The Billionaire Formula To Getting Rich In 2023 | Sahil Bloom

saw Hill Bloom was a former investment banker managing over two and a half billion dollars in his twenties we went from half a billion dollars to managing three and a half billion dollars then he decided to quit being bored having those periods of silence and quiet time is when you figure out what those non-linear opportunities are I follow his Twitter and that's where I get most of my information from and I have to say he is a genius when it comes to All Things business personal finance and investing strategies that we gotta just dig deeper so if you guys enjoy episodes like this make sure to subscribe because we have episodes coming out every single Sunday here on the iced coffee hour thank you so much and with that said thank you so much dreamyard for sponsoring this episode stream yard is a live streaming platform that allows you to create high quality content with just the click of a button all you need is a camera and an internet connection to be able to stream content right from 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lot to us thank you so much stream yard and back to the podcast why do you carry a notebook everywhere I write a lot man you know this this is like my my thing I mean you you guys have your craftsmanship around video and everything you do for me writing is my thing and so I just try to like log interesting experiences ideas struggles Etc that I'm having during the course of the day and I end up going back and looking at the notebook I don't know maybe like five percent of the time but something about the actual writing process of it it like just starts to register Idea Idea percolation in my mind it's like I think James Clear said it at one point anything that you end up writing like content you create is Downstream from something you consume and so for me things I consume sometimes it's things I'm reading or listening to or whatever but a lot of times it's just things that I'm thinking on a daily basis and if I don't write those things down they never end up having the like time to kind of seep in my mind sure and work together so the writing is big how do you know it's worth it to write down and what's not like if you're like I'm hungry I'm thinking of Big Mac right now I try to I mean I try not to be judgmental about it you know it's like some I'm sure if you went back and looked in the pages of this there would be some garbage like that that's just sitting around like you know I'm sitting on a plane actually today I'm sitting on a plane and the guy in front of me reclined his seat and I was like in recliners man these like airplane reasons two inches dude this is the most ridiculous thing well this is like my favorite Twitter debate by the way is like the whole recline you know there have been a few funny to Twitter debates that have come up like I don't know do you know Cody Sanchez yes so Cody had the one recently that she set off about picking people up from the airport did you see this so Cody tweeted like I will never be participating in this trend about it was like a girl had said she was going to pick up a friend at the airport and Cody was like I'm never doing that if you're my real friend you'll just get an Uber like I shouldn't have to be called to pick pick up your friend at airport like if you're an adult and it set off the most insane like viral angry discourse about whether or not you should ask your friends to pick you up from the airport it's funny each other out unfortunately yes it's a normal house well very responsible respectful men but uh albeit well there's this so you could be responsible and respectful in a frat by the way yeah we do have a ping pong room too okay yeah with industrial okay okay but anyways uh we have this debate within us I'm the only person that airs on the side of I don't think it's worth it to go pick someone up from the airport and drop them off because I I just time his money baby I would Uber I have no problem ubering uh especially and then but of course I'm I get asked to pick people up so I'm like okay if I get asked I may as well ask them back make it more transactional yeah okay so Airport pickup thing exactly I think it just makes more sense especially like since you'd be wasting their time and like then you have to make sure you get the timing right yeah when you get off the plane and like what do you think uh I don't think it's really worth it but if you care about a person and I think it's a good gesture yeah like if it was my you know if it was a woman that I was hoping to build a relationship with I'm going and picking them up but I would not I mean I would find it weird I suppose if a friend of mine hit me up that was like coming to town and was like hey can you pick me up from the airport it's one thing if I offer yeah and I'm like totally cool you know like if a friend's coming that I haven't seen in a really long time I might be like hey you can swing by the airport if I don't have anything going on but for someone to ask you it's sort of like dude just get a cab like you're an adult just get get an Uber Graham but every single time we land he's always like Jack hit up one of your friends to come pick us up every like it happens it makes me Google man he's running a business split an Uber so we could we could split new it's not bad it's like 20 bucks each but here's the thing gram are you just super Frugal yes uh yeah well if someone is at the house they're not doing anything are you known for your frugality is this part of your brand okay yeah okay but my point being if if but if they're not doing anything anyway then I think it makes sense okay you know all right if they want it obviously if they say no I'm not going to be like every text grand for a ride back from the airport point being though that was one like wild Twitter you know argument that went off the one before that was airplane seat reclining and whether it's like immoral and whether you're a terrible person if you recline you see it on an airplane and I had honestly never known that that was a thing until I saw that people were popping off about it I had talked about like you know people that don't put their grocery carts away uh in shop you know in shopping centers things like that whatever but people related it then to this airport airplane seat recline and I had no idea that that was a thing I was like baffled that people get that angry about it and then I sat on an airplane and I like started observing and watching people do this and it is [ __ ] annoying man it doesn't bother me if someone reclines their seat in front of me it does not it doesn't bother you it bugs me is when they do it really quick fast dude the dive bombers man the Kamikaze your laptop's right there someone jams it down into your lap really slowly I kind of look behind yeah I just give them notice yeah well what if you have a drink on there or your laptop it gets jammed up but it's just like does the two inches of Recon really make your experience that much more comfortable because you're basically saying that like my two inches of recline is worth more to me than your miserable experience on this flight but they could then reclined behind you and get that two inches back it just sets off a chain reaction and pissing people off the entire point right and then the very back seat by the way does not require doesn't recline yeah yeah so they're stuck and you're next to the bathroom too so you get both yeah you come both ways anyway yeah well that is interesting all the more reason to fly first classroom do you fly first class yeah every time yeah yeah why uh it makes my experience so so much better I like can get things done and get the refresh Southwest first class Southwest doesn't have first class but the priorities no like I'll pay for I'll pay for first class on flight like you know fun too yeah like if I'm doing cross-country like JetBlue mint is actually pretty reasonably priced for what it is but you get a full you know experience in space I like my whole life I never did that obviously I have the means fortunately to be able to now and for me I get like if I'm doing a one day trip like I'm here for a day I want to be able to do a bunch of writing on the flight because otherwise I'm losing an entire day of writing on the you know eight hours ten hours of flying me doing that an economy with some you know jerk reclining into me while I'm doing that it's basically gonna be impossible and so for me I'm like the calculation of me just spending the money on doing it versus the time that I would be losing on the writing it's actually probably worth it sometimes it's not like flying first class to you know India on Emirates where you're playing like paying a whole lot to go yeah right and if you're running it through your business it's like you know 50 off when you take off the taxes and stuff so you can figure out a way to justify it but it's expensive nonetheless um but yeah I do now in order to fly first class you must be doing pretty well for yourself right that's why you're here because you've built up some incredible businesses how exactly did you get to where you are today could you give us a little synopsis yeah um so look I mean I started my uh I started my career in like a pretty mainstream track so I went to Stanford I played baseball in Stanford um I thought I was going to play professionally I had like these big hopes and dreams like most kids when they go and uh you know going to Collegiate Athletics everyone tells you the whole thing of like 99 of you know NCAA athletes will never do this professionally but you never believe that you always think you're going to be the one um I got hurt my last year and so that kind of derailed whatever aspirations I had had to figure out what I was doing next I ended up stumbling into a role at a private Equity Fund that was just getting started in the Bay Area in 2014 and I took it over a job at McKinsey in New York and from like you know Indian mother right so like name brand things are big in Indian culture and so the idea of me going to some like no-name private Equity Fund that she you know she didn't even know what private Equity was neither did I over McKinsey like my mom I don't know to this day I think she's like what the [ __ ] were you thinking that's crazy the whole idea of that I mean she still wants me to go to medical school like she still asked today yeah I mean she's like are you sure you don't want to be a doctor I'm like Mom yeah it's kind of far like I don't think I can do this um so anyway I took this job didn't really know what I was getting into but I happened to be one of the first I don't know 10 employees at this private Equity Fund that was managing a half a billion dollars at the time um over the course of seven years that I stayed there full time we went from half a billion dollars to managing three and a half billion dollars I was co-leading all consumer investing for the fund sitting on a bunch of boards had an amazing experience did the like Finance grind right what was that like because I hear it's it's a ton of hours yeah like 16 hours a day you're sleeping under your desk yeah I didn't do the sleeping under my desk unfortunately um I did yeah I did a couple all-nighters in the office but never slept there um but yeah I mean it's look it's part of the learning experience it's like anything like when you're diving into it I'm sure you guys have done this with what you're building your careers around it's like if you want to learn a lot you have to work hard I'm not one of these people that'll come out and say oh yeah working hard is overrated it's you know just work smart and that's what matters like my big belief frankly is did you play video games when you're a kid using video game analogy okay so there are these games when you're a kid where like you start on a map and the whole map is black you can't say anything and you're in the one spot you can see where you are and as you start exploring around it lights the map up like you went and you kind of uncovered the different regions and then you can kind of see the whole map and you see where all the resources are and you know where you should be building and doing all your you know building your army whatever I think that that same thing applies to your career where like when you start you just are in one little spot that's where you started everything else is black out there and by working hard and by saying yes to things early on and taking on these different opportunities you like spread light around the map and then you can see everything and you can decide like where do I want to deploy my effort and get leverage out of it like where is the gold that I can go deeper down and figure out but without that first part you're just going to try to go deep in an area you have no idea what's there it can be a total show and so like I'm a big big believer that early on that hard work just pays off in a big big way Jack what are you doing I'm getting engaged ma'am shouldn't you be eating something with more protein than cereal oh silly program this ain't just any old cereal It's Magic spoon do you just carry that with you everywhere magic spoon is serial reinvented not only is it delicious but it's also wholesome and satiating all right let me try that foreign variety pack comes in four different flavors again you carry this all with you everywhere so one we have peanut butter then we have frosted and we also have oh this looks pretty good cocoa wait a second Jack I'm looking at this one serving is only 140 calories 13 grams of protein and only four grams of carbs magic spoon is perfect for those who are carb conscious and trying to live a low carb lifestyle so click the link in the description to try out the variety pack Jack stop that I can't help it it is good isn't it anyway so click the link below to try a variety pack today just make sure to use the promo code ich to get five dollars off of any order or you could just go to magicspoon.com ich and Magic spoon is so confident in their product they're backed by a 100 happiness guarantee so if you're not fully satisfied they'll give you a full refund again click the link Down Below in the description or scan this QR code that's appearing on the screen right now and use code ich to get five dollars off and now with that said let's get back to the podcast what would you be doing in those days though like what would that involve it depended on what level you are so analysts um the hours are largely like you know cranking through analysis it's like modeling right like you're building Financial models in private Equity it's like you know you're doing leverage buyouts so you're taking on debt to buy companies and so the whole model there is you're like looking at the cash flows of the business and seeing if it can service the debt that you're going to put on the business and pressure testing it in a variety of scenarios and that always just takes a whole bunch of time and energy and eventually it probably should be done by AI like those models should probably be getting automated but it wasn't at the time and so it's very manual and you're having to crank through it is this like a formula or some sort of algorithm that you put in all the data in and it like I mean it's like a multi-tab spreadsheet it's like a three statement financial model so you're looking at a financial model and you have to take the numbers from the company the problem if you're investing in a sophisticated public company and you're gonna go buy a public company like blackstone's a big private Equity Fund they're gonna go buy some big public company and take it private that company has tons of like really clean nice beautiful financial statements that they can take and very easily drop into a model and it's super easy to kind of have a template for the companies we were investing in like Middle Market a lot of family-owned businesses you're talking about like poorly kept QuickBooks financials for the last several years so you can't just like grab numbers out of a spreadsheet and put them into your spreadsheet it's not that easy like that you know someone's going to be running their like country club membership through the financials and you need to figure out should that stay should that go like there's all these things that you need to be asking questions about that end up taking a lot of time because you're having to kind of like dig through the weeds of these businesses so what types of businesses were you buy like would you just find like some hat store down the street and they're like doing all right but you're gonna do it better and you buy it I mean these had to be big because we were investing um you know we were investing in 10 to like 50 million ebitda businesses so they were doing 100 plus million of Revenue so I mean we looked at everything like I spent some time in Oilfield Services in like Midland Texas you know going down there and like going and looking at pump jack businesses like those things that are kind of how would you know what you're looking at like why would they send you down there I mean you go these private Equity Funds are very good about like finding an operator who has been there done that with that industry and then pair them with horsepower I.E the analyst who can like crank through this okay so that person is like your field guide you go down and they're the one telling you like this is interesting or not and then if it is yes interesting and we're gonna spend time on it pass it over to like cogs in the machine who are going to do the actual grunt work to figure out how to make the numbers work to do a deal um and that's the I mean it's a model that has worked for the private Equity industry for a long time um but man it's It's a Grind when you're early in your career is there ever any pressure that like you were worried about being wrong on some of that so like how many people review that before it goes up to the point of actually purchasing something yeah I mean I think that happens uh and you hear funny stories of it now and then like there's some model that's wrong and someone loses 80 million dollars or there's like a wire that gets sent that's wrong the scariest thing which is a funny thing that no one talks about or writes about are these things called funds flow so when a deal gets done the last step of the deal getting done is like wires need to get sent to all the different people and so in one of these companies like you know there's not just one owner of the company there's like a cap table that has tons of different shareholders and they own different percentages and they get you know different thresholds where they get paid out different amounts there's all the like banks that lend money to all these different wires and so when you're looking at a deal there's this document called a funds flow that usually the analyst manages that literally has all of the different wires that have to get sent to all the different places the exact amounts that have to get sent and the wiring details of all the different people that are having the wires sent where they're coming from where they're going one letter being off in one of those documents sends like tens of millions of dollars to the wrong freaking place and so there was always this joke of like oh yeah did you add in that you know that one that sends it to the Cayman Islands bank account for me or whatever like you know send off like 250k no one will know like in this you know a billion dollars is Flowing maybe no one will notice and it was always like this hilarious thing because literally there's some analyst that's managing the I mean I did one deal where I was the only one that knew where like two billion dollars of funds were flowing one morning like we said yes all the wires get sent and two billion dollars are falling and everyone's assuming that I'm right that like this thing actually works yeah manually into an Excel spreadsheet and by the way Excel if if something has a leading like zero in an Excel document it automatically eliminates it so if you don't put like a apostrophe before the zero you can actually miss a zero and so like there are actually things that can happen that can like screw up the entire deal uh I always just thought that was so so funny because you would hear stories every now and then I'm like someone screwing up and you're like oh that's the nightmare like you get fired for something like that that's crazy had that ever happened that you're a firm never at our firm but you'd hear I mean like you'd hear about it like in you know the Grapevine of stuff like oh some deal got had to get like redone at the last second because of why fire went to the wrong place just because someone got the wrong amount or like whatever common in real estate but for wire fraud used to be a huge thing like what would happen so like between 2012 and 2016 wire fraud was beginning to ramp up and what they would do they'd usually crack into like an escrow accounts email address find the buyer but then send them fake wiring instructions they look legitimate like the same thing just with the numbers changed around so the buyer would see this and think oh I'm safe to wire my money here at closing they'd have no idea and so they wire the money there and then escrow calls a day later we never got your wire well I sent it we never received it who did you send it to I sent it to this that's not our bank account and so I've seen instances happen before of people wiring millions of dollars to the wrong place to scammers and thankfully in every scenario that I've like seen I've never been a party to it but like just I've heard of these things the FBI and the police get involved and they're usually able to get it back if they catch it within like 24 48 hours they could trace it back and send it yeah but they're like hours from someone like just getting a money order yeah and then like leaving the country with with millions of dollars the other one I always found funny was ransomware attacks we used to get ransomware attacked a lot like uh you know this became a big thing especially with Middle Market companies the type of companies we had because sophisticated public companies have these like incredible cyber security infrastructure that they've paid for tons of money a random like Middle Market company you know somewhere in the country doesn't have all the money to spend on cyber security infrastructure and so you would get hacked and basically these attackers would come in it would be a ransomware attack which locks all of your access to data and it's encrypted and so the only way you can unencrypt it is with a key that they're going to give you and their whole thing was like you can't do business like we had a business that was doing 250 million in one year completely shut down like could not sell buy do anything until we got this key to unlock all of our data and their whole thing is like okay if you pass five million dollars in Bitcoin we'll give you the key otherwise you don't get it back and you're not allowed to do business and it became this like efficient market almost where we would just pay and you had to get insurance that would cover the payment and no like the insurance company would negotiate with the hackers yeah and it was like an efficient market because they the hacker knew that they actually had to deliver the key because otherwise the next time they did it people would just say no I'm not paying you I know you're not going to deliver the key and so like this one company it happened to us and they they asked for five and we negotiated it down to a million and we sent them a million dollars a Bitcoin and then they unlocked our data and like two days later we were had back access but that was happening the guys do they know where they are yeah there was like North Korean Rings Russian rings it was like a big big I mean and a lot of people thought it was State sanctioned stuff that was happening but there was like the Wall Street Journal did a big expose on it it was fascinating actually seeing it happen in real time because you're like you know this random this was like you know a random company that had to like acquire and then send Bitcoin to these hackers in order to get access how much would Insurance be on something like that um I actually don't know what the premiums were yeah they were ramping up a lot oh yeah yeah they were ramping up especially as become became more prevalent right and the insurance premiums were all reliant on what your infrastructure actually is and so for middle you know if you had great cyber security infrastructure and Tech infrastructure it was cheaper but for most of these companies it wasn't great and so you were paying a lot yeah I mean it was probably fifty thousand dollars plus and in cyber insurance premiums okay so when you were working at this company can you say what you were earning throughout the time yeah I mean I was making like by the time I was a vice president which was like you know six seven years in you're making like seven figures of all in compensation you know carry in the funds your cash comp is like you know mid to high six figures and then you have carried interest so Equity profit share in the funds it's your late 20s at that time yeah so I was a 27 when I became a vice president um how did you get to vice president of 2016. I mean the holy vice president thing is hilarious in finance because it's like okay yeah I'm a vice president like it's a meme now because like literally it's a bunch of 27 year old kids that are like I'm a vice president and like you know I'm sitting on my first board because when you become a vice president that's when you can sit on boards usually sure um because it sounds official enough but you're like a 27 year old kid what are you doing sitting on a board of a company I still thought it was ridiculous um but yeah I became so I did two years as an analyst two years as an associate and then like a year as a senior associate and then became a vice president and you know we were a small firm so like if you were doing well and the funds were growing and we were raising bigger funds funds were performing well you kind of got on an accelerated track um and we I mean I wouldn't even say we were like paying in the like top 10 like private Equity is a very very lucrative track for kids out of school because right away you're making north of you know 150 up to 200 maybe and you're like analyst years associate years and then by the time you're a VP you're making at least you know 500k of cash comp plus you have interest you know profit sharing the funds how many years does it usually take to become an associate um Associates after two years as an analyst or two years in banking or Consulting that's like the first thing when you come into it and like the you know the reason that people go they go into banking for two years they go to like Goldman Sachs and go to Investment Bank for two years and they put up with 100 hour work weeks and the misery of it it's because they're hoping to get this like lucrative private Equity or hedge fund gig as soon as they come out of that a lot of them now are recruiting you're locking in your private Equity or hedge fund job before starting your banking job so you start your banking job knowing that you're leaving and that you're going to be going to this other place in two years why do they set it up like that are they that hungry for people to work with them or how does they're basically the private Equity Funds and hedge funds are basically Outsourcing their training to the banks and consulting firms and the banks and consulting firms the banks in particular don't really care because they're happy to get two years of like crazy hard work from some young smart kid and then have them leave and the reality for the banks is like they only need one out of every like 10 you know good analysts to rise up and become a partner because they don't have a room they can't have 100 Partners sitting at the top they need a bunch of people called and so they're happy to have like a lineage that goes to these great firms it improves their brand it's kind of like a symbiotic relationship but it's crazy I mean you're making a lot of money at a young age working really hard your hourly rate sucks your hourly rate really sucks but you sound you know the status of it feels good you're like you know you're flying first class for work like it feels good wow so how do you justify quitting that then before we go to that I'm curious how you leveled up so fast um what do you what do you feel set yourself apart yeah I mean look I part of it is a track like you get on the track by doing well your first you know year year and a half I mean honestly first impressions are everything like you do well your first like three months and people like you and you say yes to everything and you're you know setting the standard that you work really hard and that you're uh you know a good frankly team member and that you're not weird like that they can bring you to a meeting and you're not going to be weird I played baseball my whole life I'd been in locker rooms all these Middle Market businesses are run by a bunch of people that like to talk about sports so like I could go to a meeting and shoot the hit with some guys that like baseball and talk to them about my glory years and they loved that and so like being able to be normal so it helped a lot what would be weird though if they ask about like a baseball and you're like I don't know what that is honestly no I mean honestly the weirdest you know I don't know that is weird but but the weirdest thing you can do in a meeting in my opinion is uh present yourself as like better than them in some way and this was a big big risk in private equity and in the finance World in general is because you know like I I went to Stanford right like we were hiring kids that went to Princeton Stanford Harvard like all these like Elite pedigreed kids and if you took one of them to a meeting in uh you know middle of Kansas and into a guy's company who's running you know a playset business that's doing 300 million of Revenue 50 million of eBay the guy has an airplane hangar in his back but he's from Kansas he grew up there like he hasn't you know gone to some some fancy school but he's unbelievably successful and you bring in an analyst that is almost like talking down to him in a certain way because like they see they feel like they're so smart that they went to school that's really bad you can't have that be like the type of relationship that gets set and I saw that a bunch you'd see you know analysts all the way up through directors that would like give off an air of superiority and it's like a coastal thing that I think is just a bad thing in general we've seen it societally as a country um but that that is weird and that's really hard to accelerate if you're that and if you're if you're crazy so what do you do if you see that do you pull them aside you're like hey you gotta cool it or do you just let them do their thing and they'll kind of fall into place it depends who you are as the senior person I mean we had people that would give that feedback very directly and that was great I I've always been big on like give me the feedback right away because I want to be able to improve on whatever the thing is that's from an athlete background like it's what I believed in um some people didn't do that and so then you know you'd get a year in and you'd get your first review and it was like Hey you're not doing so great here and you'd wonder why because you hadn't been given that feedback along the way but I think you have to tell the person right away because usually they don't mean anything negative by it it's not like they're trying to be condescending or trying to give off that Vibe it's just they've always been around like they went to a fancy private school in New York and then they went to Harvard and then they you know got this fancy private Equity job and so they've only been around that type of culture and you get put into a different environment you have to learn how to adapt now I think saying yes is so important I think that's one of the huge quality that people don't really pick up on what are some of the weird requests that you've gotten I'm sure there's got to be some like Ops stuff it's like you know I am going to say yes to it I mean yes man but um I had to go to a catfish farm in Louisiana um to go like see how the catfish were going on a conveyor belt once that was that was a pretty weird request we were looking at investing in this catfish farm and people wanted to see it actually in action now like this catfish farm was real and look I'm like real I'm 23. you know I'm like 23 24 getting out of school I thought that was the coolest thing in the freaking world I was like this is amazing that I could do this I was like down in Midland Texas uh you know like going and driving through the fields to go like make sure that these like pump jacks are working it was like an amazing experience that when you say yes to you get to like go see all these things my first actually my first like month working um you know I thought private Equity was gonna be like sitting at a desk and cranking out numbers on an Excel spreadsheet and I literally was in Fargo North Dakota uh helping one of our like um retail uh sales people at one of the companies we owned uh like fix uh store signage at one of our at one of our stores in the place like I was like climbing up a ladder and like fixing this store signage at the top of the store because it was looking kind of janky and I was just sitting there like wow this is not what I expected my finances to be gosh but it was fun man I I totally agree with you on saying yes I think especially early on saying yes to things just kind of expands your like surface area of luck you know you just get exposed to new things people start looking to you for opportunities when they have something cool come up they then are like oh yeah Graham said you know was around doing that thing he did that one thing well let me call him in to like sit in and just listen to this call that I'm about to do and that's when you end up learning in a world with rampant ads not enough content and uncomfortable YouTuber merch two men Brave against the standards and create something more Community oriented more robust and wait for it ad free this is Jack and Graham starring in the iced coffee hour Club linked below that's because.com was taken if you want an extra in-house episode every single month if you want ad-free uninterrupted content and early access to every episode then the iced coffee hour Club is for you starting at just five dollars and completely free for the first month you can have access to all of that and more iced coffee hour dot Club linked down below seriously guys enough of the voice man guys check it out with the link Down Below in the description it would mean a ton and the first month is free for a limited time so check it out before it expires with the link down below thank you so much and let's get back to the episode now you mentioned before there are four types of luck out there could you explain that I thought that was so insightful that makes a lot of sense yeah I mean the first type is blind luck yeah this is just like what we think of as a luck frankly it's like a place right time just happen to yeah things like that it's like you know Act of God it's like where you were born who you were born to um you know the second one is luck from motion this is like hustle luck it's kind of what we're talking about it's like you're hustling and this is you know you're creating Motion in an ecosystem so where you're like literally driving connections where people are bumping into each other you're like connecting people and so then all of a sudden you're brought into stuff that you otherwise wouldn't have been um the third type is luck from awareness this is like you are so deep with knowledge in a given area that you're able to spot luck you see it from a mile away you're like man I've been in this you know in the YouTube space for so long that I can see where the ball is going before it's there so I can we can position ourselves out in front of that yeah it's kind of lucky that you were there before it but not really because you've been doing all the work and then the last type is luck from uniqueness and this is kind of the weirdest and like most esoteric type which is just like your weird quirky habits and quirky hobbies and quirky loves and dislikes and all those things lead to luck actually being attracted to you so like you know the example that Naval gives around this is like a someone that's really into weird uh like treasure diving and they're like super into this they've been doing this for 20 years and so then there's this rare deep sea find in the ocean and they're the first person that everyone calls and so it's kind of lucky that they got the call but really it's because they were so unique and they had this esoteric set of interests and skills that they actually get the luck brought to them yeah I just think having an awareness of those different types and how you kind of approach things over the course of your life is interesting because your life starts with all blind luck you're like where you're born who you're born to the situations you come into that's all blind luck you can't control that but then as you start moving you start building into that second type of luck of hustling you're trying to create motion you're trying to do things as you start going deeper in your life and into your career it's more luck from awareness it's more like hey how can I spot these opportunities that are out there and then there's the fourth type which is like it requires years of weird interest experience hobby etc for that to even ever come to you and into your life so I've always thought that the progression of that over the course of your life is a really really interesting concept I like that how did you going back to Jack's question now justify quitting because making seven figures late 20s that's really really hard to walk away from because you could very easily justify if I just do this another 10 years and save I'll be set yeah so this is a this is a ninja this opens a can of worms so I hope you're ready so I um covid hit May or March of 2020. um I was marching down the path to become a partner at this fund I was honestly like loving it I had a great experience the group of people was incredible I was learning a ton but in the back of my mind I was always like is this what I'm gonna really do the rest of my life part of that was just because I was never that motivated by money like the whole industry if you're gonna be great at private Equity if you're gonna be the best at private Equity you have to [ __ ] love money like you have to just want to make money like you know one of the most successful private Equity Funds in the world is led by this guy who I don't want to say his name because people will know him but he during fundraising uh told this like LPS asked him what type of people do you want to hire and his response was I want to hire the type of kid who he's sitting at his grandmother's house on the couch and he's digging between the sofas looking for pennies that's the type of kid I want to hire and like that's what you have to do to be the best at private Equity that's like a perfect microcosm and I'm not that I like money don't get me wrong like I I like doing nice things I like being able to fly first class I like being able to take care of my kids I'm never going to care about a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine just not I don't have a watch like I'm wearing a whoop band I'm not into fancy things I like being able to have you know a nice place take care of my family Etc but it's just not what drives me on a daily basis and I started to think about that I was like hmm you know I don't know that I'm ever gonna be the best at this simply because what motivates me is not what needs to motivate me to become the best I'm not nerding out on this stuff enough that coincided with me discovering my talent and love of writing um I all of a sudden wasn't working 80 to 100 hours a week I was stuck at home I couldn't travel we were traveling three to four days a week for work I couldn't do that I wasn't commuting so I had all this time on my hands what were they having you do in the meantime by the way because I'm sure the equity world was kind of dead really I mean more I guess a month Yeah March to like um March April 2020 was like total chaos because our companies some of them were just shut down you were like right do we have any money are we going to get PPP loans like there was just chaos no one knew what was going on May things kind of settled into like there's not much new deal activity because people don't know what interest rates are going to be and it's hard to get someone to loan you money at that time and so you can't really do a buyout so there wasn't much New Deal activity and your companies were kind of stable because we had figured out that like consumers were still spending money PPP loans were getting you know our bad companies through the tough time and so you were kind of in this like weird limbo of there wasn't a ton of new stuff and your companies weren't in chaos and so there wasn't a whole ton of work actually until on the weekends I was like I have time I don't have a social life because you can't go out I was living in the Bay Area so you really couldn't go out yes when I wasn't like in Texas or in Florida where you were fine unless you're the governor yeah exactly then I could go to The French Laundry and I could go do my you know yeah exactly go have a wedding whatever no I was not the governor I didn't hang out with Newsome um but look so I had time on my hands and I was sitting around and I started writing and this is like before Twitter threads were the meme that they are today um I kind of discovered them and started building them as like a format for writing slightly longer form content on the platform at the time I had like 500 Twitter followers it's like May 12th when I posted my first thread um and I very quickly realized there was product Market fit to it and it was originally around sort of personal finance similar stuff to what you were originally kind of doing around around youtube personal finance you know markets things that were happening in the world a little bit of explainers simplifying complex topics and there was a big demand for that and it started growing it started scaling by the end of that year 2020 um it had grown to about 75 000 or so followers on Twitter and I had spun up um a little side business uh like an agency business helping other people to build their personal brand so like startups I'd invested in things I had done personally on the side I was starting to help those founders with growing their personal Brands kind of leveraging the playbooks I'd used that was starting to cash flow and generate income on the side in this like little weekend hobby by early 2021 that plus the newsletter I just launched was making me more money than what I was making at my lucrative finance jobs one year yeah not even a year I mean it had been at that point it had been like six months what was it what was the percentage of the money um what do you mean like where did the money come from was it mostly the the course business no no agent so agency was the CH was the primary chunk of it which it was like look it was it was helping startup Founders build their personal Brands and so it was like you you know I could get them a Ghostwriter if they needed one but a lot of it was just like helping them with strategy with the playbooks with you know the Cadence like the things I was doing because at the time there was like a real Arbitrage opportunity on Twitter too and so you could really grow quickly by leveraging this format and leveraging the structure and those were you know it was like highly recurring business it was like five thousand to ten thousand dollars a month from someone um you know and you would just get a set of clients and it was pure cash flow I didn't have costs right it was just cash to me um and I had a bunch of clients and so I was like helping people on the weekends and like I would you know help them with all the structure stuff and it was just generating a whole ton of cash would those people drop off though once they feel like they get good enough traction wouldn't they feel like well I kind of get this now I'm gonna yeah I mean there was so much more demand than supply of my time though that any time someone would churn which it was always because of success actually like there was never a case study where it just didn't work because the format just worked um you would have some churn but you'd have like three people that you just had waiting basically on a waiting list you're like hey I know you were interested in this and you can just pull someone in so that I mean that business to this day I mean I still run it as like a side agency now it has an operator there's you know people involved and it's a lot more systematized it was pretty janky at the time that business has never uh declined in Revenue since those early days wow yeah every single month has been flat or up and then one month over a month yeah it's never declined because there's always just been a backlog of I mean there's infinite demand like even just today like I saw Alex Lieberman the morning Brew guy tweeted about this like hey would anyone be interested and he said like I texted him I was like oh what did people say and he was like dude I got like 20 DMS and so then I ended up I mean that sparked me thinking about like oh is there a bigger business play with this that's disjointed from my time and so we ended up I co-founded and you know broader play to do this that's in stealth right now but scaling up and we'll be you know 100K mrr within three months of launch so these businesses are like there's a big big pie to doing stuff like that and what about the newsletter we'll give you the inspiration of that newsletter originally was just I want to go a little little bit deeper so the way I always thought about it was like Twitter is super surface level you know the format in and of itself at the time when I first started it was 140 characters per tweet it obviously expanded since then but it was 140 characters and people wanted a people wanted a better format to read my threads so that was the first thing is I was like oh I'll just send them to you in your email inbox so sign up for this and I'll just send them to you and if you don't like reading them on Twitter just read them in your email it'll look nicer it'll flow better Etc so originally it was that and then I was like okay I want to create a deeper connection with these people than just on Twitter I want to be able to you know own them in a deeper way and build a build a better Community here and so writing in a more deep construct around the same topics became what I started writing about in my newsletter and that was like May 2021 was when I really started putting effort into that um and it started with I don't know 10 000 subscribers that were on the list at the time now it's grown to I don't know 300 000 today um and it's growing growing fast I mean it should be at a million I would say within the next year based on where's most of the growth coming from um now it's a combination of top of funnel from Twitter LinkedIn and Instagram LinkedIn is probably the highest Source right now linkedin's like the new Twitter in terms of the Arbitrage that's what I'm trying for we can talk about that I can I can definitely give you some ideas on that front but LinkedIn is incredible Arbitrage right now LinkedIn has a lot of characteristics that look like what Twitter was to me in early 2020 in terms of audience growth capabilities and a very high value audience growth because people are professional and they're there to grow they want to learn they want to grow and it's not like on Twitter if you post something you get like 10 people reply you know three of them are telling you you're the devil and you should kill yourself you know uh five of them like you and then a couple are in different why do you think Twitter's so toxic it's only Twitter so I mean YouTube comments have to get pretty toxic too right they're nowhere near Twitter yeah YouTube I believe that like 95 of YouTube is very positive interesting five percent of people are gonna hate no matter what you do but I would say like 90 95 of people aren't supportive in some way or want to add something Twitter and I'll spend like an hour going through Twitter and just reading whatever I see and no matter what it seems more like a 25 it's just people like just hating on whatever this person has to say I agree with that I agree with that number too I mean it's um Twitter's interesting it's uh you know I basically only post positive things like I I'm in general I'm just a very positive guy I'm like a happy guy and so I I avoid controversial things for two reasons one I don't think about particularly controversial things I like posting positive things and two I just like don't invite that into my life and so it's just not not part of my brand um but I still get a bunch of that yeah and so it's amazing like if I'm getting that imagine if you post things that are even borderline so we've tried going not like controversial but like riding alone a little bit and you see the engagement go up so it like it makes sense yeah we're controversial you get like we'll see 10 times more growth comments shares whatever the more extreme you are yes the Donald Trump Playbook right works really well right Joe Rogan did it I mean like it's a tried and true playbook for Content creators is you like you say something that is controversial 50 of people are gonna like it 50 of people are gonna hate it so much that they share it saying how much they hate it which actually just drives your growth more which it's great it's very it's actually really really smart as a Content creation strategy I just don't want that in my life I have no desire like I've gotten death threats for things that I posted that I didn't think were remotely controversial like I wrote this thing about um a kid came and knocked on my door uh this is like um when is this uh 2022 like May yeah um knock on my door on a Saturday morning I go to the door uh young hispanic kid he's like hey you know I live in the Bronx nearby or I live in live in Harlem and um I'm you know trying to make it in the music industry uh curious if you have any like you know business so I just want to chat about business I was like did you come to my house in particularly like no I just came to the neighborhood I'm just like going and knocking on some doors I live in a nice neighborhood like a nice residential street in a in Westchester and um I was like sure yeah I was chat so I sat on my deck we chatted for a little while they seemed like a nice like Earnest kid and I had him back the next day and he like filmed a music video I had him back the next day I was like he's like the hustle to do that yeah someone to a nice neighborhood knock on people's door and talk business that's what I thought man that's yeah that's what I thought so what I wrote about that was my that was my kind of point it was like rather like if he'd sent me an email 99 chance I wouldn't have seen it or I would have ignored it because I get a million emails of people asking me for different things but he came to my door and he was like very Earnest polite had interesting ideas thoughts Etc and it was very hard to say no to someone to their face honestly it was just difficult because I consider myself a nice person and so him saying like hey would you be willing to chat for five minutes I was just like huh that was interesting he did something different yeah and so could you sit in a coffee shop in a nice area and ask people for business advice maybe could you go do things like that like just take a different approach finesse the system a little bit so I wrote something quickly about that and it turned into this like vir actually like the first 24 hours not much happened and then all of a sudden it got taken over by this like dark side of Twitter that turned it into this like viral outrage that I was gonna put people in danger that like kids were gonna get shot they were gonna go to someone's house and knock on their door and you know a young hispanic kid goes to some someone's door in the wrong part of the country and gets shot and obviously that wasn't my intention and you know that scary to me that like people took it away yeah but it never never crossed my mind partially like I understand it was just it was something that I didn't think of and you know kind of had a blind spot around and missed but clearly it wasn't my intention um and it turned into this like crazy you know I was getting death threats uh you know like fortune and Business Insider decided to write like hit pieces on it told like said that I declined comment when they never reached out to me it like turned into this whole thing wow and that moment for me um we had just had our first kid he had been born like a month before and I'm getting death threats over something that I tried to write in a positive vein and I just realized like yeah the same for me I'm never I'm not I'm not even touching anything that's like borderline like I'm not going anywhere but the thing is you didn't even know it was borderline it's like sometimes the things you say or post you don't even think are controversial but someone can interpret it in a way like you never even thought yeah it got taken in a direction that I did not anticipate um but it was a crazy experience of like okay this is the type of thing that can happen when you have a platform and when you have reach and you need to be cognizant frankly of like I don't want to endanger anyone that's obviously not my attention you know what I am thinking why Twitter attracts more so those people is because maybe it's showing more people your post who maybe don't want to see it like on YouTube the service recommendations are very catered to what you've previously watched it's probably more in line with with what you enjoy watching yeah uh whereas on Twitter you're kind of exposed to a bit of everything so you see things that maybe are more provocative yeah there's a bit of mob mentality that comes out on Twitter where um with like quote retweets in particular um I mean you see this like when when Cody posted her thing and it went crazy viral in a negative way it's like the quote retweet Army comes out and when it gets picked up in like these little micro communities that exist on Twitter like if you get picked up in the like anti-work Reddit community that exists on Twitter that was what happened to me yeah that was what happened with this it's like the anti-work people took it as like I'm promoting hustle I'm like not a big hustle culture guy but they took it as like this hustle culture bro is endangering kids by telling them to go knock on doors and like that wasn't the point of what I said but it was taken that way and I wasn't gonna comment further on it because then you're just like digging your you know when yeah I'm a big believer in the Warren Buffett quote like when you find yourself at the bottom of a hole just stop digging yeah and uh so I just did that I just muted it like went underground and it was just like a fascinating few days and an interesting story to me to say like hey I'm not touching anything that's borderline anymore um but man crazy was that tough for you to deal with personally like getting all those hate comments and everything yeah that's just scary within a newborn it was mostly just scary because I had the newborn where I was just like yeah I don't need this in my life like I have a newborn kid I'm not trying like I it'd be one thing if I was trying to be controversial and then a bunch of hate came my way and I was like yeah I asked for this I did this I just didn't mean to I clearly wasn't trying to get anyone in trouble or do anything and so it was like just dicey my wife was pissed did you ever question your initial tweet once you started getting all of those poorly received comments you're like oh maybe I shouldn't have said that or were you always still just like no no I mean I completely stand by what the principle of the idea was which is that like doing things differently and finessing a system like figuring out a different way to get in the door with people to network and do these things is smart like I completely stand by that you know should I have like sat down and spent more time thinking about you know the idea the exact idea of knocking on doors maybe but like that wasn't really the point it's just that Twitter as a platform doesn't have room for nuance and so if you just read it directly you would take it in one way when if you actually just read it with like an open mind you'd take it in the way I wanted people to take it um so I don't know I I mean more than anything else I think it just took it it just showed that like you have to assume that people are going to read the thing and experience it like by the letter of exactly what you wrote that they're not going to be like flexible in the way that they experience it and if that's the case and they're going to take it negatively I'm just not going to post it is there anything else you posted that got a totally different response than you were expecting like to that degree or was that like no that was that was like Far and Away the main one I've had a few things that people have like gotten outraged by you know in like a stupid way but that was the only one that got like really dark um but I'm pretty flowery man yeah so how do you approach it now to make sure there aren't any misinterpretations of what you have to say I mean most of my content now since my son was born frankly most of my content is sort of about my own personal journey of experiences struggles and wrestling with the like changes that come in your life as you're starting to kind of get older and experiencing these things my content lower back pain yeah lower back pain Next Step just getting old no I mean I um my life has changed a lot in the course of the last three four years right I went from like being like hustle hustle hustle Finance um I want to make you know this amount of money in this many years Etc to experiencing uh a really incredible and profound kind of new happiness and comprehensively Wealthy existence that is very different for me it's what I'm writing my book about it's like this whole idea that you can experience wealth in a number of different ways Beyond money and figuring out how to balance that wealth and build it across the different seasons of your life is what I'm sort of committing to as my life's work like I I have experienced more happiness and moments of happiness and also just durable happiness over the course of the last year and a half two years since I've made these life of changes than I had experienced in the 15 20 years prior to it combined and I want to be able to actually kind of take and bottle up some of what I've learned from that journey and help other people experience that in the same way can you say some of the life changes that you made yeah what is that Evolution for you I mean the biggest thing has been figuring out the points of Leverage that exist in the systems that I'm building like you know working in finance everything is one-to-one it's like everything about your life is like I'm going to put in one unit of input and it's going to create one unit of output that unit actually might be pretty large I'm going to work 90 or 100 hours a week and I'm gonna make a million dollars you know on the surface you're like oh that's great I made a million dollars well you know if it's 600k that's cash and you're living in New York City or you're living in the Bay Area and 50 goes out the door to taxes and your apartment's six thousand dollars a month to live in a nice place you're actually not rich like no matter what anyone says and everyone's like oh that's a privileged perspective to live in a city and say you're not rich on 500k a year it's just true like in in New York City if you are making 500 000 dollars a year and you have a family you are not rich you're just not I mean it's it's crazy to think but it's just the case um and that's just the way that that whole career path works it's one to one until you become like a super senior partner when maybe you're starting to get more leverage on your time although the partners worked freaking hard and we're stressed all the time everything about my life was that and because my finances and my career was one-to-one nothing else in my life could really Thrive because all my time was sucked up trying to feed the money machine everything was like you know the Sisyphus like from Greek lore were you like pushing the boulder up the mountain and as soon as it gets near the top it rolls back down to the bottom everything is that and so my physical health suffered I was like pretty overweight at the time I can show you guys a before and after picture I was like pretty overweight I was stressed my like skin was bad relationships suffered like you know what I don't know if it was you that tweeted this about Goldman Sachs it must it might it might have been you but um I I spent too much time on Twitter yeah there was a post that I saw about someone going into Investment Banking and wanting to go to Goldman Sachs and they said they looked at the people who worked there and like 95 of the people who worked there were overweight bald uh divorced stressed and they thought why would I want to go into a career or that's my most likely outcome yeah and that's the successful outcome by the way those guys made money like they were doing well they were thriving that's winning um I'm a big believer in that I don't think I tweeted that specifically but I do believe that um it's basically the I mean the heuristic is what is the game I'm playing what is the prize that I'm gonna win if I win that game and do I actually want that [ __ ] prize and if you see that prize and you get a glimpse at that by looking at the people that are ahead of you that have won it and you're like damn that's not a not a pretty prize I don't necessarily want that life you know you see them see the person that's climbed the mountain and they're sitting up there and they're like stressed about stupid [ __ ] and you know they're not happy because they're traveling all the time and they're relate you know their relationship with their wife or husband has suffered because they're not around and they don't have a relationship with their kids I mean for me I was like my one single heuristic in life was that I want to coach my son's Little League team and it seems like a stupid small thing but for me that bleeds out into everything else in my life because coaching my son's a little league team means I have control over my time to be able to do something like that it means that I'm the type of father that he wants to have around to be there in coaching his teams it means that I'm a type of husband that is present and able to go do those things and so that to me was like am I going to be able to do that in the life that I'm currently living and then the trajectory I'm currently on and if the answer is no then what am I waiting for I was like I shouldn't be on this I shouldn't keep going on this climb what happens to so many people is I love the like climbing analogy because I think it applies to so many things in life what happens to a lot of people is that you climb and you're like halfway up that climb of whatever your first mountain is that you're climbing in life and you realize it's not the right Mountain you're like oh crap I don't want that prize but it's so scary to think about climbing back down and starting on a new Mountain that people just stay at that halfway point and it sucks there and they're never going to excel because they don't really want that thing and they're not going to put in the effort to get to the top of it and so they're just in this limbo their entire lives and they sit there because the reality is what it takes to go to the next one is you have to go down like you have to go backwards and that's terrifying in life to go backwards and go to the next thing so most people don't do it even when they should and so for me it was like I'm gonna just do that and it took having a full-on like panic attack kind of borderline nervous breakdown in order to experience that and realize I needed to make that change um and that happened for me in May of 2021 I mean I like I woke up I mean I woke up one morning on the floor of my house and I couldn't move and I was just like couldn't breathe chest was constricted didn't know what you know I was like didn't know what was going on had never experienced a panic attack before and you know is the cumulative it was kind of like how did you go bankrupt gradually then suddenly yeah that was kind of how this happened to me it was like gradually I just had spent years kind of doing this thing and assuming that it was the right thing and then suddenly it was like I had a conversation with a friend who basically said you're living someone else's life why are you doing this and it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks and I woke up and I literally couldn't move and kind of came out of that and told my wife I wanted to move back to the east coast and within 45 days of that happening I had quit my job we'd sold our house in California that we had just built like a year prior and bought a new place on the east coast and moved yeah now what about for her how how was it for your wife thinking all right this is a huge life change to get on board yeah she it's like this is her credit signed up for yeah I mean it's it's pretty crazy because I so that was one of my biggest fears I was most scared of not you know I'm kind of a traditionalist like I believe that you know my duty as the husband is to provide for the family like I I just I sort of believe that I take that on myself that doesn't mean anything about what her role is by the way but that's how I feel about my role that like my job is to protect and my biggest fear was that she was going to like not accept that I wanted to make this change It's like because I'm providing while I'm making good money High Prestige status like it sounds impressive what I'm doing I'm on these boards everything things are good why do you want to change that when I told her this she was like yeah I don't know why you haven't done that already that's that's stupid and I was like what do you mean she said well you don't really like this thing you're doing and you're making a bunch of money doing this thing you really like doing so and you're doing that on the weekend like what if you did that with all your time imagine how much money you could make and I had just never thought of it that way I was like it sometimes it just takes that one person giving you the like New Perspective to unlock how you think about it do you know Sean Puri um he's a host of my first million another oh yeah yeah I actually had a conversation with him right around that same time and he was like I was like I'm thinking of making a big life change and he's like well what are the two paths I was like well one path as I go and you know I just apply to jobs at an investment fund on the East Coast we moved back closer to family but I go take another job and investing the other path is that I kind of go like out of my own and keep building these things I'm building start these different businesses go double down on myself and he looked at me and he was like it sounds like you're choosing between something that sounds like it sucks and something that sounds really fun and interesting so why is there a decision here and the way he said it it became so blindingly obvious to me but I had never thought about it that way until he just phrased it in those words so it I mean it just shows you the power of someone giving you like a different lens through which to see something because we're looking at our own lives so zoomed in every single day you're like I mean you're the ultimate zoomed in version of your life you're seeing everything like on the ground in the weeds Etc and until you can zoom out either you have to force yourself to or someone else gives you the zoomed out perspective you just miss you like miss all of those things how difficult is it to get back into Investment Banking Finance is that one of those careers where you take like a year or two off and come back in you're kind of like the black sheep I'm sure people think it is my perspective on that in general is like it's always worse in your mind than you actually think it is there's this tendency in those tracks to be like oh I have to hit this by this age like vice president by 27 principal by 30 partner by 32 start my own fund by 35 and if I'm not on that track I'm not you know doing the thing I'm supposed to be doing the reality is when you go look at successful people when they're 60 and you go ask them about their career you're like hey how'd you get here they're like well I spent you know seven years here and then that didn't work it's then I joined the military and I got deployed for four and then I came back and went to business school and then I started at this one company for two and then they went under and so then I ended up here and I've been here for 17 years now I'm the CEO and like there was nothing trajectory you know driven or timeline driven and who cares if like the game is to get to where you want to get to by the time you're 50 and like be in a place where you're excited about your work on a daily basis why do those timelines of like hitting Forbes 30 under 30 matter I cared so freaking much about that like I wanted Forbes 30 under 30 more than anything else in the world I was so upset when I didn't get it I wanted the realtor 30 under 30. so the step below step below you know you have the force you get the amount I mean that thing was swimming in my head rent free for a while that I didn't get that I heard I heard by the way a lot of it's paid it's definitely paid yeah I mean all these Venture funds it's like random associate Adventure films are getting on this list and you're like bro I like you're like cold calling people are you like Forbes 30 under 30s because the funds are right to get them on there I get it it's a business it is what it is but I mean the point is these timelines that you create around all this stuff are just [ __ ] and then I think it applies to the idea of getting back my general opinion when people are like oh I want to go you know try this thing that I'm thinking about for two years or go try it for a year I'm like yeah go [ __ ] try it like you can always go back to your job at Deloitte deloitte's always going to be hiring smart people that have done interesting things McKinsey is always going to be hiring smart people whatever go back if you're two years behind the people that you were previously in line with who cares it doesn't matter you think a lot of the best chains and biggest changes in life comes out of Like a Rock Bottom type thing or do you think some people need to hit rock bottom in order to find a different Avenue and flourish yes I mean I think there's this concept in so I'm half Indian um there's this concept in ancient Indian culture called The Wheel of Life which basically says that time in your life goes through these cycles of creation destruction and then rebirth and it's this endless cycle and it's supposed to be on Cosmic time but I think that in our lives we experience that same thing where like creation is those periods of growth then you end up kind of getting high on yourself and you have these periods of Destruction when things crumble down it's really dark and really challenging and when you're in those moments of Destruction the most powerful thing is to be able to have an awareness that after every destruction comes some rebirth so it's like this whole idea that when you're in the darkness a lot of people I saw this quote somewhere when you're in the darkness a lot of people think they've been buried when the reality is they've just been planted and there's something really really powerful about that to being able to outlast those dark periods to just say like oh this is actually a precursor to whatever is next for me it's not the end it's a precursor to whatever's coming next I don't think it's necessary to hit rock bottom to make a big change but it's not shocking that a lot of people do have that experience before coming to whatever the new thing is it's it's just hard to make a big change unless you're forced into it sometimes because it's so scary I mean that like I I remember the fear associated with like leaving this safe thing that I was good at that people were telling me I was good at to go do this like weird Creator thing that didn't sound impressive to anybody I mean still like I don't know when I was leaving my firm my bosses must have thought I was nuts like I when I told them I was leaving it was originally going to be that I was going to go join another firm on the east coast to be closer to home and that it made sense and then I was like actually I'm just gonna you know do this thing that I'm like Social Media stuff that I'm doing and see what happens and I hadn't talked to them about you know I didn't talk to them about this holding company like the businesses the cash flowing things that I had built on the side or like some of the things I was working on on that front I hadn't talked to them about you know potentially raising a venture fund and things I was doing there and so their view of what I was doing was literally like tweeting and they were like wait so you're gonna quit a private Equity job to tweet that doesn't make any sense um and so I don't know I mean it's it's felt very scary on the surface um but I don't know big big changes it's like sometimes you just gotta take the leap how do you remain so positive and optimistic what is it in you is this like a change or have you always been like this uh I'd say I've always been had a disposition towards optimism um I like in my baseball days I was always big on the idea that you were always just like one pitch away from getting out of any bad situation there were like two types of baseball players I was a pitcher there were two types of pitchers there was people who like would be in a bad situation and be like oh my God this is a bad situation I'm gonna give up this many runs this is going to happen and then there were pitchers who would be in a bad situation and be like if I just do one good thing right now I'm out of this like this is going to be much better I get a double play whatever it is and you're out of the situation and I always viewed baseball that way and now I always kind of view life that way where like if you just make one good decision in the moment and then you make another one and then you make another one you can get out of basically anything and you can start stacking things in a positive direction and so my bias has always been in that direction of just like nothing good comes from being pessimistic about whatever your situation is a lot of good comes from being optimistic and kind of seeing your path to actually driving out of it I'm also just really happy man I'm like my life is very very good right now I'm like very very blessed with you know our son and the experiences it's brought me and my relationship with my wife and being close to family for the first time in 12 years there's just a lot of good that has come into my life from the changes that I've made um and so I am just personally extremely grateful on a daily basis and that manifests as positivity and happiness I think it's interesting that you mentioned only like you didn't mention any monetary things it was just like funny like being close to the family the kids the wife and stuff like that yeah I mean I like I'm making a lot more money than I was when I was working in finance and frankly a lot more than I would have made for like the probably five to ten years after if I just stayed on that trajectory I mean like the way things have accelerated the like businesses that have stood up the opportunities that have come because of like you know some uniqueness luck some awareness luck I would say some of the things that we've kind of opened up and doors we've opened up um I just you know the financial side has sort of started to compound in a way that it wouldn't have and at an earlier date than it than it would have without my time actually being involved in it and so I'm not like spending all my days thinking about ways to make money and yet I'm making more than I was and so that to me I'm like I'm kind of just separated from it in a certain way where I'm not thinking about making money every day which is a nice feeling how many hours a day do you work now what is the average day look like we were having this discussion earlier and he was laughing about this um so I my average day I wake up at 4 30 every single morning I'm a morning person I go to bed at like 8 30 I'm like a grandpa sure um I wake up at 4 30 I get my cold plunge which I know we can have a debate about you want to go now or you want me to go you want to go after geez well we know we could go we could go now I think it's silly okay I think this is going to be something we look back on in 30 years and thinking like what were we thinking like in what like you think it's bad for people I don't see the BET yeah I I don't see how shocking your body with really absurd cold temperatures would do anything other than just a quick adrenaline adrenaline rush maybe something that a cold shower couldn't do so I mean it's similar to a cold shower right like it's but there's actually something about it ice water but do you do you like do you not believe the science is true like this stuff huberman has put out around like not familiar okay so like 200 dopamine increase that lasts for several hours after you get out is like a pretty big impact sure that I personally feel on a daily basis like the the feeling I feel when I get out of it and then go start my first kind of like work stream of the day and the feeling of energy happiness kind of just like euphoria that comes from having done that thing I think it's very real this might sound stupid but that dopamine release is is there a sense that maybe you could use up all of it in the morning and then you have to like produce more no I don't think so I mean so the thing with dopamine is it's like the the trade-offs of like Pleasure and Pain right it's like kind of the the swings of it and so the idea with this dopamine release is that it's associated with going through something challenging or painful to similar to like doing a really hard workout and then you feel this feeling of euphoria like go for a long run Runner's High um and that versus the dopamine you get from like a bunch of likes on social media and you're scrolling you know you're refreshing you're seeing a bunch of likes is maybe an unhealthy type we're doing drugs is maybe an unhealthy type there's no pain associated with it you just get the spike until then you get this massive collapse this is a more sustained and kind of long duration in um and and sort of gradual up and down I think because it's associated with a painful challenging experience I think personally the reason I do it is because it's doing one tiny very hard thing to start the day that makes everything else feel much easier I don't like even if none of the science is true if there's no impact on like brown fat or my metabolism if there's no impact on dopamine you know if there's no impact on like my mood any of those things I would still do it because I just start the day with this feeling that I can like tackle anything because it's doing one thing that I really don't want to do that I find really challenging and just conquering my mind around doing it I don't like proselytize from the mountains saying like hey you don't do this Graham you're a loser you're not you're never gonna make it like that's ridiculous I don't think that's true at all but it has positively impacted my life and so I talk about it because I think it's you know some some people might really like it so do you walk me through here so you get you get out of the bed and then what in your backyard you probably have this tub or something I have so our master bedroom has a deck that overlooks our backyard and it has a cold plunge and a sauna on it and so I will oh like I'm gonna wake up at 4 30 and I go outside onto the deck and right now it's in New York and so it's cold so I go outside and open up the thing and get into the water sit there for three to seven minutes depending on the day seven minutes yeah it's not a really long time that's pretty long seven minutes is long I mean seven minutes is tough hasn't it gotten easier though as time's gone on it doesn't it gets easier to do during the day like if you went in when there's sunlight out the sun's on your face even on a cold day and the birds are chirping it's rather Pleasant actually like I will I would enjoy doing that getting in at 4 30 in the morning when it's pitch black out and you're tired and you just got out of bed will never get easy for me like I hate I mean every single morning this morning I did it before flying out here fought it like just standing at the door to go out onto the deck being like [ __ ] I don't want to do this and it's just like open the door go out and do the things what makes you do it I I like the feeling of being able to like control my mind sure and say that I did the thing that it was challenging and if I do nothing else during the course of the very productive but I know that I like challenged myself in that way I feel like there's a win I also my stress response my ability to manage stress is so so much better now than it was before I started doing this because that's what it is you're putting yourself into this like extreme stressful environment having to control your breathing and control yourself and life is pretty stressful you're going to have like a bunch of involuntary stress and struggle that comes into your life and so my opinion is that by embracing and getting better like training yourself with voluntary stress you can actually be better and more well equipped for when the involuntary stress comes just my opinion do you meditate I've never been able to get into meditation okay I do like you know breath work sure and while I'm in the cold plunge especially because you really have to um but I've never been able to get into a real like meditation habit when you're in the cold plunge do you focus on the sensation of the cold or do you just try to bring your mind elsewhere uh breathing try to focus on breathing and then after the cold plunge to get in the sauna no uh I do sauna at night before bed you're supposed to like do um sauna like later in the day um so I get out do like you know a few minutes of jumping jacks to try to like warm myself up naturally um and then depending on how cold it was outside I will either like take a shower to get back to Baseline so that I'm not like miserable during myself yeah during my first like working stint or if it's summer and it's just warm out then I'll just put on clothes and start my day but we got sidetracked by uh let's hear it after that about at 5am I get a Dunkin Donuts cold brew that's like my go-to but Duncan best coffee in the world man best coffee in the world founded by Benjamin Franklin no that's not true yeah yeah um no I there's a Dunkin Donuts right near our house and um I just like Duncan has become my thing that I go to so I get a Dunkin Donuts and then I sit down at my desk and so from 5 to 7 30 which is like before my son has woken up um I do my first kind of stint of deep work and for me that's writing always so right now I'm really working on my book and so it's either newsletter or book really um for like a two and a half hour stint and then basically like I'll take my son for a walk for an hour when he gets up I'll go work out I'll do you know all my personal stuff that I like spend some time with my wife um and then an afternoon I have like one more two and a half hour stint of deep work and that's pretty much it hmm so maybe like great day yeah it's like five hours of like deep focused work and then all my walks like I'll walk my son for about three hours a day that's all my like thinking time so I don't consider that work but walking is when I do my best kind of creative thinking yeah you listening to music and stuff like that no silent walks or while I work you're asking no silent you found that to be more beneficial yeah I just like being able to like hear myself think um so I've experimented with everything like classical music I tried I tried those like binaural beats things for your brain waves I just like the sound of just being able to hear things around me and what about when you write when I write in the morning I've been using those binaural beats there's like this app called brain waves that I like um huberman recommended it on his podcast and so I started trying it and found that it actually really helped my life what is that it's like a um it's supposed to be um something that like kind of optimizes how you're like the sound actually like optimizes your brain waves for different mental states that you want to get into and that sound you know you can play like a soothing track over it so like you don't actually hear like the waves um you can play like forest sounds or rain patterning or whatever something like that um but it has a whole bunch of different Focus States you can do like Focus you can do creative there's like a bunch of different things and I've actually found it helps I'm I've never been like a big believer in those kind of things but it helps me right do you know the science behind that no I'd be so curious to try that yeah I'll send you the app it's cool it was like 3.99 or something like that okay it's great I always write to uh Philip Glass or Danny Elfman hmm that's good I mean it's I like figuring out what gets you into your state yeah is what works I used to be a huge believer in classical music I would love writing with classical music now I like reading with classical music on like a light in the background um but it just depends just depends on the day but yeah I mean I try to like I'm really trying to optimize for time with my son right now candidly like in terms of like what really matters to me in the world there's this 10-year period with your kids when you're like their favorite person in the world it's the first 10 years of their life after that they have best friends they have girlfriends boyfriends they get married and you're like no longer the most important person in their life and we live in a culture where those 10 years where you are typically is like your hardest working years and you're gone most of the time and you're not spending time with them and I'm in a fortunate state where I can actually flip that on a Ted and really take advantage of the fact that I have a you know a life in a kind of like business structure where I can really be around and really Embrace this time with them and it's special I see that thing circulating online of time spent with other people that was me that was you yeah yeah where it's in the beginning it's like family and then it you know dissipates off spouse spikes around 20 through you know 60 or whatever and then the time spent alone was something where I think from 30 to 35 you spend the least amount of time alone and then every year after that just creeps back up it's really interesting yeah those charts were fascinating I mean I stumbled upon the combined chart which had been out for years because it was like a 2019 American time use survey I think that they use the data around and I had seen the combined chart a few times but it's so uh like clumsy with all the lines on it's like very hard to actually see what it's saying and you kind of just look at it and you're like okay interesting and the dado is available to download so I just downloaded it was like oh let me look at what each of these lines looks like so I just put it into an Excel spreadsheet like brought back my analyst hat like opened Excel for the first time in three years and separated it out and I was sitting it was like a Saturday morning I was sitting there and I was like showed it to my wife I was like hey this is kind of cool right I should put like I should post these graphs this is like pretty interesting and she was like yeah that is actually pretty interesting I posted it and it went I mean pretty Mega viral right really really blew up um but yeah I thought it was fascinating I mean they'll like the couple that really jumped out to me were the children one which is what I just talked about like you get very very short period of time um and then the alone one is like yeah that's the one for me that really wow yeah I mean you got to get comfortable with yourself because you're gonna a lot of time alone over the course of your life and most people are terrified of being alone the idea of being bored in 2023 is why I mean it's like impossible when's the last time you were really bored like you have your phone with you and so you just like pop it open if your phone dies and you're like on a plane and your phone's dead and you don't have your laptop and there's no TV in front of you it's like what am I gonna take Sky Mall there's not even Sky Mall anymore out of business being bored is like I actually sat on a cross-country flight next to a guy like a few years ago that for six hours didn't take out his phone didn't read a book didn't watch anything on TV literally just stared straight ahead for six hours and I thought about calling the FBI I was like bro this guy is gonna kill us like this is terrible imagine like an old man no yeah like 45 50. I don't know like did you say anything to him no I I was terrified I'm actually not kidding I was terrified just like looking straight ahead like with a pleasant look on his face just stared Straight Ahead not eyes closed didn't sleep like literally just stared and we were in the exit Row in the like bulkhead and so it was literally a wall like it wasn't like there was people watching like there was interesting things like he literally just looked straight ahead and like shifted a few times didn't go to the bathroom I mean crazy crazy I don't know if you must have been meditating or something um do that for six hours or maybe he had like been in jail and spent time in solitary until he just knew how to do that but we're really bad at being bored humans right now I mean I'm terrible at it so like when I go on these walks that's kind of my way of like finding that boredom in myself you know what it's interesting I deleted Tick Tock because it was sick for the full day and I was in bed and so I would kill time by watching tick tocks yeah and one day of doing that I found myself the next day instinctively every time there's a spare moment pulling up my phone and opening it up every time so I deleted the app it took me a few days to like come off of that yeah of just constantly needing to grab have my phone for any spare moment that I'm not like engaged in something yeah I mean it's kind of scary like you look at your screen time and it's part of your job yeah so like part of me justifies the amount of time I spent on Twitter or these things as like I kind of have to do this it's part of my job um but it's kind of scary and the amount of impact it has in our life and on our behaviors like the fact that when something is going but I mean you probably have this with videos but like when you post a tweet and it's going viral and you're like oh let me just check let me just check let's go let me just check what's happened like it's controlling your mind and you don't need to check nothing new has happened it's just gonna have another 100 likes or whatever the number is um but we've let it come to that I mean I don't have tick tock on my phone because I don't want the Chinese influencing my brain but um that's a separate you know National Security risk and everything that'll eventually get gotten rid of I think I don't know I just get a whole bunch of dumb crap though it's like on tick tock on Tick Tock I just my issue with Tick Tock frankly was like when I first opened it for the first time they must have patterned me you know like 32 year old male I don't know what like it would have patterned me as whatever the algorithm was but it was literally just like half naked women on there every single swipe yeah and um I was like I can't open this at home because my wife is gonna like she's gonna be like I'm gonna like open it on the couch to like look at Tick Tock and it's just gonna be a bunch of like girls dancing and I'm gonna be like I didn't look at a bunch of like I don't follow these people I don't know and it's just gonna lead to like a bunch of you know I don't I don't I don't need that so um I also don't have Tick Tock the one I found very interesting I started getting recommended uh you would know this uh but Jack I think you've seen this the North Korea videos where they're going through and showing just how like great it is oh really yeah so you are patterned as like a North Korea sympathizer I don't know what it was trying to put that information out there maybe but but it's trying to pivoted is like someone who took um someone who took like a camera in there like the iPhone started like just posting it yeah and showing like great streets and like everything is calm and like walking around and like it looked so peaceful like a really nice New York City with no trash everyone is friendly like and it was weird that those kept getting like recommended over and that is weird over and over again and then I didn't think much of it I thought oh man this is weird until I went online and there was a YouTube video about uh that was also like getting pushed alongside with that people were like are you getting these recommended too and they're like yeah I am it's weird that is weird yeah no I haven't I I hadn't gotten that in in weeks was this a while ago or when was this a month ago oh that's weird man I mean the thing that scares me about tick tock just in all seriousness is like right now we're in the midst of a pretty chaotic banking situation in the United States um I'm sure you've talked about this in different videos um what terrifies me is a lot of these crises are propagated by fear with people and human behavior actually leads to these things right Silicon Valley Bank like I almost got caught up in it right my Venture fund was banked at Silicon Valley Bank we had to get money out at the last second to escape it um it's driven by like people panicking and pulling money from these things in addition to all the interest rate stuff that has happened and the changes and you know unrealized losses Etc um if China like Tick Tock is a state-owned business effectively like all Chinese businesses are whether they say they are or not and in a situation where like they are one of our main adversaries and they can during a period of already people being on edge make a tiny tweak to the algorithm that starts surfacing for a hundred million Americans a bunch of fear-inducing content about the banking situation that further leads to economic challenges in the country or to a banking collapse that's a Cyber attack I mean that's like a full that's War um that is propagated through an app that is controlled by one of our main adversaries and that to me is like that's scary couldn't you say the same thing about Twitter because I've heard a lot of things that the bank run started on Twitter but they're but Twitter is not controlled by anybody so Twitter is people there's people but it could be their algorithms but Twitter's owned by yeah I mean maybe one but Elon Musk doesn't have incentives for the U.S changing system to collapse and Twitter's banned in China so like China has banned all of the American apps from from having influence in their country and we have I'm more so saying that it makes it very easy for information to spread very quickly I totally agree to I totally agree with that and it did it did happen on Twitter you saw it with Silicon Valley Bank stuff but it's not controlled by one of our main geopolitical adversaries did you see that that video that went pretty viral of the Twitter owner or sorry The Tick Tock owner CEO that was asked if their kid has Tick Tock and they're like no my kid doesn't have Tick Tock oh no I didn't yeah there's a clip that went super viral of that I think it depends how old the kid is there okay I think the kid's 11. yeah yeah I love it we're too young what age would you hold your kid a phone uh a phone probably eight to ten to be honest eight to ten because I feel like they would need to have a means of communication they're just always on them Tick Tock what's the age that they put on 13. so why would the tick tock owners say like oh yeah my 11 year old should get Tick-Tock I I think 13. he attends young for a phone you think so I think they're if they're out because he's very laissez-faire as far as like parenting goes so far until he has kids man yeah no I'm not gonna get picked up you're not gonna fly first class on your own I don't know like tick tock preferably not at all but like but they're gonna be exposed to it in one way or another whether it be it's you know reels or shorts I mean it's it's there yeah um parenting 13. until I had a kid and then I was like so no you get everything I'm just like oh oh [ __ ] oh god dude I mean it's scary you like you put a kid out into the world and uh I mean it's it's basically like whatever they feel you feel 10x like if they experience Joy you feel it even more it's like Amplified in you you feel so happy for them but if they feel pain it's way worse for you you're just like your heart just break I mean I can't imagine like my kid getting bullied at school and coming home and being upset like I would want to go kill whoever that kid was and that's like a terrifying thing about being a parent but it also makes you I mean like for me you know if my kid falls and like hits his face his face on a coffee table there because he's trying to learn how to walk and you know he's not stable and so he just like fell and hit his face and he like had a little he can cut on his lip and he was upset for a minute and then was done and now I'm like oh [ __ ] like grab him every time but the following is actually part of him learning how to walk like he needs to experience the pain in order to like learn that if he crosses his feet he's probably gonna fall flat on his face and it's gonna hurt and that's part of it but for me I'm just like now I don't want him to experience that pain again because it was really sad I felt really bad and what if he hits his head harder than that or he like hits a step and it cracks his head open like that is terrifying so I think that well the whole you become like a much stricter parent a certain way and like less laissez-faire from just having a kid and becoming more nervous naturally I think would you agree with this quote I heard it I thought it was kind of interesting that humans experience emotions on a range of zero to ten then you get married and then the range goes from negative 10 to 20. and then you have a kid and then the range just gets completely obliterated it's negative Infinity to Infinity yeah I think so actually it's a good quote I like that I'm gonna start using that I mean I I everyone has their own range everyone has their own like point on the spectrum that their Baseline is too like my um my mom is a highly emotional person my mom like if there's a scale of one to ten my mom's probably like a nine on the emotion scale of where like her Baseline is like she's highly prone to not in like a weird way but she's um she experiences emotion very deeply and like she'll be very sad about something you know for years afterwards and we'll continue to talk about it and feel real emotions around it I am like much more of a stoic like I'm probably like a two and our relationship um has had challenges at times because she is experiencing something as a very emotion-inducing event and my natural disposition is to be stoic about it and so when we're trying to communicate around that thing it's very challenging and so like in a relationship in a loving relationship and an intimate one if your wife is an eight or nine and you're at a two you're gonna have to really communicate around that Gap because it's going to be a struggle and when you have kids and they get added to that mix if you're going to be on different ends of the spectrum it's really really hard my wife and I are both pretty low on the emotion scale actually naturally and so with our kid while maybe our like the amplitude of the wave has expanded we're able to manage it because we're sort of aligned on our General Baseline what role does your wife play in your business your life how does she massive role I mean um she I mean I would argue like none of this is possible without her in it um both indirectly and directly I mean my wife is um she's a fashion designer um she worked for the first eight years I guess it was 10 years 10 years of her career at different companies under the Gap umbrella so she was at Athleta I've been in Republic at this new brand they launched um she worked on some of the Yeezy stuff when Kanye West was with them like done a bunch of different things um when our son was born she decided she wanted to spend the first year like take time off to spend the first year and really focus on being a mom and now she's going back and working with a startup brand kind of part-time in the time that she can balance around around being a mom but if not for her being like as actively involved and as amazing as a mother as she is I would never have the freedom to be able to pursue these different things that I am pursuing right now especially around like my own kind of like health and wellness Journey which has become a big part of the things I write about you know like my book has a big component around physical wealth like building well in your life in different ways and so part of that is Guinea pigging all this stuff on myself and experiencing it being able to storytell around it and without her you know willingness to kind of allow me to kind of go on these Journeys and really like uh you know help me go on these Journeys and be able to do it travel to things like this Etc none of it would be possible so she's a huge part of it she's not directly involved in any of my business stuff which is a cognitive cognizant uh you know like an active decision that we've made that we didn't want to like work together um because we like to be able to like separate church and state if you will um I think it's personally it's just like works better for us but um I mean she's like the CEO of our household in a big big way when when you got married did you guys get do a prenup no no uh my wife comes from a um wealthy background I don't think she would be mad at me saying that I mean her father was a successful entrepreneur had sold a couple companies in the biotech space um if we were to have had a prenup at the time of our marriage it would have been Pro her because I we were high school sweethearts we've been dating since she was a freshman in high school I was a sophomore in high school when we met um and had dated all the way through gotten married you know I was like a analyst or Associated at my fund um I don't think we wouldn't have entertained a prenup I have tons of friends who have now gone and gotten prenups and are pretty you know emotionless about it um I don't think it would have been an easy conversation for us to have personally yeah especially as high school Suite after that long yeah I think at that point yeah what do you attribute to the success of that because very few High School sweethearts really last yeah this long I think part of it is luck um and I don't say um I don't say that there wasn't work along the way but there were people who were really only fit for like one season of your life if you take that your life kind of comes and goes in Seasons you have different experiences you change you're different from one season of X there are people that are only really meant for one season of that you have friends that are like that you have friends who are like a great friend in high school and you really needed them in that fun kind of effervescent stage of your life now that you're building or you're doing something different they're not maybe the right friend for that and that's okay you have these friends that come and go the relationships that come and go like that there are marriages for some people that come and go like that um we've been very fortunate in that we met when she was 14 I was 15. and for whatever reason cosmically you know or individually emotionally we've somehow matched and grown together through all the different seasons that we've gone through the first season of that was me being a high school douchebag and just like you know thinking way too highly of myself and being kind of like an arrogant prick at the time at age 16 and not being the type of person I'm proud of today but her really like sticking with me through that and helping me grow as an individual and then you know the next season was like we were in college and we were far apart from one another she was in New York City I was in the Bay area and we kind of were doing our own thing and really like struggling through long distance then we got engaged and she moved out to the Bay area and we had our first season of like living together and that was this new exciting thing um and now we're in the next season of that which is like raising a child together and so I feel like at every stage we've sort of grown closer and gotten to know each other better in a different context and in a different way and experience new challenges together but a lot of it is just luck that we've been fortunate that we have grown together I think it's pretty intentional I would say most people are more compatible than they think I think there's kind of just a threshold that needs to be met as far as compatibility goes for a lifelong partner and it's not that high like for the most part if two intentional people care enough about the relationship to make it work they can make anything work so I would say you're probably not giving yourself yeah equally want to make sure work one wants to make it work more than the other well of course both people have to be so you don't believe in the idea of the one I want to but you don't think I do no I don't either for what it's worth and my wife like maybe would punch me in the face for saying that you know like saying that on air but I I don't believe that that's true I think that it basically I think a lot of people are miserable through life because they believe in that idea because they're looking they're spending their entire life like waiting for that perfect thing to just show up and plop itself onto their lap when the reality is what actually makes a great relationship is taking the imperfect thing and working at it to make it as perfect as you possibly can and if you're so Blinded By looking for the perfect you just ignore all the things that are imperfect that come along it's like you know you you know you see the like you're looking for a perfect shell on the beach or whatever and you never find one well there were these other shells that were pretty damn good that you could have polished and it's always going to cut a little bit or something yeah exactly and that's part of what makes these things interesting frankly is the like the growth and the learning that comes from dealing with those I mean like I said like I spent many years of our relationship as a person that I'm not proud of today but part of what makes us so strong today is that we've got through that and that I had to change and that she changed with me and that she like taught me to grow up and those those experiences are a big part of who we are today as a relationship and as a unit so I I mean I also don't believe in the whole idea of the one and I I agree with you like I do think um a lot of people would be much better off by like going a layer deeper on some of the people that they don't think are the perfect fit for them right away so our average viewer demographic is let's say like a 24 23 year old guy what advice would you give to the average person listening on relationships no in general it could be relationships sure yeah sure it could be relationships just something that you think would really help them out yeah I mean on relationships expand your definition of attraction I think that at 24 at 25 everyone I know that's that age their definition of Attraction is entirely physical and I get it like I love you know like my wife is extremely attractive I love that like I think that's an amazing feature um but if you don't expand your definition of Attraction you're going to be um living a life that is really unfulfilling in the long run if you if you find a partner that's purely based on physical attraction because the reality is you know you might find that super exciting for a few weeks for a few months maybe for a year but eventually it's not gonna be the most exciting thing in the world and you need to have layers of Attraction with an individual as you're building a relationship that go well beyond the physical attraction there needs to be spiritual attraction there needs to be emotional attraction with a person things that just go well beyond that physical attraction and if you're not looking for that if you're not thinking about that when you're on the dating circuit when you're going out and meeting people you're just going to go down the path of dating the person that you think other people will think is impressive so many of my friends that are like 24 25 these guys that played baseball with whatever they're like the people are dating it's not because they really care about the person it's because they think their friends will think it's impressive that they're dating this person and that's just a recipe for disaster I've had some friends marry that person eventually and quickly realize that it's not a good not a good move so I've experienced that too I never dated that person uh mostly because it was unattainable while I was in high school but back in the day I remember everyone would be like oh my God this girl is so attractive this and she plays soccer she's really gonna talk or something like that like this is the girl right and I would find myself attracted to this person my medic desire man like a couple years later I'm like what am I I didn't find them attractive but nothing about them I found attractive it was just the fact that I just heard that they're so great and I'm like yeah sure they're great yeah and you you wanted to be able to tell your friends that you yeah because it would sound so cool yeah yeah and look I get it like part of it is um everything is status signaling right like we're monkeys at the end of the day and so status signaling matters and like my medic desire like that desire to want things because other people want them is a real thing it's like an actual social psychological phenomenon but I think that that like expanding your definition of what you were attracted to about someone and really thinking more deeply about that at a young age is is an important thing because if you find the right life partner I mean your life's success or misery is so driven by the person that you choose to marry and the person that you choose to partner with whether you marry them or not like if marriage is something you don't believe in okay but whoever you choose to partner with that can be your best friend you know the person you spend all your time with your partner whatever it is your success or misery is so driven by that person it's unbelievable and people don't I mean it can be a 10x like massive unlock for your life like it is for me I mean my wife is like all of My Success anything that we accomplish as a family is because of her or it can be a huge drag and it can lead to a ton of misery and a ton of Heartache that holds you back from achieving anything that you want to achieve um so I think just being deliberate about that is a huge piece of advice I would have so what piece of advice would you have philosophically for the average 20 to 24 year old philosophic because you said you kind of err on the side of being a stoic yeah which is actually really interesting yeah learn to embrace boredom at a young age learn to embrace silence and being in your own mind at a young age go for more walks I mean I like go if you can learn to and train yourself to just go for like a 30 minute walk every day without feeling like you need to listen to a podcast or like do some self-improvement activity during it I really think you're going to start unlocking more creative and non-linear outcomes in your life that's like the big goal of life is to have non-linear outcomes in anything you're doing if you were to like take a step back and break it down non-linear outcomes are what we're all looking for like linear outcomes are fine right I'm working an hour I'm making this much money I'm like working out I'm getting this much benefit from it I'm eating this I'm getting this much benefit those are all linear outcomes great what I really want is for me to like work that five hours and I'm making more money than I was making before way more or I want to be able to work out for 15 minutes and get the hours benefit like I want those non-linear outcomes and I personally think that being bored and having those periods of silence and quiet time is when you figure out an identity identify what those non-linear opportunities are what are some of the things that you learned from Tim Cook explain that so very unique yeah um so Tim and I met at the gym um It's Kind of a Funny Story I mean I was like working in my first job coming out of school is at that at that private Equity Fund I was working really hard um I wanted to make sure I was in the office by 6 30 every morning and so I still wanted to work out because it was still important to me and one of my big hobbies and so that meant I had to get to the gym by five every day um in order to get to the office by 6 30. so I'd show up at the gym Equinox in Palo Alto um at five every single morning there was like eight people that would show up at that same time every day so like you got to be kind of crazy to show up at opening time you know like people were waiting outside at 4 55 to let the doors you know they'd be like banging on the doors to get let in and you know you kind of get close to those people talking to them every single morning it's the same group of eight people because no one's that crazy a lot of people would trickle in at 5 30 not that many at 4 55. um and so I talked to the people after about six months I'd been talking to this group of people and I was talking to one of the gentlemen and someone came up to me and was like do you know who that is I said no I said that's Tim Cook the CEO of Apple and I was like damn [ __ ] like I didn't know that I've been talking to this guy for six months I was probably sounding like an idiot what were you talking about it's just random gym stuff I don't know like what do you talk to about like oh what you know what are you doing like what you know what's going on like how are you doing today with just like basic stuff you're like shaving in the mirror and you're like talk whatever the news is of the day like random things it's just people um but I wasn't in Tech and so like I wasn't investing in Tech I didn't know Tech I hadn't really come through the tech world and so and he didn't wear glasses in the gym until like I didn't recognize him he just didn't he didn't look familiar to me and he wasn't nearly as famous then as he is now like he was the new CEO at the time his you know prominence hadn't quite grown as much as it has today obviously um and then I figured it out obviously from that interaction and so I cold emailed him I talked to him that morning about an article that I had um seen and I cold email them uh and sent the article and just said hey I'm guessing your email address here why wouldn't you just bring it up the next day um I just like I went back I just talked to him about the article um like 10 minutes before I got into the office and I was like I'm just gonna try to send him the article okay um because I just talked about it let me just kind of shoot the shot and so I guessed an email address sent it and within five minutes he replied and was like oh thanks for sending this you guessed the right email address um you know whatever quirky response and so then I um I basically then just was like okay now that he's replied once I might as well just like be bold here and so I asked if he'd be willing to get a get a coffee and you know chat like I'm not looking for a job I'm not looking for anything but I'd love you know your science perspective spell that out yeah I was like I'm in and he knew I was in a role that I liked because we had been talking about different work stuff at the gym um and he was willing to do that so we ended up having breakfast and uh basically it led to what you know what has now been 10 plus a year like nine year I guess um like wonderful relationship mentorship and um you know I've gotten to do a lot of amazing things as a result of him uh went to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting with him one year which was amazing got to meet Warren Buffett and really yeah I mean it was like incredible um and he's just been like an amazing amazing influence and you know involvement in my life he was a big part of my decision to um you know make my life change and pursue these things that I'm really interested in he's been very supportive um and you know I'm not like texting him every day asking for advice it's not like the mentor the formal version of Mentor that people talk about like hey will you be my mentor um but he's had an amazing influence in my life and in a very very positive way and I think for me the biggest thing that I've gleaned from at least our relationship building was that it was never driven by any like transaction I wasn't looking for him to invest in a company I wasn't trying to get a job at Apple you know like I wasn't looking for anything from him other than to just learn and people in those situations and in those roles all they get all day 24 7 is people wanting something from them it's just someone coming with their hand out with their hand out asking for something and so I think in those situations when you can actually just come from a place of being genuine and not looking for something not transactional not quid pro quo it stands out and so I think I mean the fact frankly that I didn't know who he was for the first six months like I've joked about this with him later um stood out because I wasn't just like you know there were tons of people then over the like months until he wasn't able to go to the gym anymore at a public gym where like you know some guy would walk in and be like hey Tim I want to put you on my startup idea and like okay dude it's probably not gonna work right like you just very transactional it's just kind of a weird thing yeah shoot me an email like I'm sure I'll get back to you so that I mean that's it's been an amazing amazing relationship in my life I'd say the most interesting thing I learned from him um was probably like in his own career Journey the role of kind of like this this idea that Steve Jobs had around not being able to connect the dots looking forward have you heard Steve Jobs's speech on this so Steve Jobs obviously was a huge Mentor in Tim's life um Steve gave this speech at Stanford in 2005 the commencement speech and he talks about the fact that there are these dots in your life like these events that happen and you never know how they're going to connect looking forward like when you do something you never know how it's going to lead to the next good outcome you can't predict those things in in kind of looking at it forward but you can looking back so his example of that Steve Jobs was that he took a calligraphy class after he dropped out of college he walked into a calligraphy class and like beautiful handwriting and stuff and he says there was no possible way that was going to benefit my life that's like a ridiculous skill set No One's Gonna need to be a calligrapher but then 10 years later when they were making the first Macintosh computer it was the first computer that had beautiful custom typefaces and fonts and that was driven by his love of calligraphy and so he couldn't have connected those two dots from taking a calligraphy class to building the first computer that had that looking forwards but looking back you can say oh my God the fact that I did that class has led to this incredible Innovation that we've created and Tim's was he was at IBM like Rising through the ranks as an executive there just like kind of plugging away and he ended up leaving to go join this startup at the time compact which was like a small computer startup uh and he happened to go do that that was like the crazy decision that he made because IBM was like this great big company he was doing really well at it Etc went to Compaq when Steve Jobs was looking through resumes for someone to bring on for operations at Apple he looked through the resume and he saw Tim Cook and he saw IBM and he was like oh big company guy I don't want you know I don't want a big company guy he's not going to be a fit but then he saw that he had left IBM to go to Compaq and he'd only been there like a little bit of time and that in his mind triggered something like oh there's something different about this guy that he left IBM to go join this weird computer startup maybe he's interesting we should have a conversation with him they had the conversation and obviously now the rest is history and so it's another amazing example of just that of like he never would have known that by making the decision to leave and go to this computer startup which has now obviously failed would lead to this incredible career trajectory and path that he's had but in Reverse you can look at that and say like oh okay I made this decision and it led to something good so it's just these like these examples of following your intuition around things yeah like where you think your interest line where your passions lie that I think create these amazing amazing outcomes so what are some of the questions that you would ask Tim how do you make decisions around you know challenging things that happen like I would never ask him around Apple questions I don't know that I've ever heard I mean I don't think I've ever asked him a single question about Apple mind or relationship with him hey because I just don't care I'm not investing in Apple stock it doesn't matter to me and B I'm much more interested in general in how people make decisions like you know for him he's like a head of state right like you're the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world you're effectively a head of state like you have to make decisions with so many complex variables constituents involved all of these different things like how do you how do you actually do that and so learning from him you know how he thinks about like having one or two guiding principles or values like a razor that allows you to cut through the noise and make decisions in those contexts was really really fascinating to me so there's more things like that and you know like look he's very connected in political circles and he knows a lot of interesting people so just like talking to him about like what different people are like and you know what they are thinking about what does the future look like for them what are they interested in like that kind of stuff I find really really interesting what's the most surprising thing that you've learned in general no from that from that relationship with him um I would just say how deeply principle driven he is as an individual um has been surprising me my perception of CEOs prior to knowing him um was that they're very Machiavellian um and everything is just about you know profit and you know who cares at the end of the day and people say that about Tim um you know people look at him and say that from the outside looking in that he's like entirely about profit and makes all these decisions I have experienced him to be extraordinarily value driven um and really Guided by like you know a higher good in what he thinks he's doing you know on a day-to-day basis and the impact that Apple can have on Humanity in this you know as a society do you think that if you are so fixated on profit like that is what you put above all else that that will yield better returns than if you focus on something else maybe um short term probably short term I think you probably like if you focus on profits and you like are optimizing all the different things yeah I think you can probably have a really good outcome in the short term around that my guess is long term the companies that endure um you know need to have like an X Factor something that kind of is driving them uh on a deeper level in the in the long long term yeah I feel like it's hard to stay competitive after a certain point because Innovation I think will eventually take over yeah and it's hard to like profit uh Innovation right like I mean that's the big knock on Apple now right just as a company the knock on Apple is like it hasn't really innovated around new products since the iPhone and you know can they continue to innovate and create the next iPhone without Steve Jobs at the helm or without Johnny Ive or whoever the big people were that kind of really drove that stuff and they've done an amazing job of really profiting from their core and like the iPhone and the services business like it's growing and all these things they've done really well and can they continue to do that um I mean the reality is like most companies don't last that long right there's like you know how many companies have lasted 200 years most of them are in Japan which is just like an interesting there's this new article that just came out of study of companies that have lasted 200 years like 60 of them are in Japan it's like this crazy but isn't that because they passed down their businesses from generation to generation very if you sell yeah it's my understanding yeah maybe maybe um and a bunch of them had like under 200 employees I found that really interesting they're mostly small like kind of stay under the radar there's probably I'm sure there's like you reasons that are kind of driving these different things but um will a company that exists today in 50 years exist in the exact same format I don't know it's like really really hard to bet on that I find that when you look at the S P 500 1980 crazy today all the top companies I think besides like Exxon yeah just not there yeah it's completely don't exist yeah and I love watching the thing the visual is a visual yeah where it shows the company's growing in like Google spikes up but then IBM takes over yeah three-fold yeah just tanks what company that is enormous today do you think will not exist in 25 years it will not exist at all oh geez uh if you were to guess one net Netflix would have to I wouldn't even count like of the really big companies like of the Facebook Google Amazon Apple Google's here to stay a hundred thousand percent but we don't we don't know do you think so necessarily so I I might put my money on Google because I would say like what if you know open AI completely kills them that's what I would be worried about but then again Google's very uh Nimble to like adjust they have a thousand layers of middle managers sitting there though yeah I don't know Google has really YouTube I mean yeah that's true with YouTube except if you're a tick tock in which case YouTube can kind of like compete a little bit yeah um Netflix is pretty big I feel like it's it's gonna be hard for Netflix to innovate in such a way to be around 25 years so that's possible Google I have a good feeling about it yeah Microsoft though it's just a beast I don't know how it's such a beast it's amazing you're still doing so well so well um yeah yeah that's possible Apple I I think I I think I got money on Apple yeah I think so too I mean it's just they'll have to navigate succession Tesla yeah Tesla would be the interesting one I don't think Tesla will be around I don't think so too much competition and and I mean I'm gonna get like attacked by all the people that are like it's not a car company it's not a car company but it kind of is a car company um I don't know electric vehicles it's like every single company is going to make electric vehicles and you can't tell me that Toyota is not going to be able to manufacture electric vehicles better than Tesla like they're the gurus of manufacturing like Kaizen it was created there um and so I just I think it's gonna be really cheap I mean it's just gonna be challenging to compete on just being the electric vehicle in the market the cool of it I think it's got to be so many full self-driving yeah in which case how quickly could other companies and this is coming from someone I have two Teslas I think they're great cars I love them I think they're great um but does this full self-driving really full self drive or does it like randomly break on the highway yeah it's terrifying sometimes um the highway speeds are great when you put it on basically yeah adaptive cruise control essentially yeah um but yeah I don't know I I wouldn't be shocked I wouldn't be shocked I mean like Elon Musk is an interesting character uh but will he like have an Icarus moment where he flies a little too close to the Sun and you know gets melted and crashes I don't know I would love happened a lot through history I'd love to see Apple come out with a car Apple would make a really really good apple car uh Google car I think would be really cool no waymo yeah yeah yeah we get a lot of those just drive into those little test cars oh yeah do they have them here yeah because they did a lot of them in Scottsdale yeah Phoenix I used to try in um in the Bay Area they used to run a lot of their tests obviously right around Google's campus and um they had one that would do a loop on like my drive from the gym to work every morning I would see it and I used to always like it was on a two-lane road and I used to always like speed up run in front of it try to like break a little bit because I was like oh man what if it hits me like if I get into an accident and I come out and I'm like Oh my neck Google hit me like I could get a big settlement out of Google if you pay me 10 million dollars I won't say Josh never worked out unfortunately but never know but I think the Apple car would be insane insane and imagine they came up with an apple house like a prefab technology do you think people be scared of that kind of thing no I don't know Amazon people would be scared but Apple no yeah Amazon I feel like people would be paranoid it's constantly listening to them but Amazon like it would restock everything in your house that you needed at all times it could be kind of sick yeah but a pre prefab Apple house would be sick exactly I think it makes sense and then for Apple to also get into banking that's one thing I really wish that Apple card was more successful and yeah integral to like the banking side of things what do they do they partnered with Goldman Sachs right I don't think it was it was many people embraced it but I think it was because of their association with Goldman Sachs I think obviously people think yeah they wanted like an apple branded product I think yeah or hesitant especially Millennials to bank with Goldman Sachs yeah yeah it's interesting we've seen like you know the challenges of of banking and the issues that come with maybe they could have circumvented that just given their cash balance and the things they have going on but um do they want to like navigate the public company you know challenges of all of a sudden trading like a financial services company on part of your business sell products yeah through your phone yeah big one yeah you own the data and then sell that data sure from your phone I mean there's so many ways that they could monetize yeah you should go pitch it I think I mentioned this in an old Apple video where I felt through potential when they came up with the first credit card was really to go really just dive head first into banking yeah and issue loans and just do everything under the sun just for personally for the millennial yeah I think they're companies these days are kind of scared of you know expanding their purview because of the ftc's Mandate right now and like I forget yeah we're talking about no just like just how aggressive the FTC is about policing um uh like Anti-Trust stuff in the US I mean it's kind of crazy right like they're stopping Facebook Google Amazon Apple from doing like 20 million dollar Acquisitions but then Tick Tock is just operating with free reign in the U.S right like that's wild to me that they're focusing on these tiny deals that these companies are doing rather than policing you know a big issue um so I think some of the companies are just wary of that I mean Amazon definitely is because I think Amazon believes they will get broken up at some point and split between their AWS business and the retail business right um but I think that like you know Apple all of a sudden going into banking like all these companies going into all these different areas where they're controlling more and more of your lives you just congressmen are going to have a field day with that being their viral thing that they can talk about to try to get on their new cycle it is interesting though with with Amazon Basics they like you go and buy batteries first two results Amazon Basics cheaper than anything else we have more reviews yeah and better delivery yeah you can get it today yeah why would I get the one day delivery is always insane to me that I could order something in the morning and it's like it'll arrive between 3 and 6 p.m today yeah how I know it's amazing that's why when people hate on Amazon I'm always like come on yeah I just got like I literally ordered this USB cable I needed and it came two hours I'm curious I think they should have food that would be Amazon too don't think Amazon deliver for food do they yeah not groceries yeah yeah exactly like imagine Amazon for like you know you want you want like a protein bowl down the street it's there and then you go to Amazon Basics beauty of those businesses it's like the Standard Oil you know model from the Rockefeller days the beauty of those businesses when you're that big is that you can be loss making in one area in order to acquire market share because you know you're generating profit elsewhere yeah and like that's what standard oil did so well is they would just like completely drive out competition in a new region by undercutting the market and operating in a loss because they knew they were generating profits Three Counties over or whatever the thing was so they didn't care like they would you know bleed you dry in your competition area because they knew they could make it up elsewhere like that's what antitrust Regulators are terrified of with all of this stuff it's like more standard oils right building do you think that's a bad thing necessarily because part of me because it's pro-consumer I don't part of me believes that one company can lower costs overall because they have such a big market share yeah or I mean they could take the opposite approach or just charge whatever they want because they have such big markets yeah I mean I'm a free market guy yeah in general like I don't believe in a ton of Regulation I don't believe in a ton of intervention um and I think the markets sort these things out in general so um I mean I'm personally a proponent of just like allowing these things allowing the market forces to work and allow it to be governed that way I also generally think like Amazon's intention from the day it was founded was Pro customer and everything was about lowering prices and everything was about improving customer experience and so like there's not a data point I don't think really in the Amazon story that says like they're gonna all of a sudden just gouge customers on prices because they own the market I just don't think we've seen that right they've gouged Brands they've said like hey you produce a bunch of these you know USB wires well we have all the data and so we're going to produce the same wires and sell them cheaper than you and deliver them faster but like the customer actually benefits from that I'm getting cheaper and faster and so that's pretty good um and you know if you're a conversation I think the distaste for that is that they could do those at a loss just to drive out the other person yeah which yeah I kind of understand the other anti-small business right entrepreneurship right I'm actually a little bit shocked that you said you were uh like a open-market person but you think that the government should step in and intervene with Tick Tock what why do you not view government stepping in and like let's say telling Apple you have to take this off your app store and and placing restrictions on things like that why what's the difference are you okay with that yeah National Security I just like I mean China is our number one adversary um and the idea that they have control over something that controls the minds of a hundred million Americans like one third of our population is I think a mass I think it's the biggest National Security risk that we face today so if you're a president would you just do away with Tick Tock yeah banana immediately done gone do you worry about what other things they might use National Security for to ban like the slippery slope yes uh yeah I think there has to be a I I mean I think there has to be um checks and balances on these things like I actually don't I don't think it would be easy for the president to just do that overnight but I think the legislative branch would get behind it um India banned Tick Tock and people you know complained about it for a month and people were really upset consumers of it that loved it Etc and then everyone kind of moved on and said you think people in the United States would just move on because I feel like United States citizens specifically are so attached to their freedoms but like the people that are very Pro Freedom actually probably don't it like probably are the ones that would get behind this you know like you know you'd be like more of like a right-wing left-wing thing and I think more like right-wing people would probably get behind the idea that China you know like they would put a good PR campaign on it I'm sure and say like look what China's been doing in the North Korea videos and like there's evidence of these things happening and it's not you know manufactured I don't have all the details right like I don't know how separated it is I have people that I know that work at Tick Tock that say that there's like communication between the Chinese entity and the US entity so I don't know like how much of a real split there is because technically there's a tick tock us that's a separate entity who knows how split it actually is I'm not involved so I have no idea if there's investigation and there is actually proof that there's influence that comes from the Chinese I think it's it's like Espionage I mean it's like it's a way of infiltrating American culture at a very very deep and organic level that is scary to me so you're president what else do you do no I mean look I think that one of the biggest issues facing the country is um that smart ambitious young people do not want to go uh into public service uh I think that's probably the biggest issue facing us over the next 50 100 years is that um most of the people that end up in Congress or um you know in the higher uh in these higher offices are people that want to be like career politicians and they go in and they're constantly just like horse jockeying for power over a long period of time because of lack of terminal emits because of no campaign Finance reform everything's a ton of money you serve in the Congress and you're like and then you leave and you get your 15 million dollars exactly you know uh deal and so what I think which I think is an interesting proposal is you have to pay way better for people in Congress and there's a very strict term limit like when you go and you get elected you might you can make 20 million dollars in Congress Over a four-year period really and the smartest people in the world will all of a sudden want to be in Congress and it's not just going to be these like you know ego driven guys that just want to go and accumulate power over 40 years because it's a short stint maybe say it's six years say it's eight years but you're gonna get paid a whole lot if you do certain things so say say you incentivize Congress you know who brought this up to me Anthony scaramucci uh the mooch the uh guy that worked for Trump for like 10 days as communications director say you said to all of Congress um if you guys balance the budget at the end of the Year everyone is going to make 15 million dollars every single one of you will make 15 million if you balance the budget you produce a balanced budget um all of a sudden and you put a strict terminal you said six years is the max you can ever serve you'd have a whole lot of really smart people wanting to work across the aisle to get something done yeah that's true at a broader level because they would all be incentivized to do it it's like incentives are everything so why not create incentives that drive the smartest people to want to actually work government spending is like if you don't spend it then it goes to waste you know that's this mindset where we have to spend it we get more money than if we spend it because then we need more yeah it's just a broken system yeah I think I totally agree that's why I think you need something radical that completely changes the whole idea of the career politician is just broken to me like it was never supposed to be that way it was supposed to be you worked in industry and you went and did your public service and then you went back to Industry you did your four years you did whatever it was I was serving the public and we've now morphed into this weird dystopian world of these career politicians who go and like accumulate power and wield their influence over the course of 40 years I mean I had a friend um who was working for a congressman and he went you know got elected and went to kind of his first vote and they were you know the people on his party were like what are you going to vote on this and he said well I'm gonna vote no and they were like no you're going to vote Yes and he said no I kind of ran on you know a platform that would lead my constituents to believe I'm gonna vote no and they basically told him if you don't vote Yes on this you're never going to get bill passed in your entire time in Congress and so like what the hell right I mean it's a guy that just ran that got elected that's not allowed to vote on the principles of what he ran on because of the whole idea of career politicians and because he knows that he actually now has to vote Yes if he wants any chance of accelerating and getting to be more influential the exact same thing you almost have to feed into that because otherwise you're not going to get any of your points across or any of you you're not going to get the donors and you're not going to get the money it's like you have to elect it take a few shortcuts here to get this one thing that you want they eventually passed and it's like you know everyone kind of does each other favors yeah and it ends justify the means it all becomes this like Machiavellian game so I just think the idea of creating a better set of incentives and systems and severely limiting terms um is an interesting one and it would prevent the revolving door thing right like politicians wouldn't be just waiting to get their cushy Consulting gig where they like make connections do you think that should be legal what people to go get like their cushy Consulting gig after serving that's kind of a market thing right like their pay because they have influence and they have relationships still and so I like is it legal I don't think stock trading I think like stock trading should be completely obliterated I think that's crazy that politicians have been able to do that but index funds would you stop yeah no that's what I mean yeah like sure go invest in Vanguard they were trying to pass that just for recently right yeah yeah I think after the whole Nancy Pelosi thing they were trying to say well yeah they shouldn't trade individual stocks they should just invest in a fund while they're you know yeah I I completely agree with that um I don't know I don't think you can ban politicians from like leveraging their relationships and Consulting gigs like it would just be hard to police like what level is it I don't know and your market value is high because you do have relationships and the network really matters but I think it would all get reduced if you had less of these like career politicians there because then my influence would kind of leave with me like the people that I had worked with would be gone after the four years and so it would be like I don't know am I still worth 50 million dollars if I don't know any of the people that are in Congress now by the way really quick I want to let you know that's an hour behind oh [ __ ] yes oh so guys sorry we have to end it so abruptly thank you so much for coming on the podcast thank you this has been incredible you're clearly a very intelligent person so uh yeah or I'm just too confident I don't know one of the two this was a blast though guys thank you I'm glad you gave me the coffee at the beginning because otherwise I wouldn't have made it you're welcome and you do seem smart enough to get a free stocks on Instagram link down below and of course all of yourself will be left down below as well thank you guys so much for watching and until next time please thank you