YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Sonnenfeldt

lines on the record: 69
first: 2023-02-17
most recent: 2023-02-17
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

“Finance, you have a whole thing called behavioral finance. And Danny Kahneman and Tversky, his partner who passed away, wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And although it's not exactly the same, it really shows how your brain functions on multiple levels because it's evolved that way to optimize the way we function in the world that existed or exists. We don't live in the nature anymore. If a tiger walks behind the trees and you just see a little brown spot walking, your brain is attuned to seeing that and reacting to protect yourself. Unfortunately, if you read the stats on climate change and it's a slow-moving disaster over a generation, our brains really don't know how to deal with that. It's one of the natures. But to go back to analysis, basically.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think of analysis through some term. It's a gift that you give to yourself to explore your inner mind. And because I've been doing both for over a decade, I guess now probably 15 years, it's very hard to figure out what part of my personal evolution came from the meditation or came from the analysis because they're both ways to access parts of your brain or your mind that are more difficult to access if you're not mindful about it. Analysis is an attempt to explore the unconscious. There's a model of our mind. There's the part of the mind that exists on the surface of every day. And there's a part of the mind that's hidden from us except when things seep out and almost surprise us. Where did that reaction come from? Where did that idea come from? You know, in the world of...”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of an observing mind, even as we're having this conversation, if I'm on my game, I'm also observing what's going on in the conversation. And sometimes when you feel an emotion and you can see it, you can dissipate it. If you go into a room and for some reason you're feeling insecure because of something about you or something about the rest of the people, if you see yourself being insecure, the insecurity seems to fade away or angry or jealous. These are all common human emotions or just anxious or there's lots of ways that one can observe themselves and moderate behavior that's counterproductive. But I do believe that my life is immeasurably better for the meditation. I also am a believer in analysis.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I meditated using what was then called TM or Transcendental Meditation for a few years then. And then I largely abandoned the practice for a couple decades and then a little over a decade ago, I began a much different or a little bit of a different practice. Today I meditate for about 45 minutes a day, generally at four or five in the morning when I wake up in the middle of the night. You can't go back to sleep. I've been on a couple silent retreats, one a 10-day meditation silent retreat and one a five-day, those are pretty unique experiences. And there's slight differences between TM where they give you what's called a mantra and everybody supposedly has a private mantra and shivasana breathing where you're listening to your breath, the flow in and out to concentrate your mind. And then there's a concept.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For one reason or another, we were able to put up $200,000 and have loans of 25 million. And fortunately, my partner had the $200,000 and I didn't, and that's how it all began.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just having this idea as I was meditating each day at the end of the pier looking backwards and seeing this building and looking forwards and seeing lower Manhattan, I went off to college. I dropped out of the University of Michigan but went off to MIT and then got a master's degree at MIT. And then I went to Goldman Sachs where I worked in the real estate department and had a bit of a taste for institutional real estate. But after a year, it wasn't for me and I left and went to work for my father-in-law for three years as I hatched the plans for this renovation. And it was my great fortune that he and his brother didn't want to renovate. And as a result, I was able to acquire it with a partner who changed my life the day he walked into my office. And in those days, we did acquire it for $25,200,000.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Across the Hudson, and you were a thousand feet out just by going to the end of the pier. And I had this idea that Lower Manhattan was expanding rapidly because of the growth of new computer centers. And the big firms were going to suburbia and creating these campuses. But people who went to those campuses felt they were going to Siberia. It was too far from the mothership. And I had this idea that maybe lower Manhattan could move 3,000 feet to the west. to this building that was ideal because the floor loads were enough to hold the computer centers and the ceiling heights were enough to accommodate all the air conditioning ducks and the raised floors and the particular location was such that I ultimately was able to engineer complete power redundancy from two different directions and microwave transmission from lower Manhattan but I began”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pennsylvania Railroad had to divest of this what by then had become a white elephant. And my father-in-law and his brother bought it for $5 million, which was an awful lot of money, but it was a two and a half million foot facility kind of hard to imagine you could buy a major building for two and a half dollars a foot. And they ran it as an industrial building because that was their business. They were not converters. They didn't buy buildings that had one use and convert them to another. And when I came along at age 17, he gave me a job in the warehouse in the building, and I was in then into transcendental meditation. And the peer, the building is right on the jersey shore across from what was then the recently completed World Trade Centers. And if you walk out on the pier a thousand feet, it feels like you're closer to lower Manhattan than you are to the Jersey shore behind you. It's about 3,000 feet.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jersey shore and get loaded onto ships at this facility. The railcars went right out to the piers and went from the rail car onto the ships. There were 136 truck docks. And the building was eight stories high. But the elevators were so big that when we were renovating, you could drive a small panel truck right onto the elevator and take it right up to the floor. And the building was forced to be divested from the Pennsylvania Railroad by the antitrust laws that made the argument that the railroads were unfairly competing with local landlords by giving away space for free to generate rail traffic. And that meant the local landlords couldn't compete with the railroads to get tenants. And this was in the days of what was called the Sherman Antitrust antitrust law.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if it was all time, but it was pretty good and it was one of the most successful in New York metropolitan history. My wife's family was in the real estate business, but they were not developers. They had a proven formula of buying buildings and managing them and making them as efficient as possible, but they didn't have construction teams and development teams to either redevelop buildings or build them from scratch. And one of the buildings that they had acquired in 1955 was a building that had been the largest building in the world when it was built in 1929 called the Harborside Terminal. And this was an intermodal freight terminal that was the northeast distribution center for the Pennsylvania Railroad. And rail cars of goods and products would come from the West to the”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Role of the Fed, any one of these data points you can acquire on your own. And one of my closest friends never went to college and he's the best read person on the brain that I know. But when you go to a good college and get a good education, it gives you a rounding that pays dividends for the rest of your life.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't an absolute requirement for success. But on the other hand, that doesn't mean that a college education is without value. And having dropped out of Andover when I was in 10th grade and then going to college and starting at the University of Michigan and dropping out when I was a just turned 17, I went a year early. It was too early. ultimately went back to MIT. And interestingly enough, what MIT did just as one example, I took a course in law in the Sloan School. It's just an introductory course to law. If you didn't go to college, you wouldn't have had a broad education. Well, that course in law sparked an interest for me that was a lifelong interest that gave me an edge in almost every negotiation in trying to understand not just the legal framework, but also how governments work.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just at the annual Tiger 21 conference, an organization I founded 23 and a half years ago, and it consists of today, 1,220 of the most successful entrepreneurs around the world. You'd have to be 1 in 10,000 by accomplishment. And so I've sat at the table with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs and wondered the very same question because many of our members have master's degrees and many of our members never went to college. And the one thing that I'm sure of is that there are many incredibly intelligent people who never had a formal education and the absence of a formal education doesn't prevent them from creating great success, of course, you have the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates models, who both dropped out of college. So there's plenty of evidence that college”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should give you a sense of what it meant to be growing up with this giant intellect, who still was sometimes an intolerant German, but an amazing figure from whom I'm eternally grateful that I was his son.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an honor given the honor of working being the exclusive translator for Herman Gary. And my father spent many days in the fall of 1945 with Gehring, who admitted to my father certain crimes. The most important was that the whole beginning of Hitler's rise to power was when the Reichstag was burned down and Hitler accused the communists of doing it. And Gehring admitted to my father that he had burned down the Reichstag on Hitler's orders. And that's what allowed Hindenburg to give Hitler dictatorial powers and the rest is history. Anyway, he came home. He hadn't gone to high school, but Johns Hopkins led him in, graduated in three years, and then became an engineer at RCA and invented the final 17 patents that today brings us color TV. I could go on and on and on, but those two sets of facts of loan.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He actually became the manager of the factory, befriended Nehru, who would later lead India. I have letters at home and eventually made his way back to the United States after a period of time in India where his parents had escaped from Germany through Sweden. He eventually enlisted in the army and at the end of World War II, he was asked to be a translator by General Bill Dunovan, the founder of what was then the OSS that's the precursor to the CIA. But at the time the OSS was charged with the Nuremberg trials and he heard my father was a translator because he was bilingual. And it turned out he was more than a translator. And before too long at the age of 23, he was named chief interpreter of the American prosecution of the Nuremberg trials. And then if you want to call...”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You were considered an enemy alien and he was shipped off to an Australian prisoner of war camp at the age of 16. And by then he was speaking English because he had been in England for a year or two and he was able to convince the commandant of the camp that he wasn't a Nazi and in fact he wanted to fight Nazis. And somehow he was able to convince the commandant of that camp to send him back to England that a great mistake had been made and he did when he'd come to Australia was on a famous boat called the Dunera. It was a movie about that and when he was shipped back he was on the Denera but it was attacked. That's the torpedo that you mentioned. And he was let off at age 17 in 1940 in Bombay by himself. And believe it or not, he was able to get a job in a radio factory because he was a brilliant future engineer.”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have nine Jewish families, they didn't even know each other because that wasn't what their identity was. When Hitler came to power, all of a sudden they did know who each other was. And eventually between the rising anti-Semitism and eventually the Nuremberg laws, you couldn't work, you couldn't earn money. And my grandparents were smart enough to get their two sons out of Germany to a boarding school in England that had been set up to accept German youth. It was a Quaker school that actually had been in Germany and moved to England. And my father, aged 16 and his brother age 14, went to that school and they weren't there too long before the British interned all Germans aged 16 and above, just like we interned the Japanese here. It didn't matter whether in the English case, whether you were a Nazi or Jewish,”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My father grew up in Germany in the late 20s and 30s. And his family was an assimilated Jewish family in Germany, by which I mean they had Christmas trees. They didn't have much of a Jewish identity. And his parents were both doctors who had moved to the rural countryside to serve what the Germans used as a term that would be translated as peasants. Probably don't love that term anymore, but that was in common use. It was farmers and people who lived off the land and didn't have lots of money but were decent honorable people. And his parents moved out in the flurry of liberalism that came after World War II to serve the rural poor. But it was only in the 30s when Hitler came to power that this town of Gardelagen that happened to”
2023-02-17 · We Study Billionaires · TIP525: Secrets from a Private Billionaire Club w/ Michael Sonnenfeldt · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT