#451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert

Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now it is. A cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal empty skeleton. Sure

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Slash Tim. Check it out. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview world class performers from all different disciplines and My guest today is Mike Novogratz. Michael Novogratz at Novogratz. That's N O V O G R A T Z on Twitter.

He's the founder and CEO of Galaxy. Galaxydigital.io. He was formerly a partner and president of Fortress Investment Group LLC. Prior to Fortress. mister Novograt spent eleven years at Goldman Sachs where he was elected partner in nineteen ninety eight. Mr Novograt served on the New York Federal Reserve's Investment Advisory Committee on Financial Markets from two thousand twelve to twenty fifteen. Mike Also serves as the chairman of the Bail Project and has made criminal justice reform a focus of his family's foundation. He serves as the chairman of Hudson River Park Friends and sits on the boards of NYU Langone, if I'm getting that correct, Medical Center and Princeton Varsity Club.

Jazz Foundation of America. And artists for peace and justice. Mr. Novgrass received an A B in economics from Princeton University and served as a helicopter pilot in the US Army. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot, too. And this has been a long time coming. I'm excited to have you on the show.

You have so many stories. You have in Unvarnished. Yeah. And uh

I you have uh just a such a medley of experience. that I'm glad that we were finally able to get on the phone to record this for public consumption. So thanks for making the time. No, I'm excited. I sometimes feel like we were separated at birth, me and you. Yeah, we got

Long Island, we have Princeton, we have wrestling, uh, as you put it, a little bit crazy. Uh psychedelics, meditation, crypto. The list is long, and I thought we could start with a place that uh might seem like a total non sequitur, but I have to ask. I was in preparation for this conversation reading a a really nicely done Profile in the New Yorker written by Gary Steinart. And there is a there's a phrase that came up multiple times that I have to ask you about, which was speed racer pants. He kept on mentioning you're wearing speed speed racer pants. What are what are these pants? I have a pair of white pants with a big red stripe on the side of them. And they look like the pants Speed Racer used to wear

I bought them in LA at Fred Siegel one day when I was just bored and uh I started wearing around and no one in New York was wearing striped pants and so It was quite the thing for for about a year. And you seem to to have a fair amount of lore surrounding you, which certainly became even more clear as I was doing homework for this conversation. And one of them is Piloting a helicopter down Prospect Avenue. Now I'd like to know if that's true. And uh Either way, maybe you could explain what Prospect Avenue is, but did that actually happen?

You know, unfortunately it did happen. Uh I've had a tendency to drink too much at big parties. And you know, Princeton has this reunion celebration every year where all the classes come by and And uh after the P raid, this is a parade of you know, hundreds and hundreds of people, starting with the oldest graduate who, you know, is often a hundred, hundred and three years old, all the way to the new grads. Everyone migrates to this prospect avenue, and one year I had to leave early.

uh for an event and I was like Okay. I'll show off to my friends a little bit and so I got a helicopter was gonna take me back to New York City and I asked the pilot if I could drive and We just buzzed buzz prospect street, uh

Much to the thrill of my friends and probably the dismay of everyone else. Ha ha What was your Princeton experience like? Uh I we're gonna zoom backwards in time to childhood in just a little bit, but what was your experience Like it, Princeton. You know, I was a a middle class kid, so I showed up a little intimidated and you know, I thought I was smart in high school and I showed up at Princeton, I thought, gosh, I'm not that smart.

Uh I thought I was a great wrestler in high school and I went to Princeton and got my butt whooped and I was like, I'm not that good of a wrestler. And so you know, it started off Uh Intimidated. Uh in lots of ways. And You know, I look back, I took

Easier classes than Certainly my kids take. Thinking how do I get through this place to survive it? And you know, athletically that flipped my junior year. Uh socially it flipped early. And that was probably the biggest positive. Academically it never really flipped. I never really felt

Maybe until I did my thesis, like I was really a good enough student. didn't really feel smart enough to actually join the army. And on a test with seven hundred other guys got first place. And I was like, dude, I'm actually pretty smart. I learned something. Uh but I was intimidated most of Princeton. You know what's interesting. Uh the The positive side was

Socially. I was adept and realized you know I had my first roommate actually was uh Gloria Vanderbilt's son, Carter Cooper, who who unfortunately tragically, uh You know, committed suicide years later. But uh he was kind of aristocracy. Right. Not just a wealthy New Yorker, but the you know the Vanderbilt.

uh aristocracy and I Went to New York and you know, realized he had his own insecurities as well, and he had nice friends and other than them teasing me about having my hair parted in the middle, which I thought was a very cool look back then, but not New York City. You know, I quickly realized that Rich guys, middle class guys. They all use the same toilet to shit. And uh And that part I think gave me a lot of confidence in life.

That I could compete in essence. Now that's the point we were competing mostly for girls. But I could compete with with anybody. And that sounds like a small little win, but it was actually when I look back You know, where a lot of kinda confidence started. And you mentioned athletics.

What flipped junior year, if I'm remembering correctly, for you in athletics? No, I don't think I reached puberty until I was about twenty. No, I I was a decent wrestler and I worked pretty hard at it. And I just Got good enough to make

The varsity. Uh so my first two years I was really on the junior varsity. Uh, there was one guy that was better than me at the same weight and And he actually took a year off. And so it opened the spot up for me and having that opportunity to wrestle, you know, I just started doing better and better.

And I made the you know, the eastern tournament that I made the national tournament. And back then making the nationals was a huge check plus for you. You felt like you know, you're a real guy in the wrestling community. And so I came back senior year ready to you know ready to be an all American. So it was a whole shift of you know, my my confidence level again. But also I got stronger. You knowadays kids red shirt, they take a year off. I really wish I I was just getting strong and just getting good my senior year. I I kinda always needed one more year.

Probably why I've stayed involved with wrestling my whole life. Mm. What did wrestling give you. That's a leading question. I I should probably just ask what impact it had on you. But having wrestled myself, uh you wrestled longer than I did. But

Uh I'd love to hear in your words. what part wrestling has played in your life, if aside from the involvement that you had later with Beat the Streets and and s and the the Olympics and so on. Yeah, listen, I think It's a sport.

That almost like no other sport. Beats the hell out of ya. I mean it is so tough. from cutting weight, uh to going out on the map by yourself and just getting crushed. And so you learn to pick yourself up after you get crushed and you're like, Okay.

I got crushed that match. I don't need to get crushed next match. And I gotta work a little harder. And so it's resilience. If anything, the the trait it builds in people is grit. Our resilience. Um when I started Beat the Straits, we talk we looked a lot at wrestling and And it's interesting, fourteen of the forty four presidents of the United States had wrestling in their background. There's no other sport. There's no other sport with that many. I mean, Abe Lincoln used to go from town to town to wrestle for money.

Uh Teddy Roosevelt was a wrestler. Uh And Often that toughness in grit ends up in leadership. And so you see a lot of wrestlers that move on in life into leadership positions.

Hm. So let's talk about the resilience. Uh, because when I polled a number of my friends and asked them what they would most Yeah. like me to discuss with you, it came back to resilience. in some form or another. And in the New Yorker piece, there's there's one line which uh th we c we could also

uh dissect if we wanted, but Princeton like Wall Street, where Novogratz has made at least three fortunes and lost at least two is full of stories about him. So you have This incredibly powerful and public heroes journey that you've traveled more than once, and I want to read from a speech, this is the commencement speech in Iowa. I don't even know the story of how this came to be, but I uh we can get to that. So as it relates to grit. So you say, as I've gotten older, this is in the middle of the commencement speech, as I've gotten older, I've realized that we have two missions on this earth, to know thyself, or as my wife would say, to sort our shit out and to walk each other home. Most people I've met don't start this journey until they've really screwed up. They've lost a job, ruined a marriage. abused drugs or alcohol, destroyed friendships, or just can't get out of bed. I started my journey at thirty three when I had done most of the above. I was a rising star at Goldman Sachs, I was a partner, a president, a respected man in the Wall Street community, and then I wasn't. Right after I resigned from Goldman, I literally thought my life was over, I had ruined it. Okay.

So This is winding its way to a question. So that's a little bit of back story for people who don't have familiarity. And The Question is When that happened.

When you have what you might consider A public A experience like that. How do you work your way through it, like psychologically and emotionally? What do you tell yourself? What helps? I I I'm very curious to know how you dust yourself off and what you did that That helped after something.

You know, that was my kind of first Public humiliation. Failure. Um you know, personal failure, you know, failed the people I worked with. And It was painful. I I I there's no

Two ways around it. You know it was helpful that I had a Support a family that were just Letting me be. Uh I went into depression. Uh and

It took a while to kinda work out. I was I had this narrative that I that ruined my life and I would never get it back. And I remember, you know, there was lots of little pieces of advice first, but I had one lawyer. I was so worried what everyone thought about me. And this lawyer said, Dude. Do me a favor, write down. On a piece of paper.

The people That you think will be at your funeral when you die at eighty. Worry about what those people think. All those other people They don't really think about you that much. And that was kind of liberating because you as a partner at Goldman Sachs, every partner that had left Goldman Sachs, when you left, you got this beautiful little memo about all you had done and you know, it was a it was a Gold was a bit of a cult and there was a very

nice way they exited partners and I just disappeared. You know, I was not spoken about. I was like so I kept worrying that I was gonna run into my ex partners on the street and be be so embarrassed. And so first he helped me get over that. Just Think about it. But in the long run, I end up going up For rehab. Uh in Arizona.

And Yeah, that was a I kinda got snuckered in a little bit. I had this therapist. I'd never had a therapist before and he said, Dude, you talk so much. You gotta go somewhere where you can tell your stories and have a safe space. And there's this beautiful holistic place in the middle of Phoenix. Artuson. uh called Sierra Tucson and and it looked I looked on the pamphlets it looked so nice. And so I went out there and

You know, on day one. Uh and I had a drinker, a drug or got any trouble for three, four, five months at the time. But so I flew out there and you check yourself into a mental health facility and you're like, what the F just went on here. Uh and my first roommate was

in the throes of trying to kick heroin and he was Not having a good time of it. And I'm like, how in God's name did I end up at this place? But It was probably my first experience with

really digging in and trying to sort out like what are the patterns of my life that And it was kind of a little bit more. Traumatic in that. You know, the thesis that a lot of rehab centers use and addiction specialists use is that

There are these deep emotional scars, either big T traumas or little T traumas that People have a hard time dealing with and they start using some substance it might be sex or alcohol or drugs or control of your food to medicate those feelings. And that medication all of a sudden And as you end up doing more stupid things and you need more of the medication, and it's this cycle of uh and so that if you could get to those core issues. it would really help in your journey. And you're sitting around a circle.

with people and you know one guy's father had kicked him in the spleen, he lost his spleen when he's twelve and Almost all the women that were bulimic or anorexic had suffered incest. And I'm thinking here, I had nice parents. Like what uh you know, I had a pretty nice And it was traumatizing not having the big trauma. And you know, one of my insights was sometimes the little trauma.

ten years, twenty years, thirty years later can have just as much psychological Durch has big trauma. You know, and so one man's pain is no different ten years later. Uh it's just pain.

Uh or fear or and and so Starting the search to find that out was unbelievabful. It also Really started building an underdeveloped empathy muscle. You know, I remember I met one woman who

had been the teacher of the year in Florida for like Nine straight years And she had She was probably forty five years old and had a uh had a relationship maybe thirty f forty years old had a relationship with a senior

And it wasn't even sexual, but it was close to sexual got caught and next thing you know she was the pariah of the town and got thrown out of teaching and everyone wanted to shoot her. Yeah. As you met her, she was one of the nicest women I had met. And

She had a story. She had been abused by her both father and then stepfather and had developed a relationship addiction. Uh wish unfortunately then had her having a relationship with a senior in her school. But instead of being angry and wanted to lynch her. You wanted a hunger. And so that

That process of Trying to To understand where where people's mistakes came from allowed me to start kind of forgiving myself a little bit. And then since I didn't really get to the

that holistic place, I realized and maybe this is the trick of how to get started again. I just needed to create a new narrative. And some of the narrative was Fucked up. I

Went to try to understand how I fucked up. I haven't solved it all, but I'm I'm starting over. And You know, it wasn't until nine eleven happened I uh I was trying to figure out what to do. And when nine eleven happened, uh My brother called me.

And He was in one of the uh Big buildings right next to the twin towers. And he's like, dude, a plane just hit. What what am I supposed to do? And I was like buy Euro dollars.

And he was like, what the fuck you talking about? I was like, buy short dated treasury contracts. And I was like And I was like, Oh no, go get out of the building. Yeah. Uh and

And I I was like, okay, the brain's kind of screwed up. And then I was with my young son, who was like two at the time. And I was uh looking on the TV and I was like, We gotta go help. So I go wanting to run down towards the uh trade center to see what was going on and he started crying and I was like, Okay, that's not helping. So we ran back and watched it on T V But I

You know, my army side of me wanted to participate and they there was no real room for volunteers. And I felt like I gotta go do something and I realized I hadn't fulfilled kind of my my Wall Street journey. And so I literally it was a nine eleven insight and I, you know, went back to work at Fortress and

And luckily, you know, had a lot of good luck and good great partners. Yeah, five or six years later we Not even six years later we rang the bell at the stock market and You know, we were all billionaires and It was just kind of heady.

Experience because the journey from you know, walking out of Goldman Sachs and having one of the senior partners say Well, you know. Maybe a Work again sometime. I'm thinking to myself, Jeez, wasn't that bad.

Uh but really feeling like you might never work again until six years later. Yeah, feel like you're on top of the world. Yeah, that was kind of a heady ride. Mm.

What did your self care look like between rehab and ringing the bell. Did anything change noticeably, any type of habits or routines or anything that helped during that period?

So I gave up. Drinking for thirteen months. And you know, I have been a Man who loves parties, who loves drinking, who's who doesn't drink at home, but a very social drinker my whole life. And That was difficult.

Be able to be social not with a glass of wine or a beer or Jack Daniels in my hand was tough. Uh and I gave up recreational drugs. And you know Fourteen months later. I did something which I think was important. I ran this thing called the Marathon of the Sands.

Which was Six marathons in a row across the Sahara. It was one of the earli original adventure races. Seven hundred people from hundred countries and you literally run across the damn desert and it would get to a hundred and

thirty degreing the day and freeze at night. And About halfway into it, I was like, ah it's good to be alive. And it just felt like what the Ever you complaining about you're alive, this beautiful settings and you're meeting new people. And that was really the big trigger.

And so Staying fit, you know. At that age I ran a lot. But it was that push yourself into the uncomfort zone physically even. And realize you're still alive, dude. You're not dead. And so that's

That was right before the nine eleven half. That was or the June before September. But that was really the turning point now that you asked the question where I felt like okay, I can go back to work. And then A fortress. You know. There was a lot of stress at work. Because I felt like

You know, even though I thought I'd made some big breakthroughs, there were parts of my story I hadn't sorted out. One is why I carried all this pressure. All the time. You know that stopped it from being joyful. And so I you know, exercise I still I wasn't really into meditation until

Probably two thousand six, two thousand seven. You know, so early on it was just exercise. My core issues. More pressure. I when I made partner at Goldman Sachs, I felt relieved. I remember Lloyd Blankline called me up, he said, Don't tell my wife it was one of the most joyful days of my life, even more than my wedding.

I'm thinking of stuff. I should have said that when he's gonna come get yell at me. I Did it feel that? I felt relieved. Like ah I gotta check that box.

And I was thinking back on it and I was like, well, that's kind of shitty that you felt that much pressure to be a partner of Goldman Sachs. We'll really care. You know, I lost most of the big wrestling matches of my life because I felt so much pressure to win. that when I knew it was an important match I wouldn't wrestle as well. And so I got a lot of second places. And

I would remember walking out of the mat feeling exhausted beforehand. And it took me a while. Matter of fact, I remember the moment. Where I had my first insight. I had uh The year before I had been at this point.

Investor conference called Life or Key And Byron Wien used to run it. He was a legend for Morgan Stanley. And this was the first legendary investor conference. You had to be a legend to be there and you had to share ideas. And I got invited in 2006, probably. Maybe two thousand and five. And it was such an honor to be there. I was one of the young guys, and you had to give your three stories stocks. or ideas and uh it came to me

And The guy before me had used one of mine and I just panicked. I literally was like, uh uh uh and I'm sweating. And it was one of the most miserable five minutes of my life. So much so that the guy next to me was like Dude, that wasn't that bad, but I've got a plane leaving soon if you want to go.

And I remember feeling all this stress about and I was telling my wife, I was like, I don't this is so much stress. I'm not having fun. I should just Do something else in my life. And she was like, Uh, dude, you hired all these people, uh, you just hired one of your best friends, he left the his firm to work for you, like like Sort it out. And You know, as luck would happen, I I have this life

Where I Stolen mentorship. Or found it or you know, been gift at you know, in strange places. And I was One of my investors suggested I have lunch with.

Uhud Barak, who had been the Prime Minister of Israel and uh One of their great generals. One of the and he allegedly had the highest IQ in the Israeli army. And I was sitting with him and he was a charming, charming guy. Later became a friend. And he looked at me, he said, No regrets.

I think I figured you out. Yeah. You're not very smart. I was like thank you. He said but you're lucky. Good lucky.

And then he said, Don't worry about it, you know, Lewis Bacon, who is one of the macro legends, you know, one of the best investors of all time, and Bruce Covener, uh they're they remind me a little. They they think they're smart, but they're mostly lucky. And I'm looking at him and then he gave me a quote in French. Of course I don't speak French and I was like translate, you know, I'm not so smart. And it was from Napoleon. I don't hire smart generals, I hire lucky generals. And it was a and it was about intuition. And that his Napoleon's thought was these generals know where to be on the battlefield right then they can pattern recognize the thing. They have a certain intuition, and we don't have a word for it, therefore we call it luck. And the moment he said that.

The way my brain functioned as an investor, the way I operated in life, it clicked, I was like, That's what I knew. I have patterns, like I'm actually. And I realized I didn't need once I knew what I needed to make investments, to make decisions. I didn't need to fulfill what you think I needed. Right, I remember being so worried when I was at Life for Key that someone was gonna ask me who the finance minister of Russia was because I was telling'em I owned all these Russian rubles and I forgot the guy's name. Well, I didn't really need to know the guy's name for my investment confidence. Other people might.

And that was liberating. And from the moment that happened I could tell the story of how I made investment decisions and had so much more confidence. I had that my hedge fund went from three hundred million to two billion in six months, the returns went up. But most importantly, the joy showed up. Uh it was more fun.

And the confidence came, I was like, I know I can always if I need to sit in front of the screen and sort out markets and and make money from'em. And so, you know, one of the great breakthroughs, Lily, was was from this guy who Yeah, wasn't A famous Jewish general, Israeli general.

I don't know how I seem to gotten sidetracked from your question, but Oh no. This show is all about sidetracks. Those are usually where the the interesting alleys have all sorts of tidbits. So let's dig into intuition because this seems to show up again and and again in your life. And I'd be very curious to know, let's just say in that six month period where you go vertical basically in assets under management. How have you learned if you have to discern Intuition and Pattern recognition.

from say overconfidence, right? Or a rational confidence in a position or a trade or something like that. How have you learned to wield and discern what is what? Yeah, it's a great question. And listen, the world the the world's best speculators or macro traders. Have two things in common. They have.

Does pattern recognition intuition? I put that in one bucket and then I have discipline. And I said the three things, and then they have a unbelievable competitive spirit. And you know, I look at guys like Stan Drucken Miller and Paul Jones and Lewis Bacon, and to be honest, they're just They've done better than I have.

And It wasn't because'cause I spoke to him enough to understand of their understanding of markets or intuition. Uh They discipline. Was it Just

Better and it was. And I was like, why are they so much more disciplined than I? I think partly they're just more disciplined than I, but they're more competitive. They just cared more. It was interesting. I couldn't tell if that was in life a strength or a weakness. But they're You watch that Michael Jordan documentary And

The one thing that Every single person who watches it comes out of us. He cared so he was the most competitive man I think I've ever seen in anything, Michael Jordan. You know, the great Speculators are very competitive like that. And and shockingly, I'm just not as competitive. Uh and listen, I've done spec I've done very well by almost any standard, but not on the legend standard.

Uh that you know, I know who the legends are'cause I've been around'em. And so I think about that a lot and I'm trying to figure out. Yeah. That that's not all terrible. Like you'd like some more discipline.

And I think it was allowed me to have a more Diverse life. Than some of my peers. But I think about that. But that's how you the only way

you end up trusting your intuition to get to your question is to have some set of rules that you manage your risk by, your life by, your because you're You're still anxious. Right, we're learning to trust ourselves. So I think I'm right, right. It's this business that I think, not that I know. You really think like this lines up I'm almost positive

Bitcoin's gonna go up right now, but if it doesn't, you've gotta have some circuit breaker. That says, you know, I could have been wrong. Yeah. No one's right a hundred percent of the time, right? No one's right eighty percent of the time in markets. And so you need a circuit breaker. And so that's a series of rules that you manage your portfolio by, manage your life by in lots of ways. And that's where discipline really helps. And that's where I've often let myself down a little bit.

And that's sometimes just trying to do too many things, sometimes. You know, just not being tough enough on myself, but That's the challenge of anyone who goes into my business. It's those it's really hard to learn that you're actually good at it. Because

You know, it's it's not a skill that You know, how do you say, I'm I've got good intuition, right? It takes a long time for you to trust yourself. And then how do you hold steady to Really having your portfolio. Constantly being A collection of your guesses. It sounds like it should be a tautology, right? I'm bullish, therefore I'm long.

But I would tell you that. Nineteen out of twenty people that try to Be traiters. That sentence isn't consistent with them. Ninety percent of the time.

Could you elaborate on that? Yeah. Yeah, so someone is bullish, they say, I think the stock market's going up, but I'm not gonna buy it yet. Right. I think the stock market's going up, but I'm gonna buy a little bit, but I'm gonna sell calls on it. And so then it goes up and they barely make any money. Uh Stan Drackenmotter, when he's here him on TV, if he says I think the market's going up, you can better Believe he's long. Yeah, and j and just for people who are are not in uh in the investing world so long, meaning he is

I I suppose in the simplest iteration, buying things with the expectation they will appreciate their value. Yeah. Apologies, I And so That's the battle of

Um Being a speculator, but that translates into the battle being life. And you know, listen, Eden I guess if you're investing in movies, you have some algorithm in your head. Or a written algorithm of what You think makes for a good bet.

And so You invest, you invest, you invest. At one point Right, your track record. Your wins versus losses are gonna tell you, are you good at this?

But really taking the time to understand what that algorithm is. Like how do you make decisions in investing in movies or investing in small businesses, right? If you're a venture capitalist or investing in markets. And so one of my insights was always like

Any one of those processes you take in information You process it through an algorithm and you have to then manage it. Like manage the risk of it somehow. And so that I use that process in lots of things. But

Some you know, and and not every job, certainly not every investing job, is based on intuition. Quite frankly, very few are. Because The the more intuition. Based the investing is The more anxiety there is.

Right. If you're an arbitrageur, you buy something for You know, eight dollars. uh on one market and sell it for ten on another. There's not a whole lot of risk. And so that is just being commercial.

Uh. And so I always tell people that you gotta try to understand yourself and figure out where your DNA where your personality type fits it into the space. Let's

Come back to one of the names you mentioned, and that's Paul Jones or Paul Tudor Jones, who has hit the news quite widely in the last few weeks. Because of his extensive discussion of Bitcoin specifically in one of his memos. I'm not sure if he refers to them as memos or letters or something else, but nonetheless this has made the round that Paul Tudor Jones has de-risked Bitcoin for institutional investors. Here comes Wall Street, et cetera. You've referred to yourself as the force gump of Bitcoin. So so so I'll I'll give you two questions and you can choose which one you want to tackle first. So one is

Why are you the four scump of Bitcoin? And then the second is how are you different from Paul Tudor Jones? Like how do you guys I know you know each other quite well. How are you most different or most similar? So that's a great question. So the the the first couple of Bitcoin was kind of a shtick. I was the the first Institutional Great. investor that started talking about it.

Yeah, for better or worse. Yeah, back and When it was trading around a hundred I was on. And it was I I I promise my partners quite frankly. That

We wouldn't talk about crypto because Fortress was a real asset company and we weren't gonna talk about these digital assets. And I was at some conference, I didn't know the press was there, I made some witty comments about Bitcoin, and the next day I was on the cover of the Financial Times. Um And then I got sucked into Bitcoin because everyone would call me and ask me what I thought. And at that point I didn't even really understand how it worked that much. I understood

Yeah. It was a thing that was gonna go higher. But Partly by being forced to publicly speak about it. You know, I got asked to speak at the Oxford Union. And

I really had to Study and you know, try to understand how the damn thing worked. And so I became kind of an unofficial. Spokesperson. Or one of the unofficial spokesperson for it.

Paul And I are as close. in terms of what we have done. We ran similar businesses, his was bigger and and a little bit better. He's been a role model in philanthropy in spirit. Uh like if I had an older brother

Ten years were different, you know. Then my parents didn't tell me about it would be Paul. And so It's fun to see him getting involved in Bitcoin. Uh for me personally. Uh it's important because You know, I said I was pretty damn good, but Paul is one of those

Legends. Literally honestly three or four guys of his stature in the whole macro space in the last thirty years. And so for him to get involved, It basically says this is This is a real Macro instrument.

You know, there's no more debate on Is Bitcoin. Always go up, it might go up and down. You might not put it in your portfolio, but there's no shame in in being involved with this the space anymore. And that's a big deal because For stores of value, and um bitcoin is really becoming a store of value.

They only become stores of value when people believe they are. And so it's a belief system. Just the code. It's really the social construct. You say it's this, therefore it is this. And so we already have Jack Dorsey who's

Twitter handle says Bitcoin and Abby Johnson from Fidelity and Pete Brigger from Fortress that all bought it personally or had their businesses involved with it. Wences Casares and Micke Melker. I mean, these are kind of legends in their space. Paul's the first time. had a legend in the hedge fund space that didn't just buy it personally, but he bought it in his fund. And so it opens up a whole new

avenue of of potential participants in that community, which I think is really, really significant. If we had to put on the the hat of Forecaster or Nostradamus. Uh what do you predict if you're comfortable going for it with Bitcoin, cryptocurrency, et cetera, in the next let's just call it twelve months. It's currently May eighteenth when we record this two thousand twenty. Mark it down and write it down. We're trading roughly$9,600 per Bitcoin. Right now.

I think we'll take out ten thousand soon and end the year closer to twenty thousand the old highs. Once these store of values start building momentum. Uh there's not a lot of supply. We've had this thing called the havening where there's half the supply being mined than there was even a week ago. But mostly The story's finally catching Broader.

Uh adoption. It's not just hedge funds are gonna be able to buy it. You're gonna see wealth managers start selling it to their clients through products. We have a a Bitcoin fund that's targeted to the fifty to eighty year olds. in America that buy their that make their investment decisions through T D Ameritrade or Charles Schwab or Goldman Sachs are registered.

uh investment advisors. Right? Bitcoin has been a young man's game. It's been uh Gen Z and the millennials that's been bought on Coinbase app or Square or Robinhood. Uh those things aren't going away, quite frankly, there are gonna be more of them. Right. Facebook's Calibra is going to allow you to buy Bitcoin and that'll be two thousand, three thousand people using that wallet. And so there're so many more avenues of Access. Uh, I always tell people if it was easy to buy the price would be far higher already.

Right. Bitcoin's been hard to buy. And a year from now it's gonna be that much easier. Mm. Thank you. I'm really bullish. Uh and I you know, listen, I don't have

Uh I'm always careful when I'm when I say really because You know, these things are recorded and come back later and people are like, damn, that guy was stupid. It doesn't work. Uh and so you're cautious to be that bullish publicly, but I haven't seen things line up as well. Uh in a long time. Let's rewind the clock as promised, uh it feels like

Probably an hour or so ago, maybe maybe a little bit less. to family, and I know this is a little bit like memento as in how nonlinear this is, but you grew up in a big family. It seems like with with no shortage of strong personalities. Could you describe for folks what Your Family was like what your childhood was like.

Sure. So for people of my age, uh That used to watch John News movies like Pretty and Pink and Sixteen Candles. That was pretty much the neighborhood I grew up in. Like we were straight up the middle, suburban middle class, all American family. My dad was an army officer. Uh so he was a A major. He went to Vietnam twice when I was very young. A major then a lieutenant colonel for like my my growing up years. Uh I went to public high school. We had

You know, seven of us. Uh seven of us had a house that had One and a half, well, two bathrooms, one for my parents and one for the rest of us. And Yeah, we fought over the brush and the blow dryer, because back then you'd blue dry your hair if you were a cool dude. Um

My Mother Uh didn't go to college. She got married when she was 18 to my dad. They just had their 60th anniversary. 19. She got married sixtieth anniversary. And she was beautiful. And I think she had this fascination with the Kennedys because she named my sister Jackie and my brother Bobby. And we've got a John John. Yeah, my dad was a handsome football player, a football star at West Point. And

My mother We should. You know, we should be them yeah, why why not us? And so she was the one that kinda drove the pressure to succeed, not in a very harsh way, just in a

Like you know, we would used to complain. about kids and she says, Well, if that girl would jump off a bridge, would you jump off a bridge? The same old saying that most suburban parents use. But there was a pressure my mom put of excellence that we could rise. And in the background my father had been the lineman of the year in college football. He never has once mentioned a thing. He w he's the least Braggadocio guy, very humble, but he didn't have to say much because he had my mom would say it all for him. But we have this sense of excellence from my dad. That he had done this. Star football player.

We also had a sense of service, you know, my mom used to always say, Ah, you're given so much, you know, you gotta give back. And I look back, I'm like, we had seven kids fighting over one brush. But you know, we were, you know, it was a Catholic family. There was lots of love involved. We might might we come from a big extended family as well. And so we felt special. You know, it was special to be in overgrass. Uh my mother made it special to be in overgrass. Uh, and so we ran for office at the student elections and you know, didn't always win actually. Uh lost most of the time, but but like even the confidence to be the third grader running for class president came from

I think parents that made you feel especially my my dad was tough. Like it was not you know he was a military guy and he grew up in a Austrian immigrant family. And so we got whacked around a lot, my brother and I Uh We always complain that by the time my little brothers and sisters who were

There was a seven year gap between the top three and the bottom four came around. My parents were soft. Um but Yeah, I look back this big family all the time. And I the the one thing that I'm sure that came out of it was You're willing to take more risk in life when you know if you screw up. There's people that are gonna catch you.

Uh there's brothers and sisters that'll love you anyway. Uh And they also On the flip side, when you're doing really well. They don't buy that shtick either. You know, they're appreciative of it. They they applaud, but

You're not more special. Uh just because you made a bunch of money here, got this award or uh And so It it's humbling, it's it's safety on the downside and it's humbling on the upside.

Um And so that's Listen, we've we've all drafted off of each other. You know, I always laughed at you know, it's a pain in the ass to have such a famous sister'cause wherever I go, everyone knows my sister'cause she's always trying to save the world. You should say a few words about that because people may not recognize Jackie equals Jacqueline. Jacqueline Novograts just a few words about your can you say a few words about her? My sister's one of the unique souls that from like

Age five. decided she wanted to change the world and so she was like a brownie than a girl scout and She started this organization, the Academy Fund, which was really kind of the father of venture philanthropy or impact investing. Uh And has spent her whole life

Trying to figure out how to to change systems, how to to invest in The poorest of uh you know, the citizen on this c the planet to build Permanent structures around housing and

and and water and education. Um and really to change the conversation, to start with the conversation of dignity. And you know, she developed a huge following in that development world and in the conference world. Uh she's got you know, branches all over the the world now of young acolytes that want to be like her. And so you know, it's interesting. What I noticed about her, and I notice about some other leaders, but not many, is that she's never

Not known true North. Like she's and Most people and myself included, I try to be a pretty good guy and I do a lot of good stuff. But my compass gets out of kilter plenty of times. Gets out of kilter for my own desires feels pretty good. Uh gets out of kilter because I get excited about Something and I lose my own focus. You know, I put my sister in a special bucket. I, you know, Brian Stevenson is one of my heroes from

Yeah. Equal Justice Initiative, who's really one of our great civil rights leaders. And you meet with him and you're like, after just a few hours with me like he's probably never Not known true north.

Uh And so Yeah, that's listen, it's inspiring to be around those people. It's sometimes humbling and frustrating because you're like uh But it's it's good to have morale because It grounds you a little bit.

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Check it out. Yeah. See you spoke earlier of feeling an immense pressure, say going out on the wrestling mat. or at the investment conference

And so on. You have uh a large family, many Yeah. Do you think any part of that comes from a

Pressure or expectation. To succeed that was made explicit or implicitly clear from your parents? And I know that's a very binary question, but I I'm just curious. Yeah. I mean it's a big yes, and I don't know if it was I think it was more implicitly. Yeah, my mother was very good at making us all feel like we were the special one. And for whatever reason, from you know, kindergarten on my teachers treated me better than everybody else. My parents

And so I literally remember if I got didn't get an A. In like first grade. On the way home taking the paper, crumpling up and throwing it in the sewer. And I'm thinking to myself, now that I've had young kids, it's incomprehensible for me to think that a five or six or seven year old would throw a paper away if he didn't get an A. Like I will like who thinks that. So somehow at that very young age

Uh I I said in that article with Gary Steiger, I when I was at Rehab, I had to complain my mother because everybody's gotta blame their parents. Uh I said you put so much pressure on me because she used to tell everybody,'cause I talked all the time that I was gonna be a senator. And my mother's very Yeah, go ahead, go. Very quick on her feet, said Yeah. Yeah, he did all right. I should have said he should have been the president. You know, your little kid, you pick up

Hughes. My parents never meant to put pressure on their kids, I don't think in that kind of way. But you pick up cues and they become your operating system. And I operated with that system, I probably still have a little bit of in me for so long a period of time that I needed to be perfect. So I I remember cheating like I'm not saying why am I cheating on a high school test when I'm the smartest guy in the goddamn class? Uh'cause I didn't know the answer and what I I'm not gonna get an A.

Like that pressure. Was irrational. And of course by My freaking dad never told a lie in his life. He's another choir boy. They're not gonna condone cheating on a high school test. My mother wouldn't condone it, but like

And so It's interesting when I talked earlier about big T trauma and little T trauma, like the little T trauma of picking up some story. For me was just as powerful as you know. You know, unfortunately for other people having gotten beaten up. And so

That I think, you know, I again I I have a loving mom and dad. And interesting about them is they've gotten nicer and nicer. With each year. So my dad's eighty three, my mom's seventy nine and you you literally It's just fun to see parents.

grow and change and And so I've got nothing but great things to say. But I do think and and I said that in that speech I wrote that you know everyone's journey is to kinda figure out their parental issues. And w how their parents impacted them.

And then To understand it, to let it go and love their parents. Yeah, you know. Took me a long time to figure out. Where that pressure came from.

And again, I don't blame anybody for it, but it certainly was there. So y let's let's come back to that speech because this might be related what what I'm about to ask. So you have I would not call it a small. Tattoo. On your forearm.

Can you describe Can you describe This tattoo for people, please. I do I have I have uh

Four arm length. uh Jaguar slash pooba. I act it's I call it a puma, but you might think of it as a Jaguar. Um, big black puma tattoo that goes from my basically the whole length of my right forearm. that I got literally, my brother had given me a tattoo for Christmas a few years earlier.

And after uh my first ayahuasca experience where I Literally on day three. Transformed to it. Puma. Uh I was gonna call it Black Panther, but the movie had already come out, so I was like, I'm a Puma, I'm not a Panther. And growled and crawled around, uh the floor two nights in a row.

Uh and was so moved by the whole beauty of that experience, I decided I would get a small tattoo. And I walked into this. Famous tattoo caller called Smith Street Tattoos where my brother had Yeah.

Got me the appointment and set it up. I told the guy would get this tattoo and I was gonna get a small one on my shoulder. And the guy looked at me and he was like Dude, with all respect. You're old as fuck.

And if you're gonna get a tattoo, get a tattoo that people can see. And I was like I was such a genius. It's just you know when you hear the truth. So I put my forearm down there and I walked home with this giant eight inch tattoo of uh Of a Jaguar Puma on my on my right.

I love it. I have to say I love it. Yeah. Gives me power. I realized your forearms don't get flabby. It's like the one part of your body that stays fit. So Yeah.

You mentioned ayahuasca and this experience minus the Puma. in this commencement address. Why did you decide why did you decide to include that? You know. It was my first commencement address and I worked hard on it and and the thesis was know thyself. And there's so many ways one can learn about themselves and and That journey that I went on in in

Costa Rica was unbelievably powerful and I ended up getting different things from it than I thought I would. Um But afterwards I was trying to convince my sister and brother in law that they should do this and I really then started thinking Barring people that have you know. bipolar uh uh mental health issues. Uh

Would it an ayahuasca trip Not benefit someone. Is as much as it might be tough and scary, like should we put every politician on the world through that experience before they're allowed to serve? And I kept coming up with yes. And so I was like If you're a young college student and you're

physically Okay to do this. Is there anything bad? And I couldn't come up with it. And so I thought, you know. I'll talk about it publicly. And part of this was in a chapter or a part of the speech about destigmatizing mental health. Like I think

You know, one of the things we need to do as a society is to allow that people have mental health issues, that depression is real and And that You know, people have shit to work through and that we should help them work through that. And you know, both psilocybin uh

And Ayahuasca are I just think two things in that toolkit. uh powerful things in that toolkit of how one can process Trauma one can learn about themselves, one can

Dig into The places that they haven't understood before. And and you know, it's funny, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Yeah, that's true. I have a sister, she'd tell her story, but I will, that Went down after I did to the same same place.

And I had was laughing about. Puma. And she's like, God damn it. Next thing you know, her her hands were becoming kind of furry and like a cat. And she hates cats. She's like, I hate cats, I hate cats. I can't believe I want to become a cat. And next thing you know, she climbed up this ladder and

She's looking at it and it brought her back to this. High school. not high school, I'm sorry, like the little little school uh theater where she was the Cheshire cat looking out on the audience. And I rem she told me the story I remembered I was the older brother sitting there. She was probably five or six at the time. And She was the cutest kid in the plate, of course she was my sister.

And after the uh The play I remember telling you, oh she stole the show, she stole the show, she was so great. I mean she probably had like three lines, but she was the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. And For her. Coming off.

What she saw on this ayahuasca trip was All the other girls being mean to her'cause she was getting all the attention. And Interestingly enough, her whole life She never put her head up again. She always has been unbelievably supportive of everyone. She is literally our support system in our family. Uh and as she came out of that trip and she was like,

I Did I put my hat up because of those six year old girls that I didn't remember? And so like again, once you see it. Yeah. Now she's got her own podcast and she's putting her head up.

And so I find I find that's a sweet story to tell'cause it's not so you know, damningly personal. But there's so many opportunities like that that I figured You know, it's time at least to to to broaden the conversation.

Listen, University of Iowa to the Teachers College might not have been the exact right place, but it was where I was invited to speak, so I'd love to highlight two lines from that speech and one is in the middle of a paragraph, so I'll Just highlight verbally one portion of it really, but it was It's discussing your time at that holistic health center in the desert of Arizona, twenty eight day rehab center. And it says the twenty eight days didn't fix me or change me. No, it just gave me a start of understanding who I was, what forces controlled me. And then here's the part that really jumped out at me. What stories in my life were so strong I didn't even realize they were stories.

Right. So now I'm c zoom zooming out because many of the stories we have are narratives about ourselves and the world may not be stories where aware are stories, they're just our reality. And there are often stories that Or given to us. inadvertently or purposefully and we're not aware that we've absorbed them. So my question

relates to the next line and that is Coming back to the ayahuasca. was that this medicine, this process was meeting me where I was, and that was gentleness. You must start by being gentle to yourself. So like you, I think you've competed at a much higher level in many, many arenas, but I've always been very, very, very, very competitive. And Uh to the extent where

Being second place has often for me been worse than being fifteenth place, right? It's kinda like second place is first loser type mentality. So I've been very mean to myself in the same way that th those six year old girls were to your sister, right? And so that that has been kind of internalized. And

I'd be curious to know. What has helped you to be Gentle. Or more gentle with yourself. Gentler? I guess would be one of the two. Yeah, you'd think as a writer I would have this English figure out. But uh what has helped

When a lot of people would view You know, competitiveness as your Superpower. Right. And it's such a driver. How how have you how have you learned to be better at that? Well, you know, it's a work in progress. I remember before going down there, I like I'm an easy going guy.

And I don't lose my temper less. So I think I'm a nice boss. And I, you know, don't yell at people that often. I Told my uh lawyer who's been with me for ten years. I said, Yeah, of course I'm a I'm an easy boss. And she's like dude

You're absolutely not a fucking easy boss. You're such a tough boss. She said, You're nice, but you're tough. And I was like, what do you mean? She says, you never give a compliment. You're like buttons. And we're having the best party. We're like, ah, but if we only. And they're like, you know how dis disheartening that is. I was like, oh made me feel terrible. And it was when I was on that ayahuasca thing I realized, you can't be nice to people if you're nice to yourself. I'm

I never thought I was tough on myself. Why? Cause I let myself get away with, you know, the stuff that set me to rehab, but drinking drugs or you know, breaking the rules. I've been a rule breaker my whole life. And so I thought that's well, if you can do that, you're not really being tough on yourself. Uh those are two different Subject matters. I did the rest of that stuff because I was so tough on myself. And that was the interesting part of it. Oh, you shut up. And that internal angst. I think some of it was just getting older, and I think with success.

There's a little less pressure, and some of it is now just trying to have Awareness of it. And say just not that important. But you know, I I think I pulled my employees, they'd say you change little but not a lot yet. And so

You know, it's certainly a work in progress. I do notice it with my father. You know, my father Was this great looking. Guy, football star, spent his time in the army, always was nice to people. Uh

Ван та Вітнам тварин And in lots of ways. Yeah. became a colonel but didn't make general. And I remember when he didn't make general was painful in our family because of course you want your dad to succeed. And in the military it's like not making partner of Goldman Sachs. There's a hierarchy and you either get it or you don't. And and it was painful for my parents, for my mother, who had And there was some scandal behind it, and there's always some s backstory.

Um But I remember thinking. Twenty years later. Like Looking at my father at seventy, now he's

eighty three. And thinking, do you think he gives a rat's ass that he didn't make general anymore? Like his priorities had shifted. He was so happy to be around his family and the work he was doing in the church and and how we were all doing that That ego piece he just let it go. And You know. And I I didn't

act like he let it go, he let it go. And so I think there's something about aging gracefully where You let that shit go because it just doesn't really matter nearly as much as you think it does at the time. And I think seeing that as helps. Yeah, act like dad, don't act like a jackass. That's kinda my feet my my uh

internal coan. Uh mantra. But For me, it listened, it's a work in progress. Like you, it's kind of built into the DNA of like wanting to do things right. When I throw a party, I want it to be a great party.

And Yeah. My poor s my poor assistants once bought a tent that was too big. And I literally thought I was gonna like uh It the it was like I died a thousand deaths. I saw this tent, I knew we had two hundred people coming to the party, we had a tent big enough for three hundred, and all the energy would be diffuse.

Have fun in the big tenche, I guess. But I'm trying to learn that. It's but it's That's a process. What advice do you think your older self ten, twenty years older would give to your current self. Yeah.

To say you're you're you're okay. Like it's you're doing fine. You're doing great. I have a shrink my my wife calls him the greatest enabler of all time. His whole mission is to say, that's great. I'll like make some confession. He's like, Oh, that's great. I was like, Well I'm not gonna get in trouble. Yeah. That is just to accept yourself.

I have a funny story. There's a A friend. He's he's become a he's not really a friend of mine. I've met only met him three times, but I had a great time with him every time I met him. But he's a dear friend of Paul Jones, a guy by the name of Peter Goscu. And Pete has a famous business where he was like a posture expert, and then it was movement, and he had come back from W uh Vietnam War and healed himself, and then he's literally healed thousands and thousands of

People, celebrity, atleets. The Agascu method, it's called and When you meet him, you go through his process, he gives you a menu of exercises. how to get your back and his his philosophy is if your body's in alignment, you'll be in alignment. Your your emotions will be in alignment. And

So I went to meet him the first time. It was supposed to be an hour meeting and we spent like three hours talking. And I'm waiting for my menu. What's my menu? My menu. At the very end he said, No, no, no, you need to strip down naked, stand in front of your mirror every day for fifteen minutes and just accept yourself.

I was like, well that's that's my fucking menu. So I remember getting getting back and calling Paul Jones and he laughed hysterically. You didn't even get a menu, you know. Uh And so I think that's my twenty years from now, hopefully my telling just accept yourself. You're gonna and that was a little bit the That was a little bit the tattoo. I was like, I am a fucking puma, and so put it on your arm and remember, like that's part of who you are. So I have to ask, did you try the fifteen minutes in front of the mirror?

I did it twice and I got embarrassed by my body type. I literally didn't have the patience. I did try it a few times. But I didn't I didn't. I didn't follow through like you needed me to. Well, a work in progress, as we all are, like you said. Let's chat about criminal justice reform. I know this is incredibly important to you. I don't know the genesis story. I don't know how this became important to you.

So I'd I'd love to hear you describe how that came to be. You know Funny, you know, I guess If I'm metaphysical of that I I go back and I think well my It might be parents.

talking. I remember my mother my mother bringing me to Head Start when I was four or five years old and this idea of philanthropy being part of our family. But the more practical side was I saw Brian Stevenson speak once and was wildly impressed that Tad he gave his Cotta seminal speech. And so that was in the back of my head. And then my daughter Anna

Got a job at Thing called the Bronx Defenders. Where she was a twenty year old summer intern. And she was Traveling around the Bronx.

Collecting Evidence. For our lawyers' cases. You're actually the evidence collector. Like how do you know? Like she's getting, you know, video from bodegas. And I'm like, you're you're the defense team. And I was like, and so I was

A impressed with The work she did. And I was like, Wow, that's what public defense is. Uh And You know, I had made this movie with Nate Parker, and when I say made I

Didn't do anything other than invest. Uh Nate Parker was a good friend of mine, he's a wrestler, and he had this dream of making this movie called Birth of a Nation. And literally after fifteen Jack Daniels, uh, he convinced me to invest because I really didn't want to invest in a independent movie, uh, just thinking I'd lose all my money. But Nate was very persuasive and he's a winner and so I bet on it. And

It won. Every award at Sundance and it's sold for more money than any independent film ever. To this day still. Right, we sold for eighteen million dollars a independent movie. And

Yeah, it's a painful and beautiful movie. Uh but there's a big lynching And I saw Brian Stevenson who was building a lynching museum.

And so I said, geez, I'm gonna take my profits or some of my profits and give them to Brian. And But I said, Brian, you gotta come and have breakfast at my house. And so he came and of course my daughter hijacked the breakfast, but we we had breakfast and and really heard his story uh personally and asked a bunch of questions of the criminal justice system, and I just started getting angry. And then There was a thing called audacious

you know, the year cryptocurrency went a h much higher. Uh I made a whole lot of money on this thing called Ethereum. And you know, to some of you it felt like wampum be a bought wampum. It went way up in price and I sold it and and it was a Yeah, kind of a breathtaking amount of money. And I

wanted to do something fun for myself and I wanted to so I didn't feel so guilty and s'cause I kinda thought it would have been karmic justice give an equal amount to something else. So I bought a G five fifty. Uh I never had it yet. Uh which which was which was extreme. Uh, but I decided to take this s similar amount of money and And I heard this story about cash bail, unaffordable cash bail. that Robin Steinberg told. And it's a really simple story. There are half a million people that go to bed Every night in jail cells solely because they can't afford to pay bail.

And You know, the average bail we paid is somewhere close to eighteen hundred dollars. Most people in America don't have five hundred dollars. Most people who are getting arrested don't have access to five hundred dollars, so they stay in jail. They're seven times more likely to plead guilty if they're in jail than if they're not in jail. When we bail them out fifty percent of the time the DA drops the charges. When you're in jail, forty percent of all prison death and prison rape happens the first you know, fourteen days you're there. And it has horrific long term consequences for the person and the and the city.

And It just felt so stupidly unjust. That I impulsively said I will Donate a bunch of money and share this thing, the Bell Project. And then

I woke up and I was like well The bail project's gonna be the biggest bail fund by a factor of Thirty. Uh or more. In the country, you better understand the criminal justice landscape. So I hired

A guy named Billy Waterson, who's been an A plus and a small team, and we started mapping out Having activists come in, formally incarcerated people come in, visiting prisons and jails. And With every rock.

We looked under You just get more and more pissed off. You get infuriated. It it is a system of stupidity. It is a system of spite and meanness. There is nothing rehabilitative at all. It's racially oppressive. It's literally like let's figure out how we can strip people of their dignity. Uh oh let's make them shit in in public. Uh that's a very nice

Yeah. The whole system is just Bizarre. And It doesn't have to be that way. We participate on a trip where we took thirty five people to Norway and and to Germany. And you look at the German prisons and you would give them a ninety five out of a hundred. And you'd give Norway a ninety nine out of a hundred. And we're not a sixty out of a hundred, we're like a fourteen.

Like we're that bad. And so it's just got me angry. You know, fairness had always been a thing in my life. I think growing up middle class, you thought it was not fair that rich kids had a you know better start than I did. And Yeah. Uh you talk about not fair.

Middle class to To rich kids. the the prison system is just absolutely unfair. And it you know, it it it preys on uh communities that are already in duress.

You know, I think about women in prison. How about the statistic? Ninety Five percent of women in prison have been raped. So we're taking people. that have been traumatized and putting them into a trauma machine. Like who in the fuck thinks that's a good idea?

Uh and so Anyway, I I get angry thinking about it. But so we've we've got involved. I think we're you know, I'm on the board of this thing called the Reform Alliance, which has been fun, uh'cause we're doing great work around probation of parole and you know, that's Jay Z and Meek Mill and Robert Kraft and We have you know participated and funded or partially funded probably fifteen, twenty different organizations. And really it's been a big part of my life. I still am a novice, to be fair. I'm less than three years in and so

I'm a good enough storyteller that I can Tell the story. other people's stories and hear them. But we need a complete overhaul. And the only optimism I see is that, you know, when I started even there was like only a hundred million dollars of philanthropy coming into the space and four years later there's six hundred million dollars or or more. Uh, it feels like the ball's starting to roll downhill.

This Covid thing is really Shine the light on just how horribly we treat the the most vulnerable people. I would tell you it's interesting. I looked before I came on. There are fifteen countries that have decarcerated by eighteen percent. Italy.

Iran of all places, France, right? They're like, Okay, shouldn't keep people in prison when they're gonna die. Because of this damn. Virus. The US is about two and a half percent. And so while that's a lot of people.

Right. And they've all come out of jails, not prisons. So for you d those who don't know, jail is one year and under. And often Pre trial. In prison is one year and longer.

And so we just haven't gotten around to saying Yeah, we need to fix this. And we're way off. Our sentences are three times longer than Germany's for this same crime. Just mean. Mm.

Yeah. And for people who would like to learn more about this, are there any starting points you would recommend? TED Talk or a website or anything else. You know, Brian Stevenson's Ted talk is spectacular because it really gives a framework of where this all started, right? It started it's with slavery and we've never really dealt with the trauma of slavery. Uh Robin Steinberg gave a TED talk

That's fantastic about Bail uh and the Bail project. Uh And Philip Goff, Philip Atiba Gough did what about policing? And so like we're we're not anti police, to be fair. We're we're like, okay, how do you help the police department actually, you know have have data so they can

you know, be fair in how they please. And so, you know, that's a controversial one because people are like Oscar the police, they're they're they're all engaged. All parties have to be engaged in trying to say, hey, we need to make a better system. And I do feel some optimism. I mean even Trump, as much as I dislike Trump and would love to make a cage match. Uh

Criminal justice is one of the few things that the Trump administration has been okay on. Not great, but it was certainly okay. The first step back was a great start. You know, and they've they've been helpful. And so

But again, to put it in perspective, we have 2.3 million people in jail or prison. having done a whole lot of analysis on this. I think that should be eight hundred thousand. And That's a l big difference. We have five million people that go to prison every year. It's like a jail every year. It's like a revolving door. They stay in an average of forty five days. Two and a half million of them are going there just for violating parole.

Which is bizarre. We should have nobody on parole. And so we have we have a long way to go and I I fear you pass one or two acts and you declare victory and the numbers never change. And so We're working on trying to get like a scoreboard so the whole country can say, All right, this is where we think we need to get. Have people agree to it and then work to get there. I wanna shift gears just a little bit.

To Uh a few questions I like to ask a lot of my guests and If if any of them are. dead ends we can we can scrap, but I'm curious to know

What If any are books that you've given often as gifts to other people. There's one book that I've given forty copies away, probably, and it's called reminiscence of a stock operator. And for anyone who wants to be a trader or an investor. This is the Bible. It was written in 1932.

by a guy who was at that time maybe the world's greatest speculator. Jesse Livermore is the uh fictional character. And what's crazy about it is you can read it today in two thousand and twenty. And It literally is still the Bible. And so every great trader

Annotates it. Tears pages out of it. I used to be a a tell when people would come to interview to to work and they say, I've really I' I I all I care about is trading. I was like, Well tell me two books you read about trading. Oh, I haven't read any books.

And I was like, Okay. Here's a book, go read it and come back when you've read it. But you're not getting a job. You know,'cause you lied'cause you lied to me,'cause you really didn't care that much about trade if you've never read a book on it. But that's that's the book. And you know, there's I there's a anecdote but a afterward to it is that

Yeah, two years after he wrote the book, the guy committed suicide'cause he just couldn't take the uh He lost his fortune yet again. But he he but every rule that you need to, you're the discipline side of it. is all in that book. And so it's and it's a quick read, you can read in three hours. Yes.

I wanna ask about Because you mentioned earlier that you run into certain people who seem to have I finally honed True North that they've had since age eight, right? Someone like your sister. Uh or uh some of the names that you mentioned.

When you feel Unfocused. Or overwhelmed, scattered, fill in your adjective, even temporarily, what do you do? You personally. If you're feeling like you've committed to too many things or you're just not sure how focused your energies are, is there anything you do to refocus?

Yeah, I think Say no. For me, saying no has like been the hardest thing. You didn't want to disappoint people. It's come comes from my mother wanting me to be a senator. Uh and so learning how to say no and And draw a boundary. ha has been really important to me. And it's hard for me. I gotta call back three phone phone calls and finally say no. And so by Cutting a couple things out.

I think helps me. And actually the other thing is writing it all on a On a whiteboard. So it takes it out of my stress zone in onto the whiteboard. And I'm like, okay. I see all. It might be a fuckload of stuff.

But at least it's up there on the board. I can put boxes around it and I can start attacking it. And so I think that's probably the most powerful is literally getting it all out of my head and putting it And I'm a very visual person, so like I it's different so do for me a like a whiteboard or a big piece of paper is different than writing notes. Uh little boxes and I say, Okay. Here's my

criminal justice stuff I want to work on. Here's my and like what are the stress points. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Doug McMillan of uh Walmart uses a whiteboard very similarly. I need to get a whiteboard. Uh diary of a madman scraps of paper. I think I need some. Yeah, a lot a lot of my a lot of my whiteboards are metaphoric. They're the back of the back of a piece of paper, but they function the same way. Do you have any quotes that you live your life by or think of often? I mean uh are there any Any that come to mind for you? One of my favorite quotes is from Saint Augustine is Lord give me chastity and continence.

But not just yet. You know, I remember leaving rehab and that was my joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're a big circle and everyone's you know bang the floor and you had to give a story and I was like, what Like Part of that is that tension always between

Doing what you're supposed to do and you know you're supposed to do and what you want to do. And So I do think I I laugh at that quote, but I do hold that tension in You know, in in my hands. Part of being alive is being impulsive and breaking ru like you know, I I take

Take personality tests and I just I'm thirty seven out of forty as a rule breaker. And so somebody I have a son that won't break a rule, just keep off the grass, he won't he keeps off the grass. He doesn't drink because he's not old enough to drink. You know, every high school kid drinks other than my one son, Joshua, who's the sweetest kid around. And I was thinking to myself, it's just different brain chemistry. Is it just Part of it's it's it's

N nature, nurture, but part of it's nurturing, but so much of it I think is also brain chemistry because like Yeah, brothers and sisters like the uh the we have a whole family of social and Yeah, the we didn't pressure the guy to drink a little bit here and there, but uh He's like no. And I'm so impressed at how confident he is with his ability to put up boundaries and just say no. And then we're like, Dad, you're going ninety miles an hour, the speed limit's sixty.

I'm like, oops, sorry. For me that quote's important because it Holds those things in tension. Mm-hmm. Uh just a few more questions. Uh

This is one on on investing, but it's a little broader than financial instruments. It could be. But what is the best or most worthwhile personal investment you've made? Or just one of your your better investments? That could be an investment of money, time, energy, or other Resources. Does anything come to mind? It could be a trade. You know, I

You know, cheeky. I bought Ethereum when it was one and it went to thirteen hundred. I you know, like I bought Jet, like in lots of other things. Uh but I don't think that really. I because I kinda felt a little bit lucky and I was already rich. I actually think investing in friendships. You know, I Partly I'm a hyper social guy. Uh and so it came natural to me, but When I think about my life and what gives it joy

It is. These circles of friendships I have. My highlight to my life is this party I throw every two to four years. Depending on how I'm financially doing.

Where Three hundred odd people, three hundred and fifty people from my universe. get together and we play sports and listen to music and drink too much and And it's a three day That's

Takes a huge amount of effort to put on. But I feel like most complete in some ways. Like this is my exclamation point on the world on how I want to live. Uh, and so for me it's friendships. you know, their high school friendships, college friendships, work friendships, friendships people I meet at conferences and they're not all

And and they need to be invested in. Otherwise if you don't have new shared experiences They're just the they go kinda go away. Yeah, well it's it comes back to what you mentioned earlier in a way, which was the advice you received of looking at who's at your funeral, right? And worrying about those people and no one else. Well Mike, this has been extremely fun.

Is there anything else you'd like to add? Anything else you'd like to discuss or mention before we wrap up? Yeah, I think you you covered a a broad range of my life I Don't want to bore your your your listeners. Uh I think that was great. Think it was great.

Uh I Yeah, I remember meeting you Freaking uh Probably twelve, thirteen years ago. Uh when you're an up and comer.

And it's been awesome. And just because you went to Princeton and you wrestled, I have Yeah to the special interest. But I've been amazed at You know, the following you've built, the the adventures you've been on. I still go back to the I I was telling you this.

Your first book, uh the testosterone chapter and the and the orgasm chapter are required reading for everybody. Uh and so I you know, just proud, you know, proud to be your friend and uh love that I gotta get on your show and Congrats on all the success. Uh thanks so much, Mike. Uh yeah the four hour body, the chapters With so many vagina illustrations that it got yanked from Costco. That's my claim to fame. And uh it's been nice to get to know you. And

Adults should give all their teenage boys that chapter and they will have uh ha happier boys and happier girlfriends. Uh well, Mike, thank you again for taking the time and to everybody listening, you can find Mike on Twitter at Novogratz. You can learn more about uh Galaxy Digital, galaxy digital dot I.o. I'll put links to everything in the show notes, all the books, TED Talks, organizations that we've Discuss And Until next time.

Thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up. in the uh the world of the esoteric as I do, it could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off. for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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