My First Million - She BEAT The S&P 500 By 41%?!

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Episode 556: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) try to outsmart ruthless investor, 83-year old Nancy Pelosi. Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:00) Tracking Pelosi’s trades (8:00) Google's woke AI moment (time to buy) (13:00) Index fund vs. individual stocks (18:00) Business idea: Outsourced baby monitoring (27:00) Jay Penske - The Rupert Murdoch of Entertainment (37:00) Parr's 30 Studs Under 30 — Links: • Pelosi Tracker - https://twitter.com/PelosiTracker_/status/1762139692051702069?s=20 • Nvidia - https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ • r/Money - https://www.reddit.com/r/Money/ • Harbor.co - http://harbor.co/ • Owlet - https://owletcare.com/ • Mizzen and Main - https://www.mizzenandmain.com/ • MyBodyTutor - mybodytutor.com/sam • Penske Truck Rental - https://www.pensketruckrental.com/ • Penske Media - https://www.pmc.com/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd

All right. You ready to do this? Yeah, hold on. I'm just executing a stock trade right now. I am the Wolf of Wall Street right now, Sam. I'm going to live on this podcast, but I'm not here. I'm not here talking to you. I'm in Wall Street right now on the stock market floor, shaking my money saying take my money because I'm buying a stock. I don't think the Wolf of Wall Street used Robin Hood, but that's okay. Here's what we're going to do. If you want to find out how to lose money like I do,

you should stick around. First I'll tell you the sponsor of today's show, And then I'm going to tell you about my latest money losing move. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's try. So what is it? You've been on a stock kick.

You're really on a stock kick. Which is just bad news for me. Anytime I get on a stock kick, bad things happen. I just don't realize until three years later. So let me just show you these two charts. So take a look at this chart. It's about this stock called Palo Alto Networks. I don't think you're following too much of Palo Alto Networks.

Am I right in assuming that? I'm not following right now, but I know it's one of the Silicon Valley OGs. It's been around for a long time. Yeah. Okay. That's pretty good. All right. So look at the stock.

I know a bullshit or when I hear one. And you don't know what I shit about the stock. I know whatever you can learn reading the Wikipedia. I've read it the Wikipedia. Tell me this. What do they sell? What's the product? No, no, no. Why are you looking at your screen? Look at me. Look at me in the eyes and tell me what they sell. Networking and data solutions, I believe.

So something like they used to be like one of the OGs that had servers, didn't they? Dude, here's a reality. I don't know what they sell either. It doesn't matter what they sell. Look at this chart for a second. So this chart shows last five days, damn, down 14%, 15%, basically. That's pretty bad. And actually, it would be worse than that, except for there's this little uptick. So look at the second.

chart. This is today up 10%. You might ask yourself, did they just have like an earnings call? Did they announce a new product? Did they announce a big AI breakthrough? What is causing the stock in the first two hours of trading today to be up 10%. The answer is our girl, friend of the pod, Nancy Pelosi just made a trade. She just bought a million dollars of follow out to networks of stock. And immediately people start following her action and start buying this thing blind because they don't know what she knows, but they know that she knows something. Isn't that so funny that that's what's happening nowadays? Like, I follow this account. I don't know if you follow, the Pelosi tracker. And they're like, it says breaking. The queen is back at it again. She just bought

$1.25 million of Palo Alto Network calls. And then it says, like, there's a sub-edline. Palo Alto Networks is one of the leaving cybersecurity companies in the nation. Like, in case you need to know, but here's the reality. You don't need to know. You just need to know that Nancy Pelosi, who has one of the greatest stock trading track records of our time just bought this. Are you actually buying this? No, I'm not buying the palatown.

I was going to say, we just did this amazing whole thing on Buffett a couple episodes ago. Two months ago when Munger died, we did a whole episode on that. And I was going to say, you did a great job of remembering what he said, which is like invest blindly in things you don't understand, right? Yeah, invest blindly off random Twitter anonymous accounts,

you know, claims about, you know, 90-year-old women's trades. So that's what I'm doing. No, I didn't buy this one, but I did find it. I was kind of curious. I was like, I saw this tweet and I was like, I've seen her track record or like the data analysis of her track record. It's like really, really impressive.

I don't have it offhand here, but it's like better than most hedge funds. It's better than most like famous investors that you know of. And so I was wondering, are people just fast following her trades? That's why I looked at what's happened today. And the, you know, the share price is up 27 bucks this morning because the, the sort of she had to disclose what she bought. And so people were tracking that. So I just find that I was curious, does the stock actually move when Pelosi makes a trade?

And our girl moves weight, all right? She makes waves in the market. I'm an idiot and I don't know anything about politics. But what I would say is if I'm like in charge, what I would say to all these folks who are, you know, high up in the government is I would pay them a huge sum. like two or three million dollars a year, right? Because there's only like 500. How many people are, I don't even know. This is how ignorant I am.

How many people are in the Senate and Congress. I would pay them a ton of money and say, there, now you can't speak. You can't consult. And also all of your money has to be in this political ETF or whatever it's called. So we know every trade you're doing and you can't actually buy individual stocks. It's kind of ridiculous that she's able to do this, right? It's actually her husband. Her husband's able to do it.

It's their money, but it is kind of crazy. Well, I think she can't, she's allowed to do it too. It's not only. Her husband's a PE guy. I mean, he's like, this is his job, I would imagine. All right. So let me just tell you this. The last big trade that I saw from her was in, I believe, 22.

So July 2020, Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, who's a VC, decided to buy 25,000 shares of Nvidia. Hmm. They said, what's the best stock in the world right now since 2020? What is almost the most valuable company in the world right now? Nvidia. Oh, that's right. So they bought it at $165. It's currently trading at $800.

Oh, that's pretty good. A little 4.8X for our girl Nancy. That's pretty impressive. Good trade. When I first, yeah, great trade. When I first moved to San Francisco, I told you the story how I lived in this warehouse. It was like a dirt, cheap warehouse. It was horrible.

It was an awful place to live. I lived with four other guys. One of the guys worked there at Nvidia when I, I lived in this warehouse. He worked at NVIDIA, I believe, from 2009 to 2014. And I was doing the math. If he had $150,000 of equity given to him over four years, which seems reasonable, that's $30,000, $40,000 a year. If he didn't sell, his net worth would be something like $35 million. Is that insane or what? And he wasn't an early employee. He would have been employee. I don't know how big they were at the time, but it was thousands of people back then. And that insane that

someone could do that. Invidia has been insane. So what was the S&P 500 gain last year? Last year, last year the SP 500 was up 24% in 2023. Okay. Nancy Pelosi was up 65%. She just tripled the stock,

the SP 500 performance with her trades, you know, as her side hustle while she's whatever, the speaker of the house, whatever the hell she is. Pretty crazy. You know what else has grown? A mere, you know, 25% in the last?

last year? What? Our YouTube subscriber base. We are putting Pelosi to shame out here, but we need your help. We need you to go to YouTube. We need you to type in my first million, and we need you to subscribe because we put in so much work every week.

And people think it's free. It's a common misconception. They think it's free. Sam, tell them what it is. Look, this podcast isn't free. Everything on YouTube's free, except for this channel. All we need in payment is just you to click subscribe. It takes you literally 10 seconds, but it means the world to us.

We pour our hearts in this. it's all we're asking in exchange. It's called the gentleman's agreement. We're not there to actually see it you do it, but we hope you do. That's why it's the gentleman's agreement. What do you got? What's the trade that you just did that you actually are excited about? Because you said, when we started, you said

you got a trade that you're doing as we speak. What is it? Disclaimer, not financial advice. Disclamber, I'm very bad at stock trading, but I persist because I'm the little linched that could. I'll never give up. And so I noticed I don't know if you noticed, but over the weekend, there was a lot of negative sentiment around Google.

Which is why? Because their AI product is like woke? Super woke, yeah. So basically they released Gemini, which is their answer to chat GPT, formerly known as Bard, which, by the way, there's a hilarious tweet that goes around

every time Google releases a new product or rename something. And people are like, cool, should I? I would love to check this out on Meat, formerly known as Google Meat, formerly known as Google Hangouts, formerly known as Google Hangouts Plus, formerly known as Google Duo. They'd show how many times Google renames its product.

So it renamed Bard, which was an awful name to Gemini, better name. And it came out. Bardd. Basically, it was Bard. Bard. Bard was their, you know, the next great act of their company. They like, the thing about Google is it sound, the word Google sounds like a noise, which is fine.

I'm okay with that. It sounds more like a noise than a name. And they just took that a little bit too far. The barred. Yeah, they were like, what are we going to call it? Somebody burped on the call. And they're like, oh, yeah, we can go with that. And the guy didn't know what to do.

So, yeah, basically, if you went to Bard and you were like, hey, can you, it started off when people were like, hey, you know, can you generate an image of spaghetti? And it generated great image of spaghetti. And they're like, cool. Can you generate an image of a Viking? and then it generated an image of a black Viking. And people are like, huh, that's weird.

Why is the Viking black? Hey, can you generate an image of a white Viking? And it was like, gave you like a Mexican Viking. You're like, hold on. Can you give me an image of a white person?

And it was like, nah, I can't do that. Really? It was basically either saying no or it was showing a picture of a black person. It's like, what ethnicity was George Washington?

They're like, well, it's highly debated. He might be black. And it was like, you know, they would just, or it would be like,

who did more damage to society, Elon Musk or Hitler? And it's like, it's hard to say who did more damage to society, Elon Musk or Hitler. Elon Musk tweeted these things about the stock price and Hitler committed genocide. It is really a tough call. And it's like, so people were taking the stuff and running with it. It's like the perfect. The way I think about it is there's two tribes. And if you can get one tribe riled up, you're going to get that that storyline is going to get some legs.

But if you can get two tribes riled up, then you can get. you got like a real story. And so this was basically the anti big company, um, anti big tech tribe. It's like, yo, babe, wake up. Big tech made a mistake. And then there was the anti, um, anti, um, anti-AI tribes. All three tribes got together and basically had a fiesta around this. And so people were sharing this like crazy. And then people were like, the CEO of Google needs to be fired. Um, they were like, you know, Google is too bloated. It's too bureaucratic. It's too woke. It's like it's got the woke virus. It will never recover. Blah, blah, blah. You know, Seahel, the guy who created a Mix panel, awesome guy. He's like, Google has lost its way. Then I read

my next tweet, Elon Musk says, the bureaucratic, you know, a Google exec called me and promised to change it, but I told him, I don't think the bureaucratic blob inside Google will even let him make these changes. It's hopeless, basically, is what these guys are saying. You go on the all-in podcast, and they're like, I can't believe this. You know, basically like, our right freedom of speech is at risk here. It needs to tell the truth. Look at this crazy woke bias. And everybody's anti-Google.

So I woke up today and I was like, pretty sure Google still owns Gmail, YouTube, Google search, Chrome, Android, Waymo. Okay, I think I'll just go ahead and buy Google stock today because Google's on this dip right now on the negative PR. And I think it's just that old quote of like the short term, you know, the stock markets of popularity contact. and the long term, it's a weighing machine.

And I just think that they have tremendous assets, right? Like, you know, YouTube does, YouTube alone, which is not even Google's like main product, does 32 billion a year in revenue, which is more than Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, all combined. And that's just YouTube, right? And you take like Google Cloud, which is like, does, you know, 36 billion in revenue. That's just like their cloud service, not not. Google search, right? Not Android, not the Play Store, not any of this stuff. And so I just think

they have too many assets. And so I don't really do much analysis aside from I was like, I don't know, it seems like everybody's overreacting to this because it's a really good social media storyline to be like Google's lost its way. It's woke. It's going to lose an AI, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's true. I don't know. To me, seemed like a bit of an overreaction. I don't think you're wrong. I think that you're right. in this particular instance. But I subscribe to the subreddit called Money, R slash Money. And it's basically people, it's a big subreddit.

And it's people complaining mostly. There's a lot of it, not complaining, but a lot of it is like, I see all these posts of people in college who are like, I'm now 20 grand in the whole because I was buying options on Robin Hood and doing all this stuff on these apps where they trade. And in general, I am so against individual trading, even though I think you're right with Google. It ain't going anywhere.

I buy ads on Google. It freaking works so good. But it's just, I just, I refuse to go down this path. It's such a slippery slope that I don't want to get addicted to it. And I feel like I would. And you've won a few times. I know you've won a few times recently. Oh, I'll tell you every time I win.

Don't worry. But have you lost a bunch? Of course, of course. Yeah, you can't trade without having bad trades, right? What is the number one rule for having a few good trades is have many trades? That's insane that you're doing this, but you're not wrong with this one. I'm not doing it with a lot of money. And also, it's an excuse to learn for me too.

So I don't know. I think a lot of learning just comes from trial and error. And trying things when you build businesses is a really expensive slow way to, it's the highest price way to learn, right? because it takes a long time, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of focus. But there are things where you're like,

all right, well, like, you know, very simple, I wanted to learn about AI. And so I pay this guy, $500 an hour once a week to just teach me about AI. Yeah.

And I wanted to, I wanted to be up to speed with what's going on. What are the new tools? What are the limitations? What are some of the bottlenecks? And so, you know, in general,

I have a very, A, I want to have some fun in my life. B, learn. And for me, the only way to learn is like, Andrew Wilkins is the other ones. He's like, I like to walk around with a fork finding sockets to put my fork in, basically. It's like, you know, the only way he learns is by getting electrocated. And I kind of feel I'm the same way. You know, I hear things and I hear wisdom, but it's never actually sinks in until I go and do

something. And maybe the real learning here, by the way, maybe the real learning is, just don't pick it, don't trade individual stocks. You might actually be at the correct final answer. And so, I'm not saying that you're wrong about that. Philosophically, I agree with what you're saying, but I just carve out a small fund budget that I used to do this. My partner, Joe, he trades individual stocks in this week or last week. He was like, I'm screwed. I'm going back to indexing because he looked at all the money that I did a calculator.

I go, show me what you had 15 years ago. Show me what you have today. Now, I'm going to put it in this calculator. I'm going to show you what you would have had if you would have done this. And let's see and compare. And the index funding, index investing was so much higher. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to switch. And so he, like, makes the switch this week.

By the way, I did the same calculation. And it was 100% true for me, too, that if I had just bought the index or just added a consistent amount to the index over time, that would have been perfect. But the funny thing is, it's not the thing in my analysis, I was like, okay, I went through every single trade. Again, how do you learn? You go back and reflect. So I went through every single trade. And I said, what is, what story does this tell me? And I had thought the story would be, my prediction going in was, you would have made a little more money if you had done the index, but, you know, whatever.

Actually, I would have made a lot more money just doing the index. I was learning one. Number two, learning was interesting, which was I thought I would find you're not as smart as you think, buddy. Like, you know, you buy this thing because you have all these reasons, but you're wrong. And in actuality, I think I only lost money buying in a very small number of stocks. I think it was like less than five stocks that I, what I bought it for versus what it currently is, is less or even less than it would have been if I had just been in the market in the index. Like it's pretty comparable returns.

The two situations where I got it wrong were number one, during COVID, I bought some momentum's like I just like bought Zoom or something at some moment I had bought Zoom like early and it was working so well and I had bought more that was stupid I shouldn't have done that but the second one was random tips from our friends you know friends says oh man I'm doing this they say they're like yeah they're a smart friend and so I bought so that was the only times that I bought and lost all of my actual losses of where I where I made less than I would have in the market was just selling early because I sold a bunch of things and I sold a bunch of things and I sold a bunch of things Some I sold early when they had a lot more room to run.

Some I sold when the market sentiment was down or I was feeling fearful and I just wanted to move to cash and I would just sell. And so I actually lost all of my losses were in the sell, not the buy, which was surprising to me. I've been making fun of Joe because he's going on all in on indexing. And I'm like, great. You picked a really good month. All time highs, record highs.

This is the best month ever decided to do it. And now he's like second guessing it. Let me show you a company. that launched, I think, this week or last week. And I want to know what your opinion of it is. So it's called Harbor. So harbor.co. And I want to tell you what this company is and why it's interesting to me.

But I'm not sure if it's going to work or not, but I want to hear your opinion of it. Do you remember Deep Sentinel? We had Selly on the pod. So Deep Sentinel, I thought it was going to be huge. TBD. Verdict's still out. And it was basically, I like these businesses where people are monitoring things. So let me give you an example.

So Deep Sentinel, their tagline is, or I don't know if it's their tagline, but the guy said it on the pod, he goes, Ring is a great way to watch your shit get stolen, which is how it typically works at Ring. Like something like, I've had a bike get stolen before and I'm like, oh, let me look at the ring. Yep, there's the guy who did it. It is in fact stolen. And so Deep Sentinel is different because it's these cameras similar to Ring, but there's someone on the other end watching the cameras and they'll call the police. And I've had like a drunk Airbnb beer think that my house was.

their Airbnb and he's like knocking on the door at 2 a.m. And they called the police on them and like, you know, took care of it, whatever. There's this other thing called Harbor. So harbor.co, it's basically that, but for baby monitors. And I shared the deck with you. Let me know what you think.

But basically, have you ever heard of like sleep training? So basically when you, when your kid gets to be like three or four months old, when they start crying, sometimes you got to let them cry it out a little bit in order to like, you know, figure out what's real and what's not real. And eventually they quit whining and they go back to sleep.

They did this, but for baby mom's, So there's someone monitoring the baby monitor, and I think they'll call you or, like, ping your, the monitor that they give you to let you know, all right, now you actually should get up. The baby's been crying for like nine or ten minutes. It's time to get up, you know. Your baby's crying. I fucking know. Well.

That's the end of the commercial. This product makes no sense. How big is your house that you have done? that's why I want to hear your opinion on this because we had Jack Smith on the pod. Do you remember when we had him on the pod? And he did the same thing where he set up like a ring camera for his baby monitor.

And then he hired someone in India to watch the monitor. I think he used Shepard, actually. He hired someone to watch the monitor and to call a dedicated cell phone just to let him know when the baby's been crying for 10 minutes or something like that. And these guys turned that into a product. What do you think about this?

Well, I have a couple thoughts. First is, I love how Sam, the new dad, is like, you ever heard about sleep training? Talking to me, father of two. It's like if I went and worked out and I was like, bro, you ever heard of Bicep curls? And you're like, dude, what? Welcome to the gym. So yes, I'm familiar with the idea that babies cry and sleep can get a little hard for parents.

All right. Second thing, this whole class of products is like what I call like, it's supposed to be anxiety reduction, but actually it's somewhat anxiety inducing. So, you know, the idea would be, hey, you could sleep well knowing that somebody's monitoring your baby at night. And there's a whole bunch of products like this. I don't know if you ever bought like the outlet, which is like this like ankle monitor for your baby or like there's like a sock version of this. There's like a, there's like another one that's like measuring their like oxygen like at all times or whatever. Hey, I know all about ankle monitors.

I know that. I can tell you all about ankle monitors. Sorry, I'm guilty again. Preaching to the fire there. I didn't know you could put it about children, but yeah, I know a thing or two about ankle monitors. Exactly. So those all exist.

And they actually have done well. I think Alet did pretty well. I know they got in some trouble, but I think they ended up going public. What is it? Alet is that's what it is. That's the ankle monitor for babies. But with the key thing. being like it's measuring, I think, their oxygen levels.

So you know if the baby, you know, like, because you know, SIDS is obviously, you know, the biggest like, you know, nightmare for a parent would be if your baby, you know, suddenly in their sleep, you know, stops breathing. And so the idea was without you, you would get notified if the oxygen levels go down, which is to me makes way more sense than the let me know if my baby is crying. Because I know if my baby is crying typically, you know, through a traditional baby monitor or like, you know, my house is not that big. or the baby sleeps in the crib in the same room.

Like, you know, that's, I guess, I think this, I think the outlet stuff makes a lot more sense than Harbor. So, yeah, I'm not like super into this idea. And that's kind of where I said. No offense to the people behind Harbor. I'm sure they're great, smart people. The guy who started it started Mizzen and Maine, that clothing company. Remember the clothing company that it's like golf people wear it?

It's like a popular thing. It's not popular in our lives, but it is very popular. It's pretty successful, right? yeah, it's huge. It's like 100 million plus. It's like a big thing. But he came out with this thing. And I didn't, I invested a very, very small sum, a thousand dollars. He's a friend of mine. And I was like, all right, I'll just do a thousand dollars just to play. That's my version of you buying Google is just doing small investments. But I saw this. And I was like, I don't know. This might actually work. We'll see what happens. But I'm into these things that monitor things. Another one. And this is this is a little bit of a shill. This is actually totally a shill. But do you remember, My Body Tudor. I told you all about my body tutor. I use my body tutor. Happy to plug them for free. I don't get paid for this. Just a happy customer. I get a little bit paid for it. I'm a small

stakeholder in this company. I get a little bit paid for it because here's what they do. I use my fitness pal, but you could use their app. But I use my fitness pal and I upload like the calories that I've eaten and all the food that I've eaten. And they basically call me every morning to like criticize me and be like, why the hell did you eat this? Is this part of your plan? Or what's your plan today? Or what are you going to do this week? And what type of protein you're going to eat today? What type of carbs you're eat today? And they actually hold you accountable for what you're eating. I'm actually am getting paid for this. I am a stakeholder in this company. I'm not getting paid directly, but I do have a small stake in this company. And so we did this thing called my

mybodytutor.com slash sam. It's a little bit of a discount for our listeners because I do love this stuff. Has it worked with you? Yeah. It's going great. I love the product, genuinely, even though I'm not a, not a, you know, not promoting. There's no slash Sean. But yeah, happy customer. My coach Haley is awesome. And, you know, it's a, it's a good reminder. So most things in life, I always get surprised when the answer to most things, if you,

if you trace back, you're like, all right, how do I make this thing happen? And you're like, well, you got to take a bunch of action. It's cool. Non-negotiable, right? You got to take a bunch of action. Whatever the thing you want in life is, you got to take a bunch of action. Okay. Well, how do you get to take a bunch of action?

take yourself to take a bunch of action. Well, you've got to have the, you know, maybe a strategy or you maybe have motivation. Those are some of the elements that go into action. Okay, where do you get the strategy and the motivation? If you just keep going back down the chain, the number one thing is simply awareness. Like a lot of things in life that aren't happening aren't happening because you haven't actually put your focus on it, right? The laser beam that's in your brain is pointed elsewhere, and you haven't actually brought your awareness to the situation at hand. And you're not bringing your your awareness to it regularly enough. As a startup, Sam, I'm sure you used to do the same thing.

I used to put like every day when I'm coming to office, I draw a giant zero on the whiteboards. Like that's how many paying customers I have. And, you know, I was like, I don't need a dashboard. I will write this number here every day of how many paying customers I have. And I would write zero every day because I had to look at that. I had to bring my awareness to the fact that I currently have zero paying customers. Because otherwise, it was very easy to get distracted by a whole bunch of random tasks.

But if I started with, well, my main goal is to hit, you know, this many paying customers and I currently have zero. If I start my day without awareness, then I'm likely to take actions that are in line with changing that number to be what I want. In the same way, you get a phone call in the morning that's like, hey, what's your plan for eating today? And you're like, I don't have a plan. I'm just going to eat whatever fucking comes up in front of me. Right. Like, you know, whatever I see, I'll eat. Like, well, that's not right. So then you bring your awareness to, okay, that's right. I do have this goal. I am committed to making this happen. I'm going to make a plan. And I'm going to just decide up front. I'm going to

bring my awareness to that early and often. Or when you take pictures or you log your meals, you're bringing your awareness to what am I eating? Is this in line with what I've said I want to be eating or not? Right. So I think awareness is actually like massively underrated, both in diet, but really any goal you have in life, I think everything is downstream of first bringing a bunch of awareness to the thing. Yeah, dude, it's changed my life. And that's why I've invested in some these companies where they're like monitor stuff for you. And so you're either forced to focus on it or someone else is focusing on it for you. Let me tell you one more thing. Have you heard of Penske Media? No. What is that? You've never heard of that. Okay. So most people haven't. That's why I wanted to bring

this up. I found this guy a few years ago and I've been following him and I spoke to someone who worked at the company and I didn't realize how big this company is. So let me tell you this story. So there's this guy named Jay Penske. His father is Roger Penske. Roger Penske, do you remember in San Francisco? Remember those yellow trucks? They were yellow moving trucks. And they used to say like Penske.

Yeah. So Roger Penske, he was a race car driver. He was like a professional race car driver. And then he started a whole bunch of things, including a moving company. He also owns a chain of auto parts store. And so he's the self-made billionaire. He's probably close to 90 at this point. but he's like a big deal.

Well, he has this son named Jay. And Google Jay Penske. When I Googled Jay Penske, I wanted to hate this guy so much. Tell me what you see when you Google him. Let me guess. He's too handsome and too rich for you. He's too handsome.

He's too rich. I think his wife is a beauty pageant. You can be one or the other. Yeah, he's got both of them. If this guy has any handyman skills, he's out of here for us. If he can build anything with his bare hands, too much. Get out of here.

I immediately Googled like Jay Penske shirtless in order to like be like, does he have that too? Which he does, I think. But I look this guy up and I wanted to hate him. And I did research on him. And I completely love him. I think he has it all. So check this out. So you've never heard of Penske Media. But let me tell you all the things that they own. So they own South by Southwest. They own the Golden Globes, Rolling Stone, the Hollywood Reporter. Now they own a large chunk, maybe most of Vox. They own variety. So he owns South by Southwest and Rolling Stone, this guy? Yes, yes.

He owns the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Women's Wear Daily, New York Magazine, Eater, The Verge, Art News, Art Form, Art in America, the Rod Report. Have you been in The Rob Report? Yeah. It's like. This article says he is the Rupert Murdoch of entertainment. Yes, exactly. He's really under the radar. Not a lot of people talk about this guy, but Penske Media.

I think it's called a PMC, PENC Media Corporation. They're pretty under the radar. They own enough publications that something like one and two Americans go to their websites every month. It's massive. They get hundreds of millions of monthly uniques. And they're one of the few media companies that's large that is consistently profitable. They've been killing it for years and years and year. He's originally...

How did they get started? How did he build this empire? Yeah. So he originally started his first like, getting into the digital business was when he was in his 20s. He bought Mail.com. And he was like, I'm going to create a new email service. It didn't work out. And so he eventually sold the domain, Mail.com, to someone else. And he made a little bit of money doing that. And then he was like, all right, but I still want to get into digital. I still want to get into media. And so he started,

I believe, it's actually hard to find the origins of the story, but he started something like an ad network. And he starts an ad network in the 2000s. And it's going okay. And then they eventually start buying publications to put ads on. And then slowly, slowly, slowly, they start gaining momentum. And over the last 20 years, I think the company's like 20 years old at this point, they buy more and more publications. And this guy's like, he's got a chip on his shoulder because he's the son of a billionaire. And allegedly, that's what he says. He says, I've taken no money from my parents. I started this with a very small sum, my own money. And I've just slowly rolled this into another thing and another thing and another thing. And now it's this massive business. And I think two or three years ago,

They raised $200 million in order to further fund acquisitions. But people aren't talking about this guy at all. And I asked this guy who sold this company to Penske, and I'm like, what is he so special at? And he says, here's a few quotes that people have said about him. They go, I think he has a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove himself. He was hustling back then, not to be known as Penske, to prove himself, not to the world, but to his family. And another guy said that when he hires people at this point, they have something like a thousand plus people. he interviews every single person who they hire.

And when he buys a company, he wants to interview every single person who works there. And they say he's a steward of the brand and he truly cares. There's this one story about, I think it was a, what was it? It was a real estate publication owned by this woman that was notoriously rude to everyone. She was like hard to work with. She was kind of a diva and she was just rude constantly. She was one of these Hollywood real estate reporters.

And she kind of thought she was on top of the world. And Jay Pencey comes in and he's like this good looking privileged guy. so immediately she thinks she's going to hate him. And he totally toned her down and won her over with kindness and like being polite and like having her back constantly. And that's been a trend I've noticed with this guy is all these people say that he's just really kind. He's really nice. He's a really, really savvy operator. And he's super low key and under the radar.

But this guy, Jay, he's one of the biggest names in media and very few people are talking about him. I love that. He's like, I want to make a name for myself. He's like, Penske Media Group. He's the same name. also hilarious. This is fascinating. So he didn't take money from his dad.

That's interesting. He took money from the Saudis, and he took money from that guy, Daniel Loeb, who's like that legendary trader. Yeah, but I think that was like 15 years into the business. I think that they actually bootstrapped it for a long time. I think they raised $200 million at a billion dollar valuation. How would he bootstrap it?

What was the first price? What was the cash cow? Well, the first cash cow was their ad network that they made. So I used web archive and I went and looked at what their website used to look like. And it was basically, it reminded me of an ad network. Now, this was like 15 years old, I believe. And so, like, a lot of the terminology was even different. And, like, the type of stuff that they were doing isn't really relevant anymore.

But it was from, like, owningmail.com that he bought for cheap and he sold that for a profit. And then it was like an ad network is what it was. But they've run profitable for a really, really long time. So I think this super cool find. I'd never heard of this guy. and I did not know that the same family owns Penske, the truck thing, they own the Indy 500, they owned the IndyCar Raceway and all that.

And then he bought all these brands like South by Southwest and whatnot. That's super interesting. Would you want to do this? Because this sounds really hard to do. In fact, there's a quote here from someone who's like, he's the hardest working guy. I know he's always on planes. He's always on calls.

He never stops. It's been that way for 15 years. this seems like rolling up kind of like old school media properties seems like both one of the more dangerous things you could do because media is like I mean we just saw vice shut down the other day media is like not the most stable industry it's not the most profitable industry either and owning a portfolio 15 things in general and operating them is you know like just a hard way to go a hard way to live no I would not want to do this I think that this is the worst way to One of the worst ways.

2,000 employees. Yeah, and not only do they have 2,000 employees, but it's 2,000, like, L.A.-based, you know, so they own or they operate. So, like, do you know Dick Clark Studios? Have you ever seen, like, the Golden Globes? Yeah, yeah. Remember, like, when the ball drops on, like, NBC,

I forget even what network it's on. And it says, like, this is brought to you by Dick Clark Studios or whatever. They own that. And so having to host all those things, no, I would never in a million years want to do that. But someone is doing it, and they're actually doing it successfully. So if you look at Vox, or how about BuzzFeed?

BuzzFeed has a horrible market cap. And they just sold complex media for less than I think they paid for it. Or, I mean, what other media company did you just mention? Vice. Invice.com. They just shut down. No, I think this is an awful way to do it. However, it can be done.

And this is the only guy who's proving that it can be done at that size. And so the way that he's doing it is they're just being a really good operator. And so he balances letting people do their thing, but also he is like pretty strict about operations. So he expects a certain amount of profit, things like that. And he still owns 60% of the company. And so what I want to do this? Absolutely not.

But do I still think it's cool? Yes. And if you, by the way, if you Google his name, I was trying to figure out, like, where's chinks in this guy's armor? Like, where's he screwing up? The only thing that I could find was he got arrested for pissing outside when he was drunk on like Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. And so that like that,

that was like the only time that I've noticed that people really have disliked him in general. Gotcha. Yeah. See, you're not perfect. By the way, I said that his wife was a like a Miss America winner.

She's actually a Victoria's Secret model. So he's doing great in many different aspects of his life. But I thought that this guy. It's actually better to just pause after it. Just like, so. he's doing all right let it all be just let the air answer the question there he's doing all right but you know have you ever heard of sye new house do you know who side new house is no but i have an idea for you real quick um i have noticed and many of the listeners have noticed that you love a good

looking man i know you should create the Forbes 30 i think you should create the par 30 studs under 30. And it's just great-looking businessman. Just dreamy hunks. Dude, so many times so many times people in the comments, they think I'm gay or they'll comment on how I comment on people's calves.

You're like, I googled this guy shirtless. For the record, I'm not gay. But I can appreciate. when someone's really handsome. So sue me. So sue me. I love art. Long walks on the beach and a nice body.

Who's it on? Dude, it's pretty, yeah, a lot of people do think I'm gay because I remember we were talking about this one track athlete and I was like, look at his calves. You see those calves? I'm sorry. I can admire, you know? I can admire. Well, your hand was like making a cupping motion while you were saying it.

So that was just too much. That's all right. I'm fine with people thinking I'm gay. That's okay. I'll tell whatever. Anyway, interesting guy who's under the radar that's doing stuff that you use, but you probably never knew who was behind it. That's what I wanted to bring it up.

Okay, I like it. All right. Sam, you brought some fire today. The Penske thing was awesome. Pelosi, we're keeping an eye on her. I got my stock pick. I got my stock pick in. We're going to check on that one in five years and see how I did.

Good episode. That's all for the pot. Actually, we're trying to something new. So we have a new format for the next episode. that we're calling the Quicky. And the Quicky episode is just quick hitters. Basically, throughout the week, me and Sam see a bunch of things that are really interesting, but they're kind of short.

They're not like, they're just like, hey, did you see this? Check this out. This is something really interesting I saw. And it's stuff that we normally just share in our group chat because everybody likes it, but we didn't know how to make it into a pod. So we're actually going to just take the best ones from the week and put them together as a little Friday quickie of quick hitters. So check that out.

All right. That's the pod. the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back like