Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / O.D. Kobo - Entrepreneur & Asset Manager | Negotiating More Than $15 Billion in High-Stakes Deals

Transcript

O.D. Kobo - Entrepreneur & Asset Manager | Negotiating More Than $15 Billion in High-Stakes Deals · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I learned an early age where the real money is for when I was young.
• 0:04
  I've never been able to get hired anywhere.
• 0:06
  Born in Hong Kong, Odikovo's entrepreneurial journey began at just 21,
• 0:10
  disrupting the online lottery space.
• 0:12
  Over the years, he's built a career spanning industries
• 0:14
  from tech and private equity to digital assets,
• 0:16
  with nearly $1 billion in exits,
• 0:18
  from investing in pre-IPO giants like Tencent and Alibaba
• 0:21
  to selling feed for $40 million.
• 0:23
  At the age of 21, 22, I made my first million bucks.
• 0:26
  I was 20 years old.
• 0:28
  I had met two guys that were engineers.
• 0:30
  They had this idea to take the American lottery system,
• 0:33
  place it online.
• 0:35
  We all kind of made this company together.
• 0:37
  And our lawyer in New York called us up one day
• 0:40
  and said,
• 0:40
  somebody wants to buy this $1.8 million.
• 0:43
  We sold that company.
• 0:44
  Od has consistently stayed ahead of the curve.
• 0:46
  Now worth an estimated 225 million pounds,
• 0:49
  Od continues to shape industries,
• 0:51
  leading major investments in blockchain and infrastructure.
• 0:54
  His journey exemplifies resilience, vision,
• 0:57
  and an unrelenting drive to create impact on a global scale.
• 1:00
  This is the story of OD Kobo,
• 1:02
  a true modern entrepreneur.
• 1:03
  After I had that lottery thing,
• 1:06
  the money went pretty quick with me.
• 1:08
  The next adventure,
• 1:09
  we'd buy the .co.uk domains that just come out.
• 1:11
  Nobody was buying them.
• 1:12
  And we bought a bunch.
• 1:14
  So all we do,
• 1:14
  by bulk of like 100 domains for like three bucks,
• 1:17
  after a year and a half of going through everything,
• 1:20
  I sold that.
• 1:21
  And to take for about 2.2 million pounds,
• 1:24
  when life you can either eat good or sleep good.
• 1:27
  You can't do both.
• 1:28
  Just be happy.
• 1:29
  Just try to be happy no matter what you do.
• 1:34
  Welcome to success story.
• 1:36
  I'm your host, Scott Clary.
• 1:37
  The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network.
• 1:40
  HubSpot not only supports this show,
• 1:42
  but they support entrepreneurs.
• 1:44
  That's why it's such a huge fan of HubSpot.
• 1:45
  And I'm very grateful for HubSpot for supporting the show
• 1:47
  because they help entrepreneurs.
• 1:49
  And as a fellow entrepreneur,
• 1:51
  I know it takes a lot to grow your business,
• 1:53
  a lot of audience attracting,
• 1:55
  a lot of sales, a lot of marketing,
• 1:57
  a lot of lead scoring,
• 1:58
  a lot of channel management, a lot of content,
• 2:00
  a lot of long days, late nights, a lot of weekends,
• 2:03
  a lot of wishing there wasn't easier way.
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• 2:20
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• 2:25
  If you had to describe what you do for a living to somebody,
• 2:28
  how would you describe what you do?
• 2:30
  Externally, meaning publicly,
• 2:32
  I'm an alternative asset manager.
• 2:36
  Internally, you know, amongst,
• 2:40
  amongst my circle,
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  I'm a high-level entrepreneur,
• 2:46
  I'm an entrepreneur,
• 2:48
  you know, amongst, amongst my circle,
• 2:52
  I'm a high-value, large-scale deal maker,
• 3:00
  with sovereign funds,
• 3:04
  SOEs, specific individuals,
• 3:08
  cross-border mainly between Asia, Russia,
• 3:12
  the Gulf.
• 3:12
  I'm a deal maker, in that sense,
• 3:16
  I help facilitate large capital initiatives
• 3:20
  between governments,
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  private public entities,
• 3:24
  in various sectors,
• 3:26
  infrastructure,
• 3:28
  simply because the sums are a lot larger.
• 3:32
  Tech-related infrastructures, data centers,
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  or, you know, things of that nature.
• 3:38
  In the past,
• 3:41
  in the past, oil and gas,
• 3:43
  some securities,
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  depends kind of, you know,
• 3:47
  if, who I worked with.
• 3:51
  But I think in a nutshell,
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  internally, they kind of refer to me as,
• 3:57
  as the deal maker.
• 3:58
  Obviously, you're experienced as really gone across,
• 4:03
  so many different industries,
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  and you accomplished so many different things,
• 4:07
  when you look at how most deal makers,
• 4:11
  investors, asset managers structure their career,
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  at least early on, they start to focus on one thing,
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  because that's what they're proficient at,
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  and that's what they get very good at.
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  So, let's sort of go back in time.
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  Who was OD growing up?
• 4:25
  Who was OD,
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  who, did you come from an entrepreneurial background?
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  I think your parents were somewhat entrepreneurial nature,
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  but I mean,
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  what was that inflection point,
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  or that moment in time that sort of pushed you
• 4:38
  down the path that you're on today?
• 4:39
  I grew up in Hong Kong.
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  And when we grew up in Hong Kong,
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  it was because, at the time,
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  my father was in the manufacturing business.
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  So, a lot of foreigners that came to Hong Kong,
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  you know, were manufacturing other clothes,
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  or, I don't know, something like that.
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  So, that was kind of why I was, you know,
• 4:59
  brought up and raised in Hong Kong.
• 5:04
  When we first moved to Hong Kong,
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  sorry, when I first kind of grew up in Hong Kong,
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  we lived in an area called Park Foulan.
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  I think of it like the Queen's area of Hong Kong.
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  It was predominantly all Chinese.
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  It was in, I don't know,
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  if you see those presidential blocks,
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  where you see like 1,000 apartments and like,
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  you know, like that,
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  and, you know, laundry hanging out like that.
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  We lived in a place like that.
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  We were the only foreigners,
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  you know, for a couple of blocks, for sure.
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  And so, you know, I grew up there,
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  and my father,
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  you know, I love my father,
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  but my father hasn't, you know,
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  wasn't around.
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  I don't have a mental picture of him before the age of 14.
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  He was always working and always, you know,
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  out and traveling, you know,
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  to the factories or to mainland China.
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  And so, he was never there.
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  And my parents had me quite young.
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  So, my mother at the time was, you know,
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  once she had me, was roughly around 21-22.
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  And my father had to go make a living.
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  A few years later, my sister was born.
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  And, you know,
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  you're in Park Foulan in Hong Kong.
• 6:26
  And it was just the three of us, right?
• 6:28
  My father was never, never around.
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  I only really kind of connected with my father in my 20s.
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  You know, I think the environment in Hong Kong,
• 6:37
  you know, everybody there,
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  the foreigner side, the expats,
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  were there for work, right?
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  So, you know, the whole, you know,
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  let's go get money, let's go work,
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  wake up in the morning, make a living,
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  you know, grow.
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  It's sort of embedded amongst everybody.
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  And Hong Kong, I love Hong Kong,
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  you know, it has like a, like a New York kind of vibe,
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  or the old school New York vibe,
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  where, you know, streets are bustling,
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  people are moving, you know,
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  nobody's like sitting around on the couch watching.
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  You know, it's an energy.
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  So, 100% energy.
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  And, you know, my father, you know,
• 7:15
  has this ability sometimes to make money,
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  but then the gambling, you know,
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  in him, not casino gambling,
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  but, you know, with his faunce, he goes down.
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  So, one time, you know,
• 7:28
  you live in Park Foulam,
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  and then the next time you live in a nicer house,
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  and then you're back to Park Foulam,
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  and then, so I kind of created, I guess,
• 7:35
  growing up this,
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  this sort of a fear, you know, that,
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  you know, you, you know,
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  you got to be conservative with what you got,
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  like, I'm not an investor.
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  I don't invest.
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  I'll bring capital,
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  facilitate, I'll structure, I'll manage,
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  I'll bring, you know, large capital.
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  But at the end of the day, you know,
• 8:00
  if you showed me today, I don't know,
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  you know, oil well, that I can buy it,
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  you know, 10 cents on the dollar.
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  Wonderful.
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  I'll, you know, I won't invest.
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  I'll go bring a billion dollars to it,
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  and I'll take a piece, and I'll take a, you know,
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  a deal fee, and I'll take a management fee,
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  and I'll take some other fees, and all that.
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  But me, no, absolutely, no.
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  You're so, so you're very risk-adverse.
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  I tell you, it's, I learned from an early age
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  where the real money is.
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  And, you know, I watch a lot of the podcasts,
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  and I see a lot of, you know, I like things like that.
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  I love where the world's going, and I like, you know,
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  I see a lot of these motivational speakers,
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  or, you know, some guy that made like, I don't know,
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  50 million or 100 million bucks, and you're like,
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  okay, and you don't know what's up, and they're like,
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  you know, giving lessons to the world, and, you know,
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  okay, you know, I don't come from that side.
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  For me, firstly, I'm lazy, okay, I, you know,
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  yes, I'm an alternative asset manager.
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  Any intern at Brookfield KKR, CarLalcan,
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  I now asset manage me any day over the week, okay?
• 9:18
  That's, that's not, you know, that's not my forte.
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  You know, I remember when I was young,
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  you know, I even wanted to get hired by guys like that.
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  They wouldn't even let me into like the office,
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  or if I got in, you know, I've never been able to get hired anywhere.
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  I tried, honestly, I really did.
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  You know, and I went to a nice school.
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  I went to university in London.
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  I used to love London, by the way, and, you know,
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  I went to London in the 90s.
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  That was like boomtown in London, you know,
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  that was a Soviet Union in collapse.
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  So like, we had the wave of all the Russian oligarchs coming in,
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  and all of them came in.
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  And you had the Chinese flow, right?
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  You had the Arab, the Gulf money.
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  So it was really, you know, you had an oasis,
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  and, you know, all the crazy things of London,
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  and, you know, and it was a kind of vibing town.
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  I mean, I used to love London,
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  and, you know, I went to a good school.
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  I studied at first at Regions Business School,
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  then at London School of Economics.
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  And, um,
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  but London really, for me, um, you know, it was, uh,
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  I understood that the value of network and people
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  is important.
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  And I don't mean by network, like saying,
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  how I just met you and added you to my roller dex.
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  I'm saying, you know, real connections.
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  And during those years, a lot of my classmates was, you know,
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  the crown prince of, uh, you know, in Indonesia.
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  And, uh, you know, and, uh,
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  world family guys from the, you know, from,
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  from, from the Gulf.
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  And, you know, and so it was really like,
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  those were the crowds that, you know,
• 11:09
  uh, were around me at, definitely at Regions,
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  and definitely at LSC, and definitely in like the,
• 11:15
  the London scene at the time, you know,
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  and, um, so, uh, I connected very much on a personal level.
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  I'm not a fake kind of guy, you know,
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  I'm not the kind of person that, you know,
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  if I don't enjoy someone's company,
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  I, I, I, I, I smile and I move, you know,
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  uh, I'm not confrontational in any way,
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  but, um, you know, I only stick around where it's good energy.
• 11:40
  Uh, I've always been like that.
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  And for me, um, I was,
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  I've always been trying to reach a good life,
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  even from a young age, right?
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  It was never for me about, you know,
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  building an empire or seeing my name on a building
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  or having a big, beautiful, uh, you know,
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  business that's gonna last for a hundred years.
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  I never cared about that.
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  I still don't.
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  When you look, when you look at what a good life is,
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  how do you, how did you define a good life?
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  Then because again, you didn't have a,
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  a quote unquote bad life growing up.
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  Your dad worked hard.
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  You had some periods that were a little bit more affluent.
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  Some periods that were less.
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  So in your mind, what was a good life?
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  Peaceful ability to be free.
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  Um, to be able to go where I wanted to go.
• 12:30
  Um, not have the, you know, restrictions of not having, uh,
• 12:35
  the funds to do what I wanted to do.
• 12:38
  I think that freedom was a big part of it.
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  But, you know, I wanted to enjoy it.
• 12:43
  You know, when I used to go, uh, you know, I made,
• 12:47
  I got, I got, I don't know if it was lucky.
• 12:49
  I definitely lucky.
• 12:50
  Sorry, but I don't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing,
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  but at the age of, you know, 21, 22,
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  I made, you know, a little money.
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  I made, you know, my, my first million bucks.
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  And, um,
• 13:05
  ever since then, you know, I, I haven't gone below that,
• 13:09
  that sort of threshold, right?
• 13:12
  And, um,
• 13:15
  it enabled me.
• 13:16
  I didn't, you know, when I made it, I didn't go the next day and say,
• 13:19
  okay, what's my next venture?
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  I went to LA.
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  I stayed at the region.
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  I fully well share.
• 13:24
  I, you know, I, I dated, you know, nice pretty girls.
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  I bought beautiful suits.
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  Wasn't about flash.
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  It was just, I wanted, uh, you wanted a good life.
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  I wanted a good life.
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  I woke up in the morning.
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  I go for a walk around, you know, I don't know,
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  wherever Beverly Hills or,
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  you know, uh, Hong Kong, London, you know,
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  I traveled, you know,
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  wherever I wanted.
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  And I, I wanted to live a healthy life.
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  You know, I never,
• 13:55
  I never drank alcohol.
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  I never, you know, did drugs or that,
• 13:58
  you know, that was never my thing.
• 14:01
  But I wanted to have a nice, peaceful, good life.
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  And, um, and I was fortunate that I, you know,
• 14:08
  took a glimpse of some people that I noticed around me
• 14:12
  that I thought lived a good life.
• 14:14
  And, you know, and I saw that there was times for making money.
• 14:18
  And, but it's not all about that.
• 14:21
  Just to take it back to that, because obviously,
• 14:24
  like, I mean, there's so many milestones and accomplishments
• 14:27
  over your career.
• 14:27
  But I think that the first one is very interesting.
• 14:29
  So coming out of school,
• 14:31
  you, you know, you just said you were unemployable.
• 14:35
  I actually, yeah, I was,
• 14:36
  it was weird because everybody else got like, you know,
• 14:39
  the high-fancy goldman jobs.
• 14:41
  I don't know, it's only, I went to a good school
• 14:43
  if you did some of those.
• 14:44
  Yeah, you guys remember,
• 14:45
  LSC was, you know, regarded, I guess,
• 14:47
  the Harvard Business School of Europe, right?
• 14:49
  So it was considered, I mean, definitely,
• 14:51
  we're until today.
• 14:52
  It's one of the top schools.
• 14:55
  I didn't finish because,
• 14:58
  I'll tell you, I remember, I'll never forget.
• 15:01
  What was it?
• 15:03
  1994.
• 15:06
  Yeah, it was right before my,
• 15:07
  I think it was right before my 21st birthday
• 15:11
  or something like July.
• 15:13
  There it was July.
• 15:14
  In the summer, I turned, and my birthday is August.
• 15:16
  So in July of like 1994,
• 15:19
  Time Magazine published like this thing.
• 15:22
  And they said, like, I don't know,
• 15:24
  was it the strange new world of the internet, right?
• 15:27
  That was like, you know,
• 15:29
  weird, right?
• 15:30
  It sounds such a long time ago, right?
• 15:32
  And I was 20 years old.
• 15:36
  And I had met two guys that were engineers.
• 15:40
  They had worked at a company called Sun Microsystem.
• 15:44
  They were like in their 30s.
• 15:45
  I thought that was like so old at the time, you know?
• 15:48
  And they had this idea to take the American lottery system
• 15:55
  and basically place it online.
• 15:58
  You know, basically the lottery at the time was the first
• 16:01
  internet business, right?
• 16:03
  With, you know, basically an internet is
• 16:06
  a bunch of networks connected to create.
• 16:08
  So the lottery system, you know,
• 16:10
  each terminal connects to the other.
• 16:11
  So in retrospect, it was really the first
• 16:15
  internet operating business.
• 16:16
  Anyways, they thought it would be really cool.
• 16:20
  We did, if, you know,
• 16:22
  somebody in London can buy a New York state lottery ticket, right?
• 16:27
  So we all kind of made this company together.
• 16:31
  And that was during the summer, you know,
• 16:35
  time magazine, you know,
• 16:37
  did that.
• 16:37
  That was what we did over the summer.
• 16:39
  And oddly enough, it was so weird.
• 16:43
  Florida State was the only state
• 16:46
  that allowed us to play with the terminal
• 16:48
  because we actually needed a terminal.
• 16:50
  And that summer in 94, I was in Florida.
• 16:55
  And we had some real shithole place above some, you know, above, above,
• 17:01
  above like a true startup, true startup.
• 17:03
  Yeah, with that background, true startup,
• 17:05
  we rented this place and we had a terminal,
• 17:09
  an actual terminal and the engineers were
• 17:12
  ripped at a part.
• 17:13
  I sort of, anybody, you know, from the lottery that came in,
• 17:16
  they thought we were going to like hack in.
• 17:17
  I mean, I'm telling you, like, wires all over the place.
• 17:21
  You know, it was horrible.
• 17:22
  It looked like we were trying to like hack the lottery.
• 17:26
  But they were working.
• 17:27
  I wasn't an engineer.
• 17:29
  And my, my role was mostly at that time, you know,
• 17:34
  the idea and to try to, you know,
• 17:37
  I got us that deal with Florida to allow us.
• 17:40
  And, you know, even silly things,
• 17:43
  rent the office or find the location.
• 17:45
  And we had a lawyer in New York.
• 17:49
  And we had filed patents
• 17:52
  that they weren't even yet approved.
• 17:54
  And our lawyer in New York called us up one day
• 17:57
  and said,
• 18:00
  somebody wants to buy this for like, you know, $1.8 million.
• 18:05
  We were like eight months into it or something.
• 18:07
  You know, it was really early days.
• 18:09
  They see young kids, you know, doing stuff lottery.
• 18:13
  We owned the domain lottery.com
• 18:15
  where we literally just bought it off, you know,
• 18:18
  I think it was network solutions or something.
• 18:20
  Somebody sees what you're building.
• 18:21
  They see the time magazine article at that time.
• 18:23
  It was all exactly.
• 18:24
  It was like that.
• 18:25
  And the lawyer facilitated the transaction.
• 18:30
  Took 400 grand for himself.
• 18:32
  Good lawyer.
• 18:33
  Yeah, good lawyer.
• 18:34
  And the rest we split.
• 18:37
  And we sold that company and all of a sudden,
• 18:41
  you know, I go back to London that, you know, 21 years old, more or less.
• 18:45
  And, you know, we're around 600 grand.
• 18:50
  And this is like, you know, long time ago.
• 18:52
  So when you had BVI companies and, you know, bank accounts,
• 18:56
  there was no, none of that thing.
• 18:59
  So it was a lot easier, you know,
• 19:01
  to transfer capital from banks to banks and all that.
• 19:05
  And I moved back to London.
• 19:07
  And my friend did lovely guy comes from a wealthy Indian family.
• 19:14
  They had just built at the time of a beautiful hotel in Holland Park.
• 19:18
  I remember called the Halsey and still love it.
• 19:21
  It's like in a nice area of London.
• 19:23
  Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful hotel.
• 19:25
  And I took a suite there and I lived there for about a year.
• 19:29
  And I took another suite next door.
• 19:32
  And that was sort of like, I don't know, maybe an office or something like that.
• 19:35
  I got a really good deal.
• 19:37
  And I lived there for like a year.
• 19:40
  And I loved London.
• 19:41
  And, you know, I bought beautiful suits and I'd walk around and I'd go to the nice restaurants.
• 19:47
  And my friends from school, that LSE,
• 19:52
  and I just was very difficult for me to go back to school.
• 19:56
  When, you know, I had like $600,000, which at the time, you know,
• 20:01
  I got a lot of money.
• 20:02
  I thought I was, you know, Bill Gates.
• 20:04
  And, you know, and that kind of sparked off, I guess, you know,
• 20:12
  the trend for me, you know, because you were still at this point.
• 20:17
  I mean, that first venture, your peer operator.
• 20:19
  I was an entrepreneur.
• 20:21
  I was an entrepreneur up until around 26, 27, until I learned the other side.
• 20:27
  Because if I'm looking at sort of what you've done uniquely,
• 20:30
  so you build these bridges between all these different parts of the world.
• 20:34
  And that's how you facilitate these deals.
• 20:37
  And you had exposure to that in London because you're mentioning that you had all these peers,
• 20:42
  but you didn't dive into that world right away.
• 20:45
  So that sort of planted a seed.
• 20:46
  I was misled, you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs today,
• 20:51
  and I look at the stuff that's online, you know,
• 20:53
  and I think there's a lot of, how do I say this without?
• 20:59
  There's a lot of bullshit.
• 21:00
  That's exactly how you say it.
• 21:03
  You know, and I see, you know, I see like intelligent people.
• 21:08
  And I don't know if they're doing it for their persona or, you know,
• 21:11
  just to sometimes they're either ego or, you know, just sometimes, you know,
• 21:15
  but there was a difference between, do you want to make money?
• 21:22
  Do you want to build something or, I don't know, for me?
• 21:28
  I wanted to make money.
• 21:30
  When I worked, it was about making money.
• 21:32
  It wasn't about, for me, it wasn't about changing the world.
• 21:37
  I'm not here to, you know, I was saying, where, you know, where is the money?
• 21:42
  And for guys like me, we look where the money is, right?
• 21:47
  So if there's money moving in Africa, then guess what?
• 21:50
  I'm on a plane in Angola.
• 21:52
  What do I do in Angola?
• 21:53
  No fucking idea, but I'll go sit there in the hotel in Angola.
• 21:56
  There's not many, certainly not back then.
• 22:00
  And you'd be surprised, you know, all of a sudden you start meeting some people in Angola.
• 22:05
  And I've been in Angola, Kazakhstan, Mongolia.
• 22:08
  I've been to like, you know, a lot of these, you know, distant places,
• 22:12
  but I'm going forward.
• 22:15
  I know that's an interesting point.
• 22:16
  So you discovered, and I think that's actually a really valuable lesson.
• 22:20
  You have to understand what you're actually building for, or what you want in your life,
• 22:23
  or what you're optimizing for.
• 22:25
  And you know, you're alluding to a point that a lot of entrepreneurs chase.
• 22:29
  I don't even think they know what they're chasing.
• 22:31
  They're chasing money.
• 22:32
  Yeah, I think they're chasing money, but they're doing it in a roundabout way,
• 22:35
  is what I'm saying.
• 22:36
  Because they're taught that like, oh, you're going to build a company,
• 22:39
  you know, you're going to raise capital, you're going to up the valuation.
• 22:43
  Why do, you know, you raise, as a startup guy, you have to raise capital,
• 22:47
  not because you need it, because you're basically manipulating the price per equity, right?
• 22:51
  You know, you open up a company, it's a dollar of shares.
• 22:54
  They do around, now it's $5 a share.
• 22:56
  I do another round, now it's $10 a share.
• 22:58
  You're basically mad.
• 22:58
  You don't sell companies.
• 22:59
  You sell your equity and companies.
• 23:02
  And, and, and everyone's taught, then you could dilute it,
• 23:06
  and you get this board, and you do VC, and then all they are, they're strategic.
• 23:10
  And you go this like this rabbit hole, and I just, you know,
• 23:16
  how do I make money?
• 23:17
  What I've got to wait for like Google to buy me, you know, or, you know,
• 23:20
  because cash flow, I mean, certainly not in the 20, in the early 2000s, and, you know,
• 23:25
  nobody's making cash flow.
• 23:27
  And even today, you know, you see guys with, I don't know, 10 million or 20 million,
• 23:31
  you know, even in the crater economy world that you're in, you see guys with 10 million,
• 23:37
  20 million, you know, followers across their audience.
• 23:40
  Okay, they're making five, six, seven, eight, 10 million dollars a year.
• 23:43
  Not knocking it, cool.
• 23:45
  You know, but the platforms with this, you know, they're making the real money, right?
• 23:52
  And, and also just one more thing that I notice with, with founders, I mean,
• 23:56
  if you don't know what you're doing,
• 23:58
  it doesn't matter what the valuation of the companies, if you're giving up too much of it,
• 24:02
  especially at the beginning, like you don't end up with a huge check.
• 24:05
  You know, I disagree with that, but I tell you why, why?
• 24:09
  When you're in the ground, ground operator, you know things that you're bored or you're
• 24:15
  shareholders don't know.
• 24:18
  The most important thing is if it's your company you're in the ground,
• 24:22
  I believe very much in negotiations and talking, I'm a deal maker.
• 24:27
  And, you know, I have a close friend and we've been friends for about 30 years.
• 24:35
  He's worth today, I don't know, according to Forbes, nine, 10 billion or something like that.
• 24:40
  I never met him broke.
• 24:41
  Even when we were young, I think I was, when we met, I think I was 23 and he was 26.
• 24:47
  And even back then, he had like, I don't know, 30, 40 million in cash flow of about a million a month,
• 24:53
  okay?
• 24:53
  He was in online gaming.
• 24:57
  Really one of the pioneers.
• 24:59
  Anyways, when he IPOed his company for, he was one of the first to IPO on the London exchange
• 25:08
  for about a billion pounds.
• 25:11
  Two months before the IPO, he had owned less than 15% of the company.
• 25:17
  By the time it IPOed, he owned 82%.
• 25:22
  He was the operator, he was the ground level.
• 25:25
  I think there's a lot of overemphasis on how much equity do I get?
• 25:32
  You give me a big company, give me one percent, okay?
• 25:36
  Let it sell for a billion dollars.
• 25:37
  I guarantee you I'll get more than my one percent, right?
• 25:41
  In this way.
• 25:43
  So, it's how much you're on the ground, how much, you know, you know, what's going to happen.
• 25:47
  You get the news, right?
• 25:49
  Data is goal.
• 25:50
  So, if you know the information before, you can always structure different deals for yourself.
• 25:58
  You know, there's guys that sold companies to Google.
• 26:04
  I'll tell you a funny story, you know.
• 26:08
  In 2010, I was like around 2010, 11, I was 35.
• 26:14
  I was single until 35.
• 26:17
  And 35, I moved to like the seaside town to have a nice summer.
• 26:24
  Took a beautiful house in a nice kind of area on the beach and all I did was, you know,
• 26:29
  I don't know, fish and workout and swim and no work and none of that stuff.
• 26:33
  I decided to take a year off.
• 26:36
  I had been working in Beijing for a long time.
• 26:39
  I was living in Beijing for about six, seven years.
• 26:42
  It's a tough place to live.
• 26:44
  And one of the neighbors, all of a sudden, brings over this company, says,
• 26:51
  there's this company that's really great.
• 26:53
  The CEO is really great.
• 26:54
  Everybody's really great, you know, and they're having a tough time.
• 26:57
  They're doing a down-round.
• 26:58
  They need like $1.5 million.
• 27:01
  And we can, you know, I'm going to do 750.
• 27:04
  You do 750.
• 27:06
  Let's jump on it.
• 27:07
  We can take a bundle.
• 27:09
  And so the CEO of Ways comes over and, you know, shows Jerry.
• 27:17
  No, the other one.
• 27:17
  I was later on the new guys.
• 27:20
  Yeah, yeah.
• 27:21
  And they switched everything around.
• 27:23
  I think his name was Noam.
• 27:26
  And it's pretty embarrassing, but they showed me, I wasn't in the mind frame.
• 27:35
  You know, I'm like without a shirt, you know, I'm going on the beach.
• 27:38
  You know, I wasn't in that mind frame.
• 27:40
  I had made a lot of money at the time in Hong Kong.
• 27:44
  And I was partners with the QIA, the Katai Investment Authority.
• 27:50
  A Prime Minister was, you know, one of my closest mentors at the time.
• 27:56
  And, you know, I said, let me look at the logo.
• 28:01
  And the logo he got admit looks like a pretty shitty logo, right?
• 28:06
  You know, it's like that funny looking cartoon with cars.
• 28:09
  And I said, that doesn't look like an international kind of logo that's going to be everywhere.
• 28:13
  You know, not for me, right?
• 28:16
  And I backed out of that, you know, I love Ways.
• 28:20
  I used Ways all the time.
• 28:22
  I came here by Ways, right?
• 28:24
  And I got out of it because of the logo.
• 28:27
  The logo, it happened to me twice also with Snapchat, by the way.
• 28:30
  I didn't like the logo as well.
• 28:34
  I don't know how to invest.
• 28:35
  That's not my thing, you know.
• 28:37
  And once again, I'm not an investor.
• 28:40
  That's not my thing.
• 28:41
  But I passed on that Ways thing.
• 28:45
  Years later, you know, they sold for 1.1 billion.
• 28:51
  So they get that street cred that, you know,
• 28:54
  Google bought me for 1.1 billion and blah, blah, blah.
• 28:57
  You know, he's going to South by Southwest with all the
• 29:01
  speaking to all the young generation and how to build himself.
• 29:04
  And he built the magnificent company, an amazing product.
• 29:08
  I think it's fantastic.
• 29:11
  But out of that 1.1 billion, he took 27 million.
• 29:15
  And if I remember correctly, his payout was over four years.
• 29:19
  And then he had to go work at Google.
• 29:22
  The neighbor friend of mine that did the deal took about 80 million,
• 29:26
  you know, from day one.
• 29:29
  So he took out 80 million, the founder who, you know,
• 29:34
  lost his hair, lost his stress.
• 29:36
  I don't know his wife.
• 29:37
  I don't know when through all the shit that you have to
• 29:40
  sells for 1.1 billion and kept 27 million.
• 29:49
  I understood that's not a businessman.
• 29:53
  That's not a businessman, you know.
• 29:55
  And I never wanted to be stuck and reliant on that.
• 30:03
  So, you know, I've had situations before that that I learned.
• 30:11
  I think or things done to me that, you know,
• 30:15
  where the money really is being made and when where the money is being moved.
• 30:21
  At the age of, you know, I tell you, you know, when I was living in London,
• 30:28
  after I had that lottery thing, the money, you know,
• 30:32
  went pretty quick with me.
• 30:35
  And the next venture we had in at the Halcyon Hotel,
• 30:41
  we'd buy, you know, the .co.uk domains had just come up.
• 30:44
  And I didn't really know what the hell to do.
• 30:47
  But I would bring in all the, you know,
• 30:49
  the guys that were still, all my friends that were still in school during their last year.
• 30:54
  And they'd come in and we'd buy .co.uk domains.
• 30:57
  Nobody was buying them.
• 30:58
  I'm telling you every, you know, blue.co.uk.
• 31:01
  So the dream guys, we believed in that, you know,
• 31:03
  nobody was buying .co.uk and we bought a bunch of the .co.uk's.
• 31:08
  And then we figured out that, you know,
• 31:10
  can we implement Spanish names on the .coms, you know,
• 31:14
  like .todosandos.com and this, nobody was really doing that in 96, 97, you know.
• 31:20
  So we do, in fact, then used to buy bulk of like 100 domains for like three bucks.
• 31:24
  I mean, it was really like, you know, it was really cheap.
• 31:28
  And we just buy domains, or we didn't really know what to do.
• 31:31
  I'm a kid.
• 31:34
  And after, I don't know, about a year and a half of going through everything,
• 31:39
  I sold that entity for about 2.2 million pounds.
• 31:44
  And all of a sudden, you know, the tank of gas is full up.
• 31:48
  I'm now at 2.2 million.
• 31:51
  And there was a name around, you know, London,
• 31:56
  like, you know, what does this guy OD do?
• 31:58
  And, you know, they stuck me with internet.
• 32:00
  He does stuff with internet.
• 32:02
  I wasn't an engineer, but it kind of stuck, you know,
• 32:07
  when people see me out and I'm still friends with that network.
• 32:11
  And, you know, and I'm not like an extra vote.
• 32:16
  Yeah, I don't go to nightclubs.
• 32:17
  I never did.
• 32:19
  I just don't really find that fun.
• 32:21
  But, you know, if it was, I enjoy going for long walks at the park or the beach.
• 32:28
  And, you know, having dinner is here and there.
• 32:30
  But my network was always really specific.
• 32:36
  And I had, you know, been fortunate enough to meet and, you know,
• 32:42
  really befriend guys during before they became big guys, right?
• 32:47
  So when the Crown Prince of certain country was a kid, you know,
• 32:50
  he, not too many people knew who he was and today, you know, when he has this.
• 32:54
  So I had, it was a, it was a timing thing.
• 32:58
  And when I sold not for like 2.2, all of a sudden, people are like around London saying,
• 33:04
  you know, can I give you a million pounds and you do something like I don't know.
• 33:08
  They don't even know what they're even at the house going on.
• 33:11
  But I had this like thing that I'm a successful reputation.
• 33:14
  You have two exits.
• 33:14
  Pretty, yeah, exits.
• 33:16
  Yeah, it's two million bucks and think, you know, they're still very young.
• 33:19
  But, but I, you know, and I'm, I'm still, you know,
• 33:24
  25 years old, 20, you know, more or less 25 years old.
• 33:32
  Hong Kong.
• 33:34
  Is home to me was always home.
• 33:36
  I'm from Hong Kong.
• 33:38
  So London was cool.
• 33:40
  But, you know, I started traveling to Hong Kong.
• 33:47
  I managed to like raise about six, seven, I don't know, eight million pounds or something like
• 33:56
  that, you know, half a million here like that.
• 33:58
  I never worked for it in the sense that I never went to pitch.
• 34:02
  I didn't have a deck.
• 34:02
  It was people coming to your reputation.
• 34:05
  What were you, so what were you raising for at that point?
• 34:08
  People telling me, can you invest it for me?
• 34:11
  That was pretty much how they came to me.
• 34:12
  So it wasn't formal.
• 34:13
  Like you didn't start it.
• 34:14
  I don't.
• 34:15
  You're not there.
• 34:15
  I had a company.
• 34:16
  I called it Cino Sheen.
• 34:19
  It was a shelf company that I took from the guy in Hong Kong that was ready off the shelf
• 34:24
  with an existing bank account.
• 34:25
  But I can have the funds coming in.
• 34:29
  Basic structure.
• 34:30
  You guys put in the money.
• 34:32
  Anything above.
• 34:33
  We're 50-50.
• 34:34
  No management fees.
• 34:36
  No none of that stuff.
• 34:38
  No deal fees.
• 34:39
  I didn't know about those things.
• 34:43
  With this kind of people, you don't really think I'm going to take a salary or anything like that.
• 34:49
  You're comfortable.
• 34:52
  I went to Hong Kong.
• 34:53
  The internet thing in Hong Kong started in China started slowly coming up.
• 35:04
  Like these big companies, Cina Sohu, later on Tencent, we know WeChat, Baidu.
• 35:12
  Of course, the great Jack Ma, and Beijing at the time, was a real small town.
• 35:20
  I was writing you new Jack Ma before.
• 35:23
  I knew all those guys before because it was like a small town.
• 35:27
  Not too many.
• 35:28
  And I was the only foreigner in Beijing doing this kind of stuff.
• 35:34
  There was nobody else there.
• 35:35
  There was no Sequoia or Excel.
• 35:38
  Nobody there.
• 35:39
  It was just me.
• 35:41
  And the community was small.
• 35:44
  My lawyer at the time, Rocky Lee, who was awesome, he was very...
• 35:51
  We were all the same age.
• 35:54
  And we kind of just all became friends.
• 36:00
  When I raised the capital, I had loose heads.
• 36:06
  So I had a family in here, a family in here.
• 36:09
  Started throwing it around.
• 36:12
  Reason is, because I'm a foreigner at the end of the day.
• 36:15
  No matter how much I'm from China, I'm from Hong Kong.
• 36:18
  I'm Chinese.
• 36:19
  I really, you know, I just don't look it, but I'm Chinese.
• 36:24
  My lawyer in my country, I feel very at home in Hong Kong.
• 36:30
  But still, because I don't look Chinese,
• 36:34
  you know, my strategy was always how am I going to get access to deals, right?
• 36:38
  So I got to be the guy that's throwing cash out.
• 36:42
  If they hear this, it's crazy guy that's throwing a lot of cash out,
• 36:46
  then all of a sudden, people start coming, right?
• 36:48
  You know, there's a guy hanging out, you know,
• 36:51
  you just go to his hotel, you know, he's at his hotel,
• 36:53
  and you know, if everything is okay, you're just going to give you a million dollars.
• 36:58
  And I built that sort of thing for me, you know, a long time ago.
• 37:01
  A lot of the people I work with today remember me from back then,
• 37:04
  is this guy that started throwing cash around.
• 37:07
  But I knew I was building my, you know, building my network.
• 37:10
  That's a very interesting way to build a network though, because obviously,
• 37:14
  there could be massive amount of risk and just throwing capital around.
• 37:18
  It's not like you had like an investment thesis.
• 37:20
  It's nothing like that stuff.
• 37:21
  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, investment thesis.
• 37:24
  No, nothing started throwing cash around.
• 37:26
  But we did about a 16X, about a year and a half even later.
• 37:30
  It was crazy.
• 37:31
  A lot of these companies, a lot of the bankers started coming,
• 37:34
  you know, credit Swiss, the JP,
• 37:36
  all these guys started coming and picking up all these Chinese assets
• 37:41
  and dumping them on the NASDAQ, you know, taking a two to three percent investment banking fees.
• 37:46
  And then they let them, you know, swim for themselves on the NASDAQ,
• 37:51
  which is pretty tough because in the NASDAQ, you had, you know,
• 37:55
  Microsoft, this, you know, Oracle is and who the hell knows what's, you know,
• 37:59
  so who are this is, right?
• 38:00
  So they had to fend off.
• 38:01
  But the bankers took all their fees, made billions up the valuations.
• 38:06
  I mean, you at that time, there was no more than like 40 million people online in China.
• 38:10
  Nobody was profitable.
• 38:12
  Nobody was making money, you know,
• 38:15
  CPA, click rates, all this.
• 38:16
  It was pennies.
• 38:17
  I mean, they weren't even in the States.
• 38:19
  I mean, nobody was making any money.
• 38:21
  But, you know, gold, the sudden, I don't know, Goldman or whatever credit or whatever started
• 38:26
  saying it's worth two billion dollars and, you know, and manipulates valuations
• 38:30
  and dumps it on the NASDAQ at two billion.
• 38:33
  They're commissions and, you know, now you got to fend for yourself.
• 38:37
  So that was what was happening a lot, you know, and, and after I, you know,
• 38:44
  everybody made a lot of return, I remember it was like something like,
• 38:50
  I don't know, I had almost like close to 40, 50 million or something like that.
• 38:55
  And I'm still relatively young.
• 38:58
  But I don't want to be an investment manager.
• 39:01
  It's not, it's not fun.
• 39:03
  So I made a huge mistake, which was the classic thing that everybody told me and, you know,
• 39:10
  I remember the time that was when the news core purchased my space for like five.
• 39:15
  So all of a sudden news core purchase is like my space for like 500 or something million
• 39:20
  dollars and we all were like, boom, 500 million dollars.
• 39:25
  That's what the, you know, that was a big thing back then.
• 39:28
  Today it's like nothing, but back then that was a big thing.
• 39:33
  So I had a, I had made a, you know, I had made a lot of money.
• 39:39
  I was young still.
• 39:41
  I had a lot of money behind me as well and in my own.
• 39:47
  And I saw what these Chinese entities were getting valuation wise.
• 39:53
  You know, like all these, the scene or so, who by dude, right.
• 39:58
  Amazing companies, amazing.
• 40:00
  But at the end of the day, China operates as, you know, the China internet landscape.
• 40:06
  You had still, you know, 44, 48% of online activity came from internet cafes.
• 40:14
  Nobody had computers at home.
• 40:17
  And, and everything was, you know, there were no Facebook.
• 40:21
  There was no, you know, or at least they were local, you know, counterparts if you will.
• 40:25
  So the Chinese government, you know, to set up an,
• 40:28
  and to set up a company in mainland China, you can't as a foreigner until today.
• 40:34
  You have to structure a wolfie, which is a wholly owned foreign entity,
• 40:38
  which is basically out of Hong Kong.
• 40:41
  That company can hold a certain amount of equity in a local company,
• 40:44
  but still it has to have a local own majority.
• 40:49
  And you can start operating like that.
• 40:52
  So a lot of the public companies like Yahoo, this, or, you know,
• 40:56
  how do you convince your board?
• 40:58
  Let's enter China.
• 41:00
  We will put our IPs and we're going to invest billions, but we don't own it.
• 41:05
  All right.
• 41:06
  So a lot of them couldn't.
• 41:08
  So Yahoo made a wonderful deal.
• 41:10
  You know, they invested in Alibaba.
• 41:12
  They turned out successful.
• 41:13
  But everybody else had all of a sudden the local counterpart,
• 41:18
  basically copycat their product with the support of the PRC.
• 41:27
  And, you know, sorry, everything that was happening in the West was getting
• 41:32
  duplicated in the far east.
• 41:34
  By the way, is that rule still still holds today?
• 41:37
  What rule?
• 41:38
  The rule that you cannot as a, as a westerner own a China and own a company in China?
• 41:44
  Yes, of course.
• 41:45
  I didn't know that.
• 41:47
  So if you want to, if you want to, so this is still why, as a western company,
• 41:52
  it's not easy to get into China.
• 41:53
  Because again, you're still risking that you're giving your IP to something that's not even,
• 41:57
  what's not easy?
• 41:58
  Well, you know, you go, go, go get a lawyer, get the big law firm.
• 42:01
  Still, yeah, I'm a structure.
• 42:02
  You some holdings, you know, and they'll get you a local person and you'll pay a little bit more.
• 42:08
  And, you know, they'll be back to back agreements.
• 42:10
  You'll be fine.
• 42:12
  But the actual ownership will be held by a local and the bank account and signatories and all that type of stuff.
• 42:21
  You won't be able to have it.
• 42:23
  Hong Kong is different, obviously, but not in mainland China.
• 42:27
  So I saw all this, you know, people doing it and I said, okay, great.
• 42:31
  I'm going to go copy Craigslist.
• 42:35
  I'm going to go copy, you know, MySpace.
• 42:38
  I'm going to go copy, you know, YouTube and all this type of stuff.
• 42:42
  And I'm going to go copy all of that for for mainland China.
• 42:47
  And I moved to Beijing and this is like early, early, you know, early on.
• 42:53
  And I decided to stop being, you know, an investment guy.
• 42:58
  Even though I had an amazing, you know, everybody was like, no, what do you do it?
• 43:03
  I mean, I thought that was the right move to do.
• 43:10
  And I was disregarding my talent.
• 43:13
  My talent was raising capital.
• 43:16
  You know, it was good at packaging, but I thought that was the way.
• 43:21
  That was what people tell you to do.
• 43:23
  I still see people say the same nonsense on, you know, on social media and YouTube.
• 43:27
  You know, oh, you've got to have the passion or you've got to,
• 43:31
  forget me for saying, I don't know, for me, that never worked, never.
• 43:37
  And I went into China.
• 43:38
  I went into Beijing.
• 43:39
  I set up office.
• 43:41
  I don't speak Mandarin of you until today.
• 43:45
  I moved in and I stayed at the hotel.
• 43:49
  There was nobody at the hotel.
• 43:50
  China likes to build like thousands hotels, but like, there's nobody there.
• 43:55
  I just, I stayed in the sec 500 room hotel.
• 43:57
  I think there was maybe three people there, okay?
• 44:00
  It was awesome.
• 44:01
  You know, I lived in a hotel for like a year.
• 44:04
  And one of the guys at the front desk, Chen Chi,
• 44:08
  I spoke great English, became my brother from another mother.
• 44:13
  And, you know, he later on turned into my right hand,
• 44:17
  my brother and my general manager for, I don't know, 12 years.
• 44:23
  He has two multi-billion dollar companies today
• 44:27
  trading on the Shanghai index.
• 44:30
  But back then, that's how I met him.
• 44:32
  And I said, leave the front desk and come and help me.
• 44:36
  Like, I don't know how to speak.
• 44:37
  I don't know how to rent a this.
• 44:38
  I need an engineer.
• 44:39
  I need this.
• 44:40
  Let's, you know, let's set up shop.
• 44:43
  And I set up shop and I hired a whole engineering team in an office.
• 44:47
  And, you know, but for like, you know, for 14 months,
• 44:53
  I was in Beijing.
• 44:54
  I didn't leave.
• 44:58
  No, it's, you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner by yourself for 14 months.
• 45:07
  And you think you're on this bigger purpose.
• 45:11
  But I was in it for money.
• 45:13
  Okay, that was, I thought this was the way to make the money.
• 45:19
  And I'm like, oh, and you need to spend all this time, you know, and it takes years.
• 45:28
  That's not true.
• 45:30
  That's really not true.
• 45:32
  It's a, it's a mask.
• 45:35
  You know, and I went and I, you know, set up and I had like, I don't know,
• 45:44
  200, 300 engineers and we were copying the shit out of everything that was in the West.
• 45:51
  And at the time, China was very much provincial.
• 45:55
  So there wasn't like one website that was for everything.
• 45:58
  But each province had like 60 million people.
• 46:00
  And I got almost two billion people there.
• 46:03
  So we did like a, like a Craigslist, if you will, for each province.
• 46:09
  And it was wonderful because I started gaining a lot of traffic.
• 46:13
  And then I did like a copycat of my space and then it had a copycat.
• 46:18
  It's video sharing and I had like 80 websites out in China,
• 46:24
  software, it's I even built a browser.
• 46:27
  And they had IE, if you remember, and mine was called IQ.
• 46:33
  And, you know, and but my IQ reached eight, I don't know, eight million users in its first two months.
• 46:40
  You know, how?
• 46:42
  I met the number one bootlegger for Microsoft Windows.
• 46:46
  And yeah, if anybody in China goes out and pays, I don't know, $300, $400 for their salt,
• 46:50
  right? I'll rip it off. It's all it's China.
• 46:52
  You know, you got it with the, you know, pirate movies, pirate this.
• 46:56
  It was a, I went and I met this guy through Chen.
• 47:00
  He introduced me to this really fat guy who's amazing actually,
• 47:05
  because I met him at this restaurant on the street eating noodles.
• 47:10
  And I gave him $250,000 in cash to basically on his next batch of, you know,
• 47:19
  Windows to remove IE and put IQ.
• 47:26
  And when he did that, he placed it all across internet cafes.
• 47:32
  And he, you know, he dispersed like, I don't know, like a hundred thousand of these around.
• 47:38
  So all of a sudden, the internet cafes, the users in China don't know what IE is,
• 47:44
  you know, they go in and all of a sudden they see something called IQ.
• 47:49
  And all of a sudden I had a lot of users from that.
• 47:52
  So I was, I had a bunch of platforms.
• 47:55
  And I was all of a sudden, you know, I had millions of users as the sector grew on my platforms.
• 48:03
  Millions, you know, tens of millions.
• 48:05
  So I mean, like you're saying, hindsight's 2020 and looking back,
• 48:09
  there's, that's not the easiest way to make money.
• 48:11
  But at the time, it's going very, very well.
• 48:13
  Why as well? My costs are up.
• 48:15
  Not generating any income.
• 48:16
  Expenses are through the roof, you know, on the metric of your growing,
• 48:22
  like you just said, what am I growing?
• 48:23
  Because I have more users, more viewers,
• 48:25
  which means more expenses, more money, more hosting, more this,
• 48:29
  more service, more China also works on a master's slave, you know,
• 48:33
  the structure rather than clustering.
• 48:36
  So everything is longer.
• 48:39
  And everything on that, but no money, right?
• 48:43
  So when all of a sudden, like the bankers or the VC started entering China and all my friends
• 48:51
  started getting venture funding or, you know, private equity funding,
• 48:55
  I didn't get a dollar.
• 48:57
  Nobody comes to China to invest in a Jewish boy stuck in China.
• 49:01
  That's not authentic.
• 49:03
  You know, it's kind of like, would you go to a sushi restaurant that the sushi chef is at
• 49:07
  in a Colombian? Would you feel authentic?
• 49:10
  Or Swedish?
• 49:12
  You feel like you don't think it's authentic?
• 49:13
  You say, I don't know, let's study sushi here.
• 49:15
  The sushi chef, he's got blonde hair and blue eyes.
• 49:19
  So when you go all the way to Beijing and you were looking to invest in, you know,
• 49:23
  even though I'm doing a lot better than a lot of my, you know, competitors,
• 49:29
  nobody gave me a dollar, no one.
• 49:32
  And, you know, we were burning a lot of money and,
• 49:38
  I flew to London because that was the place where I had like a reputation.
• 49:45
  And I went to go raise capital.
• 49:49
  I needed a lot of capital.
• 49:51
  I was growing.
• 49:52
  I had tens of millions of users on my platform.
• 49:55
  But nobody would invest in me like they did in all my, some of these big companies.
• 50:00
  I know them all, you know, and, you know, I remember even in China,
• 50:06
  internet at the time was very much like a war, right?
• 50:09
  It was like, it was like a battleground like, you know, a land grab,
• 50:17
  you know, and no rules because even though you have this idea,
• 50:21
  there could be other people that didn't use that same thing.
• 50:23
  I'll give you an idea when Gmail launched in China, right?
• 50:26
  The biggest email provider until today is 163, okay?
• 50:29
  163 is in that ease, right?
• 50:33
  I don't know, a couple of hundred billion dollar, wonderful.
• 50:36
  I know that when Gmail launched in China 163,
• 50:42
  so if you had a Gmail and I had a 163,
• 50:44
  if you sent me an email, I would never get it.
• 50:48
  That's what 163 did.
• 50:51
  So who the hell would, so Gmail had like no shot, none.
• 50:57
  And, you know, Google came, built this whole city there and everything.
• 51:01
  And left and left at a ghost town like eight months later.
• 51:05
  And the former CEO or head first employee of Google,
• 51:09
  I took him to be my CEO.
• 51:11
  And because he looked good on paper, I thought I can raise money on him.
• 51:19
  But he wasn't brilliant, Chen Qi was always the guy, my guy, my brother.
• 51:26
  I went to London.
• 51:31
  I was lucky enough I had this old English mentor in London, Elliot.
• 51:38
  Very special guy.
• 51:41
  Elliot managed billions of Saudi capital,
• 51:47
  Katari capital, used to own the American Embassy,
• 51:51
  and if you're familiar in Mayfair and London,
• 51:53
  used to own the Waldorf Astoria, tremendous man.
• 51:57
  Elliot
• 52:04
  suffered, he had cancer in the face.
• 52:08
  And they took like his jaw and his tongue, everything out.
• 52:14
  And he used to walk around with, you know, the surgical mask
• 52:17
  that we all learned during the pandemic.
• 52:20
  The press called him the phantom.
• 52:23
  He couldn't speak well because he had no tongue.
• 52:29
  But for some really weird fucked up reason,
• 52:32
  I could speak to him and understand him perfectly.
• 52:37
  And I used to spend days and days and days and days and hours at nights,
• 52:43
  and always with Elliot in his house.
• 52:45
  And he was like this master dealmaker,
• 52:50
  my whole other level.
• 52:53
  And he was classy.
• 52:55
  And you know, you ever see that movie, The Tom's Crown Affair?
• 52:58
  No, I didn't.
• 52:59
  Great movie.
• 53:00
  Watch it.
• 53:00
  Well, there was an original with Steve McQueen,
• 53:02
  and then they made one with Pierce Bros,
• 53:03
  and also pretty good.
• 53:05
  Where it's sad.
• 53:06
  He was cool.
• 53:07
  You know, before the cancer, it was
• 53:10
  handsome, beautiful, you know,
• 53:12
  Savile Rose suits and style and managing billions in the 80s.
• 53:17
  You know, like nobody was doing stuff like that.
• 53:20
  And golf and partners and it was just on another level.
• 53:25
  And he really kind of like, you know, schooled me.
• 53:31
  And we were talking about life and everything.
• 53:35
  In a chance off meeting,
• 53:37
  he told me to come to his office to meet the right hand
• 53:41
  advisor, senior advisor of the Prime Minister of Qatar.
• 53:48
  I really needed capital for I'm growing by every metric.
• 53:53
  Users time on site, all those things that back in the day
• 53:56
  they used to tell you is, means you're great.
• 53:59
  But I'm burning a lot of money a month.
• 54:02
  And I had a chance meeting with this guy,
• 54:07
  who was an international high-stakes steel maker.
• 54:18
  And make a long story short, I raised what I thought was,
• 54:23
  I raised $150 million, which at the time was considered a lot
• 54:30
  for my business in China, for all the whole thing.
• 54:34
  And, you know, for more or less a third of the company,
• 54:41
  I took $150 million and I went back to work.
• 54:48
  And, you know, when you raise capital, they teach you you have to scale.
• 54:51
  So basically, you know, everybody else, what do you do when you raise capital?
• 54:55
  You get another office, you hire more people because you have to justify the expense.
• 54:59
  The real justification is I just manipulated the share value
• 55:02
  because when I took $150 million and gave a third out,
• 55:04
  now my valuation is X.
• 55:06
  So on paper, everyone tell me how it is.
• 55:09
  Good job. Good job, you know.
• 55:11
  I only found out a lot later
• 55:17
  that the deal was, well, the Prime Minister invested $350 million for a third.
• 55:26
  But I got $150 million for a third.
• 55:29
  That's what I stirred.
• 55:31
  And they made $200 million on the day one that we signed.
• 55:36
  So they made $200 million, my mentor and his friend, $100 million each.
• 55:44
  But the day one that I got funding of $150, how long would have it taken me to make $200 million?
• 55:52
  A long time.
• 55:54
  And I would have had to work and build and IPO and dilutions and this.
• 56:01
  They structured a deal.
• 56:04
  I got what I wanted, right?
• 56:05
  I wanted $150 million.
• 56:07
  That was what they offered me, $150 million, whatever a third of the company.
• 56:14
  The Prime Minister, you know, they told him that $350 million is the cost.
• 56:19
  And he transferred and they kept $200 million they won.
• 56:25
  And on to the next, they did that in, I don't know, two months.
• 56:30
  So in two months, a couple of deal makers took $200 million.
• 56:36
  The $150 million didn't go to my pocket, right?
• 56:38
  I didn't take it and I don't give myself, I don't know, or I have to operate this.
• 56:44
  All right.
• 56:46
  And that's when I learned that there's something else happening here
• 56:51
  that I'm on the sucker side.
• 56:56
  That I'm not on, that I'm taking because 97, 98% I don't know what the right number 99,
• 57:02
  I don't know, depends where you say, all the startups fail.
• 57:05
  And one day I get called by the gentleman and says,
• 57:16
  I always used to do this, I used to be so annoying, I'm in Beijing,
• 57:19
  I'd be like, you need to be in Geneva tomorrow morning, you know?
• 57:22
  Well, like, as if I'm taking, like, as if I'm crossing the street.
• 57:25
  So in Geneva, there's a hotel called the Bo Revache.
• 57:30
  It's been there for like hundreds of years, beautiful, like, you know,
• 57:34
  historic hotel.
• 57:36
  But this hotel, I don't know, up until around, as far as I know,
• 57:40
  it's up until around 2011, 2012 is like the center of all golf deals, they're all there, okay?
• 57:48
  They don't have like, there are certain suites and the thing and you'd be surprised
• 57:53
  who's there? And it's, I'm telling you, everybody's there.
• 57:57
  Like you go in the lobby and you see the guys from the US,
• 58:01
  you see the big funds, you see the black stones, you see the, you see all of them, all of them waiting
• 58:06
  to get called up to go sit to somebody.
• 58:10
  And, and I was there, I called, he called me up, he said, right before, you're going to have
• 58:18
  one minute to shake his hand.
• 58:20
  Don't, don't, you know, don't do anything, just say thank you, nod, and he's going to go to the next one.
• 58:29
  So I basically flew me over to meet the prime minister, who was also the chairman of the QIA.
• 58:35
  The QIA at that time was the world's largest sobering fund with around 1.2, 1.4 trillion
• 58:42
  under management. Nobody had that cash back then.
• 58:46
  I stood in line, you know, I had my suit and everything here, side, you know, all that.
• 58:56
  And, you know, he walked by and only shook, shook my head. I don't know what, but I looked him
• 59:01
  in the eye and I don't know what, but I had it, I giggled.
• 59:08
  I don't know, that little giggle really changed my life. It was, he took a look at me like,
• 59:15
  why was I giggling? He gave me a little, kind of, little tap like that and then told me to continue
• 59:22
  walking with him. I spent the next three, four days with him having, you know, when he was
• 59:30
  time for lunch, he'd want to eat lunch with me. And we talked about it. We talked about China,
• 59:38
  we talked about this, we talked about that. And then he said to me, if you had unlimited
• 59:46
  capital, what would you do in China? It's difficult to say that to a 28, 29 year old guy.
• 59:56
  But I learned a lot and they sent me on a deal.
• 1:00:08
  And it didn't work, the deal that's specific, but it taught me and I changed careers then.
• 1:00:21
  I went on to purchase, in China, you had 80 percent, you know, content distribution networks,
• 1:00:28
  the infrastructure CDN networks. So roughly around 77, I don't know, 78 percent of it was owned
• 1:00:35
  by the PRC and the balance was by like five companies. I knew them because I was paying those
• 1:00:43
  companies, you know, large sums through my internet. And I said, if I purchased all of them
• 1:00:49
  and consolidated into one, it's a great buy. So he said, great, go for it. I said,
• 1:01:01
  they're not going to talk to me. So that's why I said, I need money. So look at
• 1:01:12
  the next day they sent me to Holland. They used to be do banking back then with Fordist bank.
• 1:01:19
  I sat with the, I walked into Fordist bank as if I don't know, as if I walked into like my mom's house.
• 1:01:25
  They were all waiting for me. They gave me a proof of funds that basically I had access to,
• 1:01:30
  you know, a lot of capital with my name on it, stamped the whole thing. I used to keep this
• 1:01:36
  piece of paper in my suit all the time. So anybody that doubted me has to be like, pal,
• 1:01:41
  yeah, anybody that said anything like, oh, I was, and I went to try to consolidate these deals.
• 1:01:50
  So I went to one by one, one by one, and I closed the, and if the company was worth 60 million,
• 1:01:56
  take 80 million. I'm doing a consolidation, right? One plus one is not two. One plus one is like three
• 1:02:02
  or four. This is the same as a rollup. Exactly it. I went all four. And then the last one, I think the
• 1:02:13
  company name was 21 VNET. I think he IPO'd later on in the NASDAQ. It was a guy called Joshua.
• 1:02:24
  He was difficult. I took him to dinner, took his wife to dinner. I did everything. I tried to
• 1:02:30
  close a deal. His company maybe was worth 110. I offered him like 150. But then what did I do?
• 1:02:40
  I wasn't just buying. I understood the deal. And all with, I took with the advice and the
• 1:02:47
  direction of all the mentors. I went to KPMG. I went to also, I think it was another firm called
• 1:02:56
  Hula Hen, Hula Kee in the States. And I said, give me a valuation on what is the consolidated value
• 1:03:06
  of all these entities. Forget that it cost me half a million bucks for each one of them,
• 1:03:13
  but it cost me about half a million bucks. And their consolidated value was roughly around both of
• 1:03:17
  them was roughly around 1.4, 1.5 billion. My cost to buy them all was around 550 million.
• 1:03:27
  So I said to me, okay, great. Let's arrange for your meeting in Doha. You'll present this to the
• 1:03:35
  QIA for 50% for 750 million. 1.4 is what they're saying is the consolidated. Half of it is 750
• 1:03:47
  more or less million. It cost you 500 million to do. And you're going to make 250 million on day
• 1:03:53
  of clothes. And you'll be a shareholder and you'll be partners with the QIA.
• 1:04:02
  I flew to Doha. Nobody wanted to come with me like on my team. Everybody, this was before, you know,
• 1:04:08
  UAE and Dubai became, it was a bit kind of, you know, scary for people to go to a country like that
• 1:04:16
  back then. But I wasn't scary. I was friends with the prime minister. I didn't have a kid,
• 1:04:22
  didn't have a wife, you know, and we had a special kind of, a special kind of friendship.
• 1:04:31
  And I went and they had like this, like a special hotel they put you in, like guests in that they
• 1:04:37
  put me in. And I'm waiting for my big presentation to the QIA. That's a pretty big thing. I'm not
• 1:04:50
  yet 30. I went and they all said great. So I said, holy shit, you know, I'm about to make 250 million
• 1:05:01
  and still own and I just couldn't convince Joshua to sell to me. That was the missing piece.
• 1:05:11
  That deal didn't happen. But I built a relationship with the QIA. I built a relationship with
• 1:05:19
  everybody and I understood that that's how you make money. Because if that, if I would have
• 1:05:27
  convinced Joshua, I would have made that 250 million dollars me, you know, six, eight weeks.
• 1:05:39
  It's also when I learned high stakes,
• 1:05:45
  structuring deal-making, whatever way you want to call it, only works if the other side has a deal-maker
• 1:05:55
  too. If not, it's kind of like being a boxer without an opponent. You're just shadow boxing.
• 1:06:05
  No deal can be done. I don't care what you're doing. If the other side doesn't have a deal-maker,
• 1:06:12
  only two deal-makers can do deals. One deal-maker alone, you got no one to play with.
• 1:06:21
  And I learned that.
• 1:06:26
  And then they decided to give me my first real fund. So they were okay that this didn't go through.
• 1:06:36
  They still trusted you. They liked me. They were curious about me.
• 1:06:42
  And my internet company, I was, you know, Chen and Naseel is running. I wasn't there anymore.
• 1:06:48
  I'm not an operator. I don't know how to do it. I think I don't enjoy it. I don't have
• 1:06:54
  leadership. I don't know how to tell. I walk into the office. I'm friends with cool with
• 1:06:58
  everybody. I'll hug people that you're not supposed to hug with. I'll give a high five. I'll grab
• 1:07:03
  somebody and go to lunch with them. I don't know how to do that. That's not my thing.
• 1:07:10
  And I never wanted it to be. And I didn't want to be in the office. I mean,
• 1:07:13
  it to make money. I want to go have a good life. I want to take my bucks and continue.
• 1:07:22
  But we opened up a real fund. Opened up a real structure.
• 1:07:28
  A management company, you know, management fees, deal fees, this fees.
• 1:07:34
  I took some of my mentors, placed them up as GPs with me. And the third
• 1:07:38
  how it is that when we eat, everybody needs to eat. And in 2000 was already 2006. I raised about
• 1:07:49
  900 something million dollars. If you want to be technically your first fund, that was my first
• 1:07:54
  debut straight up at a huge amount for a first fund. Huge amount for any fund at that time.
• 1:08:02
  For anybody. But what more was interesting wasn't the amount. It was the LP. It was that.
• 1:08:13
  And it put me in a different neighborhood. And what was really cool of them.
• 1:08:21
  If they showed me around, you know, they introduced me around. A lot. I've been to that
• 1:08:30
  Bo Rivage hotel. I know hundreds of times. I know it really well. I've been there a lot. And
• 1:08:37
  I met a huge people. Also in the Gulf. And when I met them all on a very kind of like,
• 1:08:47
  this is our guy in China. And it was a big thing for me. I took a lot of pride in it, you know. And
• 1:09:01
  I was younger. So I was a little arrogant. But certainly not to them. And then I wanted to do right.
• 1:09:12
  But I learned very quickly that. That I'm better at structuring deals between sensitive
• 1:09:29
  governments, specific people of that kind of caliber. And when I refer to specifics, you know,
• 1:09:38
  it's people that are in rare positions themselves. Through that, I later on dated a girl. I met in
• 1:09:52
  London. She had moved to London. And her father was a Russian oligarch, a famous one. No need for
• 1:10:00
  names, but it was a pretty big Russian oligarch. And she and I, she's one of my best friends until
• 1:10:11
  today. And she's married and kids. And I go, you know, to her for, I don't know, Russia,
• 1:10:20
  China dinner, I'm with them and her husband. And until today, she's probably one of my closest
• 1:10:27
  friends in the world. But for about 10 months, we were kind of like engaged. Okay. And she was
• 1:10:34
  psychotic. I love her. You know, she's she used to work with her father. So 50 security guards,
• 1:10:41
  you know, like the four telephones, you know, like she was the she was the the the the sun wasn't really
• 1:10:48
  involved in the bad family business. And she was. And she was like real bossy. And you know,
• 1:10:55
  I would fly to Hong Kong and all of a sudden, like two days later, she'd be at the hotel too. And
• 1:10:59
  I'm like, what are you doing? You know, she would I love her to death, but you know, she was just
• 1:11:03
  very bossy. And I love the father. But through her. And this was like, you know, this was the
• 1:11:13
  years that the oligarchs were really, you know, unloading a lot of capital and allowing entrance
• 1:11:22
  into the Russian market. And all of a sudden, my network, you know, working with the QIA,
• 1:11:29
  all of a sudden, you know, they knew that. And that provided me with a lot of, you know,
• 1:11:35
  sort of credibility that I'm able to kid things quiet. That sort of that was my, you know, that
• 1:11:45
  if they filtered me and if they, you know, gave me the okay, then they can also and also my
• 1:11:52
  relationship with with my fiancee at the time. I learned a little bit of Russian. I spent a
• 1:12:03
  lot of time in Ukraine, Kiev and Moscow and some weird places that you know, you didn't even
• 1:12:09
  know existed. Is this around, this is still around the time when you have that $900 million
• 1:12:13
  if I go 900 million, I got company in China. And but I'm making more money off structuring
• 1:12:25
  funds between oligarchs and the Gulf. There was a lot of deals, oil, a lot of oil, petroleum,
• 1:12:34
  crude, there was a lot of fun deals. And when you structure deals, you know, on that level
• 1:12:43
  and you know, these were still like, you know, blackberry Nokia years, okay. And so it's not like,
• 1:12:52
  you know, so everything was very quiet in private settings. And I liked it. And I was learning that
• 1:13:04
  this internet company I had and you know, by the time I make money off there that I'm making here
• 1:13:11
  and you know, two, three, four months. And I enjoyed deal making, you know, and those sides there,
• 1:13:18
  there's some of the most amazing deal makers in the world. You know, Russians are amazing at
• 1:13:25
  deal making. They have a different style than let's say the good guys in the Gulf.
• 1:13:30
  I love the Saudis. I love the Qataris. I love the, you know, everybody has a very sophisticated
• 1:13:39
  way to do things. And it's been doing it for hundreds of years and to be into this world. But
• 1:13:47
  everybody eats from deals. It's not like an abnormal thing. And you said, when you say
• 1:13:56
  that everybody eats, do you find that because you're pointing that out? Is it because you feel in
• 1:14:02
  sort of traditional startup land that you feel like not everybody eats? Nobody eats.
• 1:14:08
  Nobody eats on the startup. You got some fucking VC sitting there that he didn't do shit.
• 1:14:13
  He's a partner. He gets a fucking salary. He's pretending and sitting with you as if he
• 1:14:19
  you know, invest out and know what that we did in his life.
• 1:14:23
  By the way, I'm not knocking at the big ones, right? You have like, in every entity, right?
• 1:14:29
  You have like the real ones, right? So you got Anderson R-Witz, you got, you know, Excel,
• 1:14:34
  Lays, right? I'm not, you know, those guys are iconic and, you know,
• 1:14:42
  it's not about them. But I'm talking about all, you know, the rest of the food chain.
• 1:14:49
  You know, it's kind of like we got Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and whatever. And then you got
• 1:14:54
  98% shitcoins, right? So my reference is not those guys specifically. But when a, when a startup
• 1:15:04
  guy raises money from a venture capital firm, the mechanism of a venture capital firm is like a
• 1:15:12
  meat grinder. The founder won't see shit unless he sells his company for like two, three billion,
• 1:15:20
  or like, you know, those guys that sell for a billion and he takes, not everybody turns out into
• 1:15:25
  Zuckerberg, right? And, you know, you have tagalongs, you have, you know, a ratchet veto rise,
• 1:15:34
  this double dips, triple dips, I don't know all these things they make up, but I don't know
• 1:15:39
  it's gotten worse and worse through the years. For a founder to actually make money through a VC,
• 1:15:47
  like funded entity, like I wouldn't, me personally, even I don't, it's not my world, I don't,
• 1:15:53
  I don't give that type of stuff for those kind of deals. But if I saw a venture capital firm
• 1:15:59
  involved, I would never do a deal with, never, there's no harm. If I own 20% of something and some
• 1:16:06
  VC this and I don't know, I decide to flip it to somebody else and for three X, you know, that's me,
• 1:16:12
  what the, you know, who are you to tell me no because you set a board because you put a million
• 1:16:17
  dollars, you know, three years ago at a lower valuation and it's not even your cash and you know,
• 1:16:23
  who the fuck are you? So I think, you know, I haven't done business in the United States for 25
• 1:16:30
  years. I hadn't been here. I moved to Florida a year ago. I worked mainly in Hong Kong,
• 1:16:40
  you know, and that's office and that's kind of, I guess, my base, if you will. I left England
• 1:16:47
  also many years ago. It changed and, you know, nowadays like last, you know, it's a,
• 1:16:55
  I'm almost 10 years, 12 years. I work mainly with PRC, SOEs. So a lot of the Chinese, yeah,
• 1:17:07
  say it's funny because the UAE, for example, everybody knows the Abu Dhabi Fund and then you know
• 1:17:12
  the PIF Fund in Saudi and then you know whatever the QIA of this. And in China,
• 1:17:17
  there are hundreds of SOEs in France, not just one. And the Chinese manage more capital than
• 1:17:32
  anybody in the world. And it's not just the capital. The Chinese in around the president was
• 1:17:42
  brilliant enough to come out with this thing called the Belt and Road Initiative, which you're
• 1:17:47
  familiar with in around 2013. And they've allocated trillions for this. And it's brilliant because
• 1:18:00
  through the Belt and Road Initiative, they're basically able to partner, purchase, manage,
• 1:18:13
  or deal with every major infrastructure deal outside of the United States for the last decade.
• 1:18:22
  I'll give you an example. Even the line, you know, you see this on social media a lot and it
• 1:18:28
  looks magnificent that they're building in Saudi. You saw that whole building. It's like amazing,
• 1:18:33
  right? And then you figure Saudis, wow, they got all the money in the world, right? Well,
• 1:18:40
  the Chinese are the major funders there because of an EPC structure.
• 1:18:49
  Chinese work under something called an EPC structure. EPC is engineering procurement construction.
• 1:18:57
  At the end of the day, after forget the funding, somebody has to build it.
• 1:19:03
  All right, somebody actually had to go with the nail and t-t-t-t-t, right? Who's going to build it?
• 1:19:09
  The Saudis? At the end of the day, it's Chinese workers that are building these roads in Africa
• 1:19:17
  that are building these buildings here. And what country can deploy 200,000 workers in a matter of a
• 1:19:24
  month? Only China. Yeah. Nobody else can. So when you see a road being built in, I don't know, or
• 1:19:33
  or, you know, an electrical plant or a water plant in Egypt or the airport in Morocco or the
• 1:19:44
  roads in Indonesia or it, you name it. The actual people building it are Chinese. They're not
• 1:19:54
  there out of their free will. I guarantee you these entities didn't call them up and go to an HR
• 1:19:59
  office in Beijing and said, hi, we're looking for 80,000 employees that come and help us build this
• 1:20:04
  building. And they're this right. So that's where the belt and road comes in. They come in also
• 1:20:11
  with money and with the deployment of actual people that can go build it.
• 1:20:19
  Made in China. Still made in China, just like the shirts. Everything is made in China.
• 1:20:27
  When BlackRock recently put 25 billion dollars in data centers, and now they did a 100 billion
• 1:20:35
  dollar data center. Amazing. I love data centers. I'm now involved in a large data center deal
• 1:20:44
  of the 12 billion dollars, the largest deal of my career in Egypt. The BlackRock deal
• 1:20:51
  are going to put 25 billion dollars in a data center. But then they're going to have to hire
• 1:20:56
  Chinese people to build it. Who's going to go build it? Where they're going to go hire headhunter
• 1:21:01
  New York City for who wants to get a job and go fly to Mongolia. Because what do you think
• 1:21:06
  they build these the largest, the current largest data center belongs to China Telecom.
• 1:21:13
  The second largest also. So when you want to build large data centers, and I'm talking, you know,
• 1:21:22
  20 million, 30 million square foot data centers, you need the infrastructure. So you need your own
• 1:21:27
  water plant. You need the resources. You need that. That's right. So even if BlackRock's putting
• 1:21:31
  in 25 billion, they still have to. So because of this EPC protocol or mandate,
• 1:21:37
  China will be putting in money into a BlackRock. But they'll get the money. No, they'll never do it.
• 1:21:43
  Like why did it? First of all, they'll come in and they'll say, for example,
• 1:21:48
  if I gave you today, let's say you came right now to, let's say the good old days of end
• 1:21:53
  goal. And I gave you right now, I don't know, you met now De Santos who at the time was the guy.
• 1:22:03
  And he gave you took a liking to you and gave you now the mineral or the diamond rights for
• 1:22:10
  this mine here. Okay. You got the contract. The contract is yours. You don't have a dollar,
• 1:22:18
  but you've got the contract. Now to go and build the mining and, you know, to build it's
• 1:22:24
  $100 million. So I'm just, let's say, you don't have it. So here comes, let's say, a guy like,
• 1:22:30
  I don't know, like a BlackRock and says, here's Scott, here's $100 million. I like to be your partner.
• 1:22:39
  Here's $100 million. There's a lot of diamonds in there, you know, and let's go do it.
• 1:22:46
  So he gives you $100 million. Now what do you do? You actually got to go build it. So where do you go?
• 1:22:51
  Is you go to China? Exactly. So the roads always go back to China. So wouldn't it be just
• 1:22:58
  simpler just to raise the capital from China? Of course. But do they do that? Is that what they do?
• 1:23:04
  That's what the Belt and Road does. That is the Belt and Road initiative. And American firms,
• 1:23:10
  I think, but what happens when you get the money from a BlackRock? Where do you get the money from
• 1:23:16
  a BlackRock? Bulls. Black Rocks are saying that they're building it themselves. I don't know how.
• 1:23:20
  I don't know. No idea. But the end of the day, you know, I've been to Angola. I've been to Kenya.
• 1:23:27
  I've been to Nigeria. I've been to oil refinery. I've been, I've been to Russia. I've been, I've seen,
• 1:23:32
  I've seen, I've seen the Sibnefs offices. I've seen, I've seen them. I've seen British
• 1:23:37
  petroleum. I've been there. I've seen it. It's sad, right? You go to Angola. You see like these
• 1:23:43
  huge refineries in the mid like, you know, a mile off of the water, the shores and the waters
• 1:23:50
  all black. You see British petroleum, this here and this that you see it in the waters all black.
• 1:23:56
  And you see kids and families trying to swim in the waters all black and then you drive a little
• 1:24:02
  more and then you'll see like all of a sudden like a tent village in the middle of fucking Angola.
• 1:24:08
  And in this tent village, you'll see about 60,000 Chinese people eating food, Chinese food and
• 1:24:14
  all of this because it's lunchtime right now. And then they got to go back and go back to work.
• 1:24:21
  It's all China. Nobody can compete. Who can, the cash is there.
• 1:24:28
  And the deployment of actual workers is there. Nobody can offer that.
• 1:24:34
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• 1:25:25
  Do you think the LPs that put money into these US funds know that?
• 1:25:28
  It's different. It's the United States is a different game, right? I'll give you a sense like,
• 1:25:36
  20 years ago, 25 years ago,
• 1:25:41
  that call me an investment banker. Today an investment banker is not a good word because they,
• 1:25:46
  you know, they don't like it so they switched it later on to private equity.
• 1:25:50
  Private equity also is pretty dull in that sector today. So you got like, I don't know,
• 1:25:54
  they call your other asset managers, hedge funds, right? But that's different things. But
• 1:26:06
  the Western very much focus on equity. Like you started in the conversation, how much equity are
• 1:26:14
  we getting off the steel? A lot of the SOEs that I have been fortunate enough to
• 1:26:29
  work with and know for a long time. I've known them since I'm in my late 20s.
• 1:26:38
  They don't care about equity. You will never see equity deal structure with anything.
• 1:26:42
  It's always on royalties. They don't want to be in any cap table. It's not about that.
• 1:26:52
  It's about cash, right? So they'll give you the money. You give them the EPC rights, which basically
• 1:26:58
  means the contract to build it. They can take those EPC contracts, flip it over to 20 other
• 1:27:04
  contractors anytime they want. So they already profit it off the EPC. So you give them a billion
• 1:27:11
  dollars, but you're giving them back because to build it costs, let's say $800 million. So they
• 1:27:17
  get it back. Now they have, let's say, 50% profit sharing, which is basically a royalties fund.
• 1:27:23
  They don't care about equity. They just want the money. But it's better. I don't have to deal
• 1:27:27
  with anything. You don't see a lot of their holdings. So a lot of SOEs, not just them. A lot of
• 1:27:34
  SOEs don't like everybody knowing what they own. You'd be surprised how many big assets around
• 1:27:43
  the world are owned by certain governments that you'd be in shock. But you don't see them on any
• 1:27:54
  cap table, right? A lot of them work with non-fat cut banks, right? So can't track
• 1:28:02
  known what it knows. You know, I've seen recently, you know, bank accounts some of these funds have
• 1:28:11
  with over $35 billion sitting in cash. I have a very close friend that works at Carlisle.
• 1:28:21
  He's a very close friend of mine from when I'm in my 20s, the old New York days.
• 1:28:27
  And it's Carlisle. I think Carlisle is one of the best of the best in the United States
• 1:28:34
  in their world. He's not a $35 billion sitting there in cash.
• 1:28:40
  You know, so the capital is there too. Now, the United States has capital. That's not the problem.
• 1:28:55
  US has a lot of money. You have all these mutual pension funds. This funds the account.
• 1:29:02
  The problem in the US with these big firms is deal flow. I mean, what are they buying?
• 1:29:09
  Some big fucking, you know, trucking company in the United States and manipulating the
• 1:29:14
  valuation and it's a lot more. So they don't have access to deal flow outside of the United States.
• 1:29:21
  That's why it's very common for a lot of the US firms to offer 8% deal fees just to get in on
• 1:29:30
  those deals. So I imagine if you've got like a $5 billion deal in Singapore,
• 1:29:47
  the American firms would pay 8% deal fee to take 2 billion or 3 billion or 4 billion,
• 1:29:55
  take 8% just let us access to that deal fee. The access to deals outside of the United States
• 1:30:04
  are very limited to some of these American firms in the United States. But in the United States,
• 1:30:10
  it's all based. Their money comes from retail market. Also, they offer it and they give you
• 1:30:17
  credit to this and on CDs and this and they'll offer it to a million people and they go get,
• 1:30:26
  you know, guys to put in $3,000 or $10,000. They're 401ks and blah, blah, blah and off you these
• 1:30:33
  funny little interests that you can make over the next six years or this and it works. It's nice
• 1:30:41
  and they accumulate more cash, accumulate more cash and accumulate more cash and they raise capital
• 1:30:46
  like that. But whereas the state operated investment funds, it's different. For example,
• 1:30:56
  if you're an oil producing country, you're making let's say a billion dollars a day coming out
• 1:31:04
  of the ground. You don't need to make a commercial on TV with the golden retriever and the family
• 1:31:12
  and ending. Did you think about your family tomorrow? What is your family going to be okay in the
• 1:31:17
  future to try to get a hustle for $3,000, $5,000? So it's a different play. I'm not knocking
• 1:31:28
  obviously it works but it's a different play and then there are huge deals in the United States but
• 1:31:37
  not so much on the international infrastructure level because Chinese offer an added
• 1:31:45
  bonus or added an advantage which is the deployment of actual workers. So that's a big thing.
• 1:31:54
  That's a big thing. If you really are a serious really wanting to build a large
• 1:32:03
  infrastructure or tech or data center or whatever it is today, it's very attractive to go to China
• 1:32:12
  for money. It's attractive to do a deal with them because you'll get the capital, you get the
• 1:32:19
  labor and you'll get a cheaper. BlackRock will spend $25 billion to build a 10 million square foot
• 1:32:30
  data center across three nations for half that amount. The Chinese can do it cheaper, faster,
• 1:32:39
  somewhere else and much larger. When you look at this, you said you were working on the biggest
• 1:32:44
  deal of your life is $12 billion. Can you talk about that? I'm limited to but I'll tram my
• 1:32:52
  bust. No, I just whatever. So it's very interesting for somebody to structure a $12 billion deal.
• 1:32:57
  So I wasn't by myself where I told you it's a bunch of deal makers like me or all asset managers if
• 1:33:05
  you will because it's more, it's not institutional friendly to be called the deal maker. That's fair.
• 1:33:13
  That's really weird. I don't know why because when I meet people here in the states and they say,
• 1:33:20
  what do you do? I say, I'm an alternative asset manager and then I get asked the typical questions
• 1:33:27
  that you might ask if I work the JP Morgan. What's the name of your firm? Oh, I haven't heard of it
• 1:33:33
  or there. So how much do you have under management? I'm like that and then it's like the typical
• 1:33:39
  questions. Yes, I'm labeled and I'm an asset manager. Correct. So you go into this and I guess
• 1:33:47
  walk me through how you look at a deal that you want to take on it. So when this particular
• 1:33:53
  opportunity presents itself, I never another thing is. Look, I'm 50. Now I turn 50. I'm tired of
• 1:34:02
  that. I'm tired. I've been working with not the most ethical people that don't really build
• 1:34:13
  things that help humanity or in a sense in weird countries, moving money around. I don't know if
• 1:34:21
  you're familiar. Everybody in the United States doesn't understand because in the US when you
• 1:34:25
  have money in a city bank and you want to transfer it to, I don't know, Chase, it's not a problem.
• 1:34:32
  But if you have $4 billion in a bank account in, I don't know, outside of the United States
• 1:34:40
  and you want to transfer it or do deals, you got to be better than PWC on their best fucking day.
• 1:34:51
  Structures, offshore structures and offshore don't work anymore and figure it's a very complicated
• 1:35:01
  way to move funds today outside of the United States. Very difficult. Very difficult.
• 1:35:07
  Try to open up a bank. Go fly even a flight of Singapore. Go fly this. It's a beautiful country,
• 1:35:13
  beautiful place, amazing business center. I love Singapore. I love Singapore. Go to Singapore.
• 1:35:21
  Open up a Singapore entity. You'll have to have a local director. It doesn't cost too much,
• 1:35:25
  too grand, three grand. And then go try to open up a bank account. If you do that in the first,
• 1:35:32
  that on a month, you're a superstar. And then when you do, and you want to wire, I don't know,
• 1:35:40
  some money into it, it's going to be also quite interesting. And then when you want to wire
• 1:35:46
  those funds from that to something else, that's going to be very interesting too.
• 1:35:52
  Very difficult. A lot of the Americans or people that work in Western world don't understand all that.
• 1:36:01
  The United States imposes a lot of restrictions. Many years ago, the world had Switzerland.
• 1:36:10
  There's no Switzerland today. There's no such thing as a private banker today. Switzerland is
• 1:36:14
  done. They all turned into a family office or there's no such thing as private banking anymore.
• 1:36:21
  Doesn't exist. And the major monies are in the Gulf and in Asia. And with everything that's been
• 1:36:31
  happening with Russia in the war and all the sanctions, so it's very difficult. I don't work with
• 1:36:37
  Russians today, obviously. But it's a tough landscape. And you're dealing with
• 1:36:48
  very complex things that are, I wouldn't say bureaucratic, but it's like governmental.
• 1:37:00
  And finding solutions for those things is quite creative. They're creative, however.
• 1:37:15
  I told you the last time I ever spoke publicly about what I do was 2007. There was one video
• 1:37:26
  on YouTube. That was when I was in 2007. I wanted to list the internet company that I had with
• 1:37:37
  the Prime Minister on the handsync. The handsync only had two tech companies and there were both
• 1:37:43
  like multiple billion valuations. I wanted to be the third. I didn't go. But then the 2008
• 1:37:52
  market kind of didn't happen. And then I got a better deal by selling my holdings off to the QIA.
• 1:38:00
  So I wasn't there anymore. I had to go do that, but I wasn't there. I was morally traveling
• 1:38:07
  in Monaco, Russia, Africa, the Gulf. I was traveling around like that, but I'm lazy. I never
• 1:38:20
  said I'm lazy. If you left me alone, I'm not standing, I'm watching movies, and I'm going
• 1:38:29
  for a walk on the beach, let me hang out, swim by the pool. So with all the headache around,
• 1:38:33
  it has to pop up in front of me. And that's what you take on if it pops up in front of you.
• 1:38:37
  I believe very much, and I believe in it's like a blessing given to you. If you see an
• 1:38:45
  opportunity that's presented to you or appeared in front of you, and if you don't do that,
• 1:38:53
  it's kind of like sacrilegious or something like you are
• 1:39:01
  bringing yourself with the good energy gods or something. So then what? So let's flip it then.
• 1:39:06
  So what deals would you definitely not do? Not do bad energy shit. I don't do definitely never
• 1:39:13
  weapons or this or stuff like that or anything that's like, you know, with people that are,
• 1:39:18
  you know, I want a good life. So I would never deal with anybody that comes from, let's say,
• 1:39:26
  bad, right? Like I would never, my whole point is to structure deals and to have them
• 1:39:33
  nice less. I don't have a problem making less, you know, they say, you know, in life you can either
• 1:39:43
  eat good or sleep good. You can't do both. You can't eat well and sleep well. And you got to
• 1:39:53
  choose which road you want to go on. I prefer to sleep well. I know a lot of guys with a lot of,
• 1:40:00
  you know, during big deals, they seem to balance it for a certain time. I don't know. I never
• 1:40:12
  look at it like that. I never, I never took it so seriously as that. I try to do my best
• 1:40:24
  to provide a solution. Whether it is a structure, I'm pretty good at packaging opportunities
• 1:40:35
  on a large scale. And at the end of the day, I'm an asset manager. I'm in it for the fees.
• 1:40:44
  That's going to tell you a minute for anything else. I'm in it for the fees. Now, if it turns out
• 1:40:50
  amazing and, you know, in, uh, does 10x and 50x or whatever, all that amazing. Great.
• 1:41:00
  But I'm in it for the fees. And anybody that's in my world that tells you that they're not
• 1:41:05
  full of shit. It would be some of the biggest frictions that you have to overcome when you're
• 1:41:10
  putting these deals together. And you're including all these major power players from different
• 1:41:15
  parts of the world. Is there, is there cultural friction? Is there government friction, geopolitical
• 1:41:23
  friction that you have to overcome? Or is that not even a factor at the level that you play at?
• 1:41:27
  I tell you, you know, there has to be a summary. You deal, I think you have to know
• 1:41:36
  which side you're playing on first of all. You can't, you can't be for everybody.
• 1:41:44
  Who brought you into the game? Who put you in the room?
• 1:41:48
  I can colloyalty, transparency, you know, and, and a sense of honesty to the person that brought
• 1:41:59
  you in is imperative in my world. I certainly wouldn't be able to work with, let's say, the PRC for
• 1:42:06
  20-something years on the work that I, or, you know, that I do. I like to be very loyal and look out,
• 1:42:23
  you know, for the person that brought me into the room. Now, on this kind of level, as I said,
• 1:42:32
  the other people on the other side are like me. I don't speak to the fund manager of the,
• 1:42:41
  of the SOE or something like that. I mean, I need, you know, but that's not my contact.
• 1:42:49
  My contact is a guy like me, another dealmaker. And we both understand that for us to get paid
• 1:43:01
  for both our entities to profit is to close the deal. At these levels, there's none of that bullshit
• 1:43:11
  of like, did you call me first or I called you for? If you don't email me, I'll meet you at your office.
• 1:43:16
  None of that stuff. It's not at this level. And if someone plays a game like that, I don't know,
• 1:43:25
  I've never, honestly, in my role, I've never, you know, if someone clowns around,
• 1:43:34
  he's not going to be there long. You know, because there's a lot of, you know, a lot of the guys
• 1:43:42
  that are in power in those entities, they've been there for a long time. There's not like, oh,
• 1:43:50
  we just brought the new guy in and, you know, on this. And, um, yeah, I think it very much depends
• 1:43:58
  on people. But you, so I understand, so I mean, like at the end of the day, you're doing the deal
• 1:44:03
  with the dealmaker. You, you know the outcome that you're trying to accomplish. I mean, outside of,
• 1:44:08
  I know he's loyal to his side. He knows I'm loyal to my side on that deal. But even though you both
• 1:44:13
  represent the best interests of the parties, you still both mutually know that the deal has to get
• 1:44:17
  done. The deal has to get done for us to get paid. Yeah. And for our stakeholders, you know,
• 1:44:26
  they want it. They want the deal. Right. If they didn't want the deal, we wouldn't be in play.
• 1:44:33
  So if two dealmakers are at the point of speaking, that means both sides want it. Now it's, you know,
• 1:44:42
  let's, let's try to figure it out. What would be the, what would be the one thing that you see people
• 1:44:48
  generally get wrong about getting the deal done? What would be the biggest mistake that they make?
• 1:44:53
  I don't know if people think what's in it like me, you know, like me, me, me, me, me. I, you know,
• 1:44:57
  like how much can I get the most, you know, as a greed aspect to it. As a greed, greed,
• 1:45:04
  fucks up a lot. Yeah. The greed fucks, fucks a lot of people up. You know, the greed fucks a
• 1:45:10
  lot of things up. And it's, and it's, and it's also the speed, you know, that getting it now.
• 1:45:19
  The deal that I've been, you know, fortunate enough to be invited to with some of, you know,
• 1:45:27
  the most, the highest of the, of the, of the institutions that I've been working with.
• 1:45:34
  You know, people say, oh, oh, yeah, you know, where'd you come from and do this deal? It's happened
• 1:45:41
  22 fucking years in the making, you know. But this deal, for example, took us a year
• 1:45:48
  and a half, a year and a half. One deal. That's a long time. And, and there was a lot of
• 1:46:00
  smoothing over and a lot of, you know, eagles and, you know, and you've got to, you've got to
• 1:46:08
  smooth things open. Be cool about it. I like to think that I'm the cool guy in my group, you know.
• 1:46:14
  Um, when I was younger, they used to call me Eugene Utah, which means basically the young Jewish
• 1:46:21
  boy. Now they just call me Utah, which is just Jewish boy. So there was like,
• 1:46:27
  send the Utah over, you know, me, you know. So I like to bring an essence of, you know, cool.
• 1:46:36
  Uh, I like to be cool. And, uh, I don't mean just that my temperament is cool, you know.
• 1:46:44
  Um, I, I once took, I once took a, I once took a, a government, a government guy in Moscow
• 1:46:58
  for a ride in a car blasting biggie smalls. He was 60 years old. And I was reluctant to me about,
• 1:47:06
  you know, I, uh, and we were blasting uh, biggie smalls in the car. And I'm trying to
• 1:47:10
  explain to him, you know, why I love biggie small so much and, and, and, and the meaning of the song.
• 1:47:17
  And, and, you know, and we didn't talk anything about work, okay? Nothing, nothing about work.
• 1:47:25
  We drove around I think for like two, three hours listening to hip hop. He has no idea what hip hop was,
• 1:47:30
  okay? And we drove around, I don't know, even where the hell we went. I'm a horrible driver.
• 1:47:34
  Okay? Everybody knows I, you know, up until the pandemic, I had a driver. I don't know how to drive.
• 1:47:40
  You know, I'm a terrible driver. I let my wife parallel park. I, I don't know how to drive.
• 1:47:45
  Um, you know, but we were driving around. And, um,
• 1:47:55
  you know, I've had, I've been fortunate that I actually remember some of these people, um,
• 1:48:05
  I once spent time in, in Kiev. I had to spend about two months there. It was a deal that we were
• 1:48:12
  trying to purchase the port in Odessa. And it was a great deal. And the guy that ran the port
• 1:48:21
  was super old school, Soviet style, okay? And, uh, every time I used to fly to Odessa, I used to
• 1:48:29
  fly from Belgium. I don't know, that was just the way I used to fly over. And in Belgium, at the
• 1:48:36
  airport, at the Brussels airport, they used to have like, uh, all these like special, like, you
• 1:48:42
  know, salmon and like fucking, you know, I don't know, salamis and, you know, like, oh,
• 1:48:48
  patties, you know, all these like special stuff. And I used to always like load up, you know,
• 1:48:54
  buy like all of that shit. And I used to go and bring it to this rather simple man. He was a guy
• 1:49:02
  that's been working there for like 40 something years. You know, day in, day out. And I'd bring them
• 1:49:10
  these things. And, um, I play chess. I play a lot of chess. Um, I like chess a lot. And, um,
• 1:49:23
  if I'm in New York ever, you'd see me every morning from 9 a.m till 12 at Washington Square Park
• 1:49:31
  with like a, a big puffer jacket sitting there playing chess on the Washington Square Park.
• 1:49:36
  Everybody that's like my spot. And if I made like 50 bucks or 100 bucks on it,
• 1:49:41
  can't talk to me. I know all the guys there for years. But when I went there to a death site, you
• 1:49:48
  know, it took me months to build a relationship with this guy. He didn't want to do any deals. He's,
• 1:49:56
  you can't convince people like that. This is old school. But they sent me there. And they tried to
• 1:50:03
  like convince me. And you know, I went, it took me a long time. I went there a lot, a lot of times.
• 1:50:10
  And one time he was sick. And I went to visit him at the hospital. And his daughter was there.
• 1:50:19
  And his English was really shit. And I was coming with these, you know, sausages or all this stuff.
• 1:50:26
  He loved it, you know. And I told him a joke. And it was a joke that somebody once told me,
• 1:50:43
  one of my mentors told me a joke that a gentleman that I told you they called him the fan of
• 1:50:48
  Elliott. So I loved the early. Even though he made a lot of money off me without me knowing,
• 1:50:55
  he's the same guy that gave me 150. I'm top pocketed 200 million. And that's like my trusted mentor.
• 1:51:00
  Okay. He taught you a very valuable lesson though. He gave me 150 million. I can't mark it, right?
• 1:51:05
  If you made 200 million on the same day, that's just him being on the other side of the playing field.
• 1:51:12
  I didn't know. But I
• 1:51:15
  gave it to the same joke I'm tired. I did it to me, but like in New York. So I imagine all the pigeons in New York,
• 1:51:26
  all the birds in New York, every winter they fly south for the winter. So right before,
• 1:51:35
  in a winter approaches, all the pigeons, you know, meet up like in Times Square or something. And
• 1:51:41
  every pigeon is there and they're all like stretching and the general is like, you know,
• 1:51:45
  telling everybody, okay, like 15 minutes we're going to go north and then we'll make a right turn
• 1:51:50
  and we should be in Florida by tomorrow morning. So everybody's stretching a nest and all of a sudden,
• 1:51:56
  one crazy pigeon in the back says, fuck you. I'm my own pigeon. I don't need to this shit. I do whatever
• 1:52:03
  the fuck I want. I'm independent. I don't need this shit. All the other pigeons look at him and
• 1:52:13
  it's winter coming. All right, 15 minutes go. All the pigeons fly north and make a right turn.
• 1:52:21
  And they're gone. For two, three, four days, this pigeon is the only pigeon in town.
• 1:52:28
  He's fine. He's a big shot. He's the only pigeon in New York City. He's thinking that like he's,
• 1:52:35
  he's he's the biggest guy in town. Nobody else there.
• 1:52:40
  I have to another two, three days it starts snowing and it starts getting really, really cold.
• 1:52:46
  And he says, shit, I fucked up. I'm only a pigeon. So he starts racing, racing down south.
• 1:52:56
  Flying as fast as he can. And then he gets caught in a snow storm.
• 1:53:02
  And his whole body freezes and he crashes on a farm. And he's covered there like, you know,
• 1:53:08
  like an ice cube. As he's covered there as an ice cube, all of a sudden a cow comes.
• 1:53:18
  The cow goes, move, turns around and takes a shit on the bird.
• 1:53:26
  But the shit was really warm and it melted all the ice. And it was like a warm blanket.
• 1:53:34
  Shielded him from the cold and he was all comfortable and cozy. So he started to sing.
• 1:53:39
  All of a sudden a cat. Here's like a bird cat. I was singing.
• 1:53:50
  Ox over. Sees this pigeon covered in shit. Takes its paw, cleans the shit off the bird and eats
• 1:53:59
  the bird. And the moral of the story is not everybody that shits on you is your, is your enemy.
• 1:54:09
  Not everybody that takes shit away from you is your friend. And when you're warm and comfortable,
• 1:54:15
  the best thing to do is to shut the fuck up.
• 1:54:24
  I was taught that joke a long time ago and I say it, you know, sometimes I can't tell you how
• 1:54:32
  much it relates to life into many things in business. And sometimes when we have egos or hot
• 1:54:41
  tempers, or we jump, we immediately jump and we think that guy that shit on us, what the fuck did
• 1:54:47
  you just shit on me? And we think because we don't know the motives of all the sides that we judge
• 1:54:58
  very quickly. And I see a lot of times with amateur business guys. Some guy comes and says,
• 1:55:05
  I'll give you $20 million, I'll take 70% of your company. So what? Excuse me, what?
• 1:55:11
  70% and you're thinking dilution and you're thinking like you're going to sell your company
• 1:55:17
  for a billion dollars and that's it. Breathe. Breathe. Somebody just gave you offered you 20 million dollars.
• 1:55:28
  Breathe. Breathe. If you think the only way you're going to make money is to sell that entity and
• 1:55:38
  they're stocking the shares and that then you're small minded. There's many avenues and not just
• 1:55:48
  looking at one, just like how I when I raised 150 million, I had no idea. Those guys took 200
• 1:55:55
  million, they won. No idea. So I think in my in these kind of world, patience, being cool,
• 1:56:11
  building real relationships, knowing how to speak to people in a cool manner like calm down,
• 1:56:19
  because sometimes people get, you know, I'm no angel, you get, you know, the stress that is, you
• 1:56:25
  get emotional about, of course. Yeah. I think it's imperative that we remember at the end of the day,
• 1:56:33
  there's other things to life than that deal. There's other things to life than that chunk of change.
• 1:56:42
  Right. All that money without a good heartbeat and a good blood flow, it doesn't mean shit.
• 1:56:49
  If you don't have a, I don't know, a kid to tell a story to at night, that's kind of lame.
• 1:56:56
  If you don't, you know, appreciate the simple things in life, this all bullshit them. What's the point?
• 1:57:07
  For me, at least. Do you think that when you look at sort of the part of the world that you
• 1:57:11
  grew up in and the culture that you grew up in, that sort of informed how you approach deals and
• 1:57:17
  relationships, and I asked that just to compare us into growing up in the US where I feel like
• 1:57:23
  people are almost very comfortable with adopting this very transactional high speed approach to
• 1:57:31
  deal making more so than other parts of the world where everything is very transactional,
• 1:57:35
  everything is not a handshake or relationship, everything is a doc you sign. It seems to be that
• 1:57:41
  the US is very different than the rest of the world, but I think that not growing up in the US
• 1:57:46
  probably served you best. I don't know about best or not, you know, I moved you now a year ago,
• 1:57:52
  you must notice, and I must tell you something honestly, from living, you know, in a lot of countries,
• 1:58:01
  and I'm not saying this for, you know, this or the podcast, and I mean, this
• 1:58:07
  God bless America. God bless America. I don't think there's any nation in the world coming close
• 1:58:22
  to what's here firstly, and a lot of people that have their criticisms and obviously we see what's
• 1:58:29
  going on with with with all the craziness in the world. I challenge anybody, go live anywhere for a
• 1:58:37
  year or two years, go live in Europe, go live in Asia, go live in go. Everyone's talking about
• 1:58:46
  how Dubai is great, I like Dubai, I go to Dubai a lot, you know, I wouldn't live in Dubai.
• 1:58:51
  Oh, it's zero tax, so that's okay, so perfectly okay paying taxes, let's not make more money.
• 1:59:04
  Technology has has messed a lot of that up. I don't necessarily believe it's the United States. See,
• 1:59:14
  perception is reality. Reality is manipulated due to social media, and then it's monetized.
• 1:59:29
  So what we're monetizing is the manipulation, not the essence. I don't pet stocks.
• 1:59:40
  Never. We'll never touch stocks. It's it's it's a rich game.
• 1:59:53
  It can go up or down, not based on anything. It can be, I don't know if Elon Musk will say something
• 2:00:00
  God bless him. I don't drive a Tesla, but I love Elon Musk. And I think he's so necessary for
• 2:00:12
  the world. But if you all of a sudden became a shareholder in some company, if I told you right now,
• 2:00:22
  I got Elon Musk and Bill Gates and they're going to do a company. We have no idea yet what we're
• 2:00:32
  doing, no idea, not no idea. Bill Gates owns 50%, Elon Musk owns 50%. How much time do you think I
• 2:00:42
  can bring 10 billion dollars at a hundred billion dollar valuation to that deal? Pretty quickly. Why?
• 2:00:48
  Because of their name, their reputations. Okay. So they've never had failures before. Of course,
• 2:00:53
  yeah. But that's manipulated. So what we're saying based on past history, everything will be success.
• 2:01:03
  And why the valuation of a hundred billion, where did I get? Why do you think 10 billion and a
• 2:01:09
  hundred billion dollar valuation? They don't even know yet what they're going to do. They don't
• 2:01:12
  know business model. They'll be able to close that and raise that deal in a New York minute.
• 2:01:17
  By that logic, though, by that logic, anything accessible to the retail investor can be manipulated.
• 2:01:23
  I used to do this when I was when I was an entrepreneur, kind of raising capital.
• 2:01:29
  I had my time. I always used to, you know, when I raised capital. And before I did this and,
• 2:01:37
  I'd raised a few hundred million for projects. And they always used to bring like an analyst to the
• 2:01:51
  room. You know, all those guys, the big guys, they bring you like an analyst, which they get paid
• 2:01:56
  to say no. I mean, that's pretty much what the analyst is supposed to say. So one day they
• 2:02:02
  brought me like these two big shot analysts and to discuss valuation of tech, which is a
• 2:02:16
  complete conundrum. I mean, tech valuations. And I'm 50. I don't understand them. Okay. Why was
• 2:02:23
  WhatsApp purchased for 19 billion or 20 billion dollars? Why not 18? Why not 25? Why not seven?
• 2:02:33
  Why, right? No earnings, no business plan. But you really, you really worry they can tell that's
• 2:02:39
  what it comes down to. The story they can tell and is unbelievable. But yes, I agree completely.
• 2:02:43
  But why not 30? I have no idea. Why fiber their competitor two weeks prior, which was with roughly
• 2:02:51
  half the amount of users they had sold for 900 million. Two weeks later, they sell for, I don't know,
• 2:02:58
  19 plus this and board seats and that Facebook didn't buy them for their users. Facebook has
• 2:03:04
  two billion fucking users, right? Why? What, what, where did, who did the valuation there?
• 2:03:09
  Good room to me. I'm dying to figure out how you got to 19 or 22 or 23.
• 2:03:14
  You can't sell the data to United States, right? You got laws. I can't like, you know,
• 2:03:19
  even until today, I use WhatsApp, right? I don't pay for it. You pay for it.
• 2:03:25
  I ask him if he wants to sell it. He'll never sell it, right?
• 2:03:30
  Valuations and tech is a wonderful thing because it can play for both sides if you use.
• 2:03:38
  And every time they used to bring the analysts, I used to tell them the time machine story.
• 2:03:44
  It's worked for me 10 out of 10 times. There are many metrics to what they say is valuation, right?
• 2:03:52
  The team, the vision, the IP, the market, the trend, all right, all this crap.
• 2:04:03
  Earnings, even if you have earnings, it's really bad because then you'll get some other analysts
• 2:04:07
  will say, okay, you're making X amount at a 6% year, seven years, and you're worth out much,
• 2:04:13
  and you're like, what? So it's all, so I used to say I used to come in, I can't believe I'm sharing
• 2:04:22
  this one, but it's your, if you and I, after this podcast, let's say we went, we had a beer,
• 2:04:33
  we really connected, and all of a sudden we decided to start talking about time travel
• 2:04:40
  and time machines. And you and I saw that we have this crazy passion for time travel and you
• 2:04:46
  telling me a story about, I don't know, your grandfather that you wish you can see him again,
• 2:04:50
  and I'm telling you about something that I wish I can see my grandmother again. And we,
• 2:04:55
  Chrysler, we're talking about this PhD guy that once wrote some paper on time travel,
• 2:05:01
  that if you spin the laser around and, you know, and we, and, you know, what, and we decided to
• 2:05:06
  say, you know what, Scott, fuck it, let's go for it. And you close this podcast shit up and I closed
• 2:05:13
  my fucking asset management up and we decided to partner. And I went and I take every penny I have
• 2:05:20
  ever made and I invested it in and you take every penny you've ever made and this and you mortgage
• 2:05:26
  houses and we put everything and then we go into your garage and everybody thinks we're completely
• 2:05:32
  crazy. And then, and we're not speaking to anybody, we're not going to dinner with anybody,
• 2:05:37
  our wives, their, our girlfriends think we're completely crazy. And with their, we're crying and
• 2:05:42
  we put in and we lost the money and we go went more and took another mortgage and for 10 years,
• 2:05:50
  we're building this time travel machine. Now you agree with me that if we were to build a time
• 2:05:54
  travel machine, it's by far the greatest technology. I know better than SpaceX, better than
• 2:06:01
  anything else. We could do it. Yes. If we could do it, right, there's no other technology
• 2:06:06
  in the world as we know it today that can be more valuable, right, than a time machine.
• 2:06:13
  So let's say after 10 years, we sat there, we all got, you know, more wrinkles, lost some hair,
• 2:06:22
  turned white, strives, everybody thinks we're completely nuts.
• 2:06:28
  And after 10 years, we looked at each other, we did it.
• 2:06:36
  We look at it, it works. And we say, let's go try it. And we jump in the time machine and we put
• 2:06:44
  like 10 minutes prior and we press the button, boom, you went back in time, 10 minutes and we're like,
• 2:06:52
  holy shit. And then we, and we're back. And we start hugging and high five. And we did it and
• 2:07:00
  did it. What's the valuation? Two users. The amount of capital was on here, no outside capital.
• 2:07:14
  10 years, no revenue, no plan, greatest technology in the world. What's the valuation? I don't know,
• 2:07:22
  exactly. I don't know. Is what if you can convince the other three associates and the one must
• 2:07:26
  gonna board them? If you can convince the other person that your project is a significant,
• 2:07:34
  is a time machine, then you surpass valuation. And by doing that, you have to speak really well.
• 2:07:43
  Has nothing to do with what you're doing. Very little. And
• 2:07:53
  deal making requires a lot of that. And I think with what you said, a lot of people today,
• 2:08:06
  you see very talented guys today, you know, making quickbugs through, I don't know,
• 2:08:13
  Amazon dropship being this, Instagram promoting and awesome. That's amazing. And as much as we've
• 2:08:22
  gained for me, for me, everything bad in my career over the last five years that's happened,
• 2:08:30
  came by way of this. Things that I wrote that I shouldn't have written. Messages that I received
• 2:08:38
  that I shouldn't have read or read. For me, I don't make my career, I think I would have
• 2:08:46
  I would be more successful without messaging and without this technology. And if my meetings were
• 2:08:52
  more in person rather than on call. But then again, the new generation, you know, I don't know,
• 2:08:59
  makes millions, you know, those guys are doing extremely well from it. It's all how we use these
• 2:09:03
  tools. Yeah, but but that tool is a tool is making us less human with each other. There's less
• 2:09:10
  of the human connection. And I think that that works to a degree, but when you're dealing with a
• 2:09:16
  12 billion dollar deal, somebody who's only ever cannot do it. They can't do it. No way. No way.
• 2:09:24
  That's what I mean. No way. No way. But to, you know, so it's not a dualized thing, bringing it back
• 2:09:30
  to test. You know, if I wanted to reach, you know, users online, but everything has to be so
• 2:09:35
  immediate for everybody. And I think, you know, don't get me wrong. I like doing things quite, but
• 2:09:44
  technology aspect and I gave us this, you know, like ability to
• 2:09:49
  diminish patients. We have no patients. Everything is today, now, now, now.
• 2:09:58
  It might be great. I don't know. Maybe I'm just too old. Maybe I'm just too old. I'm too tired.
• 2:10:04
  You know, a year ago, I would have never done a podcast or anything like that.
• 2:10:09
  Today, you know, I was, I moved with my family. I have three young kids. I moved to Florida.
• 2:10:19
  I'm tired. It's stressful work and when I work. And I just enjoy some more simple things.
• 2:10:26
  You know, let me go order a pizza and, you know, and take my daughter's dog Lucas for a walk on the beach.
• 2:10:35
  For me, that's, that's a good day. And if it, you know, and a lot of my, you know, billionaire,
• 2:10:43
  multi-billionaire friends or a lot of the guys that run some of these hundred billion dollar
• 2:10:49
  firms that I work with, they don't really, in my opinion, they don't really have nice lives.
• 2:10:57
  I don't see them with nice lives. I would think the guys that are in the, you know, 200 to 500 million,
• 2:11:06
  I'm still in, you know, don't get me wrong. I'm not, you know,
• 2:11:11
  but if somebody can get to the 200 or 300 or 400 million dollar range,
• 2:11:18
  stop. For what?
• 2:11:24
  For what? What's this crap? I hear all these fucking motivational and influencers,
• 2:11:30
  generational wealth and all this nonsense. What is this crap? I don't get it. What is
• 2:11:38
  explain to me? I don't understand it. But I just tell you that, I can tell you that out of all the
• 2:11:44
  people that I've spoken to and interviewed, people that have had exits between 100 million and 500
• 2:11:49
  million. Very few, I don't think I can name one who has had an exit in the nine figures and been
• 2:11:57
  like, okay, I'm good. I think they're always trying to build more and more and more and more.
• 2:12:01
  I don't get it. I don't know. And those are exit guys. Exit guys should be very thankful because exit
• 2:12:06
  guys, but I think they're conditioned. By the way, I think they're conditioned after building
• 2:12:10
  something for 10, 15, 20 years that I think it's really hard to deprogram yourself from always
• 2:12:17
  building and all. And I mean, I was 31 years old. I remember I didn't own a car. I didn't have
• 2:12:23
  an apartment. I had a hundred million dollars in the ATM machine. I used to go take out, you know,
• 2:12:32
  like my 200 bucks for the day and see the one hundred and one. I was cool.
• 2:12:43
  And and and then the other guys that had 400 million or 500 or whatever and had to rush and
• 2:12:49
  their personal assistance and 20,000 phone calls. I at the end of the day, what are we doing it for?
• 2:12:57
  Or that's the thing like my close friend, you know, that's
• 2:13:04
  eight, nine billion man, he works like a machine every day. Like morning, you know, there's the
• 2:13:14
  call that the, you know, nonstop. And I might see it with somebody like that. You speak to him
• 2:13:21
  because you're on a good one of my closest friends. Will you ever stop? Never. Why not? He enjoys the
• 2:13:30
  enjoys crushing, but he's already crushed it. What have you asked him? Like, what are you,
• 2:13:35
  what's the number that you're aiming for? It's not an it's it's a sickness, I think.
• 2:13:40
  I don't look at it. I saw, you know, I watch, I've been lately on a lot on, you know, on Instagram.
• 2:13:47
  I don't, you know, really, but my wife is on Instagram and I've got like, I don't know, 7,000
• 2:13:53
  followers on Instagram because of my wife. You know, she's got like, I don't know, I don't know,
• 2:13:58
  100, 200,000 kind of people and sometimes she tags me. I don't really photograph stuff. But, you know,
• 2:14:06
  so I'm on Instagram once in a while. And now that I live in the States, I see it because I don't
• 2:14:13
  really, I don't have Facebook. I don't have LinkedIn. I don't don't start. No, it's that I've
• 2:14:17
  no interest. I don't have Twitter. You know, I don't have a tweet or anything. But I watch
• 2:14:22
  these guys, you know, and I saw this guy, Grant Cardone. And I understand he is down this
• 2:14:31
  straight. He sells beautifully. Okay. He's aggressive. He sharp. He does these, also,
• 2:14:37
  these events where he brings like, you know, celebrities on that thing with him. He sells
• 2:14:45
  beautifully. Okay. But he sells to retailers. Right. He sells to the guy, give me $50,000, give me
• 2:14:54
  $50,000. Right. But I saw him speak once on some podcast where he was telling that he was on
• 2:15:04
  vacation with his yacht. And Ozzy was parked somewhere, Jeff Bezos rolled in with his yacht.
• 2:15:15
  And he felt terrible and he had to get up or go or something like that, maybe, you know, like,
• 2:15:22
  because as you always so much smaller than this on some like that. That's funny. And you know,
• 2:15:29
  by the way, that guy, he hasn't taken it. Now he's starting to do, because I've seen him on
• 2:15:34
  social for a long time. He said he's down the show too. He's been here? No, not here. This is
• 2:15:38
  before we moved down the floor when I found Toronto. I had him on the show. But he does, he works.
• 2:15:44
  He works. He works like crazy. Crazy. And even his vacations, he's working.
• 2:15:50
  Crazy. He does Instagram live. I think every Saturday or Sunday, I see. Yeah.
• 2:15:56
  You know, and I look in his eyes. Okay. I'm good kind of with that.
• 2:16:03
  The guy has, you know, he's been through stuff. You can see in his eyes. He has darkness.
• 2:16:15
  He's been through things and he's gone out, you know, out of it.
• 2:16:20
  Like I said, I don't know his business or in that sense, I know he does real estate and
• 2:16:25
  runs funds. I hate real estate, but I hate real estate. But I'm saying, he's been through a lot.
• 2:16:35
  He's got scars. You can see it in his eyes. And he works and he's successful.
• 2:16:40
  And you know, when he's built this persona, I don't know, just I don't get it. Why not just
• 2:16:50
  just go for a walk on the beach, close the door, you know, enough. What's the point?
• 2:16:56
  Why? He's not young. He's older than me. Yeah. He's like 60. Yeah.
• 2:17:02
  Four. I'm going to get a heart attack one day from fucking yelling on the phone to somebody.
• 2:17:08
  For what? Any, he, he, he puts a lot of energy into what he does. I see all these guys on social.
• 2:17:14
  So this is a, this is a, I love this guy. I love, you know, I watch podcasts. I love obviously
• 2:17:21
  love Joe Rogan. I love Patrick. Patrick, but David up in Fort Lauderdale. He works. So I think
• 2:17:26
  he's told his insurance company for just over 300 million. And then now he built a whole,
• 2:17:32
  he built a whole media. But he's different in, in, in with regards, I think he's doing it more,
• 2:17:38
  it look, it seems more, you know, more like it's organized or more like it's not about the push.
• 2:17:47
  He's not using the social media for people to buy into. No, he doesn't have a fund. So Grand Cardone
• 2:17:54
  has a fund and his audience are the LPs. Whereas Patrick, but David, he made his money. And now he
• 2:18:00
  enjoys, he enjoys doing this. That's okay. That's cool. But that's different. That's what I'm saying.
• 2:18:05
  Has a money he makes from podcasting and you enjoy. But he enjoys, he goes here and he goes there.
• 2:18:10
  Is it? So, you know, that's perfectly cool. I just, it's sometimes it's like,
• 2:18:15
  because we're at the end of the day, all of us waking up in the morning and doing our best to try
• 2:18:20
  to make some money and provide for our family and protect right. We're all soldiers. So I look at
• 2:18:26
  Grant like another fellow soldier. Okay. I never, I don't know the guy. I never met him.
• 2:18:31
  I just wish, you know, I just don't get it sometimes. I don't get some of the, you know, and
• 2:18:36
  I'm not saying, you know, I don't know how I don't know his net worth. I don't know anything,
• 2:18:40
  but, you know, in that sense, but I think he's got a hundred million. You know, I assume,
• 2:18:45
  I think it's companies do a couple hundred million in revenue, depending on how much you have to
• 2:18:48
  companies. Him and his, oh, and his, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then again, he's part of this whole,
• 2:18:53
  like, work nonstop hustle culture online entrepreneur. And I think that that,
• 2:19:00
  so you asked, like, why do people never shut off even after they sell a company for 100,
• 2:19:04
  or 200, 300, whatever? And because I think that now you have entrepreneurs that are sort of
• 2:19:10
  indoctrinated with this mentality from a very early age. So now if you, when you're, you know,
• 2:19:16
  18, 19, 20, all the people that you looked up to are working nonstop and working on the weekends.
• 2:19:22
  But I mean, it's hard to deprogram yourself from that because then you tie yourself worth
• 2:19:27
  into what you built. We focused too much incorrect, but it's the way that people have brought up.
• 2:19:32
  You know, Mike Tyson said something really hit home to me.
• 2:19:42
  You know, it's crazy. I, I don't know how this individual
• 2:19:48
  became so wise, obviously, through a thing. I find Mike Tyson's sometimes is, he said something
• 2:19:59
  very clever, clever, very intelligent, really hit, really hit me. He said, in our culture today,
• 2:20:09
  we idolize greatness, great athletes, great business people, the greatness, and everybody's
• 2:20:17
  striving to be great. But we don't idolize goodness. That's not a metric.
• 2:20:29
  It's the greatness that we idolize. When somebody's able to achieve a level of success,
• 2:20:39
  you know, where they don't necessarily have to go to work the next day,
• 2:20:44
  or the day after, or the year after, or forever, and not their children and not their children's
• 2:20:50
  children. Children, fuck off.
• 2:20:52
  Well, I don't know. For who is it good? I don't know. For me?
• 2:21:02
  You know, I don't know. I've never been that type of entrepreneur. I never wanted to build
• 2:21:09
  the, you know, Oracle. I don't know. And I idolize Larry Ellison. Don't get me wrong.
• 2:21:15
  I love that Larry Ellison. I just don't, I guess, don't have that in me.
• 2:21:21
  I think that you have a very balanced, healthy view of entrepreneurship. I think it's good.
• 2:21:25
  I think more people should have that. I mean, you focus on your family, you focus on your wife,
• 2:21:30
  you focus on building a beautiful home, like, I mean, how many entrepreneurs, I mean,
• 2:21:35
  you deal with the billionaires all the time. How many of them have, like, four X,
• 2:21:39
  wives and don't even talk to their kids anymore? Like, it happens. You know, I was offered recently,
• 2:21:51
  more ownership in the, in the GP.
• 2:21:59
  I would surpass the two billion mark personal net worth in about five to six years.
• 2:22:09
  Without just based on management fees and deal fees.
• 2:22:17
  I didn't take it. I like Florida. I changed maybe five years ago, eight years ago. I would have
• 2:22:26
  jumped on it and said, thank you. And don't get me wrong. I like making money.
• 2:22:33
  But I don't know, like I told you, I didn't grow up really with a father.
• 2:22:42
  I moved to Florida. I was, I was working in Hong Kong, but I had my family in Israel.
• 2:22:52
  During the Sukrat holidays, we were in Dubai. I brought my mother, who lives in New York,
• 2:22:58
  and my sister that had never been. Then we went to Dubai. We used to go to Dubai a lot,
• 2:23:03
  thanks to the Abraham Accord. It was a wonderful thing. We went to Dubai. I loved Dubai. We were there
• 2:23:11
  for, like, two weeks and we landed in Israel on October 7th at 1 a.m. Put the suitcases,
• 2:23:19
  had like three suitcases with just our bathing suits. I have three young kids and went to sleep.
• 2:23:26
  In Israel, our home was in a town called Herzaliyah, which is sort of like the Malibu of Israel,
• 2:23:34
  if you will. And it's on the beach. And at around 7 a.m., we woke up to, I can only sound like maybe
• 2:23:47
  like 50 explosions, like right above our heads, right? The iron dome. In all my years that I had been
• 2:23:55
  visiting or been in Israel, my wife, she's Israeli. And I had never seen rockets above Herzaliyah.
• 2:24:07
  They never came that far. And we went outside on the balcony to look, and I'm seeing like poof.
• 2:24:14
  My wife, who is Israeli, said to me, get us out of here. Kids crying, alarms all over.
• 2:24:34
  And it was very tough to get out because, you know, they closed the skies and all the
• 2:24:39
  nobody's own. Only LL was traveling. And there was only two flights out, one to Athens and one to
• 2:24:44
  Cyprus. And I had to get eight seats. Pretty tough. No private, no, you can fly. Is that true when
• 2:24:52
  there's a tax LLs allowed? Because LL has an anti-missile on the wings of a non-missake. And
• 2:24:59
  I thought they did. But I didn't know they're the only ones allowed to fly. And today, there's
• 2:25:03
  no other alliance to fly into Israel until today. No other alliance. Private could go. Private,
• 2:25:07
  you can go today. But not when there was the alliance. When there were a tax day, they closed it
• 2:25:11
  and only LL could fly out. And they were to Athens or Cyprus. So immediately we're, you know,
• 2:25:18
  calling luckily, I know some of the people at LL. And we got to the, you know, to somebody.
• 2:25:27
  And I got us eight seats for the next flight to Athens. All of us flew to Athens with the same
• 2:25:38
  suitcases of bathing suits that we had, you know, and three suitcases and flew to Athens.
• 2:25:46
  And we stayed in Athens for about two weeks, hoping things would calm down and can go home.
• 2:25:55
  And when they didn't, we decided to come to New York. I have an apartment in New York in the city.
• 2:26:03
  And, you know, and this was already around, like, you know, October, all right, so like,
• 2:26:10
  22nd, 3rd, 4th or something like that. And where my apartment is on the
• 2:26:17
  74th by Madison and 5th, usually a pretty quiet area. And then there were people, you know,
• 2:26:26
  I was doing the time when everybody was ripping down the hostages and all those things and protestors
• 2:26:32
  and all like that. And we had, they had some protestors throw rocks at businesses that were pharmacies
• 2:26:39
  that had a Missouza on the thing and my wife, she's not from here. She didn't, she don't understand.
• 2:26:46
  She got freaked out. She's in trauma. We just left, you know, this is her first experience,
• 2:26:51
  first experience. She, you know, we obviously, we'd been to New York before and all that. We got
• 2:26:56
  married in New York, but she never saw things like that. She thought she's like back in Israel
• 2:27:02
  or something and there's another attack. She really got freaked out. So we went to Long Island
• 2:27:12
  and we have a place in Long Island too. And we stayed there for like around two weeks as well.
• 2:27:22
  And with family and my sisters. And after two weeks, you know, it's pretty, it's nice there,
• 2:27:29
  but it's boring. And we said, let's go to Florida where there's nice,
• 2:27:34
  there are the kids we get not in school. And I came here. I didn't realize the Florida move was just,
• 2:27:42
  it was the result of October 7th for me yet. We came here and I, I kissed the ground. Honestly,
• 2:27:55
  it really changed me, you know, things, perspectives, life, our kids.
• 2:28:03
  It really changed. And, you know, it took a nice place here. It's a different quality of life
• 2:28:12
  and less fear. And, you know, and when I'm, you know, I'm usually quite introvert, you know,
• 2:28:22
  I up until up until my move to Florida, maybe I'd be out at dinner three or four times a year,
• 2:28:30
  you know, public. And I usually speak to the same people I've spoken to for 15, 20 years.
• 2:28:40
  I've made more friends in Florida the last year than I have in the last 20 years of my life.
• 2:28:46
  I go where good energy goes. And my friend, by the way, you know, the ballet at the Bell Harbors were my good buddies.
• 2:28:55
  The guy that runs the pool at the four seasons. And so he's like, my buddy, I go there sometimes just
• 2:29:02
  to have to drink with him. I don't care. I just go where good energy is, where good people are.
• 2:29:08
  I made the school that took my kids. Amazing school, amazing people, the community there.
• 2:29:21
  And I have like a different, you know, view of things. I think today than I had a year ago.
• 2:29:29
  Maybe because obviously October 7th and the change that we had and me being the father and role as a
• 2:29:37
  protector from my family. And at the end, what the fuck is it all for?
• 2:29:46
  And you know, don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm a big religious guy or anything like that.
• 2:29:54
  I like to believe in goodness and good energy and good people of all my closest friends when I was
• 2:30:01
  in London, they were not Jews. Okay. I had a Bobby who was a Muslim era. I had Omar who was Libyan
• 2:30:08
  also Muslim. I had a bunch of Russians. I had Indonesians. Okay. Jakarta. They're not Muslim.
• 2:30:13
  Malaysians. These were my those were my buddies. Okay. So I never experienced, you know, like that kind of
• 2:30:21
  so it's it's not like that. But coming to America and even New York, I'll never forget it. And I'll
• 2:30:30
  never forget the guy at the American Embassy in Athens because my youngest son, when we left,
• 2:30:41
  we didn't we literally left. I didn't have any paperwork. I didn't have his his, you know,
• 2:30:48
  passport is US passport. I didn't have anything. And the guy I'll never, I remember I asked him
• 2:30:55
  for his name. So I said to him, so please, so I just never forget your name.
• 2:31:02
  He gave us all the paper, everything in like an hour. He didn't have any, I didn't have any
• 2:31:06
  documentation. Okay. And then when we landed here,
• 2:31:12
  I think a lot of people here forget how special this country is. And I love it. And I hope that in
• 2:31:26
  my time now in my 50s going upwards, it's the first time for me, you know, that I'd like to be
• 2:31:35
  part of bettering America. If that makes sense. And the deals and stuff that I do in with
• 2:31:44
  PRCs or with the golf or with this, it's great. I enjoyed it. But I'm tired. That's not,
• 2:31:53
  that's not me today. And, and you know, and I did this is my second ever podcast. And,
• 2:32:00
  and my first, you know, you're very good storyteller, which is really what it comes down to.
• 2:32:09
  And, you know, my friend, you know, when he suggested joining his podcast, you know, at first,
• 2:32:17
  I was like, you know, for guys, I'm sure there's guys right now in my world that if they saw this,
• 2:32:23
  like, I don't know what you two, but wherever it's going to go on, they're like, oh my god,
• 2:32:27
  oh, he's on a pot. Yeah. I guarantee you that like sweating right now. Okay.
• 2:32:32
  You know, my god, I hope he doesn't say my name or the deals or this or they're like,
• 2:32:36
  they're the sweating right now because everything was, you know, top secret stuff. I know that.
• 2:32:40
  I get that sweating sweating, you know, right now. It's like not saying everyone thing,
• 2:32:45
  but, but, you know, you're very good. You're very good. You taught a lot. He didn't throw anybody
• 2:32:49
  under the bus. It's like, what, you know, it's funny. It's true. But, you know, like, I come here and,
• 2:32:58
  you know, there's this good here, man, there's good people here. And there's a lot of good to do
• 2:33:04
  and there's good stuff. And it doesn't have to necessarily be about becoming the richest dude in the
• 2:33:09
  room or building the, you know, and then spending time with the family and doing the basic things
• 2:33:19
  and going, you know, I don't know. I go with my flip flops on the beach every day.
• 2:33:24
  Well, there's no price for that. You know, there's no price for that. You know,
• 2:33:29
  not the guys. I mean, you've experienced so much of the world. And now that you, you know,
• 2:33:34
  you're focused on your family and being a father and provider and a protector. Do you feel,
• 2:33:40
  do you feel stressed like going to the part of the world that you used to go to? I don't, you
• 2:33:44
  want to know something? I've been working on that, like I told you, the largest deal of my career
• 2:33:49
  over a year and a half. The last time I was in Hong Kong was in July. Okay. And over the last
• 2:34:00
  15 years, I'm in Hong Kong one week a month. Okay. I haven't been since July. And I've been asked
• 2:34:11
  to, and I've been supposed to go also to fly to Egypt and Singapore and things like that to
• 2:34:18
  meet with very important people, you know, from the highest level of government.
• 2:34:28
  I'm not going for what? I've got money. I'm okay. I like those things. These guys 10 times richer
• 2:34:39
  than me. Oh, all good. But did I laugh today? Did I, you understand? I'm 50. I've been
• 2:34:49
  hustling and working and grinding since I'm 19. It's got to be more than that. It's got to be more
• 2:35:01
  than that. I kind of lame if it's just that. Who might like, for what? The point is to have a good life.
• 2:35:13
  That's the point of the cash. The cash is for the good life. You know, my wife, she says to me all
• 2:35:22
  the time she says, we don't have enough assets. Am I, what, why do we want assets? I said, I
• 2:35:30
  want cash. Cash is king, especially today, especially always having cash in a bank account is
• 2:35:37
  always good. That's mean to me. No, we need to buy like, you know, a bunch of apartments, a put
• 2:35:42
  for them. I got a phone call. Somebody tells me, yeah, the light bulb and the building and this
• 2:35:49
  one in the apartment, the block that you bought in Manhattan and I want no phone calls.
• 2:35:57
  I've been sitting here with you. My phone's not on silent. I don't want no phone calls. Nobody, I
• 2:36:04
  no phone calls. I don't want to have a money manager to call and tell me what this and I don't
• 2:36:13
  want to have secret structures for how to like deviate 5% of tax and all this shit that everybody,
• 2:36:19
  no, I went to my tax advisor here. He was like, uh, in Florida, you pay X. Yeah.
• 2:36:25
  I said, wonderful. In Israel, you pay 56% tax plus now a new surcharge, you get up to 59%,
• 2:36:34
  so roughly 60% tax is so heavy. Plus 18% VAT plus 135% on luxury. That means if you, right,
• 2:36:43
  so that is it. And then other jurisdictions and he came and he told me what the tax rate is in
• 2:36:50
  Florida. And he's like, but if we stretch you like this and we open up here and I'm like,
• 2:36:58
  I'm good. I like United States. I can earn if I get all good. It's fair for me. I'm happy.
• 2:37:08
  I don't want to have another entity here and open up some weird trust here and I don't, you know,
• 2:37:16
  too much headache, you know, too much headache. I'm trying to live, you know, the best, I guess,
• 2:37:26
  most of my years are in the past. I've got one to 120. What are you talking about? Let's say
• 2:37:32
  statistically, I got another 20, 20, 25 years, 75. That's young. Unless my brain works,
• 2:37:39
  unless I don't have to go every day for like a thing, you know, I got 25. I'm trying to make out
• 2:37:45
  of those 25 years that I laugh more. I'm around good people spending good time going to the beach,
• 2:37:55
  which is what I like writing a bicycle. Do you know I write a bike? I haven't written a bicycle
• 2:38:00
  in 20 years. Not otherwise, actually, you should, it's unbelievable. The little basics, they
• 2:38:05
  write it all the time going out, right? Yeah. You remember being a kid and having a bicycle? Yeah,
• 2:38:10
  of course, because all my friends lived within a, you know, whatever, a five or five kilometer,
• 2:38:16
  whatever that is, mile radius. So you always a bike to their house. That's amazing. Yeah.
• 2:38:22
  I want to ride a bike. And nobody call me. And I want to listen to Biggie Smalls on my headphones,
• 2:38:27
  and I don't want to get bothered. And if I want to do some work or some stuff,
• 2:38:36
  it better be around good energy. Other than that, I have zero interest.
• 2:38:42
  Are you going to do another deal after this one? Are you trying to stop? I had no, no, you don't
• 2:38:49
  plan. Look, I've never planned. I never, I believe, I have a different, I believe, you know,
• 2:38:56
  in luck, a lot more in life. I believe in everything is, you know, you need to work and you need
• 2:39:02
  to hustle, but nothing happens without luck. Some people call it God, some people call it, but
• 2:39:09
  fate or a diva. I don't know. If something presents itself to me,
• 2:39:18
  yeah, of course, I'll check it out. But will I be going on like if somebody tells me,
• 2:39:23
  oh, do you like back in the day? You know, I used to chase where the money goes, right?
• 2:39:27
  So when there was a lot of money in Africa, I'm an Africa. When there was a lot of money in Russia,
• 2:39:32
  I'm in Russia. When there's a lot of money in China, I mean, we're doing that. You have to understand
• 2:39:36
  the years of doing that, created the luck that you luck that you have now. You put yourself in
• 2:39:41
  a vicinity where there is, right? I mean, you know, if you know, if you put yourself in areas where
• 2:39:51
  things are around, you know, money is there, right? I'm not an innovator. I'm not Elon Musk.
• 2:40:00
  I'm not, you know, I go where the money goes and I make deals. If all the money next week,
• 2:40:05
  right, went into, I don't know, coffee beans or something, you know, and I'd go into the coffee
• 2:40:12
  being, check it out, see who's doing that. But my point is, I'm not...
• 2:40:15
  It's not what I do. You know, and I try to facilitate a large-scale deal,
• 2:40:24
  cross-border, the same stuff, but it's a stressful game. But would be the advice, though,
• 2:40:30
  for somebody who is just starting out in their career because now you're very wise. Now, you know,
• 2:40:35
  you're actually, well, you're actually, you know, structuring your life around, but it doesn't
• 2:40:40
  always start out like that. So somebody who's listening to this, who is on sort of this hamster,
• 2:40:46
  real, whether or not it's their first company or they're building an audience or whatever it is
• 2:40:51
  they're doing. They're working 24, 7, 3, 65. What is that word of wisdom? Like that one thing,
• 2:40:57
  do you think they should learn from you? First of all, chill. Chill. They say like, you know,
• 2:41:04
  and stormy waters, you can't fish. And when you're running in this hamster wheel and
• 2:41:16
  you can't catch a big fish, I think this whole hustle, hard, hustle, non-stop. I think it's a mistake.
• 2:41:28
  I think people need to chill, need to open their eyes. Sometimes you don't have to go across the
• 2:41:35
  street to do a deal and it's sometimes right next to you. The main thing is especially if you're
• 2:41:44
  young, that there's no race. Everybody has this, you know, because of this Instagram or this,
• 2:41:52
  you know, you see what other people and you think someone's achieving more than you. And I think
• 2:41:56
  a lot of it has to do with that. A lot of these guys that are starting, why are you starting
• 2:42:01
  in a company? Like, why do we need companies? Like, don't you need, if you need it, you need a
• 2:42:07
  product or you need, right? Why do you need a company? I hear people like, yeah, I might open up
• 2:42:12
  a Delaware L.C. I was like, okay, for what? What are you doing? Like, what for what? What do you
• 2:42:19
  need a company for? I can understand you need a product out or you need, right? You're providing
• 2:42:24
  a service. Okay, so if you're a service provider, okay? But
• 2:42:32
  ultimately, chill. There's no race. Make the right moves. Be a little more calculated.
• 2:42:43
  Speak less. Stop sharing your, you know, a lot of everybody shares too much. It's not in your
• 2:42:52
  favor. When, when you speak more and when you share more, I know how to evaluate you better.
• 2:43:03
  And the money comes from more guys like me than those guys starting out. Then we look at those
• 2:43:08
  things. If I see a guy that's like non-stop, you know, talking and yapping and messaging and things,
• 2:43:16
  that's not what I'm looking for. Not for big money. And I always always respect, you know,
• 2:43:26
  the cool cats, the ones who speak less, the ones who move a little smoother. Rather than the ones
• 2:43:36
  that are allowed and jump from place to place and make noise and and and jump from one entity to
• 2:43:46
  another entity to another entity to another entity to another. That doesn't show persistence.
• 2:43:53
  That shows in stability. It shows that guy's crazy. He hasn't found himself yet. He's not
• 2:43:59
  coped yet. He's not ready yet. And when the and every business has stress and pressure,
• 2:44:09
  and you just got to see how that guy deals with it. If he's frantic, if he's this,
• 2:44:16
  this is not the right guy. You shouldn't be doing that. Because at the end of the day, at the highest
• 2:44:22
  levels of all these companies, there's how they handle that stress or pressure.
• 2:44:29
  You know, I'm baffled always by Elon Musk. I don't get how this guy does all he does. I don't get it.
• 2:44:37
  He's also loud. Completely. And I understand his freak is unbelievable. I don't know how many
• 2:44:45
  companies, how many things. I don't know how he has time. I don't know. Does he have a life? I don't
• 2:44:50
  know. But I also think somebody like that. So you shouldn't look at him. He doesn't remember. He
• 2:44:54
  doesn't appear. You know, well, you shouldn't lie. It's somebody like that at that level of the
• 2:44:58
  game that he's playing. Why is he even being just like you and me? I know. But maybe he wasn't like
• 2:45:02
  that when he was building, you know, his first thing. I watched him. I mean, I watch a lot about him.
• 2:45:07
  I find him so fascinating. And I had once an opportunity, the my LPs and Hong Kong,
• 2:45:18
  Leon the rights to the Hyperloop. There are partners of his in China also with Tesla China.
• 2:45:27
  We're the same. I'm with the same sort of people. So when he was in China last time,
• 2:45:36
  even the time before, you know, a lot of people know that I'm a big fan of his.
• 2:45:43
  And they said, come eat him. On a range like, you know, like a real meeting, you know,
• 2:45:49
  not like, you know, like in a closed room kind of thing. I had to pass. I was kind of too, you know,
• 2:45:58
  too much for me. He's for me a bigger than life kind of guy, you know, he's things. But
• 2:46:05
  he doesn't necessarily look and he says as himself, he says, my mind is a storm. And it's not a happy
• 2:46:16
  storm. And he doesn't lead a good, happy life. So what can I take from him? What can I learn from
• 2:46:27
  him? Those are not the things that I currently in my life today. Maybe if I was 20 or 30 years old
• 2:46:34
  and I saw that $200 billion, you know, value or 300, I don't know how big he is today.
• 2:46:43
  I'd rather learn from that guy, this guy, John, who runs the valet at Bell Harbor shops.
• 2:46:52
  So those guys got blue eyes every time you drive by, he's got a massive smile on his face.
• 2:46:59
  All the time. What's up, John? You know, I met him every time I drive in, he's there. He works so hard.
• 2:47:11
  He's there like the six days a week. So his guy, you ever see him, little guy, bald head, blue eyes.
• 2:47:19
  So I'll look for a nice time. He got smiles from here to here. And he's done. And I'm like,
• 2:47:25
  that's something I'm interested to learn of. Elon Musk is too brilliant for me.
• 2:47:29
  I'm not that smart. I'm not interested to put a rocket on Mars. And I know interest, I'd rather
• 2:47:35
  stay home with my kids and watch that. I know last night we watched, I introduced my kids yesterday
• 2:47:42
  to Adam Sandler. And we watched like three out of standard movies yesterday, which ones. I watched
• 2:47:48
  a click. Yeah, pixels. Yeah. And Jack and Jill, which they like the most, that's awesome.
• 2:47:55
  It's awesome. And I want to learn like from people like that, you know, and how do I
• 2:48:06
  maintain to be a good guy and do good things and hang out with simple things?
• 2:48:13
  That's for me, or where I am in my life today. The younger guys, it's very difficult,
• 2:48:20
  because if I was speaking to my younger self, I'd tell me to shut the fuck up.
• 2:48:26
  It's an age thing. You won't get there and you won't know it until you pass through.
• 2:48:31
  I'd watch this doc, this podcast of me, if I was 26, I'd say,
• 2:48:36
  there's a fucking, you know, there's a fucking husband, it's over. He's tired. He's a old man.
• 2:48:42
  Not but you're happy. I'm content. Yes, I'm relaxed. I hadn't been for a long time.
• 2:48:52
  And I think the, I think that the chase, you know, we need to forget
• 2:49:00
  sometimes what's it for? What would be, I mean, we went through a lot. Obviously, you know,
• 2:49:06
  you're one of these guys that I'm sure we could probably talk for like, I'm kind of all day.
• 2:49:11
  Yeah, thank you for the time. Oh, this is really good. I really appreciate it. I've
• 2:49:15
  appreciated more of a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. I learned more about your story. I had all
• 2:49:19
  these things that I was going to go into and we sort of touched on several of them, but I was
• 2:49:25
  happy that you went more into your story and where you're at right now. I think that's really the
• 2:49:28
  most important lesson out of all the tactical things you can talk to about deal making and even
• 2:49:34
  building the relationship with some of the incredible stories and you're going to do more shows in
• 2:49:38
  the future. And more of these stories are going to come out there. I mean, your life has been
• 2:49:42
  pretty interesting. But out of all of that, I do think that the one just sort of golden nugget
• 2:49:49
  and the piece that I'm really happy that you went into is just sort of where you're at right now
• 2:49:53
  and the life that you're building right now and life and how you're structuring a life right
• 2:49:56
  now because I think that's a very beautiful thing for people to take away from your journey.
• 2:50:01
  I think that I think that's probably the most valuable thing that you can give people.
• 2:50:05
  But I want more people in my life and also just to who listen to the show
• 2:50:11
  to understand that listen. There's unlimited amounts of money you can make in the world. There's
• 2:50:16
  unlimited amount of work you can do, but ultimately like your family, your children,
• 2:50:20
  your relationships, your peace, your contentment. I think that's really what that's really what's
• 2:50:25
  important. Health and peace. Health and peace. I always ask a couple of questions at the end,
• 2:50:33
  but you've gone into so much. Let me know if there's anything else that we didn't go into that
• 2:50:37
  you did want to speak about or bring up, but is there anything that I should have asked that I
• 2:50:41
  didn't? I mean, I've enjoyed the conversation. I always think you can speak for hours and I know,
• 2:50:49
  you know, and leave me next time you're back in Miami. I'm here. I'm always here. Yeah, I'm here,
• 2:50:54
  but no, I mean, I think you're traveling for a little bit or something like that, but it's
• 2:50:58
  anytime. I tell you, I love it, but anytime with pleasure and, you know, I appreciate it. You are,
• 2:51:06
  you know, my second podcast ever. They're very easy podcast guests. I'm an easy podcast,
• 2:51:11
  right? Yeah, you know, I was like, I didn't know how, because, you know, you didn't know me,
• 2:51:18
  you know, and a friend of mine that told me about your podcast, you know, I don't feel sometimes
• 2:51:26
  comfortable to talk about, you know, size of deals or net worths or things like that. You know,
• 2:51:32
  yeah, there's stuff about the public that I've appeared is, you know, and stuff like that.
• 2:51:38
  It's never made me feel comfortable, you know, I don't like to be judged on or approach to
• 2:51:43
  as that, you know, in 2017 or 2018, you know, we were the first institutional investors out of
• 2:51:54
  the UK to invest 50 million in BTC and Ether. I saw that. I wasn't going to go down that
• 2:52:00
  route. Oh, what's wrong? I was saying, back then, you know, and everybody thought I was nuts,
• 2:52:08
  you know, for like a year period, but like, yeah, nuts. Today, we say, oh, he's innovative,
• 2:52:17
  you know, I said, no, really not. The LPs that I had with me, they were really kind of,
• 2:52:22
  they were like, let's go for it. They were kind of gamble guys. And then I had to figure out how
• 2:52:27
  to weigh, how to do it, you know, but I think sometimes just happen, you know, and I wish I can say
• 2:52:37
  to you that everything is planned and I knew and I there's, but it's not my story. But the things
• 2:52:46
  that I really value and I hope a lot of people understand that obviously money is important in the
• 2:52:54
  careers and is important in releasing yourself or putting your creativity out in the world. This
• 2:53:00
  is also, you know, therapeutic and healthy and beautiful, but pace yourself and and and
• 2:53:10
  breathe and never forget that the basics, health, peace, good vibes. That's what it's for.
• 2:53:20
  But ones that can achieve that with little money are the winners. But that's what you were
• 2:53:26
  alluding to with the value, you know, it's very happy, very much at peace, probably happier than
• 2:53:31
  some billionaires or 100%. What would be the lesson that you want to leave your kids with after
• 2:53:38
  everything you've done to her? Just be happy and don't just try to be happy no matter what you do.
• 2:53:46
  Happy, be happy.