YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Novogratz

On the record 2020

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SITTING OR EPISODE

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2020–2020

ON RECORD

podcast

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“And so that's the battle of being a speculator, but that translates into the battle of being life. And, you know, listen, even, I guess if you're investing in movies, you have some algorithm in your head or a written algorithm of what you think makes for a good bet. And so you invest, you invest, you invest. At one point, your track record, your wins versus losses are going to tell you you're any good at this. really taking the time to understand what that algorithm is. Like, how do you make decisions in investing in movies or investing in small businesses, right? If you're a venture capitalist or investing in markets. And so one of my insights was always like any one of those processes, you take an information, you process it through an algorithm, and you have to then manage it, like manage the risk of it somehow. And so I use that process in lots of things, but some, you know,”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so someone is bullish, they say, I think the stock market's going up, but I'm not going to buy it yet, right? I think the stock market's going up, but I'm going to buy a little bit, but I'm going to sell calls on it. So that goes up and they barely make any money. Stan Druckenmutter, when he's, you hear him on TV, if he says, I think the market's going up, you can better believe he's long”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, no one's right 80% of the time in markets. And so you need a circuit breaker. And so that's a series of rules that you manage your portfolio by manage your life by in lots of ways. And that's where discipline really helps. And that's where I've often let myself down a little bit. And that's sometimes just trying to do too many things. Sometimes, you know, just not being tough enough on myself. But that's the challenge of anyone who goes into my business. It's really hard to learn that you're actually good at it because it's not a skill that, you know, how do you say I've got good intuition, right? It takes a long time for you to trust yourself. And then how do you hold steady to really having your portfolio constantly being a collection of your guesses? It sounds like it should be a tautology, right? I'm bullish. Therefore, I'm long. But I would tell you that 19 out of 20 people that”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very well by almost any standard, but not in the legend standard. I know who the legends are because I've been around them. And so I think about that a lot, and I'm trying to figure out, you know, that's not all terrible, like you'd like some more discipline. And I think it has allowed me to have a more diverse life than some of my peers. But I think about that. But that's how you, the only way you end up trusting your intuition to get to your question is to have some set of rules that you manage your risk by, your life by, because you're still anxious, right? We're learning to trust ourselves. So I think I'm right, right? It is a business that I think, not that I know. You really think like this lines up. I'm almost positive. Bitcoin's going to go up right now. But if it doesn't, you've got to have some circuit breaker that says, you know, I could have been wrong. You know, no one's right 100% of the time.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said the three things, and then they have an unbelievable competitive spirit. And, you know, I look at guys like Stan Druckenmiller and Paul Jones and Lewis Bacon. And to be honest, they've done better than I have. And it wasn't because I spoke to him enough to understand of their understanding of markets or intuition. Their discipline was just better than it was. And I was like, why were they more disciplined than I? I think partly they're just more disciplined than I. But they're more competitive. They just cared more. It was interesting. I couldn't tell if that was in life a strength or a weakness, but there, you watch that Michael Jordan documentary and the one thing that every single person who watches that comes out is he cared. So he was the most competitive man I think I've ever seen in anything, Michael Jordan. You know, the great speculators are very competitive like that. And shockingly, I'm just not as competitive. And listen, I've done.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a great question. And listen, the world's best speculators or macro traders have two things in common. They have this pattern recognition intuition. I put that in one bucket. And then they have discipline.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My hedge fund went from 300 million to 2 billion in six months. The returns went up. But most importantly, the joy showed up. It was more fun. And the confidence came. I was like, I know I can always, if I need to, sit in front of the screen and sort out markets and make money from them. And so, you know, one of the great breakthroughs Loney was from this guy who was a famous Jewish general, Israeli general. And I don't know how I seem to have gotten sidetracked from your question, but.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was about intuition and that his Napoleon's thought was these generals know where to be on the battlefield, and they can pattern recognize the thing. They have a certain intuition, and we don't have a word for it, therefore we call it luck. And the moment he said that, the way my brain functioned as an investor, the way I operated in life, it clicked. I was like, that's what I do. I have pattern. Like I'm actually, and I realized I didn't need, once I knew what I needed to make investments, to make decisions, I didn't need to fulfill what you think I needed, right? I remember being so worried when I was at Life or Key that someone was going to ask me who the finance minister of Russia was because I was telling my own all these Russian rubles and I forgot the guy's name. But I didn't really need to know the guy's name for my investment confidence. Other people might. And that was liberating. And from the moment that happened, I could tell the story of how I made investment decisions and had so much more confidence.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, thank you. He said, But you're lucky. You're lucky. And then he said, don't worry about it. Lewis Bacon, who's one of the macro legends, you know, one of the best investors of all time. And Bruce Covenor, they remind me a little. They think they're smart, but they're mostly lucky. And I'm looking at them. And then he gave me a quote in French. Of course, I don't speak French. I was like, translate, you know, I'm not so smart. And it was from Napoleon. I don't hire smart generals. I hire lucky generals”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember feeling all this stress about, and I was telling my wife, I was like, I don't, this is so much stress. I'm not having fun. I should just do something else in my life. And she was like, dude, you hired all these people. You just hired one of your best friends and he left his firm to work for you, like sorted out. And as luck would happen, I have this life where I stolen mentorship or found it or been gifted it, you know, in strange places. And I was One of my investors suggested I have lunch with Hud Barak, who had been the prime minister of Israel and one of their great generals, one of the, and he allegedly had the highest IQ in the Israeli army. And I was sitting with him. And he was a charming, charming guy. He later became a friend. And he looked at me, he said, no regrets. I think I figured you out. You know, you're not very smart.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2006 probably maybe 2005 and it was such an honor to be there I was one of the young guys and you had to give your three stories stocks or ideas and it came to me and the guy before me had used one of mine and I just panicked and I literally was like and I'm sweating and it was one of the most miserable five minutes of my life so much so the guy next to me was like dude, that wasn't that bad, but I've got a plane leaving soon if you want to go.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't feel that. I felt relieved like, ah, thank God check that box. And I was thinking back on it. I was like, well, that's kind of shitty that you felt that much pressure to be a partner of Goldman Sachs. Who the hell really cared? You know, I lost most of the big wrestling matches in my life because I felt so much pressure to win that when I knew it was an important match, I wouldn't wrestle as well. And so I got a lot of second places. I would remember walking out of the mat feeling exhausted beforehand. And it took me a while. Matter of fact, I remember the moment where I had my first insight. The year before I had been at this investor conference called Lifeord Key. And Byron Ween used to run it. He was a legend from Morgan Stanley. And this was the first legendary investor conference. You had to be a legend to be there and you had to share ideas. And I got invited into.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six 2007. So early on it was just exercise. My core issues were pressure. When I made partner at Goldman Sachs, I felt relieved. I remember Lloyd Blankfine called me up. He said, don't tell my wife it was one of the most joyful days of my life, even more than my wedding. And I'm thinking to myself.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Felt like, what the F are you complaining about? You're alive in this beautiful settings, and you're meeting new people. And that was really the big trigger. And so staying fit. You know, at that age, I ran a lot, but it was that push yourself into the uncomfort zone physically even and realize you're still alive, dude. You're not dead. And so that's right before the 9-11 happened. That was whatever the June before September. But that was really the turning point now that you asked the question where I felt like, okay, I can go back to work. And then Fortress, you know, there was a lot of stress at work because I felt like, you know, even though I thought I had made some big breakthroughs, there were parts of my story I hadn't sorted out. One is why I carried all this pressure all the time that stopped it from being joyful. And so exercise, I still, I wasn't really into meditation until probably 2000.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I gave up drinking for 13 months. And I have been a man who loves parties, who loves drinking, who doesn't drink at home, but a very social drinker my whole life. And that was difficult, was trying to be able to be social, not with a glass of wine or a beer or Jack Daniels in my hand was tough. And I gave up recreational drugs. And, you know, 14 months later, I did something which I think was important. I ran this thing called the Marathon of the Sands, which was six marathons in a row across the Sahara. It was one of the original adventure races. 700 people from 100 countries, and you literally run across the damn desert, and it would get to 130 degrees during the day and freeze at night. And about halfway into it, I was like, ah, it's good to be alive.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And luckily, you know, had a lot of good luck and good, great partners five or six years later, not even six years later, we rang the bell at the stock market. And we were all billionaires and it was just kind of heady experience because the journey from walking out of Goldman Sachs and having one of the senior partners say, well, maybe it'll work against sometime. I'm thinking to myself, geez, it wasn't that bad. But really feeling like you might never work again until six years later, you know, feeling like you're on top of the world. That was kind of a heady ride.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, buy short data treasury contracts. And I was like, oh no, get out of the building. And I was like, okay, the brain's kind of screwed up. And then I was with my young son who was like two at the time. And I was. Looking on the TV, and I was like, we got to go help. So I go, want to run down towards the trade center to see what was going on. And he started crying. And I was like, okay, that's not helping. So we ran back and watched it on TV. But I, you know, my army side of me wanted to participate and there was no real room for volunteers. And I felt like I got to go do something. And I realized I hadn't fulfilled kind of my Wall Street journey. And so I literally, it was a 9-11 insight. And I, you know, went back to work at Fort.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In her school. But instead of being angry, he wanted to lynch her, you wanted a hugger. And so that process of trying to understand where people's mistakes came from allowed me to start kind of forgiving myself a little bit. And then since I didn't really get to that holistic place, I realized, and maybe this is the trick of how to get started again, I just needed to create a new narrative. And some of the narrative was I fucked up. went to try to understand how I fucked up. I haven't solved it all, but I'm starting over. And, you know, it wasn't until 9-11 happened. I was trying to figure out what to do. And when 9-11 happened, my brother called me. And he was in one of the big buildings right next to the Twin Towers. And he's like, dude, a plane just hit. What am I supposed to do? And I was like, buy Eurodollars. And he was like,”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or fear. And so starting the search to find that out was unbelievably helpful. It also really started building an underdeveloped empathy muscle. I remember I met one woman who had been the teacher of the year in Florida for like nine straight years. And she had probably 45 years old and had a relationship, maybe 30, 40 years old, had a relationship with a senior. And it wasn't even sexual, but it was close to sexual, got caught. And next thing you know, she was the pariah of the town and got thrown out of teaching and everyone wanted a shooter. And as you met her, she was one of the nicest women I had met. And she had a story. She had been abused by her both father and then stepfather and had developed a relationship addiction, which unfortunately then had her having a relationship with a single”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Control of your food to medicate those feelings and that medication all of a sudden as you end up doing more stupid things and you need more of the medication and it's this cycle of and so that if you could get to those core issues it would really help in your journey and you're sitting around a circle with people and you know one guy's father kicked him in the spleen he lost his spleen when he's 12 and almost all the women that were bulimic or anorexic had suffered incest and i'm thinking here i had nice parents like what you know i had a pretty nice and it was traumatizing not having the big trauma and you know one of my insights was sometimes the little trauma 10 years 20 years 30 years later can have just as much psychological duress as big trauma you know and so one man's pain is no different 10 years later uh it's just pain”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On day one, and I hadn't had a drink or a drug or got any trouble for three, four, five months at the time. So I flew out there and you check yourself into a mental health facility. And you're like, what the F just went on here? And my first roommate was in the throes of trying to kick heroin and he was not having a good time of it. And I'm like, how in God's name did I end up at this place? But it was probably my first experience with really digging in and trying to sort out like what are the patterns of my life that led to this and it was kind of traumatic in that the thesis that a lot of rehab centers use and addiction specialists use is that there are these deep emotional scars, either big tea traumas or little tea traumas that people have a hard time dealing with and they start using some substance it might be sex or alcohol or drugs or”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was kind of liberating because as a partner at Goldman Sachs, every partner that had left Goldman Sachs, when you left, you got this beautiful little memo about all you had done and, you know, it was a Goldman's a bit of a cult and there was a very nice way they exited partners. And I just disappeared. I was not spoken about. I was like, so I kept worrying that I was going to run into my ex-partners on the street and be so embarrassed. And so first he helped me get over that. Think about it. But in the long run, I end up going up to rehab in Arizona. And, you know, that was a, I kind of got snookkered in a little bit. I had this therapist. I'd never had a therapist before. And he said, dude, you talk so much. You got to go somewhere where you can tell your stories and have a safe space. And there's this beautiful holistic place in the middle of Phoenix, or Tucson called Sierra Tucson. And it looked, I looked on the pamphlets, it looked so nice. And so I went out there. And, you know,”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After something. You know, that was my kind of first public humiliation failure. Personal failure, you know, failed the people I worked with. And it was painful. There's no two ways around it. You know, it was helpful that I had a supportive family that were just letting me be. I went into depression. It took a while to kind of work out. I had this narrative that had ruined my life and I would never get it back. I remember, you know, there was lots of little pieces of advice first, right? I had one lawyer. I was so worried about what everyone thought about me. And this lawyer said, dude, do me a favor. Write down on a piece of paper. The people that you think will be at your funeral when you diet 80. Worry about what those people think. All those other people, they don't really think about you that much.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often that toughness and grit ends up in leadership. And so you see a lot of wrestlers that move on in life into leadership positions.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen, I think it's a sport that almost like no other sport beats the hell out of you. I mean, it is so tough from cutting weight to going out on the map by yourself and just getting crushed. And so you learn to pick yourself up after you get crushed. And you're like, okay, I got crushed that much. I don't need to get crushed next match. And I got to work a little harder. And so it's resilience. If anything, the train it builds in people is grit are resilience. When I started beating the streets, we looked a lot at wrestling. And it's interesting, 14 of the 44 presidents in the United States had wrestling in their background. There's no other sport with that menu. Maybe Blinken used to go from town to town to wrestle for money. Teddy Roosevelt was a wrestler.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I reach puberty till I was about 20. No, I was a decent wrestler and I worked pretty hard at it. And I just got good enough to make the varsity. So my first two years, I was really on the junior varsity. There was one guy that was better than me at the same weight. And he actually took a year off. And so it opened the spot up for me. And having that opportunity to wrestle, you know, I just started doing better and better. And I made the Eastern tournament that I made the national tournament. And back then, making the nationals was a huge check plus for you. You felt like you're a real guy in the wrestling community. And so I came back senior year, ready to, you know, ready to be an all-American. And so it was a whole shift of my confidence level again. But also I got stronger. Nowadays, kids red shirt. They take a year off. I really wish I was just getting strong and just getting good my senior year. I kind of always needed one more year.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Friends, and other than them teasing me about having my hair parted in the mill, which I thought was a very cool look back then, but not in New York City. You know, I quickly realized that rich guys, middle class guys, they all use the same toilet just yet. And that part, I think, gave me a lot of confidence in life that I could compete, in essence. Now, this is the point we were competing mostly for girls, but I could compete with anybody. And that sounds like a small little wind, but it was actually when I look back. you know, where a lot of kind of confidence started.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And athletically, that flipped my junior year. Socially, it flipped early. And that was probably one of the biggest positive. Academically, it never really flipped. I never really felt, maybe until I did my thesis, like I was really a good enough student, didn't really feel smart enough until I actually joined the Army on a test with 700 other guys got first place. And I was like, dude, I am actually pretty smart. I learned something. But I was intimidated most of Princeton. It was interesting. The positive side was socially, I was adept and realized, you know, I had my first roommate actually was Gloria Vanderbilt's son, Carter Cooper, who unfortunately tragically committed suicide years later. But he was kind of aristocracy, right? He did not just a wealthy New Yorker, but the Vanderbilts were aristocracy. And I went to New York and realized he had his own insecurities as well, and he had a nice.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I was a middle class kid, so I showed up a little intimidated. And I thought I was smart in high school and I showed up at Prince Enough. I thought she said, I'm not that smart. I thought I was a great wrestler in high school. And I went to Princeton and got my butt whooped. And I was like, I'm not that good of a wrestler. And so, you know, it started off intimidated in lots of ways. You know, I look back, I took easier classes than certainly my kids take thinking, how do I get through this place and survive it?”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, unfortunately, it did happen. I've had a tendency to drink too much at big parties. And, you know, Princeton has this reunion celebration every year where all the classes come by. And after the P raid, this is a parade of hundreds and hundreds of people starting with the oldest graduate who is often 100, 103 years old all the way to the new grads. Everyone migrates to this Prospect Avenue. And one year I had to leave early for an event and I was like, okay, just I'll show off to my friends a little bit. And so I got in a helicopter. It was going to take me back to New York City. And I asked the pilot if I could drive. And we just buzzed prospect street, much to the thrill of my friends and probably the dismay of everyone else.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a pair of weight pants with a big white stripe on the side of them. And they look like the pants speed racer used to wear. I bought them in LA at Fred Siegel one day when I was just bored. And I started wearing them around. And no one in New York was wearing striped pants. And so it was quite the thing for about a year.”
2020-08-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #451: Mike Novogratz on Investing, Bitcoin, Ayahuasca, and Running Through The Sahara Desert · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT