my first nellie let's go my first baby mama my first ketamine experience my first addiction i feel like got the rude work know why i could be what i want to put at all in in like a days on here's what i wanna start with i love some of the things that you say and one of the things you said is don't follow your passion people who are already rich tell you to follow your passion you should follow your talent can you unpack that can you explain what you mean i wanted to be an athlete that was my passion and then i'm going to ucla i was a blessed because i figured out pretty quickly that i wasn't in the point one percent you need to be and to make your living as an athlete and there's a fear there's some pretty basic ac axiom that should guide your career choices around where you invest your most precious capital and that is your time your human capital the first is this sex year the business the lower return on investment you wanna be in fashion the arts movies modeling sports unless you get really you know incandescent green lights from a very early age so you're gonna be the point one percent try and make a living somewhere else and then do that on the weekends and that is if you the sag after the most talented actors in the world it's hard to get a sag after a union card you have to actually ban something these are the most talented actors in the world hundred and eighty two thousand of them eighty seven percent of them don't qualify for health insurance because they don't make more than twenty three thousand dollars in a given year so the key is finding you're not finding your your passion but finding your talent and then committing to developing mastery and if you can develop mastery in anything that has a ninety plus percent employment rate which ninety eight percent of sectors enjoy the economic acc cam the prestige the relevance just the sheer joy of mastery will make you passionate about whatever it is and i'm passionate about taking care of my kids i'm passionate about being able to step in and help my aging father i'm passionate about i'd rather be raphael and they doll or federer but kinda i'd rather be me than the number three or number four tennis plan in the world because i have financed financial security i get to go to wimbledon on my own terms and not be as nervous and not throw up or before a match so yeah i'd rather be a doll but pretty much anyone else playing tennis i'd rather be and i got there with boring companies so the the the the less sex business the higher the return on investment so i would suggest that we stop you know think about will what could i be good at i think that's what your twenties are for workshop stuff and and also getting it wrong i started investment banking and i was terrible at it i didn't like them they didn't like me and i had to go back to business school and just start workshop where could i be great where what industry could i be great in so don't you know find what you're good at and then get great at it and then be a dj on the weekends by the way congratulations today the today is the release date of the book right algebra of wealth but today is the day so that's that's gonna be huge i mean i i i read the algebra of happiness a while ago and i've been watching the videos forever and so i kinda i i didn't get an early copy of the book but i will buy and read it and so you'll get my twenty three dollars i need you to well by the way number one on amazon today i decided drop that because i'm desperate i'm desperate your affirmation sam that's alright i'll give it to i'll give it to i won't starve you from that you've you got it i look up to you i think you're the man thank you well let me let me ask you about the number one on amazon real quick you you're pretty stoic guy in fact when you come on the pod it's it's always surprising to me that you are so even ke but it's the launch of your book you worked on this thing really hard your number one on amazon what how does scott gallo celebrate oh you know i'm not i'm i'm pretty flat i don't i'm i congratulate the team it feels great it's very gratifying i love benchmarks i'm addicted to and everyone's addicted to something i'm addicted to stranger affirmation which is kind that at my age and that's a form of affirmation but it's very rewarding because so many people work so kinda damn hard on this thing just not me but you know my research my analysts my p people my social people and my publisher my book agent you know greatness is in the agency of others so which is very gratifying and plus my podcast c got to number three on the best sellers list so god if i'm not gonna get to number two i must beat cara so sam if you could go by several thousand books i'd appreciate it and if you like it right a review and if you hate it please buy more and send them to an enemy but yeah i'm i'm addicted to external affirmation it's really pathetic well so i mean you the the book from my understanding is that it's basically talks about the people who have money and the people who don't and what are the commonalities between the winners and the losers and you have i've read this for years there was this awesome fast company article about you and i've seen you say this in videos where you were shockingly calculating when starting your last company l two i think you said something like deloitte did a study they did a study that shows what's the difference between the people who sell their companies for five to ten times revenue versus those who just sell it for one or two times and you had these like four or five things and it was they own a niche they have recurring revenue tech is at their core and that they're international and then finally they have defensive ip and then you went on and said how like in your forties when you're starting l two forties and fifties you we're like only focused on money you said i worked my ass off i was there at the office at two am you said but i don't regret it you said it was totally worth it and when you were starting l two i don't really know too much about that industry or that business other than a handful of articles were you that calculating with working backwards from an exit and by the way the the story ends with you selling it for a hundred and twenty million dollars a hundred and sixty boss jesus sketch your facts rate and by the way i'm number one on amazon today i don't know if i told you that yeah i i i didn't have a lot of money and for me work was about getting economic security i was very focused on money and i'm not saying that's the right way which was just my way and i had done a lot of analysis and the study referring to said okay there are companies that itself in any industry they you know the lowest ten percentile the upper d of the valuations they get taken out at and the study looked at the common features of the companies that got sold in the top d aisle and it was all the things you talked about and that's literally how i shaped the business model i opened a london office right away i'd said a charging consulting fees i had said pay me a quarter of a million bucks a year and i'll answer your toughest questions using data we focused on luxury and then consumer brands we brought our niche a little bit we spent i raised seventeen million dollars to create a series of technology and scraping tools switch that i could collect more data points than anyone in the world so it's that when the inevitable guy from the analytics department came in with his arms crossed to play gotcha they just couldn't argue with our data we just collected more data than anyone in the world on these issues and tried to dis instill it down to something actionable so i was very focused on exit and we sold for eight times revenue so yeah my basic pitch to people was you're gonna work your ass off and i'm gonna try and get you to you know gonna try and get you to where your parents were twenty your years earlier and if you're looking from balance this is in that place if you're really into management or other things tell me and i'll i'll i will try and like shape a a a role around what's important to you but we are a small business going all in to try and create economic security for us and our families with prompt media we're about fourteen people now i purposely didn't take outside capital i'm not on that hamster really again i'm not trying to jones for an exit i'm trying to build something interesting that has relevance that has a little bit more impact on the social issues we think about and also pay our people really well i used to pay people below market and give them equity and i was throwing nickel around like there are manhole cover because i wanna to have a profitable company i could sell now my priorities have changed and the people who joined the company i tell them this isn't the kind of company to get sold but what i'll do is i'll share i'll give you equity or participation in my book deals you know you are a junior analyst you get one or two percent of any book deal i get you get you know try and create some economic upside from them my natural starting point is that people come to work to develop economic security for them and their families to increase their currency their currency in the marketplace experience and also to develop relationships the workplace is a great place to meet friends mentors additional you know c cofounder you we spend a lot of money on we we saved with covid we get up our office we save about eight hundred nine hundred thousand dollars a year on an office because of course as a narcissist i had to have this amazing office and soho which is stupid and i have this rule at work or not this rule about this benefit if any four of them are together they get my credit card they can go to broadway or they can go to tu and they've done those things without asking my permission as long as there's four of them they got my credit card and the number one source of retention i think the key to building a small business is retention because we find good people you just don't want them to be with you a years years and go to google because this switching costs are enormous and if you find someone good your job is an entrepreneur or the ceo is just to create an environment where they wanna stick retention of employees in my opinion is just huge and i find or i read a study at another study on this and it said the number one source of retention or the number one lever for retention people think it's compensation people think it's culture it's whether or not that person has a friend at work if they have a friend at work they look forward to going to work and they are less likely to leave and so what i try and do everybody interviews everybody when we hire people but these kids it's really inspiring they'll go like six of them will go on vacation together so scott you're speaking in hamburg germany all six of us are gonna come and and they have a great time together they like each other and it's really it's a powerful kind of business weapon if you will now i don't think you can do that when it's a company scales beyond fifty a hundred people but i found for a small business it's really powerful and is the trick there that you don't try to be there friend because i've had that problem before i'm i wanted to be the friend and that made the management a little bit messy and i realized it's it is much better for me to not be the friend and not be included in in the the hangs the whole company functions better even though even personally i was like oh man they're all going out without me but actually it was far better than it went that way i always had a healthy sense of what the the border was meet me and my kind of my president in my company in the partner at all two we're both about the same age and we have the same view we have parties all the time we show up early as soon as shit starts getting a little like crazy we leave yeah we need hey we don't need to see them see them drunk they don't they definitely don't need to see me drunk and my attitude is what you're interesting or or what you're saying sean is really interesting and that is i'm just coming to the realization as a dad i'm not their friend i'm their dad because it was really upsetting to me that my kids didn't kinda i don't wanna say don't wanna be being my friend but i just naturally assume that my kids would adore me and be really into world war two history and crossfit because that's what dad is into i guess what they're not yeah what i realized is i'm not i'm not their friend i'm there to be their dad and it's kind of the same way i think i work with such young people i think the you know the average age is probably thirty or thirty four because i'm there but the mean or the median is like twenty five it's basically a bunch kids over educated super ambitious kids and it's easy they're doing dinner and drinks somewhere i show up for dinner i leave before dessert and then they can you know they can enjoy each other without thinking they're being judged by by scott so yeah i don't i don't i don't i draw sharp relief between you know work and fun with those guys i i love i go out with them but i go out for the first couple hours and i then i disappear so they can they can have their own fun i love the if four of you together you get my card that's amazing little tidbit i'm i'm here to collect a little lessons learned from you today and that's that's one immediate one for me thanks ma'am so like obviously you're kinda you're i don't i don't know if you're at the peak but you're you're at you're count calendar right now in terms of the your pod and kinda being in a public figure of the books and everything and then before that you had the company so you had a huge financial outcome one of the things that i think it's kinda brushed over in your history is what you doing with kinda of being an activist investor i know you're on the board of new york times and you made a few other like pretty like substantial investments i know you're working with with the hedge fund to do that what were some of the deals that you were doing what were some of the kind of the deals were some of the worst deals what were some of the signals that you had where you were like this is an interesting deal i should pounce on this sure so there's a bit of a backstory there i started coming go rent envelope and went public i was on the board i got into a fight with arguably the most successful venture capitalist in the world spoiler alert he won the fight i was kicked off the board so i was kicked out of the band that i started which was like emotionally and mentally very taxing for me and then i got angry i was really weird time in my life my mom was dying and i moved in with her and during the day i would take manager health care at night she was living in vegas i'd go to downtown and get shitty drunk with stripper and quote friends and then go back and manage my mom's health care and watch everyone loves raymond and jeopardy with my mom it was a strange time in my life i was also very angry because i just been kicked off the board of red envelope i took a half a million dollars of my money and i filed a proxy to replace the entire board and i learned everything about activist investing and shareholder governance and i tried to kick everyone off the board and own ten percent of the company and i think i got twelve percent of the vote and my proxy solicit said the two percent was probably a mistake so basically no one voted from my slate and that was kind of a low moment for me i okay now if the world has told me they don't want me involved in this corporation or in public companies and then six months later i got a call from a hedge fund that's said you're crazy but you're are kinda of crazy we have some stakes and companies and we need someone to kinda go in and rattle the cage and it just struck me that at your lowest moment you really don't know where that might lead and i got backed i went into a company called i bought ten percent of a company called united retail which was a plus size clothing brand i basically showed up and said let me build your website you don't have a website this was a while ago where i'm gonna try and replace the board this had fine stock went from two to eight and i'm like wow this is easy and i did it at sharper image bought a big stake there went in there the company seemed like a mess stock had gone up a little bit got out i did a gateway computer went on the board there that was more difficult we made a small amount of money but i never lost money doing it so then i went and raised seven hundred million dollars and became the largest shareholder in the new york times and went on the board there and timing is everything and in this case i'm one on the board in march of two thousand and eight and the stock went from sixteen to three in about five months at one point i think i was losing ten or twelve million dollars of other people's money every day and we almost lost the business the company almost went bankrupt i don't know if you guys remember that but in the world of media people just stopped advertising they just stopped it was like our tap of revenue just got turned off and it was sort of the great financial recession it kinda ended my careers in activism because one i don't think i was very good at it and two i was getting to a stage in my life where i just didn't wanna be combative anymore i didn't wanna go to war with ceo so i didn't wanna i was just exhausted by being an antagonist i thought i'm never gonna go wanna a board again unless the ceo wants me there so but i did that for a while i learned a lot i made a little bit of money but you know i was i was in my early forties and quite frankly just trying to figure out a way to make a living so i could stay in new york which is easy and you know i think i was fl a little bit but it was i was a great experience i learned a lot about human nature about shareholders about governance i get called a lot by boards when they're being challenged by an activist because i was one and i i think i have some insight into how these people think but yeah i was just a strange time in my life but it was you know it was it was interesting it was it was fun i just wasn't very good at it yeah that's cool you've had a bunch of different careers and i like that i like variety i like people who have different chapters certain saga as other their life and and you mentioned like your twenties are for figuring out what you actually like to do or what you're actually good at or the intersection between those two it sounds like yours went past your twenties and you just kept experimenting you know along the way is that is that a fair fair assessment for you yeah investment banking no good at it business school started a brand strategy firm called profit grew it took a up a hundred people sold it for thirty three million but what i wanna do i know i wanna teach the dot com imp it took me to you know from what i thought was being wealthy to not being wealthy teaching wasn't gonna help me or help me maintain the lifestyle i needed or wanted to maintain with two young kids in new york so i needed to find other ways to make money and i did a head one thing for a while did boards and then saw an opportunity and analytics and benchmarking and started that company i think o nine or o ten and that was my kind of my big win and the time timing is everything i got swept up into what is the greatest bull market economy in the history o o eight to present is probably gonna go down as the greatest extended bull market run in history people don't understand just what an anomaly the last sixteen years have been relative to the history of the market and just as i was coming into my primary income earning years you know the winds just just just filled up my sales and i caught you know i finally got all the moon sort of lined up if you will but i've always said you know you gotta be humble when things work because a lot of your successes in your fault at the same time i wish i had been more forgiving of myself when things didn't work because i have trouble forgiving myself i struggled with anger and i the person i get most angry out is myself and i have trouble getting past shit you know i was on a i was at a booked thing last night and i said something and it just came out wrong and i like sitting a bed and i can't get past that one thing it went really well but i can't think that way i i focus on what's what's wrong and that would be my advice to people is be humble when you have wins because a lot of it isn't you but also forgive yourself because you know again a lot of it isn't you my room roommate in college had the poem if on the by by i think richard kip on his wall yeah and one of the great lines of that poem is you know if you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostor just same and that's always stuck with me and that's is kind of what you're talking about like your greatest triumphs may maintaining the humility and then in your your greatest failure not beating yourself up too much you're a big proponent of stoic i mean that seems like a pretty stoic way to be give us the like you know as a lot of people listening to this right now that maybe familiar with stoic don't practice don't don't kind of know how it applies to their life like make your pitch what's why why stoic doesn't matter to somebody well just cheryl mental and emotional health and ryan holiday is kinda of my yoda on stoic and he dis distilled it this way life is not about what happens to you you can't control that but you can't control how you respond to what happens to you and i've tried to always remember that and i have trouble practicing it but con you know the the ultimate stoic piece of art in modern history or modern media is broke back mountain if he you can't fix it you gotta stand it and that is try and focus on the things you can control and you can control your emotions it's very difficult to control what happens to you and you know just also recognize and this is more atheism than stoic everyone on this podcast everyone we know everyone we care about what they think of us they're gonna be dead in a hundred years in the blink of the history nothing you say or do or what anyone else thinks of you is gonna matter for very long and something that really has helped me when i was embarrassed or i thought i didn't equip myself very well is what you realize is just imagine yourself when someone says or does something stupid you sit you think yourself oh that was stupid and then you go back to thinking about yourself and you know people aren't thinking about you your wealth your failures or successes as much as you are and so the key is just trying to be comfortable with yourself and comfortable in your own skin and only that really kinda focus on what your spouse thinks of you is your spouse happy do you have a good relationship with your kids because what twitter thinks of you really isn't that important and because i had so much trouble actually footing my emotions to that logical notion i know it doesn't matter what people on twitter or the twitter mom think of me but i couldn't emotionally separate myself from it i don't have those skills so a role model of mine is again guy named sam harris he's was like oh i got off to twitter i can't handle that he's was like why don't you get off of twitter and i'm my yeah i can so i stop i'm off of twitter for the last nine months and it's been one of the most acc things to my mental health and i didn't like to admit this but i would say five or six weekends where i just got really bummed out by something probably two or three of them started on twitter now that why am i on something that's making me on a regular basis upset and there's an addictive nature to it i think it must be just and that's what freaks me out i can modulate it you know can my thirteen year old son and all i had to don't i even know that he's upset when he goes we have a rule in my house barb boys aren't allowed to go into their rooms with their phones alone because i think this thing can literally take a teenager especially a teenager girl down a rabbit hole and kinda zero to sixty really fast and then start serving her content oh you're worried about dieting well here's extreme dieting tips despite the fact we know your five ten ninety five pounds oh you're depressed well hear some videos of people considering suicide we're gonna normalize it for you and i don't think parents are really in touch with just how ugly and how fast it gets really ugly so you know i'm trying to be very thoughtful about what it is as a you know stoic controlling what i can't control and then trying to be in better touch with my emotions and recognize that when you're down it's more about the chemistry in your head than any legitimate reason to be down it's you're gonna look at the end of life the biggest regrets my colleague at nyu adam malta did great research on people who are very near death and palliative care and their biggest regrets are won they'd wish they'd i'd stayed in better touch with friends they wish they'd live the life they wanted to lead not the life society or their parents wanted them to lead move their biggest regret is they wish they'd been less heart of themselves they wish they'd forgiven themselves they wish they'd allowed themselves to be happy and that's kind of been that's something i've been very focused on it's was like okay stop beating yourself up you're gonna be dead soon why wouldn't you squeeze as much juice out of this lemon as as as conceivable and like afford yourself the opportunity to be happy and be sad if you need to be but i think of stoic is again life isn't about what happens to it's how you respond to what happens to you and decide what is in your control and you know try try and be good yourself try and forgive yourself and also just try and be humble you're never more prone to a really big mistake than right after a big win because here's the thing you start thinking you're good at picking stocks you start thinking you're so skilled to work it wasn't that someone senior you took an interest in you and champion you you start thinking i'm great at real estate i just didn't got get lucky and buy a home at the right time so do you try and just try and ignore the market when the market tells you your failure and this is personal too you know there's been moments of my life where i thought i don't think i'm ever gonna be able to work again i think i've ruined everything i don't think ever gonna make a very very good living i remember thinking saying to my partner at the time let's move to a low cost neighborhood of charlottesville or a raleigh durham i'm gonna teach try and ride you know make decent living and just have a really nice life and my partners like that's giving up i'm my lots i'm giving up but i thought this is it i just need to substantially downgrade my expectations and i'm i don't mean to say that that's not a great life i remember thinking after my divorce like i don't think i'm ever gonna i have someone who i can share my life with again i'm like this this is never gonna happen to me i'm an unattractive broken man who's never gonna find like a partner again i i believe that for a short time and i think that it's important that everybody recognize that you know you are the answer to a firm's problem you can find someone who you can love and is gonna love you a great deal the key is getting up putting it in yourself in a place of success getting out of the house being friendly being risk aggressive surrounding yourself with people and exercise nutrition that makes you feel good about yourself such that when the wins kick up again your sales are up and i've always tried to do that i'm i had a lot of failure but i was always had my sales up such that when the wins kicked up again i was in a position to to rumble so to speak because i have a lot i know a lot of people who are very successful and then they hit some failure a personal failure a death of a parent they can't quite get over a divorce a company that fails and they get stuck they can't forgive themselves they can't forgive others they can't figure forgive the market or they don't they lose their mojo whatever it is and two three five years seven years goes on and they just haven't progressed and they start their skills start at atrophy their confidence starts at atrophy thing so what i say is put a statue of limit when any ever anything happened that happens to you you gotta put a statute limitations on it the parent dies you know within twelve weeks you should still be sad and thinking about your parents but you should be able to you should be able to function you know you go through a real emotional trauma a break up well how serious was it how much time what's the statute of limitations a business goes out of business okay more for a little while what is that two months three months but if you weren't better if you weren't back sending out emails trying to raise money going out trying to meet new people whatever it might be within that timeline you need to reach out for help and get un stuck because time goes really fast and your skills atrophy in a sort of a downward spiral and something i've always been able to do is mourn and move on churchill said the key to success is the ability to move through failure without losing your a sense of enthusiasm and i've tried i've been pretty good at not losing my sense of enthusiasm you're you're you know you you've got brilliant ideas i think you're a good business person but you talk about not just following your passion but your talent and i think that what you're most talented at is communication i've seen you speak live i've seen you i listened to the pod i've seen your videos you do such a good job at picking really sharp words and sharp phrases and just small examples like acc i've noticed that you love that word and i i've never heard anyone use it as much as you and i'm like oh i love that word nobody uses that word it's it's a beautiful word or you sign your emails with life is rich like you've you've got beautiful phrases i think that i even by the way i even had a chat jb right uploaded like a hundred and fifty of your blogs and i would ask it questions to like help give me like ideas for phrases because you're really good at that who do you steal from when it comes to or who are you inspired from when it comes to language i mean you seem like someone i if i had a guess like you're a george carlin guy something like that who do you steal like some of your delivery from or inspired by her writing you're really good and do you have like a a bank of like when you see a phrase you're like oh i'm gonna take that phrase and use that somewhere if you don't have a kitchen cabinet of people that you learn enough about that you can mimic them you're trying to play a team sport solo you're on the field alone and i didn't figure that out till i was older so i absolutely when i see something inspiring i breathe maybe one book a year people think i'm well read i'm not but i'll find a book that's really meaningful and i'll try and read it two or three times so i can adopt it into my gray matter like i daniel con thinking slow and fast i've read that book a few times and i know everything about loss of version theory i know a lot about the relationship between money and happiness i read observations of a bite standard by peter dr i read save sap and several times i wanna like really really you know embed stuff lately i'd i write down things in my phone that i just think are fucking hilarious like jokes you know when my wrote done somebody today as a prank when my doctor walks in i put on gloves i'm gonna try that i love my doctor i love the idea of him walking in and me snapping on gloves just to see his reaction you we were talking about trump today and i saw this great quote that said consequences rarely show up lube i love that i just whenever i see something that really i just think you know i i love going out in the public except for that the fact that the public is there you see these things every day and i will write them down and incorporate them into my rap and especially great phrases you know greatness is in the agency of others i remember my vc said that and i'm like that just makes so much goddamn sense i'm gonna use that over and over and over so i have a lot of inspiration i surround myself with really intelligent young people i know that's aegis but i think young people have a different frame on things that help me so but to not to not sort of if you're just reading something and not you don't take away stuff you're gonna remember you haven't really read it you haven't really absorbed it but it's all all manner of stuff i think i'm you're you're right i'm totally inspired by george carlin i think he's fantastic on society i've inspired by ricky t i'm inspired by this comedian named michelle wolf i think she's fantastic but yeah i read a lot about muhammad ali lee i think he's you know be courageous be poetic but yeah you absolutely every young person should find a couple people they find really inspiring and try learned everything about them and what they said so i'd say you can kinda turn on your muhammad ali and you know mad and a bright secretary state you know four foot ten i find her inspiring around pub policy so on geopolitics so i read a lot about her our you know our memory is long and our reach reaches far i love that she used to say that about america to its enemies right basically a really a way of saying don't fuck with us boys and i just love that this four ten woman only in america can wield you know the most powerful nation in the world in terms of foreign policy abroad and i found her she was an immigrant i just found her inspiring so i wanted to learn more about her so i could be her on occasion anyways yep build a kitchen cabinet of people scott i got a my notes app here if my it's called funny for phrases and i just i collect these i'll give you i'll give you three of my funny phrases on here the they're completely out of context so you won't you don't get it but you'll get because you do sounds like can do this too when somebody's thick you could say that they're built like a baguette i like that somebody's got the body of a baguette okay next one if you wanna talk about something that other people are avoiding you say look i'm gonna address this like an envelope right now that's a dad joke how but other one would be for ceos who have bad you know a a terrible sense of a vision of the future if the ceo was the shooter at jfk he would have died to natural causes i love these little little ism little phrase little sentences i you're gonna lose this game okay so he looks like a suicide bomber that's having second thoughts this is more serious i absolutely i absolutely love this one this is more true life advice your goal isn't to get the apology but to forgive the perceived debt i love that i love that to sing down this is really bad teaching my son about sex ed so i walked into his room with a banana in a condom and he said what's the banana and i said i can't get hard on an empty stomach i i literally think that's the funniest fucking that just hits sam that literally just hit sam i just think that's so inappropriate and so anyways sorry guys alright i'm i'm not gonna this like getting into a rap battle with o'clock i'm not i'm not gonna i'm gonna put away my swipe file right here even though i just had a good go i'm i'm gonna give up a you you win what are you excited about right now like what are some things that are going on in the world or products or ideas or trends like you know i think you talk a lot about like you know stuff that's wrong with america with the world culture with society but i wanna know the opposite what are you what are you pumped about that's not easier for me i mean to be blunt i'm i'm a glass half empty kinda of guy i think a lot about loneliness i think a lot about struggling young man i think about the threats of ai what am i excited about i have i work with a really talented group of people that are really inspiring i love the work we're doing matt i'm i've just really enjoy it i get to travel a lot with my kids i got kids at are at a great age and i get to do a ton of fun stuff with them that's really into you know i'm i'm just i get to have a really nice life at this point and i'm just enjoying it with a partner just really leaning into my kids you know just the hallmark shit i'm i'm just really having a nice time with the people closest to me and i'm healthy i got good healthy kids you know are the boring stuff man it's not anything kinda i mean i i'm going i'm on my book tour this week i go to la for bill maher and then i'm meeting a bunch of college buddies and i'm going to stage coach and then i go to miami for a bunch of speaking gigs and then i go home to london i mean i just have a i have a really nice life right now and and everyone i care about is healthy i feel relevant so i just have such a wonderful life and i'm trying to slow time down so i can really appreciate it because you know there's just no getting around it i i had lunch with ted around us which i realized as a name drop but i'm i'm desperate for for your guy's affirmation but his wife wrote a book on grief and there's this great line she has this great line and that is grief is lu receipts and i just love that i just if you really care about yeah i didn't have a lot of grief until the age of forty and i realized it was because i there's was one of my wife that really loved to really love me other than my mom and so you know what i would bless or wish for anybody is they have a lot of grief in their life because what it means is they have loss and when you have loss it's because he had something wonderful in your life and you miss it so i'm just trying to appreciate how just nice things are and really you know i don't you know i'm not really excited about you know the euro finals in germany although i'm excited about the european finals in germany my i'm just i'm just enjoying myself this is i'm rounding third i have a really nice life right now i'm just trying to enjoy it because i know everything everywhere ends you love you say for people who are not rounding third like people who are you know just just batting lead off right now so you you talk a lot to young people one of the the phrases i really liked or one of the quotes i you liked was that opportunity is a function of density he said yeah i get to a place that is crowded with success what do you mean by that because that seems like really good advice for for people well in sort of the motivation for the book was you know that study that you are kind of the average your five closest friends it there's this weird study that peer group the five people you hang out with you end up being the same body mass index you same end up with similar political value same job same neighborhood this just weird you become the same person what's different though where there's greater variance is that of those five people even though they make kind of similar incomes one will end up poor three will be okay and one will end up quite wealthy and trying to understand the behaviors that are different in the strategies between the person that ends up financially secure and the the others that are less financially secure and there's some general best practices around youth you absolutely wanna get to a city if you're ambitious i'm not suggesting this is a right way it's just my way if you're ambitious and you wanna have influence economic security before you collect dogs and kids you gotta get to a city two thirds of economic growth is gonna happen in just twenty cities and so if you're really ambitious mean get to the biggest city in your nation then get to london if you're in europe or new york in the us or if you're in tax san francisco because those cities are really competitive and you're gonna be playing you know how when you play tennis against players better than you you your game elevate when you're in this big city you're playing against the best players in the world it's hard to it's hard to live in brooklyn it's expensive which means you gotta be really good at what you do and you're surrounded by people who are gonna inspire you and who were really will elevate your game and at some point you'll probably have to move out of the city because it's it's difficult with kids but while you're young get to a big city try and try and find really high character successful people to hang out with just find people you wanna be like or that you admire professionally and personally and try and establish those friendships and try and hang out with them because you rise or fall to the level of your peer group and the thing about cities is you're just bumping off opportunities and i've moved to london in my red productive analysis of the us versus europe is the us is still the best place to make money europe's the best place to spend it so if you're in the making money part of your life it's hard to beat the us i didn't appreciate the american economy until i left it people start from yes here how can we work together actually we build something together how can we make money together london is sort of like a very polite indefinite maybe there's very little actual organic value creation in london it's people servicing other people's wealth that they made elsewhere there's nothing like there's nothing like america that says to a young person and if you work your ass off and you're really good and you get a little bit lucky you know you things can happen for you here all my british friends they say that they grew up well being afraid of tall poppy syndrome meaning they didn't wanna stick out because right their teachers with home shut the hell up get line whereas in america it's if you do something interesting even if you fail you're rewarded as being a hero of like well that's awesome man you got after it even if you even if it sucked the outcome wasn't good you we praise you for getting after it and i think that's a very unique american thing compared to europe in europe if you stick out your cha well not only that but people say in america we embrace failure that's not true but we do tolerate it and so only one out of seven businesses succeed so my strategy has been to start nine businesses and i got to two wins and all you need is one and if you aren't trying really hard in taking risk and failing and then knowing going to pull the plug and move on you're not taking advantage of the american embrace risk and failure i've never had trouble raising money because of past failures people didn't mind it as long as you treated your investors as well as long you as long as you were a decent person you didn't do anything stupid or unethical people don't have a problem funding you again i'm you know i'm not you know i had a lot of failure professionally but i've never had or i don't you know let me go when i couldn't raise money it wasn't because i had failed before and that's true in relationships so yeah the embrace or the acceptance of failure in america's is it's singular it's a wonderful thing and if you aren't trying and taking a lot of risk here you aren't taking advantage of an economy that's one of the few in the world one of the few societies i mean i was born in china i'd probably be in jail because i'm outspoken and say stupid things if i was born in europe you know i think i'd be a talented business person but i wouldn't be an entrepreneur that had recognized this success because they don't embrace failure or that's wrong they don't tolerate it the way we do can i ask you a a question about hard work and the reason being is i found i found some what read as contrary things in your work or at least in your story and what you write and so sean and i i have talked a lot about this about hard work and i think people who say they work eighty hours a week for a really long time i think they're either lying or they did a lot of bullshit work i think it's to work eighty hours a week for an extended period of time it's incredibly challenging and you talked about and in in this book as well as some of the other blog posts you're saying in my forties i grind my ass off all i was focused about all i was focused on was money and it worked out and but that's all i did and and i'm happy i did it but it was really hard work but then i read about how you delegate a ton i think you said something even as crazy as like you have someone pick out your clothes and you wear mostly the same thing you have your workout outfit and then your work outfit and how you at pro media you said something like you only meet with your executive producer twice a month you only have one hour meeting once a week with the editorial team you haven't planned vacations in twenty years and all you do is focus on a handful of things but it even though you're crazy productive now it i don't know does do are you still grinding and looking back knowing what you know now could you have gotten to where you've gotten without that eighty hour a week for multiple years work ethic well things have changed dramatically for me now i'm not working nearly as hard and i hire a lot of people and i'll over not over hire but everyone works hard but i don't i mean when you have a small business and you don't have a lot of money you know you just you gotta get you everyone needs you you need to work hard you need to set an example and you need to create an environment where everyone's working hard not sure it was ever working eighty hours was week consistently i definitely had weeks like that but when i look back on it kinda i don't know ten twenty ten fifteen years i don't remember much else other than work i mean i i worked out when i had kids i tried to spend some time with my kids i still found time for fun of vacations but you know i would vacation two weeks a year now i vacation a lot more than that and but i don't see any way around it it's really into my kids when i say my kids my students i'll ask them how much money they expect to be making by the time they thirty five and about ninety percent of them expect to be in the top one percent which is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in america and then they'll talk about that like that's what i expect but i'll say what's most important to you in your life and moving forward and a lot of the time they say balance and i'm like so you expect to be in the top one percent by the time you're thirty five but you all so believe you're gonna have balance in your life i mean i don't i've never seen that i don't you can have it all you just can't have it all at once and and by the way that's that may not be the way to go you may sacrifice you may say i wanna live a nice kind of balance life i'm gonna move to a suburb of saint louis coach little league where at forty hours a week be a good citizen find a good partner you know coach little he'd have a nice life nothing wrong with that but the majority of the people i are the young people think they're gonna be in the top one percent and also have balance in our life and i just think it's ridiculous i'm okay the only way to get there to achieve that is if you have one thing and that's rich parents otherwise expect to go all in on your career or scale back your expectations around your economics and your months because it's a competitive market and one of the things people can control is how hard they work i don't think you wanna i don't think you wanna work so much that you sacrifice your health or your relationships the there is gonna be some trade off with your relationships i didn't see my kids a lot when they were little i i i was divorced i think was a contributor to that i was i was working in services companies and never saying no to any opportunity to cmo samsung can you be in seoul tomorrow or board meeting sure i can know i mean i just said yes to everything to try and move the company forward but i i've for a long period worked very very hard and sacrificed a lot and it it takes a toll and i did it such that i could have a lot more balance now but yeah i don't i i i this notion the myth of balance get over it if you expect to be influential or economic is secure you're not gonna have a lot of balance for a long period of time some people are such geniuses that they can work a modest amount of time make a lot of money work out have a great relationship with their parents be fed donate time of the as and have a food blog assume you are not that person so just have a sober conversation and also have a sober conversation with your partner how much money do we expect to have who's responsible for making it what's your approach to spending where are we gonna live you know the number one source of divorce is not of in fidelity or lack of shared values it's usually got something to do with money and also seventy percent of divorce filings are filed by women who's still and we don't like to say this because we like to pretend women have no agency and that they're just doughy little foes is the man loses a business becomes broke or has a mental breakdown when a man loses a status as a provider he's very inclined to be on the wrong end of divorce so i think a lot about young men i think a lot about financial security i think every man should start with the notion that she's gonna be responsible for the economic well being this household and by the way sometimes that means getting out of the way and being more supportive of your partner who happens to be better at that money thing than you and that's a wonderful thing but start from a position of this is my responsibility and make sure you're aligned with your partner around this stuff because the thing we don't talk about is that your kids are gonna have higher blood pressure if you're economically strained kids and kids and long households have greater systolic resting blood pressure than kids in middle and upper income homes you're much more likely to get divorced you're much more likely to have a stroke you're much more likely to be the victim or the perpetrator of domestic violence when you don't have money in america becomes more like itself every day and that is it's a loving generous place for people with money it's a rap violent place for people who don't have money so all this bullshit that money doesn't buy you happiness my god is out of myth i'm not saying you need to be incredibly wealthy but middle income people are happier than poor people and wealthy people are happier the middle income people that's the bad news the good news is that it tops out you get diminishing returns and you have to be cognizant of when you do get to some level of economic security that's the means the ends is such that you can have an exhale release the anxiety that you feel and then use the opportunity to really spend a lot of time with your your loved ones and cement those relationships and the problem is you get on the s satanic treadmill and you grab so absorbed in your own success and your professional identity and money and making more money that you never got to the ends you wake up a wealthy person or someone who's financially scares always thought about their economic gold bang and you don't really have a great relationship with your kids or you never really leaned into your partnership and thought okay let's take time to really enjoy each other's company let's do nice things your parents died before you have a chance to really spend time with them as adults i think that happens to a lot of people they just get so caught up and i need the next promotion i need the next amount of money and but once i get here i have someone very close to my life it's a family member and i'm taking them to africa and they're like making excuses but our kids in the acquire they were making excuses i'm like you realize this is your last chance to go africa before you're dad right you're fifty fucking years old when do you go when you're seventy but you gotta get back to work an extra debt i mean what are you thinking we're gonna be dead soon and i i've just think so many people don't realize how fast it's gonna go by and never really never really like soup not only super lean into the relationships but just allow themselves just to have a great time i'm going to stage coaches just way i'm gonna go see country music festival i can't scan country but i'm going i'm gonna buy a pair of boots i'm gonna and i'm gonna have a great time and i'm gonna do an edible and i'm gonna drink a shit ton and i'm gonna have a arrested adolescence with my friends and i'm gonna look ridiculous and it's like yeah why why not why the fuck not what am i gonna do watch seas span all weekend i mean anyway i i can't stand it when people who are blessed with being in this country have some level of economic security have people in their life that love them and they love and they don't like crazy lean into it because you guys are younger than i can it just goes soak goddamn damn fast it's just crazy it is just crazy how fast it goes anyways well i don't know how to respond to that scott here's what i do though i feel like learned something and i feel a little bit bad inside at the same time and i feel a little bit good and you made me feel a little bit bad and i need to go and i need to like burp or something i need to get a little bit out of out of my system i just need to to unwind from that do they not have z often in london you know i haven't hit the anti depress it i just did ketamine therapy though that was a trip no i'm trying to i'm trying to just you know it look like the good news is i hate my life lesson less every day so i'm sort of getting there i'm sorta kidding you're like if mitch he had a podcast and open an llc i we talk about are we gonna talk about my book do think i got to number one talking about like doing therapy with you guys on these joey bag down its podcast are you gonna bring up my book yeah tell us it tell us about the book okay we we talk a little bit about the book but tell us the floor yours make your case as to what i'm gonna get out of this book because i'm gonna buy it and i'm gonna read it thanks for that but i'll read it with a different level of enthusiasm if you give me a little teaser of what i'm gonna get out of it okay so the algebra of wealth is the following you know find your talent focus workshop your twenties in an industry that will pay you once you have a certain amount of momentum professionally really trying to develop a savings muscle wealth isn't about how much make it's about how much you spend trying just get to the point at a fairly early stage where you less than you make that is very difficult the brightest companies and minds in the world are all here to convince you that an upgrade from economy to economy comfort to economy plus of business classes and investment in yourself it's not it's a it's consumption don't try and impress other people with your shit no one is just concerned with your shit as you are you don't need to order a bottle of vodka a club for four hundred fifty bucks get a hyundai for god's sakes travel coach save money start saving money early lean and if you're young lean into your advantage that as you have a lot time develop that savings muscle diversify the moment you have any real capital start diversifying that way no matter what happens you have ke you can have a stock at to zero and a bullet hits you in the chest it doesn't kill you because you're diversified and then take advantage of flow of flaw species and that's time and recognize that time will go faster than you think and if you're just a show a little bit of discipline a little bit of maturity a little bit of that savings muscle early that the s and p is up eleven percent a year since two thousand and eight well that sounds boring now that means every twenty one years your investments are up eight acts and that twenty one years will go really fast so i hope you sell a best bestselling book hope your company goes public i hope you you know your album goes double platinum or some rich uncle dies and leaves everything but just in case make sure you're financially secure and i can get you there if you follow these principles and show a little bit of discipline a little bit of maturity because the good news is i can get you rich the bad news is the answer is slowly but we can get you there so the algebra wealth equals focus plus stoic times time times diversification that's the form that's the the formula that's the formula you're the formula guide like you you you've a not all your talks you use formulas to explain stuff you've had the algebra of happiness now the algebra of wealth alright is this gonna be a whole algebra of blank series because anytime i see that i'm into it if it's an equation i'm into it yeah so humans need constructs to remember things you can read a book and if it doesn't have constructs or visualizations it's pretty easy to forget about it so i really like constructs equations i read the algebra of happiness algebra of wealth out today and i just i'm about to sign a three book deal i'm writing the algebra masculinity the algebra of work and the algebra mating those are three topics i'm super interested in and i wanna try and do enough research i can just steal it down to some best practices that people can hold on to well i wanna talk about the first variable in this you said focus mh because we talked about socialism i know about time i know about diversification but teach me about focus i'm i'm pretty bad at at focus trying to get better give me a couple words on focus as part of this this equation if you have a side hustle you need to find a different main hustle you're better off with the time you spent on the side hustle investing that incremental effort in your main hustle and if you constantly find a side hustle is fine if you're investigating a new main hustle but the way you get wealthy is not a variety of things it's being really great at one thing so that's the focus and the term we use is is mastery or ninja light capability but try and find something you could become great at and that is you know that's not that's not easy but also again we talked about this before i find it in an industry that's not very sexy because if you're in the top ten percent of tax law or of installing hvac or energy efficient hvac or you're in the top ten percent of people who know how to install soaps stone kitchen counters you're gonna make a really good living and taking care of your kids is just so much fun being able to be there for your parents is economically is just is just really exciting and a really a lot of fun and i think young people mistake passion for their hobbies not recognizing when they get older to be able to give money away to be able to do nice things to be able to relax with your partner you know it's just super enjoyable it's almost as fun as you know spinning to i mean that shit is fun that is really enjoyable and so put yourself in a position when you're a little bit older because it'll go really fast to just do wonderful things with people you care about and the way you get there is by making more than you spend saving but the first thing you gotta do is find a focus you know find something you know we are living we live in a specialist economy find something like that's here try and just think could i be great at this could i be great at this that's not the question because if you become great out at it trust me it'll become passionate about it and you can't become great at anything you hate that's not that's just gonna be automatically be screened out i'm not suggesting dr the way you find something dr or whatever the term you're just not gonna be great at it but i found consulting i never i didn't know what consulting was when i was in college and even business school and i figured out way people will pay you to rent your brain wow and i was always was really good at establishing these proxy father son relationships with powerful men and then basically my core deal with them is i understand brand better than you you're the cmo i'm gonna make you the ceo in three years in exchange for that you're gonna pay my company million dollars a year to answer very deep hard questions and i figured that out at kind of my late twenties which was a blessing and then when i sold the company i'm i don't wanna be in services anymore it's a young person's business i'm sick of being on planes so i had to workshop my life again and then i figured out okay i'm a good teacher what does it mean to be a good teacher means you have to be a good storyteller but what if my story told in different mediums could i make money in books could make money speaking could i make money in podcasts and i figured out yeah i'm good at this i could even be great someday and that mastery has led to a really nice nice life but i've always tried to i've always tried to spend reasonably spend less than i was making sometimes more than others i've finally learned to diversify the hard way i lost everything twice in two thousand and again in two thousand and eight because i thought it was so awesome that whatever is my focus is is naturally gonna be successful through my sheer force of character that's not true so i started diversifying and you know just kinda follow these basic principles and let time take over and really started saving a lot of money in my forties i deployed an army of capital to start fighting and killing for me and my family and my sleep and that army just grew in a bull market and you know came home with just immense spoils for me you know because i deployed this army early and often and i kept adding to it i feel like here's a tank alright okay i'm saving money i'm not gonna have the fat apartment alright right okay here's some more artillery go kill more people and come home with money that's a little bit much anyways we're still working off of that one yeah i'm still working through that one wrong choice wrong choice of words acc the acc of my army scott thanks for going on man and everybody go by the book the hours of wealth he has to be number one on the charts because he needs our affirmation and let's get it thanks guys thanks for your success thanks sam thanks sean and thanks ari thank you i feel like i could rude to world i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a travel never looking back