Digital Social Hour - Meeting Tucker Carlson & RFK JR, Death Threats & Running Public Companies I Todd Ault DSH #389

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Todd Ault comes to the show to talk about meeting Tucker Carlson and RFK JR, Getting Death Threats & Running Public Companies APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://forms.gle/D2cLkWfJx46pDK1MA BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Business models matter and one of the lessons I've learned about this is that if a business is broken, you really have to analyze why they're broken. Why do I run 18 companies? Uh, insanity. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe. It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. It truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, we are back. We're here with Todd Ault today. How's it going, man? It's good. I like your studio, man. Yeah, it's great. Coming off a big conference, man. One of the best I've been to.

Really? Yeah. man yeah it's great coming off a big conference man one of the best i've been to really yeah yeah it's their second one uh they're they're uh they're a lot of hurry up and wait and then they all get kind of crazy the week before yeah they're insane that was a big event we have a tucker carlson rfk jr ben muller um had a ton of people. That lineup was nuts, man. Yeah, tell people watching about Risk On 360 what it means and why you have these. So Risk On is an acronym. It's a Wall Street term. I've been on Wall Street for 34 years. And I trademarked that term, which is relationships are vital. They're everything, right?

Invest in yourself. Stay your own course. Know your competition better than they know themselves own your own mistakes and never give up that sort of risk on is a trading term for wall street when you've invested uh at a time when maybe a lot of people are like right now a risk on trade would be like ai right ai's hot Yeah. I took the analogy to be personal because I... If I actually told my story, I thought about this the other day,

if I actually told my story of how I've gotten here, no one would believe it. It's insanity. I'm married to the right person who for a hundred thousand reasons puts up with me, but I have been full on the pedal. I mean, she just told me the other day,

I've been with her for 20 years. She's like, you have never taken one day off ever, ever known you. And I said, I don't think that's true. I thought she said we were in Tahiti or Fiji or something. And she said, no, you're forgetting that you had that satellite phone and you were calling the office every day, working every day. And I thought, so it didn't seem like work to me because there was only a couple calls. But there was work. There is stress with the market. In fact, to be on this podcast, the market closes at 1 o'clock,

but there's an aftermarket. So I kind of darted over here to be here after the market closed, and I'll run two full-time assistants and a lot of companies. It's a crazy lifestyle that I really like a lot. How did you become this way? Well, that's an interesting story. I've been going to the same therapist for 23 or 24 years after my first divorce. And how did I become this way? Well, first of all, I wanted to work on Wall Street since I was 11 or fly a plane. I kind of knew what I wanted to do when I was a kid, right?

And that's because of Warren Buffett being on a show called Moneyline with Lou Dobbs. I was 11 or something, and I really fell in love with the idea of working on Wall Street and buying all or part of companies. And if I would have listened to him, I'd be a much richer man. I chose a path of what he talks about making things really complicated. And so I've, I've, uh, can I, is it inappropriate? Okay. So many things that you, you can't even, uh, well, I never know where these broadcasts, you know, I was on NBC the other day and I, I realized I cannot say any cuss word. So I've made so many mistakes, and yet despite that, I'm still here. And if I read you the list of the mistakes I made and continue to make new ones, that's a miracle.

I'm actually celebrating today because today's my birthday right now, right? Happy birthday. Thank you. I'm 54, and I'm celebrating the idea that I'm still here. So I'm mesmerized by that. But aren't mistakes a part of growth, though? They completely are. But the hope is that the mistake you make doesn't decommission you.

It doesn't put you out of business. And I have had some near misses that would have put me out of business and I have had some near misses, you know, uh, that would have put me out of business. I'm in a heavily regulated space, um, with the sec and FINRA and other, uh, letter agencies out there, you know, that, that, you know, we live in a world world where as an entrepreneur, you talk about athletes, you're celebrated when you're trying to become that marquee athlete, like a Mike Tyson. But then when you get to the peak, they try to tear you down. And I don't know why that's the case, but in this country,

we celebrate a person starting from nothing in their garage, and when they become big, we torture them and go after them and malign them and ridicule them and call them names and attack them. And you learn. I mean, I am in any given time. I bought a company in the defense business seven years ago and the company was losing money. I rescued it from bankruptcy.

Yeah. They were overstaffed and we let go of 40 people and the company still survived to this day. But within a month or two of that happening, even though I wasn't the guy actually doing the work, I was getting death threats and people attacking me online and writing me letters. And so I live in a world where when you're the guy out in front, you're going to get shot at pretty hard. And I get shot at pretty hard. And I'm also – for example, I own a company in Israel that makes part of the Iron Dome. And this whole thing that's happening in Israel, people know that I own that company, and I'm getting attacked online for owning a company that's helping Israel.

Wow. Okay, well, they have a right to defend themselves. And yet – and I got people texting me saying, you know, death threats and stuff. So I don't, it doesn't bother me. The point I was making is about earlier being a crazy life and making mistakes. Sometimes you don't know the mistake you've made until later. So you do learn from them and you have to make them, right? And so that's what Risk's on about.

It means the reason I was able to make these mistakes and still be here is because of relationships. Nice. It's the most important thing. Yeah. There's nothing more important than the relationships you develop, and there's nothing more important than that. Because that's going to be the thing that when you need help on something. Phone call. What?

I see. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So anyways, that's make a phone call. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So anyways, that's what RiskOn is. Yeah. And why did you take the approach of running multiple companies instead of focusing on one? Because you have 18 companies, right?

So I'm a capital allocator. I'm a financier. Right. You know, I consider myself an American financier, a guy who puts together transactions to help companies grow. And so I run a private company called Alt & Company that I really, I founded in my head when I was, you know, if you go to my high school yearbook, it says, where will you be in 10 years?

And it says running Alt & Company with 10 million in assets. Wow. And I think combined with Alt & Company and stuff, we get at any given time in the last two years, I think we've had between 400 and 700 million, 600 million in assets. Jeez. And so my business model is to acquire an undervalued asset, help turn it around, make it more valuable. Or like, for example, Alzheimer's Neuro, which went public in 2021, I believe.

I founded that company six years before because my father had Alzheimer's. My mother-in-law died from it. And I wanted to do something different to help solve the Alzheimer's issue. And I saw a doctor on TV, on a TV program on CNN called Weeds, I think, 2, and with Sanjay Gupta. And I called up the doctor and said, do you have funding? He says he didn't. I learned about his two drugs, went to the University of South Florida. I licensed those two drugs.

Those two drugs are now in human beings. They're ones in Phase 2B and ones in Phase 1 and A. That's the vaccine, 1A, 1B. And I raised about $30 million for the company, took it public for $3.3 billion two years ago. And so for a small period of time, because I owned more than half the company, for like a five-day period, I was worth about $1.6 billion. Holy crap. So that was the evaluation when you went public?

Went public for far less. Went public for like $100 million6 billion. Holy crap. So that was the evaluation when you went public? Went public for far less. Went public for like $100 million. Okay. But it opened up from $5 to $33, I think $33.62 a share. Now, I didn't sell any shares. In fact, I bought more on the way down, and I've never sold any shares. That's being that pre-IPO. Yeah.

I'm still in the – yeah, some people bought it for $0.20. Man. Jeez. So my point of this is that you asked why do I run multiple companies. I am not the runner of companies. I am not a manager, although I have to be to some extent.

I'm a capital allocator. So our crane company in Texas, we have a great CEO who actually worked for Buffett's company, Arnold Mabee. We have a great CEO who runs the crane company. Super proud of them. We have a great CEO who runs the Crane company. Super proud of them. We have a great CEO for our data center business called Sentinum. His name's Jay Looney. That guy came out of HP. He's a great CEO. I have a CEO of my public holding company,

Alt Alliance, Will Horn, who's been with me for 20 years. So I generally empower someone to be the boss and buy a company. Usually I'd like, prefer, if you listen to Buffett, prefer management included already. I've made the mistakes of not having that, right? There's an analogy he gives in, so there's Munger before he passed away that said, a great manager can take and can turn around a great business. A great manager cannot turn around a business, right? So there's a business models matter, and one of the lessons I've learned about this is that if a business is broken, you really have to analyze why they're broken. So why do I run 18 companies?

Insanity. Some have been a natural evolution, you know, but, and we sell them occasionally if it makes sense or, you know, dating myself a hundred years ago, probably back to before you guys were born, Jack in the Box, which was called Food Maker at the time, but had these franchises called Jack in the Box. They actually had people die from eating their hamburgers in the nineties. Wow. And their E. coli burgers effectively died. And the stock went from $18 to $2.75, and I actually bought a big stake of what was Foodmaker that owned Jack in a Box. So I've had these exits where that stock

ended up going to, I think, about $150 a share from $2.75. Jeez. They turned it around. They ran Jack for president. This is in the 90s, right? Yeah. I did the same thing with a company in Texas

called Taco Cabana, where I've had a public exit where we sold it to private equity. I was the founder of Patient Safety Technologies, which today, if you go get surgery, it's likely that when a sponge goes in your body, our device prevents it from being left behind when they close you up. Oh, wow. It's called Surge Account Medical. That was sold to Stryker. Ironically, the founder came back, who I bought it from, and he ended up selling it to Stryker for $120 million. So that was a great exit.

So I've had some exits and I've had some failures. And I have – the funny part is people talk about their successes all the time. Let's talk about the failures. Yeah, I've got plenty of failures, right? I've got plenty of stupid things I've done and plenty of those mistakes. And what I was saying earlier about people of death threats and stuff like this is that people inherently that don't know how to – I want to be careful. I'm not saying they don't know how to manage their money. But people that are risking their money don't always read what they need to read.

So if you look at my public company, Alt Alliance, the stock has done very poorly, yet we've continued to execute on our business plan. And what happened was, as we made power supplies for Bitcoin miners, we got very heavily involved in Bitcoin and we ended up getting a shareholder base that was really fixated on Bitcoin, right? And when there's this analogy of basically as me being the founder of that company, that when you make an investment and it goes up, you're a smart guy. But when you make an investment goes down, the CEO is a piece of shit. So I got a lot of people who attack me for things that if they just read the prospectuses, actually read the investment,

it would say that we committed to raising capital long-term. That's one of the things they don't like, that we raise capital. They don't understand the diversity. They say themselves, why do you have 18 companies, right? But if they read when I took over in 2017, we laid out a clear plan that we were going to acquire and do this. So it's a strange analogy that when you make the investment and it goes up, you're the smart person. Right. You won't. And when it goes down, it's someone else's fault.

Right. Yeah. And so I experienced a little bit of that. Anyways, I know I'm a little all over the place in terms of topics. It's so fascinating. I'm with you. Just not taking a day off for 20 years. Do you plan on ever taking a day off?

No, I it's, it's so funny. I think he'll die one day. I think I do take, I think in my opinion that a day off for me, I do a lot of reading. So just to be like clear,

I consume an enormous amount of, of reading. Like we're talking about on average, how many books do you read a month? Oh God, off the chart. I probably read... I consume a lot.

I wouldn't even know. What's the number? 100? 50? Books a month? I probably read... I'll probably read three or four at a time a month. So maybe a year I'll read 60, 70 books. Maybe a little less.

Right now I'm deep into Elon Musk's book, Walter Iserson's book on Elon Musk. Some of them I've reread. Some of them, if I really think they add value, I've read more than, more than 20, 30 times. I'm like two, three times. That's yeah. Yeah. And, but then I also read SEC filings. So since I run a public company, whenever I see an acquisition, I want to know how it was done. So I'll go read the filings, learn who the lawyers were, how they financed it, who the banks that were put with the money together were, where they got the capital, who the investors were, what was the strategic reason for buying them. I do a to public companies. We have a business called Alt Lending, which is a licensed California lender, which is inside our public company. Got about a – I think it's got about a $100 million portfolio, maybe a little less.

And I – sub it to reading the numbers because it fluctuates based on value. But since I lend to other public companies, when you want to borrow money from me with your public company, I will sometimes, and so will my staff, ask you the same question like six different ways but not every same day. It's a reaffirmation of learning deeply why we're providing you capital. Smart. So that ends up getting me into going down rabbit holes of why do we lend you money? What do you do? What's your business model? Um, I learned a lot of people make money a lot of different ways. Yeah. You invest in all sorts of industries, right? So how are you identifying opportunities?

I don't do it as much anymore. Um, we're, we're in, we're in oil and gas. We're in real estate. We're in data centers in a hard way. We love data centers. We love AI data centers. I bought a old copper plant. This is the most amazing purchase. This may go down as one of the greatest purchases I've ever made. Wow. I bought an old copper plant in Michigan, Dowagiac, for $4 million. 34 and a half acres, 617,000 square feet under roof.

This was a copper smelting plant. They made furnaces and stuff like that, right? So I bought the plant. I spent $16 million to convert it into a data center and make it a level three data center. Now, we only use 100,000 square feet, so the other 500,000 square feet were ran out to tenants, usually like logistics companies. So to go to level three, you need to kick them all out and have no one else there. But I don't need all 600,000 square feet.

That data center is mining more than, I believe, 35, 40 million of Bitcoin for me right now. What? Yeah, I'm in the top 15 of all Bitcoin miners in the country. Holy crap. Oh, yeah. I run a company called Sentinum, which is the old BitNow Bitcoin mining business. And so I mine.

We just put out a press release. We're mining around 70 million of Bitcoin a year now. And we use Core Scientific in Texas. And then we have our own facility in Michigan. And we just bought two new data centers in Montana. And so we'll expand our Bitcoin mining there. And that purchase, I paid $4 million. Now, granted, I put $16 million more into it.

Yeah, so it's 20 total. 20 total million. But you're mining $70 million a year. But this is the part that blows your mind. So that facility, that 34 and a half acres, still has room to expand. And it's producing a ton of Bitcoin and also it's leasing out to the other tenants. But it has 30 megawatts of power expandable to 300 megawatts. What is 300 megawatts?

So I'm the largest user of power in the state of Michigan in a single point, right, for a single location. Now, Ford uses more power than me, distributed over all their plants, but I use the most power in a single location. And I have the ability to expand it to 300 megawatts. And if you know anything about AI, I will tell you, whatever's happened in technology the last 40 years, it's going to be exponential the next 10 years. Wow. If you've used chat GPT or seen what's happening in AI, we're kind of at the forefront of this with an AI data center. So we put AI clusters in our data centers. We'll move our miners eventually out of there as it becomes heavily AI intensive.

So AI will be mining for you? No, no. We'll mine in another location. AI is for compute. It's for the usage of large language models, right? GPUs, NVIDIA products, AMD. And it's very profitable for us to convert that data center. So that they use it.

So they use all AI. And we put the Bitcoin miners maybe in Montana or something. Wow. So there's more potential with AI than Bitcoin mining. There's more potential with being an AI data center, in my opinion, and more profitability with an AI data center than there is Bitcoin. But I love Bitcoin. I'm a Bitcoin. You were at the conference.

I'm a lunatic about Bitcoin. Bitcoin maxi. Yeah. I'm a Bitcoin only everything else. Bitcoin. I only want to be in Bitcoin. And I think everyone should have yeah. Yeah, I'm a Bitcoin only, everything else Bitcoin. I only want to be in Bitcoin. And I think everyone should have Bitcoin. And if your friend, I'm not going to repeat her name in reverse, if she were to put even 50 bucks a day in Bitcoin or five bucks a day, you can do it right on any kind of like a Coinbase.

I believe everyone should be saving some money in Bitcoin. I'm absolutely a Bitcoin advocate. With this recent spike, you and Michael Saylor are up a lot. We mine Bitcoin for so little relative to the price that right now we're in the sweet spot. I'm pretty excited about it. No, you're more in the sweet spot. Yeah, we're killing it right now.

But back to being mistakes. I've made mistakes when I bought S9s. I've made mistakes on what I paid for Bitcoin before. I've made mistakes on what I paid for miners. I've made mistakes on power. I'm in Bitcoin before. I made mistakes on what I paid for miners. I made mistakes on power. I'm in Bitcoin despite how many stupid mistakes I've made. And that goes part of risk on, which is this never give up mentality, which is if you believe your thesis is correct and you have evidence to believe in your thesis, you can't give up. If you know that people are not going to order buggy whips anymore, because there's not a lot of buggies, you have to eventually give up. But you could transition to something that's not a buggy whip, right?

That's the hardest part for people is are they looking at the actual data versus just having conviction that I know I'll be successful in whatever market I'll be successful in. But the market for making buggy whips is like how big is the market for buggy whips? I haven't seen them anymore in like 10 years. Yeah. And it's not a big market, right? What was a company that you maybe thought like a fun company that ended up doing really, really well for you? What was something that did really, really well for me? Yeah, that you thought that, you know, you would take the risk on it, but you wasn't

too sure about it. Well, I bought a crane company last year in Texas that had some trouble. During oil prices got all weirded out, and the world came to an end for them, and they had to sell. And so I bought this crane company and I paid, I put in 12 million for 75% and someone else put in 4 million for 25. And that was a private equity deal. And in the first five months, the crane company returned me $2 million. And so the funnest thing about that crane company, now I've never visited it.

I've never seen one of the cranes. I've never been to the location. My staff did. We hired a guy from Sterling Marmon Crane, which is owned by Buffett, to be the CEO. And the funnest thing about that business, I would tell you, is that the guy runs the company. I don't have to do anything really. I've only spoken to him three times. The board talks to him.

Members of my staff are on the board. The best thing about that is I have no day-to-day involvement. And we own 75%. How do cranes make that much money? So these are big, huge, 250,000-ton cranes that— Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? Well, click the application link below in the description of this video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life.

Click the application link below, and here's the episode, guys. —are made by Manitowoc. They're called Grove Cranes. And they lift things for oil and gas, for expiration. They lift drill bits and they lift things inside refineries when they're going to clean themselves. They have to do a lot of crane work. And so they do it by the hour. And we're running at about 175% capacity, meaning those cranes are running more than 24 hours a day. It's really amazing. They're constantly running. And

we got 55 of them. And that business does, I think it does north of 15 million of EBITDA, give or take. And don't hold me to the exact number. All of you watching the public company stuff out there might be 13 million. But the point point I'm making is yes, what was fun. That's one of my funnest in the sense that I don't have to do anything. Risk On, which is a public company on the NASDAQ, which I just brought public. I just changed the name of the NASDAQ company. The symbol is ROI, return on investment, return on individual. That's a nice symbol.

And the company is called Risk On International. That is one of the funnest projects I have. There's a business in there called Risk On Learning. There's a business in there called Guy Care. We own part of an oil and gas drilling business called White River. But that ultimately will become a business of just the conference, something really great in AI, and something amazing around Risk On Learning,

which is a call center in a training center in Utah. So that, that part, I, I, I can envision the three of us doing something with that space. That conference was so unlike any other conference I've been to, man.

You really killed it. Really? What'd you like about it? Just the access to the speakers, man. That was crazy. Tucker's talk was amazing. And you're not going to see him at any other conference.

That was the first time I've seen him speak. Yeah. I didn't even know Tucker Carlson even show his face like like but that goes back to relationships right the r and risk on yeah i will tell you one of the things that i did with last the last conference is i had alex rodriguez there i had damon john i had uh uh the guy from that real estate josh altman um natalieunel, the guy who founded Ugg Boots. And what I learned was that as I develop these conferences and develop relationships, RFK Jr. and I are talking on a daily basis every couple days.

And I'm trying to help his campaign with the stuff he's working on. I got the privilege of talking to Trump. I didn't meet him through some people and what's working on. I got the privilege of talking to Trump. I didn't meet him. Through some people and what's going on with his campaign and people that he knew that spoke at my conference. And those relationships are critical. I mean, they are.

And it's escalated with Tucker and RFK Jr. And one of the best speakers there that day was Jim Meyer, the former chairman and CEO of Cirrus Satellite Radio, who signed the deal for Howard Stern. Yeah, he killed it. He was awesome.

Well, him and I raced together because I'm part of an indie racing team, Ed Carpenter, I'm a big sponsor there, and he owns Meyerschenk Racing, which is partially owned by Liberty, that owns F1. Wow. And I'm a big Greg Maffei and John Malone fan.

Those relationships are crazy. They're insane. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, I'm having people texting me about you. I never knew who you were. I saw your podcast a few times, but I didn't know who you were. We didn't have a relationship. We're both in Vegas.

And I got people texting me left and right. Hey, this guy's going to be here. He's going to be there. Oh, he's going to be at your conference. I'm like, okay. So, you know, those are all relationships. I met you. I can't actually tell you who introduced me to you.

I think it was Bill. It might have been Bill. But five or six other people have told me about you. Yeah, same here. Bill Walsh. Yeah. So a bunch of other people have told me about you. That's nuts.

And you're one degree away from anyone in the world, honestly, right now. Yeah. And what's interesting is that you, it's going to drive me crazy, but another friend of mine was in town to see you. He has a really interesting business where they provide IT services, and he's rolling up IT. You know who I'm talking about?

He was just here a couple weeks ago. It's going to drive me crazy. He came on the show? He was with you, I believe, on the show. Huh. So many guests. I don't remember. We filmed 500 of these, so.

Oh, so he was in town a couple weeks ago and he was telling me all about you and he's out of, I believe, out of Chicago. Chicago. And he runs a, really, this is why I'm getting older. He runs a

really interesting IT business where he provides IT services and he is buying them and rolling them up into one company. Interesting. And he spoke pretty highly of you, too. Wow. I'm going to remember his name a second, Ali.

Yeah, let me know once you remember him. I want to say his name's Jay, but he was on my podcast, too. So he runs his own podcast. But there was a couple people. And then I think you were on Brad's podcast. He was on mine. Yeah, yeah. Oh, Brad was on yours.

Yeah. Right. And so Brad and I share a second floor together. So he has half the floor. I have the other half. Yeah. I had no idea because I've been there before. Tell you a story about three years ago. I was in California and I witnessed

a crime. And I was going to a party and I witnessed a crime and no one did anything about it. And I made the side of that moment I was leaving. So tired. Grew up in that state for 46 years. They run it into the ground. It makes no sense that you can rob people and get away with it.

Yeah, it just doesn't make – We always talk about that. The logic makes no sense. So I went home. I talked to my wife. We said we're going to go to Texas, Nevada, maybe Washington or Florida. Florida, I can't – I love home. I talked to my wife. We said we're going to go to Texas, Nevada, maybe Washington or Florida. Florida, I love Florida. But if you spend any time there, you're wetter when you come out of the shower than you are when you're in the shower.

It's impossible. And I'm a big dude, and I take two showers a day. So I'm like, okay, I'm not doing that. And then Nevada is close to my family back in California. So I moved to Nevada. And I decided and told my whole staff we were going to go move and be in the same business, same building as Brad Lee before I called Brad. And about a month before I said, Brad, I'm coming there. I need office space.

He's like, what? I said, no, I'm literally coming there next month. Sure you are. No, Brad, I need office space. Okay, you can have half my building because half of it he kind of downsizes. And I just immediately leased it. And I need options. Okay, you can have half my building because half it he kind of downsizes. And I just immediately leased it, and I love Brad, and Brad and I – Brad sometimes takes my plane, takes people on trips and stuff like that. Brad and I have a great time.

We do some podcasts together. He's a good mentor. We get along great. That's awesome. And I just moved out here like that. You've had some big people on your show. Who have been some of your favorites? I thought Maria Bartiromo from Fox was big.

I recently had someone who did this movie. It's a it's a miniseries about Jesus and his life. I thought that was pretty amazing. Who are the who are my favorite people? That's an interesting story. I probably liked, I enjoyed my work with Anthony Scaramucci. I thought that was fun. I liked Alan Parsons from the Alan Parsons Project. I probably interview people that I'm somewhat enamored with and really respectful of their business and how they were successful.

Yeah. But I don't judge people's success that it's economic. I judge people's success on whether they're happy. Wow. Right. That's a statement. Right. And that is because I married to a woman who – so I was married the first time and my ex-wife is general

counsel for one of the richest men in the world, right? And she wasn't happy being married to me. It was clear as day. You know, I'm an entrepreneur. She didn't, she wanted to be home at five. I'll never be home at five. I'll never be home at five. But I married a woman who had, I think she has like five or six degrees from college

and a smart girl. She was never happy? No, the one now, the one I'm married to now, Christy, I've been married with her for 20 years. And she said, I want to be a homemaker and I want to have kids. And before, my first wife worked. And I've been able to see that someone can be very happy doing what they perceive is happy for them. So she's the happiest person being married to me, which is insanity because I'm such a crazy person.

And all the shenanigans that I am involved in. And having four kids and wanting to be a mom. And so I've learned that people can be truly happy with what they think is important to them, right? It doesn't always, it's not always economic. Now, the economics matter to me because I grew up poor in HUD housing. I never met my real father, my biological father. My mom married when I was 13. He adopted me. I took his name. So I'm a big believer in family first, and that drives my happiness. But for me, I would be unhappy if I wasn't a provider for my family. Right, right.

And I employ – I have about 650 employees. It might be closer to 700. We're a public company, so whenever I say this, I caveat by saying I don't track every single employee every day, right? But we own four hotels in the Midwest. We own a luxury, part of a luxury hotel in New York. And so I don't track all of them, but I believe the last reported number is about 651 employees. And my hypothesis on this, for me, what makes me happy is I don't want to ever miss a payroll, right? And so my happiness is derived by, are people that work for me thriving? Are they happy? Do they need to go

somewhere else, right? So what I mean by level of happiness, Gary Vee talks about a little bit too. Can you just, don't you want to just be happy? And it's more prevalent than ever right now because I cannot believe the amount of – how old are you guys? I'm 26. I'm 34. All right. So you guys are a lot younger than me. But what is happiness though to you? I'm going to answer that by saying to you the polarization right now of what's happening is so disturbing. The idea of tribalism that you have to be on

one side or another. If you guys look back to the Bill Clinton, George Bush days, they disagreed, but they got along. They actually hung out. They did things together to help society. They did charity work together, et cetera. This is insanity stuff. It's crazy stuff. Right. The political correctness that I don't know whether I'm a man or a woman, or This is insanity stuff. Like it's crazy stuff, right? The political correctness that I don't know whether I'm a man or a woman or I can call myself anything. When I see women who have fought for their rights forever, forever, women have been fighting to vote and to be equal citizens and be treated fairly for such a long time. And then for a guy to just say, okay, I'm a woman now. I'm going to compete against you.

This is insane times, guys. This is not normal behavior. It's not normal that we – it's important to learn from our past, but it's not normal to get rid of Abraham Lincoln stuff or take down Thomas Jefferson. That's not normal behavior. We're trying to whitewash history. We're trying to whitewash history. We're trying to rewrite it. I'm the most concerned about happiness for me. I would be very happy if we just could calm down on this.

I don't know if it's possible, but the advent of social media and this stuff that's right in your hand that has made it so that anyone can say anything at any time. And it's right. And it's right. And it's right. And it's not – that's – I was actually talking to my son about this. You're 34? Yeah.

So when did you get your first cell phone? Oh, I don't know. I think Bob would say high school maybe. Yeah, same. So did you go to high school in Vegas? No. Where are you from? L.A.

Where in L.A.? I grew up in Watts. Oh, I have a lot of – I played football at Edison High School in Orange County. Okay. So I played a lot of football. My son played at Modern Day. Okay. And then my son –

He must have been good. He was. He is good. And he went to UCLA, played football at UCLA. Modern Day ain't no – That's a private school? Can't just go there. Yeah, it's a private Catholic school

You're not just going to modern day It's a very good football program I think they just beat Bosco It's like Alabama It's like Alabama

for high school It is In fact the guy who plays St. Brown who plays for the Detroit Lions played with my son

My son has so many friends in the NFL it's like the most craziest thing I've ever seen Modern day is like a hub Yeah it's like the most craziest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, modern day is like a hub. Yeah, it's a hub.

I was – a point about this whole thing that my son was pointing out to me was that when he was younger – when I was younger and if I had a girlfriend and I wanted to see another girl, it wasn't on social media, right? But nowadays, like if you went off with one girl and you went on another date, someone would post that up and everyone would know what you did. And I couldn't understand. I'm like, why aren't you? He's like, dad, I can't do anything. It'll be out there in a second. That little one thing about behavior, think about a male behavior, which is maybe you're seeing a couple of girls and you don't want everyone to know. You haven't decided what your life's going to be like, but yet with social media, they know what's happening. You can't even hide it. Yeah. Especially when you have a following. Right. And someone will take a picture of you. So just imagine that, and now it's become

exponential. Everything you say or the way you say it, whether you respond to someone, it's insanity. This is like not normal. So you're not a fan of social media? I'm a big fan of social media. I'm not a big fan of- How it's insanity. This is like not normal. So you're not a fan of social media? I'm a big fan of social media. I'm not a big fan of how it's used. I'm not a fan of attacking people. Cancel culture. Canceling people. The vitriol is out of control.

If you go to StockTwits, you should do this. You should go to StockTwits and put in my symbol, alt, A-U-L-T, that trades on the New York Stock Exchange, the symbol. The stock is doing poorly. Companies, I love it, but the stock is doing poorly. I admit that. Really sad about it. The amount of vitriol about me, like 90% of the comments are they calling me a fat name or something derogatory.

First of all, I'm stunned to even have the time. The same guys show up too. I get reports because we have security. So they do these deep web threats, these dark web threats to see like, is there any risk to my safety or what are people saying about me? But some of the same people have so much time to write a post about me. I'm mesmerized. Like what could you be doing?

So the keyboard warrior, the behind the scenes, the sort of anonymous stuff. It's not productive. It's not only not productive, but what makes me sad about it is, you know, I didn't, I'm going to say this because you're black. I didn't know. I'm black. You did not know that? You know, I didn't, I'm going to say this because you're black. I didn't know. I'm black. You did not know that? I didn't know.

I didn't know. I was never, I grew up in a HUD housing. I grew up in a poor community. I never cared whether you were black or white, yellow, Hispanic. I didn't care. And I never cared until I got to eighth grade to Huntington Beach where someone said to me, I'll never forget it. When I was like, what's their problem? I had two friends, Smokey and Donovan, two black kids, who they actually were from Compton.

And their family moved and they lived with me in the HUD housing project. They were my two best friends. I had known them since I was in first grade. I had no clue when I invited them over to an event that I had people saying, why did you invite them? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? How is that even in your dialect? And so this behavior, this learned behavior, whether you're a racist or whether you're anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish, whatever, I'm not trying to say that it hasn't existed for years.

It does. It just sucks. It doesn't matter. It just sucks. It doesn't matter. It just sucks. And I find the most intelligent people understand that and that politicians use it against each other. Because they need to divide. And they kind of raise it up. They need to divide.

Raise it up, right? For sure. And I saw this thing the other day. It was a black girl posting about answering a question of whether she would want to marry and have a child with a white person. And she said, I would prefer not to. I want to marry a black man. And then the other person immediately came in and said, but if I said I'm a white guy and only want to marry a white woman, I'm a racist. So I thought to myself, this issue is so complicated.

Yeah, it is. I'm staying away from Leave me out. Leave me out because I don't it's I don't care whether you're black white Hispanic It doesn't matter to me. I I can't even imagine the idea of being a racist or are these things but on social media Everyone's transgender appears, but there's like one to 3% of the people, 1% of the population. It's grown by 20%. Dude, 21% now are gay or transgender. Yeah, but is that possible? I don't know who they polled for that.

Is it possible? They want it to grow. Bill Maher said that by like 2050, we're all going to be gay or transgender. At the rate it's growing, we're all gay or transgender. Probably 50-50 at least. It's insanity. It's crazy. So this is my conversation about

social media. Some of it's insane. Charli D'Amelio dancing and getting 50 million people to care. Good for her. I don't give a shit. I don't care. And I frankly don't give a shit if anyone likes me either. I could care less, honestly, as long as my mom, my father has Alzheimer's in the clinic,

so he wouldn't even know who I was. But my mom and my kids and my wife and some of my employees, if no one else likes me, I could give a shit less. And so that's what I've been able to solve with social media for myself. What's next for you? When's the next event and where can people find you? So there's another event next year at the same time, F1 weekend. I think this year, next year, it's going to be at the new Dreamscape.

A friend of ours owned this new casino. Nice. They bought the Rio. They're redoing it. We got some colleagues there. We're going to do a big 3D event next time. It'll be a little different. We're going to do a big 3D event next time. It'll be a little different. We're going to do it Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Okay. I got a bunch of conferences coming up. So we do Risk On 360, the Global Success Networking Conference, which is what you were at. It'll be bigger next year. We probably already have 700 tickets sold for next year or committed to. I shouldn't say sold because I don't know if they've actually paid for all of it. But I do these real estate conferences, which I'll have a bunch of mini ones, and then I do a Wealth Expo, which will be in April.

I think it's April 12th to the 14th. And then a bunch of ones about real estate and trading. I don't teach people how to trade individual stocks, but I've been trading for so long and had a hedge fund for so long that we do teach them how to trade the S&P minis. These are for people who want to figure out a way to learn how to trade, and I've been doing it for so long. On the real estate side, I do a ton in real estate. And so I'm a believer of some sort of foundational model, which is like, okay, what's my sort of expensive, crazy, if I win and I got a bunch of money in that Alzheimer's company,

if that drug gets approved, it's huge for me. I mean, it's huge for society, and it's huge for people who have Alzheimer's, for caretakers, and people who care for other people with Alzheimer's. And that economically will be a windfall for me and my family and my companies, right? That's very risky, whereas if I own a piece of real estate, you might fall asleep even looking at it, right? So I'm a big believer in you got to own Bitcoin, you got to own real estate, and then you got to have that risky stuff on the side. You guys have your own side gig here. You would argue

that that's probably the riskiest thing you're doing, but maybe not that risky because you love doing it. I'm transfixed on with Risk On on at least giving people an opportunity to meet other people, to network with them,

and to learn from the mistakes they've made and the ones that I've made because I've made all of them and I still make them today. Thanks so much for coming on, man. You killed it. Appreciate it. Thanks, man.

Thanks for watching, guys, as always. That was fun. See you tomorrow. Peace.