The Pomp Podcast - #432: Michael Weisz on Investing in Alternative Assets

Episode Date: November 18, 2020

Michael Weisz is co-founder and President of YieldStreet, an investing platform that believes in the power of technology to drive equality and transparency to investing. Previously, Michael was the Vice President at a New York-based credit opportunities hedge fund with $1.2 billion under management. In this conversation, we discuss alternative asset investing, compressed yields, COVID’s impact on specific markets, portfolio construction, side hustles, investor protections, and a Biden presidency. ======================= Want to sell your wonderful internet business? Tiny partners with founders to give them quick, straightforward exits that protect their team and culture. We’ll make an offer within a week, close the deal within a month, and keep your business operating for the long term. Get in touch at http://www.tinycapital.com, and we’ll let you know within a couple of days. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 85,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Michael Wise is a co-founder and president of Yieldstreet, an investing platform that believes in the power of technology to drive equality and transparency to investing. Previously, Michael was the vice president at a New York-based credit opportunities hedge fund with $1.2 billion under management. In this conversation, we discuss alternative asset investing, compressed yields, COVID's impact on specific markets, portfolio construction, side hustles, investor protections, and a Biden presidency. I really enjoyed this conversation

with Michael, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Tiny. Andrew Wilkinson, one of the co-founders of tiny has been on the podcast multiple times i'm a big fan and i think you will be as well if you want to sell your wonderful internet business you should go and talk to the people at tiny tiny partners with founders to give them quick straightforward exits that protect their team and culture they'll make an offer within a week they'll close the deal within a month and they'll keep your business operating for the long term the folks at tiny are founders They speak the same language. They've been in the same situations. I can't recommend them enough.

If you've got a great business and you're looking to sell it, go talk to Tiny. You can get in touch with them at tinycapital.com. Again, tinycapital.com. And they'll let you know within a couple of days what their level of interest is. If you want to learn more, go listen to the episodes I've done with Andrew and then go to tinycapital.com. Next up is Crypto.com. They're an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, or invest crypto all from one place. You can join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. They've got a great URL, Crypto.com, and it's the place where mass adoption is occurring. That all-in-one platform allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, or invest crypto all from one single place. So head on over to Crypto.com and let me know what you think.

Again, Crypto.com. You'll probably have dreams about that URL because it's really hard to forget. Crypto.com. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 85,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Michael.

I hope you guys enjoyed this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Michael here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Let's jump right into your background. What did you do before you started the company? So my background is mostly in alternative investments and specialty finance. But actually, when I first started out, I really thought I wanted to learn about the real estate market and be a developer. That was like the most exciting thing for me. And I remember talking to my dad about it when I was getting ready to start college. And I said, you know, like, if I want to get into real estate, what should I do?

He's like, well, you got to start at the bottom, clean toilets. And I'm like, okay, that's, can I do like one step above that? And so I started out doing 125 cold calls a day. I had this sick work ethic at a young age. A different time, I'll tell you about my middle school and high school side hustles. But- What were they? no tell us right now what were they all right so uh i'll give you the the middle school side

hustle was great so um they we had i was in an all boys school on long island and uh in eighth grade they decided to upgrade the lockers and uh the way it worked was you had to pay like 125 bucks for a locker but the locker would stay in your family so for all the brothers you had in the school now i had no brothers in the school and it's like december time in eighth grade and i'm like like how am i gonna pull this off you know how it is like you want to be the cool kid with the locker so another friend of mine we we decided we're going to convince our parents to start a business with us so we bought about six or seven lockers and then we went to like a variety store we got locker dividers went to costco we put in like those huge family bags of

rolos and mints and we essentially sublet space in the lockers to people who couldn't pay the 125 bucks. Six became 10. Once that happened, the school couldn't sell any other lockers. So we actually got suspended for subdividing real estate in school and taking the revenue away, which is kind of an awesome side hustle. And so I did a couple of things like that, you know, ordered bagels and people didn't want the school food. And we used to get one day credit terms from the local bagel store and get a hundred bagels. And so the older kids started school an hour before the younger kids, sub fifth grade. My next door neighbor was like on the younger bus.

It was the same bus driver doing the route twice. So I made a deal with him that I'd give him a Bialy and cream cheese every day if he picked me up on the last stop of the second route. And I went around the corner of the bagel store. My parents thought I went to school earlier and then I would come with my hundred bagels and resell them to everybody in school.

So I had this like sick work ethic. Even as a young kid, I credit that to my dad. But anyway, I would get into the office around seven o'clock, 7.30. I would catch up on emails, bust out 125 calls a day, leave the office by 540, run five blocks away to school that was 550 to 1030 twice a week, come back 1030 at night, catch up on my emails, do my schoolwork and repeat the next day. And so it was a tough time. It was a grueling time. You don't see success for a number of months there. But I think it was an amazing experience.

It taught you resilience. It taught you about rejection. And so I started there, found my way into um into the hedge fund world into private capital markets originally was doing pretty simple stuff like receivable finance purchase order funding and what i realized early on is that uh so a mentor once told me riches are made in niches and he's like you got to identify something for yourself that's different than everybody else is doing and what i learned pretty early on was that there's something called perceived risk versus actual risk and so things that are at times more complicated. People will deem as higher risk. And ultimately, you get to get paid a lot more for those opportunities. And my first foray into that world was in the legal finance world. So in

2009, it was really very limited players in that space. And what I realized was that like any other asset, contingency law firms that let's say sue pharmaceutical companies or antitrust cases or class actions had an asset that wasn't clearly defined. And so there's a level of risk around that ambiguity, but if you can get a big enough and diversified enough portfolio, then it's a really interesting strategy that has no correlation to broader markets. And there really wasn't competitive. There were four people in the world that I knew doing it at that time. And so that was my first, I had some other fun. I did a lending strategy around the NBA lockout. If you remember that back in the day. And so we were lending players during the lockout against the

guaranteed portions of their contract. And so for me, what I learned early on is if I could roll up my sleeves, work a little bit harder than the guy next to me, get a little bit luckier than the guy next to me, and try and do something different that if you put the work in and you put the effort in, then that's really a path for success. And in 2013, I started my own fund with another partner, and we focused on legal finance and other esoteric opportunities. But what was happening was really interesting. As I got more successful, two things happened.

So one is you have high net worth investors who would hear by word of mouth and other people that, hey, I heard you did a great deal. I heard my friend was in this deal. You know, can I come into the next one? I can give you 500, a million, 2 million, 250, whatever. And that flow of traffic was increasing significantly. But from an administrative perspective, it became really difficult to manage that. And at the same time, my business was growing. The size of the investments that I was looking to make was much larger. And so I needed to really get some serious capital without spending 50% of my time doing dinners and lunches and meetings, et cetera. And so the first foray into institutional world, I was able to secure with my partners $108 million investment.

It took us almost nine months and we got retraded twice. And here you are more successful than you've ever been before with a track record, with everything else. You got the whole world knocking down your door on the retail side. And basically you just got screwed twice and you don't have a choice because you have all these deals lined up to close this 108 million bucks and you got to take it etc and so i went to a mentor of mine and i said i don't understand like how does and he pats me on the back he was about 80 at the time and he goes welcome to the big boys you're going to spend 40 50 of your time

raising capital and to me that was super frustrating because that's not the part of the role that i ever enjoyed what i enjoyed was identifying the strategies the asset classes finding alpha working through helping people grow businesses like that's where i personally got a a lot of excitement, a lot of sort of stimulation. And that's where my energy was really focused. It wasn't focused on the raising capital. On the other side of the equation, you have all these people that don't have access to these investments that were literally without a tremendous amount of work ready to say, hey, let me in, let me in. And as I would talk to my friends at the time who were coming out of law school and dental and this and that and the other, and I'd say, hey guys,

so you're starting to make real money, where are you investing? And it was all like 3%, 4%, 5%, not interesting stuff, not stuff that's going to help them get ahead. There's no sort of foreseeable future to financial independence. And I would say, well, you know, you're caught in, I'm caught in my bubble at the time. Like, why aren't you investing in the types of stuff that I do with other players, et cetera? And they're like, well, we can't access them. Like nobody wants to take 20, 50, a hundred thousand. And so for me, you know, I realized that the system was very much broken in how investors can access product and how managers can distribute product. And so where the price is ultimately paid is in lower yield to investors and in lower

performance fees for managers, because there's this huge fee compression in the model. And so for me, it was a general frustration. And that's sort of a bit about my background and what I was doing and how I embarked on knowing that there's got to be a better way to embark on this journey. What's the worst story you have on the fundraising trail? I feel like every manager manager has that one story that they're just like, you'll never believe what happened. What's yours? I would actually say my worst story, most dramatic story was when I was still in the real estate space, which is really the impetus for why I left. So I was working on a 13 property portfolio refinance. I even remember the guy's name based out of Collierville, Tennessee.

Okay. Don't say his name, but go ahead. I didn't say his name, but to tell you there's a Jewish kid from New York showing up in Collierville, of Tennessee. Like that's an experience in and of itself. All right. And so I'm spending a tremendous amount of time. We're with one of the major investment banks who have a term sheet out, committed capital. We're supposed to be closing in a couple of weeks. We're going through the diligence. We get five days away from closing. Everything is done. Commitment letter is out. Deposit is in. I got a very simple email. Real estate lending is shut down indefinitely. 2008 i write back wtf with a bunch of exclamation points and question marks he writes back same

try getting him on the phone for a day nothing finally calls him back he goes it is what it is we don't know where the world is going we're not lending and so imagine spending six months on a 13 property portfolio refi with an 80 something year old guy and you're already counting your commission right i'm young at that time that's a point in commission it's a big deal and gone, poof, five days before closing. So I'd say that was probably my biggest, my biggest, most traumatic moment, which also was part of the reason I left

because it made me realize I had no control over my destiny. On the one hand, I had to call and identify and get referred and sort of find clients. And on the other hand, I didn't even control whether or not I could do a deal. And so the reason to go into the fund world was, hey, at least there's a pot of capital

or at least there's access to capital that if you can find the right opportunity and you do the hard work and you get to the finish line, you have control over your destiny. And so that was my most traumatic experience or letdown, I would say, in fundraising. And it's stuck with me ever since. And how I think about capital formation, how I think about maintaining diversity of capital, it's always been sort of running through my blood. Absolutely. And talk a little bit about Yieldstreet in terms of what exactly was the original impetus for starting the business and kind of how did you think about what you guys were going to actually go build from a product standpoint?

Yeah, so a lot of it has to do with what we just spoke about, sort of recognizing how inefficient the market was, both for asset managers and for retail looking to access capital. There's another really sort of emotional or interesting story that very much drives a lot of decision making that I've had over my career, which sort of lingered for a long time. I didn't exactly know how to deal with it or how to fix it. And so I think back to December time, 2008, I come home for Hanukkah dinner with the family and my dad's sitting at the kitchen table, manila envelope, white in the face, which is not very likely for my dad to give you a sense of who he is. Pretty resilient fellow, childhood, a child of Holocaust survivors, grew up in Vienna, Austria, shipped out at age 12 to go to school, sort of a very, very different, different

world, grew up completely broke, built a successful business for himself, at least, you know, had what he can, sort of living the American dream at, you know, at his level. And big saver, very European in that sense, and sort of pushed all his extra savings into Charles Schwab. We always had what we need growing up, weren't rich, but we're good. And so that's just who he is. And so this white face is just very uncharacteristic. I thought maybe it was like a health issue.

And so I'm prodding him to like, you know, tell me what's up. and he's not, he's not going to give, um, tough guy. And he goes, he goes to the bathroom or go somewhere. And I, you know, like a disrespectful son sneak into the envelope to see what's going on. And I see his portfolio is down about 50%. And, uh, ultimately he sells the remainder of the portfolio in a panic, really not understanding where the market's going to go. And I remember in such a juvenile way saying like, why would you put all your money in Schwab? Like, why aren't you invested in a bunch of stuff and he wrote he said back to me like well that's what people do like we save we put in Schwab and we expect to retire and like everything's going to be great

and so for me at first I honestly thought it was the dumbest answer ever because I was too young to appreciate it but looking back over the following few years the first thing was like I was petrified of ever having to have that experience the second was I was determined whatever it took to be diversified in what my investment approach and what my income approach would be. And I went on that journey, right? And so the real estate idea was, hey, I could always have multiple deals in the fire. And the fund idea is obvious. We're always investing in different strategies, asset classes, et cetera. But the part that I was never able to figure out how to fix, which came up again as I was building my fund, was how do we get people to have financial

independence? Why is it that you got 90% of the population working, some of the people on the lowest side of the economic totem pole are working harder than the people on the highest side, right? Like I don't think hard work is a determining factor per se, but they have no way to get ahead. So if you think about the mission or the goal of achieving financial independence in its simplest terms, it's how do I get comfortable that I can pay every bill I have without ever having to worry? Like that's my sort of view. And obviously for everybody, that's a different level, but that's what we want to achieve. You want to wake up in the morning, you got a bill, you click auto pay, and you're good to go. And there really isn't a path to get

ahead. And so I was always inspired by the idea of why is it always the big institutions getting that access? But to be candid, I never really had a moment of clarity where I was able to figure out how can I be a part of that movement? And so I was on my merry way of doing my thing with the fund when I started realizing some of these, you know, issues percolating and really starting to bother me. What really changed was two things specifically. So one is the JOBS Act. So when the JOBS Act a lot of general solicitation, it actually changed the landscape of how you could market to people and how you could get people to invest in your vehicle. The second thing, which was equally important, was the maturation of technology. So if you had the JOBS Act and you had no way to

identify, find people, market to people, create a seamless investment process, it wouldn't do much for you. It just meant that you could host a party at your local golf club and get people to show up and give them free bagels and lox and see if they want to invest. But with technology running at a pace of growth and efficiency as it was. And I think there was a huge change between like 2008 and 2015 and sort of what your capabilities were and how you distribute and consume information as consumers and how you sort of link to bank accounts and just make the overall process seamless. And what was really sort of the light bulb went off is if you remember in like 2013, 14, when Lending Club and Prosper really started to take off. So the notion of being able to

originate investments credit and distribute it in mass seamlessly was like a big aha moment where it was like wait you can leverage technology marketing and this new regulatory environment to leverage the masses to create financial equality like i think we could actually do it now uh one huge problem i had the investment side and i had the strategic you know foresight i did not have the technology the marketing and the operation skill set and so um i'm all sort of hot bothered by this idea, by this mission. And I get introduced to Malind, my co-founder. And Malind, which was super interesting for me, he came from the exact opposite side. So Malind grew up in India. He and his wife, he came over here to Boston for college.

That's really when he came to America. And Malind is an engineer by trade. And he was always incredibly passionate about how do we leverage technology to solve for sort of the the white space, like big, big problems. And for him, he was, you know, part of the early 2000s glory. And, you know, God knows what his paper net worth was at the time. And he saw it all vanish. And he also appreciated again in 2008 that he was putting his 401k in all his savings and he saw this huge decline. Now, fortunately for Malin, he didn't pull out because he was still a high earner. He was still, you know, in a good business, growing his career young, etc. And so he saw the capability of being able to be part of that convexity. But when he sold Yodel to Web.com

for just under $350, he had another major financial event and he was like, okay, how am I going to set my family up properly? And he's going around looking for investment opportunities and he hits the same wall that all the other people we mentioned did, right? High minimums, long lockups, not really being welcomed or able to participate in this world of passive income specialty finance. And so he became super passionate about creating financial equality and a path to financial independence, leveraging technology. And so when we meet, it's like, you know, love at first sight. It's a super synergistic skill sets, expertise, passion.

Like think about the greatest companies, right? It's about building and solving for problems that you have yourself, for your loved ones and for your friends. And so that's how we got on this journey to Yieldstreet. Our mission right now is by 2025, we want to have 5 million customers. we want to distribute $20 billion of investments and help people generate $3 billion of income that they otherwise would not have access to outside of the public markets. And that's a little bit about our founding story.

And talk a little bit about kind of this focus on alternative assets. How do you see that in investors' portfolios today? How has that changed over the last couple of months as we've kind of seen this chaos in the legacy financial system, the Fed stepping in and lowering rates and printing money and kind of all the nonsense that's been going on. How do you kind of just see the alternative investment bucket either growing, shrinking, staying the same in people's portfolios? A very loaded question. Intentionally. Yes. Okay. So, I mean, high level. Retail is always lagging the institutional world, right? The institutional world. And that's fairly simple. And it makes sense. Institutional world is filled with people who are highly compensated to identify better investment strategies.

Okay. So, you know, you and I sitting at home or even talking to people who are being sophisticated, we don't have the horsepower that, you know, a BlackRock or someone else has. And so what you'll see in every trend, you know, even when basic portfolio theory was started, right, in every trend, retail is always going to be lagging. So if you go back even 10 years ago, we started an institution, started moving 10% into alts. Now, I think what you're seeing is as a result of interest rates being low, as a result of volatility in the market, if you think about if you're an endowment and you have a 5% annual threshold that you have to meet for your obligations, for your charitable givings, et cetera, you can't get that with treasuries. You can't get that in bond markets. So you've got to look elsewhere. And so you're seeing a massive shift. We're seeing 20, 30% of people's portfolios moving into alternatives i think it's still going to take a little bit more time for retail to get

there but the bigger issue for retail was a couple of things hey how do i get access to it right do i want to go on to like a bkln and make four percent like where's all that excess fee you're seeing all these hedge fund managers and all these big asset managers making so much money why aren't we seeing the same thing when we invest in their strategies it's because by the time we get there it's fees and fees and fees and fees and fees and so the access part is a big issue to actually helping people access small alternatives if they were conscious of wanting to get there even sooner. The second thing is, I think that what people's desires of investing in the past might be different today than they were. If you think back 30, 40 years ago, you were a career employee,

you went to a particular company, you worked there your whole life, you retired, you got a pension, you put your money away and then you start collecting income the way we work today is changing right so people work five years seven years they take a break for a year they want people spend more money on experiences people build bigger homes get nicer cars like growing up you shared a room with your brother it's not as common these days right and so if you just think about the way we live our lives and the goals that people have it also requires them to think differently about how they invest do i want to have passive income do i want to make my money work for me? You want to get a car, you want to go on a vacation, you want to build a house,

whatever it is you want to do. How do I spend profit and not principal? And so being a part of the alternative space gives you a lot of advantages. And alternatives is a big word. So we're focused mostly on credit or special situations, right? And so it's going to, in our case, we're going to look for assets that are lower correlation to the markets. We're going to look for opportunities to generate consistent passive income. We're going to look for opportunities that have downside protection. We prefer to have less volatility. I think that investors generally, like sure, it's amazing if you look at the last couple of days in the market that we've shot up like crazy. Look at last week, we tanked like crazy. Emotionally, I don't think we want to

keep going through these gyrations. And so the reality is that investors, I believe, have stuck to stocks and bonds, mostly because of the limitation of what they were being offered and the experience in which they can access them. You don't want to go and get a 100-page PPM and sign the entire PBM when you can't understand it. You want to come to a platform that's digitally native, that speaks to you today. You want to see things in infographics.

You want to see things in webinars. You want things to be broken down to you. You want to consume information. We have a policy here at Yieldstreet. If you can't explain the deal to your mother, we shouldn't do it. Period, end of story. When someone comes in and says,

I have the most complex structure in the world, but you're going to make all the money in the world, it's like, thanks, but no thanks. we're not smart enough. That's it. And so I think that as people think about their financial goals, how they want to grow their assets, do they want to achieve financial independence? How do we get there? Alternatives is speaking more and more and more to what your goals and what your desires are. If you look back at data that talks about when people have accessed alternatives. So we have this great slide that we use all the time here at Yieldstreet to show an investor journey's life.

OK, so look at it from 18 to 80. So in the early part of your life called 18, 20, 25, it's all debt, student debt, housing debt, auto debt, credit cards. And the list goes on. As you start growing up, you get a job and now you have a 401k and you have little stocks and bonds, et cetera, et cetera. We only saw 10 percent of people being able to invest at the age of 65 or above in alternatives. Why? Because the minimums were high, the lockups were long, they didn't have the financial wherewithal to get into those products. At Yieldstreet, leveraging technology, we were able to bring that back. Our average user is 42. So you know the power of compounding. 23 years of investing. 23 more years. How far can that get you? That's how we help people achieve that goal. And so when you think about the broader backdrop of what's happening with

interest rates. You think about the volatility. You think about the reality that people aren't actually getting ahead. You think about how many companies were public 10 years ago versus how many companies are public today with the advent and the growth of the private equity in the venture markets. We're not actually accessing the level, scale, or quality of companies that we were 20 years ago or even 10 years. So when you invested in Apple early on or in one of these other major companies whether it's microsoft or exxon or who knows what it was you were able to participate in that convexity and that growth of equity and that growth of the business today companies are staying private much much longer and maybe never even seeing the light of the public forum and so you

don't really have that convexity story other than high risk high reward businesses like in the tech space and otherwise so where are you going to find an attractive yield or asset appreciation model with limited risk, with downside protection, with collateral, with loans, et cetera. And so that's why institutions are moving there. And that's why retail is moving there more and more aggressively. And so to answer one of your questions, where do I think it's going? I think we're going to see 30% to 40% of people's overall portfolio in alts over the next five years. How much of the obstacle right now is regulation, right? We recently saw a little bit more in some of the crowdfunding regulation, kind of go from a million dollars to 5 million. And there's

a little bit of progress happening there. But we still live in this society that's driven by regulators where they essentially, one, use net worth as a signal for intelligence, right? Or kind of a proxy for intelligence. Two, there's maybe some, you know, lack of insolvency. If you've got somebody who's rich and they make a small investment that, you know, they're not going to miss the rent payment because of it. But there's a ton of regulatory tape and obstacles that prevent the average person who makes $50,000, $60,000 a year. They go to work every day. They do a great job. They don't have millions of dollars to invest. How do we get them into some of these investment opportunities in the private market or in the alternative space that either one

have been difficult to access? It sounds like you guys are solving that with technology. But two, there's still this kind of regulatory obstacle as well it's a great question for me it's a mixed bag is the truth and I think people don't people don't look at it this way enough in my personal opinion so first of all I think honor about December 8th the accredited investor definition is changing to be more inclusive okay so it's gonna include qualified employees it's gonna include sort of a larger subset of people is it where it should be in my in my opinion?

No. Is it a step in the right direction? Absolutely. I think that the challenge for the regulators is you gotta look at it this way. From their perspective, right? Let's start from their perspective and then I'll share my perspective.

From their perspective, their job is to protect the US consumer to the best of their ability. What they see is a world of private investments that has limited transparency in some respects. And at the end of the day, sure, could they make it available to everyone? Yeah.

Are people gonna get hurt in that process by unscrupulous businesses? Yes. Who's the first person they're gonna blame? The regulators. And so if you think about the risk reward for the regulatory bodies, it's really not in their favor at all.

I don't think that's an excuse though, right? I think that we all have sort of risk in our roles, and I think their job is to find the right balance to protect the American consumer, but to give them an opportunity to get ahead, grow and to see economic freedom. And I think they're trying to do it, right? And I think a great example is what they're doing

on digital banking, trying to create sort of a licensing model for digital banks, lightening the requirement for accredited investor, allowing Reg A plus. Certain things have happened. even the general solicitation concept is a huge, huge move. I mean, I could never call you out of the blue and say, hey, Anthony, do you want to invest in this product?

And so we are moving in the right direction. This current administration has been very pro the relaxing of some of these regulations. Some of the bigger challenges, just practical challenges, I would say are a few things. One is they're always on the back nine, meaning we as entrepreneurs, as business owners, as fund managers as people you know engulfed in the financial sectors are the ones creating

and manufacturing new products and new structures all the time they need to catch up with us and they want to see what goes wrong and what goes right during that process and i think the world we live in today moves so much quicker than it did in the past it's just difficult for them to be able to sort of run checks and balances to a certain extent and so i think functionally it's difficult i think a solution to that is how do we have more of a partnership with the regulators right part of the problem is that the people who have an outnumbered seat at the table are the incumbents the incumbents aren't particularly interested in helping the small guy doesn't serve their business model well technology is a disruptor so for yield street you want to put

in 5 000 great you want to put in 5 million fantastic doesn't change anything it's the same clicks of the buttons and so we have investors all across sort of the the investment total investment size from literally as small as 5 000 to as high as tens of millions and so i think that's a challenge for them and i think the solution again is how do we figure out and create a better partnership you know a think tank model hey this is what we're building this is why we're building it let's work together the second thing is that as much as we want to sort of deregulate it's not the easiest process it's not like oh yeah you know this makes sense these guys are really trying to help other people. We should let that happen. Like, okay, we're just going to cut

the 1940 act. You know, that's fine. Or the 1933, that seems like a little, you know, a little outdated. Let's, let's cut it up. And so the process and the bureaucracy that exists to move some of these things along, unfortunately is very real and it takes some time. I think we're going in the right direction. I think that's the most important thing I can tell you from our personal experience. So Yieldstreet is a regulated entity. We go through ordinary examinations as any other registered investment advisor would. And I will tell you that the level of engagement, especially on our first exam a couple of years ago, was much, much higher than I thought it would be. And I think that obviously they were doing their job and doing the proper sort of examination and

going through and learning. But I think there was a tremendous amount of education that was happening on their part and saying like, hey, if you think back in 2016, when we started, nobody was doing this. And like the notion that you could distribute $10 million in hours or minutes is a crazy thought and it was never been done before and so making sure that the right checks are in place do you really do kyc how do you think about accredited investment verification is your technology supporting these things and just going through all that there's going to naturally be an education cycle um but again i think in summary we are headed in the right direction we have seen improvements continuously over the years can we do better sure but everyone

can do better business owners regulators government so that's not you know that's not uh that's not something to knock on. I think what we really have to think about broadly from a macro perspective is where are we giving people access and where are we not? And is the logic supportive? So should people have more capability to invest in pink sheets and biotechs or secure private credit? I would argue that secure private credit is a thousand times safer than pink sheets. And so I think we have to be a little bit more logical about how we think about why we want to give access to different cohorts of investors, but also how do we protect them? I do think that if you're looking squarely at the logic behind the SEC, it's not to suggest that wealthier people

are smarter. It's to suggest that wealthier people have potentially more bandwidth for error. the margin of error is less impactful. So if somebody is sort of at the cutting edge of a $40,000 annual job and they scrape $10,000 together and they invest in a deal and the deal goes sideways, that's going to be a really bad event for that person. If somebody has $100,000 or $200,000 investable cash and $10,000 deal goes sideways, that's a bad event, but it's much less impactful. And so from that perspective alone, they're trying to protect people. I do think people have the right to say, hey, you know, I should be the deciding factor of what my risk barometer is. And I think that is the challenge that they're dealing with and thinking about how

to open regulation up. Do we have hurdles in what we can offer to people because of regulation? Sure. How do we deal with it? We have to find structures that are old, but together with our technology, we can come up with a solution. So to be specific, we launched the 40X fund in March of this year, which is available to non-accredited investors as well. Does give them access to a portfolio of investments that are inherently diversified by multiple positions and is an investment minimum of $5,000. So you can do it. It took us 18 months.

It cost a fortune, which I'm never gonna publicly say. It was a grueling process. And I think that, you know, I think that's a bigger issue. Like the moats to entering into creating these things are just super, super high. If you're not super well-funded and have an amazing team and have access to some of the best legal staff, et cetera, you can't get that off the ground.

And I think that's cycling innovation question, which is a different story. But you can't fix it all in one day. But I think as long as we're going in the right direction and we're not regressing, then, you know, we should be we should be celebrating progress. Absolutely. And you guys have done a great job kind of navigating this environment. What are some of the more popular or interesting either opportunities or mechanisms on the Yieldstreet platform? And obviously understand that there's a bunch of regulation as to you're not trying to promote them. But if you use without name, you can kind of describe the types of things that people are coming to Yieldstreet to get exposure to.

Yeah, I think that what's most interesting about Yieldstreet than any other platform that's out there is because I think about what are our key differentiators, right? What are the real moats in the business? How are we different? And so when you talk to other sort of fintech businesses, there's a few things that I think come to mind. So one is I think fintech is a term that's abused every day. What fintech is supposed to mean is a balance between financial services and technology that help a business become much more disruptive. When you look at most companies, they're either started by a finance professional who hires a CTO, which usually ends up with limited technology, a beautiful website, some functionality, and a bunch of people in back office

doing the same thing you were doing if you weren't a tech business. When you have a tech CEO who hires a finance professional, what you have is super robust tech. You have AI, you have incredible APIs, you have beautiful user experiences, you have all this other stuff, but there generally isn't the right amount of rigor

on asset performance and asset quality. And I think what we have to do, and I know that we talk about it every day, one of our core values at Yieldstreet is investor first. You got to know a couple of things. One is, I don't care how wealthy you are or not, the money that you're putting on Yieldstreet or any other platform is hard-earned money.

Number two is not everything's always going to go right. Okay, and so you got to have tremendous attention to detail and focus on asset quality and asset performance. I always say never invest with someone because they can make you money, right? We used to have this line and my office used to be on the 54th floor. And, you know, everybody comes in

pitching the flavor of the month of their idea. And I would always say you can take a million dollars in cash, open up the window, shake it out, express elevator downstairs, we'll get down, there won't be a dollar left. Putting money out is the easy part. Bringing it back home is where the talent is. And so I think there's got to be real attention to detail and asset quality. And so the first thing that I think about when you look at the leadership at Yieldstreet is you have Malind, who is purely your tech entrepreneur and all things we discussed before, who has sort of this real, from a leadership perspective, real pressure, real focus on the team. How do we leverage data and technology to create a solution to this bigger problem? And from my perspective, it's how do we focus on asset quality to make sure that we're always distributing best in class opportunities, full well knowing that not everything is going to go perfect.

but we got to have a team that understands how to deal with those situations. And so you have a team that really has serious rigor in both financial services and technology. So I think that's key differentiator number one. Number two is when you talk to a lot of these different businesses, you know, they want to distribute real estate. They want to, so they'll say we're democratizing fractional ownership or democratizing access to real estate or some other asset class, et cetera. and i think when we talk about it at yield street it's a much bigger picture so i told you what our mission was right is if you think about it practically the how is to create a digitally native solution that really is a one-stop shop for wealth management and wealth creation in a curated

fashion so you've got td ameritrade that's got every option in the world i'm going to ask you anthony what are you know what are your favorite opportunities on td ameritrade it's like call me back in a month when i figure out the 17 000 options they're offering right and so i think consumers today want curation so you look across the risk reward spectrum i want some you know bonds here i want cash with cash alternatives i want uh equity i want debt i want um high growth equity like venture capital some higher some higher rewards etc but i want to curate it so based on my preferences my income my expenses etc show me the three or four best options for me So I'll give you an example. You look out right now on, you know, in sort of the Wall Street world,

you have every top name manager raising capital to what they're calling distress funds or COVID dislocation funds. So think about the aviation industry. At its peak during COVID, it dropped 92% in activity. So if I asked you, do you think in X number of years from now, whether it's six months or two years, are people still going to be traveling? Are people going to be traveling more than they did last year right like that's part of who we are today we travel we're global citizens okay and so there's going to be a shift in ownership a shift in the capital structure maybe who owns the planes or how they're owned or someone hasn't paid their bills in nine months so they're in default right so there's a lot of distress opportunities think about hotels

you walk around new york city most of the hotels are closed ones that are open barely have any services and so there's going to be distress in the market and people and these funds are sort going out there and raising enormous amounts of money to take advantage of that you know seeking to generate returns of 12 15 20 over the next few years i don't know anyone in retail who's going to get access to that but they should right and so when we think about what we're providing to you and why we're differentiated it's how do we create a solution for you across your whole portfolio so we want to be that place that brings you a great experience that's digitally native that has your app it has your web portal it's exactly how you if you close your eyes and you envision how do i

interact with the money this is what it would be and for us there's a much bigger thinking behind it right and the question is from a social behavior perspective what has changed over the last number of years and where are we going and how do we be part of that story or lead that story and so i have two great examples of your indulgement first one is 15 20 years ago what was your favorite cell phone 15 years ago probably uh would they have like the sidekick the razor all of those right maybe i even had it i don't know so i usually have like a b phone and an okia on my desk Somebody else may have taken it.

And so I would go for the Nokia or the Razr, right? The smaller you can get, as long as I could play Snake. For my emails, I had my BlackBerry a couple of years later, but it took me like God knows how long to separate from the two phone model and go to my iPhone. And let me ask you this. When we got our Nokias, we were looking for the smallest phone as possible.

And we didn't want to spend more than like 200, 250. I remember when that Razr came out and it was 450 bucks, like people were having a heart attack, okay? So now you're spending two, three, four, five times the money on a phone. It's four or five times the size. it's got way more glitches than my Nokia ever had. My battery on my Nokia lasted a week long, and I think I played more Snake than anyone I know on the BlackBerry Brick Breaker.

But here I am buying an iPhone for $1,000, $1,200. What happened? Let's talk about the way we shop. I remember I used to help my mom do errands and go to the baker, the butcher, the fisherman, the flower store, the variety store, the bank. Now I walk into Whole Foods, where you walk into your local equivalents your one-stop shop role so we're fundamentally changed the way we behave and interact with different things in our life i think if you if you break down the behavior we were task-based seekers so we were looking for maximum efficiency at a task level i want the best phone i want the best messaging i want the best fish etc to being utility seekers i want to do the most i can with the least effort is everything going to be as good as if it was

if I was singular focus? No. Am I okay with it? Yeah. Is technology going to get better over time? Is the store going to have better quality over time? Yeah. But I'm coming here for now.

Now, let's think about your financial life. How many bank accounts do you have? How many credit cards do you have? How many different investments do you have? How many 401ks if you're in your 40s? And so everything else in our life is getting more efficient, focused more on utility. But the part that's arguably most important,

maybe healthcare is similar, right? And same issue there. the part that's most important that we interact with every day how we spend money how we make money every single day you don't move without getting a coffee without doing this without doing that is completely fragmented that makes no sense to us at yield street and the question is how do we solve that issue how do we create one digitally native platform where you can have an enjoyable experience but specifically that's designed for you and delivers to you the curated solutions of what you're looking for and over time what you'll see at yield street over the next

number of years is how do we continue to introduce more and more investment product and other products, whether it's advice or tax, et cetera, to really create this ecosystem around Anthony's financial world that he feels comfortable in this one spot. And nobody else is thinking about it like that. Not a single platform. And when you think through that, there's kind of two parallel trends here, right? One is kind of this like land and expand strategy with a user or a consumer. So if I can get you to start buying a secured credit, now all of a sudden I can offer you parallel products. I can offer you advice around those products. I can kind of wrap services around it. I can really create that ecosystem you just described. But at the same time, there's also this

like financialization of everything, right? If you look at a company that like maybe a pipe who is literally going out and creating a financial product out of SaaS revenue contracts, or you kind of go through all these different assets that are now becoming investable in some form or fashion. You even see this in like sports cards and kind of all this crazy stuff that's going on. It feels like that is a second tailwind that is happening in finance. Is that something where you guys will also start to get into the more kind of esoteric alternatives as well? And you think that's interesting? Or is it something where you want to stay kind of down the fairway from a investable asset standpoint, and then just kind of build out that ecosystem around those

kind of more straightforward investment opportunities? I think a couple of interesting points to pick up from there. So one is, I think in part because of where rates are, and people seeking yield and seeking higher returns, people are trying to get more creative. That's number one. Number two, I think that people are using passion in different ways to direct their investments. I think that's much more sort of a younger generation, millennial practice than maybe our parents. So whether it's a focus on ESG or a focus on collectibles, it's, hey, I want to make my money doing something that aligns with who I am, right, or what I'm interested in. I think the other side is, like, for example,

you touched on collectibles. The whole collectible industry has blown up in an amazing way. Part of it is because digitalization part of it is globalization part of it's because there's far more millionaires today than there ever were before right so entrepreneurs businesses all that people spend money in different places you think about like the watch industry is insane you think and like that's like a real you know commoditized asset at this point liquid market you think about art um i think the other side is people recognizing that an asset should be considered an asset irrespective of what the underlying asset is like i'll give you something that's like less known for example was it almost 30 years ago at this point maybe 20 some odd years ago if you remember

the tobacco companies had the largest settlement in history when they settled those big tobacco cases a lot of the payments were structured to the law firms in trust over a 20 or 30 year period i don't remember exactly where it was so imagine you're a lawyer you worked on a case you get get this big fee. Now you got to get paid over the next 20 years. So what people did was they went out and sold the payment stream, either in the securitization market or through private investors. So we had one on the platform a couple of years back. And so here you had a payment instrument guaranteed by Philip Morris, let's say, who is public debt was trading at nothing, but you were able to get, you know, a 9% or an 8% yield on the payment stream. And so I think

what people are looking at today is saying if i own a piece of art and the art market has significant amount of data now and the particular artist you can have a good understanding you'll call it real blue chips like a dead artist 100 years ago 5 million plus art and so there's a there is a way to create a thesis around where that art should trade over a period of time and where rates are today and where people are looking for better stores of value and better tax strategies there is a theory of why it would make sense to go there so i think like that's part of the reason why you're seeing some of that i obviously disagree with a lot of the stuff that people are creating sort of investable assets just you know jumping on the bandwagon sort of uh

you know high tide floats all you know rises all boats kind of thing um for yield street specifically our goal was never to be like the the innovator of investment strategies like i leave that to the best hedge funds in the world and the best asset management our entire idea was how do we leverage technology to create what i call distribution infrastructure so we got hundreds of thousands of people we have this amazing user experience as technology we can distribute fantastic shouldn't say fantastic we could distribute product that could be interesting to a bunch of on the other side you can use that same technology on the consumer side is how do i create for myself the best wealth management solution in my personal opinion it's not by

trying to reinvent the wheel and say, hey, I think ring lights are going to be like the craziest thing because everyone's home now in COVID and they want to look better on an interview. So I'm going to invest in the ring light manufacturer. I think that for me, it's too much risk. I think if you look around the investment world, there's trillions of dollars of investable product with track records, with proven managers, et cetera. Within that universe, you can access the entire risk profile. You want to look for something that goes like that? Let's go find a good earlier late stage VC and participate in their fund. You want to find something that's super tax efficient and you live in New York? Let's find the best New York funds and curate

them to you. And so I don't foresee in the near future, like Yieldstreet selling Bitcoin investments or some other much more speculative opportunity sets. When you think about kind of where you guys are going, let's say 20 years from now, 10 years from now, what's the kind of one or two sentence, here's what the goal is, here's what the mission is, and where you want to be? I think in 10 years from now, honestly, I want to get there sooner. But let's say in 10 years from now, I want Yule Street to be the household name globally for digital wealth management across the board. It's a pretty good goal to have. I think it's really doable. Like I think, you know, who is that name today? It doesn't exist.

I think the incumbents it's too difficult for them to build what we're building right we're starting on you know 2015 to 2017 technology and iterating you know daily on it they're 20 30 years behind massive infrastructures it just it just can't be done yeah so I think honestly I think we have a real shot at it I think we have a massive head start there is like if I asked you like hey who do you think is like our number one direct competitor there isn't a clear answer and I think when you really think about Yieldstreet, it's a category creator. As long as we continue to scale and to grow and to build thoughtfully in a measured way and by being investor first and delivering what people really need to help fuel their financial ambitions,

then I think that's going to be us in 10 years. I love that answer. Before I wrap up, I always ask people the same two questions and you'll get to ask me one question at the end. The first question is, what is the most important book that you've ever read? this is a tough one this is a really tough one you can answer with two or three if you can't decide between the absolute best my biggest problem with books is that i think most of them should be shorter and um i think there are a few key takeaways in in different books and um i i don't know that there's a particular book that i think is like the all-time best book

ever read because i read across many different genres um for me i'll tell you some some of the more recent ones the book called the four that I found really interesting it essentially analyzes Facebook Amazon Apple and maybe uber anyway it looks at the it looks deeply into the companies to understand what is it what is really so special about those businesses that allow them to ignore the success that they had and it gives you a very different perspective in understanding some of that strategy but what it also focuses on in the book is how do you as a student which i thought was really interesting how do you as a student think about these concepts in the book and i'll mention one in a second and help that thinking

apply sort of where you want to go next and try to identify the whole notion of the book is who's going to be the fifth horseman right so let's look at all the components that make these companies so special and go from there so like one interesting example to me that sort of you know blew my mind for a moment was when you think about apple so um is apple a technology company or a consumer brand And so the author asks, when Apple unveiled the Apple Watch, they did an 18-page spread in a particular magazine. What would be like the first magazine that came to mind for you? Because you're asking now, I think it's like Vogue. But if you hadn't told me that, it would have been some kind of technology magazine.

It would be like Tech Funds or whatever. Yeah, it's an 18-page spread in Vogue with an $18,000 And so we go into the psychology behind the glass storefront. So the whole glass storefront is really about you walking outside, seeing the person inside and aspiring to be able to buy that thousand dollar phone and the person inside being able to feel like, hey, look at me, I'm buying this phone. And so it's a completely different way of thinking about how to build that brand, how they thought about that company. The notion of leveraging technology is to bring costs down.

here you have the most expensive device when it's supposed to be a tech company first right so there's a lot of interesting things there i thought that was a really interesting book um another book for me is um it's called um the road to you're really getting me here i'm just impressed with myself that i knew the name of a magazine outside of the tech world yeah i mean i i thought like all your subscribers know that your go-to vote guy but that's okay um the other question i ask everyone which is character road to character what is that incredible book so the road to character goes through you know

people throughout history great people throughout history and really focuses on how they got to greatness, how they achieved what they achieved. And the common theme across the board is number one, having real major setbacks, whether like real travesty or real challenges and having this incredible burning sort of desire for their mission, their vision, their purpose and resilience. And as you sort of go through the book time and time and time again, it sort of makes you, it forces you to recognize, which I think a lot of people internally know, but we don't talk about it as much about how that road to character and maintaining a moral high ground and being able to see these visions through

is always met with enormous amounts of obstacles. And it's about getting past that. Right. And so for me, we're always going to have ups and downs and, you know, what you see on the outside world from a company like Mill Street or others, is you see, you know, 14th fastest growing company, but then 46 the next year, which is like crazy. top 50 growing companies in america in two years in a row or you see like you know top of the stack at financial times or cranes 40 under 40 you see all these great athletes what you don't see is

every setback all the that you have to go through pardon me but all the things that don't work out well right and so being in a startup and being successful means you have to have this incredible amount of luck you got to have this amazing team everything's got to go right you got You got to find the product where it could fit and you're still going to have a ton of things to deal with. I think that was really important. And then for me, maybe the all-time sort of best recurring read is not actually a book or by now it is a book, but it's the compilation of Warren Buffett's essays.

And the reason isn't because I think you could glean the best investment advice. I think it's because who the man is, and when you bring it all together, whether it's humility, desire to have a better world, whether it's bringing calm to a chaotic investment world, you start to take all those lessons and you put them together and you see them consistently evolve over all the years.

I think as both a business person, entrepreneur, I look at myself and I try to look at, you know, the people on our team, we have a term here at Yieldstreet called a growth seeker. got to be looking to grow both personally and professionally always and so i think that if you look at his journey he represents that in a big way personally i think if you look at most billionaires in the world there's always you know some serious skeletons in the closet or how they got there and you could just you know pull out forbes 400 and look right on that list and you'll

say okay he stole that he did that he did that um you don't really find that with him and um i think the one thing that's really that can really stick home to everyone is the notion that behave today as if tomorrow morning everything you did today was on the front page of wall street journal and i think what's interesting about that message is it's not telling you to be a saint it's not telling you to be perfect but it's telling you that however you're going to live and whatever you're going to behave whether it's personally or professionally be okay with it being on the front page maybe you'll be a little bit embarrassed okay no one's perfect but don't do something don't don't behave in a certain way that that would be sort of below the line for you um so i think

there's a lot of lessons that come from him but i can go on those are great those are great suggestions the second question is more fun aliens are you a believer or non-believer how do you define aliens do i believe in life outside of earth however you want to define it everyone defines it differently so i would define that question as do you believe there is some form of life whatever that means um outside of planet earth and i would say absolutely why because i believe that things have a purpose and so we are you know nothing relative to the broader galaxy sort of the universe as a whole we like to human beings like to think of life in terms of earth and earth is nothing comparatively to the bigger universe and so the simple question is uh if not

for life or for some purpose what is it and so i don't know the answer so let's not go there but i do believe there's something whether they're gonna come and like destroy us like that's not a high it doesn't rank high on sort of my anxiety at all or my focus we want to we want to find them for sure we don't want them finding us Yeah, I don't, again, like, I don't know about that. We've managed to live this many years here and like nobody's coming and destroying us tomorrow morning. I mean, uh, if there, if that happens, thank God Will Smith is still around.

I am legend will come save us, but, um, I don't know. We'll leave that up to others. To finish up, you could ask me one question. What's the one question you have for me? how has your um how's your military background helped you in your career and building what you built here and can you leverage that to help others who have similar military background be as successful as you've been and how do the rest of us do more of that yeah i think there's probably two things and you know one of them is like a pretty uh dark view of the world of just

like, we're all going to die. Right. So, uh, when you kind of are immersed for a prolonged period of time in, uh, you know, combat scenario where there's kind of always injuries and death, and that's always kind of part of the conversation and just around you for, you know, even if it was just a couple of weeks, if not, you know, a year plus, um, I think that you just generally, uh, get this understanding of like, Hey, we are all going to die. And so like live life to the fullest while you're here uh when i was younger you know i came back from iraq when i was uh i think 21 years old and like as a 21 year old live life to the fullest means you like go by a motorcycle and you fly down the highway at like 110 miles an hour and yeah and you feel invincible

right uh as you get older you rise like maybe that's not the way to uh uh to embody some of that but uh i definitely think that's one piece of it and the second is just um you know people always talk about like the leadership training uh of the military of the army specifically i was fortunate enough to go through a bunch of their uh various schools but i always tell folks that like the best leadership lessons were not learned at one of the leadership schools that was more of just a formalization yeah it was just a formalization of what they wanted you to know right it was out of a book it was in a training scenario whatever the saying an mba graduate to build on a fortune 500 company day two of course and so i think that it's you know when you actually

kind of go through things in the tough situations and stuff like that that's really where a lot of that kind of gets forged and you know it's um it's cliche at this point because so many of these kind of great warriors that we have have come back and leverage social media to kind of build large audiences and stuff but you know if you listen to like a jocko wilnick or david goggins or a tim kennedy or any of these guys like they all pretty much have the same message right we're just like personal responsibility and like go do hard shit so that everything in life becomes easier like that's not really that groundbreaking of uh advice it's just that they say it over and over and over again and they embody it and kind of do all these things but the reason why so many people

flock to those messages is like because it's true right if you you know if every single day you're doing just things that suck and are hard and difficult and all that stuff, all of a sudden, the problems you thought you had become much easier, right? And so it's just kind of how do you constantly condition yourself to have a little bit more of that mental fortitude and stuff like that? And it helps in every part of life. And I think that's a big lesson that people eventually learn at some point in their life. But I think taking the trauma out of what you just said, So let's take the death out of it for a minute. The ability to recognize that,

A, we don't control our outcome every day. And that B, everyone's going to die at some point. So another way of saying it is like forced introspection. There's something very peaceful about that. It puts things into incredible perspective and sort of your desire to have more clarity more authentic living more authentic experiences more authentic relationships it's just that much more enjoyable and i think in a different way just to pivot to like covid coven in some ways had that experience with a lot of people right it's like

we all had this rat race i mean speaking for myself super rat race right building this business 21 hours a day working i sleep with my phone in my ear right i'm sleeping in the office sleeping in the city all this stuff um planes more than i you know i want to attest to being um the upside is i never worked a day i love it and um i feel incredibly rewarded to sort of be building what we're building like getting random linkedin or dms from people like hey oh my god i'm putting my kids in college because i'm an investment in yale street never met you never will meet you or being on a plane coming back from australia and wearing this yale street vest and someone comes door to me and says like how did you get that vest and i was like oh whatever i didn't want

to say because you never know which way it's going to go and they're like it's the best company ever i'm like oh actually right so you just you get caught up in it and um i so i got three kids at home and um in the first 10 weeks i ran the math cumulatively over the last 11 years married i haven't spent this much time with them as i had in the first two weeks right and i think that when you starting to get these emails and these texts and whatsapp groups with all these people that you know or that are second third relationship passing away you see all the horror stories of sort of loss of life and sickness there was sort of a for those who who connected with themselves and sort of you know took a moment in time it's like okay we got to rethink some of

this stuff right like what's important in life what are the relationships you didn't see your friends for an extended period of time or the people you thought were your friends and then you slowly started seeing people that you were particularly close with family and friends and sort of you spend more time with those people so more intentional relationships right more intentional meaning in life spending more time every day thinking about how to crystallize what's important to you and so i think that um the trauma is something i can't speak to i just don't you know thankfully don't have that experience you don't know about that but i think the the upside is, you know, if harnessed well, is a beautiful gift to have to sort of be able to see things

much more clearly, much more real, um, and very early in life before it's too late. Right. That is, uh, that is the way I view it at least. Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more information about the company? Best place is yillstreet.com. Um, so that's the best place you can come to us on LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. but the website is super intuitive it's enjoyable or download the old street app and um we're here for everybody ask us any questions you have and uh whatever we don't have that you want uh drop it in an email tell us because we're here for you so we got to build it awesome man listen thank you so much for doing this we're definitely gonna have to do this again

in the future i look forward to it thank you have a great day it was a great talk take care