The New Way For Ordinary People To Build Wealth - Tony Robbins (4K)
Audit your portfolio by percentage—not dollar amount—and identify where you are dangerously concentrated. Before adding any investment, write down the worst-case loss, its likelihood, and whether you could hold through a 50% drop without panic-selling. Then build toward multiple sources of return th
1h 30mKey Takeaway
Audit your portfolio by percentage—not dollar amount—and identify where you are dangerously concentrated. Before adding any investment, write down the worst-case loss, its likelihood, and whether you could hold through a 50% drop without panic-selling. Then build toward multiple sources of return that behave differently across economic conditions. The goal is not to predict the next winner; it is to stay financially and emotionally resilient enough to remain invested.
Episode Overview
Tony Robbins and Christopher Zook argue that ordinary investors can improve their odds by prioritizing downside protection, percentage-based position sizing, and genuinely diversified return streams. They discuss the growing accessibility of private-market funds, the risks of concentrated public-equity exposure, the psychology of investing, and how AI-driven disruption makes continuous reskilling increasingly important.
Key Insights
Diversification is about behavior, not the number of holdings
Owning several stocks that fall together is not meaningful diversification. The guests argue that a portfolio should include return streams that can perform across different environments—growth, recession, inflation, and changing interest rates—rather than simply more versions of the same market bet.
Size investments as percentages of your total assets
A dollar amount is emotionally misleading: $50,000 may be trivial for one person and catastrophic for another. Assess every investment as a percentage of your portfolio, then decide whether a total loss would be survivable without derailing your goals or forcing an emotional exit.
Respect risk before pursuing upside
Robbins emphasizes asymmetric risk-reward: seek situations where the downside is limited relative to the potential gain. Zook adds that the practical test is whether you can live with the worst-case scenario; if not, the position is too large or unsuitable for you.
Build for your real risk tolerance
Your allocation should reflect when you need the money, your ability to generate cash flow, and your genuine emotional capacity for volatility. An investment strategy that looks good on paper but causes you to sell at the bottom is not the right strategy for you.
Use wealth to buy time, experiences, and contribution
The conversation rejects both reckless spending and endless accumulation. Robbins proposes separating security, growth, and “dream” spending, then using some gains for meaningful experiences, reducing low-value chores, and giving to others.
Frameworks or Models
The Holy Grail of Investing
1. Identify 8 to 12 investments or return streams that are genuinely non-correlated. 2. Diversify across asset classes, time horizons, geographies, and currencies rather than merely owning more public stocks. 3. Reassess correlations during stressful markets, when assets often begin moving together. 4. Aim to reduce volatility and downside risk while retaining attractive return potential.
Security, Growth, and Dream Buckets
1. Put stable, lower-risk assets and near-term needs in a security bucket. 2. Put long-term, higher-upside investments in a growth or risk bucket. 3. Create a dream bucket for intentional lifestyle purchases, experiences, and meaningful goals. 4. When growth assets produce a significant gain, Robbins suggests allocating some to security, some back into growth, and some to the dream bucket.
OOCEMR Decision Process
1. Outcomes: define what you want from the decision and rank those outcomes by importance. 2. Options: generate at least three possible choices. 3. Consequences: list the upside and downside of each option. 4. Evaluate: estimate the probability of each consequence. 5. Mitigate: combine, improve, or protect options to reduce avoidable downside. 6. Resolve: make the decision and act despite the impossibility of absolute certainty.
Notable Quotes
"The greatest investors on earth are not liars. They will tell you, I'm going to lose. What I want to do is make sure what I lose, I don't lose very much because I've got enough diversification in what I'm doing."
"The more risk averse somebody is, the more diversified they should be."
"What's the worst case scenario? If we can live with that, the upside will take care of itself."
"Emotion is the enemy to investment success, period."
"You build decision-making muscles by making more decisions."
Action Items
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1
Run a concentration check
List every investment and calculate its percentage of your investable assets. Flag any single company, sector, cryptocurrency, or correlated group whose loss would materially change your life or cause you to sell in panic.
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2
Write a downside rule before investing
For any potential investment, document the maximum likely loss, the probability you assign to it, and the conditions that would make you exit. Only invest an amount you can hold through severe volatility.
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3
Create three money buckets
Separate your finances into a security bucket for stability and near-term needs, a growth bucket for long-term upside, and a dream bucket for intentional enjoyment. When you realize a major gain, consider allocating portions across all three rather than reinvesting everything.
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4
Choose one reskilling move
Identify one AI-adjacent skill that strengthens your current role or opens a new one. Block two focused sessions this week to learn it, build a small work sample, or explore training options.
Full Transcript
Transcript of The New Way For Ordinary People To Build Wealth - Tony Robbins (4K) from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.
People of the uk and ireland i'm coming to you live imagine that me on stage in your city dublin is completely sold out but everywhere else is got limited tickets left and you can get yours now at chris williamson dot live this is a custom built live show i absolutely adore it spent over a year working on it so if you're a fan of everything modern wisdom come and see me on stage this october around the uk and ireland chris williamson dot live. Despite being just 4% of the global population.
Americans made up nearly 50% of the world's new millionaires in twenty twenty five you've written three bucks in this area. Why another one on finance what what hadn't you said already good question i never even read the first book i've written a book for almost fifteen years i don't enjoy writing books i like the variety of the aliveness of interaction what happens. But when two thousand eight happened i was really annoyed because i worked with paul tutor jones one of the greatest financial traders of history i've coached him for almost thirty years so i had some insights of what was going on at the end of it i thought someone's gonna get punished something's gonna happen because a small number of people basically almost destroyed the world economy and what i saw was their reward or their punishment was we gave them more money and so about twenty ten eleven twelve i started saying that something's gotta happen here and i was mad because it's like.
Right now the game seems like it's rigged and the average person thinks that they can't win i want to could they and so since i got access i said i'm gonna interview fifty of the smartest financial investors in history the most successful. The red allies the carl icons the warren buffett's all of them paul tutors and i'm gonna find from them whether the game is really winnable still. And so i wrote this book money master the game i want to write a book that my billionaire clients will be blown away by but i can also someone just starting the journey would do it and we were successful number one new york times bestseller really great.
But then you know people are not prepared for what happens and i didn't know code was coming anyone can anticipate the changes in the market and so i run unshakable because i want people not to lose when the markets change and people that apply that got tremendous value. But then i'm along the way so many people are behind like they're so far behind in terms of their investments in terms of their retirements and so how do you get there well you gotta get better returns but usually requires bigger risks.
And one of the people i became really good friends with ray dalio's you know the greatest investors in history on the da vinci. And and one of the days i met him i was supposed to have a thirty minute interview and four hours later when we left as part of how we became friends as i studied everything about him but one of the final questions i asked him was. What's the single most important investment principle that you know of if there's one principle to guide people what would it be.
Cause i know i gathered all these brilliant people and i come down to like these core four things that everybody needs to do everybody needs to protect downside risk and that's not what most people think about right the best investors on earth are all about don't lose money. Which is so counterintuitive but they do it by asset allocation they don't ever put all their eggs in one basket they know how to allocate well so when they lose they can still win they know if you lose fifty percent.
You got to make a hundred percent return to get even most people don't do the math properly on their head but the biggest thing i saw was asymmetric risk reward. When i went to risk a dollar like paul tutor his goal is if i think i'm making investment i gotta believe i'm risking a dollar make five. Now if i'm wrong i can risk another dollar still make four he could be wrong four out of five times and be in good shape where's the average person doesn't think that way i met you know some people that did some investments like kyle bass.
Who are you know kyle from texas how's my work he took thirty million dollars and turn into billion in two thousand eight. How do you do that in a year in the worst year of economics he saw real estate and saw everything's gonna go up and it's not and so he risks basically fifteen cents on every dollar he could be wrong fifteen times and still make money and he made money. So i asked him at the time just for a value i said how do you teach somebody you know this idea of.
You know the thinking that you're taking huge risk to huge rewards and not how you win it's just disproportion i need asymmetric risk reward how to explain that to somebody who doesn't understand it goes well trying to say that i want to explain it to my kids. So he said i was trying to figure out how to teach it to him so when they ask a question what is a riskless investment. I said riskless investment is really such a thing he goes no people don't ask that question so they don't find the answer he said there is one nickels.
He said if you buy a nickel you can never lose the money it's always worth a nickel but he said let me explain to you how i taught my kids this. It cost nine cents for the american government to make a nickel that's how we run our government he said pennies used to be full of copper ninety five percent copper and then we turned out a two percent copper and those pennies in the past are worth twice as much money right. He said it's gonna happen and he said but also i can melt it down the meltdown value is worth twenty percent more than i'm buying it for.
So you are thirty six percent excuse me more than i'm buying it for you so i can know as we can do that legally because well that's true but somebody goes outside the country said but let me be clear. I called the federal reserve and said how many nickels do you have. I want all the nickels they would sell me. He said he bought like twenty million nickels whatever the number was and he goes if i could push a button and put all my money in nickels i do it tomorrow i have a thirty six percent return on day one.
I'll virtually guarantee a hundred percent return at some point in the future because you can't keep making things for nine cents that you're charging five cents for and he said and i have no downside. He said so that's asymmetrical risk reward right so in that area that's something that's hard to get but i knew that was valuable then the third thing i found they all talked about is you got to be tax efficient right because that is your net is based on taxes and the fourth is the one we all know diversification.
But diversifying against different assets different asset classes different time frames and different countries different currencies. But dalio said when i asked him this question he goes tony i have thought about this for the last 15 years. And i have now what i would tell you is the holy grail of investing which is the title of our book and he goes it's simply this i found out that if you will confine eight to twelve. Non correlated investments and the things you believe in you reduce your risk by eighty percent and increase your upside.
I heard this i was like wow it's hard to find eight to twelve uncorrelated investments in the world we're in today right even stocks and bonds are not supposed to be correlated but if you look at what happened in 2008 2020. They do they both go down right they correlate and then your broker says i don't know what it is right so he explained to me more detail about that but the simple understanding is you have to go to private equity private credit private real estate to have that diversification.
Unless you're you know a trader has sophistication synthesis that you can use synthesize type of investments and so that set me on looking at then. I was invited to go down to speak at the alternative investment conference for jp morgan gotta be a billionaire to get in there right i've been there two three times now. And who speaks right before me is ray dalio and they do this full interview with him at the last question they ask him a very similar question what's the most important thing you've learned in fifty years investing he says the holy grail everyone there was a billionaire plus.
Nobody written notes the whole damn day everybody had goes down writes this down because it's such a simple principle but it's the core so. I started saying how do i get to that how do i help the average person to get that. Because you know i've got a name you got a name we have we all have access to a certain extent private equity is an extraordinary result but here's what i found out in the last thirty nine years. Private equity is out produced every stock market in the world for thirty nine straight years average private equity no in this book we interviewed thirteen of the best in the world right.
Average is average fifteen point seven percent returns the s&p five hundred of those thirty nine years is nine percent. Seventy four percent better per year compounded for thirty nine years so if you put a million bucks in the s&p you're pretty happy right now you got just under twenty nine million twenty eight point seven million if you put it in basic private equity it's two hundred and ninety three million dollars the same money same time ten times the return. So now the question is how the hell do you get access because there's a big difference between the big boys and the average boy right so.
Again if you're famous you might get it i got access i know people but that the slice they give me wouldn't change my life for this nothing really huge and i was lamenting about this to a friend of mine who used to be partners with paul tutor jones it's really great guy and i helped him a lot. He said tony i'm gonna make your day i'm gonna tell you where i put most of my money and i'm gonna change your life. He said you done so much for me it's my time do for you i said really i'm waiting for him that's a very sophisticated guy he goes.
There's a company that can allow you to come in and not just try to get a little piece of these investments but you become an owner a general partner in these firms not a limited partner you make the two and twenty. You're on every single asset that they have every investment they have said really i said where's this firm i thought i was gonna say you know. New york connecticut london singapore he goes there in houston i said houston he goes yeah they're away from the beaten path and they do this better than anybody i've ever seen he said that the majority of my money you gotta come meet him.
That's how i met my co-author here christopher because i went and sat down and turned out christopher had been through my program twenty five years ago started his business based on it. Yes i got a bragging moment is a ninety six percent profit ratio on the investments he's made for twenty five straight years. We join forces about five years ago he's about two point seven billion we're going to thirteen billion just in the last four and a half five years and so i got a human investor initially they became an owner of the company partner in the company, we're on the company to have a kind of impact it's because we're able to bring people.
General partnerships like do you want to own the race horse you want on the racetrack. That's what the opportunity is and the richest people in the world if you look at the fourth four hundred are all people that are in private equity this is where the largest is not real estate it's not technology look at the list you'll see who they are there's a reason. This is one of the most unique opportunities and now the reason with the book is the average american is not had access.
If you look at the ultra high net worth people fifty two percent of their money is in private equity private credit private only twenty nine percent in the public markets there used to be a thousand companies thirty years ago now there's only four thousand the public markets, eighty seven percent of all companies are private today hundred million to three billion. There's two hundred thousand of them and that's a whole lot more to be able to do the old idea private equity is you go and you take over the company and you sell everything off.
It's not like that today it's about added value they have to be so it's a new industry and the way it's been operating and it's producing results unlike anything else you can't be all your money because you need liquidity and there even some answers to that today but we went, all in figuring out how to help people be able to grow a much higher rate so they can get to their goals but with even less risk if they manage it effectively. Do you think ordinary people are making a mistake by putting all of the money into the s&p then this is kind of old school wisdom dollar cost average in but it sounds like there's no returns to be made it's so funny i had a conversation with somebody a couple months ago and they say you know christopher i understand this diversification thing but i really don't need that i don't like six out of the seven of the magnificent seven i'm like dude you are not diversified they all move together if one is digging the other is digging as well so they all get hit together, people don't think back to where the magnificent seven literally in 2002 during the sell-off that we had there that group of stocks dropped by almost 50 percent in less than a year so people might want that upside but they have to be able to tolerate the downside so do i think it's a mistake to put money in the s&p no but it can't be everything they need to have diversification of other things that will zig and zag at different times which is the whole point of the holy grail of investing is if you have a certain things that are making money when others are losing money, and i know it's a silly example but for everybody who's a golfer out there they'll get it right if you stock a golf shop and all you sell in there is sunscreen well on sunny days you're going to sell a lot of sunscreen if all you sell is umbrellas well then on rainy days you're going to sell a lot of umbrellas but the key is to have both so on rainy days and sunny days you're still making money and that has been so hard here's another fun statistic in 2005 just literally 21 years ago if you had an average allocation that looked like most of the brokerage accounts including alternatives your average correlation was about 0.15 which meant they correlated about 15 percent with each other 85 they're moving different directions okay today literally with no change in that s allocation it is 82 percent correlation globalization is a hell of a drug man it is but it's also indexation because if everybody's buying the same stocks just all in or all out every single day they tend to all move together etfs don't discriminate no they don't and what happens is in stressful environments it actually gets worse to where it goes all the way up to about an 89 correlation when you have a down market because what happens everybody indiscriminately sells everything at the same time and that means they're getting hit from all sides which is why 2020 in the early part of that year was so tough for people in 21 22 everything basically got hammered and think about it right now the magnificent seven are 30 can you explain the magnificent seven for people that don't know what that is absolutely so magnificent seven is basically the the big names that people know the nvidia's the netflix the facebook's are meta now google amazon etc those are the microsoft's included in that that's something that's in seven and to what tony was about to say okay right now that mag seven is 38 percent of the sp500 well it's actually under 32 today that's right it pulled back quite a bit here lately and so what that means is 493 stocks make up the other 68 and so seven make up 32 and the highest percentage in history before this has been 17 of any group of companies so it's twice with more than twice what it's a consolidation of risk even inside of the sp500 which is supposed to be spread across 500 companies completely and very volatile companies to as well i want you to know they're complimentary we we have things in the sp as well but you've got to have you've got to spread your risk you can't do it all and when you look at also if you look at pension funds you look at you know university funds if you look at what's happening with high network people the majority of their investments are in private equity because that's where they're getting the returns you can't they have to be able to provide for the future and provide an income for the future and so that's where they are so and there just isn't more there's none of volume think about it to go from 8,030 years ago to 4,000 stocks roughly a little less than for that actually now in the public markets, you've got more dollars chasing a smaller number of items and you know what that creates?
Inflation that isn't necessarily based on value. Okay, lots of stats, lots of complex numbers to be able to understand here. Imagine that somebody doesn't understand investing, doesn't know where to start. How do you explain what diversification should look like just from first principles and where should that go? So what I always try to tell people is exactly like the business example. No single company really wants to sell one thing. So you want in your portfolio, you want things that are going to do well in lots of different environments.
Good economies, bad economies, high inflation, low inflation, high interest rates, low interest rates. In order to accomplish that, you have to diversify across lots of different asset classes. And most people hear private investments and they get very intimidated by that. Because like, I don't know what a private investment is. Well, most people are in the private markets, they don't really realize it because they own a home. Anybody who owns a home, owns a private asset. It's not priced every single day in the newspaper. You can't look it up online to see exactly what it's worth.
You can get a guide, but you never know for sure what it's worth until you sell it. Well, that's a private asset. The same with the dry cleaner on the corner or the subway sandwich shop that they might go shop in. Those are all private businesses. And obviously anyone who owns those is going to make money or lose money based on the success of that particular business. Not because of the fact that the Fed raises interest rates or lowers interest rates or all the other complex things that try to intimidate people or tend to intimidate people.
So getting people to understand it's just simply good diversification, good business practice, to not have all your revenue streams tied up in one single product. That's true also for your investments. Let your return streams come from lots of different sources. And here's the piece that's different today. And it's about to change because we're interviewing Secretary of Labor, Sondland right after this interview is coming into the house. There are new laws. One of the reasons we wrote the book is it's great to know this, but most people can never have access.
So what good is it? So what's happened though is the Congress and the Senate actually passed a law initially went through the Congress, not yet the Senate that said that, look, you should not be barred from having these types of investments because you're not an accredited investor with a million dollar net worth or a $5 million net worth as a qualified purchaser. The best investments have been reserved for people with the most money. It's completely unfair. Now the idea is we're protecting them from things that are unsophisticated.
Well, think about it. A lot of great business people are not great investors or a lot of people inherit money. They're not great investors, but they get to go there. So what they came up with is we're gonna create a set of questions so you can educate yourself. And if you can answer these, you're qualified. You don't have to have an economic qualification. You just have to understand what you're doing, which makes so much more sense. But even since then, there's some new laws that are coming out and maybe you can address them that are happening.
They're right now being reviewed as we speak, as we're having the interview later with Secretary of Labor. So two things. Number one is last June, a year ago, June, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, just literally with the stroke of a pen said people do not have to be an accredited investor anymore to invest in certain types of funds which own alternative assets. Funds that own things like the Los Angeles Lakers that just sold or the Golden State Warriors or, you know, Formula One teams, et cetera.
SpaceX before it was an IPO, right? Those kinds of funds were never available to investors unless they were already wealthy. So now anyone in the world literally for a $2,500 minimum can invest in those funds. That literally changed last June. And most people don't know that. The second thing that Tony's referring to is the Labor Department has put forth a rule that would enable it to be much easier for 401k plans to allow alternative investments to be available to every single person who has a 401k or a 403b or any kind of retirement account.
That is a total game changer for the industry to be able to allow people for the first time to be able to invest in so much of the economy that they've been prohibited from before. Unless they're wealthy. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside their body. And that is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests, spanning hormones, heart health, kidney function, and even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer.
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Get the exact same blood panels that I use and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. Can you, let's get specific. What are some of the investment opportunities, asset classes that people don't think about? Everybody understands, and you guys agree. S&P, that's probably a good place to have some. We can take away with that. What are the more exotic? Well, I'll give you one that's fun, and it's not exotic because everybody knows about it, but they think it's probably impossible.
Sports, is it just related? Sports are an uncorrelated investment. They have nothing to do with the markets going up or down, what's happening with interest rates. In the last 10 years, they've had an 18% compounded return. But if you look up through history, through wars, World War I, World War II, sports have always done well and they're non-correlated. So you want to find assets. So sports are recession-proof. Yeah, they are. And you know why? Today, they don't just sell hot dogs, which by the way, they have a unique relationship.
They have a monopoly in their cities, a legal monopoly. No one else can go compete with them. And by the way, their fans are called fanatics. That's where the fan comes from. They're multi-generational, and they come, and when inflation goes up, they charge more for hot dogs, we all know, and everything else you can imagine. But now they don't just sell tickets and hot dogs. Today, these are modern media organizations. So we own a piece, I own a piece of stuff. I took me, what, 20 years of my life to be able to own a sports team and to qualify.
They had a microscope to you. I helped us start the soccer team that we have in Los Angeles, the LA Football Club, and put the whole thing, invested, went through the whole nine yards. But then the rules changed, and they made it so certain firms were able to make investments directly into these firms. And now they did it in Major League Baseball, they did it in the NBA, they did it in Major League Hockey, and now the NFL's just done it. And the returns are unbelievable.
So I'll just give you an example. We have a piece of the Dodgers, own a piece of the Red Sox, we have a piece of the Lakers. Excuse me, the Lakers, the Golden State Warriors. All of these firms have grown. So Peter Gruber, one of my partners in business, we did the LAFC together, he was one of the guys that bought the Dodgers. In 2012, he paid 2.2 billion for the Dodgers. Every article said, he's insane, these people are never gonna make money, this is the most ever paid for a sports team.
Now Peter's my partner, and I was like, Peter, I know you're no dummy, what are we doing the right thing here? He goes, Tony, you can trust me on this, you know me well enough. But he said, I'm not even gonna tell you, I'm gonna make an announcement in the next week, and then you come over and we'll have a little party together. So now here's what you can understand. When you're on a sports team, if it's like the NBA, you're 1 32nd of the league, you have 32 teams, or the NFL.
NFL's an even better example. All the national and international advertising is gonna be at 1 32nd up. So if you own an NFL team, you get a $400 million check to start the season. That's your piece. But you also own your local TV advertising yourself. So Peter bought them for 2.2 billion, and then announced he just sold the rights for local television rights for $7 billion and made 5 billion in a day, right? So he's done quite well in this area, and I've done quite well with him in this area.
You know, today, he took on the Golden State Warriors, they were the worst placed team. They had paid only $450 million for it. Now they're the second highest valued sports franchise in the world, behind the Yankees, excuse me, behind the Dallas Cowboys at this point, right? 11 billion that he's built it to. So these are enterprises today that are not just selling sports. They're every aspect that you imagine, and they are an incredible return, and they have nothing to do with what happens in the stock market.
Sounds great, how do I invest? There's lots of different ways that somebody can do it if they have the right knowledge and the right information, but because of the rule changes, now there are funds that are available, literally, that people can get into for 2,500 bucks and own a piece of all of those funds. Actually, we just gotta prove for this to give you a sense. Yeah, I mean, so that was June of 25, was the first time that the rules changed to allow everyday investors to be able to do it.
But so collectively, as a firm, you know, we have exposure over 30 different professional sports franchises, and we have ways that every single investor in the world can invest with us and own a piece of all of those firms. Right? Diversified, so it's not just one team. That's right. So you've made an index fund or an ETF of a variety of sports teams. You know, I'd love to say that it's better than that, right? And I believe it is because it's not just beta, it's not just the market itself or the index fund, but actually really, really curated specific teams in specific areas that have specific opportunities for growth that we believe we bought at very attractive prices.
What's the category of firm that has access to this? Someone wants to go onto the internet right now and say, this sounds great. I love sports. I want to get in, I need to diversify. Like what do they put into the internet? Just put in casinvestments.com. That's what they would do. That's the easiest way. But I mean, there's very few firms that are permitted to be able to invest in multiple teams in the same league. And that's what the rule changes were from 2019 to 2024 for somebody to be able to do that.
It wasn't, it didn't exist before 2019. So we were very early in that theme. And one of the things I think would be really helpful for the audience, because a lot of people are like, okay, sports teams are trophy assets and people just rich people want to own it because it's a cool thing to own. It is a cool thing to own, but it's about cord cutting. It's about people getting their content differently. Watching your podcast is not something that really existed 20 years ago. So in 2005, 14 of the top 100 watch programs that were live in the United States were sports.
14 out of 100. In 2025, 96 of the top 100 watch live programs were sports. Why? Who watches a live program when you can go on Netflix or Amazon or any other and not have to watch commercials? So you're gonna watch the- Sports teams and Love Island fans. Oh, absolutely. That's all the plan. I mean, we own a, you know, along with our partners, we own a stake in Liverpool and we own a piece of Paris Saint-Germain. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, well, you know, I figured you might because of where you're from.
But in several others that you might be more familiar with, but the opportunity to be able to own those dominant franchises around the world in all different types of sports is something that most people didn't ever think of. And that was your question. What do people not think of? The other thing they don't think about is early stages of venture capital because like, well, I can't get access to it. You know, Saronic got great attention earlier this summer because they rescued those two pilots that were shot down in the Strait of Hormuz, the helicopter pilots.
It was an autonomous boat made by a company in Austin, right, that literally went out there and saved these two people with no other people being put at risk. That didn't exist a couple of years ago, but that is an example of a company that actually is available to everybody in the world now at a $2,500 minimum if they know where to go. And obviously that's a big part of what we wanted to write the book for, to be able to help people understand these opportunities do exist.
And they've got to do their own homework and they got to make sure that they're comfortable with it. But ultimately that's what something, that's something that people really just were never able to do. And now the world has changed and they have the ability to adapt with it and get exposure that they couldn't before. And if these final pieces that Sondland's working on, they've had the final comment period. So shortly there'll be a final decision, but that means people could put it in their 401k as well.
So now it's tax advantage on top of everything else that you're talking about here. But there, you know, the world has changed. Think about what the war has happened in the Ukraine and how that's changed the world. We no longer can start sending these multi-million dollar missiles to take out these crappy little drones. It's just, it's a system that doesn't work. And so now there's all these private companies that are gearing up to take on this. And now, you know, the G7 and this group has gone in and they're having to put 5% of their money and they're almost doubling what they're spending.
So you're talking about literally a level of spending that's going into the military side, but it's now companies that are based on technology who can come in and do things at scale. Guys like Angeril. Yes, exactly. Those are the ones that we've invested in, right? And so we have access to those. So those are all against ways to diversify. So we have different asset classes, right? Think about space and military. These are gonna grow. Unfortunately, we're gonna need them to grow geometrically as time goes on.
I'm happy about space. Space, good. Military, less so good. The military, but we gotta protect ourselves, right? So it's a combination of the two. And that's something to where literally the headline was, you gotta stop throwing Ferraris at Frisbees, okay? You can't use a Tomahawk missile to shoot down a $30,000 drone. So you have to come up with other ways to protect your people and to be able to protect your country. And then space is just such, it truly is the, no pun intended, the new frontier.
And to be able to do what we're doing in space and what SpaceX has done to be able to open up the commercialization of space to such a dramatic effect to be able to deliver things that were never able to be done before to places that were never able to be done before. There's another company as an example called Armada. They literally have a box that looks like a rail car. They can drop that in the middle of nowhere Africa. And because of Starlink, they can have a completely fully operational data center as long as they have power and access to the sky.
I saw a video of this. It's like a industrial shipping container thing. Yeah, I've seen this before. That's wild. Very early investors in the company because what it did, it's solving a huge need. What they refer to as being on the edge to where things in the middle of Alaska or things on a ship in the middle of the ocean. You're not gonna be able to have a data center there that's secure. So we have one of the gentlemen that works for us. He's a former Green Beret.
He can't tell the exact story for obvious reasons, but literally they were in a jungle somewhere in South America. And literally they were able to use an Armada box connected to a local natural gas facility, connected to Starlink and save their butts. He got a chance to meet the CEO and he said, you saved my life. Thank you. And he's like, I didn't do that. No, your business saved my life. That's the kind of use case or icon another austin-based company that you may know Jason ballard and his team at icon or they do the 3d printed homes Yes, I have seen this as well Okay, so they are literally able to print homes or now barrack or any other kind of industrial facility Two stories and they can do it faster and cheaper than you could ever do it with physical labor And obviously it's concrete so it's very durable and it's very sustainable.
Well, I mean businesses are crazy coming from coming from the uk America is a fantastic country, but you guys insist on making your houses out of wood It's fucking wood. Everything's made out of wood and like build it out of brick There's this ancient technology that we're doing here some thatched roof that you've got Tell you what, I had a had david friedberg on the show a couple of months ago He's so great and he was explaining to me talking about crazy new technologies He was explaining to me one of the reasons that the moon is going to be incredibly important It means that once you've got something there and you can von neumann probe Use the materials on the moon to make stuff that you send from the moon Because the launch velocity that you need to get off of there is is way lower, right?
That was cool, but he explained to me how the mass ejectors on the moon work So I was thinking you've got a small factory That finds materials turns it into kind of a 3d printing style thing And then from there you send out into the rest of the solar system and the galaxy what it is that you need But he explained to me the way that you get it off you need about four kilometers or so of Track and you use a maglev thing to send it.
But what was so fucking cool. This is my favorite thing two things First off the gravity on the moon is so low that you don't actually need to send something up If you send it fast enough flat it reaches escape velocity Just like throwing a ball really really hard and it just gets out of that was the first thing the second thing Is that you use the orbit of the moon to aim so you're waiting You're waiting boom And you send it and it's like oh i'm just going to use the way that the moon rotates To like fire it in the direction.
I was like, this is the coolest shit i've ever heard. I thought By the way icon is building exactly out of the materials on the moon. They're building the facilities for them there They've got a practice facility NASA has has Hired them to effectively make this possible. And so those are the kinds of things we were seed investors in the company of icon We've watched it grow up. That's an example of things that people would never think to invest in They would just observe like oh, that's cool But yeah, you need to be david friedberg to know that it's happening.
That's right, but you don't anymore Yeah, it's available to everybody in the world literally at 2500 bucks. What about the other side of this? What is an investment that maybe millions of americans currently believe is safe or reliable? But is actually riskier than they think it is It's hard because everything has its purpose right some investments should lose money 90 of the time But 10 of the time they make a lot of money and that gives you negative correlation or things moving opposite direction So that doesn't mean anything is bad I mean somebody could say that bitcoin is a bad investment.
It could be a phenomenal investment It can be higher risk though, right something that's higher risk than people anticipate. What would you put in that category? There's so much that fits into that category so many people don't understand that You know, the risk level is what we refer to statistically as volatility. All right standard deviation What I put it is your gut How much does your gut have the ability to tolerate if you can't see it turn into 50 cents overnight? You don't belong in it So you got to make sure that whatever it is You own is not going to create the panic that you get out of it And then you dramatically underperform the investment itself because you can't stay in the seat, right?
That's one of the reasons why leverage is so dangerous for most people Is leverage gets them blown out with a margin call because the fact that they don't have staying power Staying power can be economic and it can be gut and the vast majority of investors don't have near stuff A tough gut as they think citadel comes along and eats you on that's correct And that's exactly what happens and that's what makes a market. So it's too soon. No, no, it's okay It's just the reality of the world and obviously good for citadel not great for the other party But that's what most people have to do is not over concentrate And like bitcoin is a perfect example young people go for bitcoin like crazy And the idea was it was going to protect us and you know inflationary areas But you see what happens and when all of a sudden the tech investors lost a lot of money Guess what?
They all sold their bitcoin to cover themselves, right? So they're correlated still and so it's a lack of understanding. I'll tell you what's more scary I just read a statistic the other day that generation z and millennials a combination of the two 52 percent of them in the last year have taken money that they would have used investment to put into sports betting And that 26 think that sports betting is their way to build their financial future As to financial experts, are you telling me that's not the truth?
Definitely not hell. No Bad idea. Come on. No, it may be good for a while, but I wouldn't plan on if you're called luck, right? You're just praying for luck in that situation who wants to invest in the sports team themselves I want to invest in whether or not this guy's going to touch gloves with the goalkeeper before he finishes I mean, let me invest in the horse and not on the racetrack. That's the opposite mindset You want a billionaire mindset you want on the racetrack?
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That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom talking about the Psychology, I think this is this is an area. I already want to talk about is there a personality type That shouldn't be an active investor. Is there a type of person who? Just isn't built to be in the market at all. Well, how would you advise people who are? Significantly more risk averse to put up with the bad days to put up with that time It's such a beautiful thing because they don't ever have to have a bad day if they're properly diversified Yeah, oh boy the most people like okay I'm going to put you know, the old 60 40 right 60 percent stocks 40 percent bonds for decades That worked until it didn't and then all of a sudden people realized that they actually were more correlated And they didn't make money on their bonds and they got hammered on their stocks It doesn't mean there's not a place for bonds and it doesn't mean there's not a place for stocks But they need to build it out with the rest of it So the more risk averse somebody is the more diversified they should be If somebody's going to go out and by the way This is the biggest mistake that I see people make every single day and i've seen it for 35 years of my career People make investment decisions based on dollars.
That is crazy. No professional investor does that it has to be on percentages So a million dollar investment sounds like a lot of money and it is Unless you're worth a hundred million dollars in which case it's just one percent So ten thousand dollars or a million dollars if it's one percent and somebody says i'm going to go put Fifty percent of my money into this they'd go. That's way too much. That's risky Or if they're going to say I'm going to go put 50 grand in it Well now all of a sudden they go that's not that much money Well, if you only got 100 grand, it's a lot so the more that they diversify and properly diversify across all of their assets and Percentages are properly weighted.
They don't have to worry about volatility Because that's the whole point of the holy grail of investing is just by adding 8 to 12 different non-correlated investments You can reduce your risk by 80 percent 80 percent volatility 80 percent reduction in risk and you can usually get still a the same return or even a better rate of return well, I think what is as impressive maybe is getting Reducing your your downside risk Is what it does to the level of stress that you've got? Yes, totally something's working how many people get stressed when something is working and and the loss the The upside joy versus that all the studies on psychology versus the ceilings of loss They don't compare the loss that people stay with much longer I think one of the most important things is if people can get in a position where they have this kind of diversification And if they're in things like private equity, the great thing about private equity It's not only is it out producing every market in the world for 39 straight years But also its drops are shorter and they don't have to do it.
Think about it when the market drops You're in you're in the general market the open market All those prices go if you're private equity you hang on to what you got. You don't sell it, right? You buy things during that time. So that's how they're making money think about they're not making money Just hoping they're going to get the right price right now They're buying something at the best price they can a business and they figure out how to improve it They're bringing a new ceo.
They're bringing in ai they're bringing a new manager team They're putting in new marketing and they build that company up and then they sell that for a multiple either Taking it public or very often to another private company So they have a I love that type investing is this how I made all my money as a human in my businesses, you know I have now 121 companies. We did 22 billion dollars in business Just my group together and all of those companies we've done well because we found a way to add more value in that marketplace We figured out what to do that No one else is doing more better and we found that edge and then the business grows geometrically That's how these guys invest It's not like the old days where they find something cut it all off and sell off its pieces That was the original kind of private equity those days are over and now they got to put their own money in That's one of the reasons that we have the opportunities that we do to be able to be investors as a general partners Because since 2008 when everything dropped Bain had approved to everybody.
Hey, it's worth doing He said okay We're going to put our money in as we've done in ours You might give them a sense about that. So like bain was the first one that really did a very large gp commit Okay, that means the general partner who manages the fund puts in a bunch of their own money to show alignment With the other investors in the skin in the game Okay, so they literally coming out of the global financial crisis. Everybody's like I'm, not sure what I want to invest in so bain said, okay, we're gonna among our partners We're going to put a billion dollars into our own fund Well that got everybody's attention like oh, well, I guess you're aligned with us And so that gave people comfort and confidence that's very much the standard now Typically two to five percent Of all of the money in a fund is put up by the people managing that fund of their own capital So that way there is that alignment and so as you think about a firm growing from a billion Dollar fund to a five billion dollar fund to a ten billion dollar fund.
They've got to have very significant 200 to 500 million dollars of their own money to put into that fund But they may not have harvested their billion and their five billion dollar funds yet So they will sell a stake to firms like ours Where we have the ability to then provide them with the balance sheet that they need to go raise bigger funds Show more alignment and they obviously have to sell a piece of their company to us to be able to do that But if they sell 12 of their company, they still own 88 So everybody wins from that growth that comes from that capital just sitting on the on the psychology piece for for another minute Scarcity mindset abundance mindset when it comes to the way that people see their financial future How does how do you guys see a scarcity mindset show up in someone's investment decisions?
Well when I was interviewing, uh, I needed 50 of the the greatest investors of all time But I also interviewed mary calhoun erdos from jp morgan. It was basically overseas 2.2 trillion investments And in everybody's case I asked them, you know, what's the biggest advantage? They all talked about asset allocation every single investor talked about it And she said tony the way I look at it is if I get somebody that's super risk adverse I look at it my partnership think i'm crazy goes i'll put them in treasuries because My goal is to make sure they get what they want emotionally as well as financially if it takes them longer.
That's okay some people They're just they can't handle it and you got to understand that because if you're investing So that you can eventually feel good that you feel secure that's and you feel miserable during your investment on the way to feel good Yeah, so you've destroyed your life and she goes so that's what I do. I'd like she said i'm not dumb I still get them some balance, but I I think it is like buckets think of it this way There's a security bucket kind of a peace of mind bucket That's investments that have a fixed return, right?
Those are you know bonds that's going to be a variety of things insurance It might be your home. It's a place where things are going to go very slowly. There's very low risk So it's not high returns, but low risk Compounds over time. It looks like grass growing and then boom boom boom We all know what compounding does right? If I play a game of golf and say let's play 10 cents a hole and then right before you swing I say well Well, we doubled each hole just make it more interesting, you know, 10 cents first hole 20 cents second hole 40 cents 80 cents You go.
Yeah, there's 18 holes. Yeah. Okay, you know a few bucks. No big deal But the last hole's worth thirteen thousand dollars, right? And the first beginning it's 20 cents 40 looks like nothing in the last five holes it goes like this That's what compounding is. So even in the security bucket you can get financially free The risk bucket growth bucket risk growth. Most people think it was growth That's the places where you don't have a fixed return where you have unlimited upside and unlimited downside That can be everything from real estate to stocks to bonds to private equity to anything you're talking about Trading you can lose way more than what you put into you got to be careful.
Obviously what puts So the balance between those depend on a couple different things number one When you need the money If you need it three years from now You know, you can't be able to take too much risk because you don't have time to make it up Right if you were 30 years old You can make some big mistakes. You could have a lot more in your growth bucket risk bucket lose You got time to make it up, right? So that's the first thing when you need money Second thing you got to look at is what is your real risk tolerance versus what you think it is?
You know, we I have a game we play in one of our wealth programs that we do and i'll say to people in the Middle of the thing i'll say stand up and turn some music i'll make change with everybody like what I should make change and we play this little money song and people walk around start taking money in their pocket and they're exchanging money and And then they the song ends. I said, okay sit down and then I go on like something else and Always one or two people are really fuming and they'll finally raise their hand.
I'll say excuse me. Excuse me I said, what is it? They go. That was not fair. So what are you talking about? They go. I mean That person I gave them a hundred dollar bill and they gave me a five And I want my money back. I said, well who said it was your money? And I said who said the game was over Right, and I said and the real lesson is if a hundred dollars stress you out And you're going to be an investor You're going to lose the greatest investors on earth are not liars They will tell you i'm going to lose what I want to do is make sure what I lose, I don't lose very much because I've got enough diversification in what I'm doing.
So people's got to understand what their real feelings are about things. And then the third element that affects it is access to cashflow. If you are making $100,000 a year and spending 110, you don't have a lot of extra cashflow. But if you're making $100,000 a year and you're saving, you know, $50,000 of your money, yes, you got more cashflow. If you got a business that's putting more cash than you need, you can take more risks, right? So how much you put in that security bucket, how much you put in that growth bucket, that's really an important philosophy because what everybody does is they think they can put in the security bucket and then somebody goes, oh, Bitcoin.
Somebody goes, oh, AI, oh, something. And they get, I don't know, I'll take my security bucket and I'll put it over here in my growth bucket. And then when I make the money, I'll put it back over my security bucket. What we do tell people is when they grow in their growth bucket, for people like that, we say, take a third and put it in your security bucket so it keeps growing even faster. Put a third back. You can take a third and you can use that for other forces that we talk about as well as one example.
But it's an individual process that people need to make based on the criteria that we just talked about. What about on the other side, someone who has an abundance mindset? Like, can that make you a better investor or just dangerously optimistic? You tell me. I've seen both. Where people are, they think they're bulletproof and so they're just fearless and they make investments with no fear about the downside and it ends up working out for them, which is usually the most expensive thing that can happen because then they believe that's gonna happen every time.
Oh, they're lost in the sauce. Yeah, totally. I mean, somebody gets blackjacked the first time they sit at the table, I mean, they're toast. I'm a genius. Exactly. I'll give you a perfect example. I have a friend, it's a true story, who went through my programs, my business programs, and he bought a taxi top business in San Francisco. And he was one of the first people to take a digital, previous to that, the only things advertised was tobacco and naked bars and things of that nature.
Now he's doing movies and everything else. Well, he built it up and sold the thing for $200 million to a big advertising firm. And so I said to him, I said, how much are you gonna put in your security bucket out of that? How much are you gonna put back in your growth bucket? He goes, Tony, I give you so much credit. I tell everybody, I made $200 million based on everything you taught about how to grow a business. That's the only thing. It's like, I don't need a security bucket.
He goes, I'm gonna make these new investments. I'm going to Vegas. And he started buying advertising space in the air above spices in advance. It was actually a very brilliant strategy. And he goes, I'm gonna be a billionaire. I said, I bet you will. I said, you gotta take a little bit off the table because if you're going to Vegas, that should be the first lesson, right? You take one off the table. He goes, Tony, I love you dearly, I'm not doing that. So sure enough, he calls me up about three years later.
He goes, I'm making a killing on some of that advertising. I'm doing so great. Now, this is 2006. He goes, now I'm building buildings in Vegas condos. And I got, he told me the names of the celebrities I won't mention, so his name stays private. And he goes, I got these celebrities in. And he goes, I'm gonna sell out this first building up front using everybody else's money, just like Donald Trump, like everybody else. He goes, I'm gonna be worth $600 million. I said, I'm proud of you.
How much are you gonna take? I put the security bucket. I had the same conversation with him, right? He goes, you just don't give up. I said, you know why? I've talked about this for 30 years. I meet people come back 20 years later, 10 years later and say, holy shit, I wish I would've listened. He goes, Tony, I'm doing great. End of the story, 2008. Real estate in Las Vegas drops 70%, 70%, right? I talked to him, the second tower, everybody wants their money back.
People walk away from it. The second tower is there. He's upside down $400 million, trying to avoid bankruptcy. I'm not mentioning his name because he says, you can share my story, but I want more lawsuits. He's starting all over and all because he just didn't understand this basic piece. So the answer to your question is most people, it's a mistake. The smartest people who take risks are doing an asymmetrical risk reward. Where do I have the least amount of risk with the greatest amount of upside?
That's what makes people wealthy. That's the discipline that makes them wealthy. Well, and the abundance, my set is great because it means they're also not living in fear and they're not afraid of taking risks. So we've had a saying for 25 years of our firm, what's the worst case scenario? If we can live with that, the upside will take care of itself. We have an abundance mindset. When we invested in Icon, we knew that it could very well go to zero. And we were willing to take that risk because we knew that if it worked, it could be completely game-changing, not only investment-wise, but also for society.
That is the reason why we could do that is because we have an abundance mindset, but we always respect risk. And we're always afraid of not respecting risk because we know the risk will just whack you upside the head if you don't respect it. And Christopher and I, as a partnership, it's really nice because I see the opportunity, he sees the risk. And so- I'm the skeptic. It's the yin and the yang. But it's so perfect, right? We bring things together to each other. You'll look at, how many will we look at in a year now?
It's more now. It's over 2,000 investments a year. And out of that, we'll make? Maybe 20 or 30 in a typical year. Out of 2,000 opportunities, many of which are extraordinary. But that's why there's a 96% profit ratio of all investments over 25 years. So you have to have that kind of discipline. The supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Beyers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary.
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Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom, and modernwisdom at checkout. How do you think about taking some off the table for you to use in your life? I'm aware that much of this is what's your personal tolerance for risk and how much do you need and so on and so forth, but there's a certain archetype of person, and Bill Perkins wrote a book about this, Die With Zero, which is fucking fantastic.
There is a certain archetype, this sort of more misery person. Maybe there's someone that didn't come from money, but as opposed to, I now have it, I'll blow it, it's I now have it and I'm terrified of losing it. How do you think about advising people who are investing in the market? It's like, all right, you've done well, it's time for you to actually take some of this and- I think this is so personally critical. I teach this. I kind of alluded to it. I said two buckets, there's a third bucket.
I call it your dream bucket. And what I have people do is the dream bucket is all the things you call investments that really aren't, but they make you feel good. Like a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Yes, like a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. Like that SP3 Ferrari that, maybe it goes up from 3 million to 5 million, maybe it goes down- Like the new bed that you want, da, da, da, da. Yeah, it's your jet, it's your island, it's those things, or it's a little condo that you have, you know, depending on where your economics are.
It's $50,000 of walking around money. It's what you do for jewelry. It's those things. And I have people create those. And the reason I create those is, if you don't enjoy it along the way, most people, if they own a business, they learn how to create more when they experience more joy from what they're doing as well. But we keep the same disciplines, but instead of only having those two buckets, we'll say, when you have a big hit, put a little piece in your dream bucket as well.
Or you get a big growth expansion on your growth bucket, put a third in your security, put a third back to reinvest, and put a third in your dream bucket. And so what happens is I find people, different types of people, but that type of person gets excited. Like I fortunately was around some brilliant people, Peter Gruber, one of my dearest friends in the world for the last 35 years. I mean, he is a lifestyle guy. And like he got me, I'll never forget, I was 30 years old.
He invited me to come to his place in Aspen, a thousand acre ranch in Aspen, to give you a sense of the value. Quite highly sought after real estate. $100 million for five acres, right? It'll give you an idea. So I go to his ranch and talking to him, and he calls me up. He says, you gotta come to this meeting. And I'm not a networker. If I can't add value, I don't wanna just go talk about stuff, right? Because Tony, most influential people, I'm telling you, I need to put you in front of these people, proximities, power, come to us.
So I lived in San Diego. So I fly to LA, right? Cause that's first leg. Then I fly to Denver. Then I fly from Denver to Aspen. They lose my luggage in Denver and I get to Aspen. By the time I'm done, it takes nine hours to get there. I arrive as the dinner's ending. With no clothes. With clothes on my back. And Peter said, what the F is wrong with you? I said, what are you talking about, Peter? I've got here. I left at six, seven this morning.
I went from here to there, and he goes, you flew commercial? And I said, Peter, I'm not a billionaire like you. He goes, are you an idiot? You don't need to be a billionaire. You could charter and be here in two hours. He said, you gotta buy some crappy little, get a Learjet, get, it's 2,500 bucks an hour. For 5,000 bucks, you'd be here. And another 5,000 back, that's $10,000. And my ticket was only 1,200. Yeah, and you weren't here. And he goes, you should come up with a budget.
The amount of hours you fly per year, you should come up with a budget and just charter. You don't need to own a plane. He said, it will transform your life. And so I still didn't do it. And one night I was doing an event in Los Angeles and two events had collided. Somebody screwed up on the schedule. I finished at one in the morning. I got to be in Edmonton, Alberta, the next morning at 830 for 5,000 people. And there are no flights. So I said, and I need to sleep.
I've been going on for four straight days, 12 hours a day. So I called my team and I said, you gotta find a jet. Find the cheapest, smallest little Learjet, whatever you gotta do. And I said, I gotta sleep. They go, Tony, there's no room to sleep on those things. I said, if I was dying, if I was dead, what would you do? You'd put me on a gurney, get a gurney in that thing. They go, it'll never happen. We pulled it off. I arrived there at two in the morning.
First time I'm on a private jet. I climb in this little thing. It's such a small jet. I can touch the captain, right? I strap into this thing. We lift off. We turn an angle. We look down at Santa Monica Bay. I look up at the moon. I'm all strapped in. I fall asleep for four hours. I get up, I'm on stage in time. I do the event. I go, this is the way to live. So it changed things. It changed my ideas. Like, okay, I'm doing all this business.
Most of that is half right off anyway. Here's what the real dollars are. And I figured out how to earn more. So there's a mindset that comes if you experience a certain lifestyle. If you have ever had the privilege of someone else cleaning your toilets and you don't like that, you probably won't do that again. You'll probably find someone who's really good at that, enjoys that and provide them an income and give yourself freedom to do something else. Having lifestyle is critical, I believe, but it's different for everybody.
Some people miser, but you know, it's like there's a story about this couple that saved all their money and they went on this little trip. You know, they've saved up forever and they didn't want to spend their money and they go on this cruise. And what they bring, cheese and crackers because they don't want to spend any extra money. And so every day they go on the trip, they meet everybody. And at the end of the day, they go have their cheese and crackers. And on the last day, they finally said, look, let's just splurge.
Cause you know, on these trips, they have these huge amounts of food and desserts and they went for everything and they got the wine, everything else. And then they asked for the check at the end and you know how the story ends, right? Is all inclusive. Comes out and goes, it's all inclusive. They came with a trip and they look at each other and go, this is how we've been living our lives. That's how most people live their lives. They're so miserly. What'll make you do that more is if you actually get into giving.
Cause one of the things that made me grow more than anything else was when I started to tithe. Cause I interviewed multiple people, but I interviewed Templeton. And at the time, you know, he was the first billionaire investor. He's a brilliant man. Such a good hearted guy. I met him multiple times, interviewed him. And he said, Tony, I asked him, what's the secret to wealth? He said, you teach it. I said, well, I teach a lot of things. Which is, he goes, it's gratitude. If you're grateful about anything, you're gonna be rich.
If you have a billion dollars and you're not grateful, you're unhappy. If you got three beautiful kids and a wife, you're not grateful, you don't have a life. Gratitude's the secret. But he said, I will tell you this. If you really wanna be wealthy, I don't know anyone who's tithed at least 10%. Doesn't have to be to a religion, to something. For more than a decade, that didn't become incredibly wealthy. So I'm proud to say I've done 17%. I've gone way above my pay grade. But the rewards have been unbelievable.
And I started out feeding two families. Then I figured out, about 2014, I said, I found out in 37 years, I'd fed, at that point, 42 million people. It was pretty exciting. But I was like, what if I fed that many people in one year? What if I fed 100 million people in a year? What if I had 100 million people a year for 10 straight years? A billion meals. And I teamed up Feeding America to deliver the food, and I did it in eight years.
And when I started, it seemed impossible. Then I said, I'm gonna do 100 billion meals around the world. Because I travel around the world, you see people starving, right? And I recruited Governor Beasley, the head of the UN, of the World Food Program. He won the Nobel Prize. But when he started, there were 85 million people starving. Now there's 385 million people. I said, we'll put together a strike force. We'll do this better. But we're gonna make it measurable. I said, what's the number of meals we need for the next 10 years to be able to feed most people in the world?
And then, during those 10 years, we gotta find the sustainable solution, because you can't do charity forever. He goes, Tony, I don't know, 40, 50, 60 billion meals. I said, we'll do a 100 billion meal challenge for the 10 years. He goes, Tony, you'll never get 100 billion meals. I said, I did a billion meals. I wasn't a billionaire when I started. I've been blessed. When you bless others, you get blessed. And I said, if there's at least 99 people like me. So we went to the Forbes, you know, philanthropy event.
I brought him to speak. He's amazing. I spoke. People were in tears. I thought, we're gonna get 50 out of 100. We're gonna do half of it right here. Five people signed up. But in the last four years, by changing our approach, I started this year at 62 billion meals. Right now, I have commitments for 295 billion meals in four years, and 63 billion have already been delivered. So scaling that has changed things. I said, you know, I'm a private jet. It burns fuel. I don't wanna be incongruent.
How do I replace more than what I put out here? I burn 5,000 trees a year. Guess what? I plant 100 million trees. I not only just planted them, but then showed the people there how to build crops every single month and built a forest farm for them in West Africa, program that's there. My wife and I have like, saw what's happening with some friends of ours and trafficking that happen to children. No one wants to talk about it. So I set a goal. I said, we're going to free 30,000 children.
I went on, on one of these missions, myself undercover with scars all over my face. It was the most horrific thing I've ever done. I do not want to be faced by you in a dark alley. Well, you want to be faced by the people I dealt with in a dark alley, but I have with a group of SEAL team, six guys that are brilliant. It was an undercover operation. Someone never get as long as I live. But when those kids were freed is one of the greatest gifts of my life.
So we've now freed over a hundred thousand children, and I've got a target of a million. When those are your goals, you build businesses a different way. That's why now I'm doing $22 billion in this. I wasn't doing numbers like that before. I didn't have all these companies. It's like, I have a higher purpose in building them, all those businesses serve people. They provide things that are life changing in terms of value for people, provide jobs. But in addition to all that, I have a higher purpose in what I'm doing that will make you earn more, grow more, expand more finances.
You never found before. It's like you need something compelling. If all you're trying to do is make a living or just cover your overhead, you're never going to find the answers. You're never going to push yourself to discover what's possible. Or if the only reason that you're earning money is to reinvest the money, to never actually take it out, to never actually enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah. That's how people that do that may die that way and just pass the money on to somebody else. What do you think beyond the giving thing, which I know is probably the high oddly enough, being selfless is the most selfish thing that you can do.
You get the most reward possible. Beyond that, what do you think for a normal person? Who's maybe not quite, uh, we're going to fix world hunger or, or buy a jet. What are some of the areas where people can derive a lot of satisfaction, joy in life from spending money? Someone's being responsible. They may be doing some of the investment. They've got their one third and one third, that third third. What's a, what are some of the places that you think, Hey, this is somewhere that you really should look at spending money to improve your quality of life that people might not think about from, from the gap?
I still think here's what I want to say. I have a, I have a friend that was on an airplane recently. I'm knowing 45 to 44 years and someone's reading one of my books and he said, you know, he's left. What do you think of that book? Oh, it was my, my energy book, right? About your body. And it's unbelievable. And the stem cells and all these things. And, and then, you know, and he said, what do you think of the author? He goes, well, he's a really good guy.
He donated a hundred percent of the book, which by the way, we've done that with holy grail investing too, but don't take a dime. I give it all to feeding America. And he says, that's really cool. He goes, but you know, he's rich. So it must be easy. And my friend, Mike says, his name's Mike keys. He said, what have I told you? I've known Tony for 45 years. I had known him when he was 17 and he had $20 in his pocket and he didn't know where his next meal is going to give.
And he gave half of it to a guy in the street that was begging for it. And Tony taught me something. Then if you don't give a dime out of a dollar, you're never going to give 10 million out of a hundred million. The first place you should start is giving. I have a friend that started out feeding two or three people, he's, he's had a million, he's had a million people now in the last 10 years that come on this little trip with me, just finding little ways to help them make a difference.
So you can start small and do things. And then in terms of what are the things that people do that go in their dream bucket, besides contribution, it's usually like little things. If you are at Starbucks and they've proven this because they can measure what happens now with the secretions in your mouth, the hormone changes, nothing comes close to three things that give you the most joy are number one experiences. Experiences are more than any toy or asset because those we get used to. But if you create experiences, people remember them.
The second thing though, is giving to someone else, if you go and you buy the next five people or 10 people at Starbucks, their coffee, you don't even know the transformation in your biochemistry, the level of internal joy that people carry is greater than people that spend millions of dollars on something that are doing it for positioning purposes. Like, oh, I gave this money to charity type of thing. You can see a change in that area. Then what people do that gives them joy is all the little things.
It could be just, you know, doing something special for your kids. It can be saying, we're going to do a first-class ticket to Europe this time instead of a coach class, just for this element, we're going to upscale something in our life that feels like a greater quality of life and brings us joy. If that joy and pleasure is there, you're going to have the desire to invest more, grow more, expand more, be, be masterful in this area of your life. It's really interesting to think about the positive reward that people get from investing their money that nobody ever actually ends up withdrawing to improve their quality of life.
I'm just continuing to put money in, continuing to put money in and never paying it back down. I think a few areas that people would probably be surprised, uh, getting a maid or a cleaner for your house is a hundred percent somebody to do the gardening, some people like the gardening. Some people think that it is hell. Uh, those, it is one of the first places that you can do, not just what is it that I want, what is it that I don't enjoy doing and how is that sapping?
And what gives me more time? Yes. Cause probably the most scarce thing for human beings to the outside of money is time. Yeah. Right. Cause now so much of our time we allow to control. I mean, we used to spend six hours on screens, then, you know, people are stuck at home during COVID and went to 13 hours and it has not gone back. People walked down the street staring at it. So it's not that we have less time. It's just that we allow everything else to engage us.
And if you can free up time with a small amount of money, it gives you a totally different experience. The other thing that's a beautiful thing about that is it's not just the time that somebody gets, it's the opportunity that it creates. That's right. So being able to allow someone else to be able to earn a living, to be able to do what they're really good at, what they enjoy, what's positive flow for them. And at the same time is also rewarding for us, that's a wonderful thing to be able to do, to be able to make memories for our family, to be able to make memories for friends, to be able to give them things that they might not ever be able to do on their own and it doesn't have to be expensive, but to be creative.
So certainly for somebody who's an investor and they've done well to be able to harvest some of that and go, you know what, this was well-earned. I'm going to make sure that I pay it back either through charitable contribution or through making memories for friends or family, or to be able to provide opportunity for other people to earn a living and to be able to feed their family, whatever that may be, that why, and I'll quote him, the bigger the why, the harder we try. Ultimately that is what delivers happiness for people when they are looking at something that is just a nebular number and keeping score, it has to be for a purpose, that purpose is what ultimately causes them to not only make good decisions, but also to have staying power to go, this is worth it.
It's interesting, right? Money is a number on a spreadsheet or a number on your bank balance on your phone, and it's only when you actually end up trading it in for something in the real world that it becomes anything. It's just a number. It doesn't, and it could be like, you could look at it as dollars, but it could be hyperinflation South Africa money if you didn't know, because until you end up trading it in, the number is kind of arbitrary. Yeah. It doesn't make any difference.
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That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Okay. You mentioned about AI earlier on, what are the, how are you thinking about AI as a future and what are the opportunities in AI that people aren't seeing at the moment? Well, we invested in Anthropa and ChatGBT. I mean, Anthropica went in 2025, started at a billion, went to 10 and now by April it was 44 billion this year. There's been nothing like it. It's unbelievable. But I think it's important to understand the thesis for investing. You know, I asked most people, if I said to you in the next 10 years, do you believe there'll be more change to humanity than in the history of all of humanity, what would you say?
Depends how RSI goes. Maybe, maybe. Yeah. Most people would say yes, because I've asked millions, tens of thousands of people. Then I say to them, it's like, well, if I have a 10 year goal to feed a billion people, it doesn't mean anything unless you pull it to here. And they say like, what does that mean this year? Oh, I fed 42 million people in 37 years. I get to do a hundred million this year to get to a billion that calls you to action. So what I've been doing with people saying, so what if I told you in the next 36 months, there'll be as much change as probably you've ever experienced in your lifetime for humanity.
Almost everybody agrees, especially when you point out three things, AGI, we'll have AGI in the next 36 months. Some people would argue we already have it. That means one agent has more power in one category, chemistry, mathematics, whatever it is that any human being. Pretty much there. Ray Kurzweil predicted that this would happen in, uh, in 90, that we'd have this within three years. And now back in 1990, right. Um, and he's now I interviewed him the other day and he said, I was conservative. It's going to happen sooner.
In five to six years, we'll have superintelligence. That means one agent will have the power of all human minds combined. When that happens, the world changes so radically. Second piece, quantum. I was just with the vice chairman of IBM. We're talking about AI and I was saying, I'm concerned that look, there's people, there's no safety because everybody's going for the trillion dollar target. And if they don't do it, there's the stick of China taking over. Right? So there's not a look at this. He goes, well, if you're concerned about that, be more concerned about quantum.
He said, because quantum, whoever gets quantum first can basically make the other military defunct. We don't have to even have the missiles. We can get their codes and fire things off where it's all encryption. It's it's, and you've been evolving here in quantum is 15 years, 70. He said, when I asked him, when's it going to happen? He goes between us and, and, and Google where the two drivers, China's a little bit behind, but not much. He said, it's critically important. 36 months, you know, you go over and you see, uh, if you've been up to, um, to see, uh, Brett Adcock and his group up there and figure AI, you walk in this building and it is like you're in the future, there's nothing but robots ever doing everything, not robots.
Like you see in China, you know, they're robotic and they do karate and, you know, they're running a program thinking robots that make things happen. It's happening right now as we speak. So all of this is happening now, maybe it's more than 36 months on the robots, probably for some of them, but at some point there'll be more robots than humans. Right. Between him and Elon, you can guess that for sure, not to mention what China's doing. So we're living in a time where there'll be more change than any time in history.
So you have to say, what does that do to me, I look at my thesis and say, that means if you don't have agents as a company in the next 36 months, your chances of competing are quite small. They're not getting implemented right now because there's a fear level. 60% of most CEOs think AI is going to be the greatest thing in the world. But if you see what Microsoft just talked about, 94% of these AI projects never get integrated. That's why they're not producing them.
And yet the ones that do, it disrupts it. You heard all the frontier companies were all talking about, Hey, you know, it's going to disrupt jobs. You got to be prepared. And that didn't go real well. So now they're going to create more jobs. They are right. They will create more jobs, but in the time period, they're going to disrupt those smaller jobs and that's a mass number of people that are going to need. Reskilling. So I look and go, we want to be in the position of helping companies bring on agents, not to replace people, to empower them the way we get it.
We, I'm working with Salesforce. We just now we have the people out here from the UAE, cause they want to make their entire government agentic. And so we're working with them. The reason they're working with us is we have a different approach. Our approach is we don't put some giant AI in the sky where you put everything there, because if something breaks down, you don't know what caused it. We create these micro little AIs. And what we do is we look at people's workflow and you find out that 60% of what people do is busy work.
And so they don't like busy work, but they're caught up in it. Your head of marketing is making a PDF. I mean, what the hell are you doing? Right? So now what we do is we give them an agent that is their assistant. We have a scanning device that shows all of where they spend the work. It shows it and you put them to work. It doesn't replace your job. It makes you more powerful. That's a way of integrating. We got to reskill a mass number of Americans.
That's a whole nother element, not only America, but the rest of the world. And then we got to get people prepared for a world of uncertainty. Most of us have been living with rented certainty. The certainty of what I mean by rented is we're certain because we have a certain job, we have a certain income. We have a certain family of a certain way of being. All that goes away when your house burns down or when all of a sudden you lose your job. Or when all of a sudden somebody in the family gets injured or hurt, or there's a disease or something of that nature.
Well, we're going to see that certainty shattered by the pace of change. And so we have to prepare people for that. So for myself, I look at this as a triangle of impact. So I'm in the business of bringing companies to Gentic. I'm doing it with Salesforce. I'm actually doing the integration for them at their upcoming event in September here. I'm working on getting people debt-free college education. We have a company now that's where one of the biggest problems is how do you reskill people rapidly?
Well, traditionally you try to teach a mass number of people. And not many people have the skill as a teacher to do that. So you get one Sigma improvement. If you can make the class size small, there's always been the two Sigma problem that we've known for 40 years. And that is you take an average student and give them the one-on-one mentoring. They outproduced 98% of the class, but it's been too expensive. But with a Gentic AI, now we have it. So we take people now that just lost their jobs.
We give them a guaranteed new skills, new life, no debt. Do you know what the largest debt in America is? Mortgage. You know what the number two is? Student debt. $1.8 trillion student debt. A four-year college education takes on average 20 years to pay off. President Obama, when he was a Senator, was still paying off some of his college debt right before he ran for president to give you an idea. So we're going to create a solution. And then I'm working with the guys that built calm, if you remember, calm, the largest app in the world for meditation.
These guys built it and sold it for a billion and a half, like it was. I sat down with them and said, listen, we need more therapists. And even if you're the best therapist in the world, there aren't enough. And people are now going to chat GBT. And I'm sure you saw, there's all these lawsuits. 1.3 million people a week asked chance to BT about suicide. The other day, there's another article about a woman committed suicide and the chat GT not only explained how to do it, but it wrote her suicide note.
Right. These are made for sycophancy. They're designed to keep you online talking. They're not designed to actually help you to change. So I built something with them where we have now technology that reads your micro-expressions. So you're on screen, you can see every emotion you're feeling. It's not just an LLM, and it has auditory elements. It's $30 million spent to identify what auditory elements mean, what emotions you're having. So if you and I are sitting here, and I say, how's it going, you go, fine, or you go, fine, the LLM just sees fine.
But you and I see something completely different. So we can interact. And if it's something that's suicidal, it moves it up to 988. So think about this. There's 11 million veterans in this country. We have 2,000 therapists for them. It takes four months to see one. Most veterans don't want to talk to a therapist, and they don't want to talk to a female therapist. They find a lot of the male guys don't, if it makes them feel weak. They're not going to go spend four months, and 17 are killing themselves every day.
For 90% less money, we can be there 24-7, 365, helping them with something that's proven and has a track record. So I think you have to have a thesis, like, what's happening in the world, and where is it going? Just like the thesis of, there's going to be 5% more spending of the GDP of all these countries, then that means you probably should be looking at something on the military side if you want to have a growth investment. What's your thesis for investing? That's mine for where I'm putting my primary time and energy, but we have a series of thesis of where you can make a difference.
And so you might even touch on some of the other areas, like energy. Well, I mean, when you think about the world of AI, it's touching every aspect of it, but one of the things that is absolutely incumbent is you have to have energy to be able to power it. If you don't have enough energy, you don't have the ability to do AI of any type, any form, any substance. And everybody's talking about that with data centers, but no one really wants to admit how far behind the production of energy we are.
To be very clear, we're for all kinds of energy, from traditional, to sustainable, to transitional, whatever you want to call it. We're going to need all of the above in order to be able to meet the enormous demand growth. That's not just coming from AI. It's coming from the fact that billions of people are moving up in their economic situation. When somebody goes from lower income to middle income, they want a lot more power and a lot more energy. When somebody goes from middle income to higher income, they consume a lot more energy.
All of it is the same growth curve as far as demand, but what's not changed is supply. The amount of supply that's out there is basically flatlining or growing very, very little. Those lines are expected to cross in 2028, where we will literally not have as much power as we need to be able to meet all the demand. You're talking about the data centers alone in this country will consume more power than all of New York City. The data centers than that one city in literally three years to five years.
That is something that we have to meet the demand of, but again, it's not just data centers, so we don't want to demonize data centers. It's the consumption of AI, and obviously, if the United States is going to compete in the world of AI, the AI arms race, if you will, then we have to have the power to do it, because I assure you that China and other countries are going to be putting all the demand, all the supply out there that they need to be able to meet the AI demand.
We need 50% more energy by 2035, 50% more than we're doing right now. That means we're going to use all forms of energy, and energy, because of the way we've approached it recently, has been a tremendous opportunity. Give them a sense of what kind of changes we've seen. We've seen to where there were so many people chasing energy as an investment asset class to where people decided for reasons that they have the freedom to decide that they didn't want to invest in fossil fuels and traditional energy.
We have a very simple metric that we follow called the reserve replacement ratio. In the book, we talk about it. Anybody who's been a teenager or had a teenager, if they know that the milk is full at the beginning of the day, if they don't go buy more milk, by the end of the day, it's going to be less full, and eventually, they're going to run out of milk. That's exactly what it is with energy, because this stuff doesn't last forever. It depletes. It goes away, just like the milk carton.
Everybody has to go replenish the milk, and so far in this decade, for every one unit of energy that we're consuming, we're only replacing 0.2 of that energy. We're consuming at five times faster the rate than what we're creating new energy, and it's not like you can flip a switch. It takes years to get major energy resources online. We are way behind, and unfortunately, that's going to cross, which creates the opportunity to where, as an example, in some cases, because there's just not that many people investing in it, we're able to buy things at three times cash flow or four times cash flow, and we've seen enormous returns because we're willing to invest all across the energy spectrum, and that includes nuclear and other places where there's great opportunity, but it's going to take all of it, and those that provide the capital are going to be very well-rewarded for doing so.
I want to mention, just to catch back also, that anybody who's in a position like I have a brother-in-law that's 60 years old. He's a software engineer. You know, the Gary gentleman who's the vice chairman of IBM told me his daughter was crunching code and used to get a million dollars for a nine-month project because she's one of the best in the world to crunch code. Now it's done by an agent in four days for free. She doesn't have a job, but she's pregnant, so she has a future, and they have money, so he's not worried about her, but people are being disrupted.
The biggest challenge is how do they get re-educated? So we have an ability to do this, and if they go to unitedcolleges.org, unitedcolleges.org, they can apply and see what type of jobs are actually out there in demand, what professions they could tap into to retool themselves, and they can do it at their own tempo with an agent that knows everything about you, knows you love soccer, teaches you how to do that, adapts to your training capacity, and gives you that skill. I just want to plant that seed for people because so many people are being disrupted.
The guy's 60 years old, he walks in, 650 people are let go that morning. He's one of them. Been in the company 25 years, no economic plan to back him up, no severance, and guess what? They took the whole thing at Gentic, sold it to a Swedish company. He's got two kids in college. He's got a wife that's a substitute teacher, makes $30,000 a year, and he's got a mortgage. What's he going to do? He can't go try and get some new education and pay for that piece and go further in debt.
We're solving that aspect to give you an idea. While there's opportunity everywhere, disruption still means if you retool yourself, you can take advantage. Anybody can still do well in this world. People say, is it possible to really just do well financially? Is the game rigged? The game is still a game you can absolutely win, but you got to learn, and you got to take a little bit of time to understand what's possible, and you at least give yourself a short period of time where you say, I'm going to find a diversification of 8 to 12 uncorrelated assets and reduce my risk 80% while I'm working on my job or my career or whatever else I'm doing.
That's my other business that's going to protect me, because Social Security at this point is not probably going to be enough for anybody, if it's even here later on, for people to have a quality of life that they need. It seems like there's a lot of change happening in the world, and that means that people are going to get scared. Lots of people get stuck thinking and overthinking a decision. They spend so much time worrying about what decision to make that their life turns into a relationship with the internal drama of the decision itself.
Obviously, you've spent a lot of time thinking about human psychology, human nature and behavior. Have you got a framework inside of finance or outside of it generally in life for becoming better at the decision-making process? How do you think about making decisions? I have a very specific process. It takes a little time to explain, but it hears its essence. The most important thing in decision-making is value clarification. When you know what's most important to you, you can make a decision. Most people are trying to hit multiple targets at once.
I want to do this, and if I do that, it'll work. What if I do that? Then that works. What if I do that? They do it in their head. The first piece is it's got to be done on your computer, on paper, outside your head. You've got to start with, I call it O-O-C-E-M-R, real quick. O is you start with the outcomes. What are the outcomes? What do I want from this decision? What's the most ... Then you've got to rate them in order of importance.
They're not all equal. I want a job that's going to do this, this, and this. Is it the money that's most important? Is it the lifestyle that's most important? Is it the quality of who you're going to be around? You have to rate the importance, because you may not get them all equally. We want to make sure what's most important to you get. Once I do the outcomes clearly, now I need to know what are my options. The delusion is one choice is no choice. Two choices is a dilemma.
There's at least three choices always. If you live that principle, you'll find it. When you usually get three, you'll find four or five. I get people to come up with options they haven't thought of before, and go, okay. Don't judge them yet. Outcomes, O. O, okay. What are my options? C. What are the consequences? Now, I look at each option and say, okay. What's the upside or downside of each one? I make the list in paper, not in my head. I have actually a computer program I designed for this.
Now, I can see upsides, downsides. I've done half of it. Now, EMR. Now, I need to evaluate. I need to evaluate, okay. There's this upside and the downside, but what's the probability of it happening? You might say, okay. I've done half of it. Now, EMR. Now, I need to evaluate. Okay. There's this upside and the downside, but what's the probability of it happening? Now, EMR. Now, I need to evaluate. Okay. There's this upside and the downside, but what's the probability of it happening? Now, EMR. Now, I need to evaluate.
Okay. There's this upside and the downside, but what's the probability of it happening? Like, you might say, oh, I can lose everything. Okay, but what's the probability? Or, oh, I'll make a billion, but what's the probability? Is it 90%, 10%, 5%? That starts for you to really evaluate what your better options are. And now, what'll happen is some of those options will be clear to you. They don't make sense. So, the M is mitigate. I might end up with two or three options here, and I go, okay, well, how do I get the best of this one and this one?
What could I do to combine them? There's a new way to do this, and I teach that process. And then, the R is resolve. O-C-E-M-R. The resolve, this is what I'm going to do, because in the end, everybody wants to make a decision they're certain about. This'll get you about as certain as you can get, but at the same time, there is no absolute certainty. So, I'm going to do this. And I asked him, because he was a very decisive guy, and I asked him, you know, how is it you make the tough decisions?
And he said, when I was a private, he goes, I worked for a general. And this general was a tough guy. He was a four-star general. And he said, one day, they found out that there had been a decision that the Pentagon had struggled with for 20 years, a very giant strategic decision, and the general is finally going to make the decision what to happen. So, they sent reams of binders of information in to have him evaluate, and four days before they're getting all this, there's an army, he said, of like five people, help him to organize this for the general and summarize it.
The general had to fly overseas, and he didn't get back till the night before. So, he said, general, we got to cancel the meeting. You're not prepared. He goes, no, the meeting goes forward, 8.30 in the morning. Shows up at 8.30 in the morning, and he's freaked out. It's like, there's no way the general knows enough to make this decision. General says, okay, give me what you got, you have 15 minutes. They go, they give this, tell me your side, give me 15 minutes. As soon as they're done, he stood up, he said, that's what we're doing.
Everybody stood up, saluted the general, went, this is a decision that's not been made for 10 years, a really strategic decision. So, Schwarzkopf tells me, he said, he's freaking out inside. So, whenever he leaves, he goes and knocks on the general's door and says, permission to speak openly? He said, at ease. He goes, general, I'm the chief of staff here. There's no way you know enough information to make this decision. There's reams more of information for you to know. He said, yes. He said, how could you make that decision?
He said, because the decision needed to be made. No one's done it for 10 years. I got enough information to make a decision. I made one. Now, if we're wrong, I'm going to find out quicker because we're going to do something. And if we're right, we're going to move forward. He goes, I never forgot that. He said, then I got one more lesson from him. One time, general was leaving again, and he said, you're in charge. I'm going to be on for 10 days. Make whatever decisions are necessary.
And he's freaking out, this is a private, right? But sir, but sir, I don't know what to do. He goes, when you put in command, take charge. He said, rule 13. He goes, what's rule 13? Put in command, take charge. He goes, sir, but I don't know what to do. He said, rule 14. What's rule 14? He goes, do what's right. Do what's right. You build decision-making muscles by making more decisions. Some people have a hard time deciding what they're having for dinner. You've been with somebody, and everybody else is ordering.
They still can't decide. They have weak decision-making muscles. Decide. And the more you decide, the stronger you get. But this OOCMR, knowing my outcomes, because that's what it's about, value clarification, knowing my options, knowing the consequences, evaluating probability, mitigating to come up with a better solution, and resolving, that's the six steps that I use and teach people. Every single thing he just talks about applies to finances and investment management 100%. So if somebody doesn't know what they're trying to achieve, or they're trying to make a 30% return or a 3% return, if they don't know why that's important, if they're not willing to take the volatility that it takes, and then look at the probability-adjusted outcome of that investment, then they can't make a good decision, which is why, going back to what I said earlier, it's all about investing based on percentages, not on dollars.
If somebody's like, it's a million dollars, that's a lot of money. It is a lot of money. And you don't want to lose it. But if it's 1% of your portfolio, and it goes to zero, that's going to suck. But it's not going to be fatal. So it's a liberating and it's freeing for somebody to be able to be much more analytical, less emotional. And every single professional investor will say the same thing. Emotion is the enemy to investment success, period. So you have to be clinical, and you have to remove the emotion.
And the only way to do that is have a consistent process that is based on percentages that say, OK, if this happens, I can live with it. And if that worst case I can live with, the upside will take care of itself. And all of that applies exactly what Tony just described. OK. Boys, I appreciate both of you. Where should people go to find out more about what's going on? So he's got a whole lot of different places you can go to. Ours is simple. KazInvestments.com, that's where you can learn everything about what we're doing as a firm.
And obviously, he's got all the various things he's involved in. TonyRobbins.com, and you can see any of the businesses that we're involved in. And we've got an event coming up shortly here. We do only a few events a year now, really large ones. We have 17,000 people here in Miami for four days. It's called Unleash the Power Within. So if anybody's interested in that, they can reach out to us as well. Well, I can just tell you this, having gone through the tape series in 1991 and not going to my first opportunity to go to a live event until 2013, don't wait that long.
Folks that like and follow Tony and have learned a lot from Tony, go to a live event. It's completely different than anything that you could expect to do just through the tape. It was life-changing for me, and I know many other people do it the same way. What? The date is coming up in November. I think it's 4th, 5th, and 6th. Yes. Boys, I appreciate both of you. Thank you so much for having us. We appreciate it. We will do it again. Did you know that mosquitoes have killed almost half of all people who have ever lived?
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