YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrew Milgram

lines on the record: 113
first: 2025-08-05
most recent: 2025-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Right after my father passed away, this family that I still consider very dear to me, my mom was overwhelmed. I had tear up thinking of how it actually would take me to their house for breakfast every morning and they'd drive me to school And they really embraced me and provided a lot of stability to me at a really trying time. There were other families that did the same thing. That was a really, really tough moment. And they leaned in. I try to think about what I can do to pay forward that kind of discussion.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to succeed. And the people who live a comfortable life and are happy to play golf a couple of days a week and go have big expensive lunches, that's probably not going to be the successful model going forward.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are also interesting, that are probably less well explored at the moment. So I think there's a lot that's going to happen. The world of asset management that I grew up in is not going to be the one that I exist in going forward. We're undergoing a lot of change. And I think people who embrace that change.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retail channel, I can make and I buy the argument that large portions of the retail market are underallocated into private markets. I think that there are large portions of the retail market that are probably not super well equipped to have a ton of exposure. We're going to go bump in the night trying to figure out where those lines exist. There are going to be people will make mistakes. Investors will make mistakes. Asset management firms will have false starts. But I think there's product design opportunity. that is exciting. There are some things that have gotten a lot of heat interval funds are getting a lot of attention. There are some strengths and some weaknesses to that. Everything that's happening in the insurance space is super interesting. I think there's lots of ways to think about that. The annuity driven investing profile is super interesting and it serves a real need and opportunity. I think there are other composition of insurance assets out there.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We said it a really interesting moment in asset management. I think that what we do in our business and our investing is acquire assets that are troubled, reimagine what they could and should be, and then apply force to make that happen. I think we have to look at our own business that same way. I think we're at this moment in the asset management space where people are asking hard questions, the right questions about who's adding what value and how should that value be compensated and what are the collections of services that asset managers should be providing to their customers? How should we think about our relationships with our customers? Is it really a customer relationship or is it more of a partnership relationship? I think that partnership model is the model going forward. I also think that we have to think about where we're accessing capital. There's a big push to go into the”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't actually do anything other than by the company and show up for board meetings. I think those firms are troubled. I don't think they add a lot of value and they probably don't have much of a future.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love those guys. That's my manufacturing division Like everything, there are some people who are doing really interesting, really compelling things. The firms that I like are fundamentally value-based investors. They do what I would call scratch and dent type private equity. So they're buying carve-outs or assets that are a little unloved or difficult in some way, and then really applying force to them. But I think just like in our business, if you're just a financial investor, you're in some way a traitor. If you are bringing to bear real resources to drive the company's operations forward or to reimagine how that business operates, that I think is really interesting and really value added. And there's going to be a future for that kind of investing in that style of private equity. I think the standard group of great deal makers who knows some allocators or rich families that will back them in buying companies, but they”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they pass, then they go to the next cadre and the next cadre. And the next cadre. So there's a real tiering in terms of access. The biggest, best-known firms do have the best portfolios because they get first choice and they have the most complete access to capital and the best teams, et cetera. So I think there is great things happening in private credit. I think there are some scary things happening in private credit.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Setup. I don't see great things ahead for large portions of the private credit market. That being said, there are some private credit firms that are spectacular. I mean, superior. That list is pretty straightforward. Firms like Ares or let's say Gallop are stellar at what they do and they have great credit cultures. They have really complete teams that deal with underwriting and workouts should they get to that. The private credit universe used to be a direct origination business. There is some direct origination that goes on in private credit today, but it's largely a brokered market, which is a dirty little secret people don't like to talk about the hula hands or the Lincolns are doing a huge amount of placement of private credit. So naturally, what are they doing? They're going to the biggest, best, most well-known lenders first, Aries Gallobix.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a bit of a mirage that individual loan officers or credit committees will use to disguise maybe a less than, let's say, fulsome credit decision. Or, by the way, there are legitimate uses for it. But if a company can't pay you a cash coupon, you are taking some amount of equity risk. So the larger the portion of PIC debt in a particular instrument, the more equity risk you're taking in that investment. Pretty straightforward. We see some portfolios in the BDC market that have 17, 18% pick debt. They're no longer lenders at that point. They're taking massive amounts of equity risk in companies that are probably, again, they exist mostly in that middle market space. So they're under pressure. They start from a more difficult position with declining margins, declining earnings power. It's not a great.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The formal name is payment in kind. So rather than pay you a coupon, I will pay you more debt. Now, we oftentimes say pick means payment isn't coming. Because when you look at the data, what you see is when there's a lot of pick in a particular instrument, typically that company is going to default and you ultimately will not recover that pick debt”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, defaults are the most easily manipulated statistic in the world. A default doesn't exist unless I, the lender, call it. So if I don't want defaults in my portfolio, I simply don't call them. I always tell people, don't ask the default rate of a private. Ask the waiver rate. Ask the amendment rate. How much are they having to put hands on their credit to reorient the documents to fit the reality of the company they're operating in? We have some evidence in the BDC market. The BDC market, so business development, corporations are essentially public direct lenders. And there's an instrument or a device in credit called PIC debt. Are you familiar with that at all?”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a three year 30% cumulative default rate. So the largest portion of private credit, according to Fitch, is in CCC equivalent. Show me a private credit manager who reports something north of a 1.5% fault rate. Well, one of two things is true either in the aftermath of the great financial crisis, we have some private credit managers have invented a new way to underwrite credit which avoids all losses, risks, and defaults, or they are misleading you about what the...”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the perspective that they wear the ultimate risk in the banking system. And so he who wears the risk makes the rules. They said, look, we're wearing this risk. We don't want anything above X leverage in the system. So we want that out. That allowed the private credit market, which has always been there, but really to flourish in that aftermath of the financial crisis. And there's been an immense amount of capital that has gone into the space. where there is over allocation, there will be mistakes. And I think we see those mistakes rearing their head today. According to Fitch, about 82% of the private credit market exists in the single B- and lower credit quality space. Look, we have 40 years of data that tells us how various credit quality equivalents perform CCCs, for instance, default at about”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Private credit in particular is a really interesting space. In 2011, the federal government issued an update on what is called the guidelines on leveraged lending. And that is the perspective on the rules out of the center because we do bank regulation in a really interesting way in this country. So policy is set at the center. primary policymakers are the Fed, the FDIC, and the OCC, and they issue guidance. Now we have individual and independent federal reserve banks around the country that apply the guidance. So it's up to the individual Fed regions, Fed presidents and boards and employees as to how that regulation is applied, policy set at the center. In the guidelines and leverage lending that were issued in 2011 created the dynamic that pushed more leveraged credit out of the banking system because after the financial crisis, the federal government adopted correct”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big opportunity to be much more active and engaged in that. Now, it probably means that you can't be $100 billion of CLO capital thinking like that. That being said, people are going to do $100 billion of CLO that will do just fine under the system that exists. So I want to disparage everything that is happening, but I do think that there is an opportunity to be much more actively engaged in that portion of the market.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those pools of assets, but there are a lot that are not. So you're getting this laziness that's happening. I would also say one of the things I don't like that's happening out there is the productization of investment decisions. There's a lot of outsourcing of critical thinking because I can go to this person that'll make this decision for me and I'll go to this person who'll make that decision for me. And so again, we're bankrupting the decision making process. The investor, if that's even what you want to call them, becomes more of a general contractor and they're not actually doing anything. And I don't think adding a whole lot of value other than choosing other people to do the thinking, who, by the way, are misaligned because those folks are motivated by a stream of fees rather than an investment outcome. I don't love what is happening in the CLO system. I think that there's a”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So collateralized loan obligations. So these are a package of loans that are assembled as a group of assets. And then against those assets, there is a stack of liabilities that are sold with equity underneath. So an individual investor will put up the equity and then a number of lenders will provide stacked layers of capital, orders of priority, which allow the purchase of that portfolio of assets. The investing relies primarily on diversification and over collateralization as its method of risk control. There is this pretend system that's going on at the moment where there are analysts looking at each individual credit. And I don't want to disparage the entire CLO industry. There are some unbelievably good CLO managers out there that are smart and sophisticated and thinking very hard about how they are managing.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the primary vehicle for credit creation and corporate credit over the past 10, 15 years has been the CLO. So CLOs are a magical device.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's lots of interesting ways that people are investing. I'm always interested in how friends, colleagues, people I meet are allocating capital, how they're thinking about things. I would say I sense a lot of laziness out there. I think there's a lot of wash, rinse, repeat. We do it this way because we do it this way or we're investing to model. Or it's just the only way that I can describe it is lazy. A, I think, is intellectually bankrupt, but I also think it's worrisome because when we go on to autopilot, things don't tend to work out. And I feel like large portions of the investing world are now on autopilot.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any of that. It's more a philosophical view on where America is and where the system is. I think we as a system, we as a country, have to have a lot of grace for each other and a desire to see not just the guy in the mirror win, but the neighbor. We need to see our neighbors win. We need to make sure that the people who make America great enjoy its prosperity.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in order for the next Abe Milgram, my father, who came to this country in the 1950s, in order for him to be able to come back as the next whomever, we need to have a system that works for everybody. We need to have a system that provides for opportunity and access. It has to be a system where you can work hard and earn a good living, but you can also take entrepreneurial risk and be rewarded for it. When we design a system or allow a system to calcify such that the haves will perpetually have and the have-nots will perpetually not have, that's a system that is doomed. And it's not the American way. It's not the American system. And I think that we stand at a moment in time where we have some hard decisions to make. By the way, this is not a political comment on any individual party or person or”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“America is like the greatest system that has ever existed. It is the greatest economy. It's the greatest economic system, greatest political system that has ever existed. But countries like companies are delicate. They're fragile. They require care and feeding. They require respect. They require engagement. And they're subject to abuse. So look, I don't like what I see in the K-shaped economy. I don't think that it's great that we have this growing divide between the haves and the have-nots. I think that the magic of America is that anyone can make it, my father included. And I think that it is magical that a kid from Beaumont, Texas who”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he had gone to Eretz Israel to get married. My father was born there, but then raised in Latin America, came to this country for education, couldn't get a visa. There were constraints on Jewish immigration in those days. And so went back to Venezuela, had met a guy here in the United States that he had gotten to be pretty friendly with. And they had this correspondence back and forth about how to start a business and what would they do. And ultimately, my father, after several years, was able to come back to the United States and he and his business partner went to my hometown, Belmont, Texas, and started their first business was a precast country business. And they grew that and they grew that into a number of other businesses that ultimately service the oil industry.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She really pushed us. I love my hometown. I love the community I grew up in. It was super nurturing and really a lovely childhood in always other than the one we discussed. Great people. But she really pushed us to leave. She said, I want you to go out into the world and find your own way. I come from a good tradition of that. My grandfather, when he was just after Bar Mitzvah age, was living in what is now Ukraine was part of Romania then. But he and his oldest brother walked down to the Black Sea, caught a boat, ended up in Cura ⁇ ao, and would make enough money to bring each brother, five brothers total over. They moved their parents into Mandatory Palestine. And then ultimately they'd go back for a Shidduk for the arranged marriage. And there were ultimately not a lot of Jewish girls running around. Latin America in those days.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my mom grew up in southeast Texas for a while as a child. She had lived in the Middle East, in Baghdad. Interestingly, when the king was overthrown, she and a lot of the American families were taken hostage. It's a super fascinating story. She and her mother and brothers, while the men were forced to work by the rebels. So my mom had had this really interesting life but had married my father at a pretty young age. And my father had a big personality and himself had had an interesting, colorful life. So when he passed away, she was 35 years old and had at least two young kids, my sister's seven years younger than me. So she was really a baby. And my mom really pushed us to take control of things and to make decisions on our own and get out and challenge ourselves and drive ourselves to create our own outcomes and find our own path.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when he passed away, he had a heart attack. We were on a Boy Scout camp out. And that was obviously a devastating time and devastating moment, but shaped who I am. It shaped to my sister is, it completely reshaped my mom's life and how she saw herself and what her role was. It changed our whole trajectory. It also, by the way, showed the colors of people around us. So there were people who I would say we thought were good friends and close and reliable counterparties. And at the moment of truth, people don't like messes. They don't like difficult situations. And we saw people retreat. And I took a lot of way from that. At the same time, we also saw people of real character lean in. People who to this day I consider family because they just embraced us and took care of us.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hands down, and it's not a thing I talk a lot about, but my father passed away when I was very young. I was about 11 years old. He and I were super, super close. We did everything together, including, we used to sit together and go over the Wall Street Journal, stock pages every day. We tracked certain stocks. We invested together. Even I was really young. He brought it to a level that I could understand. My dad was an immigrant to the country. Loved the American system, loved that his son was an American, loved to participate in American commerce. was an entrepreneur and dealt with unions and dealt with large capital projects and used to bring me the meetings he would have. He would come to New York on business. He would bring me. I grew up in a little town in Southeast Texas. We would go to Dallas and wear a suit. He'd sit me in the corner and I would just listen. So from really early ages, we spent a lot of time together.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the problem solving of it. My partner Paul sometimes has said that my superpower is being able to find that intersection of needs and wants in a multi-party negotiation. I just love that problem solving. I like finding a way through. I like taking things that are undervalued, misunderstood, and getting them back into a condition where they can be, again, durable, profitable, and a success.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So it tends to find people and it self selects people the way we deal with it is, again, back to first principles. Deal with people with dignity, with respect, compassion for the reality that they exist in, compassion for the fact that this is the hardest thing they're ever going to go through, and that they don't like this. It's upsetting to them. It's having an impact on their home life, on their kids. It oftentimes destroyed their life savings. It's a big deal for people. And so they are going to be angry at you. They are going to be angry at the decisions, the hard decisions that you're making on. Turn in a durable business.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a saying that I repeat often, nobody finds distress. Distress finds you. And that's true in business. It's true as an investor. Nobody graduates from college and it's like, you know, I'm going to go into companies and be reviled by management and argued with by sponsors and yelled at by banks. It's not something that people go into.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that my partner Paul always says is every single investment is both a complicated business problem and a human drama. And each one of our investments has had some greater or lesser mix of those two things to the individual in these situations. We do this for a living and we've done it essentially our entire careers. It is familiar to us. We understand how things are going to work out, how they don't work out. We're comfortable with a level of ambiguity and uncertainty that other people generally are not. And so each one of these are the most difficult thing that the other people in it are ever going to go through. And again, you got to be sensitive to that reality. It goes to their decision making. It goes to how they engage with you, how they engage with the business or the assets. Each situation is difficult than its own way because that human drama.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that process of getting capital allocated into a distress situation and then finding the resolution mechanism that brings it home is built into the DNA of the firm. It's how we think about investing generally. Now, the interesting thing about distress is you have to use capital to get capital back. There's this cycle of capital, capital contribution, resolution that cycles. And so you're always thinking about how am I going to drive this investment and create something else out of it? Then I'm going to create something else out of that. And you create this daisy chain of opportunities, one thing leads to another.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're constantly seeking new challenge. When we were starting, it was Paul and I and an analyst and our CFO. We couldn't exercise a huge amount of control. We had $50 million in assets under management. It was the late winter of 2009. The world was falling apart. The strategy that we prosecute today is the same strategy that we prosecuted. Then we just do it on a slightly larger scale. In those days, we had to be clever. We had to outthink the competition in order to make an impact. And so we've always maintained that framework of thinking. We also, in those days, locked up capital was not available. So we started our business in an open-ended structure. Now, it had long commitment terms, but it was essentially at its core in Evergreen structure. And so it demanded that we have this discipline of how are we going to get that capital back to people.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reality is that sits on sovereign territory. How you restructure those is super complicated. And how do you generate a return that is sufficient? And so we had to explore new space in order to find the pathway through. We like doing new. We like exploring ideas, bringing new technology, interesting ways to look at things and access that value to bear in our investing style. It keeps it interesting.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to be detail-oriented thinkers. And I would also say all prophets emanate from the variant view. If you have the market view, you get the market return. If you want to generate an above market or a differentiated return stream, you have to think in a differentiated way, have a variant view, and prosecute your investments in a variant fashion. Going back to the foundation story of Marvelgate, when Paul and I sat down, we said, look, the world has a Howard Marx and the world has a Mark Rowan. The world has a lot of things. What doesn't it have? And in order to grow our business, we've made sure to try to do things that we thought were interesting, unique. The other thing is we like the intellectual challenge. We like to think about things other people haven't thought about. Years ago, we did some investing around Native American gaming assets.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of them, capital constrained, earnings power constrained. They saw this asset that they could monetize. And we were relatively easy to work with, I would say. We tried to process things pretty quickly. We could have an answer turned around and documents done within two to three weeks.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, within what we believe is reasonable. Our standard was much tougher than what the government ultimately had. One of the provisions of the law was that from when you filed, the government owed you an interest rate while you waited for the refund, 6% or 7%. So we were also earning a natural rate on the capital provided. As a safety mechanism, we also built a system that allowed us to put back claims should they become problematic with the government? Should they be disallowed or there be some sort of deficiency found? And if we were able to put back, the company owed us our capital back plus a rate. So you might ask yourself, well, why were US government counterparty rates? Why would you do this? Goes back to what we were saying earlier about the K-shaped economy. Most of our sellers, if not all of our sellers, are in the middle market.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was a year ago so the numbers are unbelievable again it's probably a poorly written law so we started going out to companies to tax preparation firms people who deal in tax credits law firms payroll processing firms and saying to them look we'll buy those credits from people now the reality is it's not a credit it is a transfer payment the government sends you a check It took us a while, it took us several months to design that system. It's complicated. There's a lot of paper to process. There's just so much manual labor required. We started processing credits, looking at individual companies who wanted to sell us their claim. Now, we passed on huge numbers of them, particularly because at the beginning, it was a pretty loosely written law, and we said we want to be Caesar's wife in our underwriting here to make sure that we're”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, we have an overburdened IRS and an overburdened number of people that are working there. So processing was just slow. I think when the government did this, we've heard some estimates that say they anticipated it to be a $50 billion program. About a year in, they had paid out $200 billion. Holy cow.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A 20% decline in their revenue during the measurement period or had been substantially impacted by a government order. By the way, not a federal government order a government order. So state, local, anything qualified as really loose language. I think if the authors of that had opportunity to go back and rethink it, they might have. And there's been a couple of attempts to. Problem is getting anything done in Washington's hard these days. So it is the law that's on the books. Companies started to apply for this. It is a separate filing. It is a paper filing. It requires you to go get some sign off from your accounting firm or your auditors. You have to, if you're going to do it responsibly, you need to put together a package that explains should you be asked why your claim is valid. It's a fair amount of work. And then the government was really slow in processing it.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been buying something called the employer retention tax credit. And so now this is an opportunity that comes out of the CARES Act. Everybody's seen these commercials that ran almost every commercial break on every channel at one point. Get $26,000 per employee payroll tax refund because the policy imperative at the time was get as much money into the system as they possibly could. Now the problem is the federal government is a big place. The IRS is overburdened already and there's lots of changes in the IRS, lots of new agents, now a lot of agents coming out. They're charged with covering a lot of territory with not a lot of resources. So they got foisted on them this new thing where there was a separate filing that had to be done by companies. The language of the legislation, which passed under the CARES Act, is that a company who had either a”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you know that saying I learned everything I need to know in kindergarten, that's really true. Treat other people with dignity, treat them with respect, be honest, be as transparent as the situation demands so you don't have to show all of your cards. You are playing poker to some degree, but you want to deal with people on a heads up and honest basis. You also want to operate on a reasonable pace. Pace is an important part of any deal discussion. People get an intuitive sense whether or not there's something to do just by how you're engaging with them or how they're engaging with you. So that doesn't mean you need to hurry to things, but if you're not moving things along, people get anxious. Time kills de”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next owner. If you try to extract all the value that they're going to get, well, then they don't want to do the deal. So trying to understand what the other guy needs is a huge portion of what we do.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counterparty is thinking. Again, we also spend a lot of time looking at data because people have an intuition about what they want, what they need. Data sometimes says something different. There are times where we want to share that data with somebody to help them understand their own needs. There are other times maybe we want to keep that data to ourselves in a negotiation. But we're looking at all dimensions of how to inform ourselves about what the other person's needs are. understand what their real hard constraints are. And one of the things that every time I deal with somebody, I try to guarantee them is you tell me you've got a hard constraint and we can understand that that is true, that you have that hard constraint. We're going to respect it in the negotiation. Any negotiation, any resolution can't be a zero-sum game. It has to be that both sides have to get something out of it. By the way, also when we're selling assets, you have to leave something in for the next.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good relationship with anybody is about respecting their needs and constraints. One of the things that I think we're really good at is understanding the needs and constraints of our counterparty, whether they're a bank, a borrower, a sponsor, a taxi driver, anyone. We spend a lot of time thinking about the other guy's needs. I tell everybody in Marvel, I tell my kids, it's easy to know what you want. You look in the mirror and tell it to yourself every morning. The real exercise, the real effort has to be focused on understanding the other person. And that understanding can come both from conversation. And that's an easy and direct way. I think it's an important way. You always have to put boots on the ground. Lots of the investments that we've made, the management teams have said, well, you're the first lender ever to show up and see the facility. Crazy. So we spent a lot of time just getting to understand how”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Distressed assets. You said it earlier, and it's a line we use all the time. It's a full contact sport. You have to be willing to engage. If you're investing in distressed assets and you are not taking an active role in both a financial and operational restructuring, you're just taking weird and unquantifiable risk that you are not participating in. I would argue. active operational role in addition to the financial restructuring role.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we do think about risk adjusted returns. The companies and assets that we invest in, they're distressed. I always say to our investors, we don't have the benefit of opening up the paper and saying, well, I think this Google thing's got legs. Let's put some capital in it. We're looking at problems. The problems that we end up chasing as investors are problems we think we can solve. We think that there are structural fixes. We think there are operational fixes. But importantly, there are fixes that we think we can tackle. These are challenged businesses. The risk is real. And so when we insert ourselves into a company or a collection of assets and we use the rights and remedies that are afforded us, we're both using those rights and remedies to drive value, but also contain risk. And you have to work on both legs of that. And so it is risk-adjusted return.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someday displace the driver and therefore displace their earnings power, you can swap that earnings power for the ability to contribute capital. So the medallion becomes a capital asset that they contribute into the system and they can cut an individual economic relationship with whatever autonomous operator is in the system at that time.”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the city has an ongoing and vested interest in regulating the system. The method of that regulation is the medallion. I also think, look, there is a true moral imperative to the city persisting around the medallion system. By far, look, we're large participants in this space, but the largest set of owners in the space continue to be individuals that own medallions. So the city, and we can talk a little bit about this, we cut an unbelievably forward-looking deal with New York City to protect individual operators. City has essentially invested a huge amount of money in protecting those drivers and their livelihood and the capital that they've put into the system. If you were to completely displace that capital, it would obviate all the work and investment that the city has done. I don't think the city has a real interest in doing that. And while autonomous will probably”
2025-08-05 · Invest Like the Best · Andrew Milgram - Full-Contact Capitalism - [Invest Like the Best, EP.436] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source