She BEAT The S&P 500 By 41%?!

Alright, you ready to do this? Yeah, hold on. I'm just uh I'm just executing a stock trade right now. I'm I am the wolf of Wall Street right now, Sam. I we are live on this podcast, but I'm not here.

I'm not here talking to you. I'm in Wall Street right now, on the stock market floor, shaking my money, saying, Take my money. Because I'm buying a stock. I don't think the Wolf of Wall Street used Robin Hood, but that's okay. If you want here's here's what we're gonna do. If you want to find out how to lose money like I do. You should stick around. Uh first I'm gonna tell you the sponsor of today's show, and then I'm gonna tell you about my latest money losing move. Yeah.

Feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I'll put my all in it like my day's all on a rolless track. So what is it? You've been on a stock kick. You you're really on a stock kick. Which is just bad news for me. I every time I get on a stock kick, bad things happen. Um, I just don't realize it until three years later. So

Let me just show you these two charts. So take a look at this chart. The fur it's about the stock called Palo Alto Networks. I don't think you're following too much of Palo Alto networks. Am I right in assuming that? I'm not following. right now, but I know like it's one of the Silicon Valley OGs. It's been around for a long time and yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Good. That's pretty good. All right. So look at the spot. I know a bullshitter when I hear one, and you don't know a shit about the stuff. I know, I know whatever you can learn reading the Wikipedia. I've read the Wikipedia. Tell me this. What do they sell? What's the product? No, no, no. Why are you looking at the screen? Look at me. Look me in the eyes and tell me what they sell. Networking and data solutions, I believe. So some type something like they used to be like one of the OGs that had servers, didn't they? Dude.

Here's the reality. I don't know what they sell either. It doesn't matter what they sell. Look at this chart for a second. So this chart shows last five days. Damn, down fourteen percent. Fifteen percent basically. That's Pretty bad. Uh and actually it would be worse than that.

Except for there's this little uptick. So look at the second chart. This is today. Up Ten percent. You might ask, did they just have like an earnings call? Did they announce a new product? Did they announce a a big AI breakthrough? What is causing the stock in the first two hours of trading today to be up ten percent?

The answer is Our girl, friend of the pod, Nancy Pelosi. Just made a trade. She just bought a million dollars of Palo Alto Networks of stock. And immediately people start following her action and start buying this thing blind. Cause they don't know what she knows, but they know that she knows something. And isn't that so funny that that's what's happening nowadays? Like I follow this account. I don't know if you follow the Pelosi Tracker. And they were like

It says breaking. The Queen is back at it again. She just bought a$1.25 million of Palo Alto Network calls. And then it says, and then like there's a subheadline, Palo Alto Networks. is one of the leading cybersecurity companies in the nation. Like in case you need to know, but here's the reality. You don't need to know. You just need to know that Nancy Pelosi Who has one of the greatest stock trading track records Of our time. Just bought this and she's a little bit more than I Are you actually buying this?

No, I'm not buying the ballot. I was gonna say we just did this amazing whole thing on Buffett a couple episodes ago. Two months ago when uh Munger died, we did a whole episode on that. And I was gonna say, you did a great job of remembering what he said, which is like invest blindly in things you don't understand, right? Yeah, invest blindly off random Twitter anonymous accounts, uh you know, claims about You know, ninety year old women's trades. So that's what I'm doing. Uh no, I didn't buy this one, but I did find it I was kinda curious. I was like, I saw this tweet.

And I was like I've seen her track record or like the data analysis of her track record. It's like really, really impressive. I don't have it offhand here, but It's Like better than most hedge funds. It's better than most like famous investors that you know of. And so I was wondering, are people just fast following her trades? That's why I looked at what's happened today.

And the s the share price of twenty seven bucks this morning because the the sort of the the f she had to disclose what she bought. And so uh people were tracking that. So I just find that I I was curious D does the stock actually move when Pelosi Um

Uh makes a trade. And our girl moves weight, all right? She makes mo she makes waves in the market. I'm an idiot. And I don't know anything about politics.

But But what I would say is if I'm like in charge, what I would say to all these folks who are uh you know high up in the government is I would pay them A huge sum. like two or three million dollars a year. Right?'Cause there's only like Five hundred how many how many people are I don't even know. This is how uh uh m how m how m ignorant I am.

how many people are in the Senate and Congress, I would pay them a ton of money and say There, now you can't speak, you can't consult. And also all of your money has to be in this pol political ETF or whatever it's called. So We know every trade you're doing and you can't actually buy individual stocks. It's kinda ridiculous that she's able to do this, right? It's actually her husband. Her husband's able to do it. It's their money, but it is kind of crazy. Her husband's a a PE guy. I mean, he's like this is his job, I would imagine.

All right, so let me just tell you this. The last big trade that I saw from her was In I believe twenty twenty two. So July twenty twenty two, Nancy Pelosi Um and her husband Paul, who's a V C Decided to buy.

Twive thousand shares of NVIDIA. Yeah. They said what's the best stock In the world right now. Since twenty twenty. What is it

Almost the most valuable company in the world right now. NVIDIA. Oh, that's right. So they bought it at 165 bucks. Currently trading at eight hundred dollars. Oh, that's pretty good. Uh a little four point eight X for our girl Nancy. That's that's pretty impressive.

Good trade. When I first yeah, great trade. When I first moved to San Francisco, I l I told you the story how I lived in this warehouse. It was like a dirt cheap warehouse. It was horrible. It was an awful place to live. I lived with four other guys. One of the guys worked there at NVIDIA when I lived in this warehouse. He worked at NVIDIA, I believe, from two thousand and nine. to two thousand and fourteen. And I was doing the math.

If he had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of equity given to him over four years, which seems reasonable Um that's thirty thousand, forty thousand a year. If he didn't sell. It it his net worth would be something like thirty five million dollars. Is that insane or what? And he wasn't it he wasn't an early employee. He would have been employee I don't know how big they were at the time, but it was thousands of people back then. Isn't that insane that someone could do that? NVIDIA has been insane.

Uh, so what was the S P five hundred gain last year? Last year Last year the S P five hundred was up. twenty four percent in twenty twenty three. Okay. Nancy Pelosi was up.

Sixty five percent She just tripled the stock the SP five hundred performance with her trades, you know, as her side hustle. Well while she's the whatever the speaker of the house, whatever the hell she is. Um Pretty crazy. You know what else has grown? A near, you know, twenty five percent in the last year. What?

Our YouTube subscriber base. We are putting Pelosi to shame out here. But we need your help. We need your help. We need you to go to YouTube. We need you to type in my first million.

And we need you to subscribe because we put in so much work every week and people think it's free. It's a common misconception. They think it's free. Sam tell tell them what it is. Look, this podcast isn't free. Everything on YouTube's free except for this channel. All we need in payment is just you to click subscribe. It takes you literally 10 seconds, but it means the world to us. We pour our hearts in this. It's called The gentleman's agreement. We're not there to actually see it, you do it.

But we hope you do. That's why it's the gentleman's agreement. Um What do you got? What's the trade that you just did? that you actually are excited about. Because you said when we started, you said we've got you got some a trade that you're doing as we speak. What is it? Disclaimer, not financial advice.

Disclaimer. I'm very bad at stock trading. But I st I persist. 'Cause I'm the little engine that could. I'll never give up. And so I noticed, um I don't know if you noticed, but over the weekend there was like a lot of negative sentiment around

Google. Which is why. Because their AI product is uh like woke. Super woke. Yeah. So basically they released Gemini Which is their uh answer to chat GPT. Formerly known as Bard.

Which by the way, there's a hilarious tweet that goes around every time Google releases a new product or renames something. And people are like, Cool, should I um I would love to check this out on um On meat, formerly known as Google Meet, formerly known as Google Hangouts. Formally known as Google Hangouts Plus, formerly known as Google Duo. Like they'd show how many times Google renames its product. So it renamed Bard, which was

Awful name. To Gemini, better name. Um and it came out basically. It was Bard. Bard was there. They're

You know, the next great act of their company. They like the thing about Google is it's sound the word Google sounds like a noise. Which is fine. I'm okay with that. It sounds more like a noise than a name. And they just checked out a little bit too far the bar. Yeah, they were like, What are we gonna call? And somebody burped on the call and they're like Oh yeah, we can go with that. Yeah, basically if you went to Bard and you were like, Hey

Um Can you it started off when people were like, Hey, you know, can you um generate an image of Spaghetti and it generated a great image of spaghetti. And they're like, Cool, can you generate an image of a Viking? And then it generated an image of a black Viking and people were like, Huh That's weird. Why is the Viking black?

Hey, can you generate an image of a white Viking? And it was like Gave you like a Mexican Viking? You're like hold on. Can you

Give me an image of a white person. And it was like nah, I can't do that. Really? It was basically either saying no or it was showing a picture of a black person. It's like what ethnicity was George Washington? They're like, Well it's highly debated, you might be might be black.

And it was like you know, they would just do or it would be like uh Who did more damage to society, Elon Musk or Hitler? It's like It's hard to say who did more damage to society, Elon Musk or Hitler. Il Must tweeted these things about the stock price and Hitler committed genocide.

It is really a tough call and it's like it's so people were taking the stuff and running with it. It's like the perfect It's the uh the way I think about it is there's two tribes And if you can if you can get one tribe riled up, you're gonna get so that that storyline is gonna get some legs. But if you can get two tribes Red up.

Then you got like a real story. And so this was basically the Anti big company. Um anti-big tech tribe. It's like yo, babe, wake up. Big big tech made a mistake.

And then there was the Anti um Anti-woke? And the anti anti AI tribes. All three tribes got together and basically had a fiesta. around this and so people were sharing this like crazy and then people were like

The CEO of Google needs to be fired. Um they were like, you know. Google is too bloated, it's too bureaucratic, it's too woke, it's like It's got the woke virus, it'll never recover, blah blah blah. Uh, you know, Sahel, the g the you know, the guy who created MixPanel, awesome guy. He's like, Google has lost its way. Then I read my next tweet. Elon Musk says. the bureaucratic you know, a Google exec called me and promised to change it, but I told him

I don't think the bureauc the bureaucratic blob inside Google will even let him make these changes. It's Hopeless, basically, is what what these guys are saying. You go on the all in podcast. And they're like, I can't believe this. You know, basically like our rights, freedom of speech is at at risk here. It needs to tell the truth. Look at this crazy woke bias. And everybody's anti Google.

So I woke up today and I was like Pretty sure Google still owns Gmail, YouTube, Google search, Chrome, Android. Waymo Okay. I think I'll just go ahead and buy Google stock today because Google's on this dip right now on the negative PR. And I think it's just that old quote of like

The short term, you know, the stock market's a popularity contest and the long term. It's a weighing machine and I just think that they have tremendous assets, right? Like uh Yeah, YouTube does YouTube alone. Which is not even Google's like main product.

Um Does it be a good thing. thirty two billion a year in revenue. Which is more than Snapchat Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok all combined. And that's just YouTube, right? And then you take like Google Cloud, which is like

Does it You know, thirty six billion in revenue. Th that's just like their cloud service, not not Google search, right? Not Android. Not the Play Store. Not uh not any of this stuff. And so I just think they have too many assets. And so I have no I don't really do much analysis. Aside from I was like

I don't know. Seems like everybody's overreacting to this'cause it's a really good social media storyline. To be like Google's lost its way. Uh it's woke.

It it's gonna lose an AI, blah blah blah. Maybe it's true, I don't know. To me Seemed like a bit of an overreaction. I don't think you're wrong. Um, I think that you're right in this particular instance. But

I subscribe to the subreddit called Money. R slash money. And it's basically cum people it's a big subreddit and it's people complaining mostly. And it's a lot of it not complaining, but a lot of it is like I see all these posts of people in college who are like, I'm now twenty grand in the hole because I was buying options on Robin Hood and doing all this stuff on on these apps where they trade. And in general I am so against individual trading.

Even though I think you're right with Google. It ain't going anywhere. I we I buy ads on Google. It freaking works so good. Uh but It's just I just will I refuse to go down this path. It's such a slippery slope that I don't want to get addicted to it. And I feel like I would.

And you've won a few times. I know you've won a few times recently. Oh I've lost every time I win, don't worry. But have you lost a bunch? Of course, of course. Uh yeah. You can't trade without having Bad trades, right? Like what is the w number one rule for having a few good trades?

Is have many trades. That's insane that you're doing this, but uh you're not wrong with this. I'm not doing it with a lot a lot of money and also Um it's an excuse to learn for me too. So I uh I don't know. I think that I think a lot of learning just comes from trial and error.

And Trying things when you build businesses is a really expensive slow way to it's like it's the har it's the highest price way to learn, right? Because Takes a long time, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of focus. But there are things where you're like, all right, well Like you know, very simple uh

I wanted to learn about AI. And so I pay this guy Five hundred dollars an hour. Once a week to to just teach me about AI. Yeah. And I wanted to I wanted to be uh I wanted to be up to speed with what's going on, what are the new tools, what are the limitations, what are some of the bottlenecks.

And so you know, I I in general I have a very Uh. A, I want to have some fun in my life. B, I want to learn and for me the only way to learn is like Uh Andrew Wilkinson said this once. He's like, I like to walk around with a fork finding sockets to put put my fork in, basically. It's like

Um, you know, the the only way he learns is by getting electrocuted and I kinda feel I'm the same way. Uh, you know, I hear things and I hear wisdom, but it never actually sings in until I go and do something. And maybe the real learning here, by the way. Maybe the real learning is Just Don't pick it, don't trade individual stocks.

You might actually be at the correct final answer. Um And so you know, I'm not saying that you're wrong about that. Uh Philosophically I I agree with what you're saying. But I just carve out a small

Fun budget that I use to do this. I uh my partner Joe, he trades individual stocks and this week or last week, he was like I'm screwed, I'm going back to indexing because he like looked at the all the money that he I like did a calculator. I go, Show me what you had fifteen years ago. Show me what you have today. Now let's I'm gonna put it in this calculator. I'm gonna show you what you would have had if you would would have done this and let's see and compare. And the index funding, uh index investing was so much higher. And he's like, Yeah, I'm gonna switch. And so we like mixed the switches we come back. I did the same calculation and it was a hundred percent true for me too.

that if I had just bought the index and got or just added a consistent amount to the index Over time. That would have been perfect. But the funny thing is, it's not uh the the thing in my analysis, I was like, Okay, I went through every single trade. Again, how do you learn? You go back and reflect. So I went through every th every single trade and I said, What is

What story does this tell me? And I had thought the story would be My prediction going in was Um You would have made a little more money if you had done the index, but you know, whatever.

Actually I would have made a lot more money just doing the index. I was learning one. Number two. Learn learning was interesting, which was I thought I would find You're not as smart as you think, buddy. Like, you know, you buy this thing'cause you have all these reasons, but you're wrong. And in actuality

I think I only lost money buying in a very small number of of of stock. I think it was like less than five stocks that I What I bought it for versus what it currently is. um is less or even less than it would have been if I had just been in the in the mark uh in the in the index. Like it's it's pretty comparable returns. Um The two situations where I got it wrong were um

Number one, when I during COVID I um bought some momentums like I just like bought Zoom or something at some moment. I had bought Zoom Like early and it was working so well that I bought more. That was stupid. I should have done that.

But the second one was Uh yeah, random tips from our friends. You know, friend says, Oh man, I'm doing this. They say Well yeah, they're a smart friend and so I bought. So those are the only times that I bought and lost. All of my actual losses of where I c where I made less than I would have in the market.

was just selling early. 'Cause I sold a bunch of things. And I sold a bunch of things, some Some I sold early when they had a lot more room to run. Some I sold when I was uh, you know, the market sentiment was down or I was feeling fearful and I just wanted to move to cash. And I would just sell.

And so I actually m lost the all of my losses were in the sell, not the buy, which was surprising to me. I've been making fun of Joe'cause he's going all on all in on indexing and I'm like great, you you picked a really good month. All time highs record highs. This is the best month ever. Decide to do it. And now he's like second guessing it. Uh let me show you a company that launched uh I think this week or last week. And I wanna know what your opinion of it is. So it's called Harbor. So Harbor.co. And I wanna tell you what this company is and why it's interesting to me. But I'm not sure if it's gonna work or not, but I wanna hear your opinion of it.

Do you remember Deep Sentinel? We had uh Selly uh s uh on the pod. So deep sentinel I thought it was gonna be huge. T B D verdict's still out. And it was basically I like these businesses where people are monitoring things. So egg let me give you an example. So

Ring is a great way to watch your shit get stolen. Uh which is how it typically works at ring. Like something like I've had a bike get stolen before and I'm like, Oh let me look at the ring. Yep, there's the guy who did it. It is in fact stole it. Uh And so deep sentinel is different because it's these can't it's Camera's similar to Ring, but there's someone on the other end watching the cameras and they'll call the police. And I've had like a drunk Airbnb or think that my house was their Airbnb and he's like knocking on the door at two AM and they call the police on him and like

You know, took care of it, whatever. Uh There's this other thing called harbor. So harbor.co, it's basically that, but for Baby monitors.

And I shared the deck with you. Let me know what you think. But basically, have you ever heard of like sleep training? So basically when you When your kid gets to be like three or four months old. And they start crying sometimes you gotta let'em cry it out a little bit in order to like you know, figure out what's real and what's not real, and it m eventually they quit whining and they go back to sleep. They did this but for baby monitors. So there's someone monitoring the baby monitor and I think they'll call you or like ping your the monitor that they give you to let you know, All right, now you actually should get up. The baby's been crying for like nine or ten minutes. It's time to get up, you know. The baby's crying. I fucking know.

Well This product makes no sense. How big is the house? That's why I want to hear your opinion on this, because we had Jack Smith on the pod. Do you remember when we had him on the pod and he did the same thing where he set up like a ring camera? for his baby monitor. And then he hired someone in India to watch the monitor. I think he used Shepard actually. He hired someone to watch the monitor and to call a dedicated cell phone Just to let him know when the baby's been crying for ten minutes or something like that. And these guys turn that into a product.

Uh, what do you think about this? Well Uh I have a couple of thoughts. First is I love how Sam the new dad Is like you ever heard about sleep training?

Talking to me, father of two So It's like if I went and worked out and I was like Bro, you ever heard of bicep curls? And you're like, uh, dude, what? Welcome to the gym. Uh so yes, I I'm under I'm familiar with the idea that babies cry and uh you know sleep can get a little hard for parents. All right, second thing.

This whole class of products is like what I call like It's supposed to be anxiety. But actually it's somewhat anxiety inducing. So y you know, the idea would be Hey, you could sleep well knowing that somebody's monitoring your baby at night.

And there's a whole bunch of products like this. Like I don't know if you ever bought like the Outlet, which is like this like ankle monitor. uh for your baby or like there's like a sock version of this. There's like a There's like another one that's like measuring their like oxygen like at all times or whatever. Hey, I know all about ankle monitors. I didn't know you could put them on children, but yeah, I I know a thing or two about Achill Monitors.

So those all exist and they actually have done well. I th I think Outlet did Ella did pretty well. I know they got in some some trouble, but they I think they ended up going public. What is it? Oh, it is that's what it is. It's the it's the that's the ankle monitor for babies. But the with the key thing being like it's measuring I think their oxygen levels so you know if the baby, you know, like'cause you know, Sid's is obviously uh you know, the biggest like You know, nightmare for a parent.

Um, would be if your baby, you know, suddenly in their sleep, you know, stops breathing. And so The idea was with Outlet you would get notified if the oxygen um levels go down. Which is to me makes way more sense than the let me know if my baby's crying, because I know my baby's crying typically. um, you know, through a traditional baby monitor or like, you know, my house is not that big or the baby sleeps in the

Crib in the same room, like Yeah, that's I guess uh I think this I think the all that stuff makes a lot more sense than Harbor. So yeah, I'm not like super into this idea. And that's kinda where I stand. No offense to the people behind Harbour. I'm sure they're great smart people. The guy who started it started Mizin in Maine, that clothing company. You remember the the clothing company that uh it's like

Golf people wear it. It's not popular uh amongst in our lives, but it is very popular. Yeah, it's huge. It's like a hundred million plus. It's like a big thing. But he came out with this thing. And I didn't I I invested a very, very small sum. A a thousand dollars. He's a friend of mine and I was like all right, I'll just do a thousand dollars just to play that that's my version of you buying Google is just doing small

small investments, but I saw this and I was like, I don't know, this might actually work. We'll see what happens. But I'm into these things that monitor things. Uh another one, and this is this is a little bit of a shill. This is actually Totally a shill. But do you remember my body tutor? I told you all about my body tutor. I use my body tutor. Happy to plug them for free. I'm not a we don't get paid for this, just a happy customer.

I get a little bit paid for it. I'm a small stakeholder in this company. I get a little bit paid for it. Because because here's what they do. They you I use My FitnessPal, but you could use their app, but I use My FitnessPal and I upload like the calories that I've eaten and all the food that I've eaten. And they basically call me every morning to like criticize me and be like Why the hell did you eat this? Is this part of your plan? Or what's your plan today? Or what are you gonna do this week? And what type of protein you're gonna eat what today? What type of carbs you're gonna eat today? And they actually like hold you accountable for what you're eating. I'm actually

Am getting paid for this. I am a stakeholder in this company. I'm not getting paid directly, but I do have a small stake in this company. And so we did this thing called my body tutor. Dot com slash Sam. It's a little bit of a discount. For our listeners because I do love this stuff. Has it worked with Bew? Uh yeah, it's going great. I love the product, genuinely. Uh, even though I'm not a not a

Uh you know, not promoting there's no slash Sean. Um, but I yeah, Pappy Customer, my coach Haley's awesome and uh You know, it's a it's a good reminder. So so most things in life I I always get surprised when The answer to most things, if you if you trace back, you're like, all right, how do I make this thing happen? And you're like, Well, you gotta take a bunch of action.

It's a cool. non-negotiable, right? You got to take a bunch of action. Whatever the thing you want in life is, you got to take a bunch of action. Okay. Well, how do you get to yourself to take a bunch of action? Well, you gotta have the you know, maybe a strategy or you maybe have uh motivation. Those are some of the elements that go into action. Okay, where do you get the strategy and the motivation?

If you just keep going back down the chain. The number one thing is simply awareness. Like A lot of things in life that aren't happening aren't happening because you haven't actually put your focus on it, right? The laser beam That's in your brain.

is pointed elsewhere and you haven't actually brought your awareness to to the situation at hand and you're not bringing your your awareness to it regularly enough. As a startup, Sam, I'm sure you used to do the same thing. I used to put like Every day when I would come into office, I'd draw a giant zero on the whiteboards. Like that's how many paying customers I have. And You know, I was like, I don't need a dashboard.

I will write this number here every day of how many paying customers I have. And I would write zero every day'cause I had to look at that. I had to bring my awareness. to the fact that I currently have zero pen customers'cause otherwise It was very easy to get distracted by a whole bunch of random tasks. But if I started with

Well, my main goal is to hit Yeah, this many paying customers and I currently have zero. If I start my day with that awareness then I'm likely to take actions that are in line with changing that number to be what I want. In the same way, you get a phone call in the morning that's like, Hey what's your plan

For eating today and you're like, I don't I don't have a plan, I'm just gonna eat whatever fucking comes up in front of me, right? Like, you know, whatever I see, I'll eat. Like Well that's not right. So then you bring your awareness to okay. That's right. I do have this goal. I am committed to making this happen.

I'm gonna make a plan. And I'm gonna just decide up front. I'm gonna bring my awareness to that. early and often or when you take pictures or you log your meals, you're bringing your awareness to what am I eating? Is this in line with what I've said a wanna be eating or not, right? So I think awareness is actually like massively underrated, both in diet, but Really any goal you have in life.

I think everything is Downstream of first Bringing a bunch of awareness to the thing. Yeah, dude. It's changed my life. And that's why I've invested in some of these companies where they like monitor stuff for you. And so you're either forced to focus on it or someone else is focusing on it for you. Um

Let me tell you one more thing. Have you heard of Penski media. No. What is that? You've never heard of that. Okay. So most people have it.

That's why I wanted to bring this up. I've been f I found this guy A few years ago, and I've been following him. And I spoke to someone who worked at the company and I didn't realize how big this company is. So let me tell you this story. So there's this guy named Jay Pensky.

His father is Roger Pensky. Roger Pensky, do you remember in San Francisco? Remember those yellow trucks? They were yellow moving trucks and they used to say like Penske. Yeah. So Roger Penske. He was a race car driver. He was like professional race car driver. And then he started a whole bunch of things, including a moving company. He also owns a ch uh uh A chain of

Auto parts store. And so he's the self made billionaire. He's probably close to ninety at this point, but he's like a big deal. Well, he has a son named Jay. And Google J Penskey. When I Google Jay Penski, I wanted to hate this guy so much.

Tell me what you see when you Google them. Let me guess. He's too handsome and too rich for you. He's too handsome. He's too rich. I think his wife is a beauty pageant. He's he's he yeah, he's got both of them. If this guy has any handyman skills, he's out of here for us. If he can build anything with his bare hands. Too much. Get out of here.

J Penske shirtless in order to like be like d does he have that too? Which she does, I think. Uh but I look this guy up. And I wanted to hate him. And I did research on'em. And I completely love him.

I think he has it all. So check this out. So you've never heard of Penski Media, but let me tell you all the things that they own. So they own Uh South by Southwest. They own the Golden Globes.

Rolling Stone, the Hollywood reporter. Now they own a large chunk, maybe most of Vox. They own variety. Yes. Yes. He owns the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Women's Wear Daily, New York magazine. Eater.

Uh the Verge Um art news, art form, art in America, The Rod Report. Have you been to The Rod Report? Yeah. This this article says he is the Ruper Murdoch of Entertainment. Yes, exactly. He's really under the radar. Not a lot of people talk about this guy, but Penski Media, I think it's called uh

Uh PMC, Penn C Media Corporation. They're pretty under the radar. They own enough publications that something like one in two Americans go to their websites. Every month. It's massive. They get hundreds of millions of of monthly unique.

And they're one of the few media companies that's large That is consistently profitable. They've been killing it for years and years and years. He's originally How did they get started? How did he build this empire? Yeah, so he originally started Uh his first like uh getting into the digital business was when he was in his twenties. He bought Mail dot com.

And he was like, I'm gonna create a new email service. It didn't work out. And so he eventually sold the domain, mail.com to someone else and he made a little bit of money doing that. And then he was like, All right, but I still want to get into digital, I still want to get into media. And so he started, I believe it's actually hard to find the the origins of the story, but he started something like an ad network. He starts an ad network in the two thousands.

And uh it's going okay. And then they eventually start buying publications to put ads on. And then slowly, slowly, slowly it starts they start gaining momentum. And over the last twenty years, I think it's the company's like twenty years old at this point, they buy more and more publications. And this guy's like He's got a chip on his shoulder because he's the son of a billionaire and Allegedly, that's what he says. He says, I've taken no money from my parents. I started this with a very small sum, my own money, and I've just slowly rolled this into

another thing and another thing and another thing. And now it's this massive business and I think two or three years ago, they raised two hundred million dollars in order to further fund acquisitions. But People aren't talking about this guy at all.

And I asked this guy who sold this company uh to Penski And I'm like, what is he so special at? And he says Uh here's a few quotes that people have said about him. They go, I think he has a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove himself. He was hustling uh back then not to be known as P Penski to prove himself not to the world but to his family.

But another guy said uh that he when he hires people at this point, they have something like a thousand plus people. He interviews every single person who they hire. And when he buys a company, he wants to interview every single person who works there. And they say he's a steward of the brand and he truly cares. There's this one story about. I think it was uh Uh, what was it? It was um

A real estate publication owned by this woman that was notoriously rude to everyone. She was like hard to uh work with. She was kind of a diva and she was just rude constantly. She was one of these Hollywood real estate reporters. And she kind of thought she was on top of the world. And J Jay Penski comes in and he's like this good looking, privileged guy. So immediately she thinks she's gonna hate him. And he totally toned her down and won her over with kindness and like being polite and like having her back constantly. And that's been a trend I've noticed with this guy is all these people say that he's just really kind. He's really nice. He's a s really, really savvy operator and he's super low key and under the radar. But

It's this guy Jay, he's one of the biggest names in media and very few people are talking about him. I love I was like I want to make a name for myself. Hensky Media Group used the same name. Also hilarious. Uh this is fascinating. So he didn't take money from his dad. That's interesting. He took money from the Saudis and he took money from that guy Daniel Loeb, who's like the like the legendary uh trader. Yeah, but but I think that was like fifteen years into the business. I I think that they actually bootstrapped it for a long time. I think they raised two hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation.

How would he bootstrap it? Like what was the first pro what was the cash cow? Well, the first cash cow was their ad network that they made. So if you I used Web Archive and I went and looked at what their website used to look like, and it was basically it it reminded me of an ad network. Now this was like fifteen years old, I believe. Uh, and so like a lot of the terminology was even different and like the type of stuff that they were doing isn't really relevant anymore. But it was from like owning mail dot com that he bought for cheap and he sold that for a profit. And then it was like an ad network is what it was. But they've they've run profitable for a really, really long time. So I think this uh super cool find. I'd never heard of this guy. Um

And I did not know that. Yeah, the same family owns. Penski the truck thing, they own the Indy five hundred, they own like the Indy Car Raceway and all that. And then he bought all these brands like South by South West and

Whatnot? That's Super interesting. Would you want to do this?'Cause This sounds really hard to do. Uh in fact, there's a quote here from someone who's like, he's the hardest working guy. I know he's always on planes, he's always on calls, he never ha he never stops. It's been that way for 15 years.

This seems like like rolling up kind of like old school media properties seems like both one of the more dangerous things you could do because media is like I mean we just saw Vice shut down the other day. Media's like not the most stable um industry. It's not the most profitable industry either. And

owning f a portfolio of fifteen things in general and operating them is is No, you know, like just a hard way to go, a hard way to live. No, I would not want to do this. Uh I think that this is the worst way to one of the worst ways to thousand employees. Yeah, and not only do they have two thousand employees, but it's two thousand Like LA based

Uh, you know, so they own or they operate. So like do you know uh Dick Clark Studios? Have you ever seen like the Golden Globes or Yeah, yeah, uh you remember like when the ball drops on uh on like NBC, I forget even what network it's on, and it says like this is brought to you by Dick Clark Studios or whatever? They own that. And so having to host all those things, no, I would never in a million years want to do that. But Someone is doing it and they're actually doing it successfully. So if you look at Vox, or how about BuzzFeed? BuzzFeed has a horrible market cap. And they they just sold complex media for less than I think they paid for it.

Or um I mean Wha w what other media company did you just mention? Um Vice. Vice dot com. They just shut down. No, I think this is an awful way to do it. However It can be done. And this is the only guy who's proving that it can be done at that size. And so

The way that he's doing it is through just being a really good operator. And so He balances, letting people do their thing, but also he he is like pretty strict about operations. So he expects a certain amount of profit, things like that. And he still owns sixty percent of the company. And so would I want to do this? Absolutely not.

But do I still think it's cool? Yes. He uh and if you by the way, if you Google his name, I was trying to figure out Mike Where's Chinks in this guy's armor? Like where's he screwing up? Uh the only thing that I could find was he got arrested. Mm.

pissing outside when he was drunk on like Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. Uh and so that like that I that was like the only time that I've noticed that that people really have disliked him. In general he's gotcha. Yeah See you're not perfect. By the way, I said that his uh wife was a like a Miss America winner. She's actually a Victoria's Secret model. So He's doing great in many different aspects of his life. But I th I thought that those guys better to just pause after just like so

He's doing all right. But he you know, have you ever heard of Psy New House? Do you know who Psy Newhouse is? No, but I have an idea for you real quick. Um I've noticed.

And many of the listeners have noticed. That You Love a good looking man. I know you should create

The Forbes thirty I think you should create the par Thirty studs under thirty. And it's just great looking businessmen. Just dreamy Hunks. Dude So many times people in the comments

They think I'm gay or they'll comment on how I comment on people's gay. Hi, dude. You're like, I Googled this guy shirtless. For the record. I'm not gay. But I can appreciate when someone's really handsome. So sue me. So Sue me.

Long walks on the beach and a nice body. Dude, it's pretty uh yeah, a lot of people do think I'm gay'cause I remember we were talking about this one track athlete and I was like, Look at his calves. You see those calves? I'm sorry, yeah. I I can admire, you know. I could admire. Well your hand was like making a cupping motion while you were saying it, so that was just too much

That's all right. I'm fine with people thinking I'm gay. That's okay. Uh I'll t whatever. Um Anyway, interesting guy who's under the radar that's doing stuff that you use, but you probably never knew who was behind it. That's what I wanted to bring it up. Okay, I like it.

All right, um, Sam. You brought some fire today. The Penske thing was awesome. Uh Pelosi. We're keeping an eye on her. I got my stock pick. I got my stock pick in. We're gonna check on that one in five years and see how I did.

Um, good episode. That's all for the pot. Actually we're trying something new. So we have a A new format for the next episode. They were calling the quickie. And the quickie episode is just quick hitters. Little basically throughout the week, me and Sam see a bunch of things that are really interesting, but they're

They're kind of short. They're not like They're just like, Hey, did you see this? Check this out. This is something really interesting I saw. And it's stuff that we normally just share in our group chat because everybody likes it. But we didn't know how to make it into a pot, so we're actually gonna just take the best ones from the week. And put'em together.

As a little Friday quickie of quick hitters. So check that out. Alright, that's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like no day song On the roadless travel never looking back

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