired sam harris i find he's so disciplined and so thoughtful and good and so una afraid he just doesn't he's like really thinks through issues it doesn't say them aaron or flipping he really does his work and then when he thinks he has moral clarity around something he's just una afraid and absolutely who else like that you admire well if dive might different reasons i think matt levine and bloomberg i just love the way he looks at the markets i find it so interesting i think bill cohen a puck i like the way he looks at the markets so i love josh brown and barry r holt so i love like a couple of long island was talking about investments you know i've just did a podcast with david brooks and i'd love how he makes the spirituality with comedy a man and community and he's a more conservative so i learned from him there's people every day that i find their work really really inspiring so i don't but i wouldn't say i have like one or you know specific role models i turn to but there's so many people out there that i i get a lot of inspiration from you do this sort of like advice for young men like i guess like bucket of content and i think it's pretty interesting what's a message that you wish like if you just picked one message out of that bucket you you're like god i really wish people actually listen to this one or internalize this one what's the one that you really wish you could just like you know if you could really get it intercept this in people's brains you think it would make the biggest difference so you're referring i have a podcast called office hours i found when i was teaching you have something called office hours your professor and people come to your office and they're supposed to ask you questions and say well i don't understand the brand core identity for the tech no one ever came to me to talk about strategy or brand strategy they came to me to talk about life advice or professional advice like uncle shit you know what it's based off of it's based off of the remember the show frazier the call he did the doctor fraser at a call show it's basically that people can call in and ask anything about life or should i move to houston i'm engaged i'm worried that my fiancee can move i'm worried that our relationships gonna you know whatever it might be or should i should i is it two eight to buy nvidia i mean it's all over the map and i enjoy giving advice i think i'm good at it the one piece of advice if i could only give one piece of advice to young people it's nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems and that is a lot of your success and a lot of your failure isn't in your fault and at the end of your life and there's research here when you're on your deathbed and that's it you're not gonna take a walk on the beach you're never gonna be with your wife again you're never gonna get to laugh with your kids again and i'm an atheist and i got a lot of power from my atheism the things you're gonna regret you're not gonna look back and say i regret that this happened what you're gonna regret is how upset you were and so recognize that when you get fired or you have an investment go bad or you have loved that's un unrelated or not returned or you screw up and you say something un kind or professionally you just you're not on the right path keep in mind again you're gonna be upset at how upset you not at what happened and at the same time on the flip side also recognize that when something really good happens to you whether it's good health or you have an investment that triples or you get promoted realize a lot of that is in your fault and you should be you're never more prone to a really stupid mistake than after a big win because you start believing your own press so be humble really be grateful realize a lot of it is the fact that you were born at the right place in the right time and we're in the right position at the right time to do something and just forgive yourself when things don't go well nothing's ever as good or as bad as it's seems like try and look in the mirror and say if you got fired i can add value to a company if someone doesn't return your love you know i could make look in the mirror i could make someone very happy investments will come and go i will find good investments if i keep trying and i'm a good person i work hard i will achieve some level of economic security because again it's it's just not nothing ever as good as bad as at seems that's the one piece of advice you're you're reading buddhism you're talking about the end of life the the dog has chilled out i've listened to you for a decade now i i i enjoy this era of your thinking the mushrooms it's it's working you i've heard it you're into that and it's working dude there's a hilarious joke you know you know hu min has the comedian he had this a great joke the other day he's like you he goes your religious preference is directly tied to how well you're doing in life he's like no one loves buddhism is more than like a wealthy wealthy a wealthy white person he's like you gwyneth pal love it loves her something must and then he's like but when you're on rock bottom welcome to islam baby he's like mike tyson when he's going through it it converts it's like you know like it's always that guy at that at that rock bottom that they find islam he's like i could just i know exactly what religion you have if i know how well you're doing in life i know what know how are you're doing life i know your religion i sound yeah i i got it i wanna ask you i think three years ago i i forget exactly when you're like chat it's more like gl ones like that's the thing and you're you're a bit early on that but what other company brand movement do you think is quietly crushing it right now that not a lot of people are talking about it well wouldn't that be nice if i knew that but that's what you do right every year every year in your newsletter you make you make some pretty wild predictions what you know surely you have a a notes app with that you're like writing down ideas on what your prediction is gonna be at the end of the year okay so i i said in twenty twenty three the technology the year was ai in twenty four i said it was gl one and i picked stocks every year i picked for what i picked over the last few years but i've gotten my big tech stock pick for twenty four was reddit and in twenty five my quote unquote big trend or big stock pick is really boring and that is i think the rivers are about to reverse in terms of capital flows and the unprecedented capital flows in into the us over the last fifteen years i think those rivers are about to reverse and we're gonna see a massive outflow of capital and it's already happened i started selling down my us stocks in q four of last year it's been my big theme for twenty five just regression of the mean is an incredibly powerful force and we have been on a unprecedented terror for about fourteen fifteen years economic cycles usually about eight years we've been on a tariff for good fourteen fifteen and i've been my big investment or big theme if you will is that you're gonna see a massive real realization of capital out of the us into non us markets and the market i like the most is europe because if you ask anyone about europe they just roll their eyes and go no they're fucked it's a museum it's over regulated that's when you invest is when something's been left for dead there are really good companies in europe trading at single digit pe and then in the us you have apple which is not growing apple grew one percent last year and it's at a pe of thirty six i think or thirty four so that just it's trading like a gross stock and it's not it's a mature stock so my big kinda of theme is not i don't i i don't know a techno my technology that i really like was nuclear and then i did more research on it and people i nuclear is gonna take five to ten years to come online it's more it's more liquid natural gas and i realized it was over my head talking about energy so my kind of my thing here has been basically that you're about to see an enormous transition massive multiple contraction in the us where we go from twenty six to the high teens maybe even lower and we're you're gonna see other markets outperform the us that's that's my big thing and that's what i'm i'm how i'm real my capital i'm gonna be almost in terms of public stocks i'm gonna be almost entirely out of the us market within three or four months does that mean you'd be owning i know you you you talked about a lot of your public holdings being indexed does that mean you you'd own like a global market fund or you'd be owning a european index what what does that mean no because it's it's started like what you were saying that i can't resist picking individual stocks i'm an investor and this is a very risky one i invested in a company called vertical aerospace which is a v tall company vertical takeoff and landing in my thesis is the generally you're gonna have multiple expansion in the uk or in the in europe i think the last mile of transportation is i'm fascinated with aviation i think the last mile is the problem to be solved helicopters are this dirty dangerous technology that just shouldn't be around and these v towels basically got them know if you've seen these things they look like drones they have you know vertical prop and they they're electric so they're really quiet one can land in your backyard and you wouldn't know it's there and they departure in america archer one of them archer and job so archer and job traded like four to six million this one again on the ropes went in when my same friend did a pipe it's got like i think a two or three hundred dollar three three or four hundred million dollar market cap and also my real my thesis is that my big thesis is i'm trying to get in front of what i think is gonna be one of the greatest increases unexpected increases in capex in modern history and that is essentially the eu has come to the painful conclusion that can know longer count on its crazy rich rich uncle for military support or for kind of consistency and so the eu was talking about taking one percent one point nine percent gdp allocated to defense and increasing that to three percent so nineteen trillion dollar economy you're talking about an incremental spend of two hundred billion dollars a year on defense spending that no one was expecting even twelve or twenty four months ago so i'm looking and by the way defense stocks have already ripped it might already be too late the few defense stocks in europe have already dramatically over performed but i think that there's gonna be i think that additional spending is gonna be s and also there'll be some technology spill over which i think will help to tax sector and i think inspire sort of an upward spiral in some european stocks so i'm an investor and this is gonna go vertical aerospace i'm an investor in a fund called the atlanta partners that find small and mid cap special sits in latin america and europe because i think big cap kind of big cap growth has taken all the returns for the last decade and i don't know if how long that's gonna last so i try and spread it out ray dahlia said something that was really powerful that the key is to try and find twelve positive income streams that are not correlated that if you can do that you're gonna do really well that on a risk adjusted basis if you can find twelve different stocks companies cash flows that are somewhat un correlated that's the goal and then you get kind of above market risk adjusted return and that's what i'm trying to do i'm trying to find either funds or individual companies that are somewhat un correlated and the problem is everything's on everything now is somewhat correlated because diversification that basic theme caught wind or purchase in the eighties and so every large institutional investors started diversifying like crazy which means it's impossible to have non correlated assets now because of an institution is investing in an iron ore manufacturer in australia and novo nord if they get in trouble and need to need capital they're gonna sell everything and so basically we're all kind we're all kinda interconnected right now so the the the recognition of diversification has made it more difficult to diversify but i'm buying both individual stocks investing with investing c investing with friends and vc i'm an investor two israeli companies do you have a target rate of return are you like i wanna compound that fifteen percent twenty percent what would you have a do you have a target and do you do you actually track it for yourself personally my target is i just wanna be a ball or what what does it take to do that same i don't how do you i how does i all i'm not as what ball scott does this start with not asking that question yeah that's right and immediately outs me as not a baller yeah i'm going tonight to some british hotspot or some hotspot in london and the door the door in the left me because i think she thinks i have more money than i have so i need to catch up to her expectations of me me i need the perception of me to catch up to the or the reality the ask like how much money do you think that i have so i know i need to target that's yeah it's like when to introduce to chase it's like when a woman returns my eye contact at a bar i'm like she's thinking i'm rich anyways i don't i'm not that thoughtful what i'd loosely try to think i'm an owl at the point where i'm not looking to get rich i'm looking to not at poor so i don't take a returns to what i think that i wanna find good investments to good assets and i wanna make sure that i i always i do i do a lot of what they did in star mains ox i do lot stress testing on my portfolio i'm like okay we have the nasdaq got cut in half tomorrow what would that mean for me what would happen if there was a real estate crash my biggest investment away i'm talking about this my hands down my biggest personal investment theme is that i think income inequality is only gonna get worse in and i've been saying this for a long time i think it's terrible but i it's only gonna get worse i think the money has totally washed over washington we now have a we now have a president who's opened a meme clone coin which is essentially a swiss banking account where anyone could put money in oh by the way congrats on your the five hundred k membership you bought to the trump friend's club yeah the ambassadors the the du douche shoes and du fill yeah for five hundred k i pay a lot of money not to be on that anyways and by the way i think those guys he he'd tell you that too he's a genius i he people been really critical at that my sense is right free assembly to do whatever want what i think is criminal is having a meme coin that putin could put wouldn't putin be stupid not to call trump and say i'll put a billion dollars in here pulse and i have these mathematicians and i'll take the value because price discoveries at the margins i'll take the value this thing up to thirty billion you and eighty i'm gonna make you wealthiest man in the world and by the way and unrelated news could you stop supporting ukraine wouldn't he be stupid not to make that call he's losing what's the trump call i what called trump coin he has a meme quote yeah what's that now what's the market cap it now it wasn't it like five billion oh went to twenty now i think it's at three or four that's by the way you wanna talk about if this happened the day before the inauguration yeah okay hold on you wanna talk about g we're they have flooded the zone with so much crazy shit you wanna talk about g they announced the trump coin the friday night the darker friday night before an inauguration so would get lost in the news thirty people made eight hundred million dollars over the weekend i'm gonna guess i'm gonna go out on a limb here that those people probably got a call maybe from someone close to trump saying launching a coin you should do this then over the course of the next couple months i think about eighty thousand people lost billions of dollars i e retail investors then as the lock ups coming off he announces a big dinner to hype the stock then he decides oh you know what the division of justice the department of justice investigating scams in the crypto market we should close that unit down that the g here if any republican ever uses the word you know hunter biden it should be like what hunter biden has been accused of is a parking ticket compared to the double murder of g this administration is loving against the american public but but but also both could be wrong both could be are wrong like both could be wrong like like you know what i cannot stand when when when people say well what about this it's like that is also bad you know what i mean like we can have two conversations to your point that by i almost respect we democrats are corrupt for hundreds of thousands of dollars speaker are to pelosi trade stocks that's fucking insane yeah she's in a meeting with health and human services and they say oh we're gonna invest more in payment systems using ai and then she goes out and she buys this happened options call options on tempe ai and then when she disclose that she's by options the stock surges thirty or forty percent that that's so democrats have been corrupt we're just corrupt for a small ball he's corrupt for he's corrupt for billions and at the damage she does in terms of reducing americans confidence in the market is bad but the ability to say hey you know i'm about invading taiwan can you make sure that your attack submarines and your carrier fleets don't show up in the strait of taiwan and by the way we're buying a shit ton of trump coin and nobody knows that script on a different level anyways i where the where i started this rant was i think income inequality is only getting worse i think there's a small what i call emerging cohort of what i call transnational oli and that is the point really o one percent that has access to influence and deal flow and corruption and gets exponentially richer and unfortunately these folks don't have no longer have vested in interest in the health of their host nation because they have their own schools they have their own rights i i will always have access to to i never get a right i will always have access to family i could i could be living in deepest re mississippi if someone in my life needs to terminate pregnancy i'd have no problem if someone comes after my rides i can lawyer up like no tomorrow if they start rounding up jews in in the united states the same way the rounding up people with the wrong tattoo i can piece out to dubai or milan so the transnational oli are losing vested interest in the success of their host countries and democracy and kind of rule of law because they have their own rule of law they have their own bill of rights and so what i see is a group of people who are becoming so exponentially wealthier than the rest of the pop stipulation and i think okay that's terrible i rail against it i'm trying to work against it but at the same time i'm not gonna fight city i'm gonna try and make money off of it and the way i'm making money off of it is the following they're really wealthy the point o one percent wanna live in one to five places they wanna live in dubai how how much is point one five percent or point anyone anyone is worth more i think it's like anyone is worth more than fifty million dollars five zero okay okay so by the way the number of millionaires the united states is doubled since twenty twenty the number of billionaires has come from five hundred to twenty five hundred and ten years yeah i mean it doesn't something like the fifteen fifteen percent the top fifteen percent is is millionaire there like or i mean it's something like where it's not like that that is when we started the podcast or but i'm not even talking i'm not even talking about millionaires i'm talking about people let's look at billionaires billionaires wanna live in one of five places dubai london palm beach aspen or new york that's pretty much it a few of them in la few of them in hong kong but my investment strategy is i own i own really nice homes in four of those five areas and my view is in thirty or fifty years those homes could be worth a lot of money and they're a great store value i can lever up on them with which i don't do but you can borrow against them and also there's a psychic benefit and that is i wanna try and figure out an investment strategy that makes it hard for my boys to avoid me and that is when they're in college they're gonna say well we could go to tijuana or we could go aspen and hang out with my dad but we have to have lunch with them i'm like well how fast the house it's fat alright we'll have lunch with your dad so but the biggest assets i have are our residential real estate and i when i'm not living there i rent them out but i think come to quality has gone so bats shit crazy not only in the us around the world that you wanna find places where these people wanna live if you're a billionaire you have a home in one of these places or you're going to and if you are worth over a hundred million dollars you're gonna have a home in one of these places and they're not making any more beach tron real estate and palm beach manhattan is constrained aspen is almost impossible to develop in and london is constrained and i think london is a super city and will always have a certain appeal for the for the wealthy so my biggest my biggest asset allocation has been in high end real estate in in what i call these super super cities homes of future billionaires whenever you earn in a bad mood feel free to come on and just just rant i i enjoy this don't humor me bitch if you if you find a new religion that you're into whatever it is do same yeah how are you guys i'm so good to talk about me how are you guys i think we both hit a point where we kinda had to make a decision on how much of our future decisions are gonna be dictated by money because you know a hundred and twenty percent of my decisions between the age of maybe twenty and thirty two were were dictated by like how do i be more successful yeah and then you sort i sort of realized like great i see two groups of people in life you know from here some people who just continue to make all their decisions based on money even though they've already earned the last dollar the lever spend if that doesn't seem like that doesn't make any sense but i totally get it because they found a game and they're good at the game the game is fun and you get rewarded for that game with a clear tangible visible metric and then there's a smaller group of people who went back and thought of a new game they wanted to play and they went back to the bottom of the mountain and philosophically that's my real answer to your question like yeah by i got good stuff going on with my kids and my business and all that but like philosophically that's where i'm at is picking what game i wanna play for the next seven to ten years because i don't think it should be the same game i just played for the last fifteen like what was the point of winning the last fifteen if i'm just gonna play the same levels again and just keep doing that even though incrementally it does nothing that's great swap awareness i i think your decision to be very focused on economic security in your twenties and thirties is absolutely the right decision because it'll provide more balances as you get older and more flexibility you know they say money is ink and your panic and write new chapters and make certain chapters burn brighter but it's not your story but fill up that pen while you have the health the strength the lack of dogs and kids and also young kids are i don't know i think young kids are overrated i i what i would say is i'm i'm contradicting myself another piece of advice take so many pictures take so many pictures because you know the the reason you will get so sentimental and be so appreciative with these pictures because we're a species at value scarcity we gorge because there's been an absence of fatty sugary food we we're you know we wanna play we wanna gamble because it was an absence of free play on the savannah we engage in porn because it was an absence of mating opportunity it's only forty percent of men of reproduce throughout history whereas eighty percent of women have and scarcity makes us miss and desire there's nothing more scarce than your kids because literally your kid i mean it's like that saying you never know the last time you're gonna pick up your kids and my kid now i mean literally my little boy you you know who i just wanna a college tour her with it was yesterday that he was coming into my room crawling in the bed man saying let's make a plan and he used to just go you know just used to go apes shit crazy like it's so excited when the news you know the new episode of man lauren came on and like run around the house or you know jump into the pool after my dog and those moments you're gonna be so sentimental and the thing that kind of kind of fills that hole of that sadness as i do those apple memories every day mh yeah and you just you cannot take enough pictures and and you're it sounds like you're more soul than i was at your age but trying to take time with your partner just to stop in kind of ba in those moments because i think it was gloria van said the happiest she ever was was when she had young kids at home and i do believe looking back on it that will be the moment i said that was a happiest i've ever been so i think you're thinking about it what see young kids are over overweight i think babies are hard i think babies i i should have said i think babies are tough yeah i think kind of zero to three dads for pretend to like it i think most dads don't yeah i opened i openly dislike zero to eighteen months and then after that stuff that's really good i and then that i'm i love it and then three to five is you know i guess starts getting fun and then like five to fifteen is just the golden decade i'm shocked at how soft it's made me like i cried pretty easily like thinking about certain things with my children dude i watch this movie wonder have you seen this movie wonder oh gosh do have a main wonder will dish destroy you that's a wonderful just had a kid wonderful sort a modern family yeah i cry every other i'm sort a modern family like it's or like look at i get when i get the thing on my phone we're like one year ago today and i'm looking my my daughter's eighteen months now and i'm like oh my god like i get my notification i'm like oh wow she was she's going a lot i i actually have a prediction on this you you know how meditation went from like fringe to in v and then you know cold plunging we do all these things to like change our state change the way we feel and like the reality is you're not cold plunging because you think it's gonna like add a a year to your life when you're eighty nine years old it's not a longevity thing it's a feeling thing and it's a brag on social media thing and so i think that the there's gonna be another one of these it's a technique that i actually learned in a tony robbins event tony tony said that he does this think with his wife once a month that's literally the weakest flex in the world it's not a learn this in tony's office whatever whatever that i'm cute that to yourself well what's you gonna say i've yeah you've you've got learn this i learn this i learned this from my finance but say and learned it on a silent retreat he does it as a regular practice so they basically him and his wife they sit down basically put like the last they they just like put the camera on the tv and he calls it like emotional flooding basically it's like you basically just like kinda wash yourself in these like the best memories the the sort of the best photos the best videos and they it keeps you like i don't know it keeps you bonded it keeps you happy it's such a simple thing it's like way easier than meditation and i feel way better afterwards and it's just been a very like healthy especially with me and my wife i got three kids under five it's like really easy for us to not like we can go five days without even talking like or the only talking we have is functional like you know they have three under five yeah yeah on right now that's hand hand hancock yeah so this is what's keeping us alive you know like i'm sure the guys in the in the bunker like had you know things that they did to feel good to this is what you just culinary like your roommate my mate night i gotta go handle these kids but just stand on a on a on a sour note because i'm you know glass half empty stay on brand yeah you what the three we almost outage you as like a half good dude whether three of us are experiencing is not a fore forgotten conclusion for the majority of young people i think in america today it's like the future prosperity here it's just not evenly distributed i think the majority of young people it's not within their reach right now to think about finding a mate and having children and it's such when you think about it it really is i think it's the great tragedy of america it despite the nasdaq going up despite the incredible prosperity despite our ability to capture these amazing technologies and create unbelievable shareholder growth sixty percent of thirty year olds used to have a child in their household forty years ago and now it's twenty seven percent well you said some crazy stats with logan and logan's a a good friend of mine love logan and you said something was it something i i don't exactly remember it was like if you're above thirty five in your man and you aren't in a relationship the likelihood that you're going to have children is only twenty percent or it was like some phenomenal stats where it was just like basically the men who are having sex who are single now are the ones who are getting all of the sex and the men who aren't in their twenties like the they have no hope something ridiculous like that's a story well i i think the stat you're referring to there's a couple a couple scary stats one if a man hasn't c habitat or been married by the time he's thirty there's a one in three chance he's gonna have a substance abuse problem loneliness really just take a bigger toll on men that it dozen women women will transition a lot of that romantic energy into friendships and into professional work whereas men men you know it they channel that energy into a lot of negative things and the scariest stat i've seen is that in america fifty one percent of men eighteen to twenty four have never asked a woman out in person so if you're a dude listening to this podcast and you think i wanna level up in terms of my success dramatically if you have ever asked a woman out i'm not saying you have to be successful she might have said no and that's fine but if you have ever asked a woman out in person you're already in the top half of young men in terms of risk aggressive and your willingness to try and express dramatic interest while making someone feel safe young men are basically surrendering from society or a lot of them are unfortunately and the economic the the fact that old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more money the fact that the fact that corruption is now gone on full tilt and a smaller number of people are aggregating all the spoils means that a lot of young people just no longer i really have the viable option to a find a mate mb should they find a mate have the economic viability to have a kid and experience with the three of us are experiencing i think that in my view that the unified theory of everything i think a lot about politics should be a series of programs that help anyone under the age of forty one meet people more therapeutic they need their version of the game when sean and i were fourteen the game the book came out and like every fourteen year old read this book called the game it was about pickup artists and they're like it took a a whole bunch of internet nerds like read this book the game i i know it but i haven't read it neil strauss you would just from a writing perspective you either was awesome it was why i read it to be clear just for the rent the pros my girlfriend in high school we were going to colleges in two different states and her parting gift to me was she gave me the book the game which is the greatest the greatest gift and the greatest ins insult i ever received in my life up till that point it was amazing yeah i know a i imagine a lot of young man this podcast you know your goal is to get to know what do i mean by that send your linkedin profile or emails to jobs and qualified for find friends your interested hanging out with and try and hanging out with him put us yourself in the agency of strangers and absolutely develop some game a plan such that you're confident enough to go up to strange change people same sex other sex and express romantic interest while making them feel safe and the only way you get to great yes is is through a shit ton of nose so start working on the nose and by the way if you don't know what to say the little dick pickup line he just goes up to a woman and he says excuse me what's your availability right now as far as being hit on the most polite pick up line that'll make her laugh i got a better one i got a better one you approach him with a camera and you say when you take a picture of me everyone says yes if you say we you take a picture of may i you're a tourist or something and take a picture and i go okay now now can you flip the camera around take one of both of us and she'll go well why and you say because someday i'm gonna show it to our kids scott el thank you very much man you're the best thank you guys congrats on everything i feel like i could rude world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less travel never looking back