I Tried Outsmarting Nancy Pelosi's Investment Strategy

All right. You ready to do this?

Yeah. Hold on. I'm just, uh, I'm just executing a stock trade right now. I'm, I am the Wolf of Wall Street right now, Sam. I, we are live on this podcast, but I'm not here. I'm not here talking to you. I'm in Wall Street right now. I'm on the stock market floor shaking my money saying, take my money because I'm buying a stock.

I don't think the Wolf of Wall Street used Robinhood, but that's okay.

If you want, here's, here's what we're going to do. If you want to find out how to lose money like I do, you should stick around.

All right, so what is it? You've been on a stock kick. You're really on a stock kick, which is just bad news for me.

I— anytime I get on a stock kick, bad things happen. Um, I just don't realize it till 3 years later. So let me just show you these two charts. So take a look at this chart. The first, it's about this stock called Palo Alto Networks. I don't think you're following too much of Palo Alto Networks. Am I right in assuming that?

I'm not following right now, but I know like it's one of the Silicon Valley OGs. It's been around for a long time and yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Good. That's pretty good. All right. So look at this stock. First, I know a bullshitter when I hear one and you don't know shit about this stock.

I've read, I know, I know whatever you can learn reading the Wikipedia. I've read it. Wikipedia.

Tell me this. What do they sell? What's the product? No, no, no. Why are you looking at your screen? Look at me. Look me in the eyes and tell me what they sell.

Networking and data solutions, I believe. So some type of something like they used to be like one of the OGs that had servers, didn't they?

Dude, here's the reality. I don't know what they sell either. It doesn't matter what they sell. Look at this chart for a second. So this chart shows last 5 days. Damn, down 14%, 15% basically. That's pretty bad. Uh, and actually it would be worse than that, except for there's this little uptick. So look at the second chart. This is today, up 10%. You might ask yourself, did they just have like an earnings call? Did they announce a new product? Did they announce a, a big AI breakthrough? What is causing the stock in the first 2 hours of trading today to be up 10%? The answer is our girl, friend of the pod, Nancy Pelosi just made a trade. She just bought $1 million of Palo Alto Networks, uh, stock, and immediately people start following her action. Start buying this thing blind because they don't know what she knows, but they know that she knows something. And isn't that so funny that that's what's happening nowadays? Like, I follow this account. I don't know if you follow the Pelosi Tracker, and they're like, it says, breaking, the Queen is back at it again. She just bought $1.25 million of Palo Alto Network calls. And then it says, and then like there's a sub-headline, Palo Alto Networks is one of the leading cybersecurity companies in the nation, like in case you need to know. But here's the reality. You don't need to know. You just need to know that Nancy Pelosi, who has one of the greatest stock trading track records of our time, just bought this. And she—

are you actually buying this?

No, I'm not buying the Palantir.

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

Yeah. Invest blindly off random Twitter anonymous accounts, uh, you know, claims about, you know, 90-year-old women's trades. So that's what I'm doing. Uh, no, I didn't buy this one, but I did find it. I was kind of curious. I was like, I saw this tweet and I was like, I've seen her track record or like the data analysis of her track record. It was like really, really impressive. I don't have it offhand here, but it's like better than most hedge funds. It's better than most like famous investors that you know of. And so I was wondering, are people just fast following her trades? That's why I looked at what's happened today. And the share price is up $27 this morning because she had to disclose what she bought. And so people were tracking that. So I just find that I was curious, does the stock actually move when Pelosi makes a trade? And our girl moves weight. All right. She makes waves in the market.

All right, everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. And this one's easy because I'm going to show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say I, I mean not my team. I mean I'm the one who actually made it. So I've got this company called Hampton. You could check it out. Joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys where we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people, a lot of times people are afraid to ask. So things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these like interesting questions. And then we'll put it in a survey. And I went and made a landing page so you can check it out at joinhampton.com/wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. And the hard part with this is with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of a, a higher-end customer, sort of like, like a Louis Vuitton or Ferrari. So I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates. That's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand. Very easy. They have this drag and drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. And once it's made, I then shared it on social media, and we had thousands of people see it, and thousands of people who gave us their information. And I can then see over the next handful of weeks, this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from. So it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn, whatever it came from, I can actually go and look at it, and I can say, oh well, that worked, that didn't work, do more of that, do less of that. And if you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it, but you could check it out. Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. All right, now back to MFM. I'm an idiot and I don't know anything about politics, but, but what I would say is if I'm like in charge, what I would say to all these folks who are, uh, you know, high up in the government is I would pay them a huge sum, like $2 or $3 million a year, right? Because there's only like 500— how many, how many people are— I don't even know. This is how, uh, how ignorant I am. How many people are in the Senate and Congress? I would pay them a ton of money and say, there, now you can't speak, you can't consult, and also all of your money has to be in this political ETF or whatever it's called. So we know every trade you're doing and you can't actually buy individual stocks. It's kind of ridiculous that she's able to do this, right? It's actually her husband. Her husband's able to do it. It's their money, but it is kind of crazy.

Well, I think— well, she can't— she's allowed to do it too. It's not—

It's not only her husband's a PE guy. I mean, he's like, this is his job, I would imagine.

All right. So let me just tell you this. The last big trade that I saw from her was in, I believe, 2022. So July 2022, Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, who's a VC, decided to buy 25,000 shares of Nvidia. Hmm. They said, what's the best stock in the world right now since 2022? What is almost the most valuable company in the world right now? NVIDIA. Oh, that's right. So they bought it at $165. It's currently trading at $800. Oh, that's pretty good. Uh, a little 4.8x for our girl Nancy. That's, that's pretty impressive.

Good trade. When I first, yeah, great trade. When I first moved to San Francisco, I told you the story how I lived in this warehouse. It was like a dirt cheap warehouse. It was horrible. It was an awful place to live. I lived with 4 other guys. One of the guys worked there at NVIDIA when I lived in this warehouse. He worked at NVIDIA, I believe from 2009 to 2014. And I was doing the math. If he had $150,000 of equity given to him over 4 years, which seems reasonable, uh, that's $30,000, $40,000 a year. If he didn't sell, his net worth would be something like $35 million. Is that insane or what? And he wasn't, he wasn't an early employee. He would have been employee. I don't know how big they were at the time, but it was thousands of people back then. Isn't that insane that someone could do that? Nvidia has been insane.

Uh, so what was the S&P 500 gain last year? Last year, last year the S&P 500 was up 24% in 2023.

Okay.

Nancy Pelosi was up 65%. She just tripled the stock, the S&P 500 performance with her trades, you know, as her side hustle while she's the whatever, the Speaker of the House or whatever the hell she is. Um, Pretty crazy. You know what else has grown a mere, you know, 25% in the last year? What? Our YouTube subscriber base. We are putting Pelosi to shame out here, but we need your help. We need your help. We need you to go to YouTube. We need you to type in My First Million, and we need you to subscribe because we put in so much work every week and people think it's free. It's a common misconception. They think it's free. Sam, tell them what it is.

Look, this podcast isn't free. Everything on YouTube's free except for this channel. All we need in payment is just you to click subscribe. It takes you literally 10 seconds, but it means the world to us. We pour our hearts in this. That's all we're asking in exchange. It's called the gentleman's agreement. We're not there to actually see it. You do it, but we hope you do. That's why it's the gentleman's agreement. Um, what do you got? What's the trade that you just did that you actually are excited about? Because you said when we started, you said we've got— you got a trade that you're doing as we speak. What is it?

Disclaimer, not financial advice. Disclaimer, I'm very bad at stock trading, but I persist because I'm the little engine that could. I'll never give up. And so I noticed, um, I don't know if you noticed, but over the weekend there was like a lot of negative sentiment around Google, which is why, because their AI product is, uh, like woke, super woke.

Yeah.

So basically they released Gemini. Which is their answer to ChatGPT, formerly known as Bard, which, by the way, there's a hilarious tweet that goes around every time Google releases a new product or renames something. And people are like, cool, should I? I would love to check this out on Meet, formerly known as Google Meet, formerly known as Google Hangouts, formerly known as Google Hangouts Plus, formerly known as Google Duo. And they're like, they'd show how many times Google renames its product. So it renamed Bard, which was awful name to Gemini, better name. Um, and it came out basically, it was Bard. Bard was their, Bard was their, their, you know, the next great act of their company.

They like, the thing about Google is it sounds, the word Google sounds like a noise, which is fine. I'm okay with that. It sounds more like a noise than a name. And they just took that a little bit too far. Bard.

Yeah. They were like, what are we going to call it? And somebody burped on the call and they're like, oh yeah, we can go with that. And the guy didn't know what to do. So he just didn't say anything. So, yeah, basically, if you went to Bard and you were like, hey, can you— it started off when people were like, hey, can you generate an image of spaghetti? And it generated a great image of spaghetti. And they're like, cool, can you generate an image of a Viking? And then it generated an image of a black Viking. And people were like, huh, that's weird. Why is the Viking black? Hey, can you generate an image of a white Viking? and it was like, gave you like a Mexican Viking. You're like, hold on, can you give me an image of a white person? And it was like, nah, I can't do that.

Really?

It was basically either saying no or it was showing a picture of a black person. It's like, what ethnicity was George Washington? And they're like, well, it's highly debated. He might be, might be black. And it was like, you know, they would just do, or it'd be like, uh, who did more damage to society, Elon Musk or Hitler. And it's like, it's hard to say who did more damage to society, Elon Musk or Hitler. Elon Musk tweeted these things about the stock price and Hitler committed genocide. It is really a tough call. And it's like, so people were taking the stuff and running with it. It's like the perfect— it's the way I think about it is there's two tribes. And if you can, if you can get one tribe riled up, you're going to get that, that storyline is going to get some legs. But if you can get two tribes riled up, then you got like a real story. And so this was basically the anti-big company, um, anti-big tech tribe. It's like, yo, babe, wake up. Big tech made a mistake. And then there was the anti, um, anti-woke and the anti-AI tribes. All three tribes got together and basically had a fiesta around this. And so people were sharing this like crazy. And then people were like, the CEO of Google needs to be fired. They were like, you know, Google is too bloated, it's too bureaucratic, it's too woke. It's like it's got the woke virus. It will never recover, blah, blah, blah. You know, Suhail, the guy who created Mixpanel, awesome guy. He's like, Google has lost its way. Then I read my next tweet. Elon Musk says the bureaucratic, you know, a Google exec called me and promised to change it, but I told him I don't think the bureaucratic blob inside Google will even let him make these changes. Hopeless, basically, is what these guys are saying. You go on the All In podcast and they're like, I can't believe this. You know, basically like our rights, freedom of speech is at risk here. It needs to tell the truth. Look at this crazy woke bias and everybody's anti-Google. So I woke up today and I was like, pretty sure Google still owns Gmail, YouTube, Google Search, Chrome, Android, Waymo. Okay. I think I'll just go ahead and buy Google stock today because Google's on this dip right now on the negative PR. And I think it's just that old quote of like the short term, you know, the stock market's a popularity contest and the long term it's a weighing machine. And I just think that they have tremendous assets, right? Like, you know, YouTube does— YouTube alone, which is not even Google's like main product, does $32 billion a year in revenue, which is more than Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok all combined. And that's just YouTube, right? And you take like Google Cloud, which is like, does, you know, $36 billion in revenue. That's just like their cloud service, not, not Google Search, right? Not Android, not the Play Store, not, not any of this stuff. And so I just think they have too many assets. And so I have no, I don't really do much analysis aside from I was like, I don't know. It seems like everybody's overreacting to this because it's a really good social media storyline to be like, Google's lost its way. Uh, it's woke. It's going to lose in AI, blah, blah, blah. Maybe it's true. I don't know. To me, seemed like a bit of an overreaction.

I don't think you're wrong. Um, I think that you're right in this particular instance, but I subscribe to the subreddit called money, r/money. And it's basically people, it's a big subreddit and it's people complaining mostly. And there's a lot of it, not complaining, but a lot of it is like, I see all these posts of people in college who are like, I'm now $20 grand in the hole because I was buying options on Robinhood and doing all this stuff on, on these apps where they trade. And in general, I am so against individual trading, even though I think you're right with Google, it ain't going anywhere. I, we, I buy ads on Google. It freaking works so good. Uh, but it's just, I just will, I refuse to go down this path. It's such a slippery slope that I don't want to get addicted to it. And I feel like I would. And you've won a few times. I know you've won a few times recently.

Oh, I'll tell you every time I win, don't worry.

But, but, but have you lost a bunch?

Of course. Of course. Uh, yeah, you can't trade without having bad trades, right? Like, what is the number one rule for having a few good trades is have many trades.

That's insane that you're doing this, but you're not wrong with this.

I'm not doing it with a lot, a lot of money. And also, um, it's an excuse to learn for me too. So I, uh, I don't know. I think that, I think a lot of learning just comes from trial and error and trying things when you build businesses is a really expensive, slow way to— it's like, it's the, it's the highest price way to learn, right? Because takes a long time, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of focus. But there are things where you're like, all right, well, like, you know, very simple. I wanted to learn about AI. And so I pay this guy $500 an hour once a week to just teach me about AI. Yeah. And I wanted to, I wanted to be, I wanted to be up to speed with what's going on. What are the new tools? What are the limitations? What are some of the bottlenecks? And so, you know, I, in general, I have a very A, I want to have some fun in my life. B, I want to learn. And for me, the only way to learn is like Andrew Wilkinson said this once. He's like, I like to walk around with a fork finding sockets to put my fork in. Basically, it's like the only way he learns is by getting electrocuted. And I kind of feel I'm the same way. I hear things and I hear wisdom, but it never actually sinks in until I go and do something. And maybe the real learning here, by the way, maybe the real learning is just don't pick it, don't trade individual stocks, you might actually be at the correct final answer. And so, you know, I'm not saying that you're wrong about that. Philosophically, I agree with what you're saying, but I just carve out a small fund budget that I use to do this.

I, uh, my partner Joe, he trades individual stocks, and this week or last week, he was like, I'm screwed, I'm going back to indexing, because he like looked at all the money that he— I like did a calculator, I go, show me what you had 15 years ago. Show me what you have today. Now let's, I'm going to put it in this calculator. I'm going to show you what you would have had if you would have done this and let's see and compare. And the index fund funding, uh, index investing was so much higher. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to switch. And so he like makes the switch this week.

I did the same calculation and it was 100% true for me too, that if I had just bought the index and, or just added a consistent amount to the index over time, that would have been perfect. But the funny thing is it's not, uh, the, the thing in my analysis, I was like, okay, I went through every single trade. Again, how do you learn? You go back and reflect. So I went through every single trade and I said, what is, what story does this tell me? And I had thought the story would be, my prediction going in was, um, you would have made a little more money if you had done the index, but you know, whatever. Actually, I would have made a lot more money just doing the index. That was learning one. Number two, learning was interesting, which was, I thought I would find, you're not as smart as you think, buddy. Like, you know, you buy this thing because you have all these reasons, but you're wrong. And in actuality, I think I only lost money buying in a very small number of stocks. I think it was like less than 5 stocks that I, what I bought it for versus what it currently is, is less or even less than it would've been if I had just been in the index. Like it's pretty comparable returns. The 2 situations where I got it wrong were number 1, when I, during COVID I bought some momentum. Like I just like bought Zoom or something at some moment. I had bought Zoom like early and it was working so well and I just bought more. That was stupid. I shouldn't have done that. But the second one was, you know, random tips from our friends, you know, friend says, oh man, I'm doing this. They said, yeah, they're a smart friend. And so I bought. So those are the only times that I bought and lost all of my actual losses of where I, where I made less than I would've in the market was just selling early. Because I sold a bunch of things and I sold a bunch of things. Some, some I sold early when they had a lot more room to run. Some I sold when I was, you know, the market sentiment was down or I was feeling fearful and I just wanted to move to cash and I would just sell. And so I actually lost the, all of my losses were in the sell, not the buy, which was surprising to me.

I've been making fun of Joe because he's going all in on indexing and I'm like, great. You, you picked a really good month. All-time highs, record highs. This is the best month ever, decide to do it. And now he's like second-guessing it. Uh, let me show you a company that launched, uh, I think this week or last week, and I want to know what your opinion of it is. So it's called Harbor. So harbor.co. And I want to tell you what this company is and why it's interesting to me, but I'm not sure if it's going to work or not, but I want to hear your opinion of it. Do you remember Deep Sentinel? We had, uh, Selly, uh, on the pod. So Deep Sentinel, I thought it was going to be huge. TBD, verdict's still out. And it was basically, I like these businesses where people are monitoring things. So let me give you an example. So Deep Sentinel, their tagline is, or I don't know if it's their tagline, but the guy said it on the pod. He goes, Ring is a great way to watch your shit get stolen. Uh, which is how it typically works at Ring. Like something like I've had a bike get stolen before and I'm like, oh, let me look at the Ring. Yep. There's the guy who did it. It is in fact stolen. Uh, And so Deep Sentinel is different because it's these— it's cameras similar to Ring, but there's someone on the other end watching the cameras and they'll call the police. And I've had like a drunk Airbnb-er think that my house was their Airbnb and he's like knocking on the door at 2 AM and they called the police on him and like, you know, took care of it, whatever. Uh, there's this other thing called Harbor. So harbor.co, it's basically that, but for baby monitors. And I shared the deck with you. Let me know what you think. But basically Have you ever heard of like sleep training? So basically when you, when your kid gets to be like 3 or 4 months old and they start crying, sometimes you gotta let 'em cry it out a little bit in order to like, you know, figure out what's real and what's not real. And it eventually they quit whining and they go back to sleep. They did this, but for baby monitors. So there's someone monitoring the baby monitor and I think they'll call you or like ping your, the monitor that they give you to let you know, all right, now you actually should get up. The baby's been crying for like 9 or 10 minutes. It's time to get up. Your baby's crying.

I fucking know.

Well, yeah, that's the end of the commercial.

This product makes no sense. How big is your house?

That's why I want to hear your opinion on this, because we had Jack Smith on the pod. Do you remember when we had him on the pod and he did the same thing where he set up like a Ring camera for his baby monitor, and then he hired someone in India to watch the monitor. I think he used Shepherd actually. He hired someone to watch the monitor and to call a dedicated cell phone just to let him know when the baby's been crying for 10 minutes or something like that. And these guys turned that into a product. Uh, what do you think about this?

Well, I have a couple thoughts. First is I love how Sam, the new dad, is like, you ever heard about sleep training? Talking to me, father of two. It's like if I went and worked out and I was like, bro, you ever heard of bicep curls? And you're like, uh, dude, what? Welcome to the gym. Uh, so yes, I, I've understood. I'm familiar with the idea that babies cry and, you know, sleep can get a little hard for parents. All right. Second thing, this whole class of products is like what I call like it's supposed to be anxiety reduction, but actually it's somewhat anxiety inducing. So, you know, the idea would be, hey, you could sleep well knowing that somebody's monitoring your baby at night. And there's a whole bunch of products like this. Like, I don't know if you ever bought like the Owlet, which is like this like ankle monitor, uh, for your baby, or like there's like sock version of this. There's like a, there's like another one that's like measuring their like oxygen, like at all times or whatever.

Hey, I know all about ankle monitors. Been there, done that. I know. I can tell you all about ankle monitors.

Sorry, I'm guilty again. Preaching to the choir there.

I didn't know you could put them on children, but yeah, I know a thing or two about ankle monitors.

Exactly. So those all exist and actually have done well. I think Owlet did pretty well. I know they got in some trouble, but I think they ended up going public.

What is it?

Owlet is— that's what it is. That's the ankle monitor for babies, but with the key thing being like it's measuring, I think, their oxygen levels. So, you know, if the baby, you know, like, because, you know, SIDS is obviously, uh, you know, the biggest, like, you know, nightmare for a parent, um, would be if your baby, you know, suddenly in their sleep, you know, stops breathing. And so the idea was with Owlet, you would get notified if the oxygen, um, levels go down, which is, to me, makes way more sense than the let me know if my baby's crying, because I know if my baby's crying typically, um, you know, through a traditional baby monitor or like, you know, my house is not that big or the baby sleeps in the crib in the same room. Like, you know, that's, I guess, I think this, I think the Owlet stuff makes a lot more sense than Harbor. So yeah, I'm not like super into this idea and that's kind of where I stand. No offense to the people behind Harbor. I'm sure they're great smart people.

The guy who started it started Mizzen and Main, that clothing company. Remember the clothing company that, uh, it's like Golf people wear it. It's like a popular thing. Not, it's not popular among in our lives, but it is very popular.

Pretty successful, right?

Yeah. It's huge. It's like $100 million plus. It's like a big thing, but he came out with this thing and I didn't, I invested a very, very small sum, $1,000. He's a friend of mine and I was like, all right, I'll just do $1,000 just to play. That's my version of you buying Google is just doing small, small investments. But I saw this. and I was like, I don't know, this might actually work. We'll see what happens. But I'm into these things that monitor things. Uh, another one, and this is, this is a little bit of a shill. This is actually totally a shill, but do you remember My Body Tutor? I told you all about My Body Tutor.

I use My Body Tutor. Happy to plug them for free. I'm not a, we don't get paid for this. Just a happy customer.

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

Uh, yeah, it's going great. I love the product genuinely. Uh, even though I'm not a, not a, uh, you know, not promoting, there's no slash Sean. Um, but I, yeah, happy customer. My coach Haley is awesome. And, uh, You know, it's a, it's a good reminder. So, so most things in life, I always get surprised when the answer to most things, if you, if you trace back, you're like, all right, how do I make this thing happen? And you're like, well, you got to take a bunch of action. It's cool. Non-negotiable, right? You got to take a bunch of action, whatever the thing you want in life is, you got to take a bunch of action. Okay. Well, how do you get yourself to take a bunch of action? Well, you got to have the, you know, maybe a strategy or you maybe have a motivation. Those are some of the elements that go into action. Okay. Where do you get the strategy? And the motivation. If you just keep going back down the chain, the number one thing is simply awareness. Like a lot of things in life that aren't happening aren't happening because you haven't actually put your focus on it, right? The laser beam that's in your brain is pointed elsewhere and you haven't actually brought your awareness to, to the situation at hand and you're not bringing your awareness to it regularly enough. As a startup, Sam, I'm sure you used to do the same thing. I used to put like every day when I would come into the office, I'd draw a giant zero on the whiteboards. Like that's how many paying customers I have. And, you know, I was like, I don't need a dashboard. I will write this number here every day of how many paying customers I have. And I would write zero every day because I had to look at that. I had to bring my awareness to the fact that I currently have zero paying customers because otherwise it was very easy to get distracted by a whole bunch of random tasks. But if I started with, well, my main goal is to hit, you know, this many paying customers and I currently have zero. If I start my day with that awareness, then I'm likely to take actions that are in line with changing that number to be what I want. In the same way, you get a phone call in the morning that's like, hey, what's your plan for eating today? And you're like, I don't know, I don't have a plan. I'm just going to eat whatever fucking comes up in front of me, right? Like, you know, whatever I see, I'll eat. Like, well, that's not right. So then you bring your awareness to, okay, that's right. I do have this goal. I am committed to making this happen. I'm going to make a plan and I'm going to just decide up front. I'm going to bring my awareness to that early and often. Or when you take pictures or you log your meals, you're bringing your awareness to what am I eating? Is this in line with what I've I want to be eating or not. Right. So I think awareness is actually like massively underrated, both in diet, but really any goal you have in life. I think everything is downstream of first bringing a bunch of awareness to the thing.

Yeah, dude, it's changed my life. And that's why I've invested in some of these companies where they like monitor stuff for you. And so you're either forced to focus on it or someone else is focusing on it for you. Um, let me tell you one more thing. Have you heard of Penske Media?

No. What is that?

You've never heard of that? Okay. So most people haven't. That's why I wanted to bring this up. I've been, I found this guy a few years ago and I've been following him and I spoke to someone who worked at the company and I didn't realize how big this company is. So let me tell you this story. So there's this guy named Jay Penske. His father is Roger Penske. Roger Penske. Do you remember in San Francisco? Remember those yellow trucks? They were yellow moving trucks and they used to say like Penske. Yeah. So Roger Penske, he was a race car driver. He was like a professional race car driver. And then he started a whole bunch of things, including a moving company. He also owns a, uh, uh, a chain of auto parts store. And so he's a self-made billionaire. He's probably close to 90 at this point, but he's like a big deal. Well, he has this son named Jay and Google Jay Penske. When I Googled Jay Penske, I wanted to hate this guy so much. Tell me what you see when you Google him.

Let me guess, he's too handsome and too rich for you.

He's too handsome. He's too rich. I think his wife is a beauty pageant winner.

You can be one or the other.

He's, he's, yeah, he's got both of them.

If this guy has any handyman skills, he's out of here for us. Dude, if he can build anything with his bare hands, too much. Get out of here.

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

So they own South by Southwest and Rolling Stone, this guy?

Yes, yes, he owns The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Women's Wear Daily, New York Magazine, Eater, uh, The Verge, uh, Art News, Art Form, Art in America, The Robb Report. Have you been in The Robb Report?

Yeah, it's like this article says he is the Rupert Murdoch of entertainment.

Yes, exactly. He's really under the radar. Not a lot of people talk about this guy, but Penske Media, I think it's called, uh, uh PMC, Pennsy Media Corporation. They're pretty under the radar. They own enough publications that something like 1 in 2 Americans go to their websites every month. It's massive. They get hundreds of millions of monthly uniques. And they're one of the few media companies that's large that is consistently profitable. They've been killing it for years and years and years. He's originally—

how did they get started? How did he build this empire?

Yeah, so he originally started. Uh, his first, like, getting into the digital business was when he was in his 20s. He bought mail.com and he was like, I'm going to create a new email service. It didn't work out. And so he eventually sold the domain mail.com to someone else. And he made a little bit of money doing that. And then he was like, all right, but I still want to get into digital. I still want to get into media. And so he started, I believe it's actually hard to find the origins of the story, but he started something like an ad network. And he starts an ad network in the 2000s and it's going okay. And then they eventually start buying publications to put ads on. And then slowly, slowly, slowly, it starts, they start gaining momentum. And over the last 20 years, I think it's the company's like 20 years old at this point. They buy more and more publications. And this guy's like, he's got a chip on his shoulder because he's the son of a billionaire. And allegedly, that's what he says. He says, I've taken no money from my parents. I started this with a very small sum, my own money, and I've just slowly rolled this into another thing and another thing and another thing. And now it's this massive business. And I think 2 or 3 years ago they raised $200 million in order to further fund acquisitions. But people aren't talking about this guy at all. And I asked this guy who sold this company to Penske, and I'm like, what is he so special at? And he says, here's a few quotes that people have said about him. They go, I think he has a chip on his shoulder and wants to prove himself. He was hustling back then not to be known as Penske, to prove himself not to the world, but to his family. And another guy said, uh, that he, when he hires people at this point, they have something like 1,000+ people. He interviews every single person who they hire. And when he buys a company, he wants to interview every single person who works there. And they say he's a steward of the brand and he truly cares. There's this one story about, I think it was, uh, uh, what was it? It was, um, a real estate publication owned by this woman that was notoriously rude to everyone. She was like hard to, uh, work with. She was kind of a diva and she was just rude constantly. She was one of these Hollywood real estate reporters and she kind of thought she was on top of the world. And Jay, Jay Pensy comes in and he's like this good-looking, privileged guy. So immediately she thinks she's going to hate him. And he totally toned her down and won her over with kindness and like being polite and like having her back constantly. And that's been a trend I've noticed with this guy is all these people say that he's just really kind. He's really nice. He's a really, really savvy operator and he's super low-key and under the radar. But this guy Jay, he's one of the biggest names in media and very few people are talking about him.

I love how he's like, I want to make a name for myself. He's like Penske Media Group. He uses the same name. Also hilarious. Uh, this is fascinating. So he didn't take money from his dad. That's interesting. He took money from the Saudis and he took money from that guy, Daniel Loeb, who's like that, like the legendary, uh, trader.

Yeah. But, but I think that was like 15 years into the business. I think that they actually bootstrapped it for a long time. I think they raised $200 million at a billion dollar valuation.

How would he bootstrap it? Like, what was the first— what was the cash cow?

Well, the first cash cow was their ad network that they made. So if you— I used Web Archive and I went and looked at what their website used to look like, and it was basically— it reminded me of an ad network. Now, this was like 15 years old, I believe. And so like a lot of the terminology was even different and like the type of stuff that they were doing isn't really relevant anymore. But it was from like owning Mail.com that he bought for cheap and he sold that for a profit. And then it was like an ad network is what it was. But they've, they've run profitable for a really, really long time.

So I think this is a super cool find. I'd never heard of this guy. Um, and I did not know that, you know, the same family owns Penske, the truck thing. They own the Indy 500. They own like the IndyCar Raceway and all that. And then he bought all these brands like South by Southwest and whatnot. That's super interesting. Would you want to do this? Because This sounds really hard to do. Uh, in fact, there's a quote here from someone who's like, he's the hardest working guy I know. He's always on planes. He is always on calls. He never, he never stops. It's been that way for 15 years. This seems like, like rolling up kind of like old school media properties seems like both one of the more dangerous things you could do because media is like, I mean, we just saw Vice shut down the other day. Media is like not the most stable industry. It's not the most profitable industry either. And owning a portfolio of 15 things in general and operating them is, you know, like just a hard way to go, a hard way to live.

No, I would not want to do this. I think that this is the worst way to— one of the worst ways.

2,000 employees.

Yeah. And not only do they have 2,000 employees, but it's 2,000 like LA-based, you know, so they own or they operate. So like, do you know Dick Clark Studios? Have you ever seen like the Golden Globes or— yeah.

Yeah.

Remember like when the ball drops on on like NBC, I forget even what network it's on, and it says like, this is brought to you by Dick Clark Studios or whatever. They own that. And so having to host all those things, no, I would never in a million years want to do that, but someone is doing it and they're actually doing it successfully. So if you look at Vox or how about BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed has a horrible market cap and they just sold Complex Media for less than I think they paid for it. Or, um, I mean, what other media company did you just mention? Um, Vice, vice.com, they just shut down. No, I think this is an awful way to do it. However, it can be done. And this is the only guy who's proving that it can be done at that size. And so the way that he's doing it is through just being a really good operator. And so he balances letting people do their thing, but also he, he is like pretty strict about operations. So he expects a certain amount of profit, things like that. And he still owns 60% of the company. And so would I want to do this? Absolutely not. But do I still think it's cool? Yes. He, and if you, by the way, if you Google his name, I was trying to figure out, I'm like, where's chinks in this guy's armor? Like, where's he screwing up? Uh, the only thing that I could find was he got arrested for pissing outside when he was drunk on like Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard. Uh, and so that, like, that, that was like the only time that I've noticed that, that people really have disliked him in general.

He's gotcha. Yeah.

See, you're not perfect. By the way, I said that his wife was a, like, a Miss America winner. She's actually a Victoria's Secret model. So he's doing great in many different aspects of his life.

But I thought that it's actually better to just pause after, just be like, so he's doing all right. Let it all be, just let the air answer the question there.

He's doing all right. But he, you know, have you ever heard of Cy Newhouse? Do you know who Cy Newhouse is?

No, but I have an idea for you real quick. I've noticed, and many of the listeners have noticed, that you love a good-looking man. I know you should create the Forbes 30. I think you should create the Parr 30 Studs Under 30. And it's just great-looking businessmen, just dreamy hunks.

Dude, so many times, so many times people in the comments they think I'm gay or they'll comment on how I comment.

I wonder why, dude. You're like, I Googled this guy shirtless.

For the record, I'm not gay, but I can appreciate when someone's really handsome. So sue me. So sue me.

I love art, long walks on the beach, and a nice body.

Yeah. Dude, it's pretty, uh, yeah, a lot of people do think I'm gay because I remember we were talking about this one track athlete and I was like, look at his calves, you see those calves? I'm sorry, yeah, I, I can admire, you know, I can admire.

Well, your hand was like making a cupping motion while you were saying it, so that was just too much.

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

Okay, I like it. All right, um, Sam, you brought some fire today. The Penske thing was awesome. Uh, Pelosi, we're keeping an eye on her. I got my stock pick. I got my stock pick in. We're gonna check on that one in 5 years and see how I did. Um, good episode. That's all for the pod. Actually, we're trying something new, so we have a, a new format for the next episode that we're calling the Quickie. And the Quickie episode is just quick hitters little, basically throughout the week, me and Sam see a bunch of things that are really interesting, but they're, they're kind of short. They're not like, they're just like, hey, did you see this? Check this out. This is something really interesting I saw. And it's stuff that we normally just share in our group chat because everybody likes it, but we didn't know how to make it into a pod. So we're actually going to just take the best ones from the week and put them together as a little Friday quickie of quick hitters. So check that out.

All right. That's the pod.