“All 5 Of Us Immediately Became Billionaires”

- June 30, 2025 (8 months ago) • 01:03:50

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Mike Novogratz	"I'm a good guy to sit around a campfire with, drinking, because I've got a lot of stories..." [sentence cuts off]
00:05	Sam Parr	Is Mike Novogratz? Mike grew up as a poor kid on Long Island. He made his first million working as a trader at Goldman Sachs at the age of 32, and his first billion at the age of 40. Is that life-changing?
00:15	Mike Novogratz	"Yeah, we were the only company ever where five guys became billionaires in a day."
00:20	Sam Parr	That's wild. Mike is a cowboy in his personal life and his professional life. This guy likes to push it, and he's max risk all the time. Yeah, that's crazy, man. Mike's made and lost a fortune about two different times. </FormattedResponse>
00:35	Mike Novogratz	We made a bunch of mistakes, and next thing you know, not only aren't you worth $2 billion, but you're going under the billion [under $1 billion] pretty quick. And you're like, "Oh shit — that sucks."
00:44	Sam Parr	"And what are you doing? What's the lesson to be learned here?" </FormattedResponse>
00:47	Mike Novogratz	The gap between the really greats and the next level — and I put myself in that next level — is...
00:59	Sam Parr	I value people who are good operators at life and who live a certain way that I like. I'm dressed like a cowboy today because I'm like, "you're kind of like a cowboy" — a little bit in the energy that you have, and that's something I really respect. But I thought one of the coolest things was how you've made and lost a fortune, I think two or three times.
01:17	Mike Novogratz	"You know, I certainly have lost lots of money. That narrative exists. One of my kids and a few of my friends are like, 'Dude, that's a little unfair, because even at your lows you still had a lot of freaking money.'"
01:30	Sam Parr	So, your first—your first hit was in your mid-thirties? You were at Goldman, right?</FormattedResponse>
01:34	Mike Novogratz	Yeah, listen. I was a partner at Goldman Sachs. Goldman is an amazing firm. It might be one of the firms that everyone should study because they create a culture there that—maybe not good for your mental health—but is good for the firm. People define themselves by what their boss thinks about them. Lloyd Blankfein was like the big guy at Goldman in the later part of my career, and every single person thought, “What does Lloyd think about me?” You gave your heart and soul to this culture at Goldman. It's a culture of excellence and world‑class people. You're competing and working alongside the best and the brightest, so you feel like you're on the New York Yankees when the Yankees are winning. One of the big advantages of that is they paid you wildly less than market on your way up because you had the privilege of being at Goldman Sachs and one day you might become a partner. I started at 24 because I had done the Army and flew helicopters for a while. On April 1, 1989, I got my job and moved out to Asia, which was a great move. The Asian financial crisis happened, and what you'll learn in a financial crisis is you're either on the right side of it or the wrong side of it. If you're on the right side—i.e., if you're bearish when the world blows up—you make far more money than you thought you would for the firm. Goldman, my team, and I were very lucky that we got ourselves on the right side.
03:05	Sam Parr	You killed it.
03:06	Mike Novogratz	Asia Blunt, and we killed it. So I became a managing director first, and then a partner.
03:11	Sam Parr	What age were you when you left?</FormattedResponse>
03:13	Mike Novogratz	I think I was 33 when I became a partner and 34 when I left.
03:16	Sam Parr	"And what was your big year?"
03:18	Mike Novogratz	In 1997 and 1998, I made a ton of money for the firm. In 1997 I got paid $2,000,000, which was by far the most I'd ever been paid.
03:27	Sam Parr	Which was a... it's...
03:28	Mike Novogratz	A ton of money—no matter what you look at. I was a millionaire at 31. I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30, but I didn't have a net worth of $1,000,000 until I was 31. The first year I really felt like I got paid, I got $2,000,000 — in 1997. Me and my team had made the firm like $200,000,000, and so that was a 1% payout, right? If you work at Citadel or any big hedge fund today, you're broadly getting paid 15% to 20% of what you make. Goldman paid us 1%. But they'd tell you, "You're going to be a partner one day." Listen: you didn't make it all on your own. There was a huge infrastructure. Goldman, you know, deserved more than—let's say—Citadel might. They had this mythology at the place that allowed you to stay there. I almost quit once, and the bosses would take you out and say, "Oh no, you're going to be a partner one day." I made partner in 1998, and in 1999 the company went public. Anyone who was a partner at Goldman Sachs when they went public in '99 was just lucky, because the company had been built over a hundred-plus years. All those people who had built that enterprise value who weren't partners that day—we sold this enterprise that was built over a hundred-plus years to the public. It was one of the coolest IPOs of all time. The junior partners—we all had 420,000 shares. The stock was a $55 IPO which traded to $75. You can do the 420,000 times 75, and we were all roughly worth $30,000,000 overnight. $30,000,000 is still a huge amount of money; in 1999 it felt a lot bigger.
05:10	Sam Parr	"Did you have to vest it? Did that need to vest for the next four years?"
05:13	Mike Novogratz	If you were a partner, it was automatically vested, but you weren't able to sell it for three, four, and five years. I think four, five, and six years—or three, four, and five years.
05:21	Sam Parr	"So, when you left, you had to keep it?" "Yes." "Okay, good."
05:26	Mike Novogratz	And listen, I left Goldman in — not the nicest of ways. I had a personal... I kinda blew up, personally.
05:37	Sam Parr	I've been there, man.
05:38	Mike Novogratz	That was horrible. It was embarrassing. It was humiliating. You know, you're letting people down. The guys had made big bets on you — you're like, "oops." One of the great conversations that we'll ever remember. At that time, I was working for a guy named John Thornton, who was one of the two co-presidents of Goldman Sachs, and he had taken a big risk on me. I said, "John, I just feel so bad for you." He replied, "Feel bad for me? I'm the president of Goldman Sachs. I'm worth a zillion dollars. I've got a house here and here. I got a nice wife and kid. You don't need to feel bad for me. You need to worry about yourself." I was like — it was such a nice thing for him to say, and it was so true. I was so worried about what those other guys were thinking about me and having let him down, and instead of saying, "Oh my God, you let your family down, you let yourself down — go fix your own shit," I left there with my tail between my legs and spent a year sorting myself out. I had a shrink for the first time in my life.
06:42	Sam Parr	I heard you tell the story that—you said it one time and it kinda got glossed over—but it's kind of brilliant. I think you said your brother was near the World Trade Center in 2001, and he calls you and he's like, "I think there's a terrorist attack. I think I'm... I'm in..." Was he—was he in the World Trade Center?
06:59	Mike Novogratz	"He was in the building right next to me."
07:00	Sam Parr	"He's like, what—what—what do I do? And what did you say—what was your reply?"
07:03	Mike Novogratz	I said, "You should buy Eurodollars for two-year notes." He was like, "What the fuck?" Then I thought, "Oh, maybe get out of the building," and after that I thought, "Maybe I should go back to Wall Street." I literally thought that. Partly, I decided to run down. I'd been in the army and I wanted to run down to help. I picked my kid up and ran down the block—we lived in Chelsea at the time. I ran to the West Side Highway so I could actually see the World Trade Center, because you couldn't see it from my roof. My kids started crying and I thought, "Oh, that's not a good idea to run down there with the kids," so I ran back in and watched it on TV. They wouldn't really take volunteers; the police had blocked it off. I felt a little impotent—no way to participate. I couldn't participate financially, and I couldn't participate in safety or physically.
07:49	Sam Parr	Yeah. It's like when you've spent all your life trying to make money, trying to be charismatic, trying to be powerful, and you're like, "Fuck—none of this matters right now."
07:56	Mike Novogratz	Yeah, and so I literally remember saying, "I want to go back to work on Wall Street, and there's another chapter left in me." In between, I was looking at things like Outward Bound or just a whole different career path. I—I was like, "You..."
08:07	Sam Parr	"We're going to be like a camp instructor."
08:09	Mike Novogratz	I was gonna try to run Outward Bound. Yeah — you know, you're looking at headhunters: what are jobs you could qualify for? Remember, I was the president of Goldman Sachs Latin America; I was a young partner from Goldman, and so being a camp instructor was below my pay grade at that. But I was trying to think of other ways to contribute to my life and to society other than Wall Street. And that 9/11 thing was like, "go back to Wall Street — you've got another chapter."
08:37	Sam Parr	And that's when you start fortress.
08:39	Mike Novogratz	I actually didn't start Fortress. My partner, Pete Briger—who was a partner of mine and a good friend, both from Princeton and Goldman Sachs—called me up in Hong Kong and said, "Hey, why don't we partner up?" Pete's an amazing guy. He said, "How about this: you have a fun life and I'm a pretty good investor, and you're a decent investor—thanks, Pete. We'll go together. We'll split it fifty-fifty: half of what I make, half of what you make." At that time his stock was trading at a premium to fair value, and my stock was trading at a huge discount to fair value. That he would make that call meant the world to me, so I said, "I'll do it." The two of us were going to partner up in something, and Pete had known Wes Edens, who had started Fortress a few years earlier. At that time, Fortress was probably about 80 people and had about $1 billion in assets.
09:38	Sam Parr	And it was a PE firm, or a...
09:39	Mike Novogratz	Hedge fund. It had been a PE firm.</FormattedResponse>
09:40	Sam Parr	"And you were buying any type of business? What... were you?" </FormattedResponse>
09:43	Mike Novogratz	Well, it was a private equity (PE) firm that Wes ran with a guy named Randy Nardone and Rob Kaufman, who are still friends of mine and partners in some other things. They were doing mostly structured-credit–type PE buying. But we knew Wes was a genius. He came up with the idea: "let's buy all the cell towers and then think of cell towers as a REIT." He would look at business opportunities and literally craft companies that would then become billion-dollar companies. We thought Pete had real expertise in building a credit hedge fund; I was going to build a macro hedge, and the three of us sat there and said, "one plus one plus one will equal ten." No one had ever taken a hedge fund or private equity company public, and we said, "let's build a company where we all build our own businesses." To be fair, 90%–95% of the time we spent alone — we didn't like, each day, asking "what are we doing today?" I built a company, Pete built a company, Wes built a company, and we all put them in the same box.
10:43	Sam Parr	Alright — a few episodes ago I talked about something and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and to explain. That's what I'm about to do. I told you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach or a thought partner. I uploaded all types of information: my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, books I like, and issues going on in my personal life and businesses — I uploaded so much information. The output is that I have this GPT I can ask questions about issues in my life, like, "How should I respond to this email?" or "What's the right decision, knowing my goals for the future?" I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing the software I used to make this and the information that I had ChatGPT ask me. It's super easy for you to use. As I said, I use this 10–20 times a day. It's literally changed my life. If you want that, it's free. There's a link below: just click it, enter your email, and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes. I'll show you how I use it again 10–20 times a day. Alright, check it out — the link is below in the description. Back to the episode: "Did you have to come up with any of your own capital to join?"
12:00	Mike Novogratz	I did. I did, and I actually didn't have that much capital. You know, when I said Goldman had — we got $30,000,000 after Goldman — well, that's pretax, and the stock goes down. I think Pete and I put in roughly $10 or $15 million. That's all I had.
12:18	Sam Parr	So, were you worth 15 or 10? You put all of it into Fortress.
12:21	Mike Novogratz	All of it into Fortress, and actually borrowed some, I think.
12:23	Sam Parr	And you're what, 37?
12:25	Mike Novogratz	Yeah — 37. I started a hedge fund; I started a macro fund. Pete started a big distressed fund, and Wes continued to build his private equity business. Part of our ethos was: if we do what we say we're going to do, people will trust us. I learned that at Goldman Sachs as well. Goldman Sachs' asset management business didn't have the greatest returns, but they had lots of money because people trusted them. So how do you build a sense of trust in investors? It's doing what you say you're going to do. No one expects you to win all the time. What was wonderful about Fortress — and very cool — is that over the first five years, really 2002 to 2007, Pete's business I don't think lost money in a month. He'd buy distressed debt; he'd give loans to people. You know, I called him a loan shark — like, if you couldn't get a loan from Deutsche Bank, you came to Pete. Private credit is a huge business now, but he was early in private credit, and so he built a very diversified portfolio of loans. Wes continued to do his stuff, and literally his track record just kept going up and up. I had a very good run as a macro trader. By the time we went public, my macro fund in those five years was a top-performing macro fund — it was in the top 5% of macro funds. Pete had never lost money in a month, and Wes's track record looked like Warren Buffett's.
13:56	Sam Parr	And that $15,000,000 that you invested, or $10 million at its peak—what do you think it was worth?
14:01	Mike Novogratz	Well, when we went public, we were the only company ever where five guys became billionaires in a day. And I think, to this day, this still holds.
14:10	Sam Parr	"So, in roughly ten years, you turned 1 million into a billion?"
14:14	Mike Novogratz	2.7... $2.3 billion — that's what the — we were sitting around our office after we rang the bell at the stock exchange. I had my two young daughters with me, and all of a sudden Bloomberg puts up a picture of Wes Edens and it was like, "Oh shit — Wes Edens, $2.3 billion." Then a picture of Pete Briger: "Pete Briger, $2.3 billion." I think Wes owned a tiny bit more, so Wes would have been $2.4 billion, and then Pete and I owned the same — $2.3 billion. My two, like, nine- and ten-year-old daughters looked at each other and high-fived because we had never talked about money, right? You know... my nine and...
14:49	Sam Parr	Ten-year-olds — is there any difference? Is there any difference between making, let's say, $30,000,000, then from two… whatever.
14:56	Mike Novogratz	I think that first sort of frenzy of us becoming rock stars almost came because we were the first company to do this — we were the first guys to take a hedge fund/private equity company public. We were all on such a high. It didn't last long because the '08 financial crisis happened. All of a sudden you get treated a little differently: you're getting calls from the president of your university who wants to sit down and talk with you, you're getting invited to cool dinners... and it goes to your head a bit. You're not really ready for the rush of excitement around it. You don't feel that different. I think it's the same friends and, you know, there's a little bit—everyone gets a little bit full of themselves.
15:38	Sam Parr	Did your life stay the same, but the people who wanted to talk to you change? Or did you start trying more?
15:44	Mike Novogratz	You're getting emails and calls from people you haven't seen in years, and people you don't even know who say they know you. Yeah — you get this, especially because it was public, right? If it hadn't been, no one would have known; but we were in newspapers and magazine articles, and so it goes to your head a little bit. And then, you know, the wonderful thing about having six brothers and sisters is they don't treat you much differently. They're excited for you, but they...
16:06	Sam Parr	Well, you have six—six or seven. You have a bunch of siblings who are also ballers, too.
16:12	Mike Novogratz	And friends... and so, you know, and then the markets always take their pound of flesh. We made a bunch of mistakes. 2008 happened, and next thing you know, not only aren't you worth $2 billion, but you're going under $1 billion pretty quick, and you're like, "oh..."
16:29	Sam Parr	You're losing a...
16:31	Mike Novogratz	Oh shit — that sucks. Some of this goes back to... this is gonna sound crass as heck, but if you were a kid in high school who played sports and the girls liked you (or the guys liked you if you were a girl), and you had a decent social life and didn't have a chip on your shoulder, it seems like success is a little easier to handle because you were used to it. It's not the same magnitude of success, but if you got lucky with the girls in high school, you usually turn out okay. Often, the people who really have a hard time adjusting were misfits socially, and that chip on their shoulder drove them to this crazed success.
17:16	Sam Parr	And you— the reason I'm interested in you is because you've won in a bunch of different parts of life. You're a great wrestler, you went to Princeton, and you did a lot of amazing things. What's funny is, because your personality is so loud and you're so funny and tell these crazy stories—like when you talk about trading—I'm like, "Oh yeah, I forgot you actually had to be skilled at something." What would the people who are around you say you're good at?
17:42	Mike Novogratz	I have a weird insight into looking at what the future is going to be. It's called pattern recognition. I can look at the charts and say this is going to happen, or I can synthesize information well. I'm a good speculator because I see the future pretty well. Do I read a lot? I used to. I watch a ton of TV now, but I read a lot of nonfiction that comes through my desk all the time. I keep up on the news and the world, and I talk to people. Most of the great CEOs read a lot—they're curious. I'm curious as heck. I get a lot of my curiosity and learning from conversation. I have this amazing network of people that I've met in the world, and I'm learning all the time. I literally had lunch with Goldman's Chief Information Officer—he's got 19,000 of Goldman's 45,000 people that work for him—and that was a masterclass in AI. I'm also meeting other people in AI. I'm learning AI from reading articles and playing with it, but mostly from finding the world experts and learning from them. That's the way I've been learning as I've gotten older.
18:53	Sam Parr	So, you think that people would say that you're good at seeing patterns. What else would they say? What do you think they think you're good at?
18:59	Mike Novogratz	I'm a good storyteller. That's been important because crypto in the last ten years has been about narrative. It has been about the story of understanding the world and then telling that story. I think I've been unbelievably well-suited for this moment in time to be a crypto CEO because I'm a good storyteller. How do you convince someone to buy Bitcoin? You've gotta tell them a story. </FormattedResponse>
19:26	Sam Parr	What about being a good trader? You were actually a trader for a...
19:29	Mike Novogratz	Long, I still am a trader. That's a hard job because you have to, first of all, develop a process—an internal algorithm—that wins more than it loses. You have to be really honest with yourself: Am I good at this? It's not Am I intelligent? or Am I smart? but Am I good at this? Am I good at taking this information and making bets on it? Even if you are, then you need to develop a discipline that ensures your guesses are actually in your portfolio. There are so many people that say, "Oh my god, you have to be short the dollar right now. The U.S. is on a downtrend, Trump is pissing everybody off." The short dollar is the biggest, easiest trade to see. Every single macro investor—almost every single investor right now—believes that you should be short the dollar, and it's a maximum-conviction belief. I would bet if you took all their portfolios, only 40% of them have a really big position. It should be tautological that if you're bearish, you're short, and if you're bullish, you're long—but it's not, because of fear: What if I'm wrong? So much of trading is anxiety management. So much is: how do I overcome my fear?
20:55	Sam Parr	"I heard a guy the other day say, 'Anxiety is just when your brain is a lot bigger than your balls.'"
21:00	Mike Novogratz	Yeah. So, listen: anxiety is real, right? There's this... lion that shows up and you go into fight-or-flight. In trading, you see the lion all the time. You get nervous when the market's going higher and you're long — what if it goes back down? "I'll give back my money." There are all these different reasons you get scared. How do you learn to trust yourself? That's a really hard process. What I've learned from the best — and I'm really good at this — is that there's a group that's better than me, and I think about this all the time.
21:34	Sam Parr	Let me say this: you're good at... "You're good at what?"
21:35	Mike Novogratz	Being a macro trader.
21:36	Sam Parr	But does that mean you're good at managing anxiety?
21:40	Mike Novogratz	It’s the whole process of seeing the world, betting on it, and making money from it. I know there are twenty-five macro traders that people have probably heard of: Stan Druckenmiller, David Tepper, Paul Tudor Jones, Louis Bacon, Alan Howard, Chris Rokos. There's a bunch of people who are great at this. The gap between the really greats and the next level — and I put myself in that next level — is discipline. So you have to have a set of rules that you follow.
22:08	Sam Parr	"Well, do you consider yourself a highly disciplined person?"
22:10	Mike Novogratz	I think I'm a really hardworking person. I was really disciplined at parts of my life, and I think I have sporadic lapses of discipline—partly because I have a really diverse group of interests and I get excited. I'm a people pleaser, so I'm trying to help things out, people out, all the time, and it's a prioritization... Stan Druckenmiller, for instance, who I think is the best—or, you know, David Tepper's pushing on him—but the best trader of his, certainly of his generation. Tepper's a little bit younger, 32, never lost money, compounded over 30%. Everyone in our seats looks at him as like...
22:53	Sam Parr	"The guy."
22:53	Mike Novogratz	The guy has a ton of integrity in how he lives his life and how he manages his portfolio. When he was managing other people's money, he never golfed during a workday — and he loves golf.
23:05	Sam Parr	But what you said—you said you had this great quote. You said you were quoting Napoleon or someone, but you said, "I hire lucky generals, not skilled ones."
23:13	Mike Novogratz	So this was how I learned that I had the right to be good at this, right? I was making lots of money and I was like, "Wow." Yeah, everyone has a bit of impostor syndrome. And Ehud Barak, who had been the Prime Minister of Israel, I'd hired as a consultant.
23:29	Sam Parr	How do you hire the Prime Minister?
23:30	Mike Novogratz	One of my investors in Israel said, "You need to meet Ehud Barak." Ehud Barak was looking for ways to make money. He had just started this business and he had two clients: Louis Bacon, a multibillionaire—one of the pantheon of the greats—and Bruce Kovner, a multibillionaire—also one of the pantheon of the greats. Mike Novogratz, who was a little peanut at that.
23:51	Sam Parr	What was his?
23:52	Mike Novogratz	Rate — maybe it was 200,000 a year or something.
23:55	Sam Parr	So you got the former Prime Minister for $200 a year to give you feedback and advice. That's a pretty good deal.
24:00	Mike Novogratz	I just remember thinking, "I've got the same consultant." He only had, like, three clients: two of the world's—literally—the great traders of all time. Bruce Kovner, who built Caxton, and Lewis Bacon, who built more capital. I'm sitting with the Hoot for lunch. He said, "You know, I figured you out." He said, "You're not so smart, but you're lucky." I was like, that's a compliment. He said, "Don't worry about it," because I was just with Lewis Bacon and I spent time with Bruce Kovner. He said, "Kovner might be smarter than you, but you guys all have an intuition... a pattern recognition, an ability to sense where things are, like a general did. That's your intelligence." They gave me this quote from Napoleon. Of course I didn't know French, but he said—paraphrasing—"I forgot, you're not so smart, you don't know French, son of a bitch." And Barak, at least allegedly, had the highest IQ of anyone in the Israeli military, and he was the most decorated soldier in the Israeli military. He was a wonderful guy, charming. He said you guys have an intuition, a pattern recognition, an ability to sense where things are, like a general did. That's your intelligence. Instantly I was like, "That's why I'm right more than I'm wrong." I never knew why I was right more than I was wrong. It's easy to know you're being commercial. You and I could be commercial: if we can make these cups of broth for $0.50 and sell them for $2, we're both going to say, "How many can we sell?" That's not hard. But why should I be able to predict where dollar/yen is going to go in a year better than you?
25:28	Sam Parr	Are you able to do this in other facets of your life, where you're like, "Man, I met this person — I predict they're going to face these problems," or whatever? </FormattedResponse>
25:34	Mike Novogratz	What's interesting is, without being conscious of it, I've invested in a few independent movies. Nobody makes money in independent movies — almost nobody. I've invested in two of the top three selling independent films of all time, independent films that sold for the top prices. The Birth of a Nation is still, I think, the highest.
25:57	Sam Parr	"Yeah — 19? Or $19,000,000? It sold for that, I think."
26:00	Mike Novogratz	$19,000,000, and then there's a movie called Assassination Nation, which didn't do well at the box office but sold for $13,000,000. Those are two of the top — you know — five prices for independent movies, at least they were. Was that just luck? Was it intuition? I...
26:15	Sam Parr	Mean, it's not luck if it happens twice.
26:17	Mike Novogratz	Right. For me, that conversation with Barack gave me confidence that my decision process wasn't random — that there was something in it. I went back and thought about how I make decisions. It's at the intersection of lots and lots of data and a gut feeling. There's that "I think" moment. Once I understood that, I was much more confident in telling investors how I made decisions. My hedge fund went from $300 million under management to $2 billion, and my performance went straight up over the next six months — mostly because investors could feel my confidence. So the lesson for you, or for listeners, is: spend time figuring out what you're good at and where that comes from. Not everyone has the same skills.
27:10	Sam Parr	Where does it come from for you, though? I mean, I remember reading about it. I'm not in the finance world at all, but I read Blackfish, which was about Steve Cohen. They told stories about how, in the Eighties when there was a physical ticker, he could just hear the rhythm of the ticker and... make [trades]. And I'm like, "That is just so vague." It's a pain in the ass because you're explaining it like an art, but I want it to be more of a science—because I want to learn. That's how you're describing it: it's very artistic. </FormattedResponse>
27:38	Mike Novogratz	For me, the type of trading I do is very intuitive and it's very pattern recognition. If I went blind, I couldn't trade — I need to see the ballet of the charts. There are other people who do things very differently. The interesting thing about trading is there are a thousand different ways to approach it.
27:56	Sam Parr	What does Steve do? You were saying...
27:58	Mike Novogratz	I know Steve pretty well, but I don't know his exact process. I would tell you he's one of the most competitive guys out there. He used to go on vacation and have all his screens set up, and if he wasn't feeling things right he'd fly right back to get to his desk. He was obsessed with beating the markets.
28:16	Sam Parr	Do you think you're competitive?</FormattedResponse>
28:18	Mike Novogratz	I'm not as competitive, which is interesting when I think about it with Stan Druckenmiller and Lewis Bacon — like why those guys have been in that category. Maybe one day I'll catch them, but I'm not in their category at this point. They are more competitive than me. I mean, Lewis Bacon — I remember playing croquet against him, and I'm like, "How's this guy beating me in croquet?" Well, he had hired the world's best croquet player to teach him. He doesn't like to lose. Partly these guys are ultra-competitive, but they are also ultra-disciplined. Those two cross factors...
28:51	Sam Parr	Creates a maniac.
28:52	Mike Novogratz	Well, creates an amazing performer.
28:54	Sam Parr	Yeah.
28:55	Mike Novogratz	Maybe not the easiest person to go to cocktails with sometimes. They are, you know, something, but like an amazing performer. I don't want to discount — I've had an amazing run of success at trading. I just know myself: as I compare myself to the other guys, I'm a little more disciplined now. I would probably argue I've had more fun. I've done more different things than most people. But each person makes their own decision on what path they want to take, and I'm not making a value judgment on how people live their lives. The key is to figure out how you want to live your own life, and figure out what you're good at. Again, that comes from mentors; it comes from sometimes chance. Without that conversation with Hooverock, I was miserable because I was feeling so much pressure. I remember telling my wife, "I might even just shut this hedge fund down if I can't have more fun." I was winning, but I was feeling so much pressure. I think I was feeling pressure because I didn't know why it was good. That literal conversation over lunch unlocked this story in me that said, "Hey — this is why I should... this is why I win."
30:04	Sam Parr	And that was intuition. You're just good at it — you feel certain things, and you should trust it.
30:08	Mike Novogratz	And it doesn't come just, you know, from sitting in a box. There's a tremendous amount of information I'm shoving into my brain—looking at charts, talking to people, understanding psychology, and seeing who's long and who's short. There's tons of stuff that goes into the algorithm. But it was at that intersection with intuition. It's all in the part of your brain that you're not tapping normally. A lot of it is historical, too: you see things, and they repeat themselves.
30:34	Sam Parr	Yeah, I heard one of my heroes is John D. Rockefeller. I was listening to Business Untitled, and you were like, "When I was in fifth grade or eighth grade or something, I wrote a paper on John D." Yeah, and I thought that was cool because he's a fun-ass dude to learn about. And you also — you and your partner Wes — did the train thing.
30:48	Mike Novogratz	Wes did the train thing. I was a cheerleader and an investor, but... yeah, that was fascinating. When I went down there, I was reading about Flagler.
30:55	Sam Parr	Yeah — he's a man. These guys are hardcore. I went and talked to a bunch of friends of ours — you and I have some mutual friends — and I want to tell you what they said. They said, "He's max risk all the time. His entire life he takes tons of risk and he lives life on the edge." Another person said, "He's blown up a couple times and he's won a lot more." I'm amazed at how good he is at managing risk. I actually talked to some of the guys you work with, and they also use the word "risk" constantly.
31:28	Mike Novogratz	It's hard to be in the crypto business and not be comfortable with risk. It's an asset — Bitcoin went up and then crashed down.
31:36	Sam Parr	Yeah, I think it's bigger than Bitcoin. I think you got lucky that Bitcoin exists when it does. I think you're a guy who enjoys risk. I heard a story about how you said you're a 37 out of 40 on some personality test — like a risk-tolerance scale — and you said, "It's funny, my kid is the exact opposite." Then I read in the New Yorker (or some article) that you flew a helicopter down the street during Princeton's graduation. There's clearly a pattern: this guy likes to push it and is pretty comfortable teetering on big risks. So, for your personal finances — are you often at risk?
32:19	Mike Novogratz	So, part of it is there's this balance between, like, yeah—there's an adrenaline need. I like adrenaline, like in sports and in trading. It's a dopamine addiction, if you want to think about it. But part of it is I like my life. I was a helicopter pilot at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and I made $18,000 a year after taxes. I remember because I had a $1,500-per-month paycheck. Pat Tierney, who's still a buddy of mine, was one of my buddies down there and we had the time of our lives. When I look at how much fun and how much I enjoyed that—in the middle of freaking lower, ugly corner of lower Alabama, right? The Wiregrass, it was called, by Dothan—with 700 other guys and almost no women around because all the women had gone off to college. There were 700 guys and a few women in flight school. We still had the time of our lives. So when I think, was that year better or worse than the year I made lots of money? I can't tell. That was a great year. I think if you enjoy your life it's easier to take risk. If I lost my money, it would hurt my ego for a while. I would be embarrassed, I'd be frustrated, because all the money really does at one...
33:39	Mike Novogratz	It allows you to help other people, right? And that's both a blessing — it's a huge blessing — but it's also a lot of responsibility, and sometimes it's a pain in the ass. I actually don't think I've tied how I live my life on a year-to-year basis to money. Now, some of my friends say, "Oh, that's bullshit — look at the parties you throw; you spend lots of money." I do spend lots of money, but I threw tons of parties when I didn't have a lot of money either; I just threw cheaper parties. So, I think so much of being able to take risks is being okay with your life and not being defined by just your money.
34:15	Sam Parr	"Have you met a guy named Brad Jacobs?"
34:18	Mike Novogratz	No, I wish I had.
34:19	Sam Parr	He has a book — I’ve never met him, but I’ve read his book. It's called "How to Make a Billion Dollars." He's created, I think, $6 billion companies, like XPO Logistics is one of them, if you’ve ever heard of that — these huge, $10 billion logistics companies. His whole shtick was he fragmented industries, bought all of them, operated them well, took them public, whatever. He talks in his book about how he would research like crazy. Anytime he got into a business, he researched intensely: > "I read all the books. I use Tejas or whatever else — the services and their alpha sites or whatever they are — and I hire experts. But then I go and talk to the employees and I just research." So it's like, "I'm really confident this is going to work because I've talked to literally 500 people and I have all these notes." What I've noticed as a pattern with you is that you don't — I don't know if you call it research — but you talk to a lot of people. And so, on the way here I was hearing a story about how your roommate was Gloria Vanderbilt's son or something like that.
35:12	Mike Novogratz	It wasn't.
35:13	Sam Parr	Like, so that's pretty magical — to be around and hear stories of that family. Then your other roommate helped create Ethereum. Then there was this other story... there were like 20 stories where I'm like, "What the hell?" It's like... you just... I'm...
35:27	Mike Novogratz	A good guy to sit around a campfire with, drinking, because I’ve got a lot of stories. But there are just so many times where it’s like...
35:33	Sam Parr	Oh, I just... it's like normal people would say, "I know a guy," or "I sat at a bar next to a guy; he did this." You just have all these stories, except that they happen to be about these wild, crazy people who... What was the story about how you first heard about Bitcoin?
35:44	Mike Novogratz	So, Pete Brigher, who had been my... he lived above me my freshman year at Princeton. He lived in the room above me. </FormattedResponse>
35:52	Sam Parr	This dorm was amazing.
35:53	Mike Novogratz	We had a pretty cool little group of people.
35:55	Sam Parr	Right — is this wild? It's like the greatest dorm on Earth.</FormattedResponse>
35:57	Mike Novogratz	He lived above me.
35:58	Sam Parr	How many billionaires do you think came from that dorm room? No, seriously.
36:02	Mike Novogratz	At least three, for real, in that dorm. Yeah — but he's the reason I got my job at Goldman Sachs. I was literally wandering around Bleecker Street, a little drunk, and I ran into him. I was interviewing for jobs. He was like, "Bullshit — you've got to work at Goldman Sachs." I was from the Army, so he got me an interview at Goldman Sachs, and 41 interviews later they gave me a job. Then we lived in Hong Kong together, and we slowly became very good friends. I'm the godfather of his youngest son. Then we did Fortress, and he was the guy that was the distressed-debt investor. Well, because he made a promise to his wife that, at one point, they'd move back to California, he moved his entire business — or the bulk of it — to the Stanford area, or Palo Alto.
36:47	Sam Parr	And what year was that?
36:48	Mike Novogratz	This probably would have been — he probably moved his business out there in 2010 or something.
36:52	Sam Parr	Alright. Good.</FormattedResponse>
36:53	Mike Novogratz	Timing... but he's not a tech guy. His brother-in-law was a tech guy, and the group of friends he had were tech guys. They all started talking about Bitcoin, and Pete wanted to be part of the clan. So he called me up and said, "I'm hearing about this thing — Bitcoin. All my smart friends are doing it. What do you think?" I had never heard of it, so I quickly did a Google search and asked around.
37:16	Sam Parr	And this was in 2010.
37:17	Mike Novogratz	This was... this would have been 2012–2013, maybe. Bitcoin was at about $96.
37:24	Sam Parr	So it was nothing, really. I mean, there wouldn't have been anything — there would have been Bitcoin.org or some forums.
37:29	Mike Novogratz	There wasn't a lot, but it was online. The Chinese had just started buying it, and I made a thesis: oh, we gotta buy it. So we started buying some of it. My friend Jeff Lowe, who's become a great investor, was working in my family office and he bought my first Bitcoin for me. Then Pete and I kept talking about it and we thought maybe this should be bigger than just us buying a little bit. So we called a third friend, Dan Moore, another Princeton guy in whose first hedge fund I had invested. He'd worked on Wall Street—at Goldman and at Tiger. He was on the sidelines after '08; his hedge fund didn't do well and he was trying to figure out what to do. He'd done some cool stuff in Argentina, researched this for a while, and came back and said, "Guys, this is gonna change the whole world." Dan was really confident and was willing to put a whole bunch of his net worth into this thing. Pete and I were wealthier—because Fortune had gone public—than Dan at the time, and we thought, he's putting that much in, we need to put at least that much in. That's the way guys think. So we all roughly put similar amounts in.
38:35	Sam Parr	Was it like eight figures, or you can't even?</FormattedResponse>
38:38	Mike Novogratz	"Say that it was... it was seven figures."
38:40	Sam Parr	Seven figures.
38:40	Mike Novogratz	But it was significant in dollar terms at a hundred, but not in our net worth terms. Right? We were very wealthy guys at the time, and it's one of the reasons we were able to hold it so long. Because even if it went up — if you're a young guy and you put $10,000 into something and all of a sudden it's worth $100,000...</FormattedResponse>
39:01	Sam Parr	Your friend's like, "Dude, you..."
39:02	Mike Novogratz	Gotta take some... You can buy a house, your girlfriend wants you to buy — there are so many reasons you're going to sell that thing, and almost nobody can hold on to it. But if you already have a lot of money, it's just another investment. We get a lot of credit for having made lots of money in crypto. It was easier having started rich, and it's got me thinking why this world is so offsides. When you're wealthy, you have assets. Assets are basically chips on a table. I bought SpaceX when it was one-twentieth of what it is today [one-twentieth of its current value]. Because everyone's like, "Oh, you gotta buy some SpaceX." You look, they're like, "Elon Musk is killing it—he's brilliant. Let me get some private SpaceX." And so all of a sudden you make, you know, $100,000,000+ in SpaceX. You didn't do anything other than put a bet down. And so getting money and getting a network makes making money so much easier. It's almost unfair. It's why Piketty wrote that book — he said there's no way the rich-poor gap ever comes back into balance because once you're wealthy you have such an advantage. And the advantage isn't just capital; it's capital plus network. One of my strengths is I like people. I like cheering people on. I like talking about people, and that makes it easy to make friends and network. Through that network, you learn stuff.
40:26	Sam Parr	So, for our podcast, my listeners will make fun of me. I own a company now that does well, and, hopefully, that's going to be a huge home run. But, for my liquid net worth, I just invest basically in the S&P 500 and bonds.
40:40	Mike Novogratz	You invest like you're a white guy from Missouri.
40:45	Sam Parr	Oh, yeah—look, it's worked out, Brad Boring, which means I've I've outperformed about 90% of hedge funds. So it's worked out. But... listen. </FormattedResponse>
40:52	Mike Novogratz	It's been a great.
40:53	Sam Parr	Yeah. I started making money in the greatest bull market of all time. For your personal finances, do you have any boring stuff, or are you active the whole time?
41:06	Mike Novogratz	No, I—listen. I have a chunk of money in, you know, these credit funds, like the one Pete ran, which are private credit funds. They have roughly done 10%+ a year, compounded. If you can compound a piece of money at 10% a year for a long time, you get rich real quick. So I have some in private credit. I have a lot in my own company, where I trade currencies and stuff on my own. Then I have a bunch of private equity investments and venture investments. I own a chunk of Bojangles, the chicken company. It was announced yesterday that the group that owns it is putting it up for sale, so I'm hoping that it sells for a high price. But I haven't really ever done bond stocks, partly because that's what I do. My money has often been tied up in the enterprise that I'm engaged in. At Fortress, I owned a lot of Fortress.
42:00	Sam Parr	I guess you've been illiquid for a large portion of this.
42:03	Mike Novogratz	I probably have run the lowest liquidity-to-net-worth ratio of anyone who's been on your podcast.
42:10	Sam Parr	"Can you tell me more about that?"
42:12	Mike Novogratz	You know, it's not necessarily what I always wanted. I've always had a lot of faith that I'd make money, and so I've always wanted to live a big life and also make a lot of investments.
42:21	Sam Parr	So... you just spend a lot.
42:22	Mike Novogratz	I spend a lot, live large, invest large, and I always think I'm gonna win. So in 2021 we thought we were going to be able to take Galaxy public, and I was going to get a lot of liquidity. It turned out we took a little too long to get into the SEC queue [U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission]. The administration changed — Gary Gensler shut the door — and so for four years there was no liquidity out of Galaxy. You know, with my other stuff I made some good investments, some bad investments, and I didn't really change my lifestyle. You slowly start burning the furniture of liquidity. So we just did a— we just did a deal: we took some chips off the table in terms of liquidity.
42:57	Sam Parr	Did you... live life on the edge? I mean, I think that I admire your ability. I'm an adrenaline-seeker too, but I'm also way more risk-averse than you, I think. I admire people who are into risk because I think it's held me back.
43:12	Mike Novogratz	I think one of the things people say is, "You blew up twice." Listen... I had a personal shit to deal with, and I lost my job at Goldman Sachs — or, to be fair, I resigned. That was embarrassing because I was on a high-flyer track there and I loved Goldman Sachs. That was painful. Coming back from that gives you a lot of confidence: yeah, you can fall down and you can lose money. It's not the end of the world. You gotta learn how to get back up. Being a wrestler teaches you that — no wrestler wins every match. Cael Sanderson did it in college, but then he lost internationally. No one wins every match. Learning how to come back from losing is one of the most important things, because losing doesn't mean you're a bad person. It doesn't mean you're a shithead, it doesn't mean you're not competent — it just means you lost that game. I think Nadal, when he talked about tennis, gave the best line. He was like, "I think I lost 48% of the points I played."
44:12	Sam Parr	You know, he was the greatest tennis player.
44:14	Mike Novogratz	Of all time—or one of the top three—that process of stumbling and coming back. I think a lot about how I have managed to do that myself because I am often asked to help people think through it.
44:31	Sam Parr	"What, like a downfall and a rebirth?" </FormattedResponse>
44:34	Mike Novogratz	Part of coming back is to take some time off, do some work, and try to understand what the hell happened. Most people don't spend enough time figuring out who they are—literally trying to understand who they are and why. It's often about your parents: you have a relationship with your mom and your dad, whatever the story was. Dad disappeared, processing that—right? That's the human condition. It's about trying to understand what moves you. Some people get there and feel like they've figured everything out; other people just make progress getting there. I think I've made progress. I'm not sure I've ever reached enlightenment—I'm actually not even close—but I keep making progress and going on that journey. There are lots of ways to go on that journey: seeing a shrink, meditating, praying, or doing ayahuasca or psilocybin journeys. There are radical ways and subtle ways, like taking time by yourself. Ultimately, it's about investing in yourself. Most people don't invest in themselves. I once asked a roomful of 800 wrestling coaches how many of them, in the last five years, had spent one week alone with just themselves. Not one hand went up—not one. Do you do that now? I try to spend one week by myself once a year. </FormattedResponse>
45:52	Sam Parr	"My friend Chris, who has a public drink company, said, 'Man, I screw up all the time, and I always try to journal: what's the lesson to be learned here?' I thought that was a really good way of asking himself that question. What questions are you asking yourself during that seven-day solitude?
46:08	Mike Novogratz	When I did the silent meditation in Cardiff, England, you sit there for freaking 11 days meditating. You can't read. You can't listen to music. You can't exercise. You can't even masturbate. I mean, it literally is for 11 days: your back hurts, and you starve.
46:29	Sam Parr	Do you set goals like this? Like, to have such a full life where you're running— I don't know how many people work here... 200 people? Yeah, a lot of people.
46:37	Mike Novogratz	600 (six hundred)
46:37	Sam Parr	600 — oh my God, I didn't even realize it. You have a lot of shit going on, but then you're like, "Oh, I do this week's meditation," and then there's this party. Are you setting, like, at the end of the year, "This is what a win would look like"?
46:51	Mike Novogratz	We do—we set goals. We've got a management team with an agenda of things we want to happen. I think both the crypto business and the data center business are in such an interesting place. We have two businesses, and both are at the forefront right now of explosive change. There's a ton to do in both of them. When I think about my time for the next six months, Galaxy's going to get a ton of my time. There were times when, when we first started and it was a smaller business, my philanthropy got a lot of my time—especially when I started doing criminal justice work. So I've dialed back my participation in philanthropy solely because this 600-person "baby" needs a lot of energy. I do think of it that way. But my brain also asks, how do I have fun? I think, if I make this much money, what are we going to do with it? My son and I are brainstorming a cool, fantasy project: what would you do if you actually had $100,000,000 to give away to one thing? What could you do to make New York City better? On Perplexity, I'm trying to figure things out—I'm working with people, so I multitask in that respect. I have goals; I try to do what I say I'm going to do. I'm much better at talking about meditating and exercise than actually doing them. This is where discipline comes in. My wife wakes up every day at 6:30, meditates an hour, and meditates an hour at night—she doesn't miss. "She's like a metronome," and I'm like, I know that would be good for me. I do meditate once in a while when I'm stressed. </FormattedResponse>
48:33	Sam Parr	"But it doesn't seem broken."
48:35	Mike Novogratz	"Yeah, when I break, I figure out how to fix myself. But no — I don't feel broken."
48:40	Sam Parr	Yeah, but on this other podcast you did, you were like, "Oh, I went to a therapist for the first time ever," and the thing was like, "I gotta love myself and forgive myself." And you're like, "That was a huge breakthrough." And I'm like, in my head, "Well, playing armchair expert here, but you're doing it again, you know what I mean?" I'm like, dude...
48:57	Mike Novogratz	People have a hard time changing patterns. One of the things you'll learn as you get older is that you see very few people who actually do enough of the hard work to change. Most of the time you see those people is when they literally hit some horrific rock bottom — when the only way to live is to change. That's the whole AA cycle: they just give up and say, "Okay, I'll do what you tell me to do, because I gotta change." Change is hard. Even subtle change is hard. And again, if someone's living their fullest life, maybe they don't want to change, right?
49:35	Sam Parr	Yeah. I mean, I love hearing about this shit, because I think—this is gonna sound pompous of me—but in my head I'm like, "I can be like... you know..." He's, you know, I'm 35, so I'm like, "Okay, he's 25 years ahead of me," and, like, I... I...
49:50	Mike Novogratz	And we both can't hear.
49:51	Sam Parr	Yeah, we're both a little bit deaf, and I came from a blue-collar family. I think you just talked about Princeton — like, I was like, "Oh my God, thought I was the shit," and then I got around people who kind of were the shit, and I was like, "Oh, fuck." I've felt that many times. I hadn't been to New York City until I was 26 years old, and I hadn't been on an airplane until I was 21. So I always felt like... [trails off]</FormattedResponse>
50:13	Mike Novogratz	That line — "New York, New York: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere." There's nothing like New York City, because you're never gonna be the guy.
50:19	Sam Parr	Like, I go home and I'm like, "I'm the man." Then I go to New York and I'm looking at apartments, and I feel like, "I'm nothing."
50:26	Mike Novogratz	But it's both so liberating and so awesome. I mean, go to a Knicks game.
50:32	Sam Parr	Oh, dude — we were supposed to do a podcast and you canceled. That night I turned on the TV: I see Timothy Chalamet, I see the "gender girl," and then I see Mike. I was like, "That motherfucker — we're supposed to do a thing." Then my wife was like, "Can you blame him?" I'm like, "No, I can't."
50:51	Mike Novogratz	Knicks in the playoffs is a must. This side of the city erupts when the next dude...
50:55	Sam Parr	You were—you had... there was Timothy, and then you...
50:58	Mike Novogratz	We got good seats. You were...</FormattedResponse>
50:59	Sam Parr	Like, good man. How much does a playoff seat cost? To where... where? Where is he? I imagine him free. </FormattedResponse>
51:04	Mike Novogratz	Seats are free, and if you want to buy front-row seats in the playoffs, they can cost as much as $5,080,000.
51:10	Sam Parr	What I thought.</FormattedResponse>
51:11	Mike Novogratz	"In the second row, the guy who sat next to me—I think—paid 15,000."
51:14	Sam Parr	Wait, yours were free?
51:15	Mike Novogratz	Well, no. Ours — we have season tickets. Okay, so you just pay the normal—whatever the Knicks charge you for playoff tickets. </FormattedResponse>
51:22	Sam Parr	"That's crazy, man."
51:23	Mike Novogratz	And so...
51:24	Sam Parr	Do you see Ryan? You know who Ryan Cohen is — yeah, billionaire Ryan Cohen. I don't... I mean, I don't know him personally, but I know who he is. I saw him sitting right in front of you during a game. Jaylen Brunson kind of fell into his lap, and he didn't break eye contact with the beautiful woman he was with. He just kept talking — he had the conversation the whole time.
51:39	Mike Novogratz	Those seats are fun because you always have a celebrity sitting in front of you. I went to one game — just a regular season game — and DeVito, the Nigerian superstar, was there. You know, there are two big guys in Afrobeats right now: DeVito is one of them, and the other guy, Burna Boy, was there. I didn't know who he was, but he had a great chain. I like chains, so I asked, "Dude, where'd you get that chain?" I went to get a beer and asked, "You want a beer, a Coke, or something?" A little later he came back, turned around, and said, "You know, no one's offered to get me a beer in a long time, and I really appreciate that." We started talking. I had no idea he was this megastar. He posted a picture, then his uncle texted me and said, "Dude, that guy knows more about crypto — get to know him." So he came on; he was on our podcast.
52:26	Sam Parr	"No shit."
52:26	Mike Novogratz	Became friends with him.
52:27	Sam Parr	He — that's the power of gift, like the "gift of gab," I think is what my father calls it. He had the same thing, but it's sort of this weird blue-collar grit or hospitality combined with big-number swag.
52:40	Mike Novogratz	People are scared to be nice to people. I don't wanna — I don't wanna hurt... Hey, the guy's sitting in front of you. Ask him, "Where did you get your chain?" Like, most people like to be at... </FormattedResponse>
52:48	Sam Parr	And you end up doing some type of business with him.
52:50	Mike Novogratz	Oh no. He just came and did our podcast. He invited me to Nigeria — I... I made a huge mistake. He invited me to his wedding in Nigeria, which turned out to be, like, the coolest-looking thing of all time. But it was like a week before my daughter's wedding, and I didn't think I could go...
53:03	Sam Parr	Miss, haven't you noticed the pattern? All these silly, small interactions — I think you said, with the Ethereum purchase you even bought a Gulfstream or something crazy — it's just funny. Serendipity might happen to everyone, but not everyone capitalizes on it. I've noticed a pattern where there are so many moments when you're like, "Oh, I just happened to do this," and I've heard that about twelve times.
53:27	Mike Novogratz	You know what I love? I love other people's stories. You must as well—otherwise you wouldn't do the podcast. I get excited for other people. Like, you meet Davito and you're like, "That's freaking so cool," and I wanted to know his story. I didn't realize he grew up a rich kid, and even the relationship with his dad—it all fascinates me. I think if you show interest in people and you're open with yourself, it opens up a lot of opportunity. It's not a strategy; it's not like I think about doing this. It comes partly from being raised with seven kids and partly from feeling loved your whole life—mom and dad love you, your friends love you—so you feel comfortable in your own skin. The gift you can give your kids, the gift you can give your employees, is for people to feel comfortable in their own skin. When I went to Princeton, my great insight: I had this roommate who was Gloria Vanderbilt's son. Unfortunately, he ended up committing suicide later on in life, and it was so painful because he was such a nice kid.
54:25	Sam Parr	"Would that have been Anderson Cooper's brother?"
54:27	Mike Novogratz	Brother and Anderson have written about it.
54:29	Sam Parr	Yeah, well—I read Anderson's book on his mother. It's amazing.
54:31	Mike Novogratz	Yes. And, you know, I'm a young guy. See, I'm meeting Gloria Vanderbilt, and I'm like, "Oh my God — I'm a..." you know.
54:37	Sam Parr	Like with royalty.
54:38	Mike Novogratz	I'm with royalty, and I'm the middle-class guy. My mom had grown up in Queens, and so... </FormattedResponse>
54:43	Sam Parr	Probably wore Gloria Jeans, yeah.
54:45	Mike Novogratz	But she knew the whole story. After about six months at Princeton, Princeton's a unique place: everyone lives in the same dorms. They're kinda crappy dorms — there's not a hierarchy of rich and non-rich in terms of living space, and, quite frankly, social life. You'd be like, "They all shit on the same toilet as we do." He's just—he's got his insecurities, he's got his strengths, just like anyone. And the moment you realize everyone's kinda the same... everyone's a little bit insecure, everyone's got impostor syndrome, everyone's trying to figure out who...
55:26	Sam Parr	They—you had that realization in college? </FormattedResponse>
55:27	Mike Novogratz	I had that realization in college freshman year.</FormattedResponse>
55:29	Sam Parr	Man, so I used to host these conferences. My old company — it was a newsletter company, or whatever, like a media company. We owned trade shows and conferences, like a TED Talk. I was 24 when I started doing it, and we'd get founders from WeWork, Casper, Bonobos, or Zapier — which is now a $10 billion company. These companies were, at the time (obviously before we knew WeWork was WeWork), like these $10 billion‑type companies. I would play a little trick on them: "Alright, your talk is at noon, but you gotta be here for mic check at ten." There's no mic check for conferences, right? The mic works — I just wanted to be around them in the green room. I would hear these billionaires complain. I'd be sitting, listening with about four or five of them — I knew how big their companies were — and I'd hear them complain about stuff, like: "I've got this CFO who I need to fire, but frankly I just hate the confrontation." Or one company had just raised $400 million, and they were like, "Things are going horribly."
56:34	Mike Novogratz	"I'm like, 'dude.'"
56:34	Sam Parr	I just read about you in The New York Times. I thought you guys were the shit. I remember thinking that that was the most enlightening lesson I'd had—probably in terms of business and how to live life—probably ever. I was like, these people—they have the same downs, the same issues I have, yet they're still just moving forward and doing it. I found it very freeing to know that the people I admire were broken.
57:00	Mike Novogratz	Listen. Everybody is going through a similar journey. There are very few people who are to blame — I've met a couple.
57:07	Sam Parr	I've met one or two.
57:08	Mike Novogratz	We're all on this path. I think the lesson I learned at Princeton wasn't that I was the same as everybody, or that I was no better or no worse than anybody.
57:20	Sam Parr	Sure.
57:21	Mike Novogratz	I did some things better than people, and I did some things worse than people, right? Wrestling is pretty objective: this guy beat your ass — he's a better wrestler. I've tried to keep that ethos my whole life. It's why, at my parties, I have a real, weird collection of people — because I dislike hierarchy, as opposed to a hierarchy of people. I think that is what's brought me lots of joy, but it's also given me… When I got to Goldman Sachs, I would walk into the boss's office and be like, "Dude, I got this great idea." I thought I deserved to be there. Often he'd say, "That's a stupid idea." I would think, "Oh, okay. Good," and go back to my seat. But the guys around me were like, "Dude, how'd you have the courage to walk into the office?" I was like, "He shits on that same toilet as you do." Like, you know. And so part of that sense…
58:12	Sam Parr	Were your parents confident?
58:14	Mike Novogratz	My dad was an All-American football player from West. He was very quiet — stoic is the right word for him. He's become the kindest man in the world as he's gotten older. He was tough but kind. My mother was very aspirational, the greatest storyteller, and she pushed us not in a direct way but in an indirect way. Like, you know, we'd complain about some kid being able to do something and she'd say, "Well, she jumped off a cliff — would you do it?" Right? There was almost this idea like, "we could be the Kennedys." I tease my mom all the time. She looked like Jackie O. She named my first daughter — my oldest sister Jacqueline's first daughter — so we had Jackie, Robert, John, John.
58:59	Sam Parr	Do you really know who John John? </FormattedResponse>
59:01	Mike Novogratz	John. Yeah, John. Oh—Michael. I was like, "Mom, you named us after the Kennedys." She said, "I did not." My mom and dad got married right when Kennedy became elected, you know what I mean? It's...
59:11	Sam Parr	Kennedy — Kennedy is one of my... I'm a huge history buff. Ken in the Kennedy family. I've probably read twelve books about him. Thank God you aren't the Kennedys, right? Like...
59:19	Mike Novogratz	But it was very... my mother was very aspirational. She wanted the best for us, and she was a big cheerleader. She wasn't what you'd call—like, you know—the "Jewish mom" or the "Korean mom" that pressured, pressured, pressured. But there was an internal sense of, "Of course you could do this," and I think all of my brothers and sisters picked up on that.
59:38	Sam Parr	"Are you nervous about raising rich kids?" "I think about that all the time."
59:41	Mike Novogratz	I thought about this when I became wealthy. I was like, there's nothing I can do about it, and so I had one rule to my children: "Be kind." The only times I lost my temper were a few instances with one son who was a bit of a whippersnapper and was tough on his brother. I wondered, "Where does that come from?" I really only lost my temper a few times in my whole life with my kids, and it was always when I thought they weren't being kind. I didn't think you could fake not being hardworking. I worked a ton when I was a young kid because I was kind of part of the labor force at home. If I wasn't mowing the grass, my mom or dad had to. If I wasn't doing the dishes, my mom or dad had to. You couldn't fake it—you had to do the work. That doesn't make any sense otherwise. My wife probably did a better job than me. All you can do is model good behavior. If you want your kids to work hard, work hard. If you want your kids to be kind—to the people in your house and to the cab driver—be kind to them. If all you do is talk about money, your kids are only going to talk about money. If you talk about interesting things around the dinner table, your kids are going to talk about interesting things. Parenting really is modeling. By no means have I been a perfect model. My kids probably could give you eighty-five stories on how I haven't. But that was my philosophy. They're going to be rich kids, and so far they've turned out lovely—fingers crossed. They're all finding their own paths and doing cool things. I think it's much harder to be a rich kid than a poor kid. For us, our success was about providing—going from here to there. We wanted to make money so we could go on a date, so we could get laid, so we could buy a house, so we could send our kids to school.
01:01:28	Sam Parr	You want to be better than your parents, and your parents want you to be better than them. Yeah. In my situation, I'm like, man — I got really lucky at a young age, which means compounding. It's like... I actually feel sorry for my children. The natural state is that you need to beat me, but I don't want you to feel the pressure that you need to do that.
01:01:45	Mike Novogratz	But they don't need to beat you. The book Sapiens was all about humans being "people of narrative," right? I love storytelling. The narrative in America was the "American Dream": your kids are going to have a better life than you. Yeah, so that got built into our system.
01:01:58	Sam Parr	Yeah
01:01:59	Mike Novogratz	At one level, you want your kids to have a good life. The European ethos is: "I just want my kids to have a good life." As you get wealthier, it shifts to, "I want my kids to feel self-actualized; I want them to have a wonderful life." But at what point...? If you're Bill Gates' kid and he's worth $100 billion, it's impossible. Like, wait—if I don't have 500 [unclear: 500 what—$500, $500k, $500M?] it becomes idiotic. And then you're like... you're talking to it, dude. So I think the moment you get even half as wealthy as you, that narrative shifts. It's: "How do I help my kids? How do I scaffold them to be self-actualized?" Whatever that means. I have one son—he's quirky and smart—and we have no idea what he's going to do. My wife and I kind of gamble on it.
01:02:41	Sam Parr	"We're like..."
01:02:41	Mike Novogratz	"God, what do you think? Can he go from here to there? He's hopefully going to find his niche and be successful, and we will cheer him on."
01:02:48	Sam Parr	Appreciate you doing this. You're the man. I really admire you—I admire your business stuff, but I don't think that's what you're great at. I think you're great at living a full life. There are only a handful of people I know, either from the outside or personally, where I'm like: if life has five different facets, I really admire up to four or even five of the ways they live. Whereas there are a bunch of people who are amazing at business—yeah, they're amazing at business—but I don't admire anything else about them. So it's kind of cool to be able to hang out and meet someone who I put on that list of people I really look up to for how they live all different parts of their life. Thanks for doing this. This is awesome. I appreciate you.
01:03:28	Mike Novogratz	Thank you.

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“All 5 Of Us Immediately Became Billionaires”

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