We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP406: Finding Hidden Treasure w/ Thomas Braziel

Episode Date: December 19, 2021

Trey Lockerbie discussed Special Situations with Thomas Braziel. Thomas was recommended by multiple guests because of his Sherlock Holmes approach to finding buried treasure (sometimes literally) types of opportunities. Thomas is not your average investor. They explore a lot of unique topics and it's guaranteed you will learn a ton. One quick caveat: Trey was recording from Costa Rica, Thomas was in London, so the audio quality had tiny glitches along the way. Please bear with us because the substance of the conversation is fantastic. And with that, please enjoy a very unique approach from the humble and kind, Thomas Braziel.  IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 01:41 - What investing in Special Situations looks like. 03:34 - Investing in bankruptcies, liens, and other esoteric situations. 11:24 - How Thomas turned $7k into over $1MM by finding an important footnote on a penny stock company. 31:09 - Learnings from Billionaire Sam Zell and others.  43:25 - Thomas’ epic 40x return from investing in claims from Japanese crypto exchange, Mt. Gox. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Thomas Braziel's Twitter. Am I Being Too Subtle by Sam Zell. Trey Lockerbie's Twitter. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. On today's episode, we are discussing special situations with Thomas Brazil. Thomas was recommended to me by multiple guests because of his Sherlock Holmes approach to finding buried treasure, sometimes literally, types of opportunities. In this episode, we discuss what investing in special situations looks like, how Thomas turned $7,000 into over $1 million by finding an important footnote on a penny stock company in his early 20s, investing in bankruptcies, liens, and other investments, esoteric situations, learnings from billionaire Sam Zell and others, and we explore Thomas's epic

40x return from investing in claims from Japanese crypto exchange Mount Gox. This story is absolutely incredible. Thomas is not your average investor. We explore a lot of unique topics, and I guarantee you will learn a ton. One quick caveat I was recording from Costa Rica. Thomas was in London, so the audio quality had tiny glitches along the way. Please bear with us because the substance of the conversation is fantastic. And with that, please enjoy a very unique approach from the humble and kind Thomas Brazil. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host,

Trey Lockerbie, and today I'm super excited to have my friend Thomas Brazil on the show. Thomas, first time, Welcome. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to have you because, well, first of all, you were recommended by so many people to me to have on this show because you are exploring so many interesting industries. And I mean, it's just such a, it's hard to know where to start, honestly. So we're going to get into it. And I think the easiest way to frame it all up is you specialize in distressed and special situations.

A lot of our audience of Red Ben Graham, and we want to talk about that. But maybe not a lot of our listeners are actively seeking out special situations. So I'd like to give them a bit of a framework as to what would essentially qualify as a special situation in your mind. I guess in my mind, it would be anything where there's sort of like, I guess some people refer to them as hard catalyst, something that's, you know, happening that's going to dynamically change the value, you know, waiting for a bunch of quarters to play out. Some people would prefer to like rebating companies and a spin-out.

Maybe that's a special situation. And I think spin-outs are great. These are always sort of like, if I can buy here for 100 and sell here for 300, sometimes that means going public to private. Sometimes that means, who knows, late stage, secondaries, maybe that means you're doing spec, like all kind of the things where there's some sort of quasi, maybe quasi arbitrage that can be realized through some hard catalysts going on. For myself, I mean, I practice distress because people will give me money to do it. And I like to think that I have a little bit of an advantage over knowing the process really well and then having the network.

Just like social networks are valuable in our field and they're incredibly valuable. I mean, it takes years to build up a network of credible people to do transactions with and to have deal flow with and to be able to get not only inbound but outbound. You know, you're sort of like, hey, how you're doing? What are you been working on? Any things? Any cases you think you're going to file? Or even, like, we're involved in Brazos Energy, which is a large Texas co-op with offer bankruptcy. And, you know, to be able to transact 40 and $50 million trade claims, like you need to kind of have the credibility to transact. Sounds like you specialize a lot in bankruptcy. both of your parents were bankruptcy lawyers, which is a fascinating place to start.

I mean, you've earned your keep as well. You're not an attorney, but you've certainly been in the space for a long time. You know, inherently, you can understand there's opportunity in bankruptcy because it's somewhat of probably a mismanaged company that's over leveraged, what have you. And you're looking for a turnaround opportunity. But when you're entering into a bankruptcy deal, is it that, like you mentioned the claim, someone's got claims on some asset in the company. are you essentially going around and purchasing those claims from those people? So they're getting money out sooner than they otherwise would have. And you now become, I don't want to say debt collector, but essentially, is there anything active beyond that?

So yeah, so I'll back up a second and give some background. But the answer is decently active depending upon the type of claim. So, you know, just to put all the cards on the table, like, you know, I used to run a hedge fund. We did like for three bucks in special situation. Like, you know, I was kind of trying to do a buffer partnership. So it was like, I had my value and then I had my workout, you know, I didn't call them workouts in the original Buffet Partnership. I, you know, so I would call them special situations. And then I was also doing a little bit of stress on the side.

And I really started doing claims because I thought, hey, my parents are lawyers. I know a lot more than most people. And also I started really doing claims because I was running a tiny fund and I didn't have prime brokerage with Goldman's Act. So, you know, if you want to buy distressed bonds, you really have to have access to those brokers. to the deal flow. And when you're tiny, no one's going to open up an account and, you know, work with you. So I really started doing it out of like that was what was available. I was like, hey, no one wants to do this. I'll do this. Hey, this is a nice little thing to be working on. So what we do in that regard is, yeah, you're normally, think of it as like, I mean,

the best way to think about it is like factoring or working capital solutions. Like, your kombucha company has a client, the client goes bankrupt. You know, now that person owes you $120,000 invoice. Hopefully, if it's been delivered within 20 days of filing, we can pay 100,000 to make 120. If it's like really a nasty bankruptcy and it's likely to be a zero or not a zero, but a very low recovery, maybe we can offer five to make 10 or maybe, you know, something. So the idea is not double our money, it depends on IRA.

We're normally underwriting's a very high IRAs. You can imagine because it's a lot of work, there's a lot of administrative. And then you also have to push back on claims. I mean, we have claims all the time. I mean, I can wheel a claimant on. right now. Like, come on stage here. And he could tell you, like, sometimes the debtors council really push back on claims,

sometimes totally unjustifiably, and we have to assert those rights. So that's when we do get really active. For the most part, we're not, but that's the, not the, I don't say the risk, but that's the service we provide. I really try to take, and this is, I guess you could think about, maybe guys that do just regular sort of equity investing, don't think about this way. But I really think of our business as a service business. And I try to empathize and think about what does that person need to accomplish?

How can I help them accomplish it? And I think that empathy leads to better deal flow, more repeat business, not that you want that much repeat business, but maybe repeat business from the professional. So for instance, like, who's our client? Is it the claimant or is it that claimant's counsel who is going to have 10 claims a year? Because he's a top attorney in Pennsylvania or wherever, Texas or Costa Rica, right? So you've got that is a thing. And I really try to think of it as a service.

We want to offer people competitive pricing with what other. There are other firms that do what we do, probably like 10. And so you need to do more than just price. You need to offer the personal solution. I always say when someone's selling their bankruptcy claim, like if you had a claim with your Cambocha company, would you be selling it because you had a bankruptcy claim problem? No, it's because you probably have a cash flow problem. You're like, hey, this is $120,000 of working capital tied up in a bankruptcy.

This could be two years. This guy's offering me 100. I mean, that's within our margin and I don't need to hire bankruptcy counsel. So it is a server. So that's the main bread and butter business that we do. And we also do what's called a debtor and possession business. Very similar to like the alt lenders you see out there, not too dissimilar to people you've had on your show, like baby oak tree type situation.

We're writing, you know, hopefully helping companies get out of trouble. And they restructure their balance sheet if it's over levered or sell parts of their business or restructure. And I think I really get on a bankruptcy soapbox. But, you know, one of the things people don't appreciate is, you know, one of the things I think that makes the American economy so dynamic is you have this amazing venture capital arm, right? Just like your can't butcher company is able to raise capital.

It's quite efficient. People know what saves are. There's a whole, like, club of people that invest in startup companies and back entrepreneurs and things. But then the yin to that yang is the bankruptcy system that allows people to watch debts if it doesn't work. You don't go to debtors president in America for having debts. And you can't say that of other parts of the world. And people say, oh, well, you don't go to jail. You don't go to jail, but you're basically totally out of the financial system if you go bankrupt. And so you don't

see a lot of venture capital. You see private equity, but you don't see venture capital. And you don't see, you see a lot of families that have a lot of money. They're able to access banks get a lot of that access as opposed to the sort of a little more of a free market where any investor with $25,000 could probably invest in the venture capital deal. You brought up IRR, which is interesting. So when you're weighing out your IRA, you're just betting or obviously projecting out how long it's going to take to get to realize this investment, correct? So does that just come with time understanding these deals typically take three to five

years? Like, how accurate can that number really be? It's very hard. And then some people, you know, we'll get claimants to say, oh, you know, 80 cents and making a dollar, like, gosh, you guys are really making a great IRA. I'm going to get paid in three months. I'm like, yeah, for everyone where it gets paid that fast, you know, we end up with a few that end up taking two years instead of three months or six months. So it's hard for us. I mean, we're trying to be an insurance company, really. We're trying to underwrite risk,

and on the whole be right. But we're definitely getting it wrong a lot of times. What you, what you try to do is build in some buffer and also underwrite a whole portfolio of these things. You try to not get too concentrated on a docket, but you try to not get too concentrated on a particular type of claim within a docket if it takes longer, if there's objections to it. So it's time, it's experience, it's time in the saddle.

And also, like, whatever you think it's going to be double it. But no, in all seriousness, it's just a lot of experience. I'm very grateful that, you know,

I've had a message over the years that it's stuck with me when things are good and things are bad. And it's not a free lunch by any stretch of imagination. It is a lot of experience and time in the saddle. And, you know, it's kind of like you can't really teach it from a book. It's not in a book. And that really adds to the value of it. It's not like if you work for one of these firms for a year or two, you probably learn a lot and you probably can, you know, go out on your own and do small, you know, smaller claims for yourself or for a club of people. But yeah, it's just experience, dude. And it's knowing the procedures. If you know bankruptcy claims is confirmed, confirmation to, confirmation, then you have confirmation. Then you have confirmation order. You know what the days are. And then you know confirmation to affect the data is 45. day, you know, you know those kind of statutory days, you can add it up, but you can always get extensions for all kind of reasons. I love this idea because it feels like detective work, and detective work feels like very

fun and exciting. So you mentioned books. I know you were reading Warren Buffett very early on. He was a big influence on you, and you set up the fund in a similar way to his partnerships, as you said. But your first experience was not really that important that it was a penny stock, but it kind ties into this idea that you were fishing in shallow waters and really trying to find shallow, very shallow. Some interesting ideas. So walk us through the story of that

penny stock opportunity that really set you up. So if you're an enterprising investor, there is so, you know, the world is your oyster. There's so many things up there. And it doesn't have to be U.S. OTC penny stocks, things like that. It can be anywhere. It can be anything. So FNX Energy, when I first found it, it was a true penny stock. It was for, it was selling for three cents. And I tried to buy. I'd, found the story. It was on a net, net screen. The numbers didn't add up on the net net screen because I saw the company file for bankruptcy. So, okay, this is probably nothing. But I'll pull open the docks to you, like what's going on to the bankruptcy. And so I did. This is one of the

things I want to highlight is, I mean, I guess PACER wasn't around when Buffett was around. You had to go to the local courthouse. And even then, you would have had to be in your jurisdiction because they didn't even have electronic files. I mean, when I was a kid, PACER was only available in the clerk's office. But by the time, you know, I was the state when I was, I was like, probably 20, when I was 20 or maybe 22, they had to be over 20. So it's also 22, 23. You could get PACER on your laptop. And so I was able to pull up in the docket, look at the trustees' reports. It was a liquidating 11. And I could see like, hey, this thing's trading for at three pennies. It was like a 200 or 250,000 on market cap. And I was like, hey, this company's going to have like a million

bucks, like potentially to the equity holders. In addition to that, they had these, what are called remission and restitution payments against the insider, the defraud of the company. So long story short, I thought, well, this is pretty intriguing. I wonder if this is right. So, and it was in the footnotes. It wasn't even listed as an asset, the remission and restitution payment. So I call the trustee. And he's, you know, just a nice, amiable, whatever, you know, just the local trustee. And he said, yeah, these numbers are right. Yeah, we're lowering for remission and restitution I guess the former insider with the fraud of the company.

And I was like, well, that's interesting. And he hadn't even really put it together that, oh, by the way, there was going to be equity. There was going to be money returned to be equity in the stock trades. So I bought up, I think, like two or three percent of the company. Like, not a lot. I didn't even have that much money.

I think I had like $7,000 or something in my Scott trade account. And I bought up some stock. And then I was telling a friend about it. And then I was trying to get a block. So I didn't know anything about trading block. and didn't know anybody in the industry. So I asked my one friend that I knew, I say friend, but the older gentleman that I knew that was like a hedge fund manager.

It was like only hedge fund manager I knew. I didn't know any hedge fund manager. And this guy, I was like, you know, Wellington owns a 20% block this company. You think you could call Wellington and ask them they want to sell it. I think there's something here. I mean, it's small, but I think it could make like four or five times my money. And the guy said to me, you know, Tom, you know, Wellington's like a very smart firm.

If there's something there, they found it. So there's likely nothing there. And I was like, huh, okay, well, I'm glad I didn't listen to as advice. And what I started doing is I realized the way this company went public, it was a reverse merger pipe. So they were literally physical shares, an actual stock certificate. So I actually bought a stock certificate off the former chairman. And for him, it's not that he wanted to sell it because he knew it wasn't worth anything. He kind of didn't think it was worth much.

And I kind of told him, like, I don't know, man, I think the work out value in the bank could be good because they're pursuing this remission and restitution against a former insider. And then they're suing the law firm he worked at. And he said, look, son, you know, I'm like in my 60s. I don't want anything to do with this. This company was, you know, a dark time in my career because he was quite a famous guy in the ethanol industry. And they used his sort of gravitas to help build the financing. So when this company went under, of course, he had friends and colleagues in the industry

be investing it. You know, it wasn't, it didn't look great. It wasn't a bright time form. He said, look, you send me a check. You send me a check for this stock certificate. I'll get a medallion signature guarantor and I'll send it out to you. And we did it. I mean, I wrote my own contract. I bought a block paid four cents. I can't remember the actual shared denominations, but I bought about 10% of the company fellow. So when I say block, I'm just referring to a big equity block, you know, like a 10% of a company or 20% of a company or 5% a block, you know, of a company. So I was able to source that from that guy. You know, I bought more later at much higher, higher prices, but it worked out. I mean, like 22 times my money,

23 times on money. You know, once you've had the taste of making five times your money or 10 times of money or 20 times of money on something, you're done. You're going to work in investments. That $7,000 you had in your trading account. Is that, I mean, you were all in on this one idea? Is that the idea, like this concentrated bet essentially with high conviction? I mean, all in. I mean, yeah, I was all in, but I mean, I was a kid, you know, after I paid my tax, it was still a lot of money. And I was just like, I remember looking at the check and being like, wow, I mean, I got the check on my, my, I had kids quite young.

My little girls are, I think it was her first or, it must have been a, and maybe it's her first birthday, but it was there, maybe a second birthday. It was on June 23rd. And the check came cashier's check from the bankruptcy trustee. And it was, you know, it was a million, over a million dollar check. And I was just like, wow, I got to do this the rest of my life. This stuff exists. It's just hard to find.

It's a lot of work. You know, don't do it for the money because, you know, you could spend two years looking, you know, and maybe their best idea is going to come in year 10. You mentioned earlier that there's no such thing as a bad company, just a bad price. I've also heard you share this quote that you should find deals on Madison Avenue, not Canal Street, which brings up this idea that, you know, cheap. Sometimes things are cheap for a reason. Sometimes there's not an underlying solvent business for that price. So how do you marry those two ideas, meaning price is what you pay, values, what you get, but sometimes the value is questionable depending on the underlying asset involved?

I mean, it's experience. I see guys that are bottom fishers, both in distress markets and in value markets and equities. I think it's a mistake to be too formulaic around. about the way you approach value. Anything that's paint by numbers is almost by definition suboptimal. Now, maybe it helps you mentally stay strong, but it can't possibly be an optimal an investment strategy unless it helps you stick to the program, so to speak. And I think, how do you marry those two ideas?

So the idea of buying a Madison Avenue not on Canal Street, what they were basically trying to say is be careful of the stuff that's too great. of a deal because it's probably fool's gold. And I think that's true in distress. You know, you get stuff where it's like, wow, they're giving this thing away. It's like, yeah, it's probably fool's gold. The stuff that's really, really cheap. I mean, maybe you can get compensated for it, but I would just be careful.

And I guess, I guess for me, that comes with like looking at companies. I don't for myself, just from my time in the markets, believe, or at least for me, it doesn't fit my investment philosophy, that buying junk that's cheap is somehow better than buying okay stuff at okay prices. I almost think it's for me, and I say that as a distress person, and you think, I'll how that fit? Well, we're doing distress. We're normally, you know, there's a whole, I think what people don't understand about stress is there's a whole spectrum of risk. You can be the guy that takes very little risk, and you're basically just being paid a premium because of complexity.

But there's very little risk in what you're doing. You're on the one side of spectrum. And you know, like first lien loans, like riding dips, like things that are very, very, very, quote, quote, safe, right? I mean, there's very little capital at risk, or I should say, like, what is it, permanent loss of capital potential. And you can go all the way the other end of the spectrum and find stuff where you're just punting.

And that's fine. It just depends on, you know, what proportion in your portfolio you're going to punt with. And I'd say punt. That seems mean. But there's stuff where you're buying something for a penny and it's just a litigation. So you can go to the whole spectrum. And I don't think people appreciate that and about the stress. They kind of just think it's all highly risky.

And that's where, what was Peter Thiel say? He said, tell me something you know about the world that everybody disagrees with you about. And I think I wouldn't say people disagree with this about it, but there's not an appreciation that there's a whole Chinese menu or, you know, sort of buffet that you can, that you can eat from in distress. And there's salad that's good for you. Probably pretty safe. Can't expect to make 30% returns,

but probably make very, very healthy returns per unit of risk. And then, you know, there's chocolate cake, right? I mean, there's stuff that is pretty aggressive and basically good, but like extremely high octane. And finding that balance in anybody's portfolio, I'm sure if anybody has a portfolio,

they think about that their own position. It's like, okay, here's some like stalwart stuff and then here's some spec. And I've got to keep it in proper proportion. So that's how I job those things is I don't know that they're mutually exclusive or they're kind of, I don't think they're talking about each other. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer.

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You say buildings being constructed and this mechanic needs to get paid for his work. And so what does the diligence process look like? You go on something like Pacer, you find this lien or this lawsuit or whatever it might be listed. You approach them. And then is there a lot of diligence on the company itself to make sure they are able to pay it and they're good for it? What does that look like?

Yeah, exactly. So you have PACER when you're thinking of bankruptcies. When you're thinking of lien or like real property lien, you don't only need to go to that county, you know, where the real property is located. I think one of the things, you know, early on you learn when you're doing, I mean, I didn't come up through a lending, you know, I didn't come up through high yield or come up through fixed income or bonds.

I came up really through just pure distress, you know, doing claims and then moving on to loan. So I came from a different angle. And you think like, oh, well, just think about this way. Anything that's a lien doesn't attach to, it can only attach to real property. It can only attach to property.

It can't attach to, you know, we really can't attach to company. So you're always thinking of what's your collateral. You know, so anything with a lien is like, okay, what's my collateral on this?

And, you know, if you're buying a mechanics lien, it's a building, what's that building worth? And so you don't even really need to know what's going on with the, quote unquote, better or the company that owns the equity.

It's almost irrelevant. And then if you think about, like, I don't know, we got involved in merit, time, okay, well, what's the vessel worth, right? And where am I in the pecking order? Am I in front of the preferred ship mortgage behind it? How much is this vessel worth? Yadda, got to get out. So you're thinking about what the collateral is worth when you're buying

liens. Those come up. We started buying them. I started buying them in bankruptcy. And then, you know, I've done a few outside. You need to know how to collect on them in state court and things like that if they're not in bankruptcy or not in chapter. and they're great. They're fun little playground, but it's hard for larger stress firms to make, there's not enough meat on the bone for them to be that interested in it. So again, it's like, you know,

I met some guys recently and I've, of course, heard about people buying tax liens. Why do tax liens exist? Because they're so unscailable. Like, you know, once you start get a certain amount of money, or if you're any certain institution, you would almost laugh at the idea of going and doing like tax liens, it doesn't matter how good the returns are.

It's completely unscalable. Well, that's what's so interesting about this idea right now, especially because with all these major asset prices at all time highs, a lot of people start looking for alternative investments and not really sure where to look. So something like this, it's interesting because I'm sure a lot of our listeners are fairly small in their investment sizes. And this is a way to find some outsides returns. Potentially, I mean, I'm not saying everyone could do what you do because you're highly specialized in what you do. But like, it's just, well, it's an interesting example of, you know, Buffett's early. days at work, you know, living on and that this is still alive and well, this idea of special situations. Something jumped out of me about what you just said about, yeah, you got to go look at the county. So what are you doing? Reading newspapers and different counties all over the

world and figuring out what there's an issue with the building. Talk to me a little bit about how these deals come across your desk. Yeah. So, I mean, we follow most of the bankruptcy filing, so that's easy because it's filed in PACER and you can either, there are a number of services, I don't know, I think maybe court listener, which is like a free PACER set up by like a 501C charity. And I'm a fan of court listener because when I click on documents, because PACER costs money, you can get the documents for free on court listener. So those cases, and in the bigger bankruptcy, they have what are called claims administration agents. So prime clerk, strato, KCC, or is it KKC?

I think it's KCC. And there are a few others, but those are kind of the big boys. And so like Hertz was on, I think Prime Clerk. It might have been Stretto. I think it's prime clerk. But these are like, you can Google these firms and put in claims administration agents. They'll come up and you can look at the dock in some big cases like, I don't know, like a Chesapeake or a PG&E or a Hertz.

When you start talking about when you're talking about, which is those liens and stuff like that, I don't even have. That's like a fire hose at me. Like I can't possibly find all this stuff. Sometimes what I'll do is I just have Google alerts set up for. things like, you know, news articles about distressed, or even if you had like the real deal, which is like, you know, really a real estate magazine, you'll see people filing court actions that will get picked up in like local trade pubs, publications. And you can just kind of read those

stories and you're like, oh, they're filing on this building. I should go to that county and look up that building. If there's one lien, there's probably 10 lanes. And you can kind of go from there. But you're right. It's very, it's so fragmented. I don't, I mean, if somebody, there are, I think, some firms out there that claim that they're like, you know, maybe building like tech to be able to gather all this information and therefore they take advantage of it for an investment strategy so they can scale it. I don't know if one exists. I think you just came up with a business idea there, which is if you were able to somehow like pull all this data in, that would be great. I mean, one company, which is called Z-Lean, basically it helped people file mechanics

loans. So one of the ways you can do it is you can, you know, frankly, just watch their blog about people filing mechanics liens and how they had such a great experience. because they were able to protect their rights and they'll follow news stories. And then all of a sudden, even on something like Twitter, you're, you know, someone's filing against some school and you have some Twitter feed that like might follow that, like a distressed Twitter feed that might say, oh, six flags might file for bankruptcy, things like that. And oh, all these guys that, you know, delivered literally this happened, roller coasters to six flags that filed like liens on their, you know, on their, on the property because they were like

still in the middle of erecting some ridiculous roller coaster. So it's just kind of like reading the news, man. And you could get more systematic about it. But I would say that for the most part, anything big starts to get reported. I mean, the problem of a lot of the stuff is it can be very, very small. And it's hard. And then if you build your network, you do get in bounds. But that takes, you know, five, ten years of like sending 10 or 30, you know,

10, 20, 30, 40 emails a day just or just sort of like random solicitation emails. I was like, hey, you know, I see you join the, you know, Turnaround Association in America. I see you join the American Bureau of Bankruptcy, American Bureau, American Institute for Bankruptcy, things like that. It reminds me that as you kind of train your mind, you start learning about investing, you start to realize that investing is everywhere. These opportunities are kind of everywhere. If you know where to look and you train your eye how to do it, shifting gears a little bit. One billionaire that we haven't really discussed much. on the show is Sam Zell.

And I've heard that he's one of your favorites. What do you like about Sam Zell's approach? And what do you think you've learned from studying him? Well, first of all, the book's phenomenal. I read it and I did the audiobook. I strongly recommend. I'm not huge in the audiobooks, but I have to recommend the audiobook

because he reads it himself and his voice is great. So highly recommended as a Christmas gift, someone's looking for one. You know, he wrote an article about grave dancing. It was called Grabe Dancing. And basically this idea was, you know, and I'm going to paraphrase, maybe someone who's a real estate person would just like totally, you know, break this part. But, you know, there are ways to come into situations, capital structures that are upside down where you can inject some capital, be the first out, meaning you put in, let's say, just making round numbers, some $100 million project that's bankrupt. You put in a few million dollars, but your first out capital.

And yet you get a lot of equity, if not all the equity. to basically help a bank or help some lender out that can't take on like, you know, in his case, it would be a real estate project gone sideways. But in the case of, you know, yourself, it might be any project you know a lot about. You know, like you could say another drinks company that's kind of gone sideways. You put it in a million, your million comes out first. You get a big chunk of equity and you right size the ship and you figure out what their copacking problem is, you know?

So I just think opportunities everywhere. And to me that he really, you know, exemplified that. And they started, you know, quite humbly as well, which everyone thinks they have to, I don't know, people think they're going to put the suit on and they have to sort of become a big hedge fund or something to do deals and get out there. And I don't, I don't know that's the case. I mean, for myself, I thought the same thing. And, you know, I had a hard, hard time scaling my hedge fund. And frankly, I've done better not having a fund, just doing deals and building a reputation as someone who can do this and is. I don't want to call it trustworthy, but just sort of like is decently professional and can transact. And, you know, both give us capital to either do deals or guys who need deals built, you know, some bankruptcy attorney or some restructuring professional that, you know, they have a client and the client needs money, you know, and they need someone who's going to get down the business and who can actually close and things like that.

So it just takes a long time to build up and do start really small. I think you just think you should really start with the unscalable and work your way out, as opposed to, I think a lot of guys are like immediately like, well, this is not scalable. I'm like, yeah, but you're 25. Like, it's just being trying to learn. It's like, you don't need to be scalable yet. What were some of the other challenges with your own hedge fund? Because you hear about, yeah, it's hard to scale.

But is that so bad? I mean, if you're getting deals and making your fees and, you know, you could probably still make a nice living off of a smaller hedge fund. Is it always just scale or die with when it comes to hedge funds? Or is there, you know, what was that the issue or was there something else? I think there's a bifurcation in the market. You're either a high net worth hedge fund, and that's a particular type of product, or you're an institutional hedge fund, and that's a different type of product

with a different type of cost structure. I think for the high net worth guys that can self-promote, you know, they can get on Twitter, they can go on podcasts, and it's amazing the democratization of just kind of people being able to get out there and pitch their investment process. That's fantastic. And those guys can get by on $5, $10 million funds. Now they won't be living their life, Riley,

You know, they're really saving and they're probably pretty young and they're living humbly, but you can make it happen. And if you put up five, 10 years of good performance, maybe get to 20, 30, 40, 50, who knows, maybe up to 100 million. And that's a business, right? That can work. On the flip side of that, institutional grade hedge funds, I'm sure someone's going to totally disagree with me. But, you know, I would argue you need way more than that.

You need probably 30 million out of the gate, 50 million out of the gate. And you need infrastructure. You need compliance and like high, high end. service providers because you got to have them, A, because they are better, and B, because institutions not requested, they demand it. I mean, they absolutely demand it because they're not getting fired over you. If you can't check the boxes from an institutional standpoint, they will not allocate to you. But I just think in terms of, I'm just trying to share there other ways to do it and go about investing capital and doing the thing you love without just

going that similar route of like, hey, let's just launch a fund, whether it's, because some guys have gone IRA and separately managed account models. And other guys have gone, you know, research-based models. Some guys are working internally with, like, one client, maybe like a family office or something like that. There's just lots of ways to do it. That's all I was kind of. That's the only...

Why are the costs so big? I mean, especially for your fund, where there just crazy attorney fees, given that you're dealing with bankruptcies and all these other issues that involve special contracts and reviewing? And where does the cost, you know, essentially lie? I think it's service providers that, you know, it's like a cottage industry. Like it starts out cheap and then people say, oh, wow, there's a lot of like demand here. I can charge more.

I can charge more. I can charge more. And so this sort of cottage industry builds up, you know, and so all of a sudden it's 10,000 or 25,000 do something where basically the documents all look the same. And I don't think that's the big hurdle. I think the big hurdle is crossing the calves between the high net worth hedge fund and the the institution of great hedge fund is almost impossible. That is a hard chasm. And the high net worth individual doesn't necessarily have the same, they don't want the same products as an institution might want. The high net worth guy is probably just like looking at the numbers, maybe reading

your write-up, meeting you and be like, oh, I like you. You're an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. I'll give you a million bucks. And that's great. But they probably expect you to knock the cover off the ball for them. And an institution is more like, hey, we want a good return. we also want like a lot of risk control. Like we're fiduciaries. We're trying to target like, you know, whatever, 8% in our pension here. You know, we're not allocating you to like swing for the fences. Unless that's a directive, which I guess there is the concentrated equity manager,

which is kind of become in vogue. I think with some institutional allocators that puts a lot of risk on the GP itself because, I mean, they'll pull their money if the GP has big drawdowns, I'm sure. But, I mean, they say they won't. But I mean, for myself with doing the stress, it's hard. hard because all the things are basically level two, level three. And so, meaning like, there's no market price. If I buy a claim and hurts, maybe I can use the bond that's a peri to market. But for the most part, it's like, I own that thing. And

like, I could probably call some brokers and try to get a quote for Mark's purposes. But it's hard when you're running a $5 million fund and you have, you know, no offense, like very low in service providers to be able to manage that and have like a full, like, a full, like, like compliance and investment and valuation committee around that. Does that make sense? So it's hard for the strategy of distress to fit in that emerging manager category. It's a barrier of entry that a lot of the larger call it 50 million up or even maybe 30 to 50 million and up, alt lender and distress firms, a luxury they have, really, that barrier

of it's hard to get the proper compliance and valuation oversight. I mean, you might have, if you take any big position, you might need a third-party valuation for your end. And that can cost you $25,000. So the actual bankruptcy administration isn't going to do a lot. I mean, it can, but that's not really it. It's more about just the cost of running something that's really a bit high end in the sort of the cottage industry for emerging managers doesn't know how to handle that. They know how to like check your interactive broker account to make sure that like, you know, the stocks you say you own, they say you own, right? They did sort of like matches, and they can look up price on Bloomberg, but they don't know how to

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All right. Back to the show. You mentioned your investors expecting you to knock the cover off the ball sometimes. There is this unbelievable example or this investment that you did that I think encapsulates a lot of what we just talked about on this episode. And that was your Mount Gawks investment. So start at the top of this example. I know you're going to try and spin it in a very humble way, but this is just such an incredible investment. Just give us the lay of the land here with this, what you saw and how it's panning out. You know, I would just say that so much of your life in business, your personal life, and in investing is going to be serendipitous in the sense that, you know,

I really believe so much of it is, you know, preparation, meaning opportunity. I happen to me in the right place at the right time. I happen to know a lot about bankruptcy. I happen to know how to buy claims. And I just so happen to see something. thing, I thought, well, wow, this is like ridiculously asymmetric. If this works, yeah, this could really work. And I'll get this ridiculously magnified return on probably the most volatile and interesting asset over time. So, yeah, so Mount Cox was interesting. I mean, I sort of

tripped upon Mount Cox reading the FT and I saw the administration. It was probably year in the administration. There was an article in the FT. And I had known what Bitcoin was, but I didn't think anything of it. I mean, who's, I mean, I, you know, I'm sort of living, as we all do, I'm living in my own bubble. And that's the hard part of our investing is this, like, this time period where you need to have your, your ears up, your antennas out, like, and you're kind of like looking, you know, like kind of scoping out, trying to find opportunities. But then when you find something, it might be interesting, you have to choose and choose wisely as best you can on where you're going to spend your time. So for this, you know,

I, I saw the docket. I thought, wow, Japanese insolvency. cryptocurrency claims. Wow, that's amazing. That is really crazy. I wonder how you buy these. I mean, that was my first. It was a sort of curiosity. I wonder how you actually paper buying this kind of thing. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool to buy one just to see if I could do it? So it was like someone saying like, wouldn't it be cool to build a cabinet, see if I could just do it? There's something like that, you know, like someone. So I did. So I kind of went out there in the market and it's easy to read about the case. It was all in English and in Japanese. It was in dual languages, just because there were so many foreign creditors that they do everything

in English and Japanese. This is like 2016. Bitcoin was probably at $300. And remember, I bought some Bitcoin on Zappo and maybe on Coinbase as well, just to kind of be like, hey, if I'm going to buy these claims, I should probably know what Bitcoin really is. is. Like, people talk about it.

I bought one claim, and I thought, oh, that's really cool. Where did you buy the claim? How did you find someone to sell you a claim? So this is true in American cases. is not always true in foreign cases, and it just happened to be that a list of creditors, of approved creditors was, I don't, I mean, it is available if you're a creditor in the court, but someone had actually leaked the approved creditor list. And I remember, because like, hopefully this was pre-GDPR, but we had gotten a hold of the list,

and it was all public there. I mean, you can, I think there's even links probably to a newspaper where they had the list, you know, posted or at least, you know, on their servers or whatnot. But there was a list of approved creditors floating around. So I started fishing around and I figured, okay, I'll start with the funny name because this will be easier to Google and find somebody to match with it. You know, because like John Smith is going to be pretty hard to find. But, you know, your last name is it lock or B.

Is that how you say it? Locker B, yeah. That's pretty, you know, trade Locker B. That would be, I might Google Trey Locker B. And I'd look for a guy who was maybe into computer science. Maybe he was into crypto, like if he had it as an interest on LinkedIn or on, on Twitter or something. And, you know, maybe he's the right age.

You know, maybe he's like below, you know, 35 and is into computer science or, you know, somehow into cryptography and whatnot. So I started doing that and I basically found a few claims, bought them. And I didn't think my, at the time, crypto is in 300. We bought the claims for a look-through price of about $100 in Bitcoin. So it's kind of an okay trade. It's like, oh, that's okay trade. This happens a lot of times in the life cycle of trade.

It's like a company know a lot about. I don't know, maybe if you followed Disney really closer or something, and you're like, this is an inflection point. The real inflection point in the trade was 2018. I think when Bitcoin went to over 20,000, but it kind of pulled back. And the trustee was sold some crypto to basically raise fiat. And we were able to buy the claim where we were buying the crypto for free. And let me explain how it was just, but you added up the cash in the estate. and you added up the crypto, or you just added up the cash, leave the crypto for a second.

And you divided by the outstanding claims, you were going to get about $450 to $480 per claim, per BTC, per Bitcoin. And we were able to buy them anywhere between $300 to $400. So we always knew we were going to get the $450 to $480 back in cash. And on top of the cash was Bitcoin. And, you know, I pitched this trade all over town in New York trying to get a hedge fund to like putting capital and let's do it. And they were, you know, people were like, hey, this is not that scalable. This is crypto.

I'll never get it passed. The common objection, too small, not scalable. It's crypto. I'll never get it best my investment committee. Or like, oh, I get it. You're getting free functionality. But like, what does Bitcoin even make it work? I mean, let's be real.

And I was like, I don't know. I think it's a real possibility. It could be worth something. And it hasn't died yet. Even in the trade I was putting it on, assuming Bitcoin stayed where it was, it was somewhere between the 8 and 10x return. And that was in Bitcoin, I think was it about 10 grand. So we're getting the Bitcoin for free.

So our downside was extremely limited. I mean, in my mind, practically zero other than like legal risk and, you know, cost of collection and IRA risk. And, you know, optionality in convex me was incredibly high. So I was, so I loaded the boat. I mean, my hedge fund at the time, we were actually winding it down. So we didn't add any in the hedge fund. But I was able to get.

a family office on board. And since my hedge fund was winding down, we were making distributions. I mean, this is crazy. And I would never recommend someone do this. I put all my personal money in it. So I did that knowing that it was a little aggressive. And maybe I did it out of spite for my hedge fund closing. But no, not really.

I really thought it was an amazing trade. I remember I actually had the claims that we bought in the whole setup. I remember sitting at dinner here in London where I am now. and one of my investors was coming through. And I remember sitting at dinner with him trying to explain to him like what, how great this was. And he's just like, you know, he's a nice guy. He's very smart.

It's just like can't be bothered to like look at the spreadsheet that I'm like, you know, I'm such a young somewhat naive person just thinking that this guy at dinner when we're having like drinks and dinner and wants to see my spreadsheet that I printed out where I lay out the convexity and how great this is and all this stuff. And he's like, this is great. Yeah, whatever, whatever, great, great, great. You know, and he just doesn't, he did not care. I wasn't, maybe I wasn't very good at pitching it. But anyway, so I got a family office on board.

We bought a few million dollars worth, I put all my money into it. And I want to say the rest is history because we've been buying claims over the years. But now we buy claims, of course, we don't, we don't, we're not making 40x. We're making, you know, we're buying the Bitcoin for about half price, maybe 60 cents on the dollar. So we buy them for a large crypto hedge fund that believes in crypto. And I have to say, I've spent a lot of time in crypto now because of this. And I'm a bit of a believer. This is incredible.

And while you were describing that, you know, I always think of like the big short that movie. And I was just envisioning you as like the Christian Bale character sitting there being like, I'm trying to buy some credit to Paul Swanson and these bankers like laughing at him. Like, this is you shopping this deal around town and getting laughed out of the room a lot of a time. And then to even go from that and have all this conviction to put all your own personal money in it. That's the brilliance here when you know what you're doing. I mean, I have to especially

asterisk's this and say you have to know what you're doing. Because it reminds me also of, you know, the Druck and Miller Soros bet of shorting the pound. And Druck and Miller takes it to Soros and says, I put 100% of the fund in it. And Soros says, why are we putting? Yeah, yeah, you're an idiot. Why aren't we putting two to 300% in this? So walk me through the idea of like even getting the family office involved. Is that your leverage in somewhere? What does that do for you to get them involved? You make some fees off of the deal, you know, shopping to them, but is there anything more

to it than that? I mean, so the original family office gave us, you know, your traditional, I shouldn't say the exact numbers, but think of two and 20 and think about what they might have given us. It's something not too far off that. I wouldn't say it was, it was a lonely trade. We did have people, you know, it's funny. Most of the time when I pitched it to the hedge funds, I would have.

have the guy that I met with, like, email me afterwards or message me afterwards, be like, hey, man, like, it's not good for the fun, but like, hey, you think I could get some of these claims from my PA? I can't tell you how many guys I had kind of do that to me. And I actually did try it with a few people to get them a claim here or there. You know, family offices are funny. You know, I met them because I had been quoted in a Mount Cox article about how I thought the case was going well. And I thought, you know, if the, it's a long story, but if the Bitcoin gets returned to the original claimants, which there was some discussion where I might go back to the company, then it'll be a fantastic return from my investors and this is a great thing and

whatever. So, so I would, I've been quoted in this little Forbes article about Mount Cox and somebody that was sort of into crypto who ran his family office, it just like reached out to me. And I said, yeah, I'm working on this trade. I'm frankly, I was closing my fund and I was trying to find a seed investor to start like an institutional grade hedge fund. And meanwhile, he was like, oh, do you mind working on this trade for me? I was like, absolutely not. I'd love to. It's a great trade.

It's a great trade. But I wasn't sure about him because I didn't know him. Family offices, you know, they might use a Gmail account. They might be in the second floor of a level walk-up office and you think, gosh, this guy even having the money to invest. But he was, I mean, he wasn't that bad. But it's very, very legit. We transacted and got an LLC agreement together and, you know, the rest of this history. So I get out of it as, you know, we get carried and a very small manager would be to run the investment.

But really, it's all carry. This guy wasn't going by any heuristics. I mean, he thought, yeah, this person knows about bankruptcy. I know about Bitcoin. I believe in Bitcoin. And I'm buying it really, really cheaply. So I'm getting a ton of convexity on the price of Bitcoin. So Bitcoin 10x is I make 100 X.

that was always the trade. And like I said, the time he was buying it, he was buying it where he was getting the Bitcoin for free. So, you know, that guy is a fantastic investor. No one's ever heard of him. And he runs around trying to find stuff like this. And, I mean, I'm glad he thinks that Mount Cox is the best trade he's ever done. But he's, I'm sure, found tons of stuff over the years.

And he's just a regular guy. It's just out there hunting. As I understand it, they're still voting on or they were considering for a long time. Just confirmed, yeah. So walk us through this idea of what the issue there was as far as the claims and the par value of the Bitcoin versus appreciation. So talk to us about the issue there and if that has been resolved or not. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So that's been resolved. And what's interesting about it and I don't want to get too, well, I enjoyed stuff. So I apologize. But, you know, in American bankruptcy and most insolvencies around the world, if you have a claim, you know,

of, Trey, if your kombucha company is owed $120,000 a day the company files for bankruptcy, well, how much are you owed? You're owed 120,000. You're not owed more than 120,000. And so the question with these crypto exchanges that went under, and this one in particular, was, well, what happens when the value of the property that you had at this brokerage goes up in value? Not a little bit, like a lot. And so who gets the increase in value? Do the claimants get the increase in value or does the company get that? And you just get what we were referred to as that damage claim, that $120,000. So the question was, this has come up in a few jurisdictions, not just in Japan, is who gets that increased post-petition? And it really hinges on whether

Bitcoin is considered property. And if it's considered property, then you should have a claim for the full amount of your property. And meaning like if you lost 10 Bitcoin, you should have a 10-Dict coin, no matter what that U.S. dollar, fiat dollar value is. Or is it currency? And you should have like this damage claim that's calculated at the time of the petition, being at the time they went under, Bitcoin is it $400-ish? And so you get, you know, 10 Bitcoin times $400.

Now that's a much lower number than 10 Bitcoin times $50,000, right? And so the question before the court was, who gets that increased? So this kind of got litigated, but not really what happened. was the Japanese court pumped in on the question. They sort of said, oh, we're not really going to answer this. It likely is property, but let's just switch it from a liquidation to what they call civil rehabilitation. In America, we would say from a 11, excuse me, from a Chapter 7 liquidation to a Chapter 11, a Chapter 11 sort of reorganization. And therefore, everybody can consensually give the increase in value to the claim. It's without having to provide a legal opinion on whether

Bitcoin is property for purposes of the Japanese insolvency code or whether it's currency and there should be a damage value and that's all you get. So they punted on the question, which is kind of genius. But they got the votes and imperative accepting class, which is the claimants, to vote in favor of it. And that was confirmed earlier this year. Boy, things in the Japanese, and I can't speak for the other parts of the Japanese legal system, but in the insolvency system move like snails pace and, well, compared to the, to America or American bankruptcy system, which people refer to as speed court.

And yeah, so that's kind of, and I don't know exactly what the question was, but yeah, it's been confirmed and it was done consensually because the paired accepting class was what the actual claimant. And so just to be clear, these were, imagine if Coinbase went bankrupt, you know, God forbid, but imagine Coinbase went bankrupt, it was your Coinbase account, you know, this is what these guys had. They basically had Coinbase accounts from 2014. And MacOx at the time was 70 plus percent of the volume of crypto, which at the time

crypto wasn't really crypto, it was just Bitcoin. Unbelievable. Such an amazing story. And what a investment and a conviction. I mean, it's so fascinating. It could be a movie, in my opinion. I have some other great stories. None that have led to such a great workout.

I think that you're better off spending time in these areas, though. stuff where people kind of think you're crazy to spend your time thinking about, I don't know, longevity, going to Mars, like, I don't know, Cambocha, like things that people think like, why would just spend a much of time on that? Everybody knows just to go work at a PE firm. I just think that, you know, life will be more interesting and the opportunities will be more interesting if you sort of find a road less traveled. I agree. And, you know, I'm often overwhelmed by just the sheer size of the investing universe. So talk to us.

If you've got any advice that we can kind of wrap up with about, you know, how these retail investors can essentially filter down the opportunities to a much more appropriate size or something that fits their bill a little bit more. What would you recommend? You know, yeah. So if somebody doesn't want, if they enjoy investing, but they don't want to spend like an ornament amount of time doing it, there's nothing wrong with the kind of never sell David Gardner, like kind of tin can stock sort of approach.

I think that as eminently advisable to somebody that's just going to buy Disney and own it for 20 years or 50 years. And they have a day job. They like what they do. They work as an accountant or they work as a doctor. And they don't need to. I see people getting into danger when they think that they can kind of armchair it. Okay, I'm not saying you can't invest a little bit in sort of the stalwart projects. But are you punting around on like little alt coins?

Like, well, you know, what are you doing? You know, it's like, I think it's like a propensity that's not really investing. It's just kind of like gambling. I mean, again, it's fine. You can do it, but just remember it's entertainment. That would be my first thing that I see people do. And I just think like, why? Why?

You know, like, but if it is of interest, you know, try to hone in on something you really like. I mean, I met guys that, you know, rolled up all kind of things. Lawn care businesses. I just got in self-storage because they like real estate and they came across the deal. liked it and they stuck with it. Even for yourself, like, okay, you're going to learning a lot about running a company with your current company, right? I mean, you must think, I think there's something to be said for pulling on the string of that. Like, if you're a doctor and you know a lot about med tech, like, why not like find some interesting med tech stuff to invest in? If you're a

bankruptcy guy, find some bankrupt stuff. If you know about CPG and brands and stuff, try to find some smart people that are launching their own brands or brands that are like, it's $100 million valuation capra is now, but it's definitely going to be a billion dollar company because I know the space and I really think that this is like a brand that'll get sort of scapelocity and 10 years, Coca-wana buy them or something. So I just think that you should use your unique advantages. Use your unique advantages. And then the third thing that individuals can do that institutions cannot do is who cares

if you have big drawdown? Who cares if it takes five years, 10 years? If you're a money manager and something takes five years, you'll be fired before that works. If you're an individual, you should be using that to your advantage. So I actually really like this book. It's an autobiography about Bill Zuckendorf. That's a phenomenal book. And I had somebody push back to me on Twitter recently saying, oh, well, he went bankrupt.

I'm like, yes, he did. I'm not saying, like, be Bill Zekendorf. But he was a phenomenal person, and he did some amazing deal. and had a great advice. So I highly recommend that book. There was one book about the Orient Express Hotel chain, which is fantastic. Again, I really like autobiographies. Actually, I know a lot of people read Alchemy and Finance by Soros,

but my favorite Soros book is Soros on Soros. And it sounds ridiculous because it's not an investment book, but Marcus Aurelius, which is fantastic meditations and things. But those are books about life. But, you know, they're important for investing. You know, Buffett's totally right. I mean, once you have a certain, I don't know, a certain IQ, you don't even need an IQ. As long as you have like a certain interest in investing, like it's so much more temperament

once you pass that. Oh, yeah. I came to investing, stayed for the philosophy. That's what I feel like I has been my experience. I love it. I was, you know, that's funny to say that because I, I think I originally want, Buffett was such a North Star. He still is, but he was such a North Star for me growing up because, you know, he was such

a fatherly figure for me and more than just investing. He was like a gentleman, you know, like someone who had ethics and actually had some principles. And so there was like, yeah, there was a business and then there was like a philosophy to it. Awesome, Tom. Well, before I let you go, I want to give you the opportunity to hand off to our audience where they can follow along with what you're doing and any other resources you want to share. Oh, gosh. Yeah. I mean, you know, I work for a few large family offices and one in particular.

I'm on Twitter a bunch, not talking about stuff we're working on just because I can't. And they wouldn't like it if I did. So normally I'm talking about stuff I'm buying with my own money. So clearly, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong with you. I'm wrong and I'm losing money. I'm not just like, I have nothing to sell. Yeah, I'm around. And I love looking at weird and interesting stuff.

I love it. This is a fascinating discussion and I highly enjoyed it. I think it's a place we don't explore very often on this, on the show, but there's so many interesting opportunities abound, it seems like, if you know where to look. And listen, I'd love to do this again soon, and I really enjoyed it. So let's do it again. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me on. Opportunity is everywhere. Remember that. Opportunity is everywhere. Love it. All right, everybody, that's all we had for you. This time. If you're loving the show, don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast app to make sure you get the episodes automatically.

If you want to share some feedback about the show, please reach out to me on Twitter at Trey Lockerby. And if you haven't already done so, definitely check out my favorite new feature on TIP finance, and that is the billionaire portfolio. Take a look at all your favorite billionaires and what they're currently holding in their portfolios and then compare it to your own. Just Google TIP finance. It should pop right up and enjoy. And with that, we'll see you again next time.

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