YouSaid · the spoken record

John Zito

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-06-03
most recent: 2025-06-03
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

“My stepdad who went to Westport, we were talking about him earlier. I was with my mom and stepdad for most of my life, but he sat a ton of structure and really always treated me like his own. Now that I have three kids. Hard to thank someone enough for that.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything good is around that, and I give all the credits to my wife, obviously, on anything health related, but also just these jobs are impossible. If you don't have someone at home that's supportive and just full trust all the time and just always making the right decision for you and always looking out for you, I'm pretty lucky to have that.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Duh, blueberry guys. We get them, and I had them the first year, and literally you can't eat other blueberries because they're so good for the, and I'm like, okay, you can't. And then now I started sending them to people on the floor. So I sent them the Zelter. They're the people on the floor all getting. Are you sending me blueberries? Just a message around just it's really unique, really special. That's how you build relationships.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife found this farm down in Florida that makes blueberries once a year, harvests, you can order five pounds once a year. You got to order the day of, you just missed it, everybody. Don't know the name of the farm, but it harvests it once”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and he like duh avocado guy, you guys can go get it right now. It's like probably, I don't know what, it's probably 50 or 100% higher than a regular avocado. Every avocado is perfect. So no matter what back to your idea on young ideas, anything that is unique, special solves a problem, you can have a business avocad”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so my wife, she's incredibly healthy. She also has a great way of finding very special things. And as like anything that is special, I love to be a part of the building of something special, something unique, and I like sharing things that are unique. First is the every time you order an avocado in New York from Instacart or order in, like half of them are not great or bad. There's this guy called Da avocado guy. And he like.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, where else can we be in the middle of compute, oil and gas, software, healthcare, being in the middle of all these conversations globally? It is the eternal learning center. And I don't think I could do anything else. And then people ask me, you know, you ever going to, I don't think I'm going to, I don't know how I stop.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I met with the founder of the firm, and he's like, look, are you competitive? Yes. Are you good at math? Yes. Do you like new things? Yes. He's like, your blood's going to turn green. Just come up here and do it. For me, it was always about having a really good product, making good returns versus other people. I wasn't so outcome focused. I've always been about trying to make sure like authentically feeling like I have an idea or a product or something that's just very original and very what we believe in. You can use a fund as effectively a mechanism to actually take that view. And the thing I loved about it too is that if you have good, I've always had the view that if you have good performance over time for long periods of time, that just you will have clients forever. They trust you and you do what you say you're going to do. It's like a pretty good framework for how to operate. And if you can do that consistently for long periods of time, you'll always have it. I didn't realize how much I was going to love the business from the beginning, which is.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going into the midtown tunnel, moving all my stuff because I had so much in my so much stuff in my bag in the back of the car. And I was like, I cannot believe I'm doing this. And then getting on 435 a.m. trains up every morning to beat my boss to work because my stepdad would say, you got to be first in work, actually got me a job. But funny story on that is like when I get up there, I try to get there first every morning and my first boss, Jim Casper, he'd get there super early and I couldn't beat him there. And he had just had a fourth kid. He was going to have his fourth kid. The fourth kid ended up being triplets. So they had six kids. And now that I have three kids, I realize, okay, he wanted to get their first before anyone woke up. So I was competing with the six kid household. Yeah. So that was like too hard. But I went up there and my sometimes like, just try it.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to be a football coach, and I was screaming to not come down to New York. It all hit the peak when I was coming in through the, I drove down from Amherst down to New York to move into my one bedroom with three guys on 38th and 1st. And I'm coming in the midtown tunnel. And my tire pops.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a willingness to try new things. I think everyone realizes the world's changing pretty quick. And if not, the thing they're going to realize, it's just changing fast. I prefer Gumby. We want people who are willing to test some of those norms and just be outside the box thinkers and not just because something worked in the past necessarily is it going to work in the future and just have fun doing it. We have our Olympics. I try to keep things pretty fun. We do like an Olympics. We had last year at the end of the Olympics we had this like kind of standard corporate Olympics. It was going to be fine. It was fun. We go out to Randall's Island. But to mix it up, I always do something a little different. I had the team meet us at the fish market at 5 a.m. We got three 50 pound grease cods because when I was growing up in Maine, we'd have this annual greased cod race where you had to get in a fireman's outfit and a 50-pound grease cod back and forth. You didn't tell anyone what the finale was for the finalists, the winners, the finalists. You guys get to race for the winning thing. And then I pulled out the two 350 pound grease cods and it was the relay race for who would win. But we still are trying to have fun here. I'd like to think that most.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing more things like we did with Ari where we provide financing and own a little bit of and we back them through some sort of hybrid instrument.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a world where let's go AI abundance and let's go seven night a week, the Ari, we just backed Ari and his Miami open and Madrid open and hopefully some other events. Their thesis is the events business went from two nights a week to work from home turned it into three or four nights a week. There you go AI abundance. It's a seven night a week business. People will be enjoying a GDP that's five to 10x and we're all just getting serviced by robots. Let's go there. AI abundance. And if we do that, the events business is pretty cool. What happens in asset categories that go up in value really quickly take sports teams, for example. When they go up so fast, but it's not so much cash flow, it's more enterprise. There's not a ton of lending. So there's just a huge gap in specialty finance. And so I think you could see us lending against teams more actively, not so much buying teams, but I could see us.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Care or not, or whether or not you're interested in that or not, in the product that you designed, they know. And whether or not they know day one, they'll know.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I started here with a $130 million fund. Like, no one paid attention to me for at least five years. What the hell is this guy doing over there with this long short credit fund? And I did that for 10 years before coming here. So those businesses are wake up every day, super risk managed, or in the liquid business, super risk managed, and every line item, every risk every night, and you're living and breathing. The artistry of that business, whether it's buying small businesses, investing in small businesses, venture, these are just artist businesses. And I think there's always room for the artist in the aggregate asset allocation. So my thing is fine. Find something that you love doing. Find something you're super interested in. Create a product around that and get yourself excited about what you're doing every day. Because if you do that, you're going to probably design a pretty good product and a pretty good investment process. And the clients, again, the clients see through this stuff. They either feel the authenticity of whether or not you.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I always think there's going to be some level of the core, let's say, core credit, core equity businesses are going to get consolidated. So if you're big, you're going to become mega and you're going to distribute and produce products. And I think there'll be consolidation there. And you're seeing that. But there'll always be the family office, the endowment that wants the small artists.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the largest providers of all that capital. It feels like that and probably defense are probably our largest sectors that are growing really quickly.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so compute is the center of all of this and the demands for compute will go up. The sizing of these mega data centers is astronomical. There's not, frankly, there's only a few investors that can finance them with matched liabilities at the scale. And we're fortunate to be one of them. I think we'll be a leader in that. Intel was just the start of that. There'll be a handful of us, which will lead that charge, which again, the most important thing for that is that we work, first off, the counterparty risk typically is high quality because the hyperscalers and others that want that compute are typically very well capitalized and growing their earnings really quickly. So the more that we can partner with them to create the most flexible type of capital structure duration-wise that matches with exactly what they need, I think the more likely we're going to be the service provider of that. And I think we are positioned given just the org design of the liability structure of our business. We're designed to be the provider.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be the framework that will suit the product's needs or the funds needs or the investment process needs. That stuff's pretty exciting for us because we're very large, which means we have lots of information and lots of optimized stuff that we can do that we haven't done yet. So I'm pretty excited about our future. In that regard, I'm really excited about doing it. It's obviously you talk to people in the ecosystem, they get a little nervous about what that means for everybody. I think that we're just going to be doing our jobs better and more proficient and be able to do more, which is, I think, exciting.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm less nihilist. I'm more excited about it, but I want to talk about it a lot. I think there's three segments of our business that we have to think about. One is the aggregate data, taking tons of unstructured data and structuring it. How do we use that in a way that's attractive? How do we use that in a way that potentially is predictive? Two is all the operations of a financial services company, which I think will just get better, right? The way that just everything from custody to cash transfer, trade settlement, whenever you do a transaction, there's a whole host of workflow that I think will get more optimized and more efficient. And three is the investment process. And really for us, it's how do you co-pilot? How do you create co-pilots to make our risk decision makers better? I think that's going to happen. You have to have people who are very proficient at that to actually train the computer and the system and create the system the way you want. You can create a system that gives you bad advice too. So you want to make sure that it's creating it under the framework that you acknowledge.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got the first call on the platform. Then we did that. We were the call, we got a call last minute on that pref from Nighthead. And in 30 minutes, because we knew the company so well, I said, okay, we'll do two and a half billion of pref because we could react that quickly at scale, big and fast, very few firms can move big and fast like that. And when we move big and fast like that because we know the business is so well, we follow them well. We have a big balance sheet to be able to commit fast and we do it in a way that it's because we've invested in five that we're invested in all these companies for so long. I.O. companies don't, they never go away. They either get acquired. They either refinance their debt. So they're back in market every two or three years or they file. It's never like you do the loan and hope you're going to get paid enough in cash. So these are companies that you follow for a long period of time.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need a combination of market vol and single name vol for that to happen. But when it happens and you can execute on it and showcase everything, again, being close to the decision maker, the more we did, the more we were getting the first call, right? By providing the four billion of securitized products.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merged it with wheels, which is a specialty lending fleet finance platform business. Then when they actually, it ended up being a solvent company where there was value to the equity, Knighthead ends up winning the bid. We provide the two and a half billion dollar exit financing, which six months later we get taken out at 130. We put in $10 billion into the ecosystem across DIP, secured, securitized product, pref, buying a business out of the platform. Nobody could have navigated that hole over a 12 or 18 month period. You have to have tons of flexibility, creativity, and agility. You have to think up and down the capital structure. That was the first time I saw the whole platform at work working together from our platform team to our senior team to our hybrid team, all working in the whole ecosystem. That was a pretty special thing.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For the journey from mid 20 to when we were buying the term loan at 60 as a distress for control, which is again not really what we do historically, but it was COVID times. And we're like, if we own it here, we don't think it's going to be distressful, but if we own it at this valuation, it's worth this. We refinanced to think about the story of Apollo and how it can actually provide solutions, right? From that point forward, we became the largest secured lender. We provided the dip. We refinanced $4 billion in that summer, $4 billion of their entire used car vehicle financing because they had because the used cars were collapsed, they needed a refi, we refied $4 billion. The term went up. Then we, when the company ultimately ended up exiting bankruptcy, they took out the term loan in November of that year. They had a lease business, a platform business that actually did fleet finance inside of Hertz that they wanted to sell before they exited. We bought it in our platform business.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that story was like 2016 annual meeting. I said that Hertz would file for bankruptcy. I was dead wrong for three, four years. It was like, because I was of the view that Uber people would rent fewer cars, pricing would collapse, used car prices would go down. That was kind of thesis in 2016. COVID hits. I talked to the management team a month later. They're like, we don't have any plans for anything. EBA does fine. I'm like, okay, I'm like locked up in my house in Bedford. I'm like, what are you guys talking about? We bought several hundred million of June insurance and company filed in May, literally a month later after they told me everything was fine. So that was like the start of the Hertz journey. From there, we bought the term loan at 60. We thought that we'd probably own the company at a sub billion dollars, very different than whether company when we hated it was $10 billion company. We were buying the company effectively at a billion. And you go over the line.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, commit to having a personal trusting relationship with whoever the decision maker is. And if you don't have that trusting personal relationship with the decision maker, not only the decision maker, but also your peers. Because in credit, you have to be able to agree that sometimes one plus one is three. It's not zero sum.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you go through the channel and you're like, okay, how did this deal get done? It got done because I was just kept going back. I kept being super brutally honest. And despite his lack of, he didn't want to trust, I think part of it was like institutionally or what we were doing. He just didn't want to. Smart people just see through it. Smart people just see through and they actually were, he heard me for the content. And once he got there, you talk to him now, he'll tell you there was no deal without us having spent all that time before the whole process of me going to Phoenix all those times and actually engaging with him and just keep giving him just feedback. That's what ultimately got our deal done. And in most cases, that situation would have ended up in some sort of bankruptcy or some sort of aggressive thing where no one probably would have won, honestly. That one was fun because I feel like Ernie and our great friends now and I think we both learned a lot and you realize that you have to have flexible capital. You have to be willing to.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sold the stock at like 15 and went to 290, so we're the idiots. Here, I'll pull it up now because I was laughing. Ernie and I are both into where he wouldn't reply to anything before. Now we're like personal friends and I'm like reading through the text and I sent him this song. I sent him evening gown by Mick Jagger. I don't know why I sent them this song like a year ago. We're both into music. And he goes, if the FBI had to profile you based on your music, they would say you were a 60-year-old from West Texas with an optimistic form of depression.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can we somehow get to an agreement on this other thing? And he's famous quote of the whole thing is co-ops are made to say no, meaning that once you guys all get together, you're never going to get to a deal. I'm like, we can get to a deal reasonable deal. Just get everyone together, send us over something. I'm just encouraging them then to do it. And eventually we end up flying out to Phoenix as a group and we back and forth and finally you realize that first off, to get these deals done incredibly hard, very rare to get done. Two, it's probably the only co-op where everything worked. We cut a deal, the stock, and we had bought stock at four. The stock went from four to 280 in the next 12 months. The bonds went from 30. You exchanged at 90. Those bonds were trading at 120 a year later. Everybody won in this. Very rarely do you have in that time short of time period, do you have a deal that's effectively a fair deal, not where we're taking the equity thing? And a year later, everybody's won.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The exchange is effectively hey if you roll into this bond at a steep discount will give you security, but you have to take a big haircut to par. All of a sudden, no. They launched it, they extended it, and no deal. And people don't know this part of the story, but I'm sitting in vacation, like my first vacation probably a year in the south of France. And I'm sitting there with my wife. And guess who sitting next to me? Ken Mollis and his wife. Okay. And I'm like, Ken, I'm on vacation. And it's one of these places where you're going to stay like a minimum couple nights or whatever. And so Ken's there sitting at every meal. And I'm like, Ken.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Handful of people I'm friends with most people in the market. I'd like to say I've not done anything wrong to anyone in the market and generally have real personal relationships that have gone for a long period of time. They're deep, real relationships that, because in credit, it's not zero sum. The equity markets are more zero sum. You win the deal. I lose the deal. You typically are in the same bond with them or seem lone or maybe we'll be on the other side. But I know I'll be in the same side again. And so it's a very different dynamic. So we were able to get 90% of the bonds on board. They launched this exchange. The exchange gets blocked.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He just wouldn't. And it was like, sure. And you could tell. He was like, who is this person? Yeah. I think in November, we caught wind that they were going to try to do. And by the way, probably did 20 calls in two or three dinners with him. He heard what I was saying, but he didn't. He was just worried that I was trying to do something that was not in his best interest, which I understood. You can get that. They hire Molus and I catch wind of it prior to it that they're going to launch a super coercive exchange. And this is before the idea of co-ops. Co-ops are”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But just because it was in the newsline, it was so much headline for meme, the whole thing. And, you know, I kind of sense that there was going to be an issue. I think probably in November of 2022, about six months after we did the original deal, every time I started going out to California to go to the Athene offices, I would email Ernie and say, hey, I'm going to be in Phoenix. We need to catch out. And he'd be like, okay. I'm sure you could tell. He was like, who's this guy? First off, who's this guy from Apollo? Yeah. And what does he want? There's not a problem yet. And then bonds keep going down. I'm texting him. I was looking at my text last night and I was like, wait, how am I going to tell this story? And you look at the text from the beginning and he like wouldn't respond. He wouldn't engage.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most fun I'd say the most time and attention the last five years I had to deal with was probably Carbana. And I know you know Ernie, that situation went from us being down half a billion dollars to up a billion dollars probably in a matter of six months. It went from us being a lead order and a JP Morgan syndicated deal in 22 to all of the bonds a year later trading at 30, having bought another 750 to a billion of bonds on the way down and being questioned about the whole investment. And I think every single investor, every meeting I went into, I was like, I will never do this again. Every single meeting I went into, I was getting questions like, what's Karma? And it sounds like it was a big position for us. But in the context of all of our funds, even with it at 30, we were up 8% or 9%. So we took 100 or 150 basis points loss by vehicle.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two sovereigns as well. And now we're on pace to grow that to, I think, 50 billion. And our long-term goals to grow that to 100 billion dollar warehouse business. We've hired 180 people into that business. Completely, we'd have to restaff it with its own CFO, CRO, entire operations as a real company. We rebranded it Atlas. And now we control 280 separate warehouses. We're one of the go-to places to provide across all these different asset categories and we control the front end. That's just right down the middle of the fair where everything about Apollo, where it's working.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To underwrite all of those things was almost impossible for anyone in the market other than us because you had to have the full suite of the team and you had to bring on the full op-ex of the business. So you're talking about 300 people in 22 when rates moved, they spent, they sent 2 million wires for margining, okay? So you have to have the scale to actually do it. You have to know all these asset classes and you have to have the experience of being able to take on a team culturally, integrate the team, all those things, and then execute on a plan. So it got down to the wire. I remember sitting here. We were sitting here. It was like midnight or 1 a.m. And I was eating Chinese food with one of the analysts and the deal partner. And I was like, this is fun. Like I love this is, but we're back. Let's do this again. And that's what it's like. We're all on the floor having fun. And we ended up winning that deal. We ended up taking on 28 billion of assets. We brought in three partners, including Mass Mutual, to partner with us on the equity.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So CS was going through some changes, and then ultimately bought by UBS. Atlas was the structured products business at Credit Suisse. It was the number one profit center for a decade, generating a big percentage of CS's earnings for a long time with effectively no losses. They had a $45 billion balance sheet. And what they do is they provide warehouses to originators all over the world. And they would let those originators write a bunch of small loans. And when they get to a certain quantum, they would securitize those loans and distribute those loans via through a distribution mechanism. Because CS stock was trading at such a discount to book, if they could sell it at book value was actually accretive. But this had every, this was the classic Apollo deal. It had mortgages. It had solar. It had commercial real estate. It had consumer.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one have very clear credit box, very clear rules of the road on what you buy and what you don't buy. When you're not clear on that, it can create lots of issues. And so the more clear you can be up front. If you're clear with someone about what you're willing to buy and what you're not willing to buy, what are the parameters and bookends of what you're willing to buy and not buy, that empowers your origination machine? If you're not clear, if you're not clear on your decision making, if there's not a clear point of accountability, it creates way too much noise in the channel because you're not delivering to the clients because they think they can do X and that actually is brand degrading. So the number one rule is make sure you spend all the time in the world to define the credit box and be very quick. If you don't want to do stuff, be quick to redefine that credit box and be clear with your communication to anyone who's originating on your behalf. That's the rule number one. It sounds pretty simple, but you'd be surprised how hard it is to execute at scale.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Returns over time because you're going to give yourself a lot more flexibility. And in some cases, have much cheaper growth capital than you think you probably do than just raising equity. If you understand credit and you're an equity investor, typically you understand all the option value you are long when you issue debt and you just create lots of optionality for yourself that maybe if you didn't understand that you wouldn't price it in to your stock.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For someone who grows up on the capital structure side where you have to understand all parts of the capital structure, but as a credit investor, you need to understand the structural dynamics and flexibility of loans and converts and bonds and prefs. When you're purely equity investor, typically when you talk to them, they're focused predominantly on one thing, which is top line growth. And if you get the three-year top line growth number right, you typically get the stock right. And when you go to California and you ask about debt, no one wants to talk about debt. But now you have venture companies actually building defense companies that are going to be super asset heavy. And now you have hyperscalers that have never had any debt that need a lot that are becoming now more capital intensive. So the powering of this stuff is more capital intensive, but investing in businesses and optimizing for ROE, if you're running a business and you understand all the different flexibility points at different parts of the capital structure on balance sheet and off balance sheet, you're going to optimize and have better shareholders.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, we're organizing our business with no walls. So the earlier comment on risk reward, it's the same thing when you talk to an issuer. What are you solving for? Here are all the things you can do in credit, public, private. We do all those things. By the way, we do them on our own balance sheet. Let's compare notes. Okay, equity. What are you looking for? Public private? Okay, we do all those things, we understand exactly that. Okay, here's the solutions we can provide you. And by the way, let's put it all together. There's a whole other ecosystem around private assets and data and exactly who owns what information you get from your data set versus public markets data sets, which I think, again, early days, but I think the broader, bigger scalable businesses that have more touch points across the economy.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third party saying that this is rated X. SP is saying this is rated BBB SP is saying this other asset's rated triple B. So you have guideposts. If you have the guideposts, when you look at your credit allocation in a 60-40, shouldn't you just be optimizing for return with your credit allocation? And will that then go into sub-investment grade? And that will go into equity. Will that go into equity pools, both private and public? Should there be diversifiers to the S&P 500? These are, I think, real questions. If you look at market structure, if you look at how capital pools are growing, they're telling you that's what's happening. When we talk to a client in the future, I don't think we're going to be talking about the 20. We're going to be talking about, okay, what's the best risk award?”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, you have to agree that privates and publics become one. Overwhelming thesis that most assets get more liquid over time. So let's just assume that assets get more liquid over time. So what was seemingly perceived to be less liquid before will be more liquid and more accessible and more acceptable into those portfolios. There are certain states today which will take a rated private asset and a rated IG private asset and it eats against their private equity bucket because it's deemed private. So by definition, we are all wired and we've talked about this a lot. We were wired to think that private is risky. But if it's an Intel bond with a 20 year guarantee from Intel, is it riskier or safer than the Intel QSIP bond? And you're attached to the asset. So you actually have a double claim in some ways. So that part we think will over time go away, particularly for start with private IG. Let's just start with credit to start, which is you have.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other people to believe it's another good idea. Having the banks in some cases finance that idea. And so I was constantly training ourselves and our team with small pools of capital with no brand. We were small brands, Brencourt, these places were small, not in the Apollo where I learned how to do things without that business card, that seat. I learned to do it with very little resources. And so now when you have the resources, all of a sudden you're just like incredibly empowered to do things and you can do the whole deal yourself. Having that public spark DNA in the context of a big private manager, that really differentiates ourselves from a lot of different people out there.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disrupt ourselves. I'm okay with that discussion. There's many people who are not okay with that discussion. I love that discussion because I'm like, okay, well, then let's do it. I want to go. Someone's going to disrupt it. I'd rather just do it ourselves before letting anything else happen. And I think you build trust by having that mentality. The other thing is I oversee a really big private credit business. That's how it's viewed from the outside. And really now I oversee a big private markets business. But I grew up in a public markets DNA in a job that was literally here's a draw of very small nominal dollars, eat what you kill if you lose money, you won't have a job. And that's like a different thing. It's a different thing. You have to be all over all of the risk all of the time. That's hard to untrain. Part of that training though was create with very little capital. I worked at a 500 billion, 3 billion dollar fund. What you had to do in that is you had to design the skill of having the idea, going and creating the idea, getting”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To distribute and hold and have our own balance sheet that would effectively 50 50 with Mubatala. No one thought about those things creating asset-backed businesses, our platform businesses, all of these things into products. If it was a good idea, pure meritocracy and pure just engagement with the entrepreneurial spirit, despite us getting bigger, we haven't lost that. And that starts with Mark and goes down to Zelter and Kleinman and just an acceptance across the board. And the team has just been amazing. And so that part has been fun. I'm definitely oddly over indexed to change, so I like it a lot. So I have to work on that because even when things aren't supposed to change, I like the change. But the industry has changed a lot. I have tried to be really market oriented around what is the appropriate equilibrium of where the market should sit, both in product design fee, and asset category, and really question how.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think part of it you always have to bifurcate seat versus person part of it I was like Mark drove a theme credit became powered by an internal pool of capital our teams did incredible job of navigating creating new asset classes being innovative but listen when you have tailwinds like that and you're one of the leaders of those business and and help architect that business that obviously helps but we have an incredible team incredible people but also the leadership across the board they've always let if we have an idea they've let us run with it you know in 2018 19 we did a billionaire deal direct lending deal when no one was doing multi-billion dollar deals and we did it with not a very big direct business when we wanted to go to the Middle East and partner with Mubadala to raise a $12 billion balance sheet no one had raised a large cap directly this is 2019 no one had thought of really raising a balance sheet to commit”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traditional when you think of 800 billion dollar manager. To me, it still feels pretty flat. We want to keep that feeling. There's the play football amherst. And there was this game that we lost my senior year against Wesleyan. We lost 24-17. We were definitely not supposed to lose. Anyone on Wesleyan, you weren't supposed to win. It was like Sunday the day after the game. We were all sitting there. And the coach came out. He was like, thumb guys, finger guys. Don't blame anyone else. Don't be a finger guy. We're all thumb guys. And the point was take the accountability yourself. Stop trying to blame everything else. And when things go wrong or we're trying to create something, people take it on themselves. And we have that just embedded culture of just owning that ownership of both successes and mistakes. But really on the mistake side, people aren't always looking to blame other people. And we've surrounded ourselves with those people. We do that with our people, but that just emanates the whole place.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Any shareholders listening? I hope they love us. We are extremely, generally at our core, we are pretty unsatisfied generally. We try lots of different things. We have probably one of the smartest, most strategic leaders in the marketplace. And that really powers the culture of the place. We have a set of people who are really, it's pretty flat still. You'll have principles and associates and analysts are not afraid to talk to me or anybody else. And we like it that way. If you have a good idea, bring it up. We don't.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm right on repeat the gestation period to raise money, it's completely gotten so much longer than it ever was. In wealth, it's the early days where they need product, they need to get more indexed. They want to go with big high quality managers. They want to go with someone they know they trust, et cetera. But there's only a handful of brands that can do that. They're all short product. So the tailwinds there are going to be hard to see them not continue to grow.”
2025-06-03 · Invest Like the Best · John Zito - Inside Apollo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.426] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source